Australians at War Film Archive

Right-o, good.

Well the major points in my life, at the finish of my life actually, or the finishing period, was getting married.

Coming home after seven years in the army and I met up with a girl who, whom I’d known all my life, she was still free and so was I, so we married. That was the major point, that went on then until she passed away 44 years afterwards.

And prior to that we, I was born in Scone, Mum died when I was nine days old and then we came home and lived with the grandparents, and the auntie and uncle. Worked, worked all the while with them, with the Depression coming on

then. And when I was 19, 1929, up until then the uncle had a horse and cart for, he was a general carrier. And we were always on, two other boys, two brothers, they were always on the cart helping him with his deliveries and what not, even though we were only kids.

And then in 1929, February 1929, the main street of Coonamble was burnt out, both sides, and we had to cart most of the bricks that went into the, into the rebuilding of that between 1929 up til,

we helped them until 1936. But they were the main things, and we had a good childhood you know, we were out on, although we were helping and we worked hard. Two brothers, one was two years older, and the other one was four years older, but apart from that, had no complaints.

As I say the Depression was on, we had some funny instances in it and funny little stories can be told about it.

Yes, well now when I was called up in, end of 1941,

we went into the, into the Ordnance Stores, we did army training, infantry training at Bathurst, there weren’t many stores there at that particular time. We did a few months in Bathurst, and then we went to Muswellbrook for about seven or eight months. From there we,

we did all ordnance training there, and went to a new group which we went through the rest of the war, was the 2/1st Ordnance Beach Detachment, and we went up to Wallangarra. Wallangarra was bitterly cold, just quietly. And we did more ordnance training there,

and we did a lot of more infantry training, they put us through actually a commando course, we did a lot of work there. Then we went from Wallangarra, they took us up to Cairns, just onto Trinity Bay actually, just, and of all things, they place we were at, was called

Dead Man’s Gully, which wasn’t a very nice thing to be told that you were going up to Dead Man’s Gully. But that’s the way we went, and we did, we did all our amphibious training and everything up there, and out at Tolga, which is about seventy miles inland from Cairns. We did more training,

got familiarised again with the ordnance, and what had to be and what not. We were then for, oh quite a while, we must have been there for six months, I suppose. Then we went across to the islands.

No, no, actually they weren’t, they were a Coonamble family, and all the relatives are still in Coonamble. But they were, Dad was an electrician, he came from Melbourne and he worked at the power station. Each town had, in those days, their own

power station. He worked at the power station there, and then met up with Mum, and he got a job over at Scone as the 2IC [second in command] of the power station at Scone. So they moved over there. That was until, that was about 1920,

that they moved over to Scone. Well in 1922, when I was born, Dad, the grandparents and the auntie, well I think that’s how it was, I wasn’t talking to them at the time, that was, I was only nine days old, after. But then Dad couldn’t stay there any longer, so he went over to,

he got a job as the electrician over at Narrabri. He was there for the next ten years, went back to Scone to do the wiring of a, of a new section of the hospital there. Whilst he was there, he developed pneumonia

and died over there as well. They’re both buried in Scone, and then we came back to Coonamble and that’s where we were raised and lived until I went into the army.

Yes, yes. Mum’s auntie and uncle,

neither of them married, and they raised us, reared us, and we had a pretty good rearing actually. As I say, things were, things weren’t always good in those days, but we got through alright. We worked hard and, but, many good times at the same time.

Oh, she died of gland, no, not glandular fever, oh I can’t think of the fever that she died of, anyhow.

No.

Hmm?

Might have been, I think, yeah,

sounds like it, yes, yes. She died there, she was only 27 at the time.

Of Dad, we didn’t see much of him, as I say he was working at Narrabri then, which was fifty odd mile away. No, it’s more than fifty,

fifty to Pililga and then about another thirty odd, round about eighty or ninety miles away. And he’d come home in his annual holidays, he’d, he’d ride a motorbike home through from Narrabri to Piliga, and there was no roads in there, that was only tracks, more less, and he rode that motorbike over, and that would be only once every, oh sometimes

it might two years before we’d see him again. He’d have two weeks with us and quite enjoyable weeks, yeah. But he was, actually he was round about, round about my build really, only a small man.

Coonamble in those days, was a population, I think, of about two and a half thousand people.

Thinking in the district and everything, best part of nearly four thousand. Coonamble was very nice little town, beautiful, progressive. And as all country towns, every one knew every one, that was a bit of a

deterrence at times, but you knew, if any sickness, or anything in your family, you knew that there was always friends from the whole of the town, not just from your neighbours. And very friendly, very sporting town, as all country places area. And there was a lot of sport, football, cricket, tennis,

swimming, the whole lot you know. And everyone really joined in with whatever went on. If there was a socials for the school, or anything at all, fetes or what not, everyone was involved.

I was, played cricket and tennis,

little bit of football, but they were too big for me, I was only a little fellow. And then later on, I took on hockey, played a lot of hockey for the three years I was in Japan, actually, yeah.

Well I must say that I wasn’t a

Bradman by any means, I never got out under thirty and I never got to forty. As for bowling, well I had a job to throw the ball from one end of the pitch to the other, so they never put me on. But I enjoyed, really enjoyed cricket, it was a wonderful game, still is a wonderful game too.

Well as a young boy, Sir Donald [Bradman] of course, he was the number one, but then there was Stan McCabe, Larry Grimmett, Fleetwood Smith. Fleetwood Smith and Grimmett were both spin bowlers. Oh I don’t know,

apart from Bradman and McCabe, I don’t know of anybody else. You know, I never got, delved into it that much, really. But as a kid you get your heart set on this bloke, he’s a champion and all that sort of stuff, you see. And, but they were just to name a few of them, yeah. But for the locals, we had very good

local players and tennis players.

Well when we were growing up, there were, probably in the whole of the Coonamble, there might have been, oh three or four dozen

radios, and that’s all you had. When a game was on over in England, they’d, we’d go around to a friend’s place, and we’d sit up with their two boys, Mum and Dad, and we’d sit there until lunchtime came on at the cricket, then we’d have to walk home.

Which was, oh around about a half a mile or so away, but that’s, that’s the only way we could hear sport. The uncle had a radio, one of the very first to come to Coonamble really, and it was a battery job, and they had about six or eight big

batteries, each of them about around the size of the modern milk crates, and they were all outside on the wall. And the aerial used to run from a gum tree down the backyard, on the river bank, which was about, I suppose seventy yards onto a pole up near the house, which was a normal electric

light pole, with another two inch galvanised pipe bolted onto the end of it, which took it up to around about forty feet. An aerial was stretched right along then, you see. We’d all gather around it, the neighbours and everyone would gather around it. And one particular instance I remember,

at night time you used to get a reasonable reception, not a good reception, but reasonable. Anyhow the uncle was a bit of a larrikin, and he had a mate who was very serious about radios and things. And Ernie put, he said, “I’ll just have a shot at Eli tonight”, so

he got the gramophone and put it beside the phone. And anyhow, he started to play a Chinese record. So he rang, rang Eli, and he said, “I’ve got, how are you, are you picking up any stations?”, and Eli said, “Not too many”. And Ernie said, “Well, I’ve picked up China”.

He said, “Well I’ll put the phone near the, near the radio”. Anyhow he put it down near the radio, and played this what’s-her-name. Eli went into a tizzy and raced out, jumped into his old Model T Ford and came around.

Of course when he got there he found out it wasn’t China at all, it was just the business. But that was, that was one of the little things that used to go on in those days, you know. Yes, the old radio, the radio itself was about four foot long and stood that high and about that wide, a monstrous thing, you nearly wanted a utility to carry it around.

There were only, Horrie Francis, and old Foghorn Charlie, they were two in the town. There were several, several of the country

men that were in it. Yes, I knew, I suppose I’d have known a dozen or more of them in World War 1.

No, they didn’t, well the same as our diggers of today. I heard one, one chap

here in Dubbo said, “Oh”, he was sitting beside me at the breakfast actually one morning, and he said, he said, “I’ve never been to an RSL [Returned and Services League] function before, on Anzac Day”. He said, “Well I came along today, because of my uncles”.

They’re up top. Looking for the girls, they’re up top. And anyhow, he said, “They tell me all they do is talk about the war and all that”. And I said, “Well just sit there and take in what you hear”, I said, “And you won’t hear. I’ll guarantee at the end of the breakfast, when I ask you,

you haven’t heard anything”. And he said, afterwards, he said, “Well now, I never heard any war stories, I heard a lot of funny stories, but nothing to do with the actual war”. He said, “They were army stories”. And that’s right, that’s quite right. In the old diggers used to, used to

be the same. They’d say, “Oh it was damn terrible over there in France or Gallipoli”, we had three or four from Gallipoli, and it was terrible. But they never went into detail. So, you know, they didn’t mind saying I pinched, I pinched a Jeep or I did so and so from the, like we did in the,

World War 2. But the lighter side of stuff, that’s all.

Well I think that what, I might say, what little I saw, I only saw about four years of it in the islands, but

you saw enough to say, “I’m going home to live a normal life, we don’t want this anymore”. It’s absolutely disgusting to think people are fighting against one another, and the injuries and that, that’s apart from the ones that were dead. When the war finished

and I went over to Japan, I was, I went down through Hiroshima in January of 1946. And I don’t know whether it was good fortune or horrible fortune, but I had to take one of our Japanese workers to one of the hospitals there. And absolutely, the,

the injuries and that, that were on those people in there, the twisted bodies and things, was absolutely disgusting. So you don’t talk about those things. And I mean, we had a few, we had six killed one morning. But that’s enough, you don’t want to be talking about it, you don’t want to have that in your mind

all the time. You know it’s there, you know it happened, by why bring it up all the time. You talk about the good times, you talk about the silly things that you did, that you shouldn’t have done. Jump into a Jeep and pinch it and go out, run out of petrol half way through the trip and,

and hope that you didn’t get caught when you came back to camp.

Yes, I’ve got photos, a photo of it there too. It’s very old, it was built back in the late 1800s,

weatherboard, and or plank and fillet actually. It had a large dining room, we used to sit down, didn’t have chairs, we had stools there. There used to be stools along either side of it, you’d have about room for eight on each

side. We had a, the kitchen was just at the back of that, which wasn’t very, it was modern by those days, I suppose. And our fuel stove, the granny pot irons, and that sort of stuff. Big open fireplace in the lounge room, which was only, only as big as this room. Off that was a bedroom,

the main bedroom, and then a couple of other bedrooms in it, one was very small and the other one was big enough for a double bedroom and a wardrobe. Apart from that there was, and eventually they, they built another, another room onto the side of it. But a storm came there,

back in the, late, yeah about 1929, I think it was, a big storm came and it lifted the, lifted the, half of the roof off, landed it across at the hotel which was right across the road from us. It just lifted up, boom bang, put it down as though it was put there by a crane, you know.

Yeah, well that was it, we had a very big yard, yard would have been seventy foot, seventy yards long, I suppose. The river, the Castlereagh River ran along the, right along our back fence.

