Australians at War Film Archive

Starting with when I was born at a place called Tocumwal way down on the border of New South Wales and Victoria as you probably know, and my old Dad was a school teacher there. It was a three-teacher school and I left there when I was nine so I don’t remember all that much.

I do remember the Murray River. We were right on the Murray River there and catching yabbies and fishing for cod and all that type of thing as a kid. It was good. And from there we moved to a place little called Tarana, which is out near Oberon. That is about a hundred and thirty miles west of here over the mountain. He was a teacher there for the remainder of his career as a teacher. And out there of course I was

nine years of age at the time. I started school out there and left school when I was eleven because I had a bit of a breakdown – a nervous breakdown. And it was a great place out there. I loved the country. I used to climb mountains and climb rocks and fish in the local Fish River for trout and make rafts and that type of thing. I did what most kids did. You know.

Of course the Depression broke in 1929 when I was thirteen years of age and it affected all the grazing properties. There were a lot of grazing properties around there, mostly around three thousand acres blocks and mostly descended from pioneer families, all the people around about. Some of them

were a bit careless with their money and borrowed money and that and they went on the banks. Those that were careful did quite well. One in particular though that I went to work on when I was thirteen years of age was owned by the banks. It was owned by the banks in Orange. The mother owned the place and her two sons were running it and they were allowed to stay there, and I heard there was a job going there when I was thirteen and I applied

for it. I got the princely sum of seven [shillings] and six [pence] a week and my tucker. My old Dad… The school was only about less than half a mile from the homestead on this property. Beautiful homestead – had a veranda all the way around and six bedrooms and three or four bathrooms and their own gas light and all the proper shearing sheds, fully fenced, the three thousand acre property. Beautiful property. Because the man…

One of the sons was more interested in buying and selling sheep, dealing in sheep, than running his property. He borrowed money and mortgaged the property to buy this last mob of sheep but the Depression broke and sheep went to about a shilling a head overnight. He lost all his money and the banks took over the property. And when I started working there the banks owned it and their two brothers were running it, and the banks owned it, so

that’s when I started work full time.

Oh, feeding pigs for a start. That was the funniest thing. I was never very big. I was only about jockey weight and the first day I think it was I had to get into this pigpen with a great big kerosene bucket full of curdled milk, and they had the trough laying on the ground for the pigs and you

had to get in and put it in the troughs. And I got in there, and these great big pigs upended me and milk and all… I lost the lost. So anyway the boss wasn’t real happy about that at all.

I spent three years there doing everything that you do on those properties. I would milk twelve cows.

They had to be milked and all this milk had to be separated. I was feeding about two hundred pigs on free range. Mustering sheep and droving. I did the whole lot. From there on I decided after three years that I was going on my own. Seven and six a week was only really pocket money, you know, although I had my food. And from then on I did everything that you could do. I was droving, I was trapping rabbits, seasonal work, living in a tent most of the time,

most of the time for the three years until I was down on the irrigation area on a job down there and I got a telegram from my Dad. All he ever wanted to do, my old Dad, was to buy a farm when he retired. And in the school holidays he had bought a farm outside Gosford at a place called Wamberal and he sent a telegram to me saying he wanted me to come up and take it over because he wanted to keep on teaching for another two or three years,

which we did. And I took over the farm and ran that for six years and developed that. It was a rundown farm and I developed it, and in the last two years my young brother came and worked with me. And then I installed a photographic business. I had a darkroom on the property and for the last three years I ran a photographic business there. And then the war came along and you couldn’t get photographic material because it was all earmarked

for the services. So I had to give that away and I thought, oh well, I would volunteer for the services to try and get… I had no qualifications of anything, you see. And I would join the air force and get myself a trade or something or a profession or something, with the idea of being a photographer, which you could. There was a big demand for photographers in the air force. Every squadron had its photographer.

So I went into the recruiting train and volunteered for service. I did okay. They would take me as a photographer or whatever. I would almost certainly be a photographer. And then they asked me would I like to volunteer for aircrew. At that time Britain and Russia were going it alone and they were having a rough time. Japan hadn’t come into the war and the

big Lancaster’s and Stirlings were starting to come off the production lines and they were very short of crews to fly them. And they were trying to talk people into joining as aircrew and silly me said, “Oh yes, I would like to do that.” That was the end of me getting a trade because not having any education, I left school when I was twelve, see, and I thought, “Oh well, I could be a gunner.”

You were either a gunner, a wireless air gunner, which was a wireless operator and gunner, a navigator or a pilot. There were those four categories and I knew I could be a gunner and that’s how it turned out. Well the man said… When I heard I was running a farm he said, “Get back out on your farm. You are no good to us. You are in a reserved occupation.” So I had the younger brother trained at the time to take over and I explained this. He said, “Well if you can prove there will be no loss of production,

we will take you in,” which he did. And I did the first twelve weeks initial training, which is all a ground subject and you do exams and tests and all that, and at the end of that time you go before a selection committee, three people, to decide what you are going to be – whether a wireless air gunner, or a gunner, or a pilot or a navigator. And for some reason they chose me to…

They classified me as having potential as a pilot and that’s how I became a pilot. So well the first stage was only the little Tiger Moths at Temora. I did the twelve-week course and then I went to Mallala in South Australia on the Ansons and twin-engine planes. And then from there to Cressy in Victoria to do a navigation course.

Before you could fly, you see, you had to qualify as a navigator. And not having any training in that sort of thing I had a few problems. At one stage I was given navigation problems involving trigonometry and I hadn’t even done algebra, but anyway I got through all that and I passed as a satisfactory, as my logbook says at a satisfactory level.

And then I went to the Beauforts training at Bairnsdale in Victoria and they were having a lot of trouble in the Beauforts at that time and a lot of losses and they thought it might be the training. Coming from the docile Anson aircraft, these things were a bit of a handful to learn to fly. And they were losing so many of them that they gave me about

seven or eight hours dual to assess me then they took me off and put me on the same station flying Airspeed Oxfords and Fairey Battles as a staff pilot. They were easier aircraft to fly to get more experience. After six months of flying those they put me back onto the Beauforts. From then on I did the twelve-week course

and then I went to Canberra and we formed up 15 Squadron. 15 Squadron brought this aircraft over from Mascot. It was a new squadron and we had eighteen brand new aircraft. It was eighteen months from then that I flew operations. I flew operations from then on. From then to the end of the war. The end of the war, that last raid you see up there was a week before the war finished at a place called Manokwari up in Dutch New Guinea near the Philippines.

That was the last raid that I did and at the end of the war they kept us up there for a while because they couldn’t get a ship to bring all our equipment home. And I finally flew that aircraft back to Wagga to an aircraft depot which was only a paddock, and there were hundreds of these things lying there. And eventually I left it there and they broke it up for scrap. Everyone…

So that left me then in 1946 where I was discharged. And I got married in 1946 and worked with my wife. Her father was running a high-class grocery business in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs. Having nowhere to live in those days, because you couldn’t get a flat, there was a flat behind the shop and I lived there for four years and worked in the shop for four years.

After that I decided I wanted to go out on my own and I went out on my own and for four years worked in a printing place in town. I was hoping I would get something that would make me something better than a labourer type of thing. And I decided there was no future in that. I bought a wholesale fruit and vegetable run.

Having worked on the production side of that sort of thing I thought I’d try the distribution side, which I did, and it was making about twice as much money as what I could make in wages, which to me was an advantage, you know. What I didn’t know was, being a bit of a naive sort of person, they were making the profits but they weren’t

very fussy about how they made them, and one of the methods they used was working the scales so I was left with the business then. I tried to make it sort of legal and legitimate but I spent four years trying to do that and then I knew I couldn’t do it and then I had to take on extra work to get back the money that I had spent on it.

I finished up after about five years where I had started with same amount of money and with no experience. And I decided that the second time I went into business I was going to make sure and I went into a milk run, which was a rock solid business when I went in. But unfortunately the supermarkets were just coming in. It was twenty-three years that I was doing the milk run. The supermarkets were just starting to take over from the small shops and eventually most of the corner

shops were wiped off because of the supermarkets. And the same thing happened with the milk. Now there are no milk runs available now; they are all finished. And there were thousands… This was the deregulation of the milk industry – thousands of dairy farmers have been closed down throughout the country. And what was I going to say,

and the deregulation and the milk run from the day I bought it started to deteriorate. So I eventually… You worked on a block. You bought a block and you couldn’t work outside that block and it was all closely regulated by the government. And not being able to make enough money this time, with two daughters by this time to rear.

And the wife never went to work but she helped me. For six years she went to work and we bought this block of land and built this house on it. And the garage. And after six years she never went to work after that. She left me to make the money and that created a lot of problems there. Well I had to find other ways of making the money, which I did by establishing a lawn-mowing run and delivering groceries. With not

having any trade or profession or whatever I had to work about twice as hard or three times as hard as anyone else to make the money I needed. What with putting two girls through university and that type of thing. So when I was sixty-three years of age I found out that I could get a [Department of] Veterans’ Affairs pension and I took all my books into the Department

of Veterans’ Affairs and the man looked at all my past books and things, bankbooks and the fellows said, “You’re mad. You’re better off on a pension.” So I took his advice and I accepted a pension at age sixty-three. And then I kept some of the lawns going. I had a lawn-mowing run and I did a bit of maintenance work on lawn mowers and things being pretty handy with my hands and with that I managed for… Well I worked

for a about twenty years, I suppose. I made a few extra dollars and put that into investments and now I am reasonably comfortable, not a lot of money but I’ve got no financial worries, you know. So that’s more or less the story.

Well the Murray River ran about two or three hundred yards from where I lived, our house. So in the summer it was quite popular to go down there for swimming and catching yabbies, catching muscles, fishing for cod and all that type of thing. We

spent most of our time down there at weekends sort of thing. And I went to school there till I think it was about third class or something like that. And the old… I remember particularly falling into the Murray River one day. Little memories come back, you know. Little brother fished me out. Because I wasn’t able to swim,

you know, at that stage. All those sorts of things. But I don’t remember a terrible lot about it really. I know I never liked school very much. I was never terribly bright so probably the reason. But anyway I don’t remember a terrible lot about it apart from that.

Seven of us all told.

Three have died. One was ninety-four when she died, the eldest one. And the eldest brother, he was eighty-four or eighty-two or something. He died of Parkinson’s disease and the younger brother was not quite seventy and he died of cancer. We’ve got one, two, three sisters left now.

Nine.

Just as bleak and just as cold. There was more life there because the railways go through Tarana on the western line and it was a very busy line. They didn’t have the road transport we have now and everything was carted by the rail.

Especially the long distance stuff. All the stock trains came through, sheep trains and cattle trains and goods trains. The mail trains came through at night-time, about half a dozen from Coonamble and Narromine and all different places. The Broken Hill Express came through regularly. There was hardly an hour went by that there wasn’t a train or something that went through. It was a… It was a good

station there. There was a stationmaster and two night officers because it was a twenty-four hour operation, and a senior porter and a junior porter. And then they had all the fettlers on the line, maintaining the line. They had all their houses there and they had two stores there and a hotel, which is still there. There are no stores at all now because when the rail

closed down the whole station closed down and there is only a single line goes through, and it was a double line in those days. And all those families kept these little stores going, sort of thing. In addition, of course, they had all the people coming in from the farms round about. It was quite a busy little town in those days. And there was Dad and he had

an assistant teacher. And there was the Tarana Quarries, which were three miles out from Tarana. A big quarry That created employment. There was a little train that went up through Oberon. That was a thousand metres up, the sixteen-mile trip to Oberon. That went up daily except Sunday with a light engine and a guard’s van and carriages and a couple of trucks

to carry all the goods and the passengers up between those two towns. So it was quite a busy little town in those days.

Well it was a big problem. They didn’t get much wage and he was heavily taxed. It was 1929 when the Depression broke. He had to pay high taxes to pay for the dole and

things for other people. He was pretty heavily taxed as well, which made it pretty hard actually. We managed all right. My old Mum was good with her hands and making clothes and cooking and a big help and that type of thing. But me old Dad managed all right on the wage, but it wasn’t easy.

Only a cat. Well we had a dog at one stage, yeah.

Oh yeah. Only for the house. Yeah. We had eggs and you could buy milk cheap and there wasn’t much in the way of vegetable but we managed quite well but with difficulty.

Well there again much the same as what we did at Tocumwal. The Fish River was running through there. And creeks and great trout in the Fish River at the time, and we used to go making rafts and swimming in our spare time. About four or five miles away there was a long low mountain. I don’t know whether you remember it or not from being there, called

the Cradle Mountain, and on top of that there is a great big flat rock where you can get a beautiful view out over the Bathurst plain, magnificent view. And we used to spend… And it doesn’t look very big from the ground but there is quite a complex formation of rocks, and we used to go up there as kids nine, ten, eleven years of age and spend the day up there. We got to know it quite well. You know. We did all that sort of thing, mountaineering, walking,

bushwalking. As a kid.

Well you were supposed to use… The most popular thing was a fly, of course, but you could sneak in a few worms if you liked, too. You could fish with worms if you wanted to. It was mainly a sport rather than a method of catching fish and it was great. People used to come from hundreds of miles around to fish in the Fish River.

They would camp there and they were all fly fishermen of course and they would walk up and down the river for miles casting the fly.

Oh yes.

Not very often. They weren’t a terribly popular fish to eat, the trout. We never used to get big ones there. Three

pounds was a big one, you know. We would get one about half that, about that size but they were full of bones. They were all right but we didn’t look on them for food really. More of a sport, you know.

Well he was a pretty important man, really. He was a… We had the school on one side and the school residence and church

on the other. I didn’t have any chance really. So he was a church warden in the little church and my Mum used to play the organ and teach Sunday school. He was a Christian person and me, when I was the age of thirteen or a bit older and I went out on my own more or less, I sort of drifted away from church. You know. It was important because the teacher in a little village like that

was looked up to, really. He wasn’t any particular… He was the chairman of the local P&C [Parents and Citizens’ Committee] and that sort of thing. Any meetings he was in the chair. You know. So he was quite important really.

Well I think probably, looking back on it, I had a bit of a… Both my daughters are teachers now.

And when I learned about education I think that I had some sort of a learning disability and I couldn’t remember things. It is just a thing that has plagued me all my life, really. I haven’t got a good memory. You could tell me a telephone number now and two or three minutes later I would have forgotten it even now. And that has been a thing flying these aircraft. It was the biggest worry of my life.

I was never ever frightened of getting killed but I had those three chaps with me and if I would let them down by doing something silly. Being in charge of the aircraft, captain of the aircraft. But anyway that’s another story again but it never did happen. But that was when I was going to school that other young chaps were getting better marks than me and better grades. I was managing all right

and I think that got to me in the finish and I had a nervous breakdown when I was about eleven and I left school at that stage.

It was terrible. Yeah. It was hard for him too but he was… Although there was never any great love lost between us. He wasn’t that type of man.

He was a Yorkshire man and I don’t know what you would call them but I suppose I’ve got some of it too. I never heard my Dad swear and he never ever laid a hand on any of us with seven kids to rear. He was a good Dad so it was pretty hard for him as well as for me, seeing me go like this. Of course there was no

chance of me going on to higher education because the nearest high school to me was thirty miles away. That was a bad thing in one way. The Depression had broken then and he couldn’t afford to send us to high school. You couldn’t board us and that type of thing so it was pretty hard really.

I don’t know. It just came on. There was no reason for it. I

had a wonderful mother. I had good parents. We had a good home, plenty of food, but I had not a lot to spent on myself like we do these days, you know. But we made our own fun, you know. We went fishing and we got boxes and made trains and all those sorts of things that we don’t do these days. My old Mum played the piano and at one stage when I started

work on this big three thousand acre property. I was very fond of the violin and my old Dad bought me a violin for three dollars. It wasn’t exactly a Stradivarius but I started to teach myself the violin. In the country you didn’t have teachers so I more or less… I had friends in the city here and I came down for a week at one stage

and she booked me in with a professor of music who taught the violin, and every day I stopped with those people and every day I went into town and he showed me how to use the bow. He knew I was going to go back to the country and I wouldn’t have any more instruction. So he showed me what staccato means when you bounce the bow, and legato when you use a long bow,

all these different things. And in that week I learned quite a lot of things about how you use a violin, how you tune it and all that type of thing. And when I went back I kept on practising every day. I would practise an hour or so because I liked doing it. You know. And eventually they used to hold

about three or four mile out of the town at a woolshed to hold a genuine woolshed dance every Saturday night and this particular night… There used to be a piano accordion come up from Lithgow and they would play till about two o’clock in the morning. Usual thing, you know, a country dance, and they didn’t turn up and one of them came in from the property out there to ask if I would go out and play for the dance.

I went out and played till two o’clock in the morning, the old dances. I knew them all then. The old Schottise and the Pride of Erin and the Gypsy Tap and the Fox Trot and the whole lot of them. And I knew them well enough to play them for technique, no technique but I learned enough to be able to play for that dance.

That was the only time I played for a dance but I had reached that stage then. And when I used to go out on these trips camping out. You might go out for… Well at one stage I was camped out for six months trapping rabbits. I would go out for a week and never see anybody or talk to anybody, and at night I camped in this old pioneer cottage that had fallen to pieces on my own and

I would practise the violin for an hour, basically because I was lonely. You know. I would keep myself company. Even if I was in a tent I would take the violin and practise if I was on my own, which I was. I would go for a week and never see anybody, camping out, tents, living in old huts and houses and that. The fiddle turned out to be quite good company. And all this time I had started

to develop photography. When I was eleven I developed an interest in photography and at home I developed one of the rooms… Well at night-time because you couldn’t have a darkroom. You know, the darkroom, and the old films by hand… You would have a bit of developer in your tray and all that type of thing. And you couldn’t

buy equipment. We didn’t have any money anyway to buy equipment because there was no electricity there. All I had was a contact printer. But anyway I got interested in the competitions run by Kodak. They were publishing a magazine called the Australian Photo Review. I don’t know if you have heard of it or not but if you have not I will show you a copy of it after.

That started in the 1890s and never finished publication till about 1957. It used to run photographic competitions every month and they were Australia wide, New Zealand, Tasmania, Australasia, and the competitions were when you sent an entry in you were competing against amateurs from all over Australasia. So eventually I got amongst the prizes there. Not out in Tarana but when I moved

to Matcham where the farm was I put a darkroom… We got electricity through there eventually and I was able to put in proper equipment to enlarge photos and it actually lead to me taking it up commercially for about three years. I did home portraits and weddings and trade work. Enlarging and all that.

On the farm actually. I had the darkroom on the farm. It was an unusual thing, you might say.

It would be eleven.

Well I used to burst into tears. It is pretty hard to explain it really. And I couldn’t

get up and read. I would get up in the classroom to read and I would burst into tears, I don’t know why. And there was no reason for it and you can imagine my old Dad, you know. I had to leave the room and at the finish he never used to ask me to read. I mean all my life I have been that way. I have fount it hard to read anything, even now. But that’s when it started.

It is pretty hard to explain really but it was very serious. Eventually I left school because I just couldn’t handle it.

Not in those days. No. Those sorts of things weren’t recognised in those days. No. And in a little country town the nearest doctor was sixteen miles away at Oberon, or thirty miles to Bathurst. So every time you got

something wrong with you you didn’t run to the doctor in a country town like that.

Well I had a pushbike at the time and I used to run around on the bike a bit and fishing. Until the Depression broke I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t… There was no jobs out there so I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do.

When t he Depression broke and this property… Actually the property surrounded where we lived. All we had to do to get to the property was walk through the fence. The old homestead, the beautiful homestead was only about less than half a mile away up on the hill and I heard that these people wanted a farmhand at seven and six a week and my food. I thought,

“That’s all right.” Anyway, and I stayed there for three years. I learned quite a bit about farming but nothing about anything else. And after three years I thought, “Well, I’ve just got to go out and see what I can do on my own.” And it started from then that getting out on my own and facing up to the world was when I started to get better from this thing that I had.

Well we had twelve cows and we had to milk those twice a day, seven days a week. We had two hundred pigs on free range. We had pigs in the pens; they had to be fed. We used to separate them. We had great big Alpha Laval separators that stood up about that height and you had to crank it like this to separate the milk from the cream. And we used to keep the milk in kerosene buckets and let it curdle and feed it to the pigs

in the pens. And every, about a couple of weeks, I had to learn to ride horses. We had a cow pony and I had to saddle it up and put the cream in a great big tin urn, which you can remember. You will know about that. Get it up on the horse, get up on the horse and get this great big thing up on it. I was only a little tiny bloke, me, you know.

I would ride down to the local station, get it off the horse onto the station and consign it onto a train into Bathurst for the butter factory. That was my job. And back at the farm I had to wash up this big separator. It had to be done with hot water and that type of things. That was my job And when I had finished that at about ten o’clock or eleven o’clock I had to go out to work on the farm all day

with sheep and crops and pulling peas and anything that had to be done. Mending fences. Chopping wood for the… Because there was no electricity. I used to have to chop down trees at age fourteen, thirteen. I would help chop down trees, saw them up and then split them up for wood, for firewood. We’d use that to run the kitchen and that type of things.

All those things had to be done. The work was never ending, really. In the winter time we used to dig out rabbits. Rabbits were in plague proportions out there and it was the responsibility of the farmers to keep them under control. One way of doing it was to poison them. You’d go round and pick up thistle roots and lace them with strychnine, little roots, and you’d put them…

Make a mark on the ground and drop one in through the paddocks and the rabbits would be eating them and you would get up to a thousand rabbits in a night. You had to go out and skin those. The skins were worth money. You couldn’t use the carcasses because they had the strychnine in them. And they had travelling… Rabbits were a big industry in those days out there in the winter time. A good trapper could make very good money out of…

They could make enough in six months to live on. But the big problem was getting a paddock to trap. The farmer would, if he had a three thousand acre property he would give the right of that to a trapper if he was a good trapper and they didn’t want to do it themselves. They would get a trapper to do it for them. And I…

Well the rabbits was a big industry out there. The trapping was the most popular way to get them for the single reason that they used to use the meat. There was a big… There were rabbit factories. There was one in the start and then two, eventually. There they had a specialist boner.

He was a butcher but he specialised in taking the meat off rabbits and that type of thing. A boner they called him. His job was to… The rabbits were trapped anything up to about twelve miles out, different ways out from Tarana. There would be the trappers and they would trap the rabbits and he would…

The first thing they would do is bleed them get the blood out of them, in the same way as they do with sheep and cattle. Then you’d split them down here and gut them, take their gut out of them and pair them together. And being cold out there they would keep for days. You would hang them up on a stick and every couple of days the little utility would come out and pick them up and take them into the factory. And

in the factory they would take the skins off them and put them on wires and they were pegged and they were all mostly exported to American for making felt hats. There was a big demand for them. The boner would take all the meat off the carcass and get it off its bones and that would be packed in boxes and sent off to Sydney.

They would make devon [sausage] and different things like that out of it. There was quite a big demand for it and good money in it. And that left the bones. So on this three thousand acre property that I worked on with the homestead, virtually in the town, and part of my work was to get a draughthorse. They had a number of draughthorses on the property, no tractors in those days. And

harness it up in a car and take it down to this factory and load it up with all these bones, and take it back up to the homestead part and get a great big boiler – one of these coppers – and boil all the bones up and make soup of it and feed that out to the two hundred free range pigs that they had, put it out in troughs. So that was part of my work, too. That was…

And the rabbits themselves were. The trappers used to make quite good money out of it. It was a good living for some of them, or most of them, those who were good trappers. It was the bones and when they stripped the skins off and pegged them out there was quite a lot of employment involved in it, and I worked on that as part of the, when I left the farm part.

After I left there I worked there in different aspects of that. You cut their heads off first, cut the head off, get rid of that, stripped the skin off and put it on the wires. Mounted it on a wire and hung it up to dry it. Different jobs like that connected with rabbits I worked on as well as trapping. I

spent six months out in the backblocks trapping, camped in an old pioneer cottage that had the old slab walls on it. In those days they used to put these great big slabs of timber and the cracks, they would patch them up with mud and all the mud would fall out. And we used to whistle through it and I’d swear it was haunted, that place. It has stairs going up to an attic,

which all those places had in those days and all that sort of thing, and being only about fifteen or sixteen at the time, sixteen I think, I was terrified. But it was the sort of thing I had to overcome, you know, which I did eventually. So the rabbits were an important part of my life out there at that time.

Another property thing out there in those days was growing peas. That was a big industry and the farmers might have fifty acres of ground that was suitable for growing peas. In particular, sheep

will camp in certain places every night and you might have four or five acres where they have been camping for years which is very very rich soil because of the manure that left there. And the pea growers would maybe rent fifty acres out from the farmer hoping there would be about four or five acres of this particular ground included in that. And

the farmers used to get a pound an acre because that was good money in those days. It was money they wouldn’t normally get, see. And the people that grew the peas had the right to grow as much as they wanted to on that. All that cultivation was done by horses. There were no tractors in those days and usually they used a three-horse team and a double furrow,

a double mop board furrow plough, which’s another one of those things that I did at that time, ploughing. And you would use a team of three horses and a double furrow plough to cultivate the ground, maybe fifty acres, and harrow it and break it all up. And they had a particular machine which would plant the seed. And then of course when the peas grew they had to be scarified

to keep the weeds down. There was just a single scarifier with a single horse in between the rows. All that was employment. And when it came time to pull them they used to get about three pulls off them. You’d find in a fifty acre paddock you might find anything up to thirty or forty pullers. Just purely seasonal. They do follow it up but

it would take a couple of months. But even from the city hear they would get all the rattlers. You know, jump the rattler and get on the goods trains out here under the tarpaulins and they would get to Tarana and jump off the train. And you’d find them anywhere under bushes and in the culverts and if you want any pullers you would go under bushes and in the culverts and find as many of them as you wanted. You had what you needed in no time, normally. You know. So it was quite a big thing.

All the characters in the world. Some of them were jailbirds, some of them were Christians or carpenters, tradesmen. Some of them were architects. There was no work in the cities.

They did. Yeah. There were some very educated people really as well as some hard cases and I mixed with all those sort of people during that time,

during the six years I was working out there. Jailbirds and I remember electricians, carpenters and there was no work in the city and they would make a few of dollars maybe only for a couple months and come back to the city again. Anything that was offered they would do in those days.

No. I can honestly say I never went hungry. I had a good family and I could come home any time I wanted in between jobs. I would go our for months sometimes camping and if I didn’t have a job I would go home, and I had my old little photographic darkroom which worked at night. We couldn’t fit a darkroom in and I had to wait till night to develop the photos and that.

