Australians at War Film Archive

Yes, well I was born in the North of Victoria, in the Bendigo area

and then we lived on a farm up there, wheat and sheep, mainly wheat growing and there was a big drought in the early Twenties and my father was share farming and they just weren’t making any money so he left the farm and moved to Melbourne to get work.

And he got work at a machinery factory making machinery and we were there for a couple of years and things didn’t get any better. People were out of work and things were very bad in the Twenties and he sold his house and block of land

in Warragul. So we shifted to the farm and it was a very old house and he started a milk round and he worked on the milk round for a few years and then he sold that and we sold milk, oh cream to a factory and then later on whole milk. And

we used to walk to school and we had to work on the farm before and after school and weekends, from little children, like most children did. And I went to school until I was thirteen and left school and work was still hard to find and things were just improving when there was

talk of war. And that meant our produce, the main market was England and there was threats that the shipping lanes would be cut off through the Mediterranean and that was really the first sign of war. That was Thirty Six or,

and the country was still poor so everyone thought there won’t be another war because we couldn’t afford it . The Government had no money. They couldn’t help the unemployed and all this sort of thing and they were very complacent about starting another war. But of course it did happen and before it happened the Red Cross were getting

geared up for war. We worked for the Red Cross and the St John Ambulance were very active in training people in case there was a war but nobody believed it would happen.

And they had the Olympic Games in Germany and that was all about, I remember reading about soldiers parading and marching and people were very afraid. The older generation were very afraid of war.

Yes, I remember the

photos in the paper. I don’t know why, I wasn’t a, I was always interested in war. I think because we had neighbours who had been to the First World War and who suffered a lot, didn’t get a lot of help, were very unhappy and they talked about war.

Not often but sometimes they would talk about war and their wives used to talk about what happened when they were at the war and I think I got involved in war and got an interest in war and I used to read the papers and usually I’d always read about the war. And the war

I remembered was in Abyssinia with Italy spreading out and I think this is where they were trying to control the shipping the lanes. And then the farmers would talk about if we lost our market. We seemed very dependant on England. It was still, they still called England home and I think when the war started the thought

was “We must help England.” And that’s what my first memories of war.

Yes.

Well I remember living, I was four when I came to Warragul,

about that age and I remember my mother in a great flap at Mentone, where we lived in Melbourne and all the neighbours being in front of our house. But later on I heard the story why they were all there. I remembered the neighbours. Must have been quite unusual and

my brother who was two years older, had been climbing the picket fence and his trousers got caught on the top picket and he was left hanging upside down on the picket fence and somebody found him. Now I don’t remember him hanging upside down but I remember these people standing around and my mother must have been upset I suppose and that’s the only thing I remember living in Melbourne.

Well we came up to Warragul and I remember coming on the train, first train ride I suppose and we stayed in Warragul. My mother, sister and I stayed in a boarding house in Warragul and my father and brother they had, they drove up by car and I suppose

with our few possessions. But before we came up I suppose my father had some money from selling the house too, although he had to borrow from the bank and he went to a clearing sale and bought that uncomfortable chair, that you couldn’t sit on. It was one of the things he’d bought and that came from a big house in St Kilda Road or somewhere and he bought quite a few antiques and pictures

and things. And because prior to that we only had a kitchen table, four chairs, a sewing machine and a couple of bed I think that they bought down from the North and that was all they possessed. So we had all this big antique furniture to put on this little timber workers cottage on the farm.

It looked quite out of place and we were all our lives walking around this awful furniture.

Well not really mine. It’s to be passed on and I don’t particularly like sitting on them either but that’s my first memory and I remember a little bit about going to the farmhouse and there was no electricity or

water or anything on and my brother running around saying “Switch on the yihts, switch on the yihts” and there were no “Yihts” to switch on. So and then it was all work until, all our lives but that’s what everybody did. They rode horses and they walked miles across paddocks and

the roads weren’t made and if they were they had metal on them so you didn’t get stuck in the mud and the butts of the trees, the forest trees were still in the roads, the back roads and you had tracks round these butts and eventually they rotted away and they did improve the roads. And the mud was terrible and one of the best inventions I

think was rubber boots for farmers because you wore leather boots and they used to get covered in mud and the mud was unreal really. Rained everyday.

Well they were forest trees and they’d be hand cut when they cleared the forests and they were too big to grub out so they’d just make track around them, so those butts

were there for years and years and they’d put the metal around the butt of the tree and then eventually they rotted away and then they’d sand roads and things.

It was on a back road, back road to Drouin where they used to drive cattle. It was mainly a cattle road when we first went there.

They used to bring the stock up from the market and take them to Drouin and the farms and if we bought cattle they used to draft them off at each farm that bought them. They had them marked which was to be dropped off and my father used to ride home with the cattle too and sort out the ones he’d bought. He used to buy and sell cattle as well as milk the cows.

Just in Warragul, just down, oh we lived on the far hill and the town was in the centre and the market was on the bottom of that hill. It was practically a straight road from the market to Drouin and it winded around and they dropped cattle off that had been bought.

I was never any good at riding a horse. I don’t think I was much good at anything really but the others were and they always used to put me on the back and tell everybody that I used to drop off and I didn’t. It was one way of getting rid of me. But I was always very small and it was always very difficult to get on a horse but my other brother and sister rode and my father, of course rode a horse for years.

Yes, older. So that’s my early memories.

Where did I go?

Warragul Primary School. There was only one primary, oh St Joseph’s had a primary school too. There were only two schools and

I did my schooling there. It went to Grade Eight, which is Year Ten, it went to. You could leave at fourteen or thirteen if you got your certificate before you were fourteen and I got my certificate then and I left school, hated school. I liked learning but I hated school. I was always tired because I got up early and I walked both ways and we

walked in on a Saturday and had to get the paper and buy any stores and Sunday we had to go to Sunday School, so we were kept busy. I think it did us good really.

It was a mile and a half and that was close compared to children who walked five and a half miles. Some rode horses and some had jinkers

and they used to bring all the children in the way in and some would be three to a horse and they’d have to have a bag of feed for the horse. They’d leave it in the paddock around the school somewhere but that’s how I started.

Yes, I remember them all. I’m

sure I remember them all. We had male and female and I think I got the cuts from the men teachers and I got a rap over the knuckles from the lady teachers. I probably deserved it anyway, usually for talking. I still talk but they were wonderful teachers, most of them. Some of the younger ones

I think they were fresh out of college and that and they didn’t impress you like the older ones. The older ones got your attention and they were very interesting people. They were terrific teachers. I think they were wonderful teachers. I think most children who I still know who had those teachers say how good they were.

Yes, they all did, they all did. The older ones did. They younger ones I could forget quite easily but the older ones you’d never forget,

they made things interesting. You were part of the scene and they were so involved and believed in what they were teaching, that you never forgot, but they were very strict and they would give you the cuts, sometimes without second thoughts. I remember lining up with the boys and getting the cuts too. They got it harder than me I think but

it was painful and you were determined that you wouldn’t cry but I think the fellow, he was a young fellow and I think he’d had a bad night out or something because another lad who got the cuts that day we were their top pupils at the time and I think he was making an example of us because I couldn’t imagine the other lad sort of getting into trouble. I mean I was always in trouble for talking

but I can’t remember what it was all about. I would have liked to have met him later in life and I would have liked to have nursed him later actually, later in life. I did nurse some of them as they got older too later and it was a pleasure to look after them. I would have given that other fellow a hard time but still I probably deserved it.

They had a strap and one lady she hit you with a ruler. She was an elderly lady. She must have been about thirty but she cracked you across the knuckles but the men used a leather strap. It used to stink like anything.

Oh I think you got the knuckle treatment when you were young. It doesn’t hurt your pride when you’re young, I don’t think and you were just naughty and you got straightened up. But when you got older, I was in the Fourth Grade when that happened I was very indignant about that. Not the fact that I was getting hurt but I was being

hurt in front of everyone in the class, standing out in front and that hurt. I think it still hurts and that’s why I’d like to get even with that man. But that was I think the exciting parts and we used to have musical nights sometimes and went to the neighbours and played cards and had a bit

of social life. The cinema started in Warragul and sometimes we went and saw the films.

It was right in the town, the main part of the town and that was a big night out, Saturday night.

No, they never went, they never went.

We had to walk there and back and it was dark and there were no lights or anything where we lived. There were a few in the town but pitch dark everywhere. And no, they never went to any entertainment, no, couldn’t afford it and we didn’t go to much I think until we got in our teens and then we got

involved with the Red Cross. And then when the war started in Thirty Nine we had the Comforts Fund too and everybody sort of pulled together and worked for raising money for the war effort.

Yes, well he’d always been in the country working on farms and my mother was used to the country too and people did that. Their was a big move to Warragul because they’d had floods in East Gippsland and they’d had drought in the North and a lot of people came to Warragul because it rained and it was hilly, so

you didn’t get the floods. And there was a big move to Warragul and a lot of the people still here now came in that period, in the Twenties because it was hard to get food. You couldn’t buy food and you had to grow the food and that was the best thing to do was to have some land. And everybody had an orchard and vegetables growing and they had

to really, there was no help. There was no wealthy or anything to help anybody. You just helped each other, which was good.

Yes.

Oh I think we milked, oh we might have got up to about forty but your average, we were milking by hand and a good

milker, you were a good milker if you could milk eight. Well kids couldn’t milk eight. We were used to be expected to milk a certain number before we went to school and if you weren’t quick enough you just had to try harder and of course the older you were the more cows you had to milk so you tried not to get old.

I think I got up to about six but I was always the slow one, the little one, and got away with that but the others had to do about eight before they went but I was always got the easy cows too because some were very slow and you had to be very strong to milk a cow. I mean it’s not as easy as it looks. Your fingers had to be very strong to get the milk out of some of them.

Because some of them we bought were sold because they were tough and were cheap to buy but that’s just how things were. If things were tough you just tried harder and there was no excuse at all. Never went to a doctor if you got sick or anything, or got lacerations. Mother patched them

up and you never went to a doctor.

Oh whatever family that was on walking distance. They were mostly all on farms except across the road there were a couple of houses, oh one had a strawberry farm

and they had five children but most of them were just on little farms like we were because it was hand milking so they only had a small number of cows and further up the road were some people who had come out from Wales and they were very nice people. And they had a very nice buggy and they used to take us to Sunday school and church and that and they were very nice

and they were older than we were. There were some over the back paddock and they were just farmers like we were but it was a very good social evening and we used to take supper and share the supper and that. And mostly we played cards and talked and a few games and things like that.

Yes, yes, my father was very musical.

Only one neighbour had a piano and she could play a few tunes.

Oh well of course if my father was there they were all Scottish songs and he used to sing Harry Lauder and some of the classics. He was musical and he used to play the classics and we had a parlophone. It was like a big

old gramophone and we had most of the records that he had were classics, Dame Nellie Melba and Harry, well Harry Lauder wasn’t a classic but he was one we used to like to hear. There was another one but I’ve forgotten a lot of the names but we had that for years. We didn’t have a radio for a long, long time and then it was a battery radio and

we used to get the news and we couldn’t have it on for anything else because you had to save it for the cricket when the cricket was on. And my mother used to sit up for all hours listening to the cricket and you used to hear these descriptions of the cricket and all the sound waves used to volume of the voice and that and it was quite weird. I don’t know how she could listen to it

but she was very keen on cricket. And flying, she was very keen on flying and if there was any flights like Bert Hinkler she was very keen about and she wouldn’t go to bed until she knew he was alright and had landed in a certain place and they’d give the news over. So she was always keen on, because flying was a big thing just starting

when we moved to Gippsland. And there were a few little planes just flying about and we used to run out to see them and that and I don’t think there’s many more now than there used to be, only they’re bigger and go faster, but it’s very quite on the airways.

Oh no, they just landed on the showgrounds or on

a paddock, a flat paddock somewhere.

No, well Kingsford-Smith came one time and they used to give flights, so people would pay him and he came to the showgrounds. I think he was at the showgrounds and some used to come up and give joy rides and people used to go for flights. But I wouldn’t have been game. I wouldn’t have had the money or been game to

go up.

She did eventually, yes, loved it, absolutely loved it. I don’t know why she was so keen on it but I think because it was new. It was a new way of transport.

She went to Tasmania one time and I think that was after the war, yes. That was the only flight she had but she was satisfied with that.

Yes, he came and gave flights, yes. He used to go to all the big towns and fly.

Oh yes, it was a big thing. I didn’t go. We could see him take off, well when he had taken off and we’d see the plane going round. I’m not really sure if whether he was at the showgrounds

or whether he was out at another field but he was around the town somewhere and they’d say “Smithy” and the children used to go out and see him and it didn’t fit in with our work schedule I suppose.

Oh the same as all fathers. He was very, very strict, yes he was.

Beg your pardon?

He was always interested in sport and he played tennis and my mother played tennis too because up North it was a social activity and everybody played tennis and he was very keen on tennis. And he was

was always interested in horses and he always followed the horse and we all used to try and pick winners because we used to see him picking winners out, not winners but he’d say who was going to win and he’d listen to the races and of course they never did win. And we used to try that too. I supposed they’d win sometimes but he was

always keen on sport, not terribly keen on football. We followed the local team and my mother’s cousin was the coach of Essendon when we went to school, so we always barracked for Essendon and we still do. And some of the, a couple of lads

that we went to school with were playing for clubs in Melbourne and we always followed them. It was quite an interest really football.

Oh never. I’ve never been to a match in Melbourne, football, I’m not that keen. I’ve been to the Melbourne Cup and the Caulfield Cup and things like that, but never football.

Yes we did. We’d go to the Melbourne Show. I think that was about all when I was young, was the Melbourne Show. I don’t think we went down to shop or anything. We didn’t have any money to shop.

No, we didn’t show cows, no, no. My husband he is

an equestrian and my family were interested in horses so we followed shows for years really, the horse part, not cattle. We used to see the cattle but show cattle is more the breeding than the production. You breed for production but the show

you’re more or less, it’s quite a different feel or it was then. Show cattle weren’t always commercial cattle.

No, he was commercial. My husband was commercial too. He was a farmer and he bred cows for the quantity and quality of milk rather than the shape of the animal.

Mind you it’s a bit of both. They’ve got to be big and strong and have all the right bits to produce. I don’t know, I’ve lost, I don’t follow it now but whether they count production or just fashion, I don’t know really.

Well Jersey’s mainly because you got paid on their content, fat content

and it all went on quality of milk, so you’d breed up to get the quality and then they’d decide no, they wanted less fat, and it would take four years to change your line. You had to keep up with what was fashionable. Well when they wanted less fat and more milk you had to get into Friesians

and cross your Jerseys, which a lot did and then you had calving problems because the calves were too big and it’s all whatever the market requires when you’re producing, whether it’s vegetables or. It’s like fruit in an orchard. You have to produce what people buy and to attract people it’s got to

look good and if there’s no taste it doesn’t matter, which is a pity because you loose a lot of quality when you just produce something that looks good. So there’s a lot in it. I don’t know, I try to learn but it’s difficult to keep up with. I couldn’t tell you what

they are told to produce now or what breed they recommend. I wouldn’t know and then you have to always think when the cow’s past producing what is her potential for marketing meats because you pay a lot for a cow and you really want to get back something when

she can’t produce enough.

Well you sort of breed from them to get good producers and after, I wouldn’t know what the recommended number of calves is now but you kept them as long as you could providing they still produced

heifer calves or you’ve got an average of bulls and heifers and you had to take all those things into consideration. How strong was this animal? Because some of our Jersey’s were small framed cows and when you try and get a line of a stronger female to say she’ll, you keep them longer. And you keep

them as long as you could as long as they were able to produce, keep producing calves and as they age they get more problems health wise and that’s costly too. You couldn’t say how long some, maybe only good for two or three years and they might be eight years or something and still producing good calves.

We always had a purebred bull, yes but not my father. I’m talking about farming later. My father didn’t. He just bought cows by judgement of whether she’ll, fed up she’ll produce more. He went for bigger frame cows and some of them were other people’s cast offs.

Somebody didn’t want them because they kicked. Some of them were terrible cows and they kicked like mad so they got rid of that cow because she kicked so much. Some of them were vicious. We used to get kicked around a lot when we were children, not later. My husband bred from good stock and it was different altogether.

Oh yes, well you used to put ropes on them then, in the early days and bail their heads up and you’d put a leg rope on them and you had to lean across them to push them over and you couldn’t catch the leg some of the time. They’d just knock you out of the bail and send you flying.

Oh yes, lots of times. It didn’t matter, just as long as you didn’t spill the milk. You’d just

sing out “Hang onto the bucket”. You got used to it.

Well it’s not done like that. It’s still not easy no matter how it’s done because it’s got to be done twice a day every day.

Oh yes, sometimes,

yes.

Oh well I think it was a great social place for men. We only went as children but you soon found out it was not a place for children. It was a place for men. I think the sense of humour, it’s just fantastic at the sales and that and I think that’s

where they got all their therapy from with their problems and that’s where they learnt from each other. It was a tradition and it was more or less men only in those days too. I don’t know what it’s like now, if they have a mixture now but I wouldn’t remember when I was at the sale yards last. I still know where they are and I absolutely hate hearing the cows

bellow. They have to shut them up at night and starve them so they can get a correct weight before they’re sold and they, I don’t know if it’s everywhere but they bring them in on a Wednesday and market day is Thursday and I can hear them bellowing when I go out the front. And I think “Oh no, not that again” and I come back inside. I just

hate the thought of them bellowing for their calves, which were probably left on the farm or something. I’m glad to be away from that. When you’re amongst it you don’t notice it but you never get away from those sounds. It’s like living in paradise in a place like this because you go to bed at night, you might here cars and people but.

It was very worrying at night. You didn’t know what was happening to your stock and you sort of listened to every sound

and you tuned in all the time, day and night and if something’s not singing out for help and some animals caught in a fence or being attacked by dogs and you couldn’t leave your farm for long because you had to keep watch for what you were responsible for. It’s a big responsibility.

Not so much as a child, you were just told what to do but you learn what to do so when you’re confronted with it when you’re older you just carry on from what you’ve experienced before and you know how important it is to take care of your stock. It’s your living and also your care.

You care about your animals.

Oh yes, all the time. Nearly every day there is, you’re confronted with a problem. I don’t think a day ever went past that

something wasn’t sick or something had to be treated and in the early days you only had, vets were very expensive and you treated them yourself. You had to diagnose the systems and use simple methods, the same as you did your children, you just

used phenyls and disinfectants and you used kerosene for sore throats and head lice. You used very simple things and you bandaged things up and pushed the skin together, instead of getting stitches and you just did everything possibly that you didn’t have to get

attention for, because of the cost. But later on, I’m not sure which period you want to go to, but later on you there were more modern techniques for some of the illnesses which were quicker and that made it a bit easier. You knew you could get a vet and they got telephones and things that you could contact them and it was a bit easier but

there was always some trauma with your animals. They come before people I suppose. If you hurt your leg or something you still had to be up on deck and it didn’t really matter and a lot of things will cure themselves simply by forgetting about them.

Oh mainly autumn and spring. Yes, you tried to regulate it so that you got them, it depended on the price of the milk you see. If there was an incentive for milk in the winter well you went in for autumn calving more but you had trouble both seasons, autumn and spring. Autumn you’d be short of feed probably and the cows would be poor and

you had calving problems and in spring you had too much and you had, they’d get milk fever and an imbalance of nutrients and things, so you had problems no matter what, when you had them. But I think now they can with artificial insemination they can plan their calving according to the area they’re

in when the production, when the feed and that is suitable for high production and that’s all very commercial now. But just has worrying now they’ve got to have bigger hoofs and you’ve got more complaints and sore feet when you’ve got long lanes and that problems grows. So you get over one problem and you

can with modern methods get another one. I couldn’t do it now. You couldn’t talk me into doing it now.