The fire, yes, on the, about six o’clock,

just before six o’clock on the 9th of February 1929, everything in the, in the town of course was well, there’s a hotel and couple of other buildings that were, did have the cement walls on them, or the brick walls. And we were sitting out

under our. Our old house, by the way, was the grandmother had a small shop there in time, just a lolly shop and iced drinks and that, and it had a veranda out the, over the footpath. We were sitting out there, and late in the evening, a very hot day, as you can imagine, February in Coonamble

or out in the west, is very, very hot. We looked up the street, one of the uncles looked up the street, and he said, “God, the School of Arts is on fire”, and all you could see was just one whiff of smoke coming out from under the veranda of the School of Arts, which was a double storey building. And in a matter of, oh I suppose,

a matter of ten to fifteen minutes, the whole thing was ablaze. And the fire brigade, they didn’t receive the call until around about twenty minutes later, which was quite so feasible, in those days, because people just, not like today, get on and

give them a ring straight away and that. And the brigade had to come, volunteers of course. And then there was a slight easterly breeze blowing, and the street runs north/south, easterly breeze blowing. And as you can imagine, you get a tinder dry house, with the

little bit of a breeze, it only takes a match, and bang, you’ve got a fire. Well it burnt through that building, through the next building, which was the Eassons Begg store. Then by that time of course, it was one great big bonfire, and with the easterly breeze, it blew it across to the

hotel, which was in the middle of the street on the other side, blew it across to there. Then it spread both north and south from there, finished up taking the, there was only one building left in the, on the western side, which was the commercial bank, it’s still there. A laneway

oh about, thirty yards up to the south of where the fire started, there’s a laneway, and on one side of the laneway there is a brick wall, and very high, oh about eighteen foot high I suppose. And further down, there’s another lane

at the end of the block, and it had a brick wall also, on there. Well the fire took the whole lot of that in between, that was those two brick walls that saved the whole of the main town of Coonamble from going up. On the other side, was a big, it went right down to the, to the corner on the other side of the house.

It went right through the night. Strangely enough, the Bank of New South Wales, which was on the eastern side and on the lane, where I said the brick wall was, across the lane, Bank of New South Wales wasn’t, wasn’t burned. But the next day, it did burn,

because the embers and that up through the roof, you see, and it didn’t get a start. But it did, and it went too.

Well they had a small fire brigade, a modern fire brigade in those days, and that was alright, they had a good, good fire brigade, they had a good lot of volunteers.

They had, the water pipes were down the centre of the street, but they were only possibly a six inch main, you see, and absolutely useless with that amount of fire that was going on. So they fought it from there, in front of the building, whilst, whilst they could, but of course it got too much for them, and they had to move down to the other end of the

street and try and, try and contain it from there. One of the, across the street on the northern side, north west side, there was a hotel. And the shop over it, was the money savers shop, that would be similar to Go-Lo and those places now, I suppose. And

old Charlie Sprell who was the manager, he wouldn’t let any, wouldn’t let the police in and they wanted, it had a veranda, you see, across the northern side, wooden posts, naturally. And one of the policemen, I think it was Sergeant Reeko or Bleechmore, Reeko I think, he wanted to get in and get access to

chop this veranda post down, so that the roof would fall up against the building, and stop the heat from going across the, to the hotel across the other side of the street. And old Charlie wouldn’t let them in. Anyhow, he forced them in, they broke the front door and they got in, and, three of four blokes, and got access, and cut the,

cut the veranda post down, and that saved the, that saved the fire from going right down, right down the street.

Yes, they, well yes, they did to an extent. They, in where it started was a fruit and vegetable shop, and as you know, with the

fruit, the packing is all straw, and electricity wasn’t a great thing in those days. And kerosene hurricane lamps were used a lot, especially out in the back stalls where the. And they came to the conclusion that it was a cat

that lived in the store there, for the purpose of keeping rats and mice down, and that the lamp was on a box somewhere, and the cat has probably jumped and knocked it over. And of course, put a hurricane lamp in amongst a pile of dry straw, and bang, what have you got? A townful of fire.

Well that was in January, that was in February of 1929. The Plaza Theatre was built in 1930, September 1930, I think it was, it might have been September 1929, I’m not really sure there. But oh within,

within four or five years they had it, it was built back. Two buildings that weren’t built up until 1936 and 1937, was the, what was termed the Rural Bank in those days, down on the north western end of the street. And the Hotel Coonamble which was on the middle,

the other side of the street.

Yes, the actual Depression, well officially the Depression didn’t start until about the 24th of October, 1929. That’s when the, the official date, but even before that, there was a, you know, there was a

real recession on, very, very, no-one had any money, sort of thing.

Well on a day to day level, well they got by, they got by, actually. Goods still came in from the, by rail.

There wasn’t many, there was certainly no road transport to there, to any extent. But people, they set up a shop here and there. I know the place on the corner that wasn’t, which I eventually worked at for five years, but they, they helped the other big store,

the other store took up an old building around in one of the back streets. And the firm that I eventually worked with, gave them you know, helped them out, sort of thing, as much as you could.

No they were all,

no they all, they all built back again, they all built back. As I say, there’s a lot of community effort, but, and of course a lot of insurance, but they all built back. I’ve got photos of the whole lot there. Go on.

The school that I went to was just around the corner

from where the main street that got burned. A convent school, run by the Brigidine Sisters, and the convent itself, caught alight actually, which would have been a terrible disaster, as much a disaster as any of the businesses. But the,

a lot of men rallied around and got up into the building, and beat it out, you know. They did have, while we are talking about how they fought the fire, there was a, what they called the bucket chain brigade. Houses that never got touched, are on the eastern side of the building that’s, the street, you see.

And they’re still there today, those houses. And a pile of men got all the buckets they could from everywhere, and they, they went in and they tried to fight the fire, when it’s in its early stages. They couldn’t stay there after everything got going pretty well, because of the heat. But the bucket chain brigade, they did a

good job.

Well I’d be telling a lie if I said I loved it. Going to school, well now we lived about a block and a half away from the school.

Of a morning, we’d be, we’d be up at daybreak and help the uncle on the lorry, he used to have an ice agency, and we’d be up at, the two brothers and myself, be up at daybreak, and we’d have to go down to the big shed. We’d cut ice

for oh, I suppose until seven o’clock, into various blocks, 7 pound, 14, 28 pound blocks for delivery around town. And we’d do that, we’d do the run around town and then when we’d come back, school started at nine o’clock. And

we’d have, snap over, I couldn’t say we’d have a quick shower, because there was no hot water services in those days. But we’d get dressed and go to school. Monday morning was my speciality, because I’d go Monday mornings, and like several

others, when the, you wouldn’t do homework of a Friday, you see. And we’d all gather at the front steps of the St Patrick’s Hall, which joined the school. And you’d say, “What answer did you get for so-and-so? Yeah, I got this, that and the other”. They’d come up on a, we’d go into class, and the

dear old Nun, I don’t suppose she was old, but she was a nun. She’d say, “Right, Ross Mann, what answer did you get for so-and-so”. And I’d tell her, because I’d written it down, because he had us. Well four or five of us would be in the same boat, you know. “Right, hold our, four cuts”, bang, bang, bang, bang. Every Monday morning, I was one

of their best customers. Then we’d, the two boys, the two brothers and myself, we’d go to school, sometimes we’d get there til lunchtime, other times we’d only get there til possibly 11 o’clock. Then we’d have to go and help the uncle on his rounds, the train used to come in,

Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 11 o’clock, it used to be a passenger train, which meant that it had the mail, and light goods on it. We’d, the uncle had, as I say, was the, general carrier, and we’d have to go over and

meet the train. The thing was that he was only able to afford another man for a certain amount of time through the week, you see, because, things were hard. And anyhow, we’d have to go over to the railway with him and get all the stuff, and then deliver it around town.

And in the afternoon, the train would go out at two o’clock, you’d have to take mail and goods back to the train, you see, which meant that we didn’t get much school of an afternoon, or for the whole day. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, was what they called a mixed train. There was a carriage for passengers,

and two or three lots of goods train, you see, all hooked on together. And anyhow, we’d, then we’d fit in whatever school we could. But it was alright, I suppose.

Who would administer,

dear old Sister Catherine or Sister Theresa, whoever was doing your class at the time, bang, bang. But then you’d go away, and I suppose it didn’t do you any harm, you did yourself harm by not doing your homework. Oh yes, and then we had a lot of,

a lot of sport, you know, normal school sports, play football and the cricket, we’d play cricket on Saturday afternoons or Sunday, mostly Sundays. You’d play cricket or football with school kids, there used to be great rivalry

between the, the convent school and the public school, still going on today, but not as blatant. Oh God we used to, used to have some fights with the, you know, “Fish eaters, you Catholic fish eaters”. The other blokes would say, “Public wowsers”,

and all that. All those things that made, made life bearable. But I don’t think, it oh, well there’s no doubt about it, there is a certain amount of bigotry on both sides. But altogether, school was good.

Well strangely

enough, if there was anything on, like if there was something on for the, a carnival or that for the Catholic school or the public school, the whole town got in, and they made that a successful function. But some people, and the old grandmother,

she was Irish, and very strict in her religion, but she used to always say, “There’s nothing worse than a bigoted Catholic”. Strange, and on the other hand, there were people there that had,

if they got the opportunity, they would cut a Catholic’s throat. You know, it was just that way of life. Unfortunately we’ve advanced to a certain extent, but we haven’t come, haven’t done the full circle yet, which is most unfortunate.

Ice. He never made the ice, he had the agency in town. The ice used to come from a place called Warrigal, now that’s down, I think, down the centre of the state, I’ve never ever found out where Warrigal Ice used to come from. There was a small ice factory in Coonamble, but it never

the ice there, wouldn’t last nearly as long as the ice from Warrigal. And to get it to Coonamble, they’d send it up on the rail, in what they called a louvre van, which I don’t think is used now. But they were louvre van was a high covered van,

and instead of solid walls, it had the louvres, just like your louvre window, it had the louvre. And they’d put about three or four inches of straw on the bottom, they’d put the ice in there in hundred weight blocks, what’s that 56 kilos or something, or a hundred, and hundred and twelve pound,

anyhow. And they’d stack it about, oh four inches away from the sides. Well now that four inches they’d pack down, pack straw down there. As the train was going, and the ice was, would be melting to a certain extent, naturally the straw would get wet, which created a

coolant, kept the ice in its full block. Well then we’d take it from the louvre van at the railway, across to where the uncle had a big cool room, which was about, I suppose, thirty foot square. The walls were packed with sawdust, they

were about four to six inches thick, they were packed with sawdust which is insulation in itself. And we’d take it over and we’d pack the ice into there. Then the following night, or, or the night, say Monday night we were getting ice ready for Tuesday mornings deliveries. We’d take it

from there over to the, to his packing shed over the other side of town, and then we’d cut it into, as I say, the little ice, ice boxes, would take a seven pound block of ice, which was about that, that long, oblong. And we’d cross, cut that with a cross cut saw, and cut it, and cut it again.