I followed that interest in photography up. I started with a Box Brownie camera and my old Dad in 1904, which is going a long way back, he bought a beautiful little 5 x 4 plait camera with a tripod taking up photography as a hobby. He kept it up for a couple of years and then he gave it away, and that camera, it was gathering dust all these years and he gave it to me and I took that. And you used to buy these glass plates

and you put the plates in a little slide, you know what I mean, and put a hood over your head and focused. And that was the ground glass, you know. He gave me that and I was using that. This was out at Tarana when I was trying to teach myself photography. I was starting to become interested in these competitions that I was talking about. The Australasian photographic competitions that I was talking about.

And… That eventually lead up to… You were asking me about…

Well a book. It is amazing what you can learn out of a book. I have never been a great reader but you can get photographic books

on the technical side of it in those days. There were no exposure meters at that particular time. They were just coming on the market but we didn’t know anything about them. And to measure exposure we had a calculator, actually. It was done mathematically. You would have the time of the day and whether it was sunny or diffused light or cloudy and you would take all that into consideration. Whether it was between

ten o’clock and four o’clock or nine o’clock and five o’clock. Different timeframe. The speed of the film you are using and all those things are taken into consideration when you made your exposure, and all those things were taken into consideration before you set your exposure except on a Box Brownie, and they were automatic. You had a… I even remember the name really because they were automatic.

It was a single lens. It had one set of glass and it used to work at F11, so if you know anything about photography, which you would, would you? It was a standard exposure of one twenty-fifth, supposed to be, and of course you couldn’t change it. That was simple. But on this other camera you could change the aperture. It had what they call a complex shutter and you could stop it down or open it up and change the speed of the camera.

And you had to calculate your exposures as well as taking into consideration the speed of the flash. So that’s how it used to work. And by doing all those things I really learned the basics from the ground up. And I got to a stage where I couldn’t enlarge. But you could buy a thing… I don’t know where I got it but

it took a postcard at one end of it and it tapered down. It went from postcard size to what they called vest pocket size, which was about… I just forget the exact size. It was the same proportions of the postcard but it was on the bottom end. And you would put that in the bottom end and it was lightproof see, like a camera. You put the postcard-sized paper and clamped it up tight, and then you took

it outside and exposed it to the daylight and then took it off and got it developed. So that is the way I did my enlarging when I first started. Sounds crude, I know.

At night-time at home. We had a fairly big house and I managed to get a dark space somewhere. And I had a few

trays and I used to develop the old rolls of film by hand and hang them out. You’d probably remember that. You put your developer in a dish and work it through the dish by hand. And that was a way we developed films in those days. And I used to develop films even for local people because you couldn’t get films developed out there. There were no photo laboratories out there.

Oh well, you made time. I have always been a pretty… I don’t know, but I get in trouble because I work too much now. You make time and people are amazed at the things I’ve done. And it is surprising what you can do if you are interested in something. But we were working on the farm and I would get home at maybe six o’clock, and in a country town there was really nothing you could do.

There is no pictures and no dances and really nothing to do. You do whatever… You know… Photography was something to do at night so I suppose that is the explanation really. But I used to do a bit of work for actual local people, too. A bit of pocket money or something. I even at one stage with this little breast pocket camera and doing the postcard enlargements,

I wrote an article and had it accepted by Kodak in the Australian Photo Review. So little things like that that was… You learn as you go along. And it became a bit more complicated later on when I moved up onto the farm. Do you want to know any more about it? I will come back to photography later, if you like.

It developed quite a bit beyond that eventually. But all this came to an end when my old Dad… I explained that his ambition was always to buy a farm. And this pea-pulling job at Tarana had finished.

It was a fifty acre block. I had actually done all the ploughing on it and scarifying and when the peas were ready to pull I came back and worked on the pea pulling team. When it finished one of the men on the team came from Griffith and he had a contact down there that there was pea pulling down there. And so I had an old motorbike at the time.

I paid twenty pounds for an old motorbike, mainly because I wanted transport to go from one job to another. Not like these days, there was no sport in it, but because I wanted a pair of wheels, see. We decided between the two of us that we would get on the motorbike and send my tent down to Griffith because he had relations down there and we would go and work on this pea-pulling job down there.

So we get on the motorbike and leave Tarana and in those days there were no asphalt roads. They were all corrugated dirt roads and it was pretty rough. And riding pillion on a motorbike with no springs was pretty rough and he got to Wagga and decided that enough was enough. We managed to book into a bed and breakfast place for the night for a bed and he decided he wasn’t going any further.

He would catch the train from Wagga to Griffith. And that left me with the motorbike, so I took the motorbike and got about halfway to Narrandera, about twenty miles short of Narrandera, actually, and the old motorbike broke down. So not knowing very much about those sort of things I set out to walk from where it broke down into Narrandera – about twenty miles. And I managed to get a lift in and

I got the part that I needed from a garage and the next day I had to walk the whole twenty miles back. I couldn’t get a lift because there were no cars on the road. So I walked twenty miles for the motorbike and when I put the part in it started all right but it wouldn’t go any faster than low gear. I rode it into town in low gear in Narrandera and put it in at the

garage and left it there and got the motor train from Narrandera to Griffith. I spent my time there pulling peas with my mate. Pitched a tent, camped on a canal. And one day I got a telegram from my old Dad saying that in the school holidays he had gone up to Newcastle where his old Mum lived at the time, and when he came back he called in at Gosford.

You know where Gosford is? Well he had contacted a real estate agent and he had been taken out to a farm out at Wamberal – it was just seven miles out from Gosford – and he had bought a twenty-seven acre farm there. Just walk in walk out and he wanted to keep teaching for another three of years and he asked me in the telegram… He wanted me to come up and take over the farm. The only

problem was that this all happened… I came up and took it all over but it turned out that the farm was completely worked out. The man that had sold it to us had developed it from virgin bush. He had raised a family on it. They had orange trees and early beans and winter peas and tomatoes as crops and it had been

worked out. It was slopes. All sloping down into a five acre paddock in the middle. And the best of the soil had been washed off the slopes into this five acre paddock and it was impossible to make a living in it any more. And he sold it to us and I was expected to make a living on it. Of course the old Dad had his salary. He was okay. So that was a big problem. I spent six years actually

bringing it up to making it viable. I did that by… The five acre paddock had beautiful chocolate soil. You can imagine down to about six feet. And I combined that with the fact that in those days the poultry industry was very closely regulated. You couldn’t run poultry on a shedder licence and you were

confined to a certain number. You couldn’t put in forty thousand like you can these days. You could only put in so many thousand. And to put in a thousand white leghorn layers, which was popular in those days out there, was equivalent to the basic wage. It was a regular thing. You sent your eggs into the Egg Board and every fortnight you got your check. It was regular cash flow in other words, so I put in… I spent six years and put every cent I made back –

I never took any wages – into putting in a long row of sheds, proper sheds. I built them myself and put in automatic watering and automatic feeding and a hundred white leghorns to each shed. Each shed was on an earth floor and nine inches above the surrounding ground so that the water couldn’t wash in from outside. And I used to pick up the

manure with a scoop and the draughthorse we had on this beautiful chocolate soil and I would go and put it in to a depth of nine inches in this pen. We had the ordinary roost for the hens. The manure would come down and go onto the ground you’d throw in grass or straw, for over the month they’d scratch all through it and that was the best manure you could get. It was

broken down by this beautiful chocolate soil. We had to take out these six hundred orange trees which we couldn’t afford to keep because they had to be fertilised twice a year with this artificial fertiliser which was very expensive You couldn’t buy it because you couldn’t sell oranges in those days, and if you didn’t fertilise you lost the trees. What I did was I used to plough up each end and put in about six shovels of this

for poultry manure and then just continue ploughing, and I would do this six months this way and then six months the other way and those orange trees when I left there were starting to… They were probably as good a trees as you can find anywhere, and only because of this manure. And so we were working the whole thing in together. And that was the only way I could make that place viable. We had the cash flow coming in from those nearly a thousand layers.

And we used to take the oranges. You couldn’t sell oranges in the city here because you had to pay a fifteen per cent commission to the agents and you had to pay a packing shed to pack them in the first place. By the time you did all that there was nothing in it. So what we used to do was take the oranges off the trees on Saturday and take them through to Newcastle – we had a tabletop utility – and put them straight into bags, take them to Newcastle and sell them at a shilling

a bucket to the poor people up there, the coal-mining people, and it was a good market for them. We’d sell them at a profit. So we were selling oranges at a profit and we had the cash flow from the eggs, and when the war came along the whole thing was a good viable proposition for one family.

Well I was doing it myself for a start and I was employing a young man. It was a bit better than seven and six a week. We used to pay a pound a week and his board and keep him and his food and his washing and his bed and a pound a week, which was good in the Depression.

We were still just coming out of the Depression and these young blokes from the city couldn’t get jobs and a pound a week was good pocket money, you know. They could use it if they wanted it. So for the first four years, three or four years, I employed somebody to help me and after that my young brother had left school and he came with me and for the last two years we didn’t employ the man.

We had to let him go and the young brother worked with me. And when I finally came to volunteering for service my young brother knew enough about the farm to take over from me.

No. I never drew a cent in the early six years I was there, and my young brother in the two years never drew a cent of it.

Everything we made… The one thing you could make a few dollars at was he had early ground where we could grow a few early beans. If you could get the early market you could make a bit of good money out of that. That was the only thing you could make money with on that farm. It was not a living but it was a good amount and that contributed to keeping the farm going. That plus what I could make out of the… For the first few years my old Dad

had to subsidise it because there was nothing coming in at all for the first twelve months. There was no money coming into it at all so he had to subsidise it from his salary as a teacher. After that we had money coming in and everything we made went back into it. It cost money to build these pens, sort of thing they were properly built, you know, with proper galvanised iron on top and timber. It all cost money to do it. And everything we made

even out of the photographic business that I had I put back into developing that farm. The only thing we drew was every Saturday night they had pictures on in town and we used to get the bus and go to the pictures. If there were local dances we would go to the dance maybe, and that type of thing.

No time for girlfriends; no money. The first girlfriend I had was when I joined the air force. Not a girlfriend. The first time I took a girl out.

No there was no money.

I liked to work on the farm. Yes.

I didn’t like the hard part. No. I like being outside. I can’t stand to be closed up. I’ve always had to be outside That’s why I bought a milk run because at least you’re out. You’re not out in the day time

but whatever I have done… When I established a lawn mowing run, when I couldn’t make enough money out of the milk – we are getting ahead a bit – but I couldn’t make enough out of the milk because we got blocked. You were in a zone and you couldn’t work out of your zone. And I had to find extra money. I had two weddings and two twenty-first birthdays in the period of three years which I had to finance, and my wife is a wizard in the way she worked it financially.

We didn’t pay any twenty thousand dollars like they do these days for a wedding. We had to keep it all down. But we had it catered for and all that and it all costs money. And I had to be able to do that so I took on delivering groceries every Thursday and every Friday in addition to doing the milk run at night-time.

That will come later. Yeah.

Well to us I’ve always… Going back a little bit to Tarana with all the trains going through. I knew every locomotive in New South Wales. At the back there they’ve got the thirty-six

club and the fifty-four in front… No they are both thirty-sixes. And my ambition was to drive a steam train or drive an aeroplane. Because those were the days when I was ten or eleven years old, Kingsford Smith and Ulm and they were all blazing the trails with these pioneer flights across the Pacific and from America. Smithy’s come out in the Southern Cross from America.

Ulm came out from Britain. And that was my ambition. Two things. To drive an aeroplane and to drive a steam train. I got… With the steam trains… Going back a little bit. When I was seventeen I heard that there was a vacancy for a junior porter on the local railway station and

with this being able to drive a steam train in my mind, because they sometimes lead to these sort of things, you know, I decided to apply for the job and I had to come down here to the city to do the tests. And it was just a simple arithmetic test. I did arithmetic at school. I did arithmetic and spelling and I passed that quite easily and then I did the eye test and they said I had a lazy left eye,

there was no way that I could be a junior porter. All I had to do was clean the platforms and help unload the train and that sort of thing. No. No way I could do that. So that put an end to me driving an engine. And driving an aeroplane was a different matter because later on….

Used to see the Sydney-Brisbane

passenger plane used to go every day. The old Stinson. Remember the Stinson? You wouldn’t remember the Stinson. It made history when it took off from Brisbane one day and disappeared. About half a mile out of Brisbane it disappeared and they found it…A man named O’Reilly found it years later. He wrote a book. Everyone gave up

searching for it. They came down as far as Gosford here and they searched all the way down as far as Gosford thinking that it had crashed on the way down. This man Bernard O’Reilly was at a place called Mt Lamington in Queensland and he had a dairy farm right on the top of this mountain, and he was a great bushman and he worked out the theory that

one of his cousins had another farming property had heard this Stinson go in a cloud and disappear in a cloud at a certain time, and he worked out that there were the three ridges where those clouds were. And it was very mountainous country up there and very wild. And he worked out that that plane could have hit one of those ridges and he went out on his own and spent

ten days… I just forget the exact story. And he want out and worked out from the theory where the plane might have hit. And he found that plane. It had crashed and there were two people still alive. One was Proud, the Jeweller man. He had the jewellery business down here. He was a big jewellery man. And I don’t know who the other one was. And they saved the lives of those two people because he had

done this. Everybody else had given them up as lost and they found the plane, and that was one of the planes that I used to see go every day.

Well I didn’t have any idea of becoming a pilot. I had the ambition but I never had any great idea about it. No. I went to a… I think an air pageant just before

I left Tarana on this pea pulling job, the one I was telling you about before I went to the irrigation area. I had this old motorbike and I went to an air pageant in Bathurst, and at this stage I was still doing the photos on the rare occasions I was home. I bought a little camera called a Colour Kodak Pupille, which is half VP [Vest Pocket] size and probably not as small as thirty-five mil [millimetres], and

the Measure camera was just coming into vogue at this time and it took sixteen exposures on this pocket-sized one twenty-seven sized film. Don’t ask me the size, I forget them now. But it took sixteen exposures on that instead of the eight and I was keen on… They were getting keen on using this for competition work. And I got on the motorbike and rode into their air pageant in Bathurst. They

landed at a place called Kelso in a paddock out there. Quite a big show, really. And I went up in an old aeroplane, I think it had an engine, an old World War I engine. It was a real old timer. And you looked out the wing. I sat in one of the passenger seats. It took about six passengers and you could look out the window along the wing and underneath it, and flying over Bathurst I got a beautiful view of Bathurst

looking down George Street with this little Kodak Pupille camera. When I got home I didn’t enlarged it but I sent it in to the Sydney Mail, which was a publication run by the Sydney Morning Herald in those days and it was accepted and published in the Sydney Mail. And that was my first experience of flying and I paid seven and six for

that and I got ten shillings for the photo. I had no ideas of becoming a pilot at that stage. No.

I did because being on the farm you had a radio. No television in those days but you heard it on the radio. All about Chamberlain and all of this and he came back with his umbrella.

We heard all of those things. On the farm we used to get the Sydney Morning Herald regularly so we kept in touch with what was going on all the time. By that time of course my old Dad had retired and he was living on the farm with us. Used to get down and wash the eggs and brush down lantana. He was having the time of his life really. The best years of his life, I think, were the last years he was with us. So yes, we heard all about it and read all about it but it was remote. It was on the other side of the world.

But immediately a lot of my friends joined up. The army. One joined the army and he eventually went away to the middle east and all that type of thing. But I… For the first few… I had no ideas of joining anything because I was so busy trying to get this farm going at the time and building sheds and that type of thing. I didn’t bother about it.

It was too remote really. We weren’t affected out here. Anyway, but we all heard about the Spitfires and the Battle of Britain, and that for young people, as well as myself, got the idea that we would like to fly Spitfires. Every young chap would like to fire Spitfires. Everybody… It was the ambition of everybody and it was a disappointment for lots of people to get into the air force and then be classified to be a gunner or something like that.

And they couldn’t be a pilot. Not a Spitfire and not even a pilot. I think he put his fingers up for two there.

So I didn’t really… Until the war broke out I didn’t… I had no ambition of becoming a pilot. No. I would have liked to but I knew there was no way that

I could and I never even thought about it because of that. You know.

Well photographically, as I explained to Matt [interviewer], that was the end of that because all the material was… Excuse me. I explained to Matt that I get hayfever and I’ve got to… Excuse me.

All the photographic material, or most of it, was earmarked for the services. Unless you were in it in a big way like Bonny Luke, the photographic studios… They could still get it. But being in a small way like me. I was at that time handling weddings and home portraits. I was running around on a motorbike taking home portraits on farms and that, and weddings were reasonable

good money and I had a developing and printing business going. Enlarging and copying and anything with processing. But not being able to get chemicals and materials I had to give it up because they are not available. But the actual farm, actually it was good because a lot of farmers went away to the war and those that were left, we got better returns for what we were actually producing.

We got good money from producing eggs and early beans, good money in it, and in the last year or two we were starting to do reasonably well, you know.

No. That’s a bit of a story too because there was no threat out here at all because Japan hadn’t come into the war. And at that time

I was so busy getting this farm going that I never gave it a terrible lot of thought. When I realised that this farm wasn’t going to be enough for two families, the younger brother was the logical one to come in at this stage because the older brother was already in the air force

as a meteorological officer so he was never on the farm. It was only myself and the young brother. I realised there was never going to be enough for two families on it because we couldn’t expand it enough to be able to do that, and I thought well maybe… And not having any trade or profession or academic qualifications I thought what I would do was join the air force

and get a trade because I knew that every squadron has a photographer, maybe two or three, and I’d maybe get some professional experience which I didn’t have. That might lead to something after the war and that’s what prompted me to get on my motorbike and go to the recruiting train and offer my services. It was not so much a patriotic thing at all.

They had a recruiting train out at Gosford, where I was at a place called Matcham, which was seven miles out of Gosford on the farm there. It was just a matter of about twenty minutes’ drive and I was there for the day.

Well they were the ones where I knew I would have the best chance of using any experience I had as a photographer.

I would have been accepted and I would have been, too. I know.

It was a recruiting train with the carriages all set up with offices and that sort of thing. You just went in there and talked to the people.

Only the air force. That travelled right through the country and pulled up at different major cities.

Well the man said, as I explained to you, the man said that these bombers were starting to come off the production line overseas and

Britain and Russia were starting to have a pretty rough time and they were desperately short of people to fly these big bombers, the Lancasters and the Stirlings and those things. “And what about having a go at aircrew?” to me, see And of course in a week moment, I don’t know why, but I said, “I’ll have a go at that.” I think deep down I had a feeling I would like to be involved in that but I never had any idea what was involved.

And that was okay. Then he put my name down and when he found out I had a farm, or was running a farm he said, “You are no good to us. Go and get back out on your farm. You’re producing food, you are in a reserved occupation. No way.” So he said in the finish then that, “If you go and take a

petition up with all your neighbours,” they are only small farms, twenty-five or thirty acre farms, “all your neighbours round about to the effect that they think the farm will have no loss of production for you leaving, we will consider it,” see. So I did that like a fool and went back in and gave them a petition and it all worked from there. I suddenly became patriotic whether I wanted to or not. I forgot all about becoming a photographer then.

Oh there would be about six, half a dozen neighbours.

I just went around and explained to them that I wanted to join the air force and they wanted somebody to sign this petition to the effect that there wouldn’t be a loss in production, and with the young brother there and the father there at that time, he had retired and he was washing the eggs

and brushing lantana and doing useful things on the farm. Between the two of them they could have run it quite easily. I had a sister living there, too, at the time. A married sister. So they could have run the farm with the way we had it all set up with automatic watering, automatic feeding for the fowls. The brother could handle the horse and the little tractor we had, little rotary hoe, that sort of thing.

And he had been with me two years to be able to grow beans, which was one of the main crops. It would have worked out quite well.

They all agreed.

I had to go in… I went back the same day, actually, to see them

and left all the papers with them and signed the papers. No. The next day. It was there a week. Yeah, the next day I think it was. I went back in there and I had to go to the local School of Arts every Thursday night to be coached in spelling and arithmetic by the deputy head of the local high school before they let me in.

No, I don’t think so. It didn’t matter at that stage because you weren’t classified as anything in particular, you were just aircrew. So you could be a gunner, a wireless air gunner, a navigator or a pilot. There was no classification at that stage.

I enlisted actually in June of 1941 and I went to this coaching thing for… You had to wait your turn to get into the air force because they had to arrange… They had all these courses going through. I had to wait until November to be inducted to the Initial Training School. But

actually I joined in June.

Well it was only every Thursday night. I was still running the farm at the time.

Not from that farm but from another farm a young man that I got to know quite well. Yeah. We joined the same day. He was classified

as a gunner and I eventually was classified as a pilot. You had to be in the air force for about twelve weeks and do an initial training course and in that you did all sorts of funny things. Well to me at any rate. You did six hours of lectures and then an hour of physical training, which was very important, and an hour on the parade ground learning to be soldiers. And at the end… Every week

we had a test of some sort. An academic one or… You were instructed in armaments and you were instructed in law and administration – anything but air force, really. And at the end of the time you were given a final exam. And by that time they had a dossier on you and you went before a selection committee of three people, one air force and two civilians, I think, and for

some reason they classified me as a potential trainee for a pilot, which I can never understand. But my mate, the one I was telling you about who I joined up with, was classified as a gunner. And after the twelve weeks he was sent up to Maroubra or somewhere and from there he went to England and he finished up as tail gunner on a Lancaster. He was shot down on his first raid over Hamburg in Germany and killed.

So it could have been me.

In Bradfield Park in Sydney. Some went to Somers in Victoria. Others went to Victor Harbour in South Australia. It depended on where you live, I think. I went to Lindfield, Bradfield Park.

Yep. Army huts. Thirty to a hut.

No problem. I got on all right. I joined in quite well. We had a bit of fun. We used to raid… When you would come to senior we used to raid the huts of the juniors and give them a rough time when they came in. All that kind of thing. Do a lot of things you shouldn’t be doing. No. I managed it quite well.

Well we had… Mostly university trained chaps on the lecture course, mathematics, navigation was very important. We did a lot of navigation, theoretical. And we had an armament chap who had come back from overseas.

He had seen action as a gunner over Germany or over France and he issued instructions in armaments. We had to strip a Browning machine gun to pieces and name every part and put it together again, all that type of thing You know. So it was quite a useful time really. They had of course a warrant officer disciplinarian and he was a corporal in our case and he did all that stuff

out on the parade ground. That was very funny at times. This particular bloke, nobody liked him very much. He was a bit of a pig, you know. And one night we got back, just before tea I think it was and we were all going in for a shower and we got him and took him outside and rolled him in the dirt and put him back in the shower again, you know. “All right you blokes,” he says. “After dinner,” he says,

“out on the parade ground.” So the whole lot went out. About twenty of us went out on the parade ground, up and down, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards and we were all marching in column. And he says “About turn.” He said. We were marching towards the bush, you see, and about half the column about turned and the other half just kept marching off into the bush and disappeared. He gave up after that. He reckoned

we were a bad mob. We had a bit of fun.

I really don’t know to tell you the truth. I think that later on getting ahead quite a bit in the navigation school… There were no excuses.

And it was a twelve week crash course in navigation. We had to qualify. You couldn’t become a captain of one of those unless you qualified as a navigator first. How I got through that I don’t know because some of the problems involved trigonometry and I had never heard of trigonometry, you know. I think what happened was they used to bring in architects and engineers from outside at night-time

to give you a bit of coaching and I used to take advantage of that. And this is just a theory but I think if the lecturers got the idea that you were trying, really trying, and they definitely wanted pilots and if the pass mark was fifty and you got forty-eight they would probably push you through. You know. That is the only thing that I could think of because it was pretty hopeless not having done algebra or any of that sort of thing.

I could do navigation problems all right. I got on with those quite easily, eventually. It was not easy but I did get on with it all right and I could handle them quite well. I navigated planes for twelve weeks anyway. We used to go out over Bass Strait in the old Avro Ansons with a staff pilot flying and we would go out for three or four hours at a time, and I came back all right so I couldn’t have been too bad.

Morse code. You had to be able to send and receive at twelve words a minute – even pilots. And wireless air gunner operators had to be able to send and receive at twenty-three words a minute. He only had to pass at twelve words a minute so we had wireless instructors instructing us in wireless. We needed to be able to use the wireless and be able to do the Morse code

and the navigation, of course, that was the most important part. Engines… We had instruction on engines. Not deep. And that wasn’t any problem for me because I have always been mechanically inclined. I have always been able to pull a car to pieces and put it together, or a tractor, or lawn mowers later on up when I was here, and

all that type of things so it was really interesting to me.

The actual flying. I loved the flying.

No. We did see the Tiger Moth parked on the parade ground. And when you started those you had to turn the propeller round and we had to learn to put one hand up and one hand down like that in case

you put the other one and it started and cut your hand off, you know. Little things like that. But that was the only aeroplane I saw for that twelve weeks. The little Tiger Moth. And that was only on the ground

I never had any other… Even though we were doing navigation problems in that initial course I never had any illusions about being anything but a gunner because I knew

to fire a machine gun you didn’t need any academic qualifications. You had to be able to pull them to pieces and clean them but there was nothing in that. You know.

I got a shock. A pleasant shock. I thought, “All right. I’ll give it a go.” It didn’t worry me, not a bit, because I always wanted to be a pilot, you know. The fact that I was,

it was a big shock, a big change, because I didn’t have a clue, you know, that was going to happen. And I thought, “Well, I’ll give it a go and they can only scrub you.” Thirty-three and a third per cent of the people who went out on Tiger Moths got scrubbed.

And ended up as gunners anyway. So no worries.

I have always heard that farmers make good pilots. I don’t know weather it is true or not. Particularly if you could ride horses. When I was on that three thousand acre property and afterwards I had to ride quite a lot because part of what I did over there was droving and I had to know how to handle horses and all that type of thing. I used to be able to ride quite well and I had handled big horses too.

Big draughthorses as well so it wasn’t entirely… So I wasn’t entirely inexperienced at that type of thing. And maybe that was why. I don’t know. But I’ve heard it said about World War I pilots, the ones that came off the land and just the coordination of handling horses and riding horses spilled over into flying an aeroplane. Maybe it was true. I don’t know.

Yeah. And I have met a lot of them since too. Yes there were a lot. Yeah. And one in particular… Later on in that air force pile there there is a thing called ‘A letter for Tim’.

And you might just, if you’ve got time, I would like you to read it. It is thirteen pages long, though. It started off as one page and ended up as thirteen. That’s the end result of my family making me get a computer and learn to use it when I wrote the book. So this man says in that that he actually burst into tears when he was classified as a wireless air gunner. He says it. He cried. A grown man.

So does that answer your question? And that is only one man. I have spoken to quite number since then too.

No. No. Never any.

That’s right. Japan had come into the picture. Things were getting a bit serious.

It did make me more patriotic, I tell you, because when we had Japan sitting off our shores up here I come to realise that they could easily invade this country. And they could have. I had friends working on the small farms

at Matcham where I lived and where the farm was… Were taken into the militia, given a .303 rifle and three months’ training and they were up on the Kokoda Trail. One of them got killed and when they came back the things they told me that happened up there were what you find on documentaries. That is quite true.