Not because I love all animals involved but I would rather just shut the door when I can hear them bellowing.

Yes, well in this area you’ve got to have metal or sand or something on your, you have them in concrete yards because of hygiene and standing a long time and you get different problems. We always had sore feet, foot rot, from the mud and stones and things in their feet and we were always treating them for foot rot.

They’d get infected feet and they’re not much good when they’re lame because they loose condition and they loose production, so it was a big problem and it was time consuming too.

Oh well that was a smaller property and it wasn’t so difficult. Well yes,

we had cows with milk fever and we used to help him. We used to do a very antiquated method that we used to pump the teats up with a bicycle pump and put air in the teats and tie them up with a bit of string but then we learnt later that you didn’t need the string because there was a valve on the teat that didn’t let the air out anyway and then we used to have to prop them

up with things. You had to sit them up and then when they were ready to get up it took about four people to hold them up, to keep them on their feet. Once you get them up you hope that wears off but that’s going back to my father’s days but I’m talking about farming in two periods after the war too. After the war we had learnt that we

were able to inject what they needed and if you got them soon enough you tried to stop them from going down, so if you bailed them up to give them an injection they could topple over in your shed and you couldn’t get them out before you got the others milking and oh it was terrible.

I don’t particularly want to go through it all again.

Oh plenty, yes, they were marvellous, they were marvellous and the women and the men could never have done what they did without the support of their women. And the women were very interested and

had taken over the running of the business side of it and that I believe it now. I always follow the country sessions on the radios and marvellous women on there. That’s the way I should have gone I think in my younger days. I would have been interested in the, but it wasn’t a women’s world when I was. I was told to just do as I was told and

that’s something I’ve always really resented. And that’s just the difference between women now and I don’t think I really accepted being told what to do.

Oh yes, and

she did the book too. She did the books when we did the milk round and she did all the books, not that they were very big books. I think I could have added them up myself in those days, a penny halfpenny here and tuppence somewhere else. They weren’t very big numbers.

Oh yes, oh my father knew

Bernice’s family. They were always good customers, so I’ve known Bernice’s family for as long as I could remember and then we went to school together and then we retired next door to each other, but she’s more social than I am, I think. She enjoys a social life and we’ve got some good memories and there are other’s in the town too.

You can spend hours talking to some of these old timers. They’ve got some wonderful stories and very good memories, some of them. I go down to shop sometimes and I think “The cat will be alright, I’ll be back in half an hour” and I might come back three hours later and the cat’s still alright so.

Yes.

Well I was home on the farm and I was still working and my mother said to, my brother and sister were too, and my mother said I had to go to work. Well we all wanted to go to work but couldn’t be done without but I wasn’t such a good worker, so they were quite happy that I got a job. And my father

approached some people. Things were still very bad. Work was scarce and they said to him “oh you live on a farm. You can feed your children and give them work” and they wouldn’t accept country people. And that attitude happened again when my children grew up in the Sixties, it must have been the Seventies. Work was scarce

in the country but they would say “Oh but his son’s a farmer and he can walk on the farm” and didn’t really want them in trades and things because town people had nowhere to send them. And it was hard to get a job and I couldn’t get a job if I, well my father couldn’t ask for a job for me

because he was on a farm and he could look after his own kids and give them jobs. And we used to have town people ringing us and saying “my son’s got nothing to do. Could you give him work on the farm?” And that happened in later years too. In the Seventies and that they’d say “My son has got nothing to do in the

town. Could he get a job on the farm? There’s nothing to milking cows is there? You just put the cups on by this time?” I said “There’s more to it than that. You’ve got to know whether the milk is alright to put the machines on.” You had to know when to take them off, you had to know whether the cow was sick. You couldn’t just have somebody coming out just to put the cups on,

but they expected you to give their child a job but not the town give your.

I think I might have been the only one that noticed it or it happened too, or I was sensitive about it. I have made some enquiries about that and I think that was the answer that I got, that I imagined it but

I had experienced it.

No, I didn’t. I had to stop on the farm and that’s when I started doing things. I used to help at the church functions, do voluntary work around and then we started, before the war, working for the Red Cross and that’s what we did.

Well that was all through the Depression. They say the Depression, they talk about a Thirties Depression, don’t they? Well the Depression as far as the farmers went started in the Twenties and I had a friend who died, she was ninety six

and she told me that the hardest and most difficult time in her years was in the early Twenties and she said it was a very hard time. I think the men had come back from the First World War and some of them were bitter about their treatment when they came back and that was a very difficult time. Well I think

that was from the Twenties until just before war broke out. It was nearly all depression, all the ones that grew up in those years were more or less affected by the Depression. It was when the war started, well before the war started we’ve got no money to have a war and that got

things moving to work towards preparing for the war, not that we were very prepared but things picked up. There were more jobs and the war started but we were working before the war started training with St John’s to qualify to work in a military hospital if we were needed.

Then war broke out so, but it was very low key. It broke out in Thirty Nine but very little happened but we weren’t prepared really but they did have a Militia and they had riflemen and they had Light Horse and there was some movement. And Warragul had a drill hall, the first

one built in Victoria. It might have been in Australia. I’ve forgotten now and there was some military activity. They had camps and things and most of those Militia fellows were in the first lot of soldiers to go overseas and then when they went overseas of course we got very busy raising money and

that’s when things changed. And there were plenty of jobs because the men went away.

Yes, they showed pictures and I suppose we were going to the

cinemas then and they would show bits and pieces of newsreels and you’d see the Germans marching up and down and there was some big fuss about that runner. I’ve forgotten his name, he was black, American black and he got a poor reception or something. You’d remember his name, I should remember.

Owens was it? Yes, I thought it was Owens but I didn’t like to say that. I remember sort of seeing him on the newsreel or something and running in that race and the reaction from the Germans. That was a frightening time and it was from Thirty Six onwards and there was some sort of suspicion.

The older people I think were very worried that there would be a war.

Yes. I did say they talked about the war quite a bit and they were very loyal sort of people to the Empire and most of that generation were. My Mother used to talk about

home “Auntie So and So was going home”, going back to England, so they were very worried about England.

No, he wasn’t. He was up on a station. I think he was share farming then I think and he was share farming when he got married and he’d been share farming before, but he

was away out in the country and I don’t know that they knew, that they would know of people going off to the war I suppose but he didn’t go to the war.

Yes.

Well there was a lady in Warragul that had been in the First War and she thought it was time we did some training in case there was a war and she got in country areas groups of girls and

leaders, trained nurses, ex-nurses to train us for first aid and home nursing and to be able to work in military hospitals so we were finished our training, well I was and my sister and a few others, finished by Thirty Nine.

We were trained in Warragul. We came I think it was once a week to classes and

then we had to go to the Warragul Hospital and work so many hours a night to get our hours up. And then we had to go to, I went to the Royal Melbourne and did a couple of weeks. I just forget how long it was. We stayed in Melbourne and we worked a shift every day at the Royal Melbourne and it was terrific. It was a wonderful experience and I enjoyed

that and living in the city was fun. So that started us off so we had our qualifications but when they called, when the soldiers went away to the Middle East well they had to have hospitals to accommodate them so they built the new one at Heidelberg, for soldiers, and they used the old military one

at Caulfield as a Repatriation. So they in Thirty Nine they started calling some of the VADs [Voluntary Aid Detachments] up to work at Caulfield and Heidelberg. And that was the way it started. They only took a few. I think they only took fifty in 1941 and to go overseas you had to

be twenty four or over, so there was a chance that you could go over as they established hospitals in the Middle East and some of them went over. And they sent two hundred in a draft to go, as VADs, with the Sisters but that’s what was going on and they were still training more and more and equipping them to go overseas and when

Japan entered the war well they had to sort of bring all those back again eventually and increase their numbers. They kept increasing them. I think they had six hundred equipped ready to sail to the Middle East when Pearl Harbor happened

and they were all stopped but nobody would tell you why they were stopped or what their intentions were because they had to work out “What happens now?” Because we had all our divisions in the Middle East and we were unprepared really so they had to get reorganised but that’s what happened. So it

was when Japan bombed Darwin in Forty Three, I think?

Two, Forty Two that we decided that we’d do full time duty. That was my sister and I, so we enrolled and we went to Caulfield and that was the start of my

army life really.

Yes, Major Appleford, she lived at Lang-Lang and she was Alice, can’t think of her first name and she married Doctor Appleford. She was

the one that got all these different centres to set up St John’s and train these girls and she’d get a retired nurse, an army nurse we had from the First World War, who was in charge of our detachment and she had a local Sister from the Royal Melbourne

who was not working, and she assisted her. And actually this land this settlement was built on was where she used to live, that Sister, so I’m pleased about that. And they ran these classes I think for a number of years, but of course we went away early in the piece so I suppose it continued on because they all went through these two ladies in Warragul and I think

they went to different areas too and ran classes out to Noojee and that way and they ran classes and we got a lot of country girls.

I think, I don’t know how we got to know about it. Whether it was a notice in the paper, or somebody asked us. I’m not sure how they advertised in those days but I think it

was a small area and one would tell the other “Oh you should come.” It was quite good fun, bandaging each other up and it was a good social night, which paid off because we were all prepared really.

Well she had to follow St John’s Ambulance book.

We had a book and it had all the chapters which you had to learn, you started with how to bandage and how to care for patients and then when we went to the hospital she would walk around and see that we were washing people the right way and that we were doing. And Matron she would go and see that we had the corners of the bed folded properly and that we didn’t leave the fellow

exposed when we were washing his feet and she walked around with her hands folded and watched that you did everything perfectly. And everything was clean that you were supposed to have cleaned and checked that the temperature reading was right and it was a thorough training. It was a big help right from the start and when

we really started they weren’t as quite, they didn’t turn out quite that way but we coped.

Yes it is. It’s a big building anyway.

Well when we started we were in a place that was intended for the nurses to sleep and

they were building a new hospital, the front of the one that’s there now. That wasn’t finished so we were in a temporary hospital, a place where the nurses may have just slept. Now that place is now a consulting rooms and the nurses were built a brick place to sleep. Well now they

all have cottages or they live out now. So after the war the big hospital was running after I came back from the war but it wasn’t at the start of the war.

Oh no, no. The old one wasn’t big enough really and you’ve got to move with the times and the old one I don’t think had

private rooms when they built it and they keep changing it according to the needs of people at the time. It was all mainly public wards. It was in the very old hospital and they were big wards mainly.

Oh I can’t remember early

in the piece whether they had maternity. They had three private ones in the town. I’m not sure that they had maternity up there at that stage. They did later. When the hospital was renewed they had a maternity ward.

Ah, hospital.

Not many home births in my day that I knew of, unless they were sudden or something, but no, they were all nearly because the doctors were limited with their transport for areas out of the town.

No, I was born in Bendigo, up there, in one of those private nursing hospitals, where most mothers went to these. Sisters used to run them, private maternity hospitals where most babies were born in my day.

Well you’d usually start with the elderly men but, medical ward, but in the medical ward you often got the young fellows too, that you went to school with, which used to be quite embarrassing and I used to hate that. And the medical wards mainly you went to because

in the surgical wards it was a bit more, you needed a bit more training and it was more they had broken legs tied up in these complicated frames and ropes hanging everywhere and it was quite frightening, so we mainly had the old fellows that were coughing and spitting. But we did have the young ones that had problems, football injuries and things.

Oh, in the early days I wouldn’t remember really their complaints. I don’t think I probably remember any. We wouldn’t be near the badly injured anyway, as students. I don’t remember what they were. I think they were mostly neglected perhaps, old fellows that they

used to bring in because nobody would care for them and pneumonias and some of them were quite sick and they loved to have somebody young about them and it was quite good. I enjoyed it.

Well we got our certificates from St John at the end of Thirty Nine and we had completed that

training in Thirty Nine, so we were ready to move on.

Yes, and we worked, it was fairly low key here as far as preparing for war so we supported the ones that had already gone to the Middle East

but when Pearl Harbor happened it was a whole new outlook. It was, people rallied around and put everything into it. Everybody was just so horrified that it was so close and that Australia was bombed. And we were losing, and with the news they only ever told you the good news and they never really told you what was really happening,

so we only ever heard of victories, victories. And until eventually it was, being beaten was put in the light of victory. It was not terribly good news and you got that way that you didn’t believe it anyway and it was all bad news and they never tell you the bad news in wartime because you might get depressed, but it’s exactly

the opposite. When the news is bad you really want to fight and that’s what happened when Darwin was bombed. We all wanted to protect our territory. It wasn’t something far away in another country and the whole attitude changed.

Well we were raising funds to send

them parcels. We were knitting and you took your knitting everywhere you went. And you worked and you cooked and you had nights where you’d cook all night, making something for a stall the next day. We worked very hard and the men ran spinning wheels in the town on the street too. Firms made donations of goods and they had these lucky wheels

and made thousands of pounds to buy comforts for the soldiers and we used to pack these big cartons of balaclavas and socks and cigarettes and pack them to have them sent off to the soldiers.

Oh the Red Cross,

I think you could get wool from the Red Cross if you couldn’t afford to buy it but most people, by this time, could afford to buy wool. And we knitted everything, all the time.

We used to knit in the pictures in the dark and I was interested to hear that a lady took her knitting to

Parliament recently and they stopped her because they were being distracted. I’m not sure what they were being distracted from, but she wasn’t allowed to knit so I’d be no good in Parliament, because if I’m not knitting when I’m sitting still I go to sleep. That’s probably why she was knitting. She was probably the only one awake.

That’s how important knitting was. I’m getting a cramp.

Well we were very busy. There was nothing really special. We were very concerned about the boys, the local lads that had gone and

there used to be lists in the paper if there were casualties and that. It was a worrying time for a lot of people, for everyone because one person was a big loss in the community. We were a very close community, you knew everybody and it was a very real thing in the district,

but overall like all these things, people get on with their lives and the war news was always good. We were winning everything, we felt we were and we were holding our own in the Middle East and it’s all quietened down and you just got used to it

and people got on with their own worries and it wasn’t the most important thing but you didn’t really know what preparation or. We didn’t know where it was heading. When the war started they said well it wouldn’t be as long as the First World War because we had all these bombs

and we had the air force and we were so good, so you weren’t terribly worried at that stage.

I would have known of all of them, I would say because they used to go to the dances. We had dances for the Comforts Fund in the drill hall and we had farewells at the hall

when people went. The church was involved, everybody was behind them so we did know and we followed and we knew where they were going, what division they were in and where that division was.

He was in the 52nd Battalion, eventually.

Yes, he did join up. It was the Gippsland Battalion but he didn’t go away overseas but things changed then, later on and then we realised that we weren’t prepared for war in Australia and the news wasn’t good.

Well then things livened up and we had to make munitions. We had a defence force and the local rifle people they trained and they didn’t have any ammunition. We didn’t have much at all. The only ammunition was

what the farmers had and every farmer I think had a gun and ammunition and farmers were good shots, so they were important for the defence force but they couldn’t go away because they needed farmers to feed the troops, so they were in reserved occupations, and they were the home defence. They would have fought well.

Oh well they trained and then they went to Puckapunyal and they were mainly stationed up there for there training and then they went North and they went overseas. They went to Timor and those places, Northern Darwin, that’s where they

ended up but the news wasn’t good at the end of Forty Two, was it? I get my years mixed up.

Forty One was Pearl Harbor and then Darwin was bombed in February and I forget the date but the time was a quarter past ten

when we heard the news, because I was in the street in Warragul and went past Valentine’s Radio Shop and it was announced that the Japanese had bombed Darwin. Well that changed everything and that was when my sister and I said “We’ll join up” and we did.

Yes, that was Voluntary Aid Detachment and we worked for anything, the Red Cross and the Comforts Fund, all those, just voluntary with our farm work. We fitted it in.

Oh no, it was mainly to work in military hospitals when the soldiers were bought back because we had hospital ships and we had a hospital in Ceylon, so the idea was that the injured soldiers were shipped back to Ceylon where there was a hospital and VADs.

And when they were strong enough, they were to be repatriated to Heidelberg and we were working, Caulfield and Heidelberg were the places, and I think the idea was they went straight to Heidelberg and were assessed and treated and then they were to come to the Repat [Repatriation hospital] at Caulfield to be cared for until they could go home.

So the VADs were at Heidelberg and Caulfield and we had all these detachments spread over Australia ready to go overseas. Well we had to recall the hospitals in the Middle East and Ceylon, of course, got bombed and they were taking refugees from Malaya and Burma

in Ceylon. Well they had to all come back and what they did was take troops over on the Wanganella mainly and the Oranje and then they bought back patients, so they were crowded those, the last trip anyway. They had injured soldiers, they had the hospitals that they bought back and they

were bought back to Australia and of course the whole strategies had to be changed and they had six hundred VADs equipped to go overseas that was all cancelled and then they had to sort them out and then they had to work out where the front would be, to stop the Japanese. And we

sat waiting, almost given up and we’d been twelve months at Caulfield and training in war and marching and gas warfare and doing all this training and working very hard, doing domestic work, which we weren’t trained for, of course.(TAPE STOPS)

We were still VADs but that was the time to change because they needed more women to do the office work and to do lots of things that didn’t need that nursing training really, so that’s about the period that they

decided to change it and they changed it from, because we weren’t enlisted, we were loaned to the army and so they set about changing it to the Medical Corps, Women’s Medical Corps. Prior to that change VADs were regarded as officers. We had officer’s status

mainly because of facilities. If we had social things, particularly in the Middle East, they were treated as officers and cared for but we had to revert to ranks, different titles. We were privates and we got less than a private as a soldier, less pay,

which was about five shillings a day soldiers were getting and we’d be getting four. And so they wanted drivers and everything so they decided to change us to, they were taking recruits for AWAS [Australian Women’s Army Service] who were drivers and doing cooks and that sort of thing. So they called us the medical part of

AWAS, I suppose and we got new numbers and we had a D number before, which was taken from the roll of the males and then when they changed it we got new numbers and we were VF, not just V,

the initials for the states. So we were Victorians and we were female so you had an F. And if you were AIF [Australian Imperial Forces] you had X so we had to get these new numbers. And they also bought in new rules. For instance you weren’t an officer unless you had rank as an officer, so we were privates but at this stage we had

been, we were going North. We had to change, we were supposed to change to khaki and not blue, had to change all our uniforms but we went and we had no time and they never had the uniforms made or they had to organise it all so we chuffed off in our old blue uniforms and

forgot all about the paperwork. After six months I think the orders came that no female under twenty one was to go to an operational area, that anybody there had to be sent back. Well there were two of us in our unit and we were told we had to go home and

I said I wasn’t going home, so the officer was very good and she appealed and asked if I could stop. And the reason she gave was that I was with my sister and there was no need for me to go back and the other girl went home. So all the other girls got their new army numbers and their

enlistment forms were changed to the new date and the new numbers on but I was under twenty one and I don’t remember this happening at the time but I looked up the records and I didn’t really enlist in the AIF until the second of August and my birthday was on the 31st of July, so when I was twenty one

to keep things right in the office I didn’t enlist until mid year when the others all enlisted six months before. But I didn’t have a clue, they just changed the forms so I was the only one really in an operational area under twenty one at that time. So that’s the only claim to fame

that I have and I didn’t know anything about it.

She was quite nice and I wasn’t any worry to them and wanted me to stay. I mean I was causing no trouble and working satisfactorily and she didn’t want to loose me anyway and so on the 2nd August I was AIF, with a new number that I had to learn. Never needed

up there and had my tonsils out on the same day because to get your tonsils out you had to have your parents permission, under twenty one, so I had my tonsils out and never told my parents, not that they could have come up and seen me anyway. But it was supposed to have been done before but they said “No, we’ll wait until you’re twenty one” and that’s how I spent my twenty first birthday actually.