We’d pack ice into, to go out to the country, even right down as far as Walgett, which was seventy mile down, Corinda was sixty odd mile down in the other direction. And we’d have a great heap of literally hundreds of wheat bags. We’d put the

ice in them, we’d put a block of ice, it might be 56 pounds, might be a hundred weight. It’d go into the bag and then we’d pack it, all around, with sawdust. And we’d turn it over and we’d pack the other side of it, all with sawdust. Then we’d have to stand it up, and bag sew it.

And that would go right down, right down as far as Walgett, which I say, is about seventy mile down, and all the country people, no one had, well refrigerators weren’t even invented then. And they, they’d come in, and in the real hot weather, they’d, we’d have to do shifts at the packing ice and that, for people that

would come in after the picture show of a night. People would come in after ice, country people would put their order in when they came to town to the movies or a dance or whatever, and we’d pack it and have it ready for them when they’d come in. We’d spend, working right through the night at times, we’d have to do it in shifts. As I say, we were only kids, we

but there was only two men used to work, another one of the uncles would come in and give a hand.

Well a block of ice, well it’d last a couple of days, three days or so, three or four days, as long as they kept it wet, the bags wet, you know. But you’d,

you’d go to a seven pound block, which as I say, about that, that big by there. In the ordinary ice box, there’d still be oh I suppose, nearly quarter of it left the next morning. Things you don’t see today.

And you talk about these things, now like yourself, it’s alright for me because I know what went on, and I can still see all the action being done then. But it’s like the metric system, I talk in yards or feet, and you talk in centimetres and what not,

different world.

Well your bath day was usually Saturday, and there was no inside laundries, you only had a tin bathtub. And your laundry was out under the cedar tree out,

out in the backyard. You’d have to boil the copper up, you’d have about a, I suppose a sixteen gallon copper, you know what a copper is, of course. You’d boil that up and you’d get a dipper and fill a four gallon kerosene tin up, carry it up about

twenty yards to the, and empty it into the tub. You did have running water though, you had the cold tap there to turn on, but a shower you never had. And that was it. But Saturday morning, Saturday morning was well, sometime Saturday, you’d have a bath.

That might last you for two or three days. BO, [body odour] plenty.

Bloody cold, yes, you had no insulation in your houses or anything, and it would be just, just freezing.

You’d get in, you’d have a quick, have a quick bath and towel down and get dressed and get out in front of the log fire in the lounge room, as quick as you could. Yes, still life was good, life was good, the good old days.

Well in our playtime, we’d have to do a lot of chores around the, around the yard. Wood, we used to have to chop, chop the wood and see that there was plenty of wood in the place. We didn’t get,

didn’t get a big lot of playtime, we used to play of a, and in the summer time particularly, our playtime was after tea of a night, which used to come on about five o’clock. And we’d, to get, get old tyres or, and we’d

run up and down the races, and that in the street. There weren’t many vehicles about in those times, neither. And then we’d, we’d play marbles or spinning tops under the light of the street light. Street lights in those days, used to be right in the

centre of the street, swung from a pole on both sides, you see, that was your street light and that was your playground. Half past nine or nine o’clock come on, bedtime. And as I say, we had, we had a lot of, a lot of sport. And

there were, I think fourteen cricket fields around the town and the district. And not one of them had a blade of grass on them, they were like the concrete out there, they were baked ground, not a shred of grass. And that was our cricket field.

Football field wasn’t very much better. Ah, they were the good old days. And good to be able to look back on them, too.

When I left school, I was about 13. I went to, I went to work at one of the

general stores. Before that, I’d go to work at the stores sometimes for a couple of hours, go to school get a couple of hours in there, and go back to work at the shop. Well that, you had to fill in time. But I was about, I was just about 13 when I left school.

Well it was a general, it was grocery, it was produce, hardware. The produce used to be, oh, building materials too. Produce used to come by rail, you’d have chaff, oats, pollet, bran, wheat.

And the carriers would bring it to the shop, and another young chap, who unfortunately went into the army and he died after an operation at Bathurst. But the carriers would bring it over to the shop, and we’d, we’d have to unload

it. Two of us onto a bag of chaff, and we’d take it right up to the apex of the shed, and wheat, we could take wheat about seven or eight bags high. Pollet would go twenty bags, twelve bags high. But in chaff I think there was only about ninety pounds, and in pollet a hundred and forty pounds,

wheat was a hundred and eighty pounds to a bag, which was fairly, fairly strenuous work for two kids. I would have weighed seven stone probably, seven or eight stone if I dived in the water and got my clothes wet beforehand, before I got weighed. Ah yes.

The impact was, was terrible. See a man would go along to a police station on a Thursday, he’d get a slip, all depend on the size of his family. But he might get a slip for,

say thirty shillings or twenty one shillings or something like that, you see. And he’d come along to the shop that he designated, and you’d give him, as well as doing the bulk work, I used to have to do in the, the counter work as well, you see, you did the whole issue. And

it’d have on it, say you’re entitled, well when you added the total up, it might be, say he’s entitled to twenty one shillings. He’d say some, he’d get about 19, 19 and six or something, and

you’d, he’d say, “Oh gee, I’d like such and such”. Well that might, might cost eight pence, take him over his limit. But you’d have to, shouldn’t say falsify, but you’d have to drop the price down, and you’d just put him in as he’s received twenty one shillings. But that,

that was the general thing, you know. Didn’t always go down well with the boss, but still, there was a lot of times the boss didn’t know that it went on. That’s just the way it was.

People looking for work, well they’d go, that’s where the swaggies came in.

They’d be, definitely no work around the district, the farmers couldn’t employ any of them, you know, only on a part time basis. But they’d put their, their swag on and away they’d go, well they might, might go from here to Orange sort of thing, and roaming around. Chop a,

chop some wood for you, all that thing, give you a shilling. Today’s work, you wouldn’t even look at it. But that’s, that’s the way it was. And rabbits, rabbits were there by the, by the trillions actually. We used to have a rabbit drive every now and again, and so, which meant that you

put a, down in the corner of a paddock, and you put a extra fence across this way, and you’d drive them in, into the cage. And be nothing to, I’ve got a book there actually, three, four hundred pair of rabbits a night. And that’s, that was good eating, that

was they had to do. Or if they were able to come across a, an emu’s nest for instance, emu’s egg was great, they’d, they’re the equivalent of about twelve hen eggs, and they were wonderful for cooking with. Just bang, fry them, put them in, oh they make a beautiful

sponge cake, lovely. If ever you get one, make one. Right, what’s the next one?

That I?

To the?

Militia? Well, most, I won’t say most, but seventy percent I suppose of the people, joined the army as soon as war broke out, well within the next six months or so, you see. Well then there was a lot that were

underage, and their parents wouldn’t let them go. In our case, the three of us, we were, we were held back, not that we were all that interested to go to war, but we were held back from joining, because we were helping my uncle out on his carrying business. And

in those days too, by the way, people coming to town or going out of town, bakers, policemen, whatever, transfer, the uncle had to pack, pack the one here at the house, if he’s moving away. He’d have to go and pack, which we had to help do that.

Then unload the furniture van over at the railway, bring it here, and then take this one back and load it back into the business. See all that sort of stuff, heavy stuff, we had to do all that. And so we sort of couldn’t go away and leave, leave him with nothing.

But then eventually they caught up with us, and we had to go into the army, my two brothers went in six months before I did. And that’s how we came to be called up.

When war was declared, it was the 3rd of September 1939,

and we were sitting around our wireless in the lounge room. And the wireless was there in that, just about where that is, and there might have been eight or ten neighbours, we were all sitting around there. Knew that war was going to be declared,

but, they were all sitting around on the floor and everywhere in the lounge room, and then about, I think, about a quarter to nine, Bob Menzies came on. And he said, “Well England has declared war on Germany, and as such, Australia is also at war with Germany”. But I can still see that as,

clear as a bell. There was a hell of a, “Not another war”, you know, terrible. But I can see, the whole lot there, don’t ask me what I had for breakfast.

Memory doesn’t go back that far.

When that announcement was made, they, Uncle Ernie, he was sitting right beside the wireless. And he said, “Well you’d better

make the best of life now, because it’ll be right”, almost his exact words. “You’d better make the best of, best of things now, because everyone will be gone to the war”, he said, “There’ll be nothing”. One more.

Well we didn’t,

we didn’t really appreciate what was going on actually. We thought there’s going to be a war, and I remember different ones, of the whole of us kids, you know, playing around the next few days, and say, “I’m going to be, I’m going to fly one of them aeroplanes”, and, “I’m going to be sailor”.

Probably only two or three of us that got what they thought they were going to get. That’s what goes through a kids’ mind, you see.

Yeah, yeah. He was the uncle I was living with, and he had our horse lorry,

and then, in 1928, he, he was able to buy, I think he sold his horse actually. Able to buy a Model T Ford 13 hundredweight truck, and that’s what I learnt to drive on actually.

In our house, there was a driveway right through down. Anyhow, we, he taught us to drive when I was only seven. You’d drive forward and then back, and you’d have to do that until you could

really, get in and go with confidence, you know. The other two boys were, as I say, two and four years older than me, they were in the same boat.

Well for a start, we did know that,

we knew that Hitler was on the move, but that was all, everything through the radio of course, and the papers. But we knew that coast at any time, this was for a month before the war broke out, we knew that things were hotting up very, very well. And Chamberlain

then, went across to, to talk to Hitler and Hitler said, “Yes, alright, peace, there’ll be no war”. Then the next thing he marched, I think he marched into Poland, the next, couple of days later. That was it. But we didn’t know, as most people didn’t know, Europe was over there, we were here, there was no way you could possibly know what was going on.

But then when the war did break out and the various, you know, oh they’d go away from, on the train, there might be thirty or forty of them on the trains, going away. “Oh yes, we’re going to be big bronzed Aussie diggers”, sort of thing, you know. “But

we’ll go over there, and we’ll do this, that and the other and what happened”.

Well they, they went, oh they had to go straight through to Sydney. A lot of them, I think a lot of them were into Liverpool camps, or came back to Bathurst camps, or

around the Sydney area sort of thing, and you know, Bathurst, and probably around there. But we, it left us all sad to think that, oh Bluey Firth’s going, Tommy Murray’s going, Ernie Murray’s going, so and so is going, different ones, you know, that our, that were our friends.

And I thought, “Well God, you know, will we ever see them again”, that was the thought going on through everyone’s mind, I think. Unfortunately, quite a few of them didn’t come back.

They did have a farewell, although I think, well they did. They had dances

and different parties, private parties and things, you know, because they were going in a weeks time or something. They were, they were farewelled OK, get them away, and then they were, they were, had a bigger farewell for them, when they came home. I wasn’t there then, I didn’t come home for another three years. But

great activities in the town when they, when they were going, sad activities sort of thing, but then when they came back, the ones that were lucky, that was great, heaven on earth.