There were some terrible things that happened up there and they had three months’ training and a .303 rifle, so things were bad. And those Japs [Japanese] got within thirty miles of Port Moresby. If they had taken Port Moresby it was just a step across to Townsville, Townsville down to here. They would have taken the country. America wasn’t doing anything at that particular stage. It was all up to Australians.

The next step was twelve weeks on the Tigers… The Tiger Moths.

At Temora out in the mid west. And that was a bit traumatic because they are a beautiful little aeroplane. They are a real fun aeroplane

but the training was such that you were given a certain number of hours and if you didn’t make it you were out. Finished. Scrubbed. And as I say I think there were a hundred and four of us who went out and I think forty of us were taken off course out of those.

In the Tigers?

Well fly the thing straight and level was the first thing. If you could fly the thing straight and level you were doing a pretty good. But unfortunately the methods of training didn’t allow for that because I found right through the training, including Beauforts and more so the Beauforts than anything else, the way to teach you to fly is to make you fly

irrespective of whether you could do it or not. They would put you in situations that you weren’t trained or weren’t qualified to handle because that’s the way you learn fast. I’ve got a… My eldest daughter had a young friend who trained as a civil airline pilot. It took him twenty years to become a captain. Twenty years. That’s how long

it took him. He is flying now for Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong. Flying the big Tri Stars. It took him twenty years to become a captain. So these things… It’s a long process to learn to fly an aeroplane like this. Not Tiger Moths – anybody can fly those. Anybody can learn to fly those. Anybody could learn to fly those but not these. And the fact that they took you off these was that the instructors would know at that stage the way

you could handle a plane whether later on you were going to be able to fly these. And rather than waste all that time you were taken off at that stage. But what they were looking for is, the first thing was to take one of those off and get it up and learn to fly it straight and level. And before you were sent go solo you had to do that flying dual. And before they were sent solo one of the first

things they did was the instructor would put the plane up into a stall turn and kick it over into a spin, and you had to recover from the spin. He would show you how to recover and the next thing you would have to land. “There you go. Get out of the spin.” And that’s all you got. That’s the only instruction you got. You got in that Tiger Moth and you had to go up to six thousand feet and

when you got up to six thousand feet, hundred feet more, hundred feet more, then you would have to kid yourself to put that plane into a stall turn because knowing that you can only fly the thing straight and level. And that’s the way it was. He was standing there on the ground watching you and you knew that. So you pulled up into a stall turn and kicked her over and away she went. And then you find this thing going, the world going round and round and round like this. And you are coming down and

you just had to remember what he told you to lift. And learning to do that and the attitudes you found yourself in then you learned more in those few minutes, you might say, than you learned in six weeks of normal instruction. And that was the theory of it you see. And the same thing with flying the… When you learned to fly straight and level…

You go solo, see, and when you are practising solo you gradually get your confidence. And you had to learn to fly the thing with a hood on the very primitive flying instruments they had, which was only a turning back indicator and a compass… An air speed indicator, nothing else really. You put the hood over your head, you’d have to… He’d

be in the front cockpit, of course, but you’d have to learn to fly the thing on instruments. And you weren’t qualified to do that. And when it came to doing… Only about three weeks after you had gone solo he would take you up and show you how to do aerobatics, loop the loop, slow roll, stall turn, the three basic aerobatics. He would land the planes and then say, “Off you go and do aerobatics.” He would show them how to do them first and he would be down on the ground,

standing on the ground watching you and you’d have to go up and do those aerobatics. Doing the loop was all right. That was quite easy. The stall turn was easy but doing that, the nose would roll you’d be screaming down to earth, you know. I couldn’t do them. I used to… The attitude you found yourself in by doing all that… Again they would learn more in the few minutes

than maybe in weeks and weeks of normal instruction, but that was the theory of it.

Yes. That’s right. Same as doing a stall turn and a loop and a roll. A slow roll was very hard to do, actually. To do it properly you had to get the plane around into the six attitude as you went round.

Upside down and back up. Step by step. And the first thing you do is you get upside down and all the controls are reversed unless you’ve got to push the strip forward to hold the nose up. And the hardest thing of all to do is to do that and if you don’t know about it, you know about it but to do it is a different matter. And the nose used to drop and when it dropped you would just finish off diving down to earth again. So eventually I did do them, but not that first time.

No, no. Well one of my mates. Well I didn’t know that man personally but he was on our course and he stalled the Tiger on the (UNCLEAR) turn, one thing you never do, on a Tiger and he spun the plane down and got killed. But no, I didn’t…

Well we did have one at about six thousand feet with the instructor and the engine failed completely. He screamed out, “Find somewhere to land!” because the first thing you do is look for smoke on the ground. You are supposed to land into the wind, you see. The smoke would show you where the wind was coming from. It is all flat country around Temora, sheep grazing country,

mostly flat, and a few trees all around the place. And we had to find a place between the trees and we corkscrewed down and turned down in between the trees, you know. We found out where the wind was coming from I think and we finished up landing in amongst a big mob of sheep. The sheep were jumping in all directions but that turned out quite okay.

But somebody had let a couple of the plugs loose through the plugs, they had worked loose in the engine, so we had no motor. But that wasn’t an accident, really. The instructor went to the homestead and rang up the base and they sent another Tiger out with a mechanic and away we went.

The fact that the instructor was there was a big help. He did most of the recovering.

Yes, definitely, but that came later on with the Beauforts when we get to it.

We went to Avro Ansons over in Mallala,

South Australia. They were the twin engines, Gentle Annies we called them because of their flying characteristics. You could land an Avro Anson at forty-five miles an hours. Stall it at forty-five miles an hour. She would just sledge… She wouldn’t spin she would just drop down. To a certain extent. After about a hundred feet she would drop a wing but you could land them from a hundred feet up virtually.

We used to call them Gentle Annies because of their flying characteristics. And they were the worst plane to learn to fly because (UNCLEAR) the Beauforts.

The difference is of course you’ve got two engines and two throttles. Each engine is controlled individually with a throttle for each engine We used to control it for each engine, you see.

When you are flying them you have got to use the two throttles together and you’ve got to keep them even, otherwise if you’ve got one too far ahead of the other you go to the right or the left, whatever it might be. So you’ve got to have those synchronised all the time. When you are in formation, for example, you use the friction nut because you can put the throttles in position with the friction nut and they won’t move.

And you loosen that so as you’ve got your throttles free and you are using those throttles all the time keeping up. You get behind the one in formation and you give a bit more throttle. If you get to ahead you ease back. And you are living on throttle all the time. So that’s the way you controlled them with those two throttles. It was different in that respect. And on the ground you’ve got the differential brakes, and with the Tigers there were no brakes at all.

With the big ones you’ve got the differential brakes. You put your foot on the left rudder and it will turn you that way because you’ll stop that wheel, and you use the starboard motor to throttle on to help you, or you can stop it with the port motor. You can control it all from the cockpit, the whole thing. So that is why the twin-engine aircraft are a bit different from the single. The single engine ones have no brakes at all.

And the Ansons had air brakes and an air bottle and they used to fill the air bottle up and when you used all the air you had no brakes. These had a compressor that filled it automatically all the time so you had your brakes all the time.

Mostly except one particular

instructor, he was a pig and I very nearly got scrubbed because of him. You can still get scrubbed later on though not the same percentage. You’d get the odd ones who couldn’t handle Ansons. And you’d definitely get ones that couldn’t handle Beaufort so you’d still get taken off later on. And this particular man, I think he thought I shouldn’t be getting my wings, I think. If you look at my logbook there you’ll find one

assessment… You had an assessment after each station you went to and I got one below average assessment which I had to fight all the way through the rest of my career because of that. I finished up… Just to praise myself up a little, I finished up in the last assessment in that book with eighteen months of continuous operational service flying a Beaufort and doing everything it was designed to except dropping torpedoes,

I suppose. On maritime reconnaissance, chasing submarines, bombing, strafing against the Japanese in the islands, and I finished up with an assessment from there of above average. And I said in that book that I wrote – I have written a few things – and I wrote somewhere that I would like to have gone and shown that man that gave me the below average. He was just

one of those people that you just couldn’t get on with.

Yeah. I think it was a personality clash. Yeah. We just couldn’t work together. You wouldn’t know… The biggest thing about learning to fly any aircraft was that if you were dual control and you were sitting side by side you didn’t know when he had the machine and when you had it. And you were frightened half the time to do what you wanted to do because you knew that he had the aircraft.

And the fact that you hesitated on doing those sorts of things sometimes lead you into rather nasty situations because you didn’t know when he had it and when he didn’t have it, or when you were supposed to have it and when you were not supposed to have it. And personalities did come into it. I am not using that as an excuse but it did happen. That was the only bad assessment I had in the whole five years I was in the service.

No. You didn’t know. He had his hand on the wheel, on the rudders, and you didn’t know whether he had it or not. And some… A good instructor would take his hands off the wheel and off the rudders and trust you to fly the aircraft. One that values his life.

You can understand it. They’ve got their lives at risk and they can get a bit nervous, you know. Some instructors, they wouldn’t trust you. They are flying with you. Unless you are flying straight and level doing something simple they wouldn’t take their hands off it. I had a friend coming into land on a Beaufort with his instructor this particular day and he was

a top instructor and he had his hands taken off for the bloke to do a landing on his own, and it turned out that something went wrong and this friend of mine had done something wrong and it was likely to turn out dangerous and he suddenly just grabbed it like that, quick as that, and just took over control. And he was alert to it all the time and he was so quick at doing it

that there was no problem to my friend, you know. If he hadn’t have done it then they might have crashed. So they had to be alert all the time to do those type of things. Some just couldn’t let go and that make it awkward for anybody learning to fly those things, on any aircraft even on Ansons.

At

Mallala they took the Ansons… Suspended training for three weeks. That is the aircraft carrier force that had devastated Pearl Harbour sitting off the north of New Guinea waiting to cover an invasion of Australia. An invasion of Darwin seemed to be almost certain at the time and they took the… They suspended all training on the Ansons

for three weeks and they put machine guns, Browning machine guns on the Ansons, and we always thought if we fired that machine gun on the Ansons, the plane would fall to pieces. It is only make of tubular steel and fabric, an Anson. It was a beautiful aeroplane but it wasn’t very solid. These things were built like a tank. They were solid. They were all metal and a very solid and sound aircraft. If you fired those machine guns on the wings and you’d get the recoil

but you wouldn’t feel it. No way. But the old Anson, they reckon she would have fallen to pieces. I had a friend who was given an old Lee Enfield rifle and six rounds of ammunition, he told me, to help up in Darwin. That was the state of our defences. That was the time when all the Wirraways and all the Walgetts got shot down. About half

a dozen Wirraways went up. They were our front-line fighters and they went up to meet about a hundred Japanese Zeros and they all got shot down. All but one, I think. But whatever it was, that was the state of our defences in those days.

Oh they had a physical trainer at the Initial Training School. We used to have to go in the gym and do all these exercises and jumping over horses and all that sort of thing. The usual thing. And also they would go for five-mile runs. And then of course the parade ground was

the usual thing soldiers did, learning to use a rifle and rifle drill and marching, endless marching, and all that sort of thing. I think cross-countries were probably the most important thing. The exercises were all… We had the physical training up on the stage and everyone would do what he said. They would lie down and do all the things he said to do. I didn’t have any problem but

a lot of the city boys did, because I was in pretty good condition in those days having spent eleven years on farms.

I don’t think mine could have really because I was in top condition.

Well in our day that’s not so important. It depends on the aeroplane. Nowadays you do need to be because there’s a force of gravity and you need to have very tight clothing to slow the blood circulation down and all those sort of things. But in our day that wasn’t important. We only had to do up to six-hour trips and sit in the planes for six

hours. Sometimes flying on a pitch black night or in bad weather is quite difficult and we didn’t have auto pilots or co-pilots – one pilot only. So you had to have certain amount of fitness, yeah. But not as they do have today. But you still had to be physically fit, though. But what degree

I don’t know. I know I was always very lucky to be physically up to what I had to do. I remember… Maybe this is a little bit delicate, but when we were operating down south here. We were working from Camden out here all up and down the east coast chasing submarines and maritime reconnaissance. We used to have a

strike aircraft on duty, that’s twenty-four hours a day, and when you were on duty in the strike aircraft you had to virtually sleep either in the aircraft or under it. You had to be fully clothed and all the guns had to be loaded and the depth charges on, everything ready to go at a moment’s notice in case on of the patrol aircraft found a submarine or an enemy, whatever.

This particular day we were just finishing out, I think it was a twenty-four hour tour sort of thing each day, and I went to the toilet, liquid that is at ten o’clock the previous night, at 7 o’clock the next morning, and there happened to be a hut close to the aeroplane

and we had managed to get a sleep on the rough beds they had in those days, fully clothed, you know. And we were just about to go to the mess to have breakfast and we got a call for the… One of the patrol aircraft had seen a submarine and we had to go out on a strike duty, sort of thing. We took off and I didn’t land till about two o’clock in the afternoon.

And I wasn’t able to go to the toilet and so on. Ten o’clock at night till two o’clock in the afternoon! So physically you had to be reasonably strong in the bladder at least. Do you know what I mean? That’s just an example, you know. Because a lot of people used to get airsick, you know. I was very lucky. I never got airsick when I was flying an aeroplane, actually.

When I navigated I was inclined to get sick. Funny thing that, isn’t it? We took off one day and we were based Camden and we had to go to Adelaide, and one of our flight sergeant maintenance men who was in charge of the engine section of the squadron had an infant son in Perth that died.

It was Saturday afternoon and there weren’t too many of the crew, we only had one squadron operating then and there weren’t too many of the crew on the station, and I happened to be there and the commanding officer said, “Take him to…” You couldn’t get transport in those days. I mean you couldn’t get on an aeroplane and fly to Perth. You had to more or less hitchhike. And he said, “Take him over to Adelaide.” He might be lucky enough to get an air force plane going over to Perth see.

So we took off and there were single controlled… And when people heard I was going to Adelaide we had a plane load of passengers going home for the night on leave because they could stop of for the night and come back. And one of them was a pilot mate and he was sitting alongside me on the wing ((UNCLEAR)] and we got to about near Mildura there and this mate said to me… It was a hot day and bumpy.

The plane was bumping up and down a bit and he said, “Would you like a spell?” I said, “That will be okay.” And we changed seats, you see. And after about twenty minutes I started to et a bit squeamish in the stomach. I knew we had to land at Renmark on the way and I said, “I think we had better change back over now, Darky.” and he said, “Okay.” I would have had to go for a bag otherwise. I changed back and as soon as I was back in the seat I was good as gold again.

That… Almost the same position in a plane but I get sick when I wasn’t… I was just sitting there watching things, you know. I wasn’t flying the aeroplane because once you get them set up they are quite easy to fly straight and level, there is nothing much to do. Never, ever… We used them for dive bombing. We did all sorts of things, not aerobatics but we did funny things you wouldn’t normally do. Steep turns.

And then sometimes we flew in atrocious whether for hours on end. But I never ever got sick when I was flying an aeroplane so I think there must be something psychological in it. It is an interesting point, I think. Anyway that’s explaining a bit too much.

Well we did the…

We did the twelve-week crash navigation course first. We went from Mallala to Cressy in Victoria, where the navigation school was. We had to do that first. We were flying old Avro Ansons there. Well we weren’t flying them. We had staff flying the planes and we were doing the navigating out over Bass Strait. And you had to do that before you could become captain on a Beaufort so that’s where I went after the Ansons.

The first time you get in one of those things… All those pilots had orders not to do aerobatics or anything. It was called an air experience and your first flight and it could be important because it could turn some people off flying, what this instructor did when I got in the plane.

Yeah. Everything that the Tiger Moth could do he did to try and make me sick. And I very nearly changed my mind. I thought, “No, I don’t want to be a pilot.” But that was the idea. That was my first experience with a Tiger Moth. And the first experience in the air force of flying and I survived it so… But they were on strict instructions not to

do that but they took a delight in doing it.

He did rolls and stall turns and loops and everything that the Tiger Moth could do, he did. Dives and turns and everything, steep turns. You name it, he did it.

I wasn’t really unnerved. I didn’t like it very much but I wasn’t really unnerved. I was pretty good that way.

It didn’t really worry me a terrible lot but it could have some people. But that particular… I wouldn’t say it unnerved me, no. Thinking back on other things that happened later on I did get a bit unnerved but not that particular time.

Yeah. A place called Mallala. That is about forty miles out of Adelaide.

Oh quite good. We had long army huts with about thirty to a hut. You know. And a bed each side… One bench all the way along and metal beds to sleep on. They were quite good.

Well we had to go… There was not much in the way of parade

work, parade ground stuff and all that sort of thing, but it was mostly lectures. You would do half a day flying. Maybe two hours. You would go in pairs, actually, and do maybe two hours each and spend four hours flying, and in the afternoon you would do half a day lectures. The next day it might be different. It would be lectures in the morning and in the afternoon flying, you know.

That’s the way it was right though the whole course.

Oh well I wouldn’t say it was home cooked by any means but it was there and you ate it. If you didn’t like it you didn’t get any. It was as simple as that. Oh it was… The only thing I didn’t like was the scrambled eggs. They used to be cold and sort of watery, you know, I used to hate that. And I never liked rabbit. Having seen and worked with a lot of rabbits, I didn’t like rabbit to eat.

The only time I ate rabbit was after the war too, funnily enough. I was travelling between Adelaide and Oodnadatta on the old troop train and I would be sent up there to ferry an aircraft, to Darwin to ferry an aircraft south and they made me go up on a troop train. We left Adelaide at eight o’clock in the morning and I think I got to Oodnadatta at about ten o’clock at night.

This friend, it wasn’t a friend, one of the other persons in the party had been given a cold rabbit by his mother when he left in the morning so he shared this rabbit with me and it was the only time I have ever had rabbit. It is only a psychological thing. They are the cleanest meat you can get, rabbit. They live on the grass and the dew off the grass and that is the cleanest thing you can get.

I handled so many of them, cutting their heads off and skinning them and cutting them and all that, that that’s the thing. But it wasn’t. It was good nourishing food but not exactly what you would choose yourself sort of thing because you were just eating to live rather than living to eat sort of thing, you know. And you knew that if you didn’t eat it then there was nothing else

because there was nowhere where you could buy anything at most of the places.

That started at the operational training unit. I started at Bairnsdale and moved over to East Sale. They had built a new station there and when I started they were doing it from Bairnsdale, the whole operational unit there. And then we moved over to East Sale in

early 1943 and I did my training there.

After Adelaide we went to Cressy in Victoria. That was the navigation school. That is where we did a lot of general reconnaissance training there at Cressy, involving navigation.. We had to go out to places hundreds of miles out to sea where there was no

hope of getting any bearings anywhere. Find your way out by latitude and longitude. There would only be a latitude and longitude position. What they called dead reckoning navigation, which was a very important part of these aeroplanes. We had a specialist navigator sitting down the front there with his sharp table, and you never used to rely on the radios because half the time there were no radio beacons to rely on. So that training

started at Cressy and continued at Bairnsdale and Sale.

I went out to East Sale. I lived at the time on the farm up here. I was home on leave. I went down on the southern haul they

called it. It was the Albury train. And I met a chap there on the same train in the same compartment. He was a nice type of young chap, a wireless air gunner, and we got talking and we decided that we were going to fly together. We were both on our way to East Sale to crew up and learn to fly the Beauforts, and on the way to out East Sale we got talking quite well and he was a nice sort of a chap and he had done his Leaving certificate. He was

quite well educated and I knew he would be quite good at his job. When we got to Sale they just pushed us all in together. So many wireless air gunners, so many navigators, so many pilots, so many gunners and in this case there were only wireless air gunners. They combined the two and made it only three. So they put us all in together and we’ve got a week to crew up.

We had to form the crew in one week and I already had one, and this young man met another man and he had met him in his training and he knew another man so we got in together, the four of us in that week. And that’s how we crewed up. And I had that crew for two years. The same crew for two years.

Well after two years you an imagine it is quite strong. Unfortunately after the war the fellow I met got too fond of the liquid amber – during the war, actually – and he became a total alcoholic. He died about two years ago. I never saw him for about ten years. He was hopeless. Absolutely hopeless. He

got married and had a couple of little kiddies. He was a spec builder and did well in his business and he lost his wife, lost his kiddies, lost the business. He was living in a shack a way up the north coast for the last five or six years. A total alcoholic. So that’s the way some of them finish up. Another one of the wireless air gunners was a six year trained, university trained, veterinary surgeon in civilian life and came to

me and flew with us and he was a very cluey man. He was a flight lieutenant, higher than me. I was a warrant officer most of the time I was flying there because I didn’t go to the right school. Because he went to university he became a flight lieutenant and that is equivalent to a captain in the army. He was very, very efficient at his job and probably one of the reasons why I am still here. And he went back to being a vetrerinary surgeon when the war finished

and he died young though. He died of a heart attack, twenty or thirty years ago. And the other one, the navigator, we never heard from him after the war finished. He lived in Perth and South Australia and we never heard from him. But he was a bit of a nerve case. I don’t know what happened to him.

The prospects were very good. Particularly on these things it was about thirty per cent, and also on the Ansons you could get scrubbed with only the odd ones on Ansons. Once you got to that stage if you finished the course, the twelve weeks flying those and got onto the Ansons you had a pretty fair chance of being able to fly the Ansons.

Yeah. And if you couldn’t fly the Ansons

your chance of learning to fly these was less than good because the Anson was a pretty docile aircraft to fly and these were the exact opposite. With these you had to be on the ball right from the start. If you didn’t you didn’t survive. You could still get scrubbed off those but it wasn’t the same percentage. Thirty per cent on these and a small percentage on the Ansons

and probably the same on the Beauforts.

You could choose to be re-mustered on a ground job, being a cook or a gardener or a administration or whatever or you could choose to re-muster as a gunner or a wireless air operator. If you were scrubbed as a pilot you had the choice of re-mustering as some other… Or you could…

I don’t think they were ever discharged. So you had the choice but it was a manpower thing in those days. You had to be in something. If you weren’t in a reserved occupation like I was originally you had to go into something. It was either the army, the navy or the air force and it was better to volunteer than to go into something.

That didn’t worry me. It didn’t concern me. As

soon as I knew that when I had signed to become aircrew, whether it was a wireless air gunner or a pilot which I didn’t know at the time what I was going to be. I knew it was a pretty fair chance, a fifty fifty chance I wouldn’t survive the war. I knew that and I accepted it. Otherwise I could have stayed as a photographer because photographers don’t fly. They just work on the ground.

They load the camera and process the films and all of that, so I knew if I became a photographer… That’s why I went in in the first place, to become a photographer so I wouldn’t be involved in the fighting probably, not in the front line anyway. So I… Once I accepted that there was a fifty fifty chance that I signed on the dotted line to become aircrew and I knew there was a fifty fifty chance that I wouldn’t survive the war.

I just accepted that and it didn’t worry me. I don’t say I was never frightened. I was scared stiff at different times but it never got to me. It was just accepted that it might happen and it nearly did on a couple of occasions. My best mate, I was telling Matt, that he became an air gunner. He was classified as an air gunner and he went overseas early and

he was tail gunner on a Lancaster bomber, only did one raid. He was shot down after his first raid over Hamburg in Germany. They had a big night raid over Hamburg so that’s the way it could happen. I didn’t worry about it. The thing that worried me most, as I explained to Matt, was my early experience at school having this nervous breakdown and that not having a good memory would find me out some day.

And what I was doing. Although I tried my best to overcome it and do everything I could to overcome it, it always worried me that one day I was going to make some silly mistake and there were three lives there behind me. And that worried me more than going into action. I went into action and I nearly got shot down on that last raid up there a week before it finished. That’s the illustration from my logbook of the raid I took part in.

I came within half a second of being shot down. I had a tail wing blown off. I was frightened but I didn’t let it get to me because I had made up my mind that I wasn’t going to let it get to me. But you do get scared. I mean you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. But that’s the way I looked at it. I was more frightened of doing some stupid thing and making some silly mistake, which you can easily do

you know… I had a friend when we were at Camden in one of the Beauforts. We formed up as a squadron and they were going out to do formation flying practice and the flight commander… The plane that he got into was unserviceable, this mate of mine, and he had to transfer to another aircraft. And that held the whole

thing back and the flight commander was hurrying him up to get into the air, the three planes to get flying in formation. And when you take off in these things you’ve got to do a pre-flight check. All aeroplanes do, even the big ones now, they still do it. And that pre-flight drill has got to be one in rotation and done properly and if you don’t do it you could be in trouble, you could be in serious trouble. And flying these things

we took part in one operation one day in New Guinea with thirty planes off a strip cut out of the jungle in formation, and you started the engine and we did our cockpit check as we were actually taxiing to take off. You normally sit on the ground and do it and he didn’t do it, and when he took off he pulled the wrong lever. There were three levers side by side, that far apart. One was to

set the flap angle for take off, which you’ve got to set at so many degrees and use them as air brakes when you come into land. The other lever was to raise your undercart, which is the first thing you do to reduce the drag so the aircraft will pick up speed quicker, and the other one is to lock the tail of the aircraft so that the aircraft will keep straight. The tail will shimmy, normally. It wouldn’t shimmy if you lock it.

That’s the last thing you did was lock that tail. What he did was pull the wrong lever. He let the flaps down and they came down to full flap, which is breaking flaps. You normally use ten degrees flap and he had full flap and he was at five hundred feet and the aircraft turned over on its back like that. There were five of them killed. See he just pulled the wrong thing. I had a horror that I was going to do the wrong thing. Pull the wrong lever, pull the wrong switch

and I think it made me all the more careful. But having that lack of memory, not being able to memorise things is something I have had to fight with all of my life. That’s probably why I would never have made an academic. Both my daughters have masters degrees in two different things. They worked hard for them but they have got the capacity to do it.

And I don’t think I would have had the capacity. I don’t have the capacity to memorize things and learn things which most people have, and that was something that always worried me and that was not getting killed.

Well if you had gone through what I’ve gone through in the last years since I’ve been retired

you’d realise how important it is. One of my grandsons is in university at the moment doing civil engineering and he has got a wonderful brain. My oldest daughter is a mathematics, science graduate and teaching high school and all that type of thing. Well she has done… And his

father has a Bachelor of Engineering and a Masters degree in Civil Engineering and held a big job in the government in that capacity and he inherited the brain. He did wonderfully well at high school, just sailed though. And what he wanted to do when he finished high school was take a year off, you know, the way young people do these days. And I said, “You get that education first,” and

I tried to explain to him what has happened to me when I was discharged to try and get him to do it. Oh no. He wouldn’t do it. He actually won a scholarship to Wollongong University and he threw that in. He started it. Three thousand dollars it cost him. Well it cost my daughter and of course he didn’t want it. He wanted to have this year off. He has gone back

to it fortunately. He has seen the light now so maybe my talking to him has done a bit of good. But to do what I did, I was discharged. The last, because I was only twelve when I left school… If you left school when you were twelve, when you graduated as a pilot or whatever or even a navigator or a wireless air gunner, and if you went to Scots College or somewhere or Kings Grammar School or these private schools you graduated with a commission. If you went to ordinary

public schools only to where I did and left school when you were twelve you graduated as a sergeant. And if you wanted to get a commission, which I never really did, you had to work your way up through the ranks you see. I became flight sergeant and then became a warrant officer, and a warrant officer to me was the best rank in the air force. I was still the boss.