That was on the Saturday and why it was the second and not the first that I joined the AIF was because it was a weekend and I was twenty one on the Saturday and enlisted on the 2nd of August. It’s interesting to me now but I couldn’t have cared less and we eventually of course, when we came South we had to get with it and be army and wear

khaki and be privates or corporals or whatever we were.

I remember my VFX but not the first one. I remember that but not the first one.

It was the later one. Well the later one went on us when we were in the Territory. The danger time was from

say Thirty Nine if you were in the Darwin area to the 29th of October and I get my years mixed up here, Forty Three and that’s the time the raids stopped, so you were no longer, to be qualified as an ex-service person you had to be there in that six months, which according to their records I was only there three months but I was actually six months but

that’s just the difference.

Yes twelve months.

I wasn’t here, was I?

In February I wasn’t here then. February was when Darwin was attacked and when we enrolled and went straight to Caulfield but we used to come up on the train, the steam train, which had to stop and take on water and it used to take hours. On these coal trains it used to take hours and we came up and yes, now what happened

was mainly the councils took on security and enforced the blackouts. I think they were told what to do and there were blackouts and petrol rationing and clothes rationing, which never bothered us much. We made our own. And it was serious business. People realised that they had to have trenches. In Melbourne they

dug trenches. I don’t know if they did up here or not but probably too wet. Would have got drowned in some years and you got instructions from the council where you were to assemble if there was an attack. We all had to congregate in the showgrounds and proceed to Noojee, out in the bush, which would have been an interesting exercise.

But that’s what they went through and they were rationed on some food but of course we were in the army by this stage so clothes rationing didn’t bother us and food didn’t bother us and we weren’t hungry at that stage.

We were all medically fit to go anywhere that we were required and we were all trained in all sorts of warfare.

That’s what we wanted to do. I didn’t have a hope because you had to be twenty four so I had to be contented with home service and I loved ships and

I always was interested in ships. I knew all the ships names and I suppose it was because I wasn’t interested in a lot of other things. I was very keen on travel and I was so cross that I was so young because I would have liked to have gone overseas and but I couldn’t and you didn’t worry about things that were impossible anyway,

so I was content to do the domestic work at Caulfield. I was quite happy there and I loved the old soldiers. I think because I was young they put me mainly with the old fellows or whether the other girls preferred the young ones, but it didn’t worry me. And I loved talking to them but you could never be caught talking to them. I mean you weren’t there to talk. You

had to work but if you got caught talking to them you had to work longer, so you had to be very discreet about your conversations with them but they were terrific. I loved them. I really loved them. I loved, when they told me I had to work in this ward the girls “Oh you’re going there, oh.” I thought I’d never ever be able to cope

with it and the stories they told me about these old men and I didn’t want to go there but the sergeant was away on leave and I couldn’t go and cry on her shoulder and say “Look I don’t think I could cope with that ward, please don’t send me there.” I had to go. It was a good lesson. I just adored those fellows. I just wish that I could have

done more for them and talked to them more but as I say that was taboo.

These were mostly, we did have the odd young one that you could talk to because they’d come out in the kitchen and talk to you. They’d still get pushed out if they were caught but you couldn’t control the young ones like they could the old ones. The

old ones couldn’t get that far anyway. They were bedridden most of the poor devils but it was a great lesson and I absolutely loved it and the work didn’t worry me. We worked very hard and very well disciplined but it was good training and I appreciated it. But I was still keen to go somewhere and twelve months seemed a long time and we didn’t

know what was going on and it was, the older one’s got discontented more than I did. They were anxious to go and some of them had been on the draft and got taken off and it was a big disappointment. It’s a big build up and the excitement of not knowing where you were going is a real kick really. And then one day we were just told to pack.

See it was all secret so you didn’t get told where you were going and why you had to be in such a hurry and about fifteen of us, I think, left and of course we were running around and I was asking these old fellows “Where would we be going?” And they didn’t have a clue either but they had their ideas and they’d be studying the movements of the troops and that I

suppose but it was all so exciting. You didn’t care where you were going and we got all this tropical equipment and it was all so secretive and you got final leave and you got final leave again and you got final leave again. It was great. You were up and down in the train all the time and saying goodbye to everybody until you got so, you felt like

you were a liar. You’d say “I’m on final leave” and “Where are you going?” You couldn’t tell them and I think they thought there was something funny going on and then you finally disappear and we caught the train. We got equipment, all the tropical gear but still were in our navy blue suits and hats and I think the gloves

wore out. We had kid gloves when we were first issued until we got rid of them early in the piece. We went off to Adelaide. We didn’t know where we were going but we went to Adelaide and then we went to Alice Springs by train. Well we were going North

anyway in our winter clothes and we eventually went to Katherine, by convoy we went to Katherine Hospital. And we put our suits in a, most of us had taken calico bags that you could hang up in the tent. We didn’t know we were going to tents but we had equipment that looked like we were going to camp and we ended up in these tents and hung the navy blue uniforms

up and we sort of never saw them again until we were going home and they’d gone mouldy. We didn’t wear them home I notice in photos. I’ve forgotten what, we must have packed them and sent them down and they came down in luggage.

I beg your pardon?

Yes,

well we were given, before we went down to enrol that day we had a list of what we were to take. We had to go to Melbourne and be measured for our uniforms and we got about forty pounds allowance at the time to buy an overcoat, a hat, a tailored suit, well made,

that didn’t fit very long because we put on weight and I think it was about six uniforms for working in, veils and socks and shoes and things. And we had to have all that done and report to VAD headquarters in Lonsdale Street and we signed up an attestment form. It wasn’t an enlistment form, so we were enrolled as a VAD and

from there we went to Royal Park I think and had a medical test and had x-rays and signed more forms. And an interesting point was they filled in my enrolment form and they put my birth date as being born in 1942, which was the year of enlistment so I’ve

been listed as four years old, so as I say the records are not always right, but somebody had crossed it out with a big query and got “Four years old?” At least they read it and after the x-rays and everything was clear and you were medically fit you got your postings and I think four of us went to Caulfield and there may have

been two or three others went to Heidelberg. They were the only two places at that time. It was where they were sort of staging places where they’d got their numbers from when they wanted a unit formed and we were worked there under these Sisters from the First World War. And they were in charge and they were very strict and it

was a very military place at Caulfield. I don’t know what it was like at Heidelberg but we had all old army Sisters and we had a mixture of old army men and the young fellows repatriated from Heidelberg amongst them which livened the place up quite a bit. I think the old army nurses thought they were a bit of a handful but they were

good fun and we were, I don’t know if we were allowed to take them out for a film or something or whether it was underhanded. I don’t know. It might have been a bit of each. I think they could apply for leave but it was against the rules to be friendly with any patients. That’s one thing you learn in training, it’s

purely professional and no Christian names and that type of thing and no talking to the doctors who were up on pedestals and that sort of thing. It was strictly military run and well run and I think the patients got good nursing care but they didn’t have much fun.

On no, only army patients, different to in a forward area where you get children and maternity cases. When you go to an area like Katherine or any of those places or I suppose in any country you cater for the civilians as well.

At Caulfield?

Well at Caulfield they were typical army wards, big long wards, probably about, usually about fifteen on each sides. I don’t think we had any special private rooms for dying patients

that you normally get. I can’t remember. I don’t think many died when I was there. I think you just put screens around them if they were dying. It was the only privacy and in a way that was good because they were not left. I found later in nursing that it wasn’t always, it’s nice to die privately I suppose

but it’s nice to know someone’s about too. I think it’s something that there should be more research into. I’m not sure what happens these days. I have learnt a lot by watching animals and animals know when they’re going to die and they disappear on their own, no matter how

faithful they are they’ll go away and hide away under a bush. They want to be on their own but we were not supposed to be like animals so maybe we like company but I’d like to die on my own. That’s what I think now but I think when I’m dying I might want to have something to say at the last minute. You don’t know because you can’t come back and say

“I wish I wasn’t looking at that face when I died” or “I didn’t want to hear that again”. I think we all should think about that.

It’s something you’re not going to tell anyway. If I decide now “Oh well I think I’ll do such and such”, you’ve got no say in it. I mean a stretcher comes in and if they think you’re dead they take you one way, this way and if they think you’re not, they’ll take you that way. You’ve got no say

anyway and if you can’t fill in the form you won’t go anyway, will you? Anyway, where were we?

Oh that was, I can fill the tape up on that. We lived at Tate’s home. He’d offered his beautiful home in Kooyong

Road to live in for the duration of the war and it was a beautiful home. It was a wonderful home and that was up the road and we could catch a bus either way but that didn’t work too well, not for the country people. We had our own methods of travelling. It had all the comforts and the main thing was the hot water. We’d rush home from

work and the quicker you got home, that’s why we didn’t wait for the bus and you could use all the hot water and too bad for the one’s following. It had French door in the bedrooms and we had about five to a room and it was absolutely luxury. Beautifully furnished and I worshipped that fellow Tate

that did that for the nurses and the girls if you went out you had to have a pass and when you came in you had to report in to the girl on duty. As I say they used to report in the front door and sneak out the French windows to go out again and they’d say “Don’t shut the windows” because they’d be in at night. So that’s where

we lived and it was at the end of Kooyong Road, Balaclava end and then the hospital was down sort of Alice, over Glenilla Road, so you could walk but it was a bit dangerous in the blackout and that going home. See we used to work broken shifts too and we always got broken shifts and you’d work until after lunch and

things quietened down in the hospital because they had visiting hours and you either worked through and cleaned windows and did other jobs while visitors were about and then you came back for the teatime and worked until after supper and you had to walk back and I don’t think the buses ran late. But you had to get back but

no-one was murdered so nothing was done about that.

Yes that was, yes, that was. It was not a good time really. I think the blackout probably aided the murders.

Well there were about five. We had a big room on the ground floor and there were five in it. Some of the rooms were smaller upstairs and there’d be three perhaps to a room and I think the sergeant in charge of us, well she wasn’t a sergeant then but she was, Commandant I suppose. She was the lady in charge of us and I think she might have

had a room to herself. I have got a photo of them and there’d be about twenty girls, perhaps. I couldn’t be real sure on that but you didn’t see a lot of them because you were working broken shifts and you had one day off a week so you didn’t have a house full of twenty girls all the time because some were working or some were on days off. But it was,

and there was a kitchen there and you could make supper and well it was great really. It was very comfortable and we went from that to a tent, which was better still, loved it.

No guards, we had a person on orderly duty who checked everybody

in and you were supposed to be in at a certain time and we never had any trouble. Well I don’t remember any trouble. We came home one night and it was pouring rain and we came home from a late shift or being out, I’m not sure because there were two or three of us and we were often alone coming home and it had a big front door and a

porch, which was the door was always unlocked. I don’t think we ever locked it really, can’t remember now. I was orderly at times and I don’t remember locking the door, it was always open, unlocked, shut and we pushed the door open and there was a soldier lying on the porch. Oh that cause a bit of a panic. We had to step over him and go inside and said “There’s a fellow out there in the porch” and

I think he had a bit much to drink. Either that or he’d passed out but we revived him and got a bit of sense out of him and he said he thought it was a church and he sheltering in it, which it did look a bit like a church too and he was just sheltering and I forget what happened.

Oh they were domestic. We washed dishes and we polished the floors and we had to shift the beds. We never

ever took a temperature. No nursing, what so ever. The army nurses treated us as wards maids. We gave out the meals but we never fed the fellows. Feeding the fellows is when you get to know them, you’ve got time and they’re very slow eaters if they like you and you can spend hours feeding them but we didn’t do that so we didn’t really get very close to the patients.

We peeled vegetables for the cook and we had fights with the wards maids. There were some wards maids there who didn’t like us at all and we did washed walls in the afternoon and we cleaned windows. We had male orderlies who looked after the toilets and the shower rooms. We were

never, that was their domain and they protected that area. They did all the panning and washing of the patients too and it was just purely domestic work. I think some had turns in the mess, setting the tables and doing the mess work but I never

worked in the mess there. Meals were shocking and we weren’t fussy but terrible cook. I think she couldn’t get a job anywhere else.

Corn beef and cabbage I suppose. Cabbage was the main vegetable. Must have been the cheapest and plenty of potatoes and it was adequate but it wasn’t

very imaginative. You had the same thing. You knew Monday’s you’d have such and such. You had fish on Friday and you’d have corn beef I think was Monday’s. You knew exactly what you were going to get.

Yes, I would think so, I would think so. Not feeding the patients

I don’t remember much about that.

Yes and we did. There was a place and I think it was called Russell Collins, which evidently wasn’t too expensive and we used to go in there and have a night out and we had everything you could get, beautiful salads. That was really special. We also went into the city and there were also

little clubs and things that the churches ran and you could go there and have coffees and if you went to a film and we had quite a good social life up until ten o’clock and then you had to be home and about once a week you could have a late pass and go to a dance. And we went to dances at the town halls. They’d run them for service people and they were good. And we used to go

to Luna Park and the Trockadero for skating and it was good, it was good really for us, from the country who had never been to those places. And they would sometimes get tickets for a musical or something and they were wonderful. We had some really good nights.

Oh yes, of course.

Oh well there was somebody Wallace who was a comedian because he had the same name as me and I remember him and seeing him and he used to do funny things on the stage. He might have been a relation although I don’t think I’d have been much good on the stage. And of course we met Tivoli used to travel around the camps and we did

meet a lot of those girls who were in the shows later. But there were some names but they’ve just slipped my memory now but they were well known during the war and they were great entertainment. It was good fun really, the Tiv.

Oh we all took it in turns.

Well this lady in charge of us made sure that things were done. I mean you’d have a notice up in the kitchen and you’d have to wash all your dishes and all that sort of thing and you did it because you weren’t untidy and in the army you do as you’re told. And you didn’t have a lot of luggage

to be draping your goods around the place anyway. You had your space and you kept to it and your beds had to be made like a hospital bed and they did rounds to see and I suppose you lost brownie points if you didn’t measure up. I think probably you got, well later on I was in charge at a place too and you had to send in reports and I think you would if somebody

was overstepping the mark, I can’t remember anybody doing it, but I think perhaps if people were sneaking out and got caught it would go down and the report had to be done every month or something so you would loose brownie points and wouldn’t be sent away. And that was the whole point. You were dying to get away so you didn’t play up.

You didn’t, yes, you didn’t get caught at what you were doing. If you did get caught you’d have leave cancelled and probably warned I’d say but I don’t think I was ever caught. I wasn’t game to do much.

What was I caught doing? I remember going off the ward about three minutes early and the Sister saw me and I had

to work two hours later and then miss the bus later. They were terribly strict and they really were. Yes, I did nick off early and the work was finished but she wasn’t there when I started because we had so much work to do and we didn’t wait for the bus. Some of us had bikes and I took my bike down from Warragul and I used to cycle to work and we used to start an hour earlier. There was no restriction on when you started, only when

you knocked off but you never got any credit for that. But if you went earlier you could set up getting ready for breakfast leisurely. Do it properly instead of the last minute rush or the bus being a bit late. I don’t know what they would have done if you’d said the bus was late and that was no excuse.

If there was no bus you walked home in the dark.

In the blackout, yes, yes. Sometimes if there were other girls finishing at the same time you’d walk home together or something like that but often on your own and another thing, when you were on the late shift you had to count all the silver. You had to line up all the knives, forks and spoons and you couldn’t go off duty until that last spoon was

found and you’d miss the bus anyway. I’ve got an idea there was a bus about the time we finished but if you were looking for that spoon, you had to go around and ask these poor, old helpless fellows if they had a spoon in their locker or they’d perhaps kept a knife to cut up fruit, if they could use a knife. It was terrible and you worked terribly hard. It was hard work shifting the beds and polishing the floors and you did everything on the run

almost, without running because nurses don’t run. You just had to walk so quick. That was an art you had to learn to walk quickly without making it a run.

Well

we were taking their jobs. We wore uniforms that was a step above, I suppose according to us and them at the time, it was a bit better than a wards maid uniform and they were earning their living and I suppose in a way they thought we weren’t. In a way we weren’t earning our living

the same way that they were. We were more or less told how to earn our living where they had to earn their living by their own wits and keep their jobs and I can understand it if I was a wards maid I would have hated these upstarts coming in and taking over. Wouldn’t you?

My word it did at times, yes.

You’d just have words with them and you’d tried not too but if they asked for any trouble we stuck up for ourselves but you’re pretty much controlled and that’s one thing you have to learn, your place. Like we couldn’t put in a complaint about the Sisters

so you just fitted into a category when you’re in the army and you’re told “Don’t step out of your boundaries”. So we were pretty controlled and we couldn’t say too much but they could call us for everything because they weren’t controlled as we were. And I suppose it was a

proving ground and I think because we stuck it for twelve months was why we got chosen on the first draft to go North because we were the first ones and That’s something I think perhaps to our credit, whether anybody else thinks so. It was a good training ground and at that age twelve months was a long time and

I found after, later in life how hard when you’re young, you want to move on. If you’ve done something for twelve months, you like a change. I thought I’d never get married because it’s a lot of time and at that age I wouldn’t dream of getting married because I wanted change after twelve months.

I knew I would and that’s how you grow up, the time goes quicker but when you’re that age twelve months is a hell of a long time in the one job.

Well the Sisters there was no friction at all. They were boss and they were big and powerful. You didn’t argue. You did as you were told which is what the army is all about. You don’t think for yourself. I never got to the situation.

My thinking got me there perhaps.

Well I wasn’t game enough to fight with them individually but if we were all together and there was any, if you were together and you got up to something, fights with them, to right you joined in a bit and it gets very verbal and you throw things about.

We did a bit of that.

Yes, that was quite common in some situations.

Whatever was at hand actually, but we didn’t congregate very often together. It was usually you had one or two to a ward. I think mainly we only had one and that was to a ward and that was mainly in the kitchen

and running out meals which was a very precision exercise so that everything had to be done to the minute. The fellows had to be ready for their lunch at a certain time. There was no maybes at all. You had to be on time and everything worked to time and it was different. See the wards maids didn’t

any of that training or anything and they more or less freelanced and they could do as they liked and say as they liked but we were more restricted and we were better shots we found out anyway. Some of us were but I was very meek and mild in those days, so I wasn’t a troublemaker. I did as I was told mostly. For instance you never got time to sit down

and we used to sit on the benches after the dishes were washed and you’d be absolutely exhausted sometimes and you’d just raise yourself on the bench to have a bit of a sit and swing your legs and oh you’d just about be thrown out. You couldn’t sit for a minute. I don’t think I sat for, how long, five years.

Look I can’t remember. I don’t remember those little things. It pays to forget them.

No arguments about that.

Like in the wards?

We had a, we think we called her, in the VAD times, I think we called her, I think she was our commandant. I’m not sure what her title was and when the army took over she would have been a sergeant. She was,

now she was training for a uni course. See a lot of girls gave up training to do this voluntary work and they had finished their education and they were at uni doing courses but took time off because the war was only going to last a short time because we were

so well equipped and they were willing to give up twelve months, a couple of years and then go back to their training. So a lot of the girls polishing the floors, some were fully trained and some were from uni getting some experience, so

they knew quite a bit about life and everything. And this sergeant, her title was sergeant, after she was partly trained in infant welfare or something and she didn’t, she gave up and hadn’t done her final exams and took time, a year off to come in the army and that’s how she got her position because she was partly

trained. And I didn’t know that until many years later and somebody said “Oh well”, I said “What happened to Caulfield eventually?” And she said “Well the Sergeant, she only worked part time as she went back and finished her course” and I didn’t even know that she had started her course. But you didn’t brag on “Oh well I was at uni”.