Well 6th, some 9 Divvy, I don’t know which divvy, divisions. No, most of our blokes were in the 6th Divvy, and the 9th Division rather. Then

another lot went into the 8th Division into Singapore. But the first lot, most of them went in, I think they were in the 9th Division.

Yes, I think he was name of, one of our old school mates, Tom Murray was killed at Benghazi, I think, in the Middle East. And yes, it sent a shockwave right through the town, you know. To know

that one of our, one of our blokes was. Then we had another one, another was air force, killed over in, fighting over in England, he was a fighter pilot from there.

Well the town, as I say, the country towns are a wonderful place. You get a little bit of trouble, doesn’t matter what it is, bang, you’re all in together. And they do give, give a lot of support. See in the bigger town and things, even like Dubbo, well you might get a,

your neighbours, your close neighbours, or a few odd friends. But in a country town, everyone is a, is a neighbour when there’s trouble.

Life just, well it went on

to a certain extent, normal, but it still had, you had that feeling that something was wrong. You know you get a hollow feeling of someone’s not here, sort of thing. But apart from that, everything went, well certainly didn’t go on as it did previous to the war

starting, but it did have, have that sense of community still there.

Well they were doing everything, they were having card parties, street

bazaars, all that, anything at all. Anything, they’d have a sports day, see, and whatever, wherever they could make a shilling, they could make it. The country women, or not just the Country Women’s Association I don’t mean, but the country women, used to make

oh, well they’d have a knitting day or all that sort of stuff. The country people would, would donate sheep or a beast or something, for a, some cause or other, you know. Anything that was a shilling in it, they’d,

turned out to be a lot of Jews, actually. There, they, no irrespect to the Jews, I like them, but that’s what was commonly called. But that’s the way life went on.

1922 and about seventeen, yes sixteen, seventeen.

Must have been seventeen. June 1922, to 1932 is ten, yeah, I’d be just on seventeen.

Well no, no, no I don’t think there was a frustration with the, all of us ones that weren’t

able to go, you know. Because you didn’t know what was going on, you were still just in your late teens, and you didn’t know what to expect or anything. So no, there was no frustration really. But a certain amount of relief when, when you did get your call up,

because you saw, everyone else was in there and they’re doing whatever, they’re doing their jobs, and so we’re going into help them, that was the, the general opinion of them.

No, no, Japan hadn’t entered. 21st of December,

1941.

Well we, the only thing, don’t actually remember a lot apart, anything specific. But you think to yourself, “Oh gosh, Japan’s into it, and how many million people

have they got, how many soldiers they’re going to, they’ve got to come, and we’ll have to fight like one thing to keep them out of here”. I think that was the general run of it. And then as they started to come down, and when they came and landed in Milne Bay, oh gee, you know,

Cairns and them will be the next issue. But I couldn’t say there was any special anxiety or anything.

Well, we knew that they were a very, very arrogant mob, a nation

that didn’t care for anybody apart from Japan, that was the general consensus for the whole lot. And we knew from them, by going into, into China and there in 1936, just how, what a horrible customer they were.

And they’d stop at nothing, if they wanted anything, they’d get it, didn’t, life didn’t mean anything to them. And that’s, that was their, the general opinion of the whole population, I think. They’ve got so many millions, and we’ve only got a couple, fourteen million

or something at the time, how are we going to stand up to these blokes.

Yes, I myself, I was a chocolate soldiers, chockos as they used to call us. We were ones

that, for some reason, we weren’t allowed by our parents, “No, you’ve got to stop at home, you know, you’re not going to war, you’re too young”, and all this. And eventually, when you did get called up and you were chockos, chocolate

soldiers. Term meaning, you’d melted easily in battle, you’d be no good in battle, you’d melt, you know, run like one thing. And that is why when I got called up, oh not only myself, but we were

in January, around about April, I think it was, that all of our mob that we were with then, decided we’re going to join the AIF [Australian Imperial Force].

Actually one of the officers came out and he said, “Any of you men that want to join the AIF, we’re taking a trainload, or convoy of them down to, down to Sydney, to Marrickville Barracks. So we’ll be taking them down tomorrow or the next day

whatever”, and we thought, “Oh well, gee, that’s good, we’ll join up and we’ll be no longer called a, a chocko”. As it turned out, the so-called chockos were the first ones to resist the Japanese at Milne Bay, which meant right through, or it

showed, that didn’t matter whether you were a chocko or not, you could still fight as well as the fellow that went, that was a regular army bloke before the war, because you still had that, you know, fight in you. Oh, there was a lot of arguments and dissention about that, “Oh you’re a chocko, we don’t want to, we don’t want to be in,

in the same camp as them”, sort of thing.

I don’t know, well it did, I think, I think it might have been brought about with the AIF blokes, really. Sort of well, I’m in here, are you going to come in, or are you going to stay,

and let us do the work, you know. That sort of attitude was the beginning of it. But oh, it turned out, everything turned out all right in the finish. I don’t know that, I don’t know that there were many, so-called chockos,

left in it after a while, I think they were all, all AIF. And of course, when you get the blokes who were, went out on, or didn’t, didn’t join because of the, what do they call it, their religious, religions, I won’t go in because it’s against my religion,

to, to shoot someone or something like that. But in the finish, I don’t think there were too many, well as far as I know, there weren’t too many so-called chockos left in, they were all AIF men, and all fighting along with the old fellows.

Well they weren’t very happy about it, weren’t very happy. Because we were going through the same, the same military training as the AIF blokes. And we had to be on the same level of training, as they were.

I will say this though, that when we first went in, we were doing that, that infantry training, and oh I don’t know, it just, we didn’t really, didn’t like being referred to, as chocs.

Well it was there to back up the, it was there to go in the front line if they, if necessary. I mean they could have been sent, they didn’t have to be asked, well you’re in the militia, you’re a chocko, do you want to go to war? It was a case of, right-o, you have been called up, you are in the

army, you’ve going. General Muthesalem says you’re going there, so that’s it, you’re there. And that was the whole, the whole stint.

Yes we did. First of all we started off by, the first,

the second day we were in camp, we started off by, of all things, learning how to dig a slit trench, and that was done by numbers. You had to swing the pick, one, two, strike, break. And that was A,B,C work.

And then, that was the second day we were in. The third day, we were in, we were issued with our full pack, and we had to, had to run all along the dry river bed, from Bathurst Showground where we were camped, up to Kelso, which was very

heavy. But then from there, we got into, into going on, doing infantry training, we were issued with rifles and live ammunition, we were out doing the, hiding behind bushes and what not, as we would do if we were in the

business, we did exactly the same thing.

Training with the, the [Lee] Enfield .303 rifle, rifle and bayonet. And they were, and then, oh well it wasn’t until a long while after that, that the Owen gun came in. But we had the Bren guns,

which were the machine gun. We had them and we had to learn the anti-tank rifle, which was a hell of a thing. We had to do all that, there was no, no messing about and saying, “Well don’t play with that little boy, because Mummy won’t like it”.

Yes, we were put through, well not just then, then we were being hardened up, as a front line soldier. Then when we went into this unit by, I’m talking about the 2/1st Australian Ordnance Beach Group, and

we did a lot of heavy training, we did a lot of sort of commando training, we did that quite a, quite a bit. And we were, we were hardened diggers when we went away.

Well they taught you how to attack a, a man from

behind and how to not be afraid to go up and put the bayonet with, which we’ve all done with straw bags. How to hide and find your way through, you know, or creep up on, on the enemy, all that sort of stuff.

Well usually its just straight through from the, go up and, in and out, in, give it a bit of a twist and out, which is not very, not very pleasant. I wouldn’t like to have ever had to do it. But that’s, there you are you see, but we were trained that way.

And oh we had to do long, long route marches, we’d do fourteen mile route march, full pack and everything, and they were all sorts of terrain. Mountains and slush and mud and all that sort of stuff.

When?

When I went to Muswellbrook. Muswellbrook had a big army ordnance there. And the ordnance stores there, I was in charge of shed number nine, which was just at the back off the main street of

Muswellbrook. And we had to, just know how, know the motor vehicles part, if. You’d have to get, all the motor vehicle parts you had to know, and we did have one chap with us from Maitland who, who could run off a motor vehicle part

number. You’d say, “I want, I want so-and-so for, for a vehicle, for a Chev [Chevrolet]”, see. “Oh yes, that’s part number such-and-such”, and he could rattle it off like one thing, never missed, he was a wonderful bloke. But we had to learn, you know, learn what motor

vehicles and what gun parts and all that sort of stuff. But of course clothing and that, which we dealt in mostly, not altogether we were doing boaters and we were doing clothing, and we were doing rifle and machine gun parts and that, well we had to learn that. And with us, we had to,

we had an ammunition section, there was only seventy five of us in the unit altogether. Half of us were, what they called the stores, and the other half was the ammunition section. Well we had to learn how to handle the ammunition, what ammunition was required,

if they called in from the front line and said, “We want such and such ammunition”, we could get it. They on the other hand had to learn to, know where we had the motor parts and things.

It was, it was

no joke, put it that way. You had to learn it, you had to realise and at one stage, we had to. What was there, there was twenty seven, we had to do, oh about six months packing of motor vehicle parts,

and gun parts. And we had to have them thoroughly waterproofed which was, we had to melt, melt gallons and gallons of, or blocks they’d come in, about a fourteen pound block of, of sealing stuff. You’d have to wrap your

parts up in that, and wrap them up, and then you’d have to make sure that was sealed. Then dip it into this oh, waterproofing stuff, wax sort of thing, and label it all up, do the whole lot. It took us about six months to do all that. We had

twenty seven sections of it, there was, there were nine, nine containers of, of it, the same thing went into each, each bin in those twenty seven lots. The idea of that was that you, in convoy, you couldn’t put it all in the

one boat, because if you got torpedoed or bombed or anything, you’d lose the whole lot at once. That meant that we had them in the twenty seven different ships, we had exactly the same. If ship number one went down, we knew that ship number two had exactly the same as went down in one.

Yes the role of the ordnance is, that you keep the men in the front line equipped, that’s the, that covers the whole lot. It means that they, when they, when they were fighting, they’d make an assault on the,

on a beach. Right, the infantry would go in, the infantry would go in and twenty minutes later, we would land with a various barges loaded with, with equipment that they’d want. They would have ammunition there, they’d have gun, guns, anything that the bloke,

blokes in the front line, if the enemy sort of bombed him or, and he lost a vehicle, jeeps or that, well we could, we could give them, we couldn’t give them a jeep straight way. But we could give them ammunition, replace guns, replace clothing if they wanted it, replace ammunition.

Well, the, a runner I think, or what they’d call him, or a messenger from the front line, would come in, in a Jeep, up in the islands, come in, in a Jeep, “Right, I want x amounts of rifles”, or, “Blokes are up there shot to pieces with their clothing ripped”,

or what, couldn’t be used because they were in mud or bushes or something. Alright, we’d have them there, ready to, to go. You see we used to set up a, certainly not a Grace Brothers, but we’d send up a, as quickly as we could, usually by the second or third day, we’d have a chance of putting up a shelter.