I had three commissioned officers in my crew and when we got on the ground I was outranked. I didn’t salute them. That was what it was… I was completely outranked. But in the air I was the captain and the boss, and I was only a warrant officer. Only about three months before the war… If you are looking through those and you’ve got time to look at them later on I’ll show you an assessment that my flight commander gave me

about two months before the war finished when I had completed about fourteen months at least of operational flying. Flying a Beaufort in every role that it is designed for except dropping torpedoes. When they were phased out they weren’t using them then, and I had a lot of experience of operational flying

and the flight commander assessed me as being above average as a pilot and a flier. That is something I am proud of and because of that I got a commission. I finished up… You’ll find on the book.

No. You’ll find on there flying officer. Because of that I finished up as a flying officer. So that to me… I had to start

my life getting married in 1946 not as a flying officer. I had a good job in the air force as a pilot and finished up as a flight officer. I had to start my life as a labourer right from the word go. Twenty-nine years of age. No academic qualifications, no trade training. No experience in any trade except what I had learned myself, and to do that I finally

bought a milk run after a few false starts in business and I worked twenty-three years with only one day off to pay my bills. See the wife left work. She worked for six years while we bought this block of land, built the house and six years she worked and then she left work and never went back to work after that. I had to provide the money myself. And because of not having those

qualifications, trade qualifications or academic, I had to work twenty-three years at a milk run with only one day off. And the only reason I got that was because they had a national milk strike and they wouldn’t give us the milk. And I was telling my grandson and he said, “You had your weekends off, didn’t you?” And I said, “I didn’t have my weekends off. I worked seven days a week.” Every night at half past eleven I would

get up and go to work. And that is one of the penalties you have to pay if you don’t have an education. I wanted to educate my girls better than I had. Put them through university, which I did, and to be able to pay for that at one stage the milk with the run had deteriorated with, as I explained previously, the supermarkets taking over and we couldn’t compete and I didn’t

have the return coming from the milk run in my zone, and you couldn’t work outside your zone. So I started a lawn-mowing run and I was delivering groceries two afternoons a week for one of the chain stores. I was working eighty hours a week to pay my bills at one stage. Seven days a week at eighty hours a week. People don’t believe me when I say that. But I only did that to pay my bills.

That to me is a pretty good example of what happens if you don’t have a good education or trade qualifications. And that’s a fact. I had thirteen teeth out one day. I had a lot of teeth that I needed to have filled and I went to a dentist over at Leichhardt and he made me pay first and pulled the whole lot out, and I walked

out and got in a taxi and came home here and that night I was out doing a milk run, thirteen teeth and they put the plate straight in. People don’t believe me, you know.

I’m sorry.

I get a bit carried away.

That’s what they told me when I wrote that book.

I’d write a letter there but I’d get a bit carried away.

It would be about, just a shadow over twelve months.

I came to Camden and they formed a new squadron at Camden – 15 Squadron.

That was in January of

1944 and we didn’t have any planes and no personnel, nothing. We just formed them from scratch. We started and they brought the planes over… All our even number planes… 09536. That was my plane. They brought that over from Mascot where they assembled them. They were assembled over here, seven hundred of them. That is a story in itself. And we got our eighteen planes

either from Mascot or from Fishermans Bend in Melbourne. If they were an odd number they would come from Fishermans Bend. With those eighteen planes we formed the squadron and we started anti-submarine patrols and chasing submarines up and down the coast. Right up and down the coast and right around to Mount Gambier, actually. The south of Tasmania. From that very first time that’s how we started our operations.

Well they’ve got to get all the cooks together and all the administration staff, the people who run the show and the disciplinary people and it’s a big job really. There are a lot of people involved in running a squadron. They used to reckon there were ten people on the ground to keep one pilot in the air. All those people have got to be posted there or whatever you…

Gathered together and brought together and taught to work together.

The station was there because there had been air force units there previously, briefly, so all the accommodation huts were there and they had one strip, right down the… One strip only. They

had a duty pilot’s tower, which wasn’t used much because there wasn’t an awful lot of traffic there. Mainly our squadron. So apart from that we had a proper camp, actually. We had all the kitchens and the messes for the pilots and the officers and the NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers] and this and that. It was set up so we just walked into it, really. It had had

air force units occupying it previously, briefly, you know. So that part of it was all right. We had the hangars for the aircraft and the maintenance people to work it. It was quite a good setup actually. We never wanted to leave there actually.

Army huts. But they were different there. The aircrews had… An army hut was just a big hut with thirty people in it and all the beds.

There was two rows of beds and you had a locker behind you, that close to you, and the next bloke that close to you. There was just a long line of them, you know. At Camden they had army huts and they put little cubicles in them with a passageway down the middle, and each one had a door leading to a cubical and the cubicles had anything up to two or three people in it. So you had a bit of privacy, you know. It was quite good there.

Oh yes. Briefly. I went straight to… I think in a about January ’43 I went straight to Bairnsdale as it was in those days and I did about six hours on the Beauforts and they

reckon I wasn’t ready to go on them. They had such tremendous losses on those things. A hundred and forty Beauforts they lost in the first sixteen months. That was a lot of Beauforts. And they were going to pull them out of service actually. Only the fact that they were so short of pilots and things got so bad up north did they keep them going. That was the story. They were losing so many. There was something mysterious. They couldn’t work out why.

Nobody could work out why. They had the normal crashes where you know something happened like a plane coming down on a dark night or from a dead reckoning exercise and hit a mountain. You are off course and you don’t know where you are, things like that. You could explain those but you couldn’t explain what was happening to these things. A lot of these were just disappearing, mysterious. And because of that they thought one of the things might be

training pilots in the Avro Anson, for example, which was a very docile aircraft. You could land one of those at forty-five miles an hour. In the Beauforts if you get below a hundred and twenty you might get into trouble and it’s pretty hard to land that fast, on a pitch black night it’s pretty hard to do that and they thought, “Well maybe they are too much of a handful.” And if you did six hours and the instructor thought you might not be ready he would take you off to give you a bit of extra experience.

They did this with me and instead of taking me off… But this time they had moved the whole unit to East Sale, which was a new aerodrome which had just opened, and they put me flying Oxfords and Battles, which was a part… It was an Oxford and Battle squadron which was part of the unit. They were using those to train the Beaufort crews and I did that for six months as a staff pilot flying Oxfords and Battles.

Disappointed because I thought I was doing pretty well. We all think that but they knew better than me, obviously. But no, I did feel disappointed but then I thought, “Oh well, if that’s the way it’s going to be, okay.”

No. But it is a beautiful plane. It is a beautiful aeroplane to fly. Slow, but a beautiful aeroplane.

No. Didn’t have any.

As you know now, they use it to tow the drogues You probably know that by now. And the drogue was just a big windsock that was towed two hundred yards behind the Battle. They… You had to get

permission from your flight commander or the commanding officer of the Battle and Oxford squadron. You sat in the Battle and you worked out all the cockpit yourself on the ground. You do this with the throttle or you do something else with that lever or you do this or the other thing. You try to get it all in your mind what you are going to do before you take off. You do a pre-takeoff check and what you are going to do when you get off the ground.

And then when you think you are ready to go you get in the Battle and stand up behind the pilots. You stand up behind the pilot. You’ve got the drogue on the back and the solid part and then the cockpit in the front like a Spitfire pilot and an open cockpit in the front, even though it had a canopy over it. You stand up. That is where the navigator normally sat in the Battle, see. You stand up there and you watch the pilot take off and the altitude of the aircraft

and climb, and he levels off and you watch what he is doing with his controls and that, and when you come back it you think you have done all right you just take the Battle off. That’s your dual. That’s all you had.

The unfortunate part was we got out to the towline and first one I did there was a lot of trees underneath us, and

you go to the towline and it was the beach. And the towline they are firing out to sea all the time. They are firing the guns out to sea. And you arrange it so they are fighting out to sea, so you fly up and down just outside the beach. I was just standing there and the pilot screams out something and the engine failed, see. The old Rolls Royce motor packed up. The drogue operator down the back… We had a drogue operator down the back

to let the drogue go and pull it in, you know. He thought he had said, “Let the drogue go,” and he let the drogue go and suddenly we’ve got two hundred yards of cable and a drogue and it is fifteen hundred feet up, you see, and of course I’m stuck into the middle. There is no chance of you getting out. And anyway the pilot, all he could do was… They did glide pretty well, the Battle, fortunately, not like these things. They are like a ton of bricks and they roll like a ton of bricks without motors.

But here you are. He started on the way down and I got down to the back and told him what happened and we managed to find a pair of pliers, and just before we got to the level of the trees we managed to get the drogue clear, you see. I don’t know why that helped but anyway the pilot was lucky enough to find a ploughed paddock and just enough ground to put it down safely, and we landed all right So that is my experience of

my dual instruction.

I can absolutely see because it would be a sitting duck for a fighter plane. They didn’t have any rear guns for a start and I don’t think they had any forward guns either. They were only a light bomber.

They were slow. They cruised at a hundred and twenty miles and hour and these things cruised at a hundred and eighty, you know. A lot faster. Although that had a top speed of about two hundred and twenty without all the operational gear. I could see that they didn’t have the defensive armament. They didn’t have an engine that was powerful enough to get away if they got caught. Later on they put an engine twice

the horsepower of the Rolls Royce Merlin, the Rolls Royce Griffin – I think that is what they should have done in the first place – and it became a frontline fighter. It was a good reconnaissance plane, a navy plane. They were a top plane on the aircraft carriers, the Fairey Firefly, because they had double the power of the engine because the Battle of France,

most of the planes we’ve got came from there. They put them on a ship and brought them out here. They were expendable. They didn’t care much what you did with them. If you were going solo and they crashed one they didn’t care because the were expendable. But they were to fly, slow, a hundred and twenty miles an hour slow cruising speed. But to land them they were stable. You could wind the tail back and put the nose up and just come in on the throttle

and they’d come in, and if you judged your throttle right they would nearly land themselves. But you couldn’t do it on these, no way.

We used to wonder why we got bullet holes in the planes when we landed. We found out when we started to fly the Beauforts ourselves.

They used to fly the Beaufort alongside and you’d be doing about a hundred and twenty miles and hour in a Battle and the Beaufort would be doing a hundred and eighty. They called it a deflection shot, and of course that was a rather hard shot. What they used to do… I know a bloke who would get the pilot to put down the flaps to slow it down to a hundred and twenty, which was the slowest you could fly a Beaufort, and you’d be virtually a stationary shot. You’d be shooting stationary, you know. Not something you are going past.

They used to have coloured bullets and so if you hit the drogue you could know by the bullets which gunner hit it, you know. So that was one… That wasn’t a general practice but I know it has been done. But the hard part… They weren’t all terrible good shots anyway, the gunners. They were firing out of their rear turret here because that rotates two hundred and seventy degrees and they would be

firing between the wing and the tail elevator. You know. And when it came time to use the guns on the front, the two guns on the wings there… The idea was that you would fly your Beaufort up. This was the pilot flying, using the guns, you see. You are using the plane like a fighter plane. You’d get up high and you turn three ninety degrees and there would be a ninety degree shot,

a full deflection shot, and that’s the hardest way to shoot because you’ve got a plane going this way and you don’t know what way (UNCLEAR) is going and you’ve got to shoot ahead to hit the drogue at 200 yards behind. We quickly learned that the best way to do that was to aim your sight on the front there. We put a gun sight on the front and get the Battle in your gun sight, you know, and open fire.

Aim at the Battle, in other words. You could see the bullets going and hopefully they would curve away at the last minute. We used to wonder why we got bullet holes in the Battle without going to war. They used to get bullet holes in them. You learned that when you were flying the Beauforts later on.

I never heard of any. They must have been pretty well organised with it. Those guns fired

eleven hundred bullets a minute, you know. There are two of them there. If you can imagine the number of bullets going straight through the Battle.

Six months. We used to do… The Airspeed Oxfords were a beautiful aeroplane but a bit sensitive on the control. But they would have been a better aircraft to train on, which some pilots did. Some trained

on Airspeed Oxfords. But they would have been because you had things like raising the flaps. In a Beaufort you didn’t raise them because you had to pump them down or pump them up or whatever. And the undercart, you didn’t put it down because you had to wheel it down with a hand thing. You had to wind it a hundred and eighty times to get it up. You never put it up, I mean. You kept it down all the time.

Little things like that. The Oxford was quite a nice little aircraft. They used those and the Beauforts in the Oxford squadron to take the crews and these out and the exercise over the water. When they put these in the pilot did six weeks training to do his conversion onto the Beauforts, and then they brought the crew together. In that six weeks all the crews, the navigators and the wireless air gunners and that would go our on day trips

and sometimes night trips in the little Airspeed Oxfords, dead reckoning navigation, you go right out to sea where there was no beacons and no ways of getting a picture or anything so you had to navigate entirely on your charts navigating, dead reckoning they called it, and our job was to take them out, the pilots, on the Oxfords, to take them out on these dead reckoning exercises in between the Battles and the Oxfords. We did both jobs.

No. Never. It wouldn’t have worried me but I was never very keen to get there. I was in one respect in the fact that that was where the action was taking place. Sometimes you did get a bit that way where you would have liked to have been there in the thick of it, that sort of thing, but no it didn’t worry

me a terrible lot. We had a beautiful place. This base at Sale had been taken over by the government from small dairy farms and they all had these beautiful double brick homesteads, and being a cold place they had a fireplace in every one. In this one the farmer had only gone out of it a few months previously. They pushed him out and took it over to

equip the base there. And it had a fireplace in every room and they had some beautiful redgum timber on it which they had cut down to make way for the runways and that. We used to get this stuff and put this redgum on and have a fire inside on the cold days when we weren’t flying. We go to the cooks and get some cheese and bread and toast it, and we used to think this would be a good way to spend the war.

We didn’t want to go up there. This would be a good way to spend the war. It didn’t work out that way, unfortunately.

The Beaufort. Having flown it for two years and eighteen months of that on operational flying doing everything you are supposed to do with it,

the Beaufort was a fine aircraft. And by that time, by the time we’d finished our training on it they found out what was causing all the trouble and all those losses. The losses were more back to what you would expect. And although I was involved through the training and I could have lost my life because of it, we had just about finished the training on the Beauforts when they found and corrected the problem.

The Beaufort itself from our operational experience was all of what it was itself. It was a fine aircraft. It was a rugged aircraft that would take a lot of punishment. I have known incidences of people who had been caught because they didn’t have the power in the motor. The only thing that we didn’t like was that the engines could have been a bit stronger and more powerful. They put them into the Beaufighter. These had a twelve hundred and fifty horsepower

motor the same as the DC3 airliners had, and they put a three valve engine, sixteen-hundred horsepower engine in the Beaufighter, and the Beaufighter was only a modified Beaufort. Same airframe, same wings, and it was based on the Beaufort. And they used to use dual control Beauforts to train Beaufighter pilots. But they put the sixteen hundred horsepower motor

and that gave them the edge to get away from fighter planes up north. I know of a case when one of our top pilots got hit one day and he opened his engines flat out and got away from the Zeros. In these you couldn’t do that because you didn’t have the power. If you got caught in these you only had one option. You had to fight it out. And that’s what happened to this mate of mine I told you about earlier. He got jumped by five Zeros off Gasmata.

I trained with this bloke but he went up a bit before me while fighters were still active there. He got jumped by five of them and he fought them off for twenty minutes and he couldn’t get away from them because he didn’t have the power in the motors. And the fact of that was it was a very manoeuvrable aeroplane. He was able to manoeuvre it and do everything it was supposed to do with his gunner telling him where the planes were coming from and when to open fire and when not. He got away with it. So even…

There was never a Beaufort shot down by a fighter up there in daylight. They were shot down at night-time but never in daylight. The Beauforts could take care of themselves so from that point of view they were a good aircraft.

Well the inline felt a lot smoother to fly. This was a bumpy lot. There was a lot more vibration than there was in the…

That was the main thing. I’ve flown both of course the Moths and the Battles and they were very smooth, particularly when the got up high But these are a very rough engine but they were a good engine, particularly as they were made in Australia. The whole aircraft was made in Australia. The aircraft and the engines.

Well you had the navigator in the front there.

That top part there on top of the roof there on top of the pilot there. Do you see that bit of black there? There was a hatch there and you’d go down through there. There was another one on the side and you’d get up a ladder and climb up in there.

Usually we would just climb up the wing and go down through the top, the navigator and myself. The gunners would go down through the back way. You’d crawl up along… You didn’t have much room. You’d only have less than three feet. The whole… By the time you had the wireless in you had a passage about that wide for one man to crawl up the aircraft from one end to the other.

Yeah. You could go right up to the bomb aimer or the navigator. You could go right up to them.

There was a hatch, an open part there with a spar alongside, and you had your instrument panel in front of you here and you would go down through the hatch, and when you got down there

there was a table on the other side in his compartment running longways and he used to sit this way at the table with his charts. He could do all his navigation down there. He used to keep plots and plot on his charts. So they had to have the facilities to do that.

Behind the pilot. The porthole you see on this side there, there is one on the opposite side too

and so the wireless operator could see out of the aircraft, actually.

He’d be facing the same way as the pilot, the way the aircraft was going.

No. No. Yeah he would be on top of it. Yes. He was after where the pilot was.

He would have to be, yes, with the way the wing goes through there.

That is the turret you see there. It had twin Browning machine guns in it. And you could rotate it to two hundred and seventy degrees. The only thing is it had a solenoid to stop you shooting you tail off. When you were shooting if you got your tail

and it accidentally came into view, the solenoid cut the machine guns off. Same when it got to the wings. So you could take it right round and shoot in front or shoot behind. That was important if you were being attacked by an aircraft. But if you were coming in higher the biggest problem was underneath – you couldn’t do anything underneath. So the only thing you could do was

being a low-level aircraft you could get down on the ground. If you had any ground you’d get down on it and they couldn’t get underneath you then. There were ways of doing it. But there was never one shot down by a fighter out there in the day time.

Operated by the navigator. Manual. Because you could rotate them around actually. They weren’t just fixed guns. If you saw a plane

coming in there you could bring them to bare on the plane coming in. And then they just fire straight ahead.

Perspex.

You have no idea. Up in the islands we were taking off on bombing raids up there

and on one I took part in there was thirty Beauforts involved, and you are on the ground ant it takes you a while to get your plane off the ground with thirty aircraft, you know, thirty planes off a single strip cut out of the jungle. I was sitting there sometimes waiting for the word to go, too. You’d have to sit there in the plane. It was like a glasshouse. You used to

have to carry a water bottle, actually, to stop yourself from dehydrating. It was terribly hot. Once you got off the ground you were all right.

No. Yes. We had sunglasses. Yes. Oh yeah. if you were lucky enough to be issued with them. No windscreen wipers was the worse part. No windscreen wipers and if you got into bad whether you had

real problems. You had a little quarter windscreen on the side and you were supposed to put your head out the window to see where you were going. If you put your head out when you are going at two hundred miles and hour you get it blown off. No way in the world. But it was a bit difficult. I got caught like that one day up at Mackay coming in in cyclonic whether.

Yeah.

Oh just ordinary… In summer time it would be drabs. In the winter time we had ordinary overalls. You know, combination overalls. We had a pair of combination overalls. We wore those most of the time, winter and summer. Up in the islands we only wore drabs in the summer of course, but down south we used

to wear the blues sometimes in the cold whether. They are not heated at all. They get very cold.

With a bombsight. A standard bombsight.

No. The navigator does that. It is in the nose, under those guns there. They had the drift side on. They would take a measure of the drift and the air speed and

work it out mathematically on the bomb sight for precision bombing. And we were called on to drop bombs only a hundred and fifty yards away from our own blokes in the jungle and that was a navigator’s nightmare because they used to mark where they wanted the bombs dropped by a mortar bomb, a smoke puff. The smoke can drift with the wind. You are liable to make a mistake and bomb in the wrong place.

The used to carry two 400-pounders and four 260s, and they are big bombs. Not big compared to the Lancasters and that but big bombs for personnel. Big for bombing the targets that we had. We didn’t want to make any mistakes, you know, because there is troops on the ground. At Wewak they’d

be pinned down by a foxhole or a machine gun, and in the old days before air support they would have to rush it in the old days. Without air support they would have to rush it and take it and they might lose half a dozen men. They might mow them down on the way in. What they used to do then was pull back and call in the Beauforts, and the Beauforts would wipe that out and they used to do it by precision bombing from about fifteen hundred feet flying low.

They would use that bombsight and that’s the only way they could do it. It was all worked out mathematically. It was a nightmare really.

Well there were so many other aircraft up there that were better. That is the main thing. They did a good job over there on what they were supposed to do, anti sub [submarine] patrols and maritime reconnaissance, which was their main work. They sent them out

to bomb the… to torpedo the Eisenhower I think it was. That was in Bass Strait. They were never terribly successful with the torpedoes for some reason. They used them up here at Rabaul too against the shipping up there but they used to drop them in the water and they used to go somewhere else instead of where they should go. They finished up… I was actually classified when I finished at Sale to go on to training at Jervis Bay

on the torpedoes but in the meantime they phased them out. They weren’t getting the results they needed. So they phased them out. they found that during the war that the best way to attack warships and anything like that and torpedoes was missile bombing. That’s how the Japanese destroyed the American fleet, dive bombing. They didn’t use torpedoes all that much. They found dive bombers far more effective.

That’s why the Beaufighter turned out to be a better aircraft to attack shipping than the Beaufort. We were relying on the torpedoes and not getting results. With the Beaufighters they had the rockets and frontal attack aircraft with powerful engines and that. They had everything they needed. And they were a better attack aircraft. Far better than the Beaufort was. If they’d have had a sixteen hundred

horsepower engine in the Beaufort it would have been every bit as good as the Beaufighter. But they didn’t do that, unfortunately. That was about the only complaint I heard about the Beauforts from friends and colleagues and people who worked with them that they could have had a more powerful motor. It didn’t matter for speed because if you were caught with five Zeros you couldn’t get away anyway. Even with more powerful motors the actual construction of the aircraft prevented them from

flying faster than the Zero where as the Beaufighter could. The operational gear that we had was a better line. A better streamline if you see what I mean. You could just get away from a Zero if you had to.

There is your control column here, which is a wheel. That way

the wing drops that way and that way the wing drops that way. If you bring it up here the nose goes up. If you push the whole control forward the nose goes down. Hopefully. And you’ve got your foot on the rudder bars and you push on the left rudder there. You use the rudder on the back like you do in a boat. And hopefully the aircraft will turn to the left. At the same time as that you’ve got to also use bank. You can’t just turn an aircraft like a little skid because a skid just goes that way.

You just push your rudder bar that way and apply your rudder here it won’t turn. It will just skid. What you’ve got to do is tilt the wing like that, and the steeper you turn the more you’ve got to tilt the wing. So you are almost 90 degrees bank to pull on a very steep turn to keep it in the air. It will drop down otherwise. You’ve got to pull it round in a ninety-degree bank in a steep

turn so you work all those controls together. Not one, but all together. And if you are doing a slow roll, you don’t do one of those normally, but in these things if you are doing a slow roll then you’ve got to use all these controls together.

You’ve got two throttles here. Two pitch levers which control the pitch of the airscrews. If you turn those airscrews right down

round three or four angle right onto the edge of the cockpit. If you have the pitch levers then you’ve got special electrical controls.

Had two mixture control levers on a pedestal here right on the right-hand side. And you had trimming devices. You had to trim the aircraft for pitch, for straight and level to keep your wings straight. You had to trim it for direction. You had all the pitch controls on the right-hand side here and in the front you’ve got all your instruments.

Yes.

We needed a fair bit. There

was no power systems anywhere and there was a fair bit of strength required, particularly on landing. I over came it personally by… I always landed like, but… And it wasn’t the in thing to do but not having a lot of strength in my arms, that last bit you’ve got to pull hard so it will drop onto the ground. Pull hard so it will drop onto the ground three points. And not having that strength in my arms

I used to come in into land and trim it back slightly tail heavy so it would be slightly tail heavy, and then I would push forward on the control column and bring it into land. And with those you never brought it into anything higher than thirty feet if you wanted to live. That was a characteristic. It was a very hard aircraft to land.

You brought it into thirty feet off the ground and that was very hard to judge at night on a pitch black night I tell you. I would just ease back on the control column and at the last bit I was just able to bring it back a bit. And not being all that terribly powerful and strong I was able to fly a Beaufort quite well. I flew that way for about two years when I flew the Beauforts.

Well for… As far as the engines were concerned you had four, right up in front of you there. Two were tachometers, that is rev [revolution] counters. They counted the revs of the motor. And the other two were boost instruments. They measured the boost manifold. And it is an aircraft, not like a car when you can see the distance and the relation to the ground.

You can see it’s moving. You can’t see an aircraft moving so you don’t know. You don’t know how much power to apply so you have to do it in reference to the manifold boost and the rev counters. You combine those two to get the horsepower you need to do whatever you want it to do. You take off using a certain boost to take off. A certain boost to cruise. A certain

boost for idling and all this type of thing. You got that all from those four instruments in front of you and they related to the engine. The other instruments for the engine were the cylinder head temperatures and the oil temperatures, which you had to be very careful of them but they were on separate instruments. The other six instruments were immediately in front of you and they were for blind flying. That was the blind flying panel. They were your life when you were

flying at night or in cloud.

Basically you had the artificial horizon. Your whole life depended on that. It was only a little thing about that big and it had a tiny little aeroplane in it and a line and that line remained constant. It was controlled

by gyroscopic action. Gyroscopic action is you spin a top and the top will spin, and while it is spinning it will stay upright. They call it rigidity in space, actually. And all line following instruments on this aircraft operated on this principal, and in particular the artificial horizon. There was the datum line, which was the horizon. If you are looking outside the aircraft you see the horizon.

If you are lucky enough to see it on a clear day, it’s the horizon. But inside when you can’t see that that represents the horizon and the actual aircraft itself is on this rigid space thing. And they used to move up and down depending on what the aircraft was doing, and it used to be up and down above the horizon line. And if the wing went down, this little aircraft’s wing would drop too.