But some funny things went on. A girl arrived to work in this ward with me and she was very nice and she had a name that’s well known in writing circles and she appeared from nowhere and I often wondered about her and then she wrote, I think she had written a couple of books before and was a good writer. But I think

she was doing a uni course and she was planted there, she wore a uniform, she was doing the same work as I was and I worked with her and she was quite a good worker but she was there on her practical stint so she could write about the army. And that’s what she did and there was another one. Some of them did that and there was another one that’s written a lot of books that was also in the

VADs and she came from this area so we knew her. She also was a writer of sorts and she used her army experience to write about you, to write about VADs but a story from someone else is quite different to what she writes about VADs. A lot of that went on and up in the Northern

Territory, who people were, the boys, who they were in civilian life was none of our business but some of the names you knew and the same thing happened and we got civilians who were just Mr So and So who you didn’t know

because he was from a different circle to my farming background but some of the boys would know and the boys would say “see that bloke over there Nurse, well he’s so and so. He’s a famous so and so” and I wish I could remember the names, but you didn’t. And you always remember, I can remember what bed he was in and I can remember what was wrong with him but

you were sort of trained not to connect to that person. I used to talk to him a lot and I’d love to know his name. I’ve got a thing, I only keep things that mean things now and I’ve got a little kangaroo there and I went back one day to work and he gave me this kangaroo. It was made out of bush wood and he sculptured it.

There’s no initial on it and I don’t know his name.

He was a sculptor and a writer and a well known name and I’ve read a lot of history trying to find out who was up there in the Territory at that time. See he was a civilian and he was working for the army as a sort of historian

sort of thing. They get the feel of it so they can write about it and he was jolly good. He made it out with a pocket knife out of a piece of wood, which you can have a look, as long as you don’t take it with you because I wouldn’t part with it.

Very clever but I would like to know his name now but if I did know it I wouldn’t tell you anyway because that’s just something you don’t do. Those things happen but there were some people who were very famous

but they were often the best people to nurse. Very wise sort of people but that’s the sort of thing you were trained that you, as you say if you were a patient of mine up in Katherine and some of the wards I worked in for a long time and I knew the patients very well but if you asked me what their name was I couldn’t tell you to this day but I’d say “I remember him.” You remember them by his complaint.

Yes, that’s how it was, yeah. I don’t know that it happens now.

Not at all except that you were taught to work well, keep your mouth shut, finish

the job, be on time. You learnt the fundamentals but never took a temperature, never took a pulse, never told the Sister “I think that fellows going to have trouble to get the next breath”. That was nothing to do with us. You had nothing to do with the patients at all. If you fell out of bed it wasn’t your job to pick him up. You’d have to go and get the orderly to pick him up.

You never touched a person. You never fed a person and I can imagine, I think I used to turn the pages of the books and I used to put the cigarettes in the cigarette holders when they were crippled and couldn’t but that was the closest I ever got to the patients but I used to talk a lot to them when nobody was looking. And they’d ask you where you came from and they’d tell you different stories and that but you couldn’t be, you

weren’t allowed to talk to them either. And they’d come out in the pantry some of them and you’d have good old yarns to them then because some of them were diabetics and they’d come out and weigh their lunch and that sort of thing but you never gave them an injection.

Goes on through life, doesn’t it? Nothing’s changed

from what I’ve seen of it. Very little has changed. That sort of thing is happening every day if you haven’t got that piece of paper to say “I’m trained to do this” you don’t do it, do you? I mean if a fellow’s dying in the street you’re not meant to touch him because you haven’t got CPR [Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation] in the last two years and I could be in trouble, so you let them die, do you? I don’t let my animals

die. Where’s my cat?

Helpless state a lot of them, had been there for years and years, very crippled.

Gas was a pathetic thing and a lot of them were gassed in that war and the older they got the worst it got and that did nothing for your mental state either really. I mean they got very little sympathy. Some of them couldn’t even get there, country fellows and they got very little help I felt.

They were totally incapacitated in that ward and that’s why people didn’t like to go, work in that ward but it was a wonderful experience. And it was a thing I needed, I needed to attempt something that I was frightened to attempt and I think after that I’d have a go at anything. I mean I would have even ridden a horse if I had to, something I wouldn’t have

done if I’d stopped home on the farm. If I didn’t like horses and I always said horses didn’t like me. They were always so much bigger than I was that I wouldn’t attack a horse but that was just lack of courage which I had to learn I suppose, try to learn anyway. Some forgotten (UNCLEAR).

Yes, their families were wonderful. They really were wonderful. The families never gave up. I think that was something that was very special. When you think how long after the war that was and families were dedicated to those soldiers and so were the Red Cross and the Voluntary Assistance. You always get excellent work from volunteers

because they want to do it. That’s what I’ve found anyway. Yeah, it was marvellous to see how, and they were, I’d say the nursing would have been spot on because those old Sisters they were marvellous Sisters. They were marvellous in their job and they carried it out well. They did get younger Sisters too, and I think

they had more trouble than we did. They had to work with them.

They were repatriated and the majority of them were wounds from our own side. Mishaps with guns and things because they were still learning how to fire these big guns and some were

sabotage from Malaya and those places. A lot of that went on but you don’t read about those sort of things that a lot of our injuries were not actually from the enemy but then you have that with young fellows anywhere, don’t you? You can’t blame the enemy on the roads and that sort of thing now.

Well a lot

we got were eyes, eye trouble, accidents with eyes and I don’t know if somebody was shooting the other way or whether or just how they happened but there were a lot of eye injuries that I struck in my ward. It depends on your ward. There were a lot of skin conditions that they’d got I suppose from allergies or something with chemicals or food.

A lot of skin patients which were very pathetic and shrapnel wounds mainly from our own mishaps. I suppose from training. They were training in different warfare by this time and they were doing jungle training and quite new things and you got a lot of broken legs and things that would be fixed

at Heidelberg. And we had a very good, at Caulfield they had a very good place for fitting artificial limbs and that sort of thing because some of the boys had their arms blown off or legs and that would be treated and they’d come to Caulfield and they’d be measured up and fitted so there was a lot of that rehab work, very efficient and very well

done from what I could see. But I didn’t know very much about it.

Oh no, no I don’t think. I think they would have whipped you off to Heidelberg if you swallowed a spoon or something like that. I don’t think they would have coped with that sort of thing. They were very good specialists were very good. They kept an eye on these patients and I don’t know where they came from. If they were from Heidelberg or where or been there for years maybe because the hospital

was there since the First World War and I don’t think it’s changed much now. It’s still used for something and I think in conjunction with the Alfred or the Royal Melbourne or something. I think it’s still used as a convalescent place but I’m not sure about that.

These fellows hadn’t been away. They were from Malaya, these ones that I’m thinking of and they weren’t away long by this time and you think they didn’t go to Malaya until Forty Two, at the earliest. I don’t know when the first contingent

went but that would be the 7th Divi or something. Didn’t they go?

So they weren’t away from company for very long. Some were captured I think. One whole Divi was captured in Malaya but these would be probably be after them or just before them, so they weren’t away for long, but you got that later of course.

Oh they had their doctors but we had nothing to do with the doctors. I mean we were pretty low in status so I wouldn’t have known what they looked like. I wouldn’t have ever spoken to one and they wouldn’t have spoken to me.

Well as a VAD we were sort of loaned to the army but we were sort of paid so we weren’t really volunteers, were we? We volunteered for the service and the army sort of borrowed us to fill the gap because they were short of wards maids because they were getting more patients

from the war, from Heidelberg. It was getting bigger so you had to cope with them so we were wards maids filling that gap. Even civilians had to change their workplaces to fit in with working clothing factories. It was all Government run. You were told if you were an engineer

and you went to join the army at Royal Park and you said “Well I’m an engineer” and they would say “Look we’re short of engineers, you can’t join the army. You’ll go to New South Wales and you’ll work” and you had to go. It was called Manpower or something and it was the same, the Sisters all went, the Sisters could go overseas. They couldn’t get enough of them and they had to

be twenty five I think, twenty four or twenty five and they left the country hospitals and city hospitals and they were short staffed so Manpower supplied them with staff to help in the hospitals and Melbourne Sisters were detailed to come to country areas and you went whether you wanted to go or not. I think they had a lot of fun too. It changed lives.

Yes, I think, I think Heidelberg opened and it wasn’t quite finished and they opened that to receive these soldiers before we

got them and they had to get staff but they needed trained staff, Sisters, and they also needed help for those Sisters and the only trained help available at the time was the VADs from St John’s. That’s where it started so all the first VADs went to Heidelberg and when we started at Caulfield we sort of

started there because Caulfield was getting patients from Heidelberg and they wanted them there so we went there. And they used the two places for holding people that they could contact when they wanted a group to go overseas to the Middle East but when the Middle East had to come back they still had to hold and wait to see where the front was going to be.

And this is why we were sent according to where they were going to set up the front and when the Japanese got right down to Timor the front was going to be the Fortieth Parallel or somewhere and that was the demarcation line of active service. If you were above the,

I think it was forty to forty one degree parallel that’s where the demarcation line is for activity and operational and non-operational so we had to sit and wait until they made up their minds whether the line was going across, right across Australia from that parallel and we were going to hold the Japanese there and we were setting up twelve hundred

bed hospitals, Katherine and Adelaide River because we had to, the one in Darwin was bombed. And those Sisters were marvellous sisters and they had a terrible time and they were evacuated and some went to Adelaide River, which was just North of Katherine and Katherine and they set up these camp hospitals.

They were marvellous women and not much credit has gone to them and the idea was we were to go up and Sisters, more Sisters to relieve them and VADs to help them at both these hospitals for these demarcation line. We were going to hold the Japs back and some very well known person said “No, don’t let them in,

don’t let them land because you’ll never get them out.” Because that’s what happened right down through Malaya and Burma and everywhere. They set up their bases and they said “no, once they get in you won’t get them out” so in the meantime MacArthur arrives and he says “No, we will fight them on the islands”.

And by this time the Japs had gone to New Guinea and were taking over New Guinea and he said, there were big fights and I don’t read much about it but I remember it happening, that MacArthur came to Queensland and said the Australians were no good anyway. Have you heard that?

Well that’s what he meant but “They’re no good as soldiers anyway.” Well

there was nearly a fight between the Australians and the Americans about that and he said “no, we’ll fight them from the islands here”, so we were sort of on our way to Katherine when all this happened, which we didn’t know at the time because you weren’t told anything.

We were treated the same in an operational area. There was no change where I was so I don’t know really. We never changed our uniform. We never had them. Paperwork changed. Nothing changed with our work and as far as pay went you didn’t know what pay you were getting. You didn’t know anything really.

And if it went up or down it didn’t matter anyway because you never used it. You had nowhere to spend it so it didn’t mean a thing to us, even in the wards or anything. I noticed on my discharge things it will say classified as a Group Three on my nursing orderly thing, which

meant I was above private’s pay. Some stages I was a corporal and some places I was acting sergeant when I did RAPs [Regimental Aid Posts] and you were never told yet if you were a corporal and you didn’t wear your stripes you could be pulled up and you could be fined and you could be reprimanded. But they didn’t always tell you when you got them so you didn’t know and that’s what went on and

in Katherine we didn’t know about these, the others were told when they got new numbers “from now on you are to forget the old one and this will be your number because we’re changed to army.” Well I didn’t change then and when I got it later I don’t remember even being told but I suppose I was told to change my number but we weren’t using our numbers so it didn’t matter. I mightn’t have been told till I

came back, so nothing happened as far as we were concerned. We were still treated as officers going to dances and we were still just nurses to the people and rank didn’t matter. It was when we came back.

Well that didn’t concern me because I wasn’t old enough but the other girls were terribly disappointed and they waited and waited thinking they’d be on the next draft to go somewhere. Some of them were, some of them were with us and some went to Adelaide River in the next

lot that went up and the rest if they went anywhere went to Queensland and then later on as the war, as they, after the Coral Sea Battle was when a change took place so by, and I get my years mixed up, so by early Forty Four,

would be when they changed from Darwin being the main centre, they were going to attack, the Americans attacked the islands around New Guinea and New Guinea. The Japs were already in New Guinea and had captured a lot of places so what they did the defence was from the East

side not the West side of Australia so the rest of the girls went up to Queensland that had missed the drafts, if they didn’t get forgotten. Some just got forgotten and didn’t go anywhere and then they moved onto New Guinea as the Japs were pushed back and we remained in Darwin, in the Darwin area and then came back. And the hospitals got

smaller because we were to take the injured and sick from the Timor side and Malaya. They were to come there and by the time they pushed the Japs back the action was on the other side and the bombing stopped on the Darwin side but for a while the Japanese were still attacking the Darwin area and South and sending subs

to Sydney and I mean they even went along this coast and around Australia and you never knew. Their main force was their navy and all the subs so they attacked Sydney Harbour and they bombed Townsville twice I think, or up that area and they still want it called an

operational area but the bombing wasn’t continuous so there wasn’t danger for any length of time. So that’s why we were up North West, the hospitals then were reduced, came South.

They changed the forms, yes. Yes, that was the middle of, that was August the 2nd 1944.

The Coral Sea Battle must have been, was it May? They’ve just had the celebration. 1943. Does Colin [interviewer] know his history? When the Coral Sea Battle was on?

Well I’m a year out. So Forty Two

was the Coral Sea Battle? That’s when we started really making some headway with our battles and that’s when they, the Americans were well into the war and the shift went to the East coast instead of the Territory.

In 1943, in March and

then I was twenty one at the end of July.

Well we got very short notice that we had to pack and to report to somewhere

to be equipped to go North and we didn’t know where and we were issued with tropical gear and we had to have respirators and tin hats and everything but we had to carry them everywhere. We always had those really. We didn’t carry them around Melbourne but if we moved from one place to the other and we always had that baggage, which was necessary

I suppose. And we had palliasses, which was to put our blankets in and we had mosquito nets. We had, we didn’t have slacks I don’t think. I can’t remember

and we had canvas buckets and they turned out to be the most useful, practical things we had and you could fold them up and we had water bottles and we had a survival kit and that was important. That was a first aid thing and we didn’t have cyanide tablets like the men had but we had minor aids for first aid in this

little pack. And a limited amount of gear, no cameras, no diaries, no radios, nothing in that line. That was very much kept to, big trouble if you had that

and I think that was all. Very few personal clothes and we had bathers I think, I’m not sure. Didn’t matter much and one dress, one civilian dress only. I think we were allowed one. I think we were allowed one dress anyway but on recalling I don’t know if we ever wore them, wore anything.

It was always uniform and we had summer hats and our felt hats too. And we had one pair of shoes that we wore and still our thick stockings and our toilet bags. That was really the main ingredients of our equipment.

Oh my goodness yes. We had respirator call regularly at Caulfield and we had to go through gas chambers and it was frightful. No problem going in and when you took them off you breathed in the gas, tear gas it was and it was terrible. You’d weep for hours afterwards and we did that regularly. We had to march with our respirators

on and tin hats and things in our lunch hours regularly training.

In one of the parks around Melbourne. I wouldn’t know the name of the park. A lot of our work was done at Caulfield Racecourse, that’s where the dental hospital was and x-rays too, I think and a lot of that because

a lot of that had to be increased to cope with the extra soldiers they were getting and Caulfield Racecourse was one of the main depots for medical and that sort of thing for troops before they went away to camp. But you did that on your days off, your hours off. You only got one day a week and we had a lot of marches in Melbourne

to promote war and recruit new recruits. We had lots of interviews with papers to try and get more people to join up.

Interviews with reporters and that and they’d tell you what to say and a lot wanted to say other things but.

Oh round the streets of Melbourne, just like an Anzac Day march or something. Soldiers would march and we’d march as the medical section and we had to do a lot of marching around at lunchtime in Caulfield.

Yes, we used to come home.

Well we didn’t know we were going up North. We were just on final leave. We didn’t know where we were going. Well they were very supportive and I don’t think there was, we didn’t participate in social activities then. We were just home to get some of Mum’s cooking and

enjoy home and I think you really missed it even though we were having a good time you still liked to get home. But people were all busy working for the war and a lot had gone away or the one’s I had gone to school with were most gone anyway.

My age group but otherwise things went on the same and the younger generation and that and you sort of get old

quickly at that age.

We caught the train at Spencer Street and went to Adelaide and then we were in Adelaide until we got the Ghan to Alice Springs and we went first class and the boys

were in cattle trucks behind on the train, the troops going North. And then a couple of days in Alice Springs and they organised our part of this convoy. We went in a transport convoy taking equipment and guns and provisions up to Darwin, which they were doing all the time and

we were in cattle trucks with seats down the sides and a canvas over the top. And the dust rolled in the back and we sat day after day in red dust and we still didn’t know where we were going. We were just going North.

No, we didn’t know. We were on the way to Katherine and we didn’t know where we were going because you weren’t told. But it was rather funny when you were in Katherine, the Japs knew and they probably knew we were going to and where we were because the boys used to make crystal sets and things and they used to have cameras and things too some of them. They sort of knew how to get away with it whereas

we weren’t experienced and they used to tune into the Tokyo radio which they would hear all the time and we used to know just about when they were going to raid because Tokyo Rose used to boast about it. And at one stage when Mr Curtin announced that a squadron of spitfires from the

RAF and the RAAF had been sent to Darwin the Japanese came over two days later and they were intercepted by the Spitfires. They came over to bomb the aerodrome and the Spitfires but the Spitfires shot down some of the bombers and that was the last biggest raid I think on the. They were bombing the

airfields around Darwin but they went to hear, the radio, the Japanese radio picked up everything our politicians announced so they had a fair idea where the troops would be, well that’s what I’ve learnt since because we didn’t know. The boys used to tell us

little bits and pieces and tell us what was on the radio and “Don’t forget your tin hat nurse”. We had to take our tin hat to the wards every day for the first few months and you had to wear them and there was nothing worse than trying to cut stitches out of some fellows belly with a tin hat bobbling around on your head. They weren’t very good fits but in a very high temperature.

We used to wear our tin hats in our training.

Well you mean military training? We did our military training at Caulfield. We had the experts come and show us how the respirator was used and I couldn’t show you now

how they were used. I never thought they were much good myself and I suppose they were good because we survived going through the tanks or whatever we walked through and they worked when we were in the tank. It was when we came out and it was when you got the gas off the masks, so we knew how to use them.

And it was compulsory to, I can’t remember when we didn’t have to take them with us. If we went to a, we used to have open door cinemas in the bush and we’d all go along and we always had to take our tin hats and our gas masks, but over time you forgot about your gas mask. They must have thought “Well they’re not using gas”, so they didn’t officially tell you

you needn’t take it but you weren’t caught if you didn’t have it. But if you didn’t have your tin hat with you, you could be on a charge because we didn’t know, Tokyo Rose would say they were going to bomb the hospital the next night or something but they didn’t always tell you the exact thing they were doing. They just tried to scare you.

Oh yes, well you had to look after your patients and I think, I’ve forgotten and it sounds funny but I think it was to get your patient out of bed and get under the bed with him. It was all this sort of thing went on but in the situation you’d cope. I mean it’s not funny when it’s actually happening but we would make it funny.

And there was a very funny story, I don’t know if this is the place to repeat it because I’m sure she’ll be interviewed, one nurse at Adelaide River, so we’ll just pass that one and that’s her story but it’s typical.

I think she will be if you’re interviewing people in Melbourne .

It’s her story and it’s been written and I’ve read it and I know her quite well.

No, it was at Adelaide River that was and I know who she was with and it’s a standing joke actually but that’s her joke and it’s funny to hear her tell it to this day.

It depends I suppose. Even the worst experiences could be very funny after the event, not funny at the time.

Well you knew, you knew where the trenches were and where the evacuation points were and you were all, you had to be familiar with all the, they had fire buckets all around the tents and all that sort of thing.

You had to know, well you had torches and lanterns anyway. There was no worry early in the piece about your SEC [?] breaking down because you didn’t have it. The fridges were kerosene run and the lights were torches and lanterns and later we got them, so

they were basic.