And we’d have all this stuff in there, lined out, as much as we could, lined out as, as they did, as they do in the shops.

To set-up that we’d need, I suppose, the supply of ammunition was

always away from us, but the rest of the business would be, oh we’d throw up tents to the extent of the size of this house, I suppose, a bit bigger.

Well as I say, we had thirty five men in our unit, and that’s, we’d all be on

job at once. I’ll show photos of it there afterwards.

No, that’s how they, when they called us up, they said you’ll report to Bathurst Showground, on such and such a date, and that’s what you did. You went in there, and you didn’t know what you, whether you’d be flying an aeroplane next day, or what you were going to do.

It was just right-o Joe, and this is what you’re doing and that’s all, that’s all it added up to.

Conditions were, were very good. They were, the camp itself was, I’ve got an idea they were doing a bit of

infantry training up there, but it was a place they called Bowman’s Paddock, a couple of mile out of town. But the, all under tents and I think there was six men to a tent. I was lucky, I was, I was put in charge of a, one of the store sheds where we had all the motor parts, or a lot of the motor parts, down in town.

And I only went up, up to the camp a couple of times, I was, I was riding well.

No, I met him at the Wallangarra. After we were at Muswellbrook for a little while, we got word to

say that a new unit was being formed for the, preparing for the attacks around New Guinea, and Borneo. They didn’t say Borneo, they said New Guinea. See well, so they formed us as a, formed up the unit then. And the morning we arrived,

we all went from different areas, we arrived at Wallangarra, which is on the Queensland border, New South Wales. And one of the first chaps. They said, “Right-o, into, into the lorries, we’ve got about two miles to go to the camp”, which was, in actual fact,

an advanced ordnance depot for, a bit depot. They were supplying the troops all up north, you see. And anyhow, we got onto the, into the truck, and as it turned out, Alan McKellar and myself were in, in the one truck. When we got there,

they said, “Right-o, there’s your barracks”, they were huts that had about twenty eight bed spaces, not beds, they were just palliasses on the floor. And I was one of the first, I was the second one in the door, and anyhow, a chap by the name of Poppa, we used to call him Poppy Craddock, he was a bit older than, he got in, and he said, “This will do me, I’m over near the

window”. I said, “Right-o, I’m over on this side then”. And Alan said, “Right-o, I’ll take this one”, and that started a fifty four year friendship, that’s how it turned out. And I met one of the boys three, no, yeah about three weeks ago down at Canberra.

I met one of my old mates that I haven’t seen since the war, at, he lives in Canberra. And I just happened to, one of these instances that happened, and I got, I was able to get his phone number and everything, and I rang him up and met him, and we had about an hour and a half together.

I don’t know, I suppose we were just, we went in sort of like brothers, that we’d never, ever met before. But we went in there, and Alan was there, and Dick Busby and Billy Burn and the rest of them. But somehow or another, we just

we hit it off. But, and when we came back on our, came down on our final leave before we went away, before we went to New Guinea. We were on the train, we were coming down north of Hornsby, about eight o’clock at night.

And we all had our leave passes for, for ten days, I think it was. Anyhow, Alan came over to me and he said, Desert they used to call me, now why I don’t know, Desert Head. Anyhow, he said, “Right oh Desert, where’s your gear?”, and I said, “Over there, Al”. He said, “OK, you’re coming to my place

for, for leave”. And I said, “No, I’m going back out to Coonamble”. He said, “No you’re not, I’ve got your, I’ve got your leave pass all fixed up, everything’s right”. So I had no alternative but to go with him when the train stopped. And lo and behold, we caught another train into, into North Sydney, and he took me to his parents’ home.

And his parents and his two sisters were living there then, and he took me home, and outside there was a couch out on the front veranda, only a little lounge, not as big as this I don’t think. And he said, “Now wait there”, so I said, “All right, I’ll wait here”. He knocked and he said, “Stand over there”, alright, knocked Mum came out, and oh,

great greetings you know, for about fifteen minutes. So I thought to myself, this blokes forgotten all about me. Anyhow there’s a bunk there, I’ll be able to, I’ll be able to sleep on this. This is around about ten o’clock I suppose, I’ll be able to sleep there for the night, and I’ll wake him up in the morning. About fifteen, twenty minutes went by and he came out, and he said, “Oh yes, Mum”,

he said, “I’ve brought a mate home with me”. That’s the type of bloke he was, you see, and we just went along in that way, ever since. And when, when I came out of the army, I got a letter from him, to say he was getting married on the 1st of November, and you’re best man.

And it just went and on, wonderful.

He was the first one that called it to me, I think, and that was because I was starting to go back in the hairline. Desert head, yes,

some funny things go on.

Oh, only about five weeks, I think.

Oh at Muswellbrook, I was there, something like, best part of, five or six months, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, got leave, got leave, got, as a matter of fact, it’s a, I went ackwilly [Absent Without Leave] there at Muswellbrook. I was a day late getting back, and I got, I think they docked me,

twelve shillings I think, took it out of my pay.

That’s a long story. I was youth, I was energetic, I was youthful, I was madly in love. Anyhow, that, that blew that. I had to stay a day late,

I told him I’d been to the doctor, I’d got appendix. But the doctor didn’t say that, the doctor just gave me a note to say, “Well he’s, he’s suspect of appendix”. But there you are that’s what true love. Came back for about a month later, and I, all correspondence finished.

I had cold shoulder for the rest of the war then.

She was in Coonamble, she was in town. Subject closed. Finished. I went back after seven years, and I found she’d

married some other bloke. Can’t trust these women. However, it turned out to be really good, I won in the finish, I really did.

Well all depends how, if you were only away a,

away four or five days, well you’d get, you’d get booked, you might get extra duties. But you’d get, you’d lose so much pay. And, but the rest of it, if you went away and you got, you were away for a month or something, well you, you’d go back, or when you did get back, they’d probably put you in the

detention centre. I didn’t give them a chance.

Well I was never near one, but I think it would be alright. I don’t think they were flogged or anything like that, you know, I think they were just, bad mark on your record, watched for ever after.

Well you’d, you’d get, you’d arrange your leave so that Skippy used to say, “Well now, your leave will start from midnight Monday until midnight Saturday” sort of thing. So now the train, I can’t get a train until midday tomorrow. So he said, “Oh well, I’ll make

the leave from midnight, midday on Monday until when does your train get back?”. Well the train comes through every day, oh make it til midnight on Saturday sort of thing. So they’d work in that way. They never said, “Oh well”, if there was no transport, well bad luck mate, you’ll have to stay where you are.

Hmm?

Where was the next port of call? The next port of call was at Wallangarra, and we were there then, there then for a few months, might have been five or six months, Wallangarra, the coldest place on earth. And did our, did a lot of

infantry training and that there, see. With, all sorts of infantry training, and then we went up north of Cairns. Then we went from the north of Cairns to, out to Tolga on the, it’s about sixty miles west of Cairns.

We were doing infantry training again,

we did a lot of infantry training. As well as helping out at the big ordnance stores depot up there. But we did the, we did a lot of infantry training. We were fully fledged soldiers, really.

In, in Cairns, we didn’t have stores in Cairns, our stores, the stores we were allotted to then, was up at Tolga. At Cairns we did, most of our training

there was amphibious stuff, we’d have to load onto, get onto barges and go out a couple of mile and then come in and, that posed quite a few problems at times. You’d come in and you were going to land, and you’d have, the barge couldn’t get right into the beach. So

it had to drop their door, and you’d get off and sometimes you’d be, you’d go into a trough, you know, along the beaches, we’d go into there. The bloke next door to you, might only be knee deep sort of thing, going on, which was supposed to be. But you might be unlucky and get into one of these

holes in the. You’d think, “Oh this is good, he’s only knee deep there”, bang, go down to, down to the neck. It wasn’t very pleasant either, it would be alright if you had a bathing suit on, wasn’t very pleasant with a full pack. But we did quite a bit of that, and then we’d go out to, you’d go out on the bigger, the bigger barge. And,

and you’d do, going over the side, climbing down the net, that rope net, which was, when there was a bit of a, good swell in the sea, made it a bit awkward at times. Because you’d go down and you’d think, “Oh, only got one more step to go down on this rope ladder”, and the next thing the barge has

gone down, and you’re up in the air. Anyhow, that got us through the war, that.

We would just have to, you’d be fully packed yourself. But your equipment, well when you were taking equipment with you,

you’d have like. If you only had a rifle or a Bren gun going down sort of thing, with your full pack. But when you’re actually getting your stores onto a beach, we’ll they’d go in, right in and they’d drop the front door. Mostly, you were, you were right. If you weren’t in a,

in an attack zone, like Lae for instance, where we, we may have started the nude bathing really, at Lae. The barges would come in of at night, they couldn’t come in through the day because of the air raids. And they had to stay out so that their engines, would be able to take them

straight away if there was an air raid siren. And we’d unload, we’d unload tonnes and tonnes of stores at, at night. And they’d have to keep moving the barge out as the tide went out. Finished up several times there, I was up to my neck in, in the water. You couldn’t, couldn’t

wear, cause you didn’t have swimming togs and your clothing you couldn’t wear going in and out, in and out to the barge. Tonnes and tonnes of it, we’d unload of a night, on the go all the time.

You’d just have to strip off and hope for the best, in you’d

go.

We carted the stuff up on our shoulders. Sometimes up a little bit higher. But it was good, you came out cleansed, I might say.

Yes, that happened more than once.

Camp conditions were good there, we were only actually, oh I’d say a hundred yards from the beach, from Trinity, Trinity Beach. And our,

our camp conditions were good, it was a set camp for all the troops doing the amphibious training, we’d just have to march down and get onto the, onto the barge.

No tents, six men to a tent, yeah. Oh yes,

we even had a proper mess tent, to go and, go and sit down in a, in a proper mess tent, which didn’t happen very often.

Cairns was very nice at those times, they tell me it’s about ten times bigger now. It was very good, the people were very friendly.

And funny thing, on the trains, as I was saying with those girls, there might be six or eight girls, and there’d probably be fourteen of us blokes. We’d go to a movie, so the girl furthest, who lived furthest away, was the first one we’d deliver.

We’d all go around and we’d, by the time we got back to Meg Roach’s place, which was only about a block from the railway, there was one girl and about fourteen blokes, you see. Cause a bit of a stir today, what sort of a girl is that, you know. Anyhow, we’d, we’d drop Meg off, and then we’d go over to the

railway station, and some of us would break off and go to the fish and chip shop, just across the way, you see. Go up to the station and the train would be there, little rail motor. And you’d go into the station masters office and, “We’ve still got a couple to come, mate”.

“Oh right-o, let us know when they’re here”. It might be twenty minutes before they’d get their fish and chips, you see. And come back, and say, “Right-o away we go”, and we had to go out to Edmonton, when we were eventually camped at Edmonton, which was nine miles south. And he’d just pull up,

on the, the nearest point to the camp, the train would pull up, let us all off and away he’d go. Absolutely no rush, bustle or anything else, it was great.