It would show you if it was that way or the other way, and basically all your flying was done on that artificial horizon. If you found you had taken off on the fish back line, which we did on occasion, you left the fair glass and nothing on there. You were looking outside. You’d get that little aircraft slightly above the horizon line with your control column or your trim

and you would keep it there, and if you wanted to climb you would climb. If you got it too low you’d dive into the ground. And then when you are cruising, up top cruising, you do the same thing. You set that on what you imagine to be the horizon line. You used to be able to check that by the other instruments that you had. If your nose was too low you got an air speed indicator.

If you were going a hundred and eighty miles and hour and then you went up to two hundred miles an hour it means your nose was down. If you got back to below a hundred and eighty mile and hour it means your nose is too high. So you are checking one instrument to the other all the time. Six instruments you’ve got. One was a directional gyro because you can’t steer on a compass, a magnetic compass. If you try to do that every time you tip the aircraft over the needle will

turn around. If it is turning around you can’t steer straight on it, so they had this directional gyro based on this register space thing there. You set whatever course you wanted to fly. You take it off the magnetic compass and set it on the direction of the gyro. And when you were taking it off, if you wanted to keep straight the only thing you had was that directional gyro to keep you straight with your rudders and your engines and each instrument. And then there

was a turning bank indicator that showed you if you were turning the amount of angle you had to have to turn because you couldn’t see. You’d have to have the right angle for the right… You had to apply with. It was all goes in together with these six instruments and that blind flying panel. I have flown it on some occasions for up to six hours on a pitch black night. You never see a thing.

It would. They were based on gyroscopic action. There was a little thing on the front of that aircraft that you can see down the bottom. You can just see it there. And it was called the pitot head, and the pressure was taken in on that little pitot head and it kept all the instruments just standing upright by keeping them spinning. And if you did a steep turn or any violent manoeuvres in a Beaufort those

instruments would lose that whatever it is keeping those instruments upright and they would collapse, and you’d lose the whole blind flying panel. And that happened to me once. I might be able to come to it later.

My first operation was when we formed up at Camden. It was on an anti-sub patrol, you know. We had done all those things in the training stage, a four months’ course where we converted to the Beauforts. That was an operational training unit so you do the same things in the training unit as we did in operations. So that was much the same thing I did. Just went out. We were responsible for the all the up the

east coast, in particular between Port Kembla and Newcastle. That was the most sensitive part of the coast at the time. A submarine came up to Sydney, you might remember. Shelled the eastern suburbs from there and those type of things. So submarines were active then and that was our patrol in that particular time.

Because that’s where most of the heavy industry was. Port Kembla, Wollongong, Newcastle. The steelworks and the things that affected the production of tanks and aeroplanes. The industrial heart, you might say, of Australia. Melbourne was important round Williamstown and actually we extended right around, but this was deemed to be the most important part. Submarines were operating off the coast. In fact we saw one, one night, on the radar.

We had a very primitive radar set on the Beauforts. Another one of their useful things. And we picked one up one night. It was hard to identify at night because it is not a photograph or anything. It is just little beeps on the screen. It was a five-inch screen we had on the Beaufort and we picked up the beeps and they were unusual. There were two planes involved

coming in off a long patrol about eight o’clock one night and they were so interested in this down the south coast near Mallacoota. They were so interested the operations room and we were ordered to go in the next morning. We went to the operations base for a debriefing and about two or three nights later a sub torpedoed a ship at the same area. We’ve got no doubts at to what it was. But you can’t tell at night. It could have been a little fishing ship.

We had bombs on but there was nothing we could do about it at the time.

They had the full complement of machine guns; they were always loaded. Not that we needed them out there. And they carried depth charges. On a long patrol you had to cut down on weight to be able to carry more petrol on a six-hour patrol. So we

just carried four 260-pound depth charges and they were quite effective to obstruct a submarine. Do a lot of damage.

Not depth charges but bombs, plenty of bombs in training and that. So we did all this at the training station. They don’t use big bombs in the training station because they are too expensive. So they use little practice bombs, 25-pounders, and you take about twenty out at

a time and just keep dropping them until you don’t have any more left. Dive bombing, all type of bombs. Skip bombing, precision bombing with the bomb sight. Whatever a Beaufort could do, you did it, you know. So you were pretty well trained in it really. Also we were pretty well trained in fighter affiliation because up in the islands quite a few Beauforts had trouble with Zeros and things like that in the early days.

I was lucky. I went up and the only Zeros we saw were on the ground. It was part of our job to make sure they stopped there. But we went right up as far as the Philippines at the finish, but none of them caused any trouble there but we had the gunners to counteract if we were attacked. So they were a very manageable aircraft, the Beaufort, in spite of all their faults. They could outfight a Kittyhawk fighter as far as manoeuvrability was concerned.

We’d fly from Camden straight out. We would usually fly east and we might go a hundred miles out. You’d turn and you’d just go up and down. Very boring, up and down for the five or six hours or whatever it was. Up from Port Kembla to Newcastle. You wouldn’t see them. Of course you were a hundred miles away so you wouldn’t see them but you knew

they were there, you know. And that would be our patrol line on that particular… Not all the time but that was the regular patrol line for the Beauforts to cover all the time, even though they had other aircraft available for other jobs. On one job we started at Mt Gambier, South Australia, and brought four units of the British Fleet around. They were supped to come through Bass Strait but a Greek ship… A submarine

came up and shelled a Greek ship off Mt Gambier in South Australia and they decided… The latest British battleship, the King George V, had just been commissioned and they sent it out here to give us a hand with the Japanese fleet up there. It was coming round to Sydney for a refuelling and just to get everything ready to go up onto operations. And being the latest British battleship they didn’t want to lose her, so instead of bringing her through Bass Strait they brought her right down south of Tasmania and made a long trip of it, you know.

Immediately they did that they sent a flight of nine. Eighteen’s in a squadron of Beauforts and they sent nine and picked it up off Mt Gambier and escorted it round. Twenty-four hour coverage all the way round. That was a fairly big job.

Sweeping ahead of the battleships,

looking for submarines.

About fifteen hundred feet normally, but sometimes… We had occasion to go out on a strike job one day. We had striking aircraft on duty twenty-four hours a day. I think I mentioned previously. Their job was to… They are fully clothed and virtually sleeping

with the aircraft and when a patrol aircraft found a submarine they were all ready bombed up to go out if they hadn’t bombed the submarine successfully. So I was… I went out on this particular… Seven o’clock in the morning we left, as I mentioned before, and

got back at two in the afternoon or thereabout. But we flew at five hundred feet for the whole of that operation. That’s fairly low, you know. But normally you fly about fifteen hundred feet, which is not very high really. It is essentially a low-level aircraft, the Beaufort. It never went above. There is only one time in my whole service that I went above twelve thousand feet. We went to fourteen thousand feet to get above the cloud on this pitch black night.

It was a navigation exercises. Astronavigation, taking sights on the stars. We were trying to find the stars and there was a mass of cloud from fifteen hundred feet up to twelve thousand feet. Went up through the cloud and we fly on the stars for nearly six hours. Never saw the ground. Saw the flight path disappear. Never saw it again till six hours later.

We had to find out way back on a pitch black night with no radio beacons to help us. One big problem there was that the cloud was from fifteen hundred to twelve thousand feet, and about sixty mile north of Sale we saw a photograph of a man. There were mountains in the background looking out over

a monument there. It was here. You might have noticed it. That was the Snowy Mountains. Those mountains there. That is the Snowy Mountains, the Australian Alps. And they extended to within fifty miles of our base at Sale and they were anything up to seven thousand feet high, and if you are coming down in a cloud at night-times and you can’t see anything there and there’s a mountain seven thousand feet high, the pilot crashes on the mountain. And in a case like that you’ve got to be very accurate with your navigation,

and we couldn’t be because we didn’t have the facilities in those days. We might have been anything up to a hundred miles away from where we should have been. Astronavigation was good for giving you a rough idea where you were, but it was definitely not accurate. We could never be sure of being within a hundred miles of where we should be when we got back to base, so coming down through that cloud we just didn’t know where we were. A bit scary really. So that is mentioned in that book. I don’t know whether you have read the book or not.

And we were glad to see a light come down fifteen hundred feet and I hadn’t seen anything. We knew we were in cloud because when you are in cloud the sound of the engines is reflected. Even with earphones you can hear them. We were in more or less silence at fifteen hundred feet and the sweat started to pour down me and you did start panicking. We only had about a quarter of an hour’s petrol left and we didn’t know where we were.

We could have been anywhere. We hadn’t hit the mountains and that was the only thing we knew for sure. We saw a light and the light was Cape Everard lighthouse. I had tried to arrange it so I would have a rough calculation of where we were and I would try to come down on an easterly course so we come down out at sea, and there were no mountains out at sea. We were about thirty mile out at sea and then the only thing we had to do was identify the light and hone in on it and then fly

back to base. So when we landed we had about five minutes’ petrol left in the aircraft. So that sort of thing. If you are trained to do it to do what you’ve got to do… We were only training you see at that time. We were at the operational training unit and we were learning to do all this work. We weren’t operational. If we had the equipment like we have today it would tell you where we are today. They have these satellite things and they can press a button and they know exactly where they are within a few feet.

We couldn’t do that. We would be lucky if we could find out where we were within a hundred miles in some situations and it wasn’t good enough because a lot of aircraft were lost like that on the training stations. Young people coming down without any experience, not knowing where they were and not being able to see anything. And you had to come down. I mean you couldn’t stop up there. And you could bale out I suppose but it’s not much good baling out if you are out over sea, is it?

It was a sound training. It was a good training. I wouldn’t say anything… It was too good really. The problem was you were sent out on things you weren’t qualified to do. At that stage of our flying this type of thing that I mentioned earlier on. A friend of my eldest daughter only wanted to fly. He did a science degree at the university there but he only

wanted to fly. He finished up as an airline pilot and it took him twenty years to become a captain with all the equipment they have today. But these were worse because they didn’t have the facilities they have now. As far as the wireless was concerned, wireless beacons. We had a primitive type of radar which was quite good. So you were doing things that you weren’t trained to do and you didn’t have the experience to do.

So… And that was the only way they could teach you because the average pilot would be… From the time you joined up to the time you went into operations was round about eighteen months. This man took twenty years to become captain of an aircraft. Eighteen months you are captain of something like that. And they’ve got the same engines as the big DC3 airliners and a lot of the same switches and levers and switches and dials

in the DC3 airline they’ve got. And the DC3 has the same motors, the same motors exactly. A DC3 airline was run by a pilot, a co-pilot and an automatic pilot. These planes only had one pilot, no automatic pilot. It was an all-British aircraft run by only one pilot, even the 4-engine bombers. So to put you in charge of an aircraft at that stage it just wasn’t enough. That’s why

they lost a lot of planes and it was inexperience in a lot of cases. You were lucky to survive if you got through. There were more casualties on the operational training than in the operations. I have a book of all the operations that were carried out and what happened and what happened to the aircraft. And I counted them up and there was more planes lost from the operations training base in Victoria than

from eight squadrons of Beauforts operating though the islands on operations. Up there they already had a fair bit of experience, hopefully, and that made all the difference. So… But apart from that the training was good because if you survived it did teach you how to do these things and what to do under these situations

and you proved that you could do it more or less. If you lived you proved that you could do it. So… But the training was good. That’s the only thing I would say about it. That applied through even with the Tiger Moths. I explained previously that you were given things to do that you weren’t trained to do, like aerobatics. You couldn’t fly the plane straight and level and you were expected to do a slow roll and a stall turn,

the basic aerobatics and a loop. You could hardly fly the thing straight and level but they reckon you could get the aircraft in so many different attitudes and you’re up at six thousand feet so you need to know how to get them out of them. So with the trouble you are in you learn far more in half an hour or less than you would learn in six months of ordinary instruction. So it was a shortcut. And the same thing applied with the Beauforts,

with any aircraft, any operational aircraft. That can’t do it now because I think these F111… The Beaufort Association went up there and we were briefed by those pilots up there on the tactics they used. I believe it takes nearly seven years to train a F111 fellow. You need to have university degrees and all sorts of things nowadays. So by that stage they have got a fair bit of experience behind them. They have quite a few hours. You know.

Well mine were quite good. I was lucky that way. I won’t say I wasn’t scared. I was scared stiff at different times. You know. My hair virtually stood up on end at times and I was frightened. I was lucky. I could land and go to sleep that night and sleep

well and think about it get up the next morning and go on as usual. I have known people who couldn’t do that. I had one down at the operational training unit who would take a plane up but he couldn’t land it at night, and even with the instructor he couldn’t land it. And they were short of pilots at the time so they sent him home on leave for a fortnight to think it out. And when he came back after the fortnight

the first flight he went up they sent him up solo and he went up and when he landed, he taxied down the runway and stopped and the engine kept running and he never moved. This is a friend of mine. They sent one of the tenders out from the duty pilot’s tower and he was at the back of the plane hanging on to the elevator and shaking like a leaf. His nerve had gone completely, it did happen see, so they just took him off because there was no way he was going to be able to fly.

He was just taken off the course and put on a ground job or something. I think he was put on a ground job actually. He wouldn’t be able to fly again. Another case was over at Kembla. I was on pilot’s duty in the control tower and this one rang up on his radio. He wasn’t far out and he was absolutely frightened, scared and asked what’s the weather like. The weather was all right. A few clouds around but nothing to worry about.

He absolutely lost his nerve, totally scared he was. He came back and he landed. He managed to land the plane all right but he was gone the next day, posted out, lost his nerve. So it did happen.

Oh we never discussed it really. We did at reunions. If you don’t mind me using a little bit of

coarse language, my flight commander I mentioned there, the one that gave me the good assessment in the finish who I told you about. And I got a commission through it. He assessed me on about fourteen months of operational flying. He was my flight commander for most of that time. He knew how I could fly. He knew with me at operations and we met. The first time I went up to a reunion was at Murwillumbah or Coolangatta.

After forty years of not going anywhere I went to these reunions, the first one. And we met… It was a reunion of 15 Squadron only. Not all of them. Just our 15th Squadron. All our ex-people turned up with their wives and we had a wonderful time up there. And he got talking to me one night and he discussed that particular operation there where those five Beauforts are with all the flak that’s come up between them. I had been

in quite a few operations at the time but for some reason flight commanders weren’t allowed to fly, only on special occasions. They weren’t allowed into many of the operations because their job was to control us, the pilots who were actually doing the flying. And he hadn’t done a… He’d never faced an anti-aircraft fire before. And we were talking about this at this reunion and he said to me, “Geez, I could shit,” he said.

Excuse the language. He told me forty years later that he was frightened and they are not supposed to get frightened, the commanders. So if we’d have know we’d have probably been frightened too, you know. It’s not very pleasant to be flying amongst that sort of stuff, I can tell you.

It did. Not by me personally but of a lot of pilots, particularly on Beauforts because they developed a fearsome reputation earlier on. If you had any influence anywhere, like your father was a judge or something, you would try and get yourself posted somewhere else rather than on those. Even before we got onto them we knew they were… Like even flying Tiger Moths the reputation came through. We knew they were having trouble with them and

they were having very serious trouble. Part of it was due to inexperience but a lot of it was due to a mechanical problem which they couldn’t find it until we had just finished our course. They finally found it and notified the Beauforts but up until that time it was quite common to have one of these going each week. One hundred and forty Beauforts That was the official figures issued by the government in 1993 after all these. It was kept quiet. A hundred and forty Beauforts in the first

sixteen months, and that is a lot of aeroplanes. And the young fellows had the knowledge of this going on and if they were posted to the Beaufort squadron they would do everything they could to get out of it. They would fly badly and they would kid their nerves had gone and all that type of things. And the first thing that happened when they got to the operational training

place they put us… They assembled us in the gymnasium and the commanding officer, a man named Candy, Captain Candy, stood up there and he gave us a welcome speech, you know. And he got on to it and he said, “There have been a lot of young people coming through here who have chickened out through nerves, and if anybody shows any signed of doing that in the future there will be an immediate discharge and there will be an

army man waiting at the gate to take you into the army, into the infantry.” That was the warning he gave us. So it was a serous thing, really. A lot of them were chickening out.

Well it wasn’t my way of doing things. Maybe I am not bright enough and they knew something I didn’t but it never occurred to me to try that. No.

I could have got out previous to that, you know, different things. Flying badly. Even that guy who wanted to take me off because he didn’t think I warranted a pair of wings and he wanted to take me off the Ansons. I could have kept on that and got out that way but I had this thing that I just wanted to go through with it and they needed pilots badly and they needed to fly these things. They had to have pilots to

fly them. The navigator and the wireless air gunners couldn’t fly them. It was an important thing to me, so that’s why I did it personally. So it never really entered my head to try and do that. In fact I fought every inch of the way to make sure I could fly. I had several handicaps to overcome and I could have used those to get out of it.

But LMF did occur. You hear it over the other side, with the Europeans you saw it more than you do here. But it did occur with Beauforts. I know that for a fact because I was involved in it. You know.

I don’t think that… I know for a fact that pilots overseas were getting white feathers from people out here.

That was not so much the fact of LMF but the people out here thought that with the Japanese sitting on our doorstep up there that they should be out here defending Australia so they sent them a white feather. They couldn’t help it. They were posted over there. And you did what you were told. And they were flying big aircraft like Lancasters and they were a very important part of the war. And they were doing a very important job over there and they

can’t be everywhere so it was quite unfair really. But I think there was people who got white feathers. You know, I don’t know what happened to those that were taken off. They just disappeared. They were probably put on ground duties or discharged. So I suppose there was. It wouldn’t be a very nice thing. If you did get

through the war and were discharged it would not be a very nice thing to carry, would it? It would not be a very nice reputation to carry really. They wouldn’t have thought of that and they couldn’t help it. Nervous types, you know. And they did exist. If you haven’t got the nerves you haven’t got them. I was lucky I did have so it is hard to say really what happened, what would happen. And I think when you were faced with that you would think about it too. It might make you try a bit harder, you know.

You didn’t want to have that on your record if you did get through the war, probably.

Yeah.

Well you couldn’t do anything when you were flying the aeroplane. You used to have to sit there and fly the thing. You flew it the whole time you know, no automatic pilots or anything. Between yourself you would be talking to each other. We had

intercom and the earphone and we would be talking to each other. We would talk between the planes and talk to the base. We had a good wireless system. A long distance system with Morse code, you know. And the plane would talk to radio telephone of course, and even for your information you could talk to the plane next door with short range. But we would just have a bit of fun. We were there one day coming up, that was when we were bringing the battleship up, actually. We

were right down around the south of Tasmania and day and night we had to fly, twenty-four hour coverage, and we took off at two o’clock in the afternoon from Hobart – we had a great time in Hobart. When we weren’t flying we went though Wrest Point they call it now, but it was there in those days and we had a few things on the dice or whatever it was, and then we stopped in the best hotel in town. Our flight commander got in trouble because we

should have been in the army huts. We took off at two o’clock n the afternoon and the ships were coming up the east coast at that time and we had to sweep ahead of them, and we were ahead of them and we are flying along straight and level and both engines failed on the boat fifteen hundred feet up. And that is a scary situation. They had a habit… They had four tanks on the wings and they had a habit of feeding back one from another so

we were supposed to get six hours range flying out of them, and you mightn’t get the six hours because those tanks were feeding back into one another. You mightn’t be able to get all the petrol out of them. And one way of doing it was to take off on the inner tanks and then switch over to the tanks and then cruise on those tanks and get every ounce of petrol out of those tanks. In my case, knowing I was going to land on

a strange airstrip and with the strip cut out of the trees sort of thing at Mallacoota air strip and with about half a dozen flares and I had to find it in the first place, knowing that it was a pitch black night I wanted to get petrol when I got back. But if the whether was bad I was going to have to look for somewhere else to land. I was going to need every little bit of petrol I had. And I was trying to squeeze every little bit out of it, out of the aeroplane, and I was sitting there with my hand on the petrol cock catch

watching the gauges and it showed about five gallons on each of these outer tanks so everything looked to be pretty right. And if you suddenly got an air lock… If you got them too low and got an air lock then both engines would stop, and most cases you couldn’t start them again. It happened to a mate of mine. He couldn’t start them again but he happened to be over land and he crash landed over land. I was out to sea and I didn’t want to land on the sea, you know. And when they stopped, well it frightened me I tell you. And they had a

big lever down there. It was a big lever that used to override the mechanical fuel pumps with a manual pump. The first thing I did was, it was automatic that I twitched the two petrol cocks back to the main tanks. Almost within a few seconds, you know, when they stopped. I got on this pump and pumped like mad and said a prayer and that was about the only time that I’ve ever known of the engine

starting again before we hit the water. While this was going on… This is what I started to tell you about, actually. The funny part is the navigator decided he wanted to go to the toilet, which is right in the back part of the plane. A bit of a pan sort of thing, you know. He went down there and he… We never used to do it. We used to take the canvas deflector bags off the guns and do it in that, you see, and he was trying to do that and the plane,

it was lurching all over the place and they were lurching all over the place and they were laughing like anything, you know. I could hear them over the intercom. The air gunner from the turret, he was out there laughing at him as though it was a great joke. I was trying to upset his aim, you know. So he got back and he crawled alongside me and back into his office there and he put on his earphones and I told him, and he never spoke again for the rest of the morning. Yeah,

little things like that that used to make a bit of fun. It could have been serious but you had to work in with them and have your bit of fun while you could. You know. On an ordinary big patrol we used to talk a bit. We were only on intercom we weren’t broadcasting outside, sort of thing. But sometimes there was wireless silence. You weren’t allowed to… They didn’t want to pick up where you were, the enemy sort of thing. But inside on the intercom you could talk as much as you like.

They were a good bunch of chaps. We got on well together and we’d have a joke and talk about when we were on leave and all that. We had to do something.

Leave. Well up in the islands we didn’t get any. It was all go. I mean you didn’t fly all the time of course but you didn’t get any recognised leave. But out here you might get

two days every fortnight or something like that, not very much.

Well I had a girlfriend at the time when I was at Camden.

Being a warrant officer, which is the best position in the air force, I thought, you dodged a few of the official duties

like raising and lowering the flag and mounting a guard and officer of the day. If you were a warrant officer you missed out on all of that so that was good for me. I used to sneak over the fence. We could leave Camden provided we left a telephone number or an address where we could be contacted in an emergency,

as long as we got back before midnight sort of thing ready for the next day. And I would sneak over the fence. There wasn’t anyone on guard duty anyway so it didn’t matter. The walk into Camden was about a two-mile walk and you could get a little train into Campbelltown those days, and then and electric train into town. She is now my wife. And we would go to the pictures or have dinner or whatever. I used to do that quite often but

I got leave more than once a fortnight really by doing that. If you worked it right there was no problem.

We had Mae Wests of course. We always wore Mae Wests because most of our work was out over the ocean, a good deal of it. At some stage we would be flying over the ocean and the Mae West you’d have strapped on because

if you had to get out of the plane that would at least keep you afloat. So we had a Mae West and we used to sit on a parachute. That was part of our seat. And the other chaps had a harness and a loose parachute. They would clip it on if they had to get out in a hurry. So we all had parachutes, and in that big wing there there was a hatch that you could break open if you ever crash landed on the water.

You could press a button or pull a lever or something and the whole thing would jump out a big dinghy, which gave you a chance of getting into the dinghy and floating for a while. So we had all sorts of emergency things, yeah.

No. It wouldn’t have worried me. No I never had occasion to parachute, fortunately. I felt like it a few times, getting out and walking.

Well I’m a bit of a rebel at heart and one method of teaching you these things… There were certain things that they couldn’t demonstrate, they were too dangerous, and the instructors couldn’t show you so what they would do is they would write it down on the big screen. I’ve got it there. Two lots, actually. And you read it carefully and you took it all in, signed it and

placed it in your logbook that you understood that. But you never did that. I could never fully accept something unless I could see it proved. That is a cantankerous thing about me. One day we were out here at Pagewood, actually, we were doing a cooperation with the army – anti-aircraft guns. And we had to fly at about a thousand feet straight and level

like that and turn and come back the other way, and they’d sight their guns at us and try and follow us, see. Army chaps with anti-aircraft guns. And I got a bit tired of this and I thought I’d give them a bit to think about so I came down in what I thought was going to be a medium turn, you see. And one of the things we’d been instructed was that in a steep turn, a ninety-degree back turn, you never do that unless you

use more power in the engines because aircraft will normally stall at about a hundred miles an hour and the whole thing will stall at under eighty miles an hour in that situation. They wouldn’t demonstrate it, so we had to write it in our book. I was a bit too keen and I went over the speed limit almost into a steep turn. And I tried to roll it out two hundred feet above the ground and I tried to roll it back over to

the straight and level and keep it from going over on its back, and I got the biggest fright I got in my whole service career then. My hair stood up on end, it really did. So that was plain stupidity. But after that I learned to listen. I never did it again.

No. No one ever knew about it. The crew might have known but they didn’t say if they did know.

I don’t think they knew what was happening and I was the only one that knew. I just got up to almost a level part like that and I was going straight up and down, and I did something that I don’t know to this day whether I was supposed to do but I must have done something right because it started to come back the other way again. At two hundred feet above the ground there was nothing you could do and it just would have

come straight down, but it started to go back the right way so I think JC [Jesus Christ] must have been looking after me or something. But what I did was I kicked hard on the right rudder hoping one of the ailerons, one of the top ailerons, would… That’s what it was. The ailerons had no pressure, no air pressure. The recovery was too slow because we should have been doing a hundred and eighty miles an hour and I think by doing that it put a bit of pressure on the aileron.

That’s what I think happened, theoretically. I don’t know, but anyway I am still here. The other time was out at Richmond. I did the same kind of thing. I got a bit over keen at searchlights and I lost all my flying instruments. I had nothing to fly on. When that happens you don’t know where you are or what you are doing. You got a panel in front of you. Pressure. You lose

the pressure, you lose the (UNCLEAR), you lose the whole lot. You can’t see the horizon outside at night-time. You can’t see outside. Normally you can see the horizon in relation of the nose to the horizon, whether it is tilted or whether it is up and down. At night-time you can’t see it, it is all gone, so you are depending on those instruments. And we had WAAAFs [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force], the army girls, they were operating the searchlights round

Richmond over here, a pitch black night it was, and I was flying at nine thousand feet, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards and I got a bit tired of that after a while and I thought I would make this a little bit more interesting for them and do a tighter turn for them. They were trying to follow us with the searchlights, you see. And I did two tighter turns and the instruments collapsed in a minute and a half. I didn’t have any blind flying instruments. I didn’t know whether the plane had looped the loop or rolled or what. I had no idea what it was doing or where it was going.

I am still here though.

Which?

I’m what you would call an agnostic. I sit on the fence. My wife is very religious and my youngest daughter is a very committed Christian. She goes to a Christian church. My old Mum was a Christian. She used to play the organ and teach Sunday school. My old Dad was a church warden but I don’t think he was, sort of had to be a Christian.