No, because it was the start, it was the start of preparing for whatever might happen and it happened quicker than what they expected. And at least we had some knowledge that you could be sent out and say they bombed Melbourne and you would

be called on to organise the ambulances and things like that and you would have had to do it and you could have done it because well that’s just commonsense.

St John’s teach you what to do in those sort of situations.

Well a lot who had missed out on the overseas draft were on it and others that had twelve months experience but then that wasn’t necessarily what it was on because some came that perhaps hadn’t had much experience at all.

And some were office workers and someone from South Australia was a pathologist. There was a number from each State and some of them, I think one was a physiotherapist but when they were changed to army they were made officers because they had accreditation for those,

their training was finished and they were able to be physiotherapists and that sort of thing and they were officers although they were VADs beforehand. And the hospital had to be self supporting. You had to have cooks, you had to have, we got telephones eventually so there was a telephonist and

it was just like a base hospital. You had to have ambulances for your patients. We used, the trains, some would come by train from Darwin to Katherine and then the ambulances would bring them out to our hospital, so it was just like an ordinary army hospital anywhere under primitive conditions, which was okay.

You did all your sterilization on Primuses [stoves] which you had to pump up all the time and the wind would, in a tent, and the wind would keep blowing them out. You had to wash the bandages and hang them under a tree and it’s a bit different now but that’s what you would have done at home. You wouldn’t go and buy a new bandage, you wouldn’t buy a bandage at home at my place anyway.

My mother would tear up a sheet but we did have gauze bandages up there and I suppose it was a hospital supply.

You couldn’t be because you might wake up to where you were going, so you couldn’t be. You were just expected to be able to cope on what you had learnt and you had army training as well as your nursing training, even if you weren’t doing it at Caulfield.

It was great. It was good and we lived in tents and the army, the wards were huts, some huts had been put up and other ones were four big tents with a bell tent in the middle, which was the office and the kitchen, so we were working under canvas and sleeping under canvas

in the day time if you were on night duty and it would be a hundred and seven, a hundred and eight in the shade, no fans, no cooling whatsoever. And the trees around Katherine are those very fine leaved gums and that and there’s not a lot of shade under the trees in the bush there, so it was very, very hot.

You just perspired all day. It was just so hot and on duty well you had to wear your starched uniforms and your nylon stockings and as little as possible underneath.

Well there was no difficulties. In the train we were first class in the carriages. We had sleeping berths and four to a cabin I think we had and we went to the dining rooms for meals.

The boys were catered for I suppose by a support, oh rations carried on the train too and they mostly had their meals I think out when the train pulled up. It would just pull up anywhere in a little place and we used to wave to them and they’d be having a beer or something to eat.

They didn’t have a mess like we had a dining room but they would just have to be, they’d have some provision on the train to supply the army food on the way up.

We were expected to know how to behave. We were never instructed at all about behaviour. We

were supposed to know how to behave and when you’re established in a unit you have notices go up about what the change of dress is, winter to summer and where you’ll be at a certain time for a certain event. There might be a service that’s compulsory and you were supposed to read them every day and know what was going on in the unit. And nobody

comes around to remind you and you’re expected to know and you get into trouble if you’re not there. So no, you weren’t told how to behave. You were expected to know how to behave.

We had a lieutenant because we were army and a very good lieutenant and we had a sergeant I think. The lieutenant was in the truck that I was in and I think there was a

second truck of girls and I think there was a sergeant in charge of them who were good leaders and we didn’t have, we used to get tired by the end of the day and get a bit stroppy I suppose. We just got a bit difficult and sick of one another and that

by the time we got to the end of the day but then we’d be fresh in the morning. The lieutenant would get us to sing and we knew what the boys were singing in the trucks following us on the way up.

Well we knew the way, they used to put words to all these well known songs. They used to put their own words so we knew what they’d be singing.

Oh we used to hear the boys singing, yes.

They used to make them up. Pardon?

No, not in our company. I couldn’t say that I ever struck any that were. They respected women in those days and they knew how to, they wouldn’t swear in front of a girl and if they did the other fellows would reprimand them. Their mates would pull them into line, so it didn’t pay to be

rough. And some of them, they were a very mixed lot, especially the patients we nursed. You got them from all over Australia.

I wouldn’t know, we wouldn’t know where they going. They may have been a unit establishing up there. They may have been reinforcements for a unit

but they wouldn’t know themselves. They were just in transport, going from one place to another as we were and we were very anxious to know where we were going but we didn’t know.

I don’t remember that, whether we did. I think the boys would have known better than us and

would work it out. Somebody always seemed to know what the plans were and what the army would be doing. I don’t think, I can’t remember. All I worried about was “Where was the Japanese?” That was all I wanted, not where I was going but “Where were the Japanese?” Because the little information we did get in

Alice Springs they’d covered a lot of ground and they were only just starting to push them back and that’s why our departure was delayed. They weren’t sending us if it was going to be invaded. We wouldn’t have gone. They would have sent ambulance males but the fact they decided to send us I felt confident that the

Japanese were being pushed back and they were pretty sure we were safe and that’s why we had to spend so much time at Caulfield. But it would have been nice to know that but if we knew the Japanese would soon know.

No, it was twelve months after because we went, no

the first raid was in February ‘42 and we had twelve months waiting. You see in Forty Two until the Coral Sea Battle which was May, they didn’t know whether they would put up the defence line in Australia but then when the Americans sent their ships and that over they decided to land in New Guinea, the islands

and get bases.

It was a year after the raid. We joined up in the time of the raid. They made us join up and we waited at Caulfield before we went anywhere.

Yes, I can’t remember

how many days. The road convoy it was because there was no train from Alice Springs then and we were in this convoy in the trucks.

Well we sat there and swallowed the dust. We were absolutely red by the end of the day and we stopped for toilet breaks and the men went one side of the road and we went the other

and we had a toilet stop mid afternoon, mid morning and mid afternoon and we stopped at Tennant Creek for lunch and I remember the first day I think. The CWA [Country Women’s Association] ladies cooked the lunch and that was terrific and we had some girls in the Tennant Creek hospital too, who we saw and we had them in Alice Springs too. And

then the next day, I’m not sure where the stations were but it was arranged with a station to supply a meal and we’d stop at a station and be given a meal. I suppose the army gave them provisions and they provided the tables and things and that’s how we got fed on the way up for lunch anyway.

And I don’t know if it was going up or coming back but the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association] had a van with soft drinks and chips or whatever they had in those days and they would wait for the convoy and supply drinks, particularly to the troops. They were good, very good but I can remember them but I can’t remember if it was on the way up or the way back.

Probably on the way up I’d say and then at night we would stop at an army camp for the evening meal and they’d have a bit of entertainment and that at the unit for us and they were very good. We’d use the showers and we had, slept in the camp and we’d have breakfast

the next morning and then we’d go off and have lunch. I think it was, I can’t remember how many days it was. I suppose it would be Alice Springs, Barrow Creek, Tennant Creek, oh it was probably about five or six days I suppose.

All sorts of camps. Well you wouldn’t really know what they were

or whether they were camps or asked “what do you do here?” They were training and that for warfare and I don’t know whether I could mention, remember just what the camps were. Occasionally you did meet somebody that you knew or had heard, the VAs [Voluntary Aids] as they still called us, would come in and you would see one or two from your local

area or an ex patient and we used to have a dance at night and you often met some of them, which we did through the war at different places. But it brightened up one night for them which was quite good.

Had what?

Oh that.

Well I nursed them later and the poor things, it was very rough. The

roads were rough and they did a lot of driving and that was one of the complaints and we had a ward where you’d have, I think you might have five or six with haemorrhoids and they were so bad sometimes that you’d have to put hot compresses on them. They used heat then rather than cold, to ease the pain. It was a terrible complaint

to have in the work they were doing and of course you couldn’t get any sympathy because you couldn’t very well say “Mine’s bigger than yours”, could you? It was a very painful condition and it was one that they couldn’t really talk about. There was a lot of patients with that and they suffered a lot.

Mostly the transport drivers, yes, yes, because if

you were on a machine gun or something like that you wouldn’t be spending so much time. Really I don’t know what the seats were like on those big tanks and things, whether they got haemorrhoids or not.

Yes, yes.

Now the hospital was sort of set up from the tents from Darwin, what they still held, so the hospital was fairly established and the Sisters had their quarters in tents and they got a, what we called a compound where we lived and it was a section on it’s own and they had all the tents set up. It was just a bare

tent and it had army stretchers, two to a tent, army stretchers, and one hospital locker and that was the only furniture. We didn’t have a chair or cupboards or anything but this locker for two people, but we didn’t have much luggage anyway. I think, I don’t think, we had suitcases that we

left a few things in and had them under the beds but that’s all we had anyway and then finally you’d get packing cases and things. Sit on them and then the boys would sort of knock up a cupboard for you and we got a few comforts and things but I think that’s all the furniture we actually ever

had.

These were patients, patients, walking patients that used to do those things. We needed electricity and we didn’t have electricity, we needed water on and later we got electricity on from some generator and there was

Allied construction workers. They weren’t army but they were employed by the army and they used to build things, put up more wards or huts or something and they did tremendous work. And I suppose it was from them that they did the plumbing and that because the first thing they had to do was put up showers too, tin showers,

iron I suppose, galvanised showers and get the water laid on. Well the water had to come from the river and I think it was on at the hospital and we had to get it on to our compound and when we got the water we could have showers and wash our hair, but until that time we used these buckets. And we used to go down the river and do our washing and wash our hair

and then someone would tip the water over your head to wash the shampoo or soap or whatever you had off and we’d walk back to the hospital and we used those buckets and we couldn’t have done without them. We used them for everything. They were really good. We got little gardens around the tents and we used them to get the water from the showers to water the plants and they

were marvellous. We used the bucket more than we ever used the water bottle, which we were always supposed to carry.

It was light bush, light bush which needed to be cleared and in the wet season the grass grew up all around but that doesn’t last long and it soon dries off and there was long grass and natural scrub

all around, light scrub in the far North. It was pretty light. We got lots of storms. You get lots of storms up there.

No, no, it’s fairly flat, it’s fairly flat. You get out of Katherine a bit,

Elliott and Larrimah and those places and the vegetation changes, thicker bush and different type of tree and you get more undulating areas, not terribly hilly. You leave the hills I think in the McDonald Ranges at Alice Springs and you go through the McDonald Ranges and then it gets more arid and spread out.

But the vegetation changes about every hundred miles I would think. You get mulga a lot of the way after Alice Springs. Well then the mulga thing thins out when you’re getting into the tropics but the mulga trees are very sparsely, the foliage is sparse on a mulga tree.

Yes you run into another range but it’s not South of Katherine, not through the road. It’s North, no is it North? I’ve got to think. It’s East of the town if I remember rightly. We used to go there and swim.

Yes.

Big trees and there was a rope on one where we used to swing onto the other and jump in and it was a very high bank, the river, like there was a bank where the river does rise and fall a bit and we used to jump off that. And there was one big hole where we used to swim there but that was very beautiful. But see you’re in another range of mountains

then when you’re at Katherine and that range goes round. I don’t know the name of them but there are a lot of those places. Katherine Gorge, there’s Geikie Gorge, there’s many gorges. Carnarvon Gorge, there’s lot of places the same as Katherine Gorge.

Oh yes, we had an Aboriginal hospital and we had Aboriginals camped. We were on the edge of the compound and the Aboriginals were just behind our tent in an area there. They used to, they were there for a long time. They were very good, very nice people they were and what can you say? They lived their way, they didn’t bother anybody and

they were well looked after by the army?

Well they put, they did gather them up sort of and put them in areas because they were afraid of the Japanese because there were a lot of pearlers still in the Territory and they were a bit afraid they might work against us and they were sort of watched and that no information was getting out and when they were in the compounds the

army supplied provisions and checked on their health. And they’d send an ambulance out and bring any in that were treated and they had all kinds of diseases some of them and the lepers went to Melville Island because we still were in control of Melville Island and they were looked after and got treated. And we had quite a number of children at different times.

In the hospital and they were absolutely spoilt because the men just waited on them. The men just loved them. It was really good for the men who more or less had nothing to do and they would teach the child different things and it was terrific and it was a wonderful experience and we had civilians as well as children. Most of

them had been evacuated but some stations did have civilians still there and they gradually came back as the Japanese were, the invasion was not expected then.

Well they were on, Darwin was evacuated and Katherine was evacuated and people just left

and then the time came that they couldn’t come back because the army had taken over the hospital. There was a little private hospital in Katherine, well the air force took that over for billets for the air force, so they couldn’t come back because there were no services, like there was the pub was just, the shops were just, they just walked out of the pub and the shops.

Everyone left, took what they could carry and there was absolutely nothing there and then they couldn’t come back because of the fear of invasion so it was all under the control of the army.

Oh yes, well it was a deserted town until the army and the air force went there and the army had full control.

And Katherine was bombed when we were on our way up there and Pine Creek that was bombed when we were there, which was a bit further on from Katherine. But we didn’t know all this. Australia didn’t know about that, so Katherine was a deserted town. There was nobody in it and the houses were all empty and it was all under military

control, so that’s why the Aboriginals, they had to check on what information might have been passed on and but they weren’t any trouble at all. And some were in the army and they were very good, very fine people the original ones. There was a lot, now when I say it was all deserted the, some of the stations had to stop there because they had to mind their

cattle and some of the Aboriginals still worked there. They were still stockmen on these stations and Manbaloo [?] was a big station where we used to swim and you had stations here and there. But they were also, the army was in touch with them and I think they worked in with the army if they wanted

provisions or anything because we had to keep the food supply up. And a lot of them provided the meat for Vesties who had the cold stores somewhere, Katherine or somewhere and they were still in operations, so you had to keep the stations going to feed the troops. So you think and we thought too what muddlers the army was at times

but who were we to judge? There’s so much involved. You’ve got civilians, you’ve got food to supply. You can’t bring it all up from the South. You’ve got to get as much as you can from the area you’re in and you’ve got to look after the civilians that are there too. So we nursed civilians, the women from the stations having a baby came to a military hospital, so the

ones that had their mid had to be prepared to use it and some were just out of training who hadn’t really had much experience and they were petrified and had problems with a baby, which was understandable because they weren’t through for long. And they had joined the army straight away and never expecting to nurse women as I never expected to nurse simple

things like scabies or something.

Never nursed scabies at the local hospital or in the Royal Melbourne or anything. You wouldn’t put them in the hospital but there was nowhere for them to go so you had to cope with everything. It’s a big job and it’s easy to criticise but it’s a whole

population that has to be cared for as well as the soldiers.

Oh yes, there was, well there wasn’t much there to start with. And like it was just a pub and few houses and a little hospital and a civil aerodrome and

those people all left. The railway was bombed and things like that but there wasn’t much for them to bomb. See they were looking for camps and military establishments and they bombed Wyndham where there’s big meat exporting place and they bombed Broome where a lot of the refugees were going. I don’t think there was any military

things there. They bombed all those towns and of course they bombed the airfields out of Katherine and they were a bit afraid of the strength in the air. Well there was no strength to start with but we did get Spitfires and we had the American bombers and those sort of things, so they were out to bomb

them.

Oh yes, well we got most of ours from the islands, from North of Timor and that and they would be flown to Darwin and then from Darwin they would go to

however had room, Adelaide and Katherine and we had a couple of small camp hospitals too, that took whoever needed it, whether they were civilian, Aboriginal or some were flown into Darwin. Because we had sort of, on all those little islands outposts with

air force or something on them, the coast guard and that sort of thing and we still had troops now, we didn’t have any at Darwin I suppose to speak of because most of them left when it was bombed. They had no direction and no equipment and they cleared out most of them. So that all had to be established so we had a lot of troops

up there on coast guard and that so we got all those too. But the fighting was over the Queensland side so they flew them to Queensland to the hospitals there whereas we were just taking, they might be off flying boats or carriers and we got navy and different people like that and Americans until the Americans

started their own hospitals. But we had Americans too as well that were flying the bombers out from the airfields, so we had all sorts, army, navy and air force and all American and Australian. Anybody else that was floating about really and we had a lot of those construction units that they did a marvellous

job too and we looked after them too because there was nowhere else to go. It didn’t matter who it was. You weren’t turned away. If it was Japanese, if we’d shot any down and we would have nursed them too as we followed the Convention and it doesn’t make any difference who they are. I think that’s carried out pretty well, well it was carried out. It wouldn’t matter

who you were and if you were just a tramp along the road and was sick you’d be looked out the same as the officer in your ward because that’s what the Convention said anyway and they were pretty good at sticking to those things. I mean it was difficult sometimes

when you had somebody who wasn’t, didn’t fit in and the boys didn’t think you were nursing them and it was difficult because they felt you shouldn’t be nursing them, whereas you knew you had to nurse them. It didn’t matter and it wouldn’t have mattered if it was a Japanese or an Englishman as far as a nurse was concerned. But as far as your other patients were concerned they had a line they didn’t cross.

No, I never nursed, not that I can remember. No, but we had other, we had our own Australians that the boys didn’t approve of either that were just the same and I think really Australians in that period if you

had a sick Japanese they would accept him as a man and a patient, not as an enemy and I think that’s what you’ve got to do. And I think they would too, having later experienced some of those things. I think deep down if a man was hurt as far as the soldiers

that I nursed, would treat him as an injured man. I know we had Aboriginals in beds next to the whites and now they go on about all the colour bar and all the rest of it but the Australian soldiers didn’t treat him differently because of the colour of his skin. They

would treat him the same as the white fellow in the next, he was a man. He just wasn’t distinguished as a black man and you’d have an American Negro and if they thought he was a good man he was accepted the same. If they didn’t think he was too good they’d let him know. And you always felt very safe. You’d be on night duty and you’d have, I suppose you could

have thirty patients. You had a ward each end and you had balconies and you’d be on your own on the edge of the bush and it was usually on my ward. It was number thirteen, right down the end and you’d be on your own with a lamp with all those men and you never felt nervous at all. You had a Sister on call

who would be between two wards and she’d have a ward the same size and if you needed her for a sick patient you’d get a patient who was able to walk to go down and get her. You didn’t have a telephone or a bell to ring or anything. You’d get a sick patient to go down and get her and there was never any, as far as I was concerned, I never

had any fear of your own safety. And somebody, as I say, if they swore or anything and they thought that the nurse heard they would reprimand the fellow. I mean they disciplined themselves and you didn’t have to discipline them. They used to get cheeky at times and do things to you and that but that was good. They were

powerful fellows that used to threaten you at times but they would protect you with their lives. I think that’s the respect you’ve got to contribute to as a person too. They were wonderful too and I think they underestimated.

That was ENT, Ears, Nose and Throat and we had a lot of Singapore ear we called it and that was through swimming so much. We used to swim and it was so hot and if we could get to water we would swim and we’d get, and the Aboriginals were mostly Singapore ear too from the water.

Yes, and too much water. I mean we swam under the

water and we were just like fish and I couldn’t even swim when I went up there. I mean Warragul had a tiny little pool. It was a wee little thing and we used to have to go there when we were at school because they believed in every child learning to swim. Well I used to go there about three times a summer and I never ever, we were taught how to swim and learn the strokes and I don’t think I ever

let go of the bar because I was frightened of drowning. So when I went to Katherine and I couldn’t swim but I learnt quickly because sometimes you had to swim across the river and everybody could swim but you, so you got left behind or you learnt to swim. And I think that no-one should join the army unless they can swim. It’s so important and a lot of them couldn’t swim.

A lot of those boys couldn’t swim. They’d never lived near water. They came from the outback and they’d never learnt to swim.

Oh yes there were crocodiles but crocodiles were being hunted then. There were not as many as now. I’ve been up since and there were crocodiles everywhere in the Katherine River. Well we didn’t see them like that because they were

hunted and they made skins into shoes and bags. Well they stopped that but I think they’re a bit out of hand now because they’re just everywhere. They were in the river and you would see them but I think we made so much noise that we frightened them anyway. But they were huge and we would see skeletons of them and that and oh they were massive big things. You’d see them before you went in the river and

you swam pretty quickly to get to the other side. And pythons, there were water pythons. I don’t know if they were called water pythons but there were snakes, water snakes and things and pythons up the palm trees and that but you sort of learnt to live with them and they don’t bother you very much. But they were huge.