We met the girls, there were,

we’ll we’d all go in, mixed religions we were, we were, had about four, possibly five Catholics and the rest were other religions. But we’d all go in to the Catholic Church on the Sunday night, go to Mass. Then the,

the girls, it was known, I think it was known as the Hibernian Hall, the Catholic Hibernian Hall, which was across the road from the Cathedral. And the girls would be, well the ones that weren’t at the evening mass, they’d be over in the hall, preparing a supper and that. And that’s how we came

to meet them all. Go over to the hall afterwards, you know, the girls would say, “Well come over to the hall and have a dance”, and that was the regular Sunday night thing. And we got there, and then we’d, we’d go down, we might have a, Sunday leave all day, so we’d, the girls would say, “Right-o,

well we’ll go for a picnic down to Gordonvale”, just on the river. We’d go down and we’d have a bit of a picnic, and other days we’d play tennis and all that sort of stuff. Home away from home, enjoyed by everyone.

At that time, I think there might have been anything up to, oh,

possibly fifteen hundred there. There was quite a big, quite a big lot, all camped in the one area, at the back of Trinity Beach.

Well I don’t know really. I think as far as businesses were concerned, they, they thrived on it. But I never

heard any bad reports of the, of the soldiers themselves, you know. As for, no doubt there possibly would have been a bit of a fight or two somewhere, but never heard of any, any malicious damage or that stuff. But the people were all very, very friendly. It didn’t matter where you went, they just as though

you knew them all your life. I was sorry I wasn’t able to ever go back there, but now I never will. So that’s, life there was good.

Well the stores there were like, I don’t whether

have you seen these ex-army, air force, big huts over the road? Have a look at them when you’re going home, they’re straight across the way there. Well that’s what they were, they were monstrous big stores, corrugated iron. And the

top, you know, rounded, like half a tank. And they were monstrous because they had to supply all of the divisions and all of the battalions and that were, that were camped and training out Mareeba and all around the Tolga, Mareeba areas. Which added up to possibly, might have

been four or five thousand troops there, all the time. And they had to have a full, full issue of stores to keep them going.

Well they’d come to, well I think they’d go by, not too sure. But they’d go by, by rail

up from Innisfail or somewhere there, I would think, up, either to Mareeba, up to the Mareeba Plains, you know. Otherwise they’d have to, they’d have to come into, come into Cairns by boat, and then they would go I would think,

by army convoy trucks up over the mountains. Now that’s a question, I never ever, you don’t think of those things, oh well the stores are there, where did they come from? Santa Clause brought them. Yeah, but they were enormous stores there really. But if you were going, or when you were going out,

just go this way across the railway line a couple of hundred yards, and then you’re, you’ll see them. Did you stop here last night, in Dubbo?

Where were you at? Did you come up that way?

Yes.

No, oh well we were, we were told that we would be, if we did go, have to go out of Australia, we would be going to New Guinea, or the islands, but that’s as much

as we were told, that’s as much as they were allowed to tell us. But we didn’t know exactly where, what islands, or anything else. It might have been Noumea or anywhere, as far as we were concerned. We had no idea, apart from the fact that we were trained for tropical conditions. We were issued with tropical clothing.

Well jungle greens, as we used to call them. Not this camouflage stuff that they have now, but just green, green trousers, loose fitting, pockets, a few pockets down here, and green jacket, like

ordinary little jacket, you know. And plenty of mosquito repellent, of course. But that was about it. We had a couple of sets, I think it was two sets we had of, of clothing.

Rained about twelve inches in ten minutes, I think, at times. My God, it used to rain there, it would fall down. We were in, where we could, we didn’t do any, any outside training, but mostly we had to train, so that’s all there was to it.

Well it would make it terrible, awful. Because you had, well ten times as bad as it is here, when you get a real good thunderstorm or anything, you know. You’ve got to walk around in it, and you’re in mud and slush and sometimes you’ve covered over your ankles in the,

in the mud, and. But there’s something else, I was just going to tell you there. Anyhow, go on, carry on, I’ll think of it afterwards.

We had actually no knowledge apart from the fact that

you’re going to the islands, it’s going to be much worse than it is out here, where we are. And if we do go out of Australia, that’s where we’ll be going, to the, to the islands, malaria infected place. Where ever we go, and you’d be

looking for conditions that you haven’t even thought of experiencing yet. That’s what our officer, some of our officers give us information, something. Not very happy to, outlook on life. But they you are, then we finished up landing in Milne Bay, mosquito,

malaria infected place, worst in Australia, worst in New Guinea, I think.

Yes, got very, very nasty memories of it, just in one, for one particular stage. We were told we were on the

move, we had to be in at the, at the wharf to be on the load on to these sea, no, not the Sea Barb, the boat’s name was Howell Cobb, it was a ten thousand ton Liberty boat, if you know what they Liberty boats were. They were a

boat put together in a hurry, they were strictly a cargo boat, and they were just more or less like a cargo boat of today, and no accommodation or anything on them. And we had to be in there by ten o’clock in the morning, with all the, with all our equipment. So we went in, we unloaded our equipment into

the shed on the wharf, it was overcast. And we, then we had to put them out onto the wharf, and the wharfies would do all the, loading work, you know, all that sort of stuff. But we had to load the nets they were

putting it in. And in the afternoon, at lunchtime, I’ll show you the people there, a young, one of our mates came up to me, a very quiet bloke, we used to call him ‘Bombo’, because he never, ever drank any, never drank wines, beer, he was like myself. But anyhow

Bombo came up to me nice and quietly, and he said, “Hey Ross, can I see you a minute?”, I said, “Yeah Frank, what’s, what do you want?”. He said, “Can you, can you lend me twelve pound”, and I said, “Oh yes, I suppose I can”, I always had a few, my pay with me, but. Anyhow, he was courting one of these girls

that was in our party. And he said, “Oh, I’ll tell you what I want it for”. Margaret, I think it’s Margaret, he said, “We’re going to get engaged at lunchtime”. I said, “Oh good on you, Frank”, but he said, “Now, don’t tell anybody, don’t tell the boys until we get on the boat”.

And I said, “Alright”, and I loaned him that, and he said, “We’re going out to dinner”. And so, twelve pound was to buy the engagement ring. And he said, “I’ll give it back to you on the first pay day”, I said, “Don’t worry about it”, I knew it would come back alright. So anyhow, that’s one of the things that I really do remember about Cairns. The other thing was, we only had our kitchen gear left,

to be loaded on the boat. And all of our gear had to go on the top deck, poop deck I think they call it, on the front of the boat, and that’s where we had to go, because we were first off. So anyhow, we, they only had about oh, they only had one, one

net full of stuff to go on, which was our cooking gear, there was a drizzle of rain. And the first thing we knew was the wharfie pushed his trolley into the thing, and said, “Oh well, that’s it for the day”. And we were all standing around, waiting to go on the boat, and we said, “No, this stuff over here’s to go”, and he said, “We don’t work in the wet, mate,

we don’t work in the wet”. And I thought, “You animal, here you are a boat load of blokes going over, blokes over there all the time, not only us, over there fighting to keep you fellows free, and you won’t go out”, and it was only a drizzle. “We don’t work in wet”, he said. And I thought, “Well my God, that’s”, I’ve never liked the wharfies since.

But that, it was just so ridiculous. Now if our blokes hadn’t already been over there and stopped the Japs, he’d have probably been laying in the bottom of the sea himself.

They didn’t like them at all, they did not like the wharfies, because that was one reason,

that they didn’t like them. You used to get groups of them that were good, but there was a lot of them, as I say, there only had to be a, a drizzle and down tools, we don’t work in the, in the wet. They wouldn’t have got soaking wet if they’d been out there for an hour. I’ve never, ever forgiven them. Horrific.

If they’d have been going on a pleasure cruise, alright, that, that would have been, you could understand it. But when the blokes were already over there, fighting to keep that fellow in his job. He was right, five o’clock would come and he’d go down the pub, and go home to a warm bed, good cooked meal. We went over there and they had, we had to scrounge around and get,

get the tops cut out of kerosene, or petrol drums. Catch the rainwater, and that’s what we had for drinking water, you can imagine what a few drops of kerosene is like in your, in your cup of tea. That’s all we had. Had to make do with a bit of cooking gear.

But that, that was Cairns, that’s what I remember, my memories of Cairns, of going, getting orders to go on the boat.

No I don’t think so, I’ll give everyone their due. I think there was,

there was always a certain amount of oh, you’re a base waller, you know, you wouldn’t know what’s going on sort of thing. We’ve going over there to fight, but I don’t know that there was any, I don’t know that there was too much of it, you know. Certainly didn’t get to the stage where they, they used to have a brawl or two amongst themselves when they’d be,

when they’d be at the pubs, which was an everyday occurrence anyhow. And at one stage, the Yanks were coming home, I think that was at Mackay. The Yanks were on one train and the Aussies were on the, on the platform. And of course, there was a great hub-bub about the Yanks are over here, overpaid and over-

sexed and they’re only here to pinch the girls, and all that. It’s going to, it got to a stage, and I have an idea it was Mackay, that they actually fired shots. There was quite a hub-bub on the, on the platform, which doesn’t take much to stir blokes up if they, if they know their,

their wife or their girlfriend has been pinched, doesn’t take much to stir them at all. Especially if they’ve got a beer or two in them.

Oh I don’t know. There was, was when war was first declared, but

after that I don’t know, I wasn’t, well, in the cities and that, was, was bad I think for a while. But then of course, living so far away, four hundred mile away, that was, oh only what you used to read in the paper, or something like that, you know.

But no doubt there was a certain, certain amount of it, why should we go to war, and all this business. But then that’s, I suppose that’s, that’s the way of the world. You think of what, like us going to Iraq. We don’t like our blokes over there, I think it’s absolutely ridiculous myself,

that, that he should have got in there in the first place. Because they went in with, went in and lost a lot of lives, tremendous amount of lives lost in our bombing. And what’s it got us. They wanted to get one man, well I’ve seen

cowboy pictures where they go in and get the man they want. I don’t think it was necessary for him to go in as he did. But then he’s brought the rest in, see. Just doesn’t, just doesn’t cut any ice with me at all. We’ve sent our troops, I suppose we’ve done, they’ve done a good job,

but we’ve been lucky, the Australians, that they haven’t lost so many men. But the Yanks have lost a lot.

Well, our, talking amongst ourselves that afternoon, that

night when we got out. We were sitting up there on the deck, and we were, “Where are we going? What’s going to be the outcome of this? Will we be away for long? Why, what’s the point in going over, New Guinea is just a rugged island”,

sort of thing. And so, “Why”, I don’t know, we were lost in ourselves, put it that way. Why go over there and, and fight? What are we going to do afterwards? Will the war finished, will the Japs come down, and we’ll have to come back and fight them

from this end? Quite a lot, you know, a lot of mixed feelings, and something you can’t, you can’t really argue on it. You can argue, I suppose, from daylight til dark, still wouldn’t give you the right answer. It’s a, ruined a lot of lives.