But being a teacher in a small country town you’ve got to be in with those sorts of things, you know. But no, I’ve just come to certain conclusions. I’ve thought a lot about religion but I’ve never been very impressed. You might be a religious person and I wouldn’t like to upset you, sort of thing, but I haven’t been impressed really with established religions, you know. I could never

commit myself to any particular… My wife goes to the Church of England around here. She is Church of England, you know. Much to my youngest daughter’s disgust. She is very committed to it. Out in the country at a place called Umina or Woy Woy or somewhere there. She lived up there and she used to… Much to her disgust. She wants me to become committed but I don’t think you can become committed, really. It’s got to be fair dinkum.

You know. You say you are going to be committed to me. Anyway you’ve got to be sincere about it. I think… As a matter of fact I wrote a letter to a friend of mine down in Melbourne, a wireless air gunner he was, and he had much the same rocky road

more or less after the war as what I did. He left school at thirteen, too. But he did a bit better than me after a lot of trouble. We were talking about religion and we were writing to each other. We get on very well together and only just recently he said, “Religion,” and he said, “I yelled and God heard me.”

He does believe something although he doesn’t go to church. He does believe in something. He yelled and God did hear. God heard. Became… He became chairman and chief executive officer of a friendly society doing good, not bad, good to people throughout the world, for young people throughout the world in Victoria. It started twenty-nine years ago and it developed into a

thing where he’s got three hundred and fifty five thousand members in the society and members enrolling at the rate of a thousand a week, and he is handling about one point two billion dollars a year of other people’s money and investing it. Invest this money against youngsters and when the young people can afford to pay it, so much a week and invest this money and when the particular child that is nominated

reaches eighteen, if they go to high school, which they will go to high school, and then to further education to go that extra bit, which I found was very hard here with my two going to university and trying to make the money. I had to work three times as hard. To have that money at that stage for the kids to go to university they established a scholarship for them to do it. He had thousands of youngsters all

over Australia have benefited by this, and when they have finished going to university that money which the parents have contributed is paid back to the people. It is an unbelievable thing but it does work. He had employed a hundred and twenty people at his head office in Melbourne and twice that many in regional offices

all over Australia, and a couple of months ago when I wrote to him he had just come back from New Zealand where he had met the New Zealand Prime Minister and between the two of them they established a friendly society in New Zealand. So he did a little bit better than me. But that was his answer and I more or less think… I quoted a well-known rocket scientist.

He was a rocket scientist. Werner Von Brown. At the end of the war he was taken by America over to America and he became America’s top scientist and responsible for putting a man on the moon, virtually, with his brains and they asked him what he thought about God and he said, “When I look around at the wonders of nature, how can I believe there is not a God?” But he is an agnostic, you see.

Well I was brought up in a church. I was confirmed and I went through all the motions up until I was thirteen. Church when we were out in a country town was only once a fortnight, you know. We didn’t have a regular minister to come out every week, you see. So I was made to go to church but when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and I started to go out on my own I drifted away from it. You know. I’ve had opportunities since. One of my best mates for twelve months when I was training in the air force was a dedicated Christian.

We used to have a bed alongside one another. When we moved from one stage to another we would try to be together in the same tent or whatever. But I used to go to Bible study with him and all of that but I never ever got that way that I would commit myself to anything. It has always been that way. Yeah. It is not something that is in my heart. It is in my head. I just can’t… I will die

that way. It is there and I can’t do anything about it. And I don’t put religious people down at all. My youngest daughter, I am wholeheartedly behind what she does. They are virtually the ones that run the particular church where she goes. It is United or Presbyterian or something. Anyway her husband is the same. They haven’t had a minister for twelve months.

Her husband conducts most of their church meetings and does sermons and my twenty-two year old grandson is brought up in the same tradition. All he wants to do is… He is going to university at the moment and all he wants to be is a minister. It is just bred into them and they are dedicated Christian people and I’m all for it. They are living a Christian life. None of those kids have been involved in drugs or alcohol

or smoke or any of those things that you can well do without today, so they are living a good Christian life and I think I am one hundred per cent behind it and approve what she is doing. So I am not against religion at all. I’ve done paintings – you might have seen one there for the Blake. It is a religious painting for a religious theme like our Archibald, the head of our Archibald. The big thirty-five thousand dollar one. The Blake is the same

type of thing but it is only about ten thousand dollars, it’s peanuts, and I’ve had two or three goes at that. And I’ve had to study the Bible cover to cover to do the paintings that I wanted to do. So I have had a little bit of contact with religion one way or the other and I come to this conclusion.

We had a kiwi because one of my wireless air gunners was a six year university trained veterinary surgeon and he came from New Zealand, the South Island. He did his training over here and he joined the air force here. His wife made a kiwi and a kiwi is their national

thing over in New Zealand, and he was always sitting on our behind me there whenever we flew. I got a photograph from there. Yeah but there was nothing that superstitious about it though. Just because the lady made it I put it there we used to fly with it.

Not really because you

were at fifteen hundred feet and that’s pretty high. It is hard to pick out… Like whales, you could pick out a whale, probably. But I don’t remember seeing whales. You couldn’t see sharks because they are down below. You know. And Porpoises, if they were in the surf you wouldn’t see them because they were too small. But if you were flying really low you would, yes. I can’t remember seeing any sea life. No.

He was a meteorological officer in civil life and he was stationed at Port Moresby when war broke out with Germany, and because he had that job that involved forecasting the weather for the aeroplanes as well as providing the data for the headquarters where they do all the forecasting, and a very important

part was forecasting the weather for planes before they took off, and he was taking straight into the air force as a warrant officer and six years later he was still a warrant officer. They offered him a commission but he wouldn’t take it. He reckoned warrant officer was the best job, like me. But he was in Port Moresby when the Japanese came into the war and he went through all that bombing up there. He had his own government

residence up there and that was destroyed. He lost furniture. He came out of there at one stage and all he had was a pair of shorts and a shirt. He had nothing else. He had his wife up there and one little baby at the time. They were brought out before that, actually, when it looked as though they were going to invade Port Moresby. And he did that. He went through all that and then he did a second tour after that, too. I met him up there one day at Tadji.

He was forecasting the whether at Tadji, which is where they were operating from when we did the Wewak show up there. And I even took him for a ride in the aeroplane one day. He was biting his fingernails a bit. He is dead now, the poor old bloke. He died of Parkinson’s disease. But that was the day I… Up at Tadji I nearly pranged 536 there.

I was one of thirty aircraft taking off a strip cut out of the jungle. We had a hundred metres on each side and there was nowhere to go if anything happened. Thirty aeroplanes one after another on the one strip taking off in formation. I got up to about ninety mile and hour, almost ready to lift off and the port engine failed and spun us around three ninety degrees like that, and I kept going right around a hundred and eighty degrees because with one engine going and nothing on the other,

even if you stop it quickly once you start you go right round. I would have gone straight into the path of the aeroplanes behind us. There were quite a number, twenty, behind me and each of those had two thousand pounds of bomb, six thousand rounds of ammunition an about six thousand rounds of petrol. The explosion would have blown the whole base to pieces, you know, if I hadn’t have stopped it. But I managed to stop it from going round because fortunately…

I think JC must have been on my side there too. I mean Jesus Christ. That’s what the air force people used to say, “If I lose control, JC takes over.” He must have taken over on a number of occasions. The port engine came good. And the natural thing to do, the first thing to do would be chop the throttle on the starboard engine. That would be the first automatic thing.

And then of course the second thing is you would use your rudders, but rudders are no good in a case like that. You could use the right rudder sort of thing but they were no good anyway. The second thing you tried to instinctively try and jiggle the starboard throttle hoping that something might happen. And in this case it did happen and the port motor came good. It came on full throttle, full bore on the port motor and nothing on the starboard motor. Couldn’t win. Anyway then it swung back the other way.

By the time I finally got it back under control before I got it on the runway again she was jumping and all sorts of things, and gradually pulling up with full brakes on and all that. Both engines had stopped at this stage with no engines at all and she was jumping about all over the place, and I finally pulled up a couple of hundred yards further on. It gave us a shaking up but the aircraft wasn’t damaged very badly. My brother happened to be standing on the foot of the control tower

watching the takeoffs. Well I was trying to get out really and he knew my plane by the call sign, VDD. He wrote back to our mother on the farm at that particular time that I was trying to be spectacular and take off from the taxiway instead of the runway. That was all the sympathy I got. But that could have been a nasty thing too. But old 536, she didn’t let us down.

They had to fix all the tail there and for a fortnight we had to change and then we were back in operations again.

Eighteen months. The whole of the operational. The whole time I was in the operational squad.

Oh about twelve months. And we went up to Madang

and we flew from Madang on operations and reconnaissance and supply drops and all that sort of thing. Maritime reconnaissance again. And then we went to Wewak and from Tadji we did the Wewak show. We supported the 6th Division landing there. Then we went a thousand miles further west to near the Philippines and we operated up there and that’s when they started to throw stuff at us. Anti-aircraft stuff.

They were getting a bit fair dinkum about it, really. It wasn’t so bad up in…

Well they got the… You know the Kokoda Trail? They got within thirty miles of Port Moresby, the Japs, before they were stopped by our soldiers. If they got to

Port Moresby it was just a step across to Townsville. From Townsville it is a step down to here and then we’ve got a base here for their aircraft and their army and their navy. And we would have no hope of stopping them. We’d have been invaded. And they nearly came in at Darwin. They just stopped there in time. It was only the Battle of the Coral Sea when the Americans arrived that stopped them.

Whatever we think of the Americans, it was the Americans that stopped them. We couldn’t have done it We had about a dozen of those aircraft. That was the only operational aircraft we had. We had Hudsons but they were only the converted civil airliner so they weren’t a real operations aeroplane. The only fully operational aeroplanes we had at the time capable of meeting the Japs, we these Beauforts, about a dozen of them. They were building them in Melbourne. They built seven hundred eventually.

It was a wonderful feat by the Australia people to build that from the design. They designed that in England of course. It’s an English aircraft and it was built under licence out here. Even the engines were built here. A great feat for people who couldn’t even build a car. It was amazing. We think so and having flown one in genuine operations when we didn’t have the little

Hawk to worry about. Anyone feeling like me would consider them to be a very fine aircraft. Ideally suited for what we were using them for up there. They were so versatile. There were so many things we could do with them. We could do photo reconnaissance with an F24 camera worked by remote control by the navigator. We used to go over bases and set them running and they would work all automatically with remote control We could photograph a five-inch negative, a five-inch film in a roll and we would take the photograph,

and they even set overlaps to get the depth of the field. We had to overlap the photos. You’d do a run over a target and you’d start the camera rolling, the navigator would do it and it would take the photograph and it would overlap each one by about thirty per cent. And the intelligence officers, one they were printed, could use those to pick out depth.

That particular operation there we had a photo reconnaissance on one of our aeroplanes there and before that the intelligence officer counted out twenty-eight anti-aircraft batteries though this photographing process.

We were supposed to go up six months earlier but then

it was very hard to get… They had the bases there for us at Madang. The room was there for us but it was very hard to get ships to move all the heavy gear. We had the ship all lined up but then suddenly it was cancelled. We had all the aircraft packed and everything six months before that to go to Madang And then from Madang we were going to go a thousand miles further west to a place called Middleberg Island near the Philippines but they…

Because we couldn’t get that ship we had to take all the gear off. We were all disappointed we didn’t make it. I don’t know why. And then we had to do another six months of boring patrols, see. When we did go we had the ship to shift all the heavy gear to Madang and we took each plane… We flew up usually three planes together. I had a squadron leader,

one of our top pilots, leading me and another warrant officer pilot. Three planes. And we took off from Camden and had to fly to Townsville nonstop and these will do it for range, and it was cyclonic weather up there at that time. Really bad weather at that time. We knew there might be problems when we got to Townsville because there might be extra people trying to find an alternative aerodrome so the three of us pulled in at Amberley in Queensland

to refuel and have lunch. And the squadron leader said to me and the other chap, “Just fly individually from now on and if you have trouble, pull in at an alternative aerodrome.” He just left it to us, you see. I flew blind for about an hour and it didn’t look very promising ahead and I was coming to a break Rockhampton so I decided I was going to land at Rockhampton.

I didn’t feel particularly adventurous, you know. I didn’t see any particular reason for it. We landed there and this other chap, friend of mine who had heard I had landed on the radio, he came back and landed too. The squadron leader showed up but the other man disappeared into a rain cloud and we never saw him any more. Five chaps in the plane. Never heard from him since.

Well I think in the air force once you have reached that stage where you are flying like that you more or less… It would have to have an effect, I suppose, but you more or less… I don’t say become accustomed to it but you just carry on. I mean, what can you do? The thing is I was never a great drinker. I never used to go much to the mess at night. That’s where all the social life went on in the island or wherever you were. There was

nowhere else to go, you know. But of course they used to drink and that never appealed to me. I’d never been a great drinker. One schooner for me and that’s enough for me. That’s it. And I got in trouble for that in the air force because we used to stop in our tent out there. We would go and have dinner at six o’clock and then just go back to the tents. I had two or three mates who felt the same way. We just sat in the tent talking and writing letters and that or whatever.

What was the theme of that you asked me again?

Well we got to Rockhampton all right and it was pouring with rain there but I managed to get the plane in there all right, and next day we had to search for Squadron Leader Sharp and he was one of our top Beaufort pilots. He was a DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross]. He had flown with

Blenheim in the Middle East. He won a Distinguished Flying Cross and he was a very, very good pilot. He was an absolutely superb, a real white man, and he had a wife and a little kiddy and I think when he was going up on his second tour it got to him a bit because He made a few mistakes on the way up in respect of signing in. You had to sign a thing called the WE77, the

last thing you did, which was just signing that the aircraft was okay, all the tradesmen had done their work on it, and you ticked them all. And he never signed his and that wasn’t a thing he would do because he was a stickler for doing things the right way, you know. We think that maybe he was a little bit worried about leaving his little baby or whatever or children or that. That was one theory but whether that affected him or not. He ran into some shocking weather.

We struck it the following day and we had to go in to take off and fly six hours searching for him. We looked at the mountains round about and coming back we landed at Mackay. And Mackay has high ground up there. It is about fifteen hundred feet high, the hills around there, and the circuit height was fifteen hundred feet. You’ve got to get up to fifteen hundred feet to make your circuit. And we

got into this bad weather. You couldn’t see anything for the rain. And we flew… Rather than fly up the coast I got out to the water and just flew five hundred feet so I could see the water underneath. And there are islands up there, Hayman Island and all those tourist islands up there, everywhere they are, and they are up to fifteen hundred feet, some of them. It was rather a dangerous

thing to do. And I had the wireless operator working the radar so that we would get signals from anything solid and ahead. We would get the signals back. That would give you a range of how far that was away so it meant it was a rough way of navigating. It meant that there was an island out there and if there was one ahead of you turn left or turn right. We knew the direction, see, and we worked it that way between the two

of us and we got back to Mackay. And it was no good flying at five hundred feet there because we had to get up to fifteen hundred feet. The hills around there were fifteen hundred feet high to do the circuit on end, see. So I had to get up to fifteen hundred feet and I ran into this rainstorm and I couldn’t see a thing. I remember seeing a water tower going past at about a hundred yards at one stage, that’s what I remember. And we’d hone in…

We had the radio going and we honed in on the beacon on the radio station there. And come in over the drome and see the strip underneath but you couldn’t see them ahead. We wouldn’t be lined up with it, you know. We’d go out again, came back in, honed in again, not good the strip, and came in again. We did it three or four times and I think on the fourth time I just happened to see the strip underneath. I got the impression that the strip was going this way and we were going that way

at a ninety degree angle. So I did what I had been trained to do – one turn this way through ninety degrees and another that way, and another one turn that way through ninety degrees starting the descent, assuming I was going to come down. Came down, down, down to about five hundred feet and down through the rain and I got a glimpse of the runway almost straight ahead. There again JC took over, you see. See

we didn’t have blind landing facilities in those days. We had to land by yourself. That’s what it was. So that was a pretty hairy thing too. I’d like to quote someone comparing today’s flying with what we had to do, you know. I had the occasion to present a painting to the Roulettes [RAAF aerobatics team] in my old air force base at East Sale

and these paintings have been entered in the Heritage Award in Canberra and successful, and this one was also in there. And this one was in there too. It was a painting of the final manoeuvre of the Roulettes. You might have a chance to look at it after. The coordinator of the awards contacted the commanding officer of East Sale air base to say that the painting was available and would he like it, and he said

he would be delighted to have it, and the Roulettes came over to the War Memorial and we met them down there. Myself and my two daughters and their husbands and one grandson. There were eight of us. We got entertained to dinner by the air force. It was an open day at the War Memorial. That was the reason that the Roulettes were there. They had navy things going, army things and all around, you know. The Roulettes put on the display at about half past eleven and then they landed at the Fairbairn air force base

down there and they came up to where we had been and had lunch and filed in, the seven of them. They had given their display and that and I presented the painting to them and they presented me with that photograph. That framed photograph up there. The Roulettes in action It was individually signed by the pilots so it was a good day, wasn’t it? I got talking to those pilots and I had the privilege of talking to them for about half an hour. And the difference in sixty

years of flying and we were talking about that, the facilities we had to they have now compared to what he had. All that type of thing. You know. The difference in flying. I couldn’t fly the way they flew. Because they fly one plane that way and another thing upside down ten feet above them. That was the finally… And the others were doing Prince of Wales feathers and all that sort of thing. I cold have flown that all right but I couldn’t have flown when they went upside down – that is flying. And that’s what I painted in the painting,

you know, and we’ve got… They said that I couldn’t fly the way they flew, which was true. They were all ex-F18 and F11 pilots and now instructors at the Central Flying School. And they are the Roulettes in their own time. They have to have a lot of experience so there is no way in the world that I could have flown the way they fly.

On the other hand, they said that they couldn’t fly the way we used to fly. We did the dead reckoning navigation and we had no beacons and no radio stations half the time. They couldn’t fly the way we flew so it was quite interesting to talk to them. I got a big kick out of that. I also got a big kick knowing that my painting was going to hang up in my old air force base. I spent about nine months, in fact nearly twelve months there.

I went there in April 1943

And I left there in… I was staff pilot there for six months and then three months I was on course, so that was nine months. About ten months I was there. I went there in April.

Yes.

Madang we went to, and Middleberg Island. We did a few operations in between and I finished the war at Middleberg Island. Flew the aircraft back and left it in one piece at the aircraft depot in Wagga, got a receipt: ‘Received one aircraft in a good order and condition’. Because you had to take it on charge, you know. There was the aircraft and all this equipment.

We didn’t… Yes we did. We took a landing at Mackay where we did the difficult landing and then went to Townsville and then went over to Madang, and we operated from Madang for… And then we went over to Rabaul and up the Sepik River and different places on operation.

Then we went almost a thousand miles further west to a little island called Middleberg Island.

That didn’t worry me. No. I was conditioned to it and I knew what I had to do. I accepted it. In fact I was glad to do it really. I was tired of doing patrol. They got a bit… They had to be done. We knew they had to be done and it was all part of

flying and you were in just as much danger because you were out at night-time and out in all kinds of weathers and that. It was dangerous really, probably more so. We knew all of that but if you haven’t got somebody firing at you then you haven’t been in the war. The first thing we did when we got to Madang was an operation along the Sepik River. We were flying at about a hundred feet most of the time and we knew they were down there with machine guns firing at us. We couldn’t see them but we knew they were there and fortunately

we never got hit. But at least we knew we were at last in the war, you see. So It really didn’t worry me.

Well one of the biggest impressions was the fact that the strips weren’t nearly as good as what they should have been. It was a bit short to land one of these on and it was a bit rough. Also the air was different. It was much thinner. When you

are coming into land you are dropping quicker. The air won’t hold you up as quick as much. Like with lighter air you drop down quicker. You had to get used to the different conditions of flying and when you are taking off the aircraft won’t get into the air so quickly. The air won’t support it. It was like that. You’ve got to master that straight away because you are landing on a strip in New Guinea and that’s all there is to it and you’ve got to

work it out. So that was probably… That’s where we were, on the strip. We had tents adjacent to the strip so we never really got far away from the strip. We didn’t get to know New Guinea as such very much at all.

Jungle. Nothing else. The only thing you’d see would be the strip cut out of the

jungle. Wherever you were was jungle. We used to go out and drop supplies. That was the other thing you could do on those planes pretty well. Instead of putting bombs on them they put canisters on them under the wings and in the bomb bays and drop them with little parachutes. If we dropped a big biscuit bomb from the height, eighty per cent of them would be lost because

some of the bales would disintegrate and they could only collect about thirty per cent of the contents. So the way we did it they used to collect everything because we used to go and find out where they were, go in low, just above the trees, and drop the canisters, and they would float down on parachutes and they would get everything that was in them. They’d be able to collect

them because we could drop them accurately from being low. So that was an important part of our work up there really, the fact that we could do that. That was another thing they could do well and we used to go over near Rabaul and you’d fly for maybe a hundred miles. All you would see is jungle, solid jungle, no roads, no nothing. And when you got to where you were going, where you were supposed to be going, you

were navigating by dead reckoning. Latitude and longitude – the navigator worked on those in his office. When you got there they would indicate where they were with a mortar bomb and a puff of smoke. And the puff of smoke through the trees was where you would drop your canisters and that where they were. So it was all well organised.

Oh yes. At Wewak, yes. You would see the guns firing and even up around Middleberg while we were there. A lot of bases and islands around Dutch New Guinea were heavily defended right up until the end of the war. You would fly over them. You knew they were at this particular place, it was Manokwari –

that’s in Dutch New Guinea south of the Philippines. As I said they established that there were twenty-eight heavy anti-aircraft batteries and we didn’t have much enthusiasm for going over there. I was over there about four times, actually, and then we didn’t have much enthusiasm about being there. We were having a bit of trouble there. But you would go to other places and you could actually see little flashes where the anti-aircraft guns were firing at you. You wouldn’t see

machine guns, of course, but the big fellows were there.

We used to fly sixteen hundred feet. Too low. Two low for the forty millimetre stuff.

I never had any experience with them. What I had heard of them was not very flattering to them. We were always told… If we were shot down we could expect…

All you can expect is to get your head knocked off. They never used to take prisoners. They would not take air force prisoners. So that’s what we had to look forward to so we had to make sure we were never got shot down. We tried not to.

Madang itself is a township. I never really got into Madang township. The aerodrome is out a little bit from the township and I was

there for a couple of nights, I think. I went over to a film one night but I don’t remember seeing much of it. We were in tents, of course, and we had a little camp there and that was all right. You could go swimming every day. It was quite good.

In the little harbour there. Madang harbour. We used to swim with a big hammerhead shark. He used to come in every day.

When we were there there was an American ship anchored along there and they used to throw their food overboard, throw the shark his breakfast every morning, or his lunch. We would just get out of the water until he went by and then just go back in again. We were always told that a hammerhead shark won’t attack you but I’ve heard since that they can. They tell us now, you know.

Well you never got any time off at all when you were on operations. You worked when work was there no matter whether it was Sunday or Saturday. You just forgot about time. You know. There was no leave whatever. I went the whole time I was out there, nearly six months I think, with no leave.

Well we flew three or four times a week.

Well Madang most of our work was done along the Sepik River. It was armed reconnaissance. We would probably start at two o’clock in the afternoon and

come back at about five or six. You’d fly low all the time on an armed reconnaissance because you are trying to work out… They used to have barges and they would sneak along under the mangroves in the day time. That’s why they used to supply the bases for the Japanese. They used to sneak along in the mangroves and try to hide in the mangroves and we had to go down to about twenty feet to find them.

Flying was low and if you attacked them you would usually attack with machine guns, not bombs. So that’s the way that most of the flying that you did at that particular stage was being done that way. So we didn’t use the bombs so much there but further on of course we were using the big bombs all the time.

Well the Sepik River of course is only about two or three hundred miles from Madang. It is a big river. We used to go right down on the river and follow the river wherever you could. We knew where the bases were. The bases were all marked on the map for us. You’d go in a particular area and it would be described to you on the map. The boundaries would be described and anything inside

the boundary was fair game. That meant that if you got inside that boundary and you saw a barge you could attack it. And that was rather a bit awkward at times because we came in on one particular day and there was a navigator on the front and they got a bit eager and opened fire before he should have and before we got over the boundary, and

some poor beggars in a canoe got killed. I think they dived overboard. I don’t think the bullets hit them but they dived overboard and they got drowned, you know. We weren’t actually court-martialled over it but we were warned over it. Those sorts of things happened. You know. Very hard to pick a boundary in those sort of areas. Where you’ve got jungle all the way round it was very hard to pick a boundary exactly. You only got

latitude and longitude and that’s not all that accurate, you know. So you could make mistakes and… But the armed reconnaissance we did there was all up the river, but when we got to Middleberg we did one armed reconnaissance up there. Typical of what we did up there was to find a particular

base that we knew had had anti-aircraft guns and we thought it had Zeros that were active. We might have had to face up to fight us as well. The first part of it was to do a line overlap run it at nine thousand feet and you would go in straight and level and start your camera run in and take these overlap photographs, and if the cloud base was down we couldn’t do it.

We went into the cloud and we flew to where we thought flying blind, to where we thought it would be over the base where we were supposed to go. There were no breaks there so we turned around and flew back out of it and we went on with the reconnaissance. And at one stage we were down about twenty feet shooting along the shore and we came across a Japanese man standing up in a canoe fishing. We did the wrong thing. We

turned and he was still there the second time. He must have thought it was one of his own planes, you know. The gunner fired in his vicinity just to show him it wasn’t one of his own planes and he dived into the mud. He wasn’t very happy with us, I don’t think. But another place we came to… Whatever you saw you had to investigate. We saw a village and there were some white leghorn hens, WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s, fleeing into the village so we didn’t

see anything there so we kept going. And at another place we saw an oil rig and we went and investigated that and that wasn’t being used. You make note of all those things. That is part of reconnaissance. This other place where we were supposed to take the line overlap photographs there we had no cloud cover when we went back over it later on so we did a bombing raid over it. Well the cloud was down to about fifteen hundred feet and we did a bomb run, two bomb runs,

at about a thousand feet. The first time we just dropped a single bomb. One blew up a hut nearby and the other one blew up in the jungle. We went off and did some more work, more reconnaissance. An hour later we came back and had a look at this place and said, “We’ll go and do this over again.” So we dived down and went fast over it, across it, you know and took some big photographs with the big

camera out the side of the aircraft. We wanted to try and get a close-up of the airstrip. And then we went on to this other place where we had seen these white leghorns to see if there was anybody there. We didn’t see anybody there so we turned and went home then. Anything that is of interest you take note of it and take it back to the intelligence officer.

The navigator. Well we had

a debriefing and you debriefed as a crew. The navigator makes the notes as you go along but you debrief as a crew.