Oh yes, they came and we had one in the

mess one time and it was huge and they used to creep about and up the trees and everything but they were very mild. I think I had more trouble with frogs than with snakes really. In the wet season they were just everywhere. They were a nuisance. They weren’t frightening but

it was good.

Well you know they are there and they were there before you got there so there’s nothing you can do about it. You just don’t annoy them I suppose. They just keep away. They’re not looking for trouble. I suppose they were hungry

but they were probably getting plenty of fish anyway so you’ve got to accept what was there and not destroy it, so they don’t really worry you. I don’t know that we had any lessons on protecting the wildlife. You just weren’t destructive anyway, so

you wouldn’t harm them although it was a bit tempting with the baby animals and that. I did try that once but it didn’t work but you don’t go out to harm the animals and they didn’t bother you.

Well I tried to sneak a crocodile, a little baby one, and I got caught with that,

and it was taken off me. I was a bit sore about that. I would have liked to have kept it and had it stuffed. The thing to do was to get a baby one and mount them because the boys used to put me up to these things and “What a good idea it would be” and if the opportunity came I would make the most of it but I couldn’t get away with that. I tried but.

Oh one of the officers did and he sent it to a zoo which saved it’s life but I suppose that’s good but it probably would have eaten somebody, one of their troops if it had grown big.

Oh just everything that people get.

I mean eyes were very troublesome because of flies, a lot of eye problems. And in that ward we had ENT [Ear Nose and Throat] and they’d come in with Singapore ears or eyes but they also had rashes. They

had other things, boils and they had other conditions too because of the monotonous diet and lack of vitamins and things and they were susceptible to a lot of other complaints, but that was mainly walking patients. And we did the tonsillectomies there and any throat surgery. I think we had a dentist. I can’t remember

if we did dentistry. I think eventually we got a dentist. Usually we had a dentist but when we went up there we had to have either false teeth or very good teeth or they wouldn’t send you because they didn’t have enough dentists. And I can’t remember a dentist but there was probably one later anyway. And we did brain tumours sometimes.

We did all those sorts of things that just happened to people.

Oh yes we had a theatre and we had our own theatre in ENT and there was a bigger theatre elsewhere for appendix and so in a surgical ward you had to operate on haemorrhoids a lot and you got appendix and the normal hernias. We had a lot of hernias

and they weren’t allowed to get up or move. They weren’t allowed to move for a week and we kept them in bed for two weeks. Now they send you home the first day. We had to feed hernias patients because they weren’t allowed to feed themselves. That’s how medicine changes and we just did what a normal hospital would do or if

we couldn’t do it they were sent South by air to be treated at. We had burns, we had shrapnel wounds. We had whatever, just what you’d expect really to get and we had a lot, we called it the troppo ward where we had mental patients and we had to learn

psychology. And we did, the medical officer gave us lectures on psychology and surgery and medical diseases, tropical diseases which you didn’t learn down South. You had to learn tropical diseases and we had to do path, pathology. We sort of learnt something about all those sorts of things that you wouldn’t have in

Caulfield. Not that we nursed in Caulfield but in a civilian hospital, so it was just what you got in a normal hospital and you got ulcers galore. I mean we got ulcers everywhere, leg ulcers. You broke your shin or your skin anywhere and it would nearly always turn into an ulcer so you had to treat ulcers and it was just a bit of everything. You wouldn’t know what you were getting.

Accidents, we had accidents, vehicle accidents and things like that. You’d never know what you were getting. A big problem was of course, when you had practise sessions of raids and the sirens would go and you’d all have to go to your posts and you had to arrange to protect your patients and

that was always a big operation because if you had bed patients that were tied up with broken limbs and things, legs, you had to get them to a safe area and that’s where your nursing orderlies were trained for that sort of evacuation. So we used to have those fairly regularly early in the stage. The siren would go and they’d usually announce it was a practise

raid and you’d have to go to your post and do all this plus your other work. We worked very hard because another, like in the nursing profession you were never allowed to sit down. You had to stand up while you fed the patient and you never got a chance to sit down only on night duty you sat in the office and

you wrote your report and perhaps did charts and things like that, but when you were filling in your charts, the injections and medicines that you gave, for drugs, well you stood up. So you’d think I’d be worn, wouldn’t you? I’m not. It’s done me good and hard concrete floors in the hut wards but

the tent wards were a lot easier on your feet.

Not to start with, no. I think, I can’t remember when we got it on but we had kerosene fridges, which we were lucky to have. We had a lot of trouble keeping them going but we had ice boxes. We had ice works in Katherine that used to make the ice and we’d put drinks and things in them and

we did the sterilizing with the Primuses and we had lanterns for lights and things but I think we probably got the, yes, we had generators eventually and we had electricity. Because we needed the electricity for the x-ray machines and things like that too.

I suppose we could have run them off the generators.

We did have lots of walking patients in my ward, where I worked mainly and in most wards you had a, there was nowhere for them to go. They might only be getting a treatment for your skin or something that you would do

normally at home but they had nowhere to go really, so you sort of kept a few longer than you would in a civilian hospital. And they were rostered for duty. They helped make the beds, they went to the mess and the kitchen and carried the meals to the ward and they helped dish out and they

helped you feed the patients, which was a tremendous help, because that’s very time consuming. And they would go to pathology with specimens and they were very good. It gave them something to do. It was good for them mentally. We couldn’t have managed without them. They were absolutely marvellous. Any dishes to wash or anything and I think we used to wash

the, they had pannikins and they had army issue plates and things and I think they washed the dishes. I can’t remember. I know we had tea towels and they must have washed them and dried them because I remember our CO [Commanding Officer] did a round or something and they were terribly officious with their inspections and nobody was allowed to sit,

and weren’t allowed to sit on the bed and no patients were allowed to sit on the bed. Where you dished up the meals had to be spotless and there was a tea towel somewhere where it shouldn’t have been and I was in the pantry, we called it, in this ward and a couple of fellows were sitting on the table and this CO came in and well, the tea towel was in the wrong place and.

The people I worked with and roomed with?

Good relationship all round.

I think you sorted yourselves out and they lasted. You had very few distractions. There was no competition in what you wore because you didn’t shop and you had much the same interests in your work. I don’t know that we talked about work

that much but we enjoyed picnics and going to the stations and swimming and swimming took up most of our so called rest periods. It was a sort of, you got your

values sorted out, what was really important in friendships and they lasted a lifetime really. Some had different ideas of enjoying themselves and they paired off perhaps with friends, others but on the whole we just mixed. Some of them were engaged to be married to fellows that had been

or back from the Middle East. A few got out when the fellows wanted to settle down and perhaps were getting out because of war injuries and things and I think that if they had been away, the soldiers, for a length of time you could apply for a discharge,

to go back to base. You couldn’t get discharged at that time I don’t think and some of them I think did go home, which was good because if, as I say, they were selected to go overseas and they were twenty four when they got in well it was more or less expected that girls got married about twenty five and getting onto

thirty was more or less regarded as being over the hill. So it was important I suppose for the country that you kept those mothers to be were to be productive because that’s why the country was settled really. I mean it all depends on history, doesn’t it really? That you’ve got to respect the fact that there was no guarantee

how long the war would last and they should have been at least sent back to base if they were happy to go and a few did go back. And a few did get married, got married later and it was quite good and I think at that age they felt they’d done their bit which they had done very well and they were very fine women those early VADs,

I’d say a lot of them were, most of them were. But they were a special kind of person because they’d volunteered anyway and if they hadn’t been paid they still would have done it. I think that’s what is important, that you’re doing it, not for yourself so much. I was younger and I think I was more concerned about doing things

because it was an opportunity to do them and that I was very loyal and very Australian and just the same at that stage I wasn’t interested in the money and didn’t even know what I got and I would have done it for nothing and been quite happy to do it for nothing. So if I was paid

it was a bonus. I mean you didn’t join up for what you were going to get out of it. If you got any perks they just happened to come along and you took the opportunity, so most of them had that attitude, those first ones that I worked for. They had never worked hard like that most of them. They had come from cities, they had come from universities,

and they knew what they wanted to do and they had good lives and I think they were terrific people. And the officers, like our lieutenant and our sergeant and that I mean you couldn’t get better people anywhere. The lieutenant was a very gracious lady who was respected

by officers and men alike. She was a credit to being feminine I would say. They were the sort of people that gave you the good name at that stage. It was an honour to sort of be associated with them and there was a Lieutenant Colonel May Douglas who came from South Australia and I think she was in the Girl Guides and was a commissioner or something. And they liked people who had been in the

Guides because they had some leadership training or something so if you were a leader in the Guides you moved on pretty quickly and May Douglas eventually was the head of the AAMWS when it was changed and she did a marvellous job. She put a lot of work into it and she’s only died fairly recently and she has a history worth reading.

She was a fine woman.

No, she went round, she came to Katherine in her official capacity and she would come and she’d get us all together and tell us what the latest tune was or what they, quiz shows had just, I think Jack Davey had just, was on the radio and

they had these radio shows. And she would get us, set up a quiz thing and show us how it worked, trying to give us entertainment and keep us up to date. We didn’t know what was going on and she went around to the various hospitals and a terrific organiser. She was in, I don’t know what, I think

she was in VADs and anyway she was called to Southern Command or somewhere and told that they were changing her position over to army and she’d be this and that and she said “oh no”, she said “I’m so and so and I’m happy with that and I don’t want this other high position.” And he said “I am

ordering you” and she had no choice and they made her the head sherang and she was a marvellous woman. She was absolutely marvellous. Some of them were and some of the matrons were terrific people too. I had the greatest respect for them.

That’s right and to give you something to do but we were never ever bored that I knew of because if you weren’t working you were doing

your washing or swimming and you had companionship with the ones that you were off duty with and a treat now and again. We got sick of the dances but we were more or less ordered to go to but we loved picnics and the units were good to us and if they had a spare ambulance they’d

ring the officer, our officer and say “If there’s enough girls you can have an ambulance to go somewhere this afternoon.” So we had our favourite drivers and they’d come around and take about eight girls, you needed eight off duty to make it worthwhile to go to a station and, or a different swimming spot. And of course you had this one fellow and eight girls and it was so hot you’d have to put your bathers on and everything so we used to send him up

river and we’d go skinny dipping and it was terrific. And they’re the sort of things we used to do.

Oh well and he was trusted too and we said “We’re going skinny dipping”, which he probably did too but you didn’t all skinny dip together. You would these days I suppose. I don’t know. You might know?

But they were the sort of things they you wouldn’t have done here in that time. I mean if you were caught well that would be all over the town in no time and you certainly wouldn’t be able to join the VADs. They had to see that you weren’t that sort of person but it was a special time that you felt that you had no problem with that. You didn’t

have wet bathers to get, they sort of almost, it was so hot and sweaty a few minutes out of the water that you had to roll them off. You couldn’t peel them off so it was not comfortable at all. The Red Cross was very good. They used to send us parcels now and again and also the army realised that how hot it was and

they sent up light cotton frocks they called “durnales” and we all got one of those and they were marvellous to wear. Come home and take your uniform off and you could lie on your bed and that was a great help. Just little things like that is how you set your values that are really important and at night time we all had to have mosquito nets and we

didn’t wear too much at night time either. So what, nobody would sneak around to see us anyway, so only the mosquitoes. I mean there were those little things that you felt perfectly safe and it was just a trust that developed without having being told really.

Well of course there’s nothing like an Aussie soldier for humour. They were fantastic and they were real characters. They really were and the concerts and we used to have concerts and things like that and they were unreal.

Well the girls would sometimes and take off the boys and then the boys would do one and take off the girls

and dress up and of course you had no costumes or anything. You had to make your own and they’d be borrowing bras and all the rest of it and it was just a battle of wits but they were absolute comics. They really were so there was a fair bit of time went into concerts and things. When the South Australians joined us about mid year, the unit changed over and we

stayed on and we had another batch of AAMWS from South Australia who were terrific girls. We got on very well with them and they were quite talented. Some of them were very musical and could sing and do skits. In the laundry we had a girl sewing and she used to mend things for the hospital and she made all the costumes on the machine and half of them were made out of

paper and you made your own fun. It was so much more fun than going to the opera.

They’d take the matron off and they’d get skits on swimming and they would make up anything and they were very clever and you know

when you think about it we had more opportunities than they had for making fun and that and they had to make their own. Look at the time they had at night. They played a lot of cards and in the hospital wards they played crib a lot and they played cards and they used to bet on anything but and some of them had

radios on the quiet and listened to radios but some never ever had that and they were stuck way out in the bush and forgotten about. Sometimes you used to think, you’d forgotten about yourself and you’d only been there twelve months but they had a long time in the bush not seeing anybody but the fellows in the bush. But you’d have to ask them what they did and what their humour was. The humour in the ward was unreal.

Really they were very smart.

Oh look no, I don’t think so. It was something that happened everyday and it was very good but I just can’t at the moment think of some of the things or they couldn’t be repeated anyway.

Don’t push me too hard or I’ll start making it up.

Well they were respected and they were looked after and they were treated very well and they were very good. The Sisters too were very good. We worked very hard and they did too.

Later on we got some that hadn’t been in the army very long but that wasn’t at Katherine. They were all pretty, they were pretty all, I think some with the South Australian unit hadn’t been out very long but they were easy to get on with, very nice people. They didn’t pretend anything. They were who they were and that’s probably why they were chosen I suppose. I don’t think we had

any big problems with them. I think we called them nicknames and things off duty “Oh you’re going in there mate, if she gets after you”, I mean that sort of thing, that’s just Australian isn’t it?

Any of them really.

It was up to you. They knew who they could lead on and that and they worked that out. It was never any problems. If somebody did try to make the Mickey out of you one of his mates would flatten him. He wasn’t game, you wouldn’t be game too. It was up to you whether you encouraged it or not. I mean I always

felt I was there to work and that’s what I did and they helped me. I mean I used to give them little jobs to do and I’d have a queue a mile long to do treatments for and there’d always be somebody there and you’d say “You do that fellow while I do”. Acne was another thing they got and you had to have a little tube and squash it over the pimple and get the stuff out. It used to take ages and if you got a fellow in with acne

all over his back and you’d get one of these capable fellows and you’d say “You do this bloke and I’ll do the next one.” And it was good for them too, so you worked together. You had to and if your lamp went out they could always get the wick up and get it going again and they loved to do it. You could rely on them for anything and if you did hear noises that you

were a bit suspicious of you could wake them and they’d go out and see because sometimes it might have been a dingo or something and you’d think “What’s that noise?” Or somebody about and, or some of the patients from the psychological ward used to wander a bit and they had to watch some of them and they’d take them back to the ward. You had a lot of little things like that but you coped with it because you knew that they’d support you anyway

so there was never any, you never ever felt frightened. If I was frightened I was more frightened of the thunder and lightning than I was of the planes that might drop bombs. They were mostly in the day time and they were surveillance planes coming over to see what they could see but that petered off by the end of

October anyway. But there was a lot more raids in that area than was ever reported because you couldn’t make people scared and I think they knew what they were doing. We didn’t know what they were doing but they were watching.

Yes, it was always

busy and a lot in it and it was from being in isolation so long and I never worked there. We did do lectures and learnt all about it but I didn’t work there. I think they probably had older girls and perhaps some who’d worked in those sort of wards before because it was a big problem.

Oh yes, some did develop and some girls were very anxious to get married, so we had a couple of weddings up there. I think you weren’t supposed to be married at that stage and you had to go home if you got married and some of the fellows were pretty keen to get married too because

as I realised much later too, if you had a wife back home she could always get sick and they’d get compassionate leave and it was rather handy. I think that happened a bit. Not all of them of course but if you wanted to get married there were plenty of others pretty keen about it and they would have taken the risk I suppose. But I wasn’t interested in getting married.

Pardon?

Oh well, casuals but that was just something you had to avoid if you weren’t, there would have been plenty of opportunities for them and yourself if you wanted to get back South but I had a lot of other things on my mind that I wanted to do really and I thought it could wait. I didn’t know how long I had to wait anyway

or if it was too late but it was too bad.

No, no, I never was, I never had the need for it really. If I did drink it would be at a formal mess and it was something to do. They were so boring that

you sort of had a bit of an aid to survive the night. They went on for so long which I thought was a waste of time but I suppose it was just one thing that went with being in a service as every now and again you had to go through the performance of an official meal and remember your manners, I suppose. So others were in need of it more than me and I certainly had a lot of fun without it but I think it

helped the boys a bit and they got cigarettes too through Red Cross. I think you could buy them at the canteen and they got free issue. I know in Japan we got free issue and I used to sell them, which was better than smoking them anyway.

Oh yeah, in the Territory we got it, two bottles a week and in the later stages,

not when we first went up there.

Well I used to swap mine for four bottles of lolly water, which was made in a factory in Katherine out of the river water that we used to swim in and that was what I used to drink. And it was really good too because you really had to drink a lot of fluids because you sweated all the time and it was very hot and in the

wet season it was worse still because everything went mouldy and your clothes were wet all the time and it was very uncomfortable.

Trying to sleep on night duty, it was, I mean there was no shade and just canvas. It was very difficult

but it was only for a month or something like that but nothing that’s very traumatic. I enjoyed camping. We did go into huts later which was, there was more shade although it was galvanised and they were fairly high roofs and they were up on cement floors

so you didn’t have bugs in your shoes and things like that and it wasn’t quite so exposed to the elements as the tents but you coped. I don’t think anything was life threatening.

Oh whatever, it would

have been about, it would have been fifty six hours. We worked seven days and you never finished on time. You finished when the work was done. I’d say whatever it was in civilian life we would have been under that award or something. I think if the need was there hours didn’t count and then we only had

one day off a week and then after six months you were allowed one week’s recreation leave. Well there wasn’t anywhere to go and they eventually got places where you could go and stay for a week and I don’t think we got a week off anywhere to go anywhere because there was nowhere to go in our time.

The ones that went up later did. I think that was put onto your leave when you came back because I seemed to have a fair bit of leave when I came back. I think at Howard Springs I think they had a place and they had a place at Darwin but when we went to Darwin we only went for a day because there was nowhere to stay. But they did get a rest period but other than that we didn’t. We

just worked six days a week and had one day off but sometimes you’d have one Saturday or Sunday off and you’d have Monday for the next week and you got two days off but then you had a long time to go before you got another day off but there wasn’t much to do on your day off anyway so it didn’t matter.