Ruined a lot of families, made a hell of a mess of things all around. Right, what’s next?

Conditions on the boat weren’t very good. As I say, we were, we were deck cargo, because we, we were the first off.

End of tape

Well they weren’t good, the only good part of it was, that it was an American ship, American crew. And the meals were good. As with all the American staff everywhere you went, they had good meals,

they were fed. We only had bully beef and dog biscuits in our pack, but they had everything. The only trouble was that they were, their meals were terribly sweet. And so that, that was good, that was really good. But when we’d come back up on deck, we’d,

that was our living quarters for the next five days. And we had nothing, we just had our. When we, we had to tie our two man tents together, and to make a cover from the daylight, or the rain. But no, the conditions weren’t, weren’t good at all.

Oh some other infantry people on there, but not many, there was only very few on it actually, we were, it was loaded with stores.

Well, our first

sight of it, was beautiful sunny day, beautiful sunny morning, one of the nicest, you saw the lovely green hills and it was an eye opened really, to be so close, close to what you’ve always heard about. Going through the, the

China Straits at the end of New Guinea, a group of islands there, the sea was as calm as the floor there, and it was absolutely beautiful. And we thought, “Oh gee, we hope its all like this”, you know, inside. But then when we got into, into the harbour, we got a

shock. We knew what was in front of us from there on. Just you were right on the edge of the jungle then. Milne Bay itself, I think is about eighteen miles long and fourteen miles wide, or something, an enormous big bay. But no the first impressions was, as we came into it, oh this is,

this is good. But then when we got into the dockside, we changed our mind.

Well pulling up, it was at, late in the afternoon as far as I can recall.

We unloaded, we were taken inland for, I think for about oh, oh must have been about four mile inland. They’re rough figures of course, but I think around that. Fortunately no rain then, we pulled up at,

at a base camp, where we were to stay for the next couple of weeks. And when we unloaded at the camp, they said, “Well now your tent there, your tents are there”. There were blokes already there, that had been in, in Milne Bay for quite a few

months. And we put our, our packs and everything, just put them down on the outside of the tent, because there was no room inside. One of the old hands, said, “Look, don’t leave your bags there, sometime through the night you’ll most likely get a downpour of rain”. And we looked

at the sky, and I said, I remember saying to him, “Well it doesn’t look like any rain tonight”. And he said, “Don’t take any notice of the sky”. He said, “It’s a clear as a bell now, another hour or so, it might be raining like something”, which it was. Poured and poured and poured, right through until the

next day actually. And then we had to traipse, traipse through and we had to, we had to make a, an advanced depot outside of that. And clear everything away, and oh gee, was it awful. It’s a hell hole. Terrific.

Mud and slush and water everywhere. It didn’t matter what you did, you couldn’t stay dry, you couldn’t even get dry. But that was the, that was the impressions of Milne Bay. It is, or it was then, the most severe

Dengue fever and Malaria area in the whole of New Guinea. Didn’t matter where you went, there was mosquitoes and that on you. And as I say, slush and mud everywhere.

Well I

think we were, with the training we’d been through before hand, and being up around Cairns, I think we were ninety percent equipped for that. We were, we were physically, we could stand the, you know, traipsing through the mud and that, which is heavy going at any time. But it was all, I think

we were pretty well equipped for it.

Well we had, oh it was a mosquito lotion anyhow, horrible smelling stuff. And trying to think of the name of it, it was in a bottle, and you’d have to just, long sleeves all the time,

dab yourself with it, to keep it. But then of a night, we were lucky at night, we had, we had a, a mosquito net, not that it was a hundred percent, but it was partly.

An advanced depot is where they. Now you go up with the forward troops. Now they get the area cleared off, of the enemy. Then you go in and you make your, your clear as much of the area

as you can. Your ordnance stores come in, and you lay them flat on the ground. Cases, or if you have time, you can knock down some, cut down some saplings, lay them down and then put your stores on them, keep them from the moist ground. You set up a

a depot there. Now that, where the advanced comes in, is that you’ve got the stuff there to supply the forward troops, the ones that might only be three or four hundred yards in front of you. But you can if, if they want rifles or ammunition, clothing or motor parts,

you’ve got them, close handy.

Well, you look to the sky and say, “God help us”. You’ve got to, if they’re pushed back quickly, and you can’t, you’ve got no time to do

anything, you try and destroy what you’ve got. Petrol or whatever you can, to spread on them, and then go. That did happen at one time, where was that? Either Tarakan or,

one of the places anyhow. And the, the troops got pushed them, but they went to, too quickly, and the Japs came around. Fortunately only a few of them, only possibly a few squads of them. And our troops then, our rear troops had to go in and stabilize the conditions again.

But that’s what you’d do, if they came, and I mean to say, we were trained, infantry training, we, we would have been able to defend ourselves to a certain extent. Then the artillery would have come in, or the planes would have come in, and fought them off

again, you see.

You, you had to save as much as you could, but there’s some, some instances where you wouldn’t be able to do it, you see. Heavy equipment you couldn’t do. Fortunately we weren’t in the position, only once we were in the position

but we didn’t, didn’t have to get up and run. Because they were a few hundred yards in front of us where they broke through, and they, the second back up troops, quietened them.

Anti-aircraft supported us, almost from the start, every time. They had what they called a Bofors gun, and they’d keep the planes up around about, oh eight or ten thousand feet, make it very uncomfortable for the, for the planes. And they’d put up a barrage,

and there was usually, I think four or five batteries set around, you know, the area, keep them up there. But then they would come in, they’d, at times they came in and they gave us, a few bombs on us. We lost a few blokes with that way.

Well we, we were expecting then, that they would be coming in across the northern, the north coast of, like Buna and Gona and right around the Huon Gulf there, to Lae.

We did expect them to come in that way, which they did, and Buna and Gona were terribly, terribly heavy fighting, fortunately we weren’t in that. And then at the same time, came over the Kokoda Trail, which was absolutely shocking. They don’t know, men should have never been asked

to go in there. But the Japs did come in there, and they had so many men, so many troops, possibly for every one of Australians, they had, they might have had a hundred of the Japs. But that’s what we sorted of expected, we knew things were going to, going to be going on.

Well we, the actual battle, the ground battle was,

was finished. They had come in and, we did get air raids over. But the, the Jap ground forces were, were defeated there, before we got there.

Well, it was all along the foreshores as you came up to the, the landing docks, that was all destroyed, all shot to pieces. The harbour itself, as I say, was I think, eighteen miles by sixteen miles wide or so, but it didn’t seem to be apart from the actual landing

section, seemed to be sort of peaceful enough.

Well there, we only had, I think we only had about four at Milne Bay. Then later on, when we got around to

Lae and those places up on the Huon Gulf, we had them frequently, they were almost constant visitors.

Well, right in the depot really. You had to be as close as, well you didn’t have any area to go into, apart from the depots there,

just made a trench where you, as close as you could, hoping that it was, well enough dug. Which was only, say you went down about, about that deep I suppose, possibly that deep, and you sort of squatted down in it. Usually about two, two men, three men

to a trench. You had to dig down as quick as you could. They weren’t big trenches like you see, over in the First World War, like that. You just had those bits of trenches, where you could make a hollow. Two of us were in a trench, up at Finschhafen later on.

And they dropped a string of bombs straight across our tents. Luckily, straight across our campsite. Luckily, the only, we got four casualties out of that. But a big bloke dived into our trench, just as the bomb landed, and he just got in on top of us,

damn near broke our backs. Landed on top of us, he was a fairly big bloke, his foot was sticking up like that, and he just cut. They had to send him home, he was finished with the war. But that was the only casualty that night. Other nights we had a lot more.

Well,

if you could, if there was a chance, they’d have a, they’d have a siren, we didn’t, but one of the units would have a siren, give the air raid warning. Moonlight nights, you could see the plane go across the moon. And then you just hoped for the

best, the ack-ack [anti-aircraft] guns would take over, of course, in the spotlight. And keep them away as far as they could, with the ack-ack guns. But we had them come straight across, but you knew there was, you knew you were on the receiving end of it, when you could count first boom,

as more or less evenly spaced out as they’d land, you see. And you’d hear them coming towards you. Quite a few times they missed us by about, oh I suppose a hundred and fifty yards. And on a couple of occasions they didn’t miss us at all.

We didn’t suffer any, any damage. The only damage we really suffered there, was that a fire broke out in one of our fuel depots. I think there were about, they said there was about four thousand gallons of fuel, which was, wasn’t far over from

our tents. Oh well, I say not far over, it might have been a kilometre away. But, and we had to supply troops to go over, and as well as that, the natives came in to help roll drums away, and all that sort of stuff. But they were all separated the, it wasn’t just one big

dump, you didn’t have all your eggs in one basket. You had some here, and some over there, well how the fire started, could have been from a, an aircraft, a strafing raid or something, we don’t know. And that went on, and we, we had to battle that for quite a while.

We had good contact with the natives. They were, they were helpful, we had, it was all pidgin English of course. We didn’t strike any of them, as they didn’t strike us neither. We could get there and speak fluent language. But they worked well with us, and they made what,

they could understand what, what we wanted, and they learned very quickly, they were very, very helpful. Beautiful lot of people.

I, I don’t think they were paid with money, I don’t know what their payments actually were. But I, I know if they’d given them,

if they’d have given them a million pounds each, they would have been underpaid. They were marvellous, marvellous.

Well ANGAU [Australia and New Guinea Administrative Unit] was the name of the business, they were, you might put it down to be, a sort of a mission,

as they have the missions over there. ANGAU was, that’s where they, they were under their command, and they taught them how, a bit of the language, and they all spoke, the ANGAU people all spoke pidgin English. And they’d come along with a working party,

might be forty or fifty in it. He’d give his orders, and they’d come along and, they knew what they wanted. And you’d, they’d work away well, work very well. Couldn’t speak highly of them.

Yes, well they had lap laps, most of them, that’s so,

that’s as much as they had. Bones through their ears, just as you see them on the TV. That just, no boots or socks or anything, the soles of their feet were about that thick. But they, yes, that’s all they had. Just the lap lap.

Well I think that they all realised, that they realised that the Aussies were there to, otherwise they would have been slaughtered. And they were there, and realised that the Aussies and the Americans were there to protect them, and fight with them.

At Milne Bay, we had none, none with the Americans. We didn’t get that until we got around to, I think it was at Buna, we were there for a day, only a day or so, yes. But the

boats we had to, they were all Americans, the barges and that, yeah. But we had to, we had good relations. Then later on, that, none at all at Milne Bay apart from going in the barges. But later on we had quite a bit to do with them.

At Milne Bay, we had home made stretchers you might say, just a few rails and fabric stretcher over them, and that’s it.

There was no first class accommodation, we weren’t at the Ritz or anything like that.