No. We had a specialist intelligence officer who did all this, and he used to analyse the

photographs and try and tell us how many anti-aircraft guns there were and any features about it likely to help us in what we were doing. But you wouldn’t go to the commanding officer. He was overall command. The flight commanders were the commander of each squadron but the overall commanding officer, two flights, was the one for each flight. He was in charge of each flight. He was in charge of all the different planes, nine planes in each flight, and that’s the way it worked. So

anything like that to do with the planning of any operations was all done by the intelligence officers. They got all the information and put it all together and then we were debriefed before we went out on what to expect.

Oh we were down to about a hundred and eighty miles an hour. That’s about the cruise

speed of those things.

About a couple of months, I think.

Flew direct to Middleberg Island. That was a thousand miles west.

It was a mile long and it was three quarters of a mile wide and there was a beach all around it and it was good

for swimming. We used to swim a lot there.

Nothing. Well there was coconut palms. Somebody had tried to establish a coconut plantation there at some stage. We cut them all down and built administration buildings out of them. We had some galvanised iron that some transport planes had brought up for us and a bit of timber, so we had some carpenters in the squadron as pilots and that and they all got together.

We built these offices for administration. We all lived in tents ourselves. It was quite handy really. Apart from that there was nothing on there.

Oh a squadron would be about two hundred and fifty I suppose in a squadron. There were some American Negroes. They had been there to built the airstrip in the first place and they were still there.

They still had their bulldozer there actually and they camped there on another part of it and so there were only the two lots of us there. That’s all that were there.

None. None at all. They had their camp and we had ours. We used to see them and talk to them and say good day to them but that’s about all. We had no social life there at all.

It was built originally where they would take the big aeroplanes. the B29s.It had the best strip Most of the airstrips I landed on up there were very primitive and no good, but this was a beautiful airstrip. They had pushed it out over the end of the island. It was metal matting laid on coral, a very good base, very smooth, and it was built for the big B29s but they eventually found they could operate them further up Okinawa and those places over in Japan

and they didn’t need it so we were given the base.

1945. Yeah, 1945. So the war was coming to an end.

Only what we… We got the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] news and that was all up there.

Apart from that we didn’t know anything. It was only what we heard on the wireless. We didn’t get newspapers. We weren’t officially notified about anything there. We knew when the war finished, of course. We heard. But that’s about all.

I used to walk round and round. When the war finished I used to walk round and round the beach most of the time.

It was something to do. Trying to work out what I was going to do because I knew that I was due to get married in 1946 and I knew that I was going to have a battle coming down from being an officer to being a labourer. I had no qualifications so I was going to have to do something. And I used to worry more about that than flying in operations, really. About what I was going to do when the war was finally over. We had to wait there for a while, for about two months. We couldn’t get a ship home again. We had to keep our aircraft there

for about two months and we did nothing during all of that time. No operations or anything. It was a boring time, really.

Oh we were.

Oh we would get mail about once a week. It used to be flown in from other places. Finschhafen mainly, I think. I think it used to be flown nearly a thousand miles to get to you. They would get to a certain

place and they’d sort it all out and it would all find its way back to 15 Squadron. No. We used to get letters. My wife used to write. She wasn’t then but my fiancée used to write every night, nearly. She have a very busy job managing a business but she used to write every night. I would get a letter sometimes fourteen pages long and I couldn’t write any because you weren’t allowed to write any. All the letters were censored. You had to write a letter you had to give it to an officer

to sign and say that there was nothing that shouldn’t be there, so you had nothing to write about really. There was no life on there to describe so we used to look forward to letters from home.

I think there was some sort of code. I forget now how they did it exactly. It had a

code that would get to us. It would go to a certain, here, and then it would go to Finschhafen, which was a big base in New Guinea where they had postal facilities, and they would have the code and send it on by the next plane that was heading our way. We would be lucky to have a plane going our way because sometimes planes used to… Transport planes used to call in there fairly frequently, mainly just to refuel, so you might go weeks and weeks without getting anything.

But that’s the way it worked. I think they were all coded sort of thing.

At Tadji. A place called Tadji? T-A-D-J-I.

No. It was in Papua New Guinea.

Well we were based at Madang, actually.

We were supporting elements of the 6th Division with the big landing they had there. And there was a big operation actually. The army had been working from Tadji base where the air force base was. They had been working from there and they had been working down the coast towards Wewak. It was the last major Japanese base in New Guinea,

very heavily defended, and they had got to a certain point and they couldn’t get any further because there was too much opposition, they would have lost too many men, so they decided to mount an amphibious landing. They brought the troops in from the ocean on this beach at Wewak. And it was supported by five navy ships – two cruisers and three destroyers – and they had about thirty big landing

barges. They all came in on the landing barges to land on the beach there. But unfortunately the Japs… Wewak point was a big point there. An elevated hill sort of thing. It was honeycombed with caves and they used to get into the caves and you couldn’t get at them so it would have been quite nasty with those caves. The guns covered the beach where they would have landed.

If they would have landed there they would have had maybe… Well the ANZAC [Australia and New Zealand Army Corps] landing in 1915 was a good guide. They lost two thousand men on the day of the landing because of the guns up on the cliffs covered by the Turks up on the cliffs. And these guns hadn’t been… The guns in these caves hadn’t been silenced. We would have lost at least a thousand men there when the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] 6th Division landed there

because we did operate there for weeks before heavy bombing… I was actually there for the landing. I saw the landing over there and because of the air support given by the Beauforts they lost one man wounded in the whole operation.

The weather wasn’t too bad that day particularly.

We had to be there at about seven o’clock in the morning. There were about thirty aircraft involved.

Oh we knew there was a landing coming off. We could see the boats too from where we were. We flew

right over it, over the beach, so we could see the actual… Some of the warships were even firing their guns. So the whole operation was taking place while we were there.

Well you are so busy with your own thing that you don’t see anything, really.

You’ve got thirty planes and you are one of thirty and you are formatting on the plane ahead of you, then you’ve got a full-time job formatting on that plane. The only one that sees anything would be the leader, and he’s got to keep a check on everything – where he’s going, etc. – and he leads you in over the target. He drops his bombs and you drop your bombs at the same time. You are so busy with that aircraft fifty feet ahead of you formatting on him that you really don’t see anything.

Nothing that I can identify at the moment. You are flying out… You get glimpses when you are flying out of the troops coming in the barges, but that’s all you get because you are travelling pretty fast, you know. You are not over there that long so you don’t really get much of an impression of it.

Fifteen hundred feet that day, down low.

That was a different day. It was later on that I was flying in flak. It was more towards the end of the war. There was flak there but not as much as what you see there.

Pardon?

No I didn’t see any fire. I didn’t see any flak actually.

I read later, afterwards, that there were anti-aircraft guns there firing at us but I didn’t see anything. I don’t know. Maybe I was too busy.

A lot of training because you have got to have a lot of training for this type of flying. We did… When we were

at Camden we did two victory parades over Sydney. They used to have victory flights in aid of the victory lanes to raise money to fund the war. And we had two over here when we were in Camden. We had to fly in formation everywhere and show off our wares. You had to fly in formation. We didn’t fly like the Roulettes did, though, wingtip to wingtip. We got in close at times. I suppose forty or

fifty feet out, close enough. For a big aircraft it’s a bit harder. But these chaps they live in formation. They do roles all together as though they are tied together, those Roulettes They are the ones that can fly.

Well the most difficult thing of course is not to overrun the plane. If you get in too close and

hit his wing he wouldn’t be very appreciative of you. Sometimes… I’ve got photographs there. You’ve got to be careful of other planes in the formation too all the time. You have got to watch the tails, where they are. You’ve got to know exactly where they are and keep your formation. You’ve got to live on your throttles all the time. You’ve got your throttles loose and you are working them backwards and forwards all the time. A bit more power, a bit less power. To keep in formation it looks simple but it is not really.

You’ve got to live on it. You really live on it all the time You’ve got to watch all the movement up and down. You’ve got to watch the movement from side to side, always, so it’s like a car on the road except that in a car you’re just on one plane. In the formation you are not. You’ve got about four or five different planes you are working on all the time, you know. And you’ve got to watch those all the time. That’s the hard part.

You mean the bombs? We had four 260-pounders and two 500-pounders. They are big bombs. Two thousand pounds of bombs, two thousand pounds. We had five thousand rounds of ammunition for the eight machine guns because we used to come down strafing too, sometimes. We would drop the bombs and then come down and strafe the base. And we had two guns in the wings that the pilot used to use

and two at the front for the navigator and two in the turret that the gunner used to use, plus two out each beam if you wanted them, so there were quite a few machine guns. We were usually carrying about six thousand gallons of petrol. They were quite a lethal thing when you were taking off if anything went wrong.

Well the machine guns are capable of firing eleven hundred rounds of bullets a minute. Each of those Browning machines and the machines in the wings there. And in those wings there are two machine guns, one on each side. They are used by the pilot. He could use the plane as a fighter plane. You actually aim the plane. Wing side on the front. You actually operate the plane. You don’t

work the guns. The guns don’t move. It’s the plane that moves. And you sight everything on by the plane. Those guns are firing over a hundred rounds a minute each and the guy in the nose of the aircraft is firing his and there are a couple of thousand rounds there as well as that. If you strafe front way you might be firing anything up to four thousand rounds a minutes. So…

Just above the top of the trees.

Pardon?

You don’t know, fortunately. We would have, I imagine. I don’t know. I mean you go in to do that. You are there to hit them but whether you do or not. It is not thing you can be proud of so you don’t talk about it.

Well I signed up. I signed up that I was going to do what I was told; that’s it as far as I was concerned. If I was going to have to kill people then I was going to have to kill people, but I accepted it. I didn’t like it but I accepted it. I loved to fly. I loved every bit of flying as flying but I didn’t like some of the things I had to do. But that is only natural. You don’t like the idea of killing people or knowing that you are killing people.

But you’ve got to do it. That’s war. If you don’t kill them they are going to kill you. More than likely to. They are trying to. So you don’t worry about it. Well I don’t. I may be different. Some people do but I didn’t. I decided that I was going to do the best I could, do the best job I could of what I had to do and what I was told to do and that’s what I did.

I was very fortunate in a lot of ways. I was given a good aircraft and I had a good crew. I had the same crew for two years. A lot of people didn’t get that. They would do a tour of operation for nine months and that was it. They would have the same crew for nine months and then they would have to go and do something else with another crew and some other aeroplane. They never had their own aeroplane, a lot of people. It didn’t mean that you flew that all the time because sometimes that was in service, but while that was in service you flew somebody else’s aircraft.

And sometimes while their aircraft was in service they’d fly yours. So you’d work in between with the aeroplanes.

I did. I was sorry to leave it there. There were a lot of dicey situations you survived in it, you know. But even though you know it had a very bad name earlier on –

you knew it had been through all that… But to me I think for what we had to do it did very well. It did what it was required to do and that’s what it was built for. It was an operational aircraft and it was built to do those things and it did it well. It was a solid aircraft and it was reliable. I only had one problem in it. Once I lost a motor. That’s not the aircraft’s fault, that’s the engine’s fault. So

it was a good aircraft. I’ve got a photograph of it there where they broke it up. You can just see a bit of the top of the plane and somebody got me a photo of it. I treasure that. Well you can’t… You go through those experiences and you can’t say you don’t have some sort of feeling for it, can you, really? It had been part of your life sort of thing

for eighteen months, so it was for mine.

It was an advantage for the plane because you got your own ground crew, and ground crew is very important for looking after the aeroplane. So we had… One engine fitter would have three aeroplanes and

that would be his three aeroplanes and he took a personal interest in that. These were his three aeroplanes and they were his pride and he’d be responsible for it if he did something on the engines. And he would have to test fly it. He would have to fly with it on the test flight so he had to do his job properly. And the electrician had to do his job properly. A rigger, a man who rigs the aircraft, he would have to do his job properly. And the riggers were very important because if the aircraft was… If it was flying low…

And the ones we had in the training stations, there was no particular person who had them. They were just training stations. The old quacks that had been flying in operations were sent down to the training stations and they were the worse for wear and they had all sorts of rigging problems. Maybe the wing might be flying low. Well if you had that in the squadron with your own fitter or rigger he would report to the pilot, and between you and the pilot you would work on it between

until you got it exactly right, and everything like that went through the whole aircraft. It was important to have the same crew, which I did, had the same ground crew too. And the same crew flying with you and you got to know. You are sitting up there on you own and you can only visualise what is going on down the back, even though you know the gunner is sitting in his turret and the air gunner is at his wireless and that type of thing.

You’ve still got to have charge of the whole operation, you know. You’ve got to know what it going on. And you’ve got to have people that you can depend on that will do the right thing and do what you want. People that you know that will do the right thing. So it was very important that you had a good crew. I think probably the reason that I am here is because we had a good crew. Because the navigator was very important to me. You get into cloud and fly for four or five hours in cloud and don’t know where you are

and haven’t seen anything for four or five hours, and you haven’t got good radio beacons or radio stations to get bearings on, or no way of getting bearings, you could be anywhere. But if you have a navigator who does his job properly then you’ve got a way though. I think that man Sharkie that I was telling you about, squadron leader who disappeared in the cloud, I think personally he had a strange navigator the day he flew up there. His own navigator

for some reason hadn’t been able to fly with him and they put him with another navigator. I think personally when he got into cloud this navigator didn’t know what he was doing. That’s my own opinion. That mightn’t be right. But it was very important to have a good crew and a crew, you know. And I was very lucky like that. We had…

One of the funniest things, just getting back onto… Can I talk a bit about a couple of the funny things? There were quite a few funny things. We used to… If you didn’t have a sense of humour then you couldn’t survive, I don’t think. You worked out amongst yourselves what… I had an armourer mate. An armourer is someone who arms all the guns and puts the bombs in them and fuses

them and that type of thing. Very important man, you know. He was one of my best mates, actually. I got to know him quite well. More so after the war than during the war, actually. When we were up there I didn’t know him all that well. I got to know him afterwards at reunions and that. And a bit of a hard case. He was standing at the edge of the Middleberg strip that day waiting for the planes to come back from a raid, and I wasn’t flying that particular one and

just off the edge, about twenty feet off the edge of the strip I suppose, and this Beaufort touched down about a hundred yards before it got to us. As it touched down a 500-pound bomb dropped out between his wheels onto the tarmac. It was sliding along in between the wheels of the plane. In no time at all there were about half a dozen blokes there. We were all in the ditch and me on the bottom. I was pretty quick in those days. Bob was on top. My armourer mate was on top and nothing

happened so we thought it was okay. Nothing had come our way and it hadn’t gone off. So Bob puts his head up above the ditch and has a look and it is over the other side. It has slid out from between the wheels and it is over the other side, you see, and Bob being an armourer said, “I had better go and defuse this.” He had a took kit with him, a heavy tool kit, and we went over and touched the bomb and it was red hot. A red-hot bomb to an armourer man

is a sign that it is about to go off. He took off. He is gone about fifty yards and he realises he has his tool kit with him and he threw that away so he could run a bit faster. That is all true because I saw that happen. The second bit I’m not so sure about. Sometimes you dress these things up a bit for reunions, you know. But he went away back to the armour section and the warrant officer in charge

got into his ute and took him out to the bomb to defuse it, you know. And he is hitting something on the fuse and my mate Bob is nearly having a fit, you know. It was a live bomb that he thought might go off. And the bomb is sliding all over the place because it is a funny shape. You know. He said, “Sit on it to keep it still,” and Bob sat on it, you know, and he is still hitting the thing and he stops hitting and drives off a hundred yards. Left his jeep there and then he walked back.

Bob said, “What did you do that for?” He said, “We didn’t want to lose the jeep too,” he said. I wouldn’t vouch for the truth of that one but that’s the way he put it, you know. It makes fun. I know the first part of that was true because I was there. We very, very quickly got away from that when we first saw that bomb. We dived into a ditch all right. Have you got anything else you want to say?

Well fire away. I don’t want to take your time.

Well what I could say there is that most of those times when you are flying in flak you are flying in formation and you know you’ve got to drop your bombs. There are six bombs there and you know you’ve got to drop them on a certain spot.

And you’ve got to cooperate with your navigator. You’ve got to open the bomb bays and the bombs have got to be fused and all sorts of things you have gotta do. You are so busy you really don’t … In my case up there when we were actually over the target there but I was really too busy to worry too much about it. I didn’t get an impression that stuck with me after the war. Something particular

busted and nearly got us there. I can still see that after all these years.

Okay. Do you mind if I get this down here?

Okay. That’s… One day I was sitting here, and this is imprinted on your brain, and that’s what they call an impressionist painting. I did it in about a quarter of an hour.

And it was an impression of what I saw that day and that’s almost exactly what I saw. There were six aeroplanes in the formation there but I’ve only got five that day, but when you take a photograph you’ve got to take it from one so there were really six that day but that is based on this paining. That’s what it looks like.

Forty millimetre shells. They explode and as they explode the metal casing goes in all directions. If that had hit me if would have blown the starboard wing off and there was no chance we would have got out of it. The plane would have gone over and straight down. But in addition to that, if you are within about fifty feet of it

these little bits of metal that break up from the casings of the shell and go in all directions, they are called shrapnel. You’ve probably heard the term in army terms. That’s a shell that bursts and the case flies all over the place in little bits and pieces – it’s called shrapnel. And that is just as lethal as bullets. So you not only had the chance of your wing off or being blown out of the sky, but even if it burst fifty feet away from you it could kill you. And those

nasty little black puffs of smoke there, they are quite lethal they are.

That had burst a hundred yards ahead of us. It burst a hundred yards away from us and half a second later the starboard wing ran through the black smoke. So it would have been dead on. It would have blown our wing off. There was

only half a second in it. So you don’t forget those sorts of things. They sort of stay imprinted in your mind all the time, I think. I painted that and entered that into the Heritage Awards, the first one, three years ago. The first one I entered in down there and it was successful but that’s what it was based on. On that particular incident

there of an actual operation I took part in.

No. Not really. I don’t know. You get something in your mind like that and

I am eighty-eight years of age and I’ve lived a fair life and I can still remember those things. And I haven’t got a good memory, as I told you before, but I still remember those things. I don’t think you ever lose it, really. Some impressions you never lose. You don’t lose them really. There’s other impressions I got during the war, I can’t think of them at the moment, and you don’t talk about them, but

that’s why I gave it away for forty years. You can’t talk about these sorts of things to a lot of people. They are just not interested. Well they weren’t. It is only lately that I have met up with mates and colleagues, people that I flew with – well those that are left – and we talk over those things and joke and laugh about them and all that sort of thing.

Yes. I have with members of my family, some nephews in particular. At one stage I would get started on my experiences and they were quite interested when they were young chaps, about nineteen or twenty, nephews of mine who knew I had been away to the war. They were quite interested and when I get somebody interested I will talk about it. But normally at home or with my friends I never

discuss that, you know. Discuss these sorts of things.

Oh I don’t think… Well I think I… After I was discharged I think I sort of… At the time it didn’t seem to worry me much. I mean you are doing those things every day virtually, well just about every day.

You are going out every day and you sort of accept it, you know. And things that had to be done. I don’t remember that I was really stressed out in any way through that. Maybe I’m not normal. I don’t know. I won’t say I was never frightened. I was telling you about my flight commander. My flight commander was scared stiff flying in formation.

I wouldn’t say I was frightened but you just got in your head somehow. I just remember seeing it there, it always being there, and it always will be I suppose. But it never really got to me. I never let anything get to me really. I would be worried for an hour or two or a couple of hours maybe and then go home and go to bed and forget about it next day and go on as usual, so I didn’t

really get stressed out about… If I had been stressed out, I would have been stressed out about these things because they lost a hundred and forty and I saw a lot of that every week. When I was staff pilot at Sale that I would be one of the ones that disappeared and strange things happened to them. One of my pilot mates, he had the bed next to me actually, he went out… When he was doing his course on the Beaufort he was going out over Bass Strait

on a night formation exercise, and in night formation one plane does the navigation, knowing where you’ve got to go, and the other plane formats on. It is his job just to practise the night formation, which is very hard to do, and he… The wireless air gunner in the turret at night told us later that he was just sitting there and he saw this plane in formation and he turned his eyes away like that, as quick as that,

within a second or two, and then turned back and the man had gone, the plane had gone. It just disappeared. And the pilots were in communication on radio telephone. No word from him. He just disappeared. See little things like that, those things, do worry you. You don’t know what is happening. None of us knew what was happening at that time. We were worried. We were more worried there than what we were on operations really.

And there were more pilots affected by it too. Because if you knew that a plane was coming down in a cloud and crashing into a mountain you expected that because… You expected that because you knew it could happen. But it was different when they just disappeared without any trace at all. And then I happened to be flying a Fairey Battle just before I went back on the course for the second time and I was just sitting there

waiting to take off and this plane came in to land. It just did a touch and go. A Beaufort instructor and a pupil, somebody doing his training on Beauforts, and he just touched the ground and kept on going. And I turned in behind him and followed him up. And when I was doing the cross leg of my circuit, he was coming downwind

outside the perimeter. For some reason I just happened to be looking out at him and for some reason he just dropped his nose, quick as that. Strait down. In eight seconds he was gone and he dived straight down into the swamp and all we could see was petrol burning in the water. He just went about forty feet into a bit of a swamp. See things like that. What happened to him.

And that was the first time that anybody got a clue as to what was happening to the Beauforts. That was the first clue they ever got. And they were initiating an inquiry a few weeks after that to decide if they were going to withdraw all the Beauforts out of service. Scrub the whole Beaufort program. That was how serious it was. And I gave evidence

to that court of enquiry when they had it and that gave the first clues as to what was going on. It would have to be an elevator problem. Whatever happened it would have to be the elevator because there was no way in the world that a Beaufort with proper elevators would go like that. They would go down gradually but they wouldn’t go like that. If you lose elevator control then you’ve got no control this way. That gave them the cruise. And then

I was on a Beaufort course, and then towards the end of it on the course one of our top Beaufighter pilots who was on the commander at Tocumwal. And the Beaufighters are based on the Beauforts with the same wings and same airframe. But the Beaufighters had no dual control. With the Beaufighters they used to teach them on the Beauforts to fly there Beaufighters. He was flying a dual control one of these, normally they were in single control,

from Tocumwal to Bankstown out here, and this is the commanding officer, Black Jack Walker, Brian Walker, he got over Crookwell over the mountains there and she started to pitch violently fore and aft. And he asked one of his crew to get down and see if he could find anything wrong with the controls down the back, but before he could do anything she became nose heavy. He was a very experienced pilot and

the knowledge of the elevator problem and he put his feet up on the instrument panel and he got his navigator, who had the dual control, to put his feet up too, and between them the grown men, strong men, could just barely hold the nose up and they had to make up their mind whether they were going to crash land it. At one stage they were going to turn it upside down and bale out, but he had passengers with him so he couldn’t do that. But it was still flying so they kept it going and it was forty miles to Bankstown. He got to Bankstown all right and

put it down on its belly there, crash landing, and they found this tiny little bolt, that big, in the trim tab of the elevator. It was sheared off and that was the cause of all of the crashes. So they modified that and that was about the time I finished my training on it. I had only just finished my training on the Beauforts so I was lucky really. They got…

They had a fearsome reputation early on but when they ironed that out as I proved from eighteen months of continual operational flying. I did everything you can do with them, that you were supposed to do with them. Bombing and supply drops and photo reconnaissance, strafing and bombing and the whole lot. People like me found them a fine aircraft so that’s the way it went.

Yeah. Just thinking about it.

Yeah. It wasn’t problems actually. I don’t say I was terrified or anything like that. It’s just that it kept coming back. That dark cloud of flak in that particular position and

the planes looking out from the pilot’s view of the plane. It was sort of in my mind somehow or other. It was just stuck there. I don’t know why. It wasn’t that it was worrying me. I mean I wasn’t thinking about it. Well I was thinking about it when I drew that rough sketch of it, but it wasn’t really worrying me in any way. I was thinking about it but it wasn’t worrying me.

So I don’t know why but it certainly didn’t worry me at the time. I was too busy, which we usually were. If you were going to worry you’d probably worry when you got back. And I never wasted time doing that.

About four months.

Yes.

It came as a big surprise actually. We didn’t have a clue that they were dropping atomic bombs. It was just announced one day that the war had finished, just like that. It was all over. We didn’t know whether we were glad or sorry. A lot of them were glad but some were sorry, I think. But it was a big surprise actually.

I wrote a bit in that book there about… Did you read that book at all? About the little man at the back. And the man said… The commanding officer, Tony Primrose, got up, and like a turkey cock he got up all important, “The war is over, boys.” And the man said, “Who won?” I thought that was funny. It was

worth putting in the book. “Who won?” There were some characters. You used to meet some characters. That was the good part of it really.

Well my navigator one day. I don’t know whether he was a character but this was a funny episode anyway. We were up at Tadji and we had the aircraft parked at the edge of the jungle and decided he wanted

to go to the toilet. There weren’t any toilets up there. You just went off and found the nearest coconut palm or whatever. And he goes off and there was an armourers’ hut just at the edge of the jungle with open windows. There were no windows as such. This is just a gap where the windows are. And our plane was parked right on the edge of the strip and one of the wireless air gunners was doing a check on the wireless. He didn’t know anything about any of this. Suddenly the whole place erupted.

There were bombs going off and flares going off and bullets flying everywhere. We thought the Japs had broken through and taken the base again, you know. So we all took off and went away as far as we could, you know. Me in the front, you know. And there were a couple of armourers supposed to be working in this hut and I can remember them flying out of the windows too. And then Johnny the navigator came

flying out of the jungle. What he had done, he had tripped over a flare wire of a Japanese ammunition dump that was hidden in the jungle there – they left it there you know – and it set off bombs and bullets. It wasn’t the bullets, it was the shells. Go, the bullets sat, they stay under the shellfire and flares and little bombs going off and we all thought the Japs had arrived again. So that wasn’t so much a man that was a character but he

was certainly in a hurry to get out of that jungle, I tell you. And that same operation we were parking… We were waiting to go down to… We had done the Wewak one in the morning when they were landing and we were waiting to go down for a second go with about forty Beauforts lined up.

They were parked just off the strip under the trees, close to the jungle, like in the jungle under the trees and where there was some shelter. We were all sitting in the shade of the aircraft to get a bit of cool because it is very hot up there, and waiting for the call for us to go down, take off and go down. And one of the navigators said to one of the wireless air gunners, “Get up and check the bombing circuits, you no good so-and-so.” We all used to do that with each other with different

positions. I’d do different parts just to keep familiar with them. Different things that the navigator was doing normally. They couldn’t do what I was doing but we’d sort of interchange quite a bit on the ground to keep familiar with what was going on in other parts of the plane. And he got up to test the bombing circuits. He had a little clock thing and he used to go past the six stages of the bomb. As you went past a little

light that would show on the dial that the connection was right, the bomb was okay. But then they had a master switch down below and it would switch the master switch on and the bomb dropped off. So what he did was he switched the master switch on. And so all these four crew were sitting in the shade under the plane and two 500-pound bombs and four 60-pound bombs dropped between them on the ground. But they don’t go off because they are not fused. They don’t drop far enough for the fuses to work.