Alright, I can do that quite easily because I did it so often. Now I’ll take me ward ENT, ward thirteen, which is a hut ward and it was a little bit different routine to a tent ward. And you’d start off and

test the urine of new patients and if their train came down you might have nine or ten new patients so you’ve tested their urine, new admissions and you tested urine on every patient that was on sulphanilamide antibiotics because that was all we had at that stage. So you had to test their urine four times a days, so before you gave them your tablets you’d have to get a specimen

and you’d test it and that all took time, so that was your first thing in the morning. You tested the urines and your sulphur patients and that was routine. You went out to the pan room and you saw how many bottles, the fellows were given bottles and a specimen with their name on it and you recorded it in the book. So that was your first stretch, which you had to do fairly quickly. And by that time

you had to give the mixtures, before meal mixtures if there was anyone with say indigestion and he might have to have so and so before he had his meals and then the boys collected the breakfasts and you fed the patients that had had operations or hernias. Well you didn’t have hernias in that ward but your patients with brain tumours or something, a cerebral and he might have had

an accident and been unconscious and you’d have to feed him until he was okay. We did tonsillectomies twice a week so twice a week those patients had to have soft foods, special diets and you had to encourage with fluids and it was very painful. You’d give them APC [Aspirin Phenacetin Codeine] before the meal so you always had to cover the meal with something soothing or some medication or something and

twice a week on operation day you had to give them their pre-meds, so many, half an hour before the operation and then the orderly took them to the theatre, walked and coming back they’d come back on a stretcher and hold their boots, because they only used local anaesthetic. And you might have minor operations and sometimes you sent them to the other

theatres so if they’d had a general they had to be watched all the time until they were conscious, so you had your operation days. And you had the days when the people from the compounds, the Aboriginals, came and you had a clinic and that’s where you sorted them out and they might need treatment there or the lepers

we sent to Melville Island and the yaws I think we sent them somewhere too because we didn’t keep them and the ulcers, they were all syphoned off somewhere. So you had clinics as well and you’d have to get ready for the clinics and assist the doctor and prepare your patient and so then you’d have a day especially

for eyes where the doctor would see your patient and change treatments and you’d have to catch up with the treatments. That’s just what you had to cope with. Now beside that your routine everyday would be giving out, I think ten o’clock you made the beds or got the patients, the walking patients to make the beds but you had to wash the

patients that had had ops and couldn’t shower, so you’d make the beds, wash them and make the beds and I think you did that before breakfast actually. Then you did their backs in the morning and then you gave out all the mixtures. Most of them could walk up to the office and get their mixtures and the ones that couldn’t walk you took it round.

You took their temperatures at ten o’clock and two o’clock and then if you were on evening shift you did six o’clock. So you did all the temperatures and you did all the mixtures and then you had treatment parade and they’d come up and get the drops in their eyes or drops in their ears. We used to do syringing nasal operations and things, so you did all the treatments too.

And you had to if the Sister wasn’t there do the rounds with the doctors and record what he wanted changed and the what medicines to stop and as well you still every four hours you tested the urine of the ones on sulphur tablets and that was just your normal routine and you did any extra in between.

So by the time you finished the treatments and the medicines and the odd little things you had to do it was lunchtime and then you had to feed the patients again and you weren’t allowed to sit down when you fed them, stand on your legs and they’d talk and talk and every time they opened their mouth you’d pop a bit in and they made it last as long as possible and that was entertainment. Then after lunch you’d do their back again

and do the temperatures again and the mixtures again and treatments were four hourly sometimes and some were two hourly and you had to do all that. You never had time to sit down anyway. Sometimes you got a cup of tea and you could sit down and have a cup of tea in the office. That’s just a day and that was the main routine you did in hospitals as a VAD

anyway, that was a normal hospital routine.

Well the tropical diseases, I mean I’d never seen ulcers like I saw up there. They were just shocking

and if you had somebody with a broken leg and he was in your ward because he had a bad eye as well and his leg was getting better I mean he could produce an ulcer almost overnight, the plaster rubbing on his leg or something. If you had a break in your skin it could turn into an ulcer in no time in the heat and sweat and probably lacking nutrition too. They were a bit

low in that and they were sitting shot for ulcers and skin complaints and things. Oh there were lots of things. I mean you’d never have Singapore ear in Victoria I suppose. You wouldn’t what it was but up there every second fellow had it. And you had a very, things you would never strike down here.

I think that’s all. I think it was a terrific experience and I loved every minute of it. I think I would have stayed another year if they’d wanted me too. I got used to it and that but that’s what I’m saying

now but probably if I really, if I was very anxious to return I suppose I would have remembered counting the days but it was very exciting to pack up and find all your clothes mouldy and that sort of thing but we didn’t really care. We looked like tramps when we left Katherine. I think we were. I’ve never seen such baggy looking girls when we

returned as the smart ones that went up there. And awfully good fun coming back because the fellows were going up still, replacing units and things and we used to wave and sing out and we were the smart ones coming back and laughing at them going up there. What a shock they were in for.

“You’ll be sorry” was the main one, yes. No it was good, and it was good to come

back.

Oh it was just a wreck really. There was bomb damage everywhere and they hadn’t been able to repair much. They’d tidied it up a little bit.

The gaol was still in one piece and the post office, not the post office it was bombed, and I think one of the hotels wasn’t touched and that same hotels still there because I’ve been up since but it was terrible. It was flattened really. I mean they get accused the air force and army and that of sort of taking over but there was nothing left really to

shelter very much. The hospital was bombed. There were two hospitals, the civil hospital and the army one and the army one sort of had to take all the patients and all the ships were still in the harbour, the bombed ships and it was an absolute disaster. Oh it was terrible. They had no defences. It

was unbelievable.

Yes, and many more deaths of course and it was horrific and Broome was just as bad really. All this was colossal and we criticise, well we don’t criticise but some people have and they just walked out, they ran but I mean by the attacks

you’d think “Well they’re going to follow this up with a landing and we’ve got no”. They didn’t have ammunition to shoot with. They had rifles some of them and I think they still had last war’s rifles and they had nothing. The planes they said were just little Moths and things. They didn’t really have any defences. It was very unexpected I think but they were

sort of winning in Timor where they were going to set up their base to land, that’s for sure.

Well they just cleared out, the same as you do clear out, like they cleared out in Singapore, you just escape and you leave behind everything. You just go with your life.

We came back by convoy and then back by train back to Adelaide that I remember. Yes, we caught the train I suppose because we wouldn’t come back with that load of females with scarves around their heads and some with overcoats on and

everything wouldn’t have been allowed in Adelaide, so I think we got to Adelaide by train. I don’t remember that bit actually. I suppose we came back on The Ghan too and had to get back into our suits in Adelaide, which probably didn’t look much better than the clothes we were wearing in the trucks coming down.

Yes, we’d be in the mouldy suits when we got to Adelaide.

I remember getting cleaned up and going to the hairdresser in Adelaide to have our first do over since we went away. It wasn’t worth it when we were in the river everyday. So we cleaned up a bit to catch the train back to Melbourne. I don’t remember much about that either. So it wasn’t very important at the time.

Well we had leave and then we had to report back and I was sent to Broadmeadows to a camp hospital, just out of Melbourne and that was rather good. A mixture of patients and not terribly ill patients because you were near Heidelberg and we had more medical cases and I worked there in the wards and

did the same routines on a smaller scale in the wards, temperatures, mixtures and night duty and treatments. And you had a mixture of patients, some in transit, some in the local camps and you lived in a big old home in the hospital grounds and

it was just a bit like Caulfield I suppose except we lived on the spot and we were, they were very strict on passes and this sort of thing and it was military actually, really military but I quite enjoyed it. And from there I was sent to do a rookies school because you all had to now do a rookies school before you could join a unit, so all the

ones that had been in for two or three years had to go back to the beginning and learn it all from scratch again, how to clean the wards and give out medicines and things and got our ticket.

Oh I think it was six weeks or something and that included bivouacs, army style bivouacs and a lot of marching and drill.

You used to have to do this and that and whistles blew and we lived in, slept in long huts and I think there were thirty two women in a hut. And I think a sergeant would come through and blow a whistle and the lights had to go out and stop out and then I think they had reveille at six a.m. and oh we had all this performances and I was sent,

you either went to Heidelberg or Bonegilla, which were big base hospitals to do your practical and that was very military too. You had to go out on the parade ground when you got up in the morning and you all got up at the same time and you had to go through a bit of a performance every morning before you started work but it was a very well run hospital, very efficient. And it was good fun there, but

we slept in tents and of course it was freezing cold and I’ve never been so cold in my life as Bonegilla and we had no heating whatsoever. Because we were only, we weren’t on the staff. We were just training so it was very tough at Bonegilla but the hospital work, we loved working because it was so well organised and so efficient. It was good.

Well Caulfield we weren’t nurses. You couldn’t compare Caulfield with Broadmeadows. Bonegilla was a military hospital, big,

it was big. You got the same things, like you’d get, Katherine was tropical, more tropical diseases but Bonegilla was the same as you’d get at Heidelberg. You’d get fellows and perhaps they had to be in for medicals before they got discharged because they had TB [Tuberculosis]. They had a lot of TB patients. Other than that

you’d have appendix and hernias and one that I haven’t mentioned and the lady’s left the room, circumcisions. They did things like that when fellows hadn’t had an opportunity to have it done. You had a lot of those things to do and you had skin diseases and they either got better or perhaps repatriated or something, so it was just general nursing,

what you’d get in Warragul Hospital, not so much war wounds but accidents in training camps around. There were a lot at Albury and places like that. From what I can remember there was nothing spectacular and I was in a medical ward and that was mainly nasal drops, inhalations, cough mixtures and things like that for medical.

And I think they had a special ward for ears, nose and throat but I was in a medical ward. Some were in TB wards and they were very short of TB nurses, so if you, they tested you with an injection and if you had no resistance to it they’d put you in a TB ward, so you were in contact with TB and you either got an immunity or

you got the disease and some of them got the disease. Two, we were in a tent of four and two got tuberculosis, but that’s how they got their nurses. Well that’s how we think they got them. That was the story that went around, so if you didn’t have it they wanted you to get an immunity to it and then you had another TB nurse. They put them in the ward and then they got it.

Well I had a bit of tonsil trouble in Katherine, that’s why I had to have them out. They don’t tolerate something that’s persistent and I had a couple of doses of tonsillitis and they said “out”. And of all things I got the German measles when I was at Caulfield.

I’d worked in the morning and at lunchtime we had to do marching and I got very hot and when I came back to the ward the nurses said to me “gee you’re red in the face” and I said “I’ve been marching and I’m hot” and they said “Ooh, ooh, ooh” and it was a day off the next day so I caught the train home and the next morning I looked in the mirror and I was absolutely covered in red spots. And I

had German measles, so you weren’t allowed to travel on public transport with an infectious disease. So aren’t I lucky because I’m home so I contacted them and they said I’d have to stop home for so many days or two weeks or something before I could travel back, which I did and then when I went back they sent me to a convalescent place at Hampton until my time of isolation ran out.

I wasn’t sick at all but it was very handy and I had a good holiday but other than that I don’t think. I had my tonsils out and I can’t remember. Oh I had a poisoned finger at one stage in Japan and I was in a surgical ward and got a wog in that finger and I wasn’t in hospital but I was off duty because it was infectious but I can’t remember anything else.

It was very minor if it was.

Well of course we got a lot of that in Japan and they had their own hospital and we did get the patients first and they were tested and then they were moved to the hospital which was

quite common in Japan but they only had male orderlies and that there and they were treated and probably went home with it but that was all hush-hush. I mean that was their business and we didn’t have to nurse them.

Well there wasn’t that much that you had to have a ward and if there was one they would have been nursed separately or sent somewhere else to perhaps an infectious. They wouldn’t be at our hospital I wouldn’t think once they were diagnosed. I never heard, those sort of things were private and nobody knew and nobody was told about it. They’d probably be flown back to base, the nearest base one I would say because

when penicillin came of course they did have, they responded and it helped those cases, so I think if they got them early enough and that had been around awhile then and it was nothing new for the army because it was in the civilian population anyway.

Yes,

Forty Three, that was the first penicillin used in Australia in my ward.

Yes, it made a big difference because we didn’t use sulphur drugs and it was very effective, so it meant you didn’t have to test the urines. It was absolutely marvellous

and when it first came out it was almost instantaneous. It controlled infections but it didn’t take long before the body sort of, the germs beat the penicillin so they got streptomycin in which was good. You had a choice of drugs

but there was a big change in nursing when that came in.

It’s a pretty long story and it revolved over the years which has caused a lot of problems because the technique of, say for pneumonia. Now pneumonia was a deadly disease

when I was a child. It was really fatal for children and it was one of the worst things to get was pneumonia. Now when penicillin came in that was one thing that it would save children, that was penicillin and it was absolutely wonderful. Then as I say the germs

got resistant to it and the nursing techniques were lost in that period. So if you had a child with pneumonia and it wasn’t responding to penicillin and you used the old methods and kept them alive until you built up their resistance but over the years a lot of those techniques have not been used. There was a lot of changes like that and

they’ve had to introduce more drugs and the more you introduce I think you loose a lot of skills. There could be a time when the drugs are not available and would they know how to cope? I do wonder if it has been, well it has been a wonderful thing for a lot of

cases, but I still think it needs the combination of care and as well as the drugs. But I’m not knocking the system as far as treatment goes because when you think of the way we treated a hernia patient for instance and we did everything so he never moved a muscle and that poor devil when he had to sit out of bed for the first time was just, he needed a morphia injection to move his muscles.

You had to make up all that time of muscle loss and it created a lot of pain, whereas you have your hernia done in the morning and you can go home in the afternoon and they put a bit of wire gauze over it and you’re home. I mean look at the time they’re saving and time is money these days, so I’m saying we perhaps prolonged the

recovery time by kindness, but on the other hand a lot of the techniques still need to be used when drugs are not procurable.

We got them in the, because I was the most important, and we used them for eyes and there was a fellow with an eye and describe your patients and that’s

what we got it for and it did a wonderful job, it really did and I think it was available for troops before the civilian hospitals. It created a lot of work as far sterilizing the needles and drawing up the stuff and waking them every four hours through the night to give them these injections. It all had to be recorded and added up and Doctor Lord would order so many hundred thousand

units and it all had to be accounted for and it made a lot of paper work in other ways. But as far as the care of the patient it was dramatic the influence it had on the germs.

I was at Katherine when that special order arrived. They ordered it from Melbourne and it was interesting to

read when some of this history was published that the pilot that flew that penicillin up because I had written about it too and this pilot said one of his duties during the war was the fly medicine to Katherine for a patient and it was one of my patients and I was rather pleased to read that, because I thought “Well I didn’t dream that.” I’ve got living proof. If I tell you I can show you. I kept

it and now I can show you that that was right, if that interests you?

I think that’s good history, isn’t it that, that they made the effort to. It shows you how they could act quickly when the need was there. It was remarkable to get that penicillin. I think the doctor, they were good doctors some of those doctors and they were very practical.

He knew that that had been made and when he requested it they sent a special plane up to deliver it and that was terrific. Those little things are the things you remember. Well I remember them, so I suppose my memory’s not too good.

Well you know how good I am with the years but it

was a long time by the time I got back to reality. It was a lot of years that you never ever thought “well I joined up in 1942” but now I think “well was it 42 or 43? When did I get out? When did the war end?” I’ve got to go back and the war ended I think in 1945 and I got out a year after that or somewhere around that,

so that’s how I remember when these events took place. And I remember the Coral Sea Battle when the war really changed and it was in May and they’ve just had the anniversary because a friend of mine had her daughter, was born on the 6th of May or the 2nd or whatever and when her daughter was born she said something about the surgeon

coming to see her, her doctor and she said “He won’t be here today because of the Battle of the Coral Sea” because he had gone, flown up to Queensland. He’d disappeared overnight so that’s how I remember May, “Oh so and so was born then”, oh the Battle of the Coral Sea. I’ve got to connect it with something else as your brain deteriorates.

So if you really want to know the date you look up the history and you’ll see what I mean and that was the Coral Sea Battle in May 19, when did I say? 1942.

I had very little to do with it because I was in RAP

when I came back mainly because I was in training and I was in the camp hospital where we wouldn’t have used it. Anyway we did have a, we’d sent anything to base and they’d have it at base and I wasn’t at base so I wouldn’t know how available it was and when I finished with RAPs I went to Japan and we had it there too. We used it as a cover

for surgical cases and I did a fair bit of surgical work in Japan and we used it I think as a cover. I think that was overdone a bit.

Well we’ll give you a shot in case you get an infection from your surgery and I’m not a doctor but I think we overused it in the finish. I know in the farming world they did. They did things that I

wouldn’t have done just because they thought it was a good idea. The body got resistance to it by the cover, the germs got used to the thing and set up their own defence mechanism so it was better to use it when they got the complaint and give them a shock. They didn’t have time to attack it.

Now that was the finish of the training course and I was sort of with the others. My sister was still with me and they needed her to keep me in order. We were both at Bonegilla and the bomb was dropped and we had six weeks to work at Bonegilla and I don’t think we did

the six weeks because one afternoon they, I think the soldiers, the patients told us that they’d dropped a bomb on Hiroshima. And that’s right, the war hadn’t ended and two days later they said the war was over and they’d dropped a bomb on Nagasaki and

the war was over. So we were told to pack I think that day and we were told at lunchtime to pack and catch the train at Albury at six o’clock and we had to be packed ready with everything, a certain number of us. And my sister, what happened to her? Yes, she had to pack too and a few of us and this friend of mine that I was with a lot of the time she was on

the draft too. I saw very little of her at Bonegilla. She was on the staff there and anyway she was one too and she was working in the wards and her uniforms hadn’t been done at the laundry so she didn’t have all of her uniforms. So she went to the laundry and said “I’ve got to pack and catch the train tonight, can I have my uniforms?” And they said “No, they’re not done yet, you’ll have to

do them.” So she had to work in the laundry until about half past four or something to get her uniforms to pack them and catch that train. She had to work in the laundry. We at least got a few hours off to pack and that was very exciting. And we asked a patient what was happening and we didn’t know the war news and the Allies were going up the islands and

they were at the Halmaheras at that time and they said “We think perhaps they’ll have a hospital in the islands up there and you’ll go in the Pacific somewhere” and somebody said “Oh no, you’ll go somewhere else”. And then we got to Melbourne and I think we went to Royal Park or Camp Cal or somewhere and they said that we were to go to Malaya to bring the prisoners,

nurse the prisoners so they’d be fit to come back. And we were sent to Ingleburn straight away and joined the 2/14 Hospital and we got equipped to go to Singapore and we were packed and the ship was to go that day or the next day and they said “we’re going to reduce the draft because

the prisoners are going to be flown back. They’re in a better state than we expected and we won’t need so many on the ship”, so they reduced it to about half. So that must have been the day before because they were to sail the next day, the next morning. And they gave us permission to see the boat off and it was pretty hard. We’d been dying to go over and help the prisoners

and we were left standing on the wharf. So we knew what all these other girls had been through when they were pulled out at the last minute and those sorts of things happen. So they had all these girls in Sydney with nothing to do and nowhere to send. Things were, peace was just as confusing as war and they were not organised for peace, so we were in Sydney for about three weeks and

doing odd jobs for them and they sent us back to Melbourne and started to place us where we were needed and I did odd jobs like on the trains, taking the prisoners interstate and a couple of trips that was all and that was quite good.

Well they had RAPs on the troop trains and you had a

carriage to yourself and the boys used to get up to all sorts of things, breaking windows and throwing bottles around and things and scrapping and you’d get cuts and bruises and well that was quite good. I think you came back, you didn’t come back with anybody. You’d just take them over and the next day, you had private board when you were there and you’d come back

and perhaps go on another trip if they needed you but you were sort of on call for trains.

Adelaide was my run and there was about three hundred on the train. Some prisoners of war and some troops being relocated and there was a fair bit of movement of troops then when they all had to be taken back to their States. They had to go through medicals, even

in their home state or in transit.

This was straight after the, like instead of, because they were flying troops and prisoners back they all had to be taken to their home states. Some of them flew to Sydney and trained from Sydney to Melbourne and Melbourne to Adelaide and Adelaide to Perth and they had

one nurse on each train.

Oh they were good. The prisoners of war were good if they were allowed to travel and they wouldn’t, they would be at the base hospital until they were well enough to travel. The prisoners were fit enough to go home by train after being examined and that was quite good but there were other troops as well. The only, I thought “Oh God”, it’s a big responsibility

to be able to diagnose what’s wrong with them when they come and say they’ve got a headache or they’ve got a pain but there’s always someone around to give you advice and the officer on the train was very good, probably a doctor. I don’t know but he was quite good and the only, I had headaches and cuts and things but the only medical condition was a fellow who got chicken pox.

And of course that was an infectious disease so I told the officer and an ambulance met the train somewhere and he was carted off. He wasn’t allowed to be on public transport with an infectious disease. That was the only problem I had and it was quite good. It was an experience a couple of times but then I did RAPs and made up my mind I’d go to Japan, so that’s how I went to Japan.

Well the soldiers were absolutely elated. I mean if they had a pain that they could put up with they wouldn’t tell you. They’d take it home and sort it out then. Some were wanting to talk to you and that’s why they had a headache.

Nothing really serious at all. So they were, just so overwhelmed to be returning home and it was wonderful and you couldn’t help but feel how special it was for them after all that time to be returning home and being able to go in

their group and not in an ambulance or having to stay in the base hospital for months. Years some of them had to stop and they went back to their families and they’d be like a fish out of water, very hard for them. They’d be out of touch with things because things move on and you stop the same mentally.

I thought it was very hard for them but they were in great spirits when I was with them.

Well I just thought good it was. It was almost unbelievable.

It had been so long and it was just a wonderful relief that it was over but I still had the ambition to go a bit further and I was young enough to do that and a lot of the others just felt that they’d had enough. And my sister, when you sign on you sign on for the duration and twelve months after so it was about 1946

before a lot of them got out. If you were getting married, there was a point system, how long you’d served and what you were going to do and if you were going to do your training in some particular field or go back to university you could get out a bit sooner. But if they required your services you could wait for the twelve months after period but

I had my mind made up.

Well in the printing works we were printing books about Japan for the Occupation of Japan, for the soldiers, the officers to take and we were, the Manpower sort of commandeered us because we weren’t doing anything in Sydney.

We were just sightseeing and having a good time so we had to work in this factory and I used to read the books and I said “Oh I’d love to get one of those books” but I never have. I will one day and all the information where everything was and what the air force had photographed. They had all the photographs and all the war history in those books for officers to take with them, so I knew they were going.

So when I came back and I had an aide posting in Melbourne and the commandant came to check on me, that I was at work and not round the streets and she asked me what I was going to do and I said I was going to Japan and she said “Oh the Government haven’t decided yet”. And I said “They will decide to go and I’m going.”

She never had the heart to stop me really. She was soon ringing up and saying “you’re going to Japan” and I went to Japan. I was very lucky and the girl that my sister and I started with also went to Japan. My sister didn’t but she went to Japan so we joined up on the same day and we were discharged on the same day and we’re still friends. So that’s how I came to go to Japan and

that was sort of a little bit of push there as quite a lot wanted to go and I sort of let it be known that I was going whether you were going to send me or not.

I was always interested in Japan as I’d had an uncle who had been there as a tourist. He was a stamp collector and he used to talk about Japan a lot and I was always a bit interested in Japan.

I was interested in geography at school. I think we had a good teacher and I wanted to be over there and that was the only way that I’d be able to go I suppose.

Well that happened fairly soon afterwards. The war ended in August and we arrived in Kure in March the following year and I was there

about fifteen months, I would say. And that was like starting all over again because the hospital had to be set up our way and it was quite an experience really.

Yes we were on the Manunda, the hospital ship and

we slept in the hammocks in a ward and we learnt Japanese language. We had to do that everyday I think on the ship and learn the basic words and how to count because when we got there we had Japanese working for us in the wards. They were the wards maids and they were running the meals out and you had to call your patients by numbers.

In another hospital if you had to tell them, your walking patient to deliver the meal you mightn’t remember his name and you had to learn all the names of the new people so you’d always refer to the man with the eye or the man with the leg or the man with the broken arm. It was always the complaint

and they knew who to take the meal to but in Japan you had to know the number of the bed, so you told the Japanese girl the number of the bed so you learnt your patients by numbers, what number they were.

Well even you got that way in talking to the other nurse, you’d say “Oh Bed Fourteen” and you got in the habit of giving them a number and the wards maids and that

were very good and they did a lot of the running around with the meals and things like that, so it was nearly all nursing. It meant the patients, the walking patients did less there and they were harder to get out of bed as they liked the stop in bed. I think they thought the war was over and I’m here for a holiday and it was a bit of change of attitude

something that we noticed almost straight away. I think even amongst the girls it was a bit more isolated and you were working for a cause during the war but that cause was no longer there. It was a change and I think that was getting you used to for more changes later on when you were no longer in the

army.

That’s right, it was more for what you could get out of it yourself. I mean you were in another country and it was important you saw a bit of that country by any means sometimes. You sort of, to put it as a common term

you used people a bit. You got to know people in transport because they wheels. It wasn’t because he was such a nice fellow but it was good to cultivate someone that you could use. I think that was sort of not done in a mean way but it was important that you could get around. You didn’t waste your time if you had any spare time and it was an interesting country,

beautiful country.

Yes, we landed at Kure and then we went by barge to an island where we had the hospital. Well Kure was a, it was a foggy, dull, lifeless morning that we arrived and all this bomb damage was done around. The ships were bombed

and still there and the piers, the docks were all bombed and it was so gloomy and a band played Waltzing Matilda and it was absolutely marvellous that they came down on a cold, foggy morning, I suppose they were told to, and gave a welcome. That was something that you never forget and we caught a barge.

And then we caught barges and we went to an island that had an old naval academy, which was the big one for Japan and they were making all the ships and subs and everything. The New Zealanders

had been there for a few days or a week or so and then each country had their zones and they moved to another zone and we took over that particular zone of Kure, Hiroshima and Etajima and around there and that was the Australian Forces to occupy that part of Japan. So we set up the hospital for them and

out of this naval academy we made wards and mess and got the building, which had been wrecked by Americans. They had sort of made it so the Japanese couldn’t use it and start off again. It wasn’t bombed and I think some of the houses nearby were hit but it wasn’t. It didn’t have bomb damage but the plumbing was pulled out and

the electricity and things well we had to renew all those and set up a hospital. And the nursing was much the same as in all the others. It was just general nursing. You had your surgical wards and your medical wards and that sort of thing, so the nursing was exactly the same. It was all nursing and the Japanese did the cleaning and all the jobs like that, so it was all nursing there. We did night duty

there and they were big wards. There was a lot of running around and walking to get to places in this big building but otherwise it was very well organised. It was good to work there and it functioned very well and the patients, a lot of the patients were accidents that happened because they were

sort of cleaning up ammunition dumps and chemical storages and they were making the area safe and they had to see that the guns were not loaded. They had big, Etajima was fortified as most of Japan was and they were going to defend their country to the last

man and they would never give in. They were determined if they were driven back to the home country they would defend that and if they lost every man they would defend it, so they wouldn’t have a chance if they had to bomb it to get in there in the first place really. They had a lot

of their factories underground so you couldn’t stop them making ammunition or anything as you couldn’t bomb them if they were underground. They had their chemicals stored in caves and there was a lot of work to get the island safe too.

Oh ,

you could have any kind. You could have Indians, perhaps New Zealanders and it just depended how close they were to our hospital or the next one that was stationed in another area. It was mainly Australian because that was our area to occupy at the time but they were a mixture. The Indians were also a part of the British and the Allied Occupation Force.

They eventually got their own hospital in Kure, the Indian Hospital. They set that up early too, so you had an air force hospital at Iwakuni, you had the navy at, I don’t know where the navy went. I think we had some of the navy too from ships that called in and we had some of the navy. So you had a mixture, whoever was sick and needed a hospital.

No, no, we didn’t have Japanese. No, they had their own I suppose.

No, no, it was Occupational Forces hospital.

Well I was mainly in the Officers’ Ward and the Surgical Ward there which were both very

high powered sort of, a lot of the Surgical Ward was full on. It was a very busy ward and they did big operations too and the Officers’ Ward well you had a mixture of medical and surgical.

My cat would like to go out, a couple of doors there. I don’t know if she’ll go with you. She might go out this one now that you’re there. Can you do that?

(TAPE STOPS)

Well you weren’t supposed to. That was one thing you were supposed not to do. You were drilled on how you were to behave towards them and how you had to teach them about what democracy was about and you got lectured on that on the boat going over and the boys were told they were not to

do this and do that but that didn’t work out. They were friendly to them and the Japanese were very polite and there was no trouble at all. They’d move to one side in the street and they treated us with respect and we treated them with respect and what the boys did was their business really. But as far as when I was there, there was never any trouble.

There were a few little things that they did which I thought were a bit mean but that was none of my business anyway.

No, I think out. Some were out to take it out on them and being smart I didn’t think they were supposed to do that.

No, they worked outside, mainly outside. They would

sweep the corridors and they did repair work, repairing a lot of the work. They worked with Australians and they worked quite well.

No, we had some

ex-prisoners of war that were, wanted to come over in the Force and they treated them quite well. No, I don’t think on the whole they did take it out on them. I think a lot of people wouldn’t have gone that wanted to take it out on them. I think if you had that attitude it wasn’t that sort of expedition. It was to

teach them democracy and that was the idea of occupying the country and to help them get back to a non military lifestyle because even children were taught to be soldiers and to die for their country. So they had to change that attitude.

Not really, not to the patients, no, because the majority hadn’t been, they’d been

in the islands and some of them had rough times and had come across Japanese and that but I don’t think there were that many. Some went on from New Guinea to Japan for a time before they returned to Australia and they had faced the enemy but I don’t think they were bitter.

Some were bitter, I’d say some were bitter and were petty but we didn’t come across that sort of thing. I didn’t see bad treatment. Oh you’d get the occasional fellow that would push a Japanese, which the Japanese that were working around the hospital were usually elderly

anyway and they were country peasant type people so they weren’t for getting in anybody’s way, so I don’t really think there’s a lot to say about that. There were other things that went on I know but I didn’t see them so I couldn’t really give my opinion on them.

Oh there was no military activities. I mean we had guards on the hospital gates and we had guards in places, but on the whole there wasn’t any. There wasn’t any activity. We had parades now and again. They loved parades and they marched around in their uniforms. That was fairly common and it was to show that we were there.

And the Japanese didn’t resist that at all. Yes, we had the Scottish Regiments and we had Welsh Regiments and they all had their turns as guards and some of them we found it a bit difficult to get on with. They were a bit persistence with their appearances at the hospital

but we managed.

Well they always had some bright idea of having a dance and so many would get go or if we were having a dance and they heard about it they’d just arrive, just to come and see you but with the idea of going to the dance. We had a fair bit of that but we sorted that out. Some were rather persistent.

Yes, yes, that was a personal thing anyway, so you got out of your problems.

Yes, we were in one of the big rooms which we had as a dormitory and they were in partitions and there were about eight in each section.

We lived in this great big room on one of the floors and the hospital was up the other end of the Academy. It was a huge building.

Well we were only near it. You could see Hiroshima from the hospital, where it used to be. It was across the water and so we caught a ferry. We got a bus

to the other side of our island and got a ferry across and then we’d get to Hiroshima and it was only a few miles from Kure and it was just up the road from Kure really, because they were both big industrial towns. Kure was the big port and they had a lot of munition factories and Hiroshima was the big

city which I suppose had military places too, but of course everything was blown up so you wouldn’t know what military establishment were there. There was absolutely nothing left of Hiroshima.

Well

it was unbelievable that there was once a city there. It was still sort of dead while we were there. It was six months that you weren’t supposed to go there because of the radiation but we went there as soon as the six months were up and there was still no growth in the trees or anything. Everything was absolutely dead and I suppose couldn’t really be cleaned up because of the radiation until

from then on and then gradually they cleaned it up, well parts of it, and they had little shops along the street and people were making things and selling them and that’s where you’d cash your cigarettes. You’d perhaps buy a piece of material for a packet of cigarettes, so you traded. But what they really wanted was

food. They wanted chocolate and condensed milk for their children. They were starving and they wanted food, so if you happened to get an issue of cigarettes, which you got free once a month, and if you didn’t smoke you’d trade them for something. And if you could buy a tin of condensed milk at the canteen you could trade that.

You weren’t supposed to but you did because the lire, Japanese money was not worth anything and the money we used at the canteen was printed money, Australian money but it was just paper money and it was no good to the Japanese, so you couldn’t trade any other way.

No, you had Occupational money, which was no good to the Japanese but I think you could swap some of your money for lire later on but at first there was no trading there, so there was no point in having lire because there was nothing to buy.

I think a thing that was sort after was medicines. If they could buy an Aspro they would pay, you could get quite a decent article for a packet of Aspro’s. You could buy a diamond ring or something quite expensive. Goods were the value, not money.

Yes, it was common. You weren’t supposed to but you did.

Well there would have been if you were caught but you made sure you didn’t get caught doing it and there was no harm in it. If you didn’t smoke and you were given them anyway as you weren’t buying them and taking them off anybody and you were doing them a favour if you

weren’t giving to a smoker, because he’d just smoke them and get more lung cancer. They were no good to you if you didn’t smoke. It was like the beer in Katherine, if you didn’t drink it you’d swap it. So that’s what we were doing, what we didn’t use we swapped.

Yes, yes.

Well usually it took three months to change over because you have to be replaced and another contingent takes your place so it takes about three months to swap over. By the time we left they were building houses for civilians to come up and they were building schools, so

dependants were able to go and live there after we’d been there, so it changed after that.

Well we would get another contingent of sisters and AAMWS. After your twelve months they’d work on replacing you so gradually it’s all new staff and you had the chance, we could have signed on for another

twelve months too. You were asked if you wanted to stay and you could stay another twelve months but by that time I’d had enough and I was ready to get out of the army and I was getting older and a bit more, getting older and it was time I got back to normality again.

Oh yes, well that was very good training there in Japan there because it was all nursing, it was all different and it was a well run hospital. It was quite good but that didn’t count when you came back because you had to train again.

Yes.

Yes, they would, their English would improve and they learnt Australian ways and a lot of them would have employment for quite some time because they were very reliable and quite good workers and they would have had quite a lot of jobs created through that. Especially on the island because they could get work then on

that island which was really a fortified island prior to the Occupation.

Yes, straight away. We went to Royal Park and got a discharge and we had so much leave owing to us. We did get a couple trips away in Japan, so we used some of it

and we were discharged and I was ready to be discharged. I’d had enough and I was contented to go back as a civilian and well that was the start of another life again. Here I was when I was eighteen and my mother wanted me to train as a nurse, three years seemed like an eternity. But when

you’re twenty five as I was three years didn’t seem so long, so I did eventually, I went to a careers person when I came back. I didn’t really want to train but I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to do besides nothing. And I couldn’t bear to do nothing for long, so I went to a careers person in Melbourne and they said “Its quite obvious that you

should do your training now you’ve had all that experience.” So I decided to train as a nurse and that’s what I did and I started off again like rookies school and went through it all again and they didn’t give you any time off at all. And I started on the 3rd of December, and that would be 1947 I think and I finished on the 3rd December three years later because

I didn’t want to spend a day later. At least I trained. I suppose that was an achievement but it was difficult.

I trained at the Warragul Hospital. I always say I trained in the army and got a certificate at Warragul Hospital. I don’t understand it but that’s how I felt. The training in the army hospital was really good training so that’s what I did, my three years

again and got my certificate and then I went to England and Europe and still went on my ships, which I always wanted to do.

Yes, I worked but I did private nursing which I enjoyed. I worked for two months and got enough money to travel for two months and then when I came back I was back a while and

then I got married and then I went back to farming, which I love and I was I suppose in a way I’m still a farmer. I still potter and that’s my life story.

Yes, I did write a book. When I got married, I hated school, but

when I was about nineteen I got an idea of being a teacher. I used to do a bit of teaching when I was in the last grade at school because they were short of teachers and they used some of the people to teach the little ones and I spent most of the last year teaching little ones how to read and write and hold pencils and wipe their noses and things like that and I rather liked that.

I’ve always liked children and at nineteen I thought, before I joined the army, I thought I’d like to be a teacher but I didn’t know how to go about it and my parents weren’t sort of educated to know how I could do teaching and support myself. Being from the country you’re not up with all those things but when the war came and I did the

nursing with St John’s well I was sort of a nurse because of the way it happened and how it was easy in a way to get into. So when I got married I was still keen to learn and I did a bit of night school and learnt a few things. And that was mothering and farming with a little bit of spare time instead of sleeping, so I did courses

and after a while Adult Education started and I did every course who’d take me. I did everything I could do just for something to learn and then creative writing was one and I thought “I don’t know what creative writing is but the only way to find out is to go”, so I went to the class and

there were a lot of teachers there. A very good teacher teaching it and it was very funny. I remember one exercise you were given, I think about five subjects and you had to write an essay on one of the subjects, because I didn’t know how to read the question and I went home and oh it was such fun and I wrote something on every subject. But I don’t waste

time so I only wrote a start and an introduction, then the body and then I did the conclusion so I had every subject done in a few lines, telling him the whole story and handed it into the teacher and she didn’t say anything. But another teacher was sitting there and she said “She’s sorry”, this was the next week, “I’m sorry, I haven’t finished my assignment” and I thought

“God, you must be a teacher, you’re slow” and she bought it the next week and the teacher read it out and I have got a copy of what she’d written and of course when I read this and she’d written about one subject, which you were supposed to do but you had to do pages and pages and you had to research. I think the subject was

what you thought of women writers or something and she wrote about the women writers who weren’t recognised and it was absolutely fascinating to read and I got really hooked on it. So we had a lesson on her thing which was very interesting and after that lesson, the main teacher didn’t sort of say “Jean’s the bottom of the class”

but she kept me in after class and told me how wrong it was, how to improve. So the next time she explained that she’d give a title and you wrote about the title, which I did. So when the classes all finished she approached this one who had written this good story,

“Would she sort of guide me a bit?” We’d finished the classes at the Adult Education and “would she sort of take me under her wing and give me a bit of help along?” And she sort of like interviewers do, they prod you and get bits out and she’d say “well tell me more about that” and I’d

say “That’s nothing” and she’d say “There’s a story there” and she finally said “You should write a book and I’ll help you” and so I did and that’s how it started, but I did change it a bit because I sort of put it in my own words and I didn’t use her. She guided me and told me about copyrights and all the things I couldn’t say and for one thing I used

sexist language. I mean I called Aboriginals by a different name because you did in the Territory and that you couldn’t do that and she told me what you couldn’t do but I shifted it about a bit. And I asked her to help me near the finish and she said “No, I’ve taken you as far as I can take you and it’s up to you to do the rest”. And left me in the lurch a bit and I thought “Well I won’t do it that way, I’ll do it my way”,

which I did.

Well it’s just what I’ve told you today but I wrote the story but I did it in my style, trying to do the right thing too, which is not politically correct as far as an author goes, but it was read and there’s a lot of politically correct books that are never opened, as I found out, so I said

“I’ll start and write another one now as I’ve learnt a bit more.” I just want a bit more time.

Oh I wouldn’t know. I don’t put a title to them until I’ve finished because.

Oh Shut The Gate is the one I’ve written but I didn’t have a title until the lady who helped me lift the gate open and then I got the title and changed the book. And then the best part of it was, I think a lot of books never get

written so when it was finished I put it in a yellow envelope with her address on it and I tripped out the hills where she lives and I put it in her letterbox and it looked as if it came from the post office. So she cleared her mail box and she put it on the shelf and thought “another book”, put it in the pile of her literature for school

And that and never touched it for a week or so and I was thinking “Oh God, I’ve done the wrong thing” and I was nervous about it and then the phone rang one day and she said “Oh, I couldn’t believe it. I opened it up and thought just another book” and she saw that I’d written it. She didn’t understand the title so I had to explain that it was her. She said “What a terrible title, where did you get that from?” I said “I got it from you”.

She said “I would never think of a title like that” but I said “No, but you left the gate open when you went home” and I went back and I said I know the name of what I’ll call that book and that’s how I got the title. Put that through the book, shut the gate and that’s the finish. And that’s time we shut the gate, isn’t it?

Well I think

that’s enough don’t you? You don’t want to hear about what’s happened since because, bring some more tapes and I’ll tell you what went on from then. Anyway thank you for being interested and it’s a pleasure to have you.