They didn’t go off. But if a 500-pound bomb hits you on the head you have a bit of a headache. We all thought that was a bit funny too. The armourers didn’t – they had to load the bombs on again then. So little things like that they used to try and make your fun.

Well you didn’t. Some of them were pretty early morning takeoffs and you’d have a guard that would call you. You were living in a tent and it would probably be too dark for you to see, but you’d curse the guard and get out and get dressed and go to the operations room and they’d give you a brief and what you were going to do, what you had to do, and then you had

to get all your gear together – your parachute and all your Mae Wests and all the stuff you had to have and the earphones and all that sort of thing together. And you go out to the plane, the first thing you’d do is go round the plane, check the plane all around the outside. Check the tyres and the torpedo heads and all the different things and the engines, the things you could do on it. There were things you couldn’t do. And if you thought everything was okay you’d get into the plane and check everything inside

and do all the things that had to be done. And finally it was start-up time and you’d start your motors and taxi out and away you’d go. So everybody would have their particular jobs to do. Like the wireless operator would check their wireless and make sure it was working correctly, and the gunners wouldn’t fire their guns but they would check their guns and make sure they were working all right, and when they got in the air they used to fire them, a couple of bursts, to make sure they were all right.

So you had to check everything. That was pretty important because it didn’t take much to go wrong to cause a crash actually and that sort of thing. Half the battle was making sure everything was all right as far as you could, that is.

We worked

with the army and the navy. That is the only operation I took part in was Wewak, working with the army and the navy, and that was spot on. It was a good operation. Probably one of the best they had up there. One of the biggest and one of the best. And everybody did their part and worked in well together. The fact that there was only one man wounded was a credit to the operation. Of course the Beauforts took a big part in that, destroying all the opposition first.

That’s the difference between air power and not having air power in the early part of the war. The soldiers had no cover. At Wewak we had to drop bombs within a hundred and fifty yards of our own people. If they found a foxhole or a machine gun nest then they would normally have to charge it, and if it was open ground they might lose a dozen men. They would get shot down with the machine guns in the old days.

We’d be called in to do precision bombing using the bomb sight, fly in from a low level to get accuracy. We would drop the bombs within a hundred and fifty yards of our own troops and all you’d have underneath you would be solid jungle – you couldn’t see your troops. It was a bit of a nightmare that part, but we got there. So it shows the value of air support

as against the lack of air support years ago – the difference that it made. It was air power… Well it was air power that turned the war. There was no doubt about that. World War II, all those terrible raids over Germany destroyed all Germany’s capacity to produce planes and tanks and guns and that and factories. So there was no doubt about that.

The power that had the best air force was the power that was going to win the war. We were just lucky that we had the Empire [Air] Training Scheme to train the crews to fly these planes because we could train pilots in places like South Africa and Australia and Canada all those sort of places where the Germans couldn’t do that. They were confined to their own particular country to train their pilots so we had an advantage there. And we also had America. They trained pilots over there.

Not really. No.

We used to carry… A colonel would sometimes come with us on reconnaissance trips to work out what they needed to know, you know. But usually they were colonels so being a warrant officer you didn’t have too much to say to them, you know. You

didn’t know whether to salute them or not. No, they were decent blokes really, but I remember one… This same mate, the one I told you about, the flight commander, he got down in a valley there in Dutch New Guinea and he couldn’t get out. He was down too low. The aircraft didn’t have to power to get over the hill. He was almost taking the trees with him. He had full power on and he was sweating

and this bloke was sitting along side him laughing. He thought it was a great joke. Harry was trying to give him a demonstration of low flying, you know. It’s just… Sweat was pouring off him and he was just clipping the trees. He only just got out of the valley. This colonel thought it was great. But that’s the only time I remember meeting any Yanks [Americans] really. We used to see them on the bases. We didn’t talk to them much. They had their own business and their own

jobs and that. We didn’t have contact with them really. The only thing we liked about them was their quartermaster stores. They used to sell good clothing We used to raid those and go and buy pants and shirts from them. Much better than what we got. And they put on a good meal too. If we landed on their bases we’d get a good meal, or as good a meals and you’d get down here at one of our good hotels, you know.

But they looked after themselves, the Yanks. You’ve got to hand it to them. They did a colossal job. If it hadn’t been for them we’d have been invaded here, certainly.

Well it didn’t change at all for two months because we couldn’t get a ship home.

And the only flying we did was we used to go out on the mail run. It was about a thousand miles down to Finschhafen. And to carry beer… We had a wet canteen, you see, and we had to bring our own beer up so we’d load the planes full of beer, see. I didn’t take to kindly to that because it was very heavy. With a bomb load or those, if you lost an engine on those you couldn’t keep going unless you got rid of the weight. So you would drop your

bomb load and lose the weight and keep going on one motor, but with beer you couldn’t and the liquid was heavy so I never took kindly to that. But those things we used to do. Then a ship came to take our heavy gear home and when that happened of course we could fly our aeroplanes home. I don’t know whether that was the reason they kept us. We could have easily flown home, I think. I wasn’t the boss. So we had to put in the time the best way we could. I used to walk round and round and round the beach thinking about what I was going to

do when I got discharged, or trying to. But there wasn’t anything to do and there was no entertainment. One night we had an entertainment group came over from Morotai and a lot of them were female impersonators, and you can imagine people who had been shut up on an island, males, and these people came and the reception they got.

Anyway, they put on a concert and it was a good concert too. We had a bit of a stage then and a concert thing there and we used to put on newsreels and that. Not newsreels, films. Only eight-millimetre stuff but it was quite good. It helped pass the time away. But the next day we had to fly these dozen back to Morotai and I got six of them in my

plane and I took off and one was sitting alongside me, actually. I thought I had better show these fellas I can actually fly an aeroplane and I dived down and nearly took the top of a palm tree, you know, just to show him I could fly the thing and he was in good hands On the way we pulled into a couple of what had been enemy bases until a few weeks previously when the war had finished and it was now

friendly. We knew it was friendly so I gave these fellows a bit of a close look at a Japanese base, see. Then we pulled up again and saw a couple of aircraft ahead flying in formation and I thought, “I’ll be in this,” so… Anything to break the monotony. And I pulled up, two planes there and I came in in an echelon formation and I’m here, see. So I got sick a bit of it after a while so I thought, “I’ll change this to a V.” One there, one there and one there, you see. And to do

that you had to drop underneath the other plane like that, come across and up, see. And this bloke… They had a plastic roof on the Beauforts there where you could look out the top, and he looks up and he sees this plane about ten feet above us and I guarantee he would have jumped out of the plane if he could have. He jumped up off his seat. Gee, we are horrible people. You remember all those things and they are the things you talk about at reunions mainly. The good things

that happened. And there were some – they weren’t all bad.

There were quite a few native women up there and they got whiter every day. I think the worst ones were the married ones really because they were used to the married life, sort of thing, and

taken away from them. The single ones went off after girls when they were on leave. I don’t know. It didn’t worry me because I was engaged at the time up there anyway. And it didn’t… I never wandered away from it really, from what I had committed myself too. Quite a few of them did really. But we had a plane load of nurses land there one day to refuel the plane and all the nurses

got out to stretch their legs at the duty pilot’s tower, and I guarantee every male in the squadron except me was over there to try and talk to the nurses. So it did affect them, yeah. It must have done. It did affect them. We used to have them at Camden. Call girls we called them, and they used to wander around in cars looking for dates, you know. I’ve heard since that they were based in a

hotel in Camden. You know, brothels and that type of thing. But they used to drive up around all different roads around the aerodrome hoping to meet some air force blokes going on leave, you know. So it was quite common really. You were getting away for years like that and it was only natural, female company, you must feel it. It is not a natural thing really.

So you can’t blame people I suppose. But most of my mates were pretty good really.

Yes. All of those things.

Yeah.

The southern coast of New Guinea. I think we went to Biak first

to refuel and then down the southern coast of New Guinea to Higgins Field right on the tip of Cape York Peninsula. The furthest north spot on Australia, right on the very tip. We had a refuelling base there, Higgins Field, and I landed there to refuel. The next day we went to Rockhampton and I landed there. The following day we flew from there down to

Wagga and left our aircraft there. I got a receipt for it: ‘Received in good order and condition. A9536.’

Oh I looked back from the gate with a bit of nostalgia because she had been a good aircraft to us.

Yeah. A9536.

No. Well I don’t know whether you can get sentimental about an aircraft or not but you can’t help feeling a bit resentful that we didn’t keep some of them because there were hundreds that came back. There were ten squadrons of Beauforts operating and we were only one squadron, see. A lot of those aircraft did survive the war and they came back and ended up at Wagga, and the Beaufighters too,

and every one was broken up for scrap metal and they never kept one. And they have been fifteen years now, the last fifteen years trying to rebuild one for a static display. And they had one finished this time last year and it is only static display. It was only finished on the outside, actually, and it was scheduled to be in the War Museum for two or three months for the Beaufort people to go and see it, and

I went down this time last year before when I had my little heart operation and saw it in the museum. And that’s the only one in Australia, now, after all this time. And they’ve been fifteen years rebuilding that. It is built from parts they’ve got in New Guinea and parts here and parts there. The screws they got up at Tadji and the wheels they got from somewhere else. Put it all together. Made a good job of it too. But it won’t fly. It is only a static display.

It is only there to look at. There is another one being built by a private man in Queensland and he’s got a panel beating business and he’s been building that for the last fifteen years too. But that one’s going to fly up there. When that’s finished that will be flying on the various air displays and that, which will be good. So I don’t think I’ll get a chance to fly it, but just to see it will be good. So we hope that will be… It is just a crying shame that all those aircraft…

They could have kept one or even half a dozen, you know. Breaking them up for scrap metal. It just shows. And those aircraft were all built in Australia, seven hundred of them. It was a colossal thing for the Australian people to do at that time. They couldn’t even build a car. They couldn’t even build a wheelbarrow properly. To turn round and build one of those things. They are a very complicated aircraft. You mightn’t think so. There is a lot of work goes into that. Thousands and thousands of parts

goes into that. Today that would cost about two and a half million dollars to build, so in those days they were eighty thousand dollars. But if you take it on the inflated price of today they would be at least two and a half million dollars so they are not cheap, you know. The engines were all right because they could use those on the DC3 airliners They sold all of those to the DC3. They were all right. But the aircraft themselves were all broken up.

I never operated out of Rabaul. The only time I got close to there was when I had a supply drop. I was dropping the little canisters to an army outpost that was looking out over Rabaul. This is while the war was on. They could see Rabaul from where they were, this army outpost.

I had to travel a hundred miles over the jungle of New Britain to get there. When we got there it was indicated by a smoke puff. That was the only thing we had. I didn’t actually see the town of Rabaul but that was as close as I got. They could see Rabaul from where they were. But I had mates who went over there and they were involved in torpedoing the Japanese ships in Rabaul Harbour. They were involved in that earlier in the war than what I got up to. They

did quite a lot of work there. Quite a few Beauforts got shot down there, actually – not by fighters but by anti-aircraft fire. And another place called Gasmata on the south coast of New Britain, about half a dozen Beauforts got shot down there. That was anti-aircraft fire. But Rabaul. That was the only time I saw Rabaul and I really didn’t get to see it properly from where I was, but these people could have seen it because they were out looking. That was their job.

They were at an army outpost to try and report any movements. So there was a lot of Japanese activity in there during the war with ships and that, and it was a big target for the Beauforts. They were attacked there quite a bit. They were actually night attacks because they had Zeros there, fighter planes.

Well those who could take care of themselves with a Zero, it wasn’t advisable to take the woozier if you could avoid it, you know. They used to fly there at night-time and drop their bombs and torpedoes at night. They found one of my mates about twelve months ago, actually. I’ve got a newspaper clipping. He was one of my best mates. I trained with him on Beauforts and he went up a bit before me. When I went down here to Camden he went straight up there

in a different squadron. He was coming back from Rabaul and he just disappeared. Nobody knew what happened to him. They found his plane about two years ago. A diver found it just off some island in the water about twenty or thirty feet down. They were strapped in the plane as they were when they were flying. And they got them out and gave them an air force funeral at Rabaul. It was in the paper and on the television at the time. He was one of my best mates. Johnny Woodgate.

It just shows the way things go. The way things work out.

Pardon?

My biggest fear as I said before was doing something silly myself.

Yeah. Doing something silly. Pulling the wrong lever or making a bad decision

or not making a decision quick enough, and I had to make some pretty quick ones sometimes, I can tell you. But fortunately they nearly all turned out right. But it was quite easy to do the wrong thing even though you were an experienced pilot. You get a bit stressed and a bit worried about something and my attention is somewhere else, and I pull the wrong lever or push the wrong button. And some of those things had a terrific effect on the flying of the aeroplane that

could cause you to cause accidents. So that was always my biggest fear that I would do something silly. I was always… I was frightened, I don’t mind telling you, at various times. You would be a liar and you wouldn’t be human if you said you were never frightened. But it never used to get to me and the next day I would be there working away as usual. Forget all about it. I had that capacity, apparently.

No not really. I have been so busy trying to get back in civil life properly for the last twenty years or more, fifty-six years, isn’t it,

that I haven’t have much time to think about it. It doesn’t worry me specially. I remember quite clearly the time I turned over upside down two hundred feet above the ground. And I remember my hair virtually standing up on end and I remember getting very frightened. I remember getting very frightened one pitch black night fourteen thousand feet above where we hoped was Sale

and we had to come down through a column of cloud from fourteen thousand feet down to fifteen hundred feet. There was cloud all the way down and a pitch black night and we weren’t sure we were within a hundred miles of where we should have been. It was one of those situations were we had to be in exactly the right place, otherwise we would have hit the mountains coming down through the cloud. And I was scared that night.

I was terrified but I just kept going. I knew, what can you do? Nobody else could do anything and I wasn’t going to get out of the aeroplane and walk. I couldn’t get out. I wasn’t going to bale out. I knew we might be out at sea. You may as well land on the land than halfway to New Zealand. What can you do? You weigh all those things up and you make a decision.

Actually I got a course from the navigator that night to descend on a certain course and I refused to take it, even though we only had about quarter of an hour’s fuel left in the aeroplane, because I knew that if we weren’t exactly right we were in serious trouble. You know, we might hit a mountain. I called… We weren’t allowed to use our radios except in emergencies and at this stage I had used my radio because that was enough of an emergency for me.

I didn’t want anything more of an emergency than that. I called for a radio bearing and they gave me a bearing from Melbourne and we were way out over East Gippsland. Over at the Entrance [Lakes Entrance], somewhere over there. And that’s a fair way. And you’ve got one bearing but you’ve got to get two bearings, one this way and one that way so you get position. So all that bearing gave us was we knew we were along that line somewhere. We didn’t know where so it was no use to us really.

And then I figured out that the course he gave me I wanted to come down out at sea because there would be less chance of hitting a mountain that way. So I got him to give us a course that was headed east, out to sea, and we did, we came down out at sea, about thirty miles out at sea, and that was a decision that was probably the right one. And that was one of those times when I had nothing to work on except probably my own experience.

And you had to make decisions like that sometimes and you had to make them in a hurry. You didn’t have any time to stop and think them out properly. Like the day the engine failed up at Tadji I had less than eight seconds to prevent probably the biggest explosion you’ve ever seen, when the plane would have come round and hit the other planes each with two thousand pounds of bombs

and six hundred gallons of petrol, etc., including ours. So I had less than eight seconds to make up my mind what I was going to do and when you acted you had to act correctly. So I was fortunate enough to be able to do that. Either that or I had somebody helping me up top I think. Maybe.

Well when a plane is going along and it drops like that it would have to be an elevator problem. That isolates the whole thing to one section of the aeroplane. It couldn’t be the main wings. It couldn’t be anything else. And having done that

we didn’t know anything beyond that, that it was an elevator problem. And we knew that whatever happened to that man that day, that instructor and the pilot, happened suddenly and he had no chance of stopping it. It was just sudden like that. What I saw was sudden as quick as that and down. So whatever happened there was no chance. And the other one we knew about was my mate. He was in the turret and he saw the other man and he just disappeared. Obviously

the same thing happened to him. He didn’t have any chance to talk to his pilot mate or anything. He just went in, straight in. So what happened was happening suddenly and we isolated it to the elevator. They didn’t do anything. They were supposed to notify them but they didn’t know what to notify, what to do at that stage, and it was only when Black Jack Walker, one of our top pilots, the one I was talking about at Crookwell, he was the only

pilot that had ever survived that happening in an aeroplane. So he survived because he got on to it straight away. And to me he must have had knowledge of, at that stage, clues of what I’d provided as it being an elevator problem. I think he knew it was an elevator problem so he knew what to do, and being a top pilot he was used to… The speed of the aeroplane was important for him. For a hundred

knots, which is the slowest you can fly one of those things. He put his feet up on the instrument panel and he got his navigator to do the same and two full-grown men could barely hold the control panels up to hold the nose up. So the fact that he did all that would be based on the fact that he knew it was an elevator problem. He would have the clues at that stage and they were the clues that I provided of what I saw that day. Eventually over the inquest provided those clues.

It was isolated to the elevators. They knew that much at that time. That’s the way I look at. There has been other theories about it but I stick to that and that’s the air force findings so that’s good enough for me.

That was harder than going into the air force, I think, because of the fact that I had no training in anything.

Eleven years on the farm. I could do anything with my hands, mechanically. I haven’t got any mechanics certificates or anything but I can pull to pieces a car or a tractor to bits and put them together. I just have a gift for those sorts of things. You know. And that has been an advantage. But you still can’t make your living out of that sort of thing. If you haven’t got that certificate then you can’t go and ask for a job as a motor mechanic, can you?

Because I never even tried but I did a lot of work of my own. With my daughters’ cars when they bought cars, I went and bought it for them. They paid for it of course when they were working or with the scholarships they had or whatever they had, and I would bring it home here and I’d overhaul it for them. Put new rings or a gearbox or whatever it needed. I could do the whole lot. They were good little cars. They all had good little cars. You know. My son-in law…

The eldest daughter… He bought a little Standard 10. He was going to the University of New South Wales doing civil engineering. I’m talking now about forty years ago now. He bought a little Standard 10 and it was the worst little car you would ever like to imagine. We spent twelve months on it rebuilding it and he used that all the time running in to town. And he lives only round the next street here. Well he did at the time. And he spent… Called it Piggy – it even had a name.

And he used to run into town with it. Into the University of New South Wales backwards and forwards until it finally wore out. Little things like that that I have always been handy at. You know. Not that I am clever or anything it is just that I have that knack of working with my hands. I can figure things out. If that lamp goes I will put a new one in myself. I am not supposed to but I have always done it. You know. Now I can’t do it because I’ve got a physical problem, I can’t get up there. But if I was all right

I could still put it in there. I took a big fan out of there the other day. Someone gave it to me. He had a house built. Up the road he had a house demolished and he put a beautiful new storey up. An he gave me this fan and rather than throw it out I hung it up there, and when I hung it up there I thought, “I may as well hook it up and when I have been using it for eighteen months…” You know. I thought today, “Well that’s going to be in the way up there so I will pull it down,” and I pulled it down.

You know. Being handy like that. But I’ve never had any… And even the photography. I was doing commercial work developing printing, enlarging and copying anything like that. Photographs. Weddings at the finish and home portraits. Working quite a good little business from the farm up at Gosford when the war came on. But I didn’t have any qualifications. So when the war finished I thought, “Well

I can do these things but you’ve still got to have that business training to go into anything like that.” I just walked away from it altogether. You know. And flying… I was granted a commercial licence because of the flying I was doing, the type of flying, you know. But I didn’t take it up because of too many people doing the same thing at the time. I knew I was getting married in 1946 and I knew there was eventually going to be a family, or I hoped so. I had responsibilities so I was going to

try and figure something out in the city that I could get into and work my way up. You know. It didn’t work out that way, unfortunately. I got into a couple of businesses and one of them was a disaster and the other started to deteriorate when I first bought it, spent a lot of money on it. But it gave me a living, sort of a living. We had to be a bit careful of money but we got through. Two lovely daughters and six grandchildren who we are very proud of. My

daughters got good educations. One is a science and mathematics teacher in high school and one is a head teacher at a TAFE [Technical and Further Education college] in Gosford teaching nursing and health. She worked her way up from an ordinary nurse. She did nursing thirty years ago at RPA [Royal Prince Alfred], the old RPA emptying bedpans and that. She got a degree in her own time, a nursing degree in her own time with a family of three teaching five afternoons a week at the TAFE college and did the degree

in Bathurst in her own time. And then she went on and did a master’s degree in her own time in the last couple of years. As a result of all that she got a job as a head teacher at a TAFE college so I am very proud of my daughters. So I had a lot ahead of me and I had to work hard. But over the last twenty years when I retired I took up painting as a hobby. I didn’t have any lessons. I just picked it up mixing with professionals, joining an art society.

What I know I have learned as I went along. And I have sold quite a few paintings but I am not in the business of selling paintings. It is just a hobby with me. I give them away sometimes and make a few dollars for charity with them. But there again when I retired I kept a few of my lawns going. I like to be out in the open. I am still a farmer at heart, you know.

But the money I made at those… I invested the little bit I made and that gave me a little investment portfolio which keeps us fairly comfortable financially, you know. So I have no worries from that point of view now. So at the finish it all worked out all right. I was lucky enough to live long enough to benefit from it. Do you know, we paid… Just to get on to real estate for a minute. We paid

three hundred and fifty pounds for this block of land in 1948 and just a couple of weeks ago we were offered nine hundred and eighty thousand dollars for it! That is nearly a million dollars! Unbelievable, isn’t it! And stupid if we had to pay for it. We’ve got the little scooter which we take up to Westfield every Tuesday

and a little Laser car that I can drive easily and well. We’ve got everything we need here and everything is arranged in the house for the wife. She can’t even reach the switch because of the arthritis. She can’t use her hand. So it is nearly a full-time job now. Not really full time but I have to be around. I can’t be too far away at any time, do you know what I mean,

because she gets little things that she can’t do. That of course is unfortunate because she doesn’t get to go to any social places. The few that I have been able to go to she can’t go to really. I have been down to Canberra on a few trips with my art society friends to get to these awards and to the presentation of the Roulettes with the air force. She can’t do that because she can’t walk. If there is a step that high she can’t get up there.

We have to lift her up. Anyway, enough of my worries. What is your question?

Well I would say that I don’t think back on my mates that I had in the war. I have studied in my little book there that if I went down… I’ve got a painting there that you might have noticed in the corner there

of the War Memorial and the wall where the names of all the young chaps who have lost their lives in the air force are engraved in gold letters. I was there with a mate one day and he was looking for the name of one of his brothers who was killed over England, and if I had half a day to go through that I could find the names of at least a hundred young chaps who I knew. They were not all best mates but they were all

chaps that I was involved with that lost their life. You know, it is a lot of people, isn’t it, when you look back on it? Some of those were special mates, good mates. I often think of those on Anzac Day. I can’t help it. I mean you’ve been through all that and you just can’t help it. So it does come back to you. A lot of people will tell you you shouldn’t be thinking about those things

because the war’s finished, it’s gone, but you can’t help it. Because I like it too from the marching point of view with all the little kids coming out and shaking you by the hand and waving their flags. Someone puts their hands out to shake and you can shake hands if you are on the outside of the column sort of thing. You know. And all the people cheering. Suddenly the Beauforts come into sight, the Beaufort banner, and up goes the cheers. You know they are all Beaufort people.

Up goes everybody cheering and waving their hands, you know. It gives you a good feeling. You know. I like it from that point of view. But thinking about the past and that, you can’t really go too deep into it. You know, it’s all gone. I had a lot of good mates. One in particular wouldn’t fly with anyone but me. He was a flight sergeant motor mechanic and I used to talk to him quite a lot about mechanical things, having an interest in mechanical things

myself. We used to have a lot of conversations about… We joined early on. He became a flight sergeant straight off because of his trade. He was a qualified mechanic and he went straight in and six years later he was still operating as flight sergeant. Whenever we moved anywhere, if we moved from Camden up to Townsville

we would have our normal crew plus a ground staff bloke. When we went to Madang we had to have someone there to service the plane. He had to fly. He had to be up there to service the plane. So he chose… He wouldn’t fly with anybody but me. He was sitting along side me the whole trip and when we went through cyclonic weather and he saw the sweat pouring off me was the only time he got panicky at Mackay when he saw the sweat pouring off my face, and he really go into a bit of a panic then.

And he wouldn’t fly with anybody but me, that man. We were tent mates at Madang, tent mates at Middleberg, right through the whole thing together, and he was a lovely fellow. You know. We used to talk a lot about mechanics and all sorts of things. Instead of going to the mess at night we would go back to our tents at night and talk and write letters. We were really good mates, you know. Some people like that you get to know. Because he survived the war. He was a mechanic. As I said in my little book there

he said… He met our engineering officer and our engineering officer was a university trained man in charge of the maintenance. He was the big boss. Never a very popular man with any of the maintenance blokes, this fella wasn’t. Anyway, when the war finished Jim met him one day driving around in his jeep. He said, “When are you going to have the operation, cobber?” And Parker said, “What operation?” He said, “Have that operation cut off, you so-and-so.”

The war had finished and he could say what he liked. He was a flight lieutenant. He could say what he liked. But he was due to go home. When he went home, the day he was due to come home he had a bad attack of flu. It turned out to be malaria, actually, and he was sick as a dog and he had to climb in the back of the aircraft come with us. No way would he go with anyone else So he came home with us too. Anyway. What is your next question?

If all these ratbags that are around now, like in Iraq and these places and the terrorists and that, all these people could invade this country over. It would be easy to take this country over. China Japan, anybody. Even China. All this vacant country we’ve got here that they could make good use of. It is a beautiful country,

a wonderful country, and what a thing it would have been for the Japanese. The reason they went to war is because they had no oil and no coal and no iron for their industries to make aeroplanes and tanks and all that, and even consumer goods, refrigerators or whatever, and this was the reason they went to war. So they would still want all the iron, all we’ve got out there now in Western Australia and all the coal we’ve got here. That’s all our country would have been for Japan.

Indonesia is the same. They have a million men in their army there and what have we got here? Twenty-three thousand! So there’s your answer. It is important for young people to become involved if they are able to. So I’ll never see another war here but in the future people could see it – this place going to someone else. You can see it happening now without anybody coming here in Hurstville.

There are nearly all Chinese people here now in all the flats and that gaining all the business, which is good. They are good people. But there is always the danger that they’ll all end up Chinese, isn’t there? You know. I think a young fellow should be prepared to train in either of the three services and be prepared to fight if he’s got to

because nobody else is going to do it. And if you don’t, what is going to happen? I don’t know whether you are a pacifist or not, but if you are that is your right, but to me that would make sense. When I saw how close this country came to being invaded personally…