Where you could. The tent, we’d always put a tent over the cookhouse first. So, because that’s where you got your sustenance. You went, they were always looked after first, sort of thing. And stores, we used to just put them out there, and

we’d cover them with what tarpaulins we had. And then, just sit around on a log or wherever, eat it out of a dixie.

Well we had a captain,

captain and two lieutenants, might have been three, no two lieutenants and a captain. Captain Juner, Lieutenant Amos, Lieutenant Walters I think was the other bloke. And they’d get there, they’d get there command from headquarters, and of course, they,

those three would pass it on to us, you see. They’d, they’d say what stores were wanted, and you’d get them in as quick as you could. It was just like ordering your ordinary grocery shop, ring up Cadbury’s and say I want ten dozen boxes of chocolates, send them in.

We heard Tokyo Rose

a few times, we heard her, she used to go like wonder, she was, she was like these, just the ordinary announcer, but she used to, used to tell all the troops, “Oh yes, go home your girlfriend wants you, she’s not satisfied with the bloke from the office that’s doing her housekeeping”,

and all that sort of stuff, you know. She’d, “Oh dear, go home, your poor parents want you, your family needs you”. I’m sure she had some of the Yanks [Americans] crying at times, you know. Oh, she was a wizzer.

She had an American accent.

Probably she was educated, as a lot of, our interpreters when we got to Japan, they were Japanese men and, but they lived in America, all their lives. And they just, they were, they were real Americans, but they were real Japanese at the same time.

Oh no, we only used to hear her, she was the only Tokyo Rose, “This is Tokyo Rose. Now all you boys out there, your mummy and daddy are longing to get you back home, and Sarah’s very, not very happy, because she’s, she’s got to put up with this fellow, and he’s a little bit quiet”,

and you know, “Really need you, she really needs you”. Yes, she doesn’t need us, she’s got the bloke over there. That’s the, that’s as far as that goes.

I think, our troops didn’t give a damn, they were there, and they were, that was it. But the Americans, God, you’d get in with their, mix in with their units and that, and they’d say, “I want to go some furlough”, they never called it leave, furlough. I’ve been out in this place for

three God darn months, haven’t been back to the states in three God darn months. They thought it was hell on earth, because they’d been away from home for three months. God they used to, at times we used to think they were, he should have a bloody Jap cap on that fellow, and we could shoot him. But apart

from that, they were a good bunch of blokes, but they were terribly homesick.

I don’t know, I think they, they were like the, you see on TV.

Doesn’t matter, on the darkest of nights, if you’re a blind man, you could walk down the street and you’d see American flags everywhere, you know. Nothing like America, God Bless America. All that sort of stuff, I think they’ve been reared on that business, you know. We’re Americans, and nothing like us,

and we’ve got to be at home, sort of thing, you know. As far as their wellbeing was concerned, blimey Charlie, they used to eat like elephants. They’d come over to our unit, as I say, we’d have the stores, we’d have the, our Australian army boots, and they were the best boots in the world.

And they’d come over, they’d be transport mob, they’d be unloading boats and that. And they’d come over with a tin, or, do you remember the old Mintie tins, or sweet tins, about that high and that round. And they’d come over and they’d say, “Give you a tin of candy”,

they always used to call it candy. “Give you a tin of candy, for a pair of them Aussie boots”, they’d give you anything for a pair of Aussie boots. But that was it, they were supplied in their canteens, they had chocolate, they had candy, they were living like they were down in New York.

They were prepared all right, they were physically, they were really good. I think that they were always, well like everyone else, they were always wishing that they weren’t there. But I don’t think that they were the, they had the same tenacity as the Australian troops. I don’t think of anything like

it. They used to go in, I think, with, sort of, with power. They had plenty of sub machine guns, plenty of boats out there, pounding into, into the enemy and that. I don’t think they, yes, I don’t say they were all that way, but I think the majority of them were on that line.

A lot of them had it hellishly hard.

We came under sniper fire a couple of times, yes. Yes, they, you wouldn’t see them.

Talking of snipers, one very funny, well funny at the time, but serious. One of our blokes when we did a landing and we, snipers held us up for about, possibly an hour. Anyhow one of our, one of the blokes, he wasn’t in our unit, transport, and he was carting stuff

up from the beach. And anyhow, he got up there and these snipers were shooting away. Fortunately we weren’t, didn’t do, he didn’t do any damage, they didn’t do any damage to us. But this fellow went over, he said, “I’ve got to go to the toilet, got to go to the toilet”. “Alright, slip over there,

and go to the toilet”. Anyhow, he went over behind the bushes, and he just got sat down, dropped his tweeds, sat down, and the sniper hit him straight across the bum. Very funny, one of the funny parts, see. Doesn’t matter how serious the things is, there was always a funny side,

don’t you think. He got what you might say, the hot seat. Carry on McDuff, yes.

Only that he sung out, and said, “I’m hit”, and tried to run as well as he could, with his pants down. But anyhow,

he went out on the boat the next that, later, when everything quietened down, he had to go out on the boat and go to the hospital ship.

I think roughly two months.

Only the fact that there

was, that we were on the move, that we’d be on the move in the morning, we had to be up, we had to be, we left our stores where they were, because another mob came in and took over. We were given orders, I think we had to be on the boat at eight o’clock the following morning. And we went, weren’t told where we were going, but when we got out of

Milne Bay and we turned right, turned left, and we, then we turned sort of roughly north east, northwest, this is going to be, the only place we really knew of would be Lae or Finschhafen, because we knew that,

their position on the. We were here, we came out and swung around, and Lae was in here, and Finschhafen was further up. And from what we’d gathered, we reckoned that, it’s like we’re going up this way, that’s where we’re going, either Lae or Finschhafen. As it turned out, we Lae was still, in

Japanese hands.

End of tape

After Milne Bay we went to Buna, on the top side of New Guinea. We went around there and they, they were still fighting between Buna and Gona, and, and Lae,

they were fighting all along that top, you see. And we unloaded three hundred tonne of stores, got it unloaded and we were going to set up camp the next day. And then some bright spark came along at eight o’clock the next morning and said, “Right, all this has got to be re-loaded,

we’re setting up camp, we’re setting up for an invasion of Lae”. So we, we took everything up there, up north of Lae to, I think it’s about six mile north, north of Lae, on the Huon Gulf, up to the landing beaches, red, green and yellow beach. That’s where the three landings were made.

So then they sent us, so they sent us up there, and then we didn’t unload or anything there, and Lae was taken, I think Lae was taken in the morning, and we went up in, we landed just after lunch.

What was that?

Oh, just, knocked about to blazes, it had been bombed and shelled and everything. And we set up just at the back of the beach, actually, well right at the back of the beach, we set up there.

And then we had to, 9th Division were landed at green beach, I think, and we had to handle all their supplies. And the day we landed, we said, “Right, we’ll set up a stores tent”.

So what should happen, our stores tent was unrolled, and it was snow white, one great big tent, you know, really big. And of all things, it was near moonlight, near full moon, you must have been able to see it from Tokyo,

it was sticking out like one thing. So the next morning at daybreak, we, we had to get up and, and make mud cakes, and throw it up to camouflage it. It took us all day to do it, we had buckets and shovels and things going everywhere. But we’d think, well this is a great thing in the.

Sticking out like one thing, you know, if he comes over, that’ll be the only target he’ll go for. But fortunately when they came over the next night, they came over and they dropped bombs, they, they landed in the bay. And there were two or three warships, little Corvettes I think they were, running around in the,

in the bay. And so they sort of attacked them, but they didn’t do, didn’t do us any damage at all. Actually, one of our planes went up and shot one of them down, there were nine, nine Japs came over. And then we, we were able to fill the tent, we got another barge load in, and filled the tent. That’s when we were,

had to go in, strip off and go in, and wade up to the neck. Yes.

Hey?

Oh the, the stores were in real good conditions, and we were able to, we had

one, one bit of a scare. We had to patrol right around the tent all night, so for. One bit of a scare, two of the, three of the Japs apparently got through our lines up, up the front somewhere. And they thought they were going to,

they would attack the stores tent, which was a natural thing for them to do. But the stores were in good order, they, they didn’t ever, ever got wet, we were able to keep them up out of the way.

They, they got them,

they got them about, oh, half a mile away from where we were. They, they broke through, and I think they were just heading for, heading for the sea. But they didn’t do any damage anywhere, no shots were fired or anything, they just, they might have just been lost, and came across,

up to the north of us. They were in, no action was taken or anything, they were just put into a prison camp there, they made a temporary prison camp.

Well, we were able to. Lae was not as

thick jungle as the other, as Milne Bay and Buna there. And they were able to run Jeeps through, and they, they’d come in from the various sections, you know, units that were out, and they’d want more ammo, they’d want more of everything, sort of thing. So they just loaded them into the Jeeps, and

away they went. Jeeps were a wonderful thing, wonderful vehicle, could go anywhere.

No, no, no, they’d, they’d have a, oh I suppose you’d call it a runner or something. But they’d send them back to, back to stores to get, get what they wanted.

Yeah, there was, no, we didn’t have any, we had nothing to do with the actual fighting. It was our job to see that they were kept fighting.

Well we were, we really, in close, pretty close all the time, not actually with our unit, but

see around us, there was, there was headquarters, further down on the beach. And there was spotter planes flying over, they were little Cessna sort of thing, they were for flying over all the while. And they were relaying messages to headquarters, and of course, they were in contact with the forward units. And then there

were contacts going between them all the time. So we didn’t, we knew where they were going and what might be needed, all that sort of stuff.

It was radio or telephone, they used to run out quite a lot of telephone to, you see, just a wire

like this. And run it through. And they had, they had good contact, good communications. Then of course when they got right up into the hills, well away from Lae, well away from the coast even, anywhere at all, they’d

they’d have their two way radio.

No, no, we provided pretty well. Because you see when we packed the stores, there was always a flow of them coming in, because we had a pretty fair idea, you know, well didn’t have an accurate idea, but

we knew that we’d want so many boxes of clothes, pants and shirts for the, with the big call on. Because in the mud and slush and everything, and we’d get through them all the time. A general store, we were. But we never fired a shot,

fortunately. Probably would miss and we’d get the shot back at us.

In the store there was motor parts, just to keep an engine going. We didn’t have any engines or that, they were, they were supplied by army workshops, which was a

separate unit altogether, and they were away from us all the time. They had engines and, like a big garage. They had, they had a really big thing that they’d, if a Jeep got hit, they could get it back to their workshop with the engine out of it, if necessary. And,

or whip an axle off it, all that sort of stuff, that was nothing to do with us. We just had the working parts, carburettors and fan belts and all that sort of stuff. But with that we had, as I said this morning, we had twenty seven back-ups. There was nine

canisters, and in each one of those, was exactly the same. So if number one canister, that row was lost, number two canister was on another boat. They were, we were right.

Oh well we had, oh gee,

fifty odd in the convoy I think, was with us. And then, then there were boats coming through all the time. Because as the, as the army was moving on, they’d, more reinforcements and more stuff was being diverted from say, Port Moresby, around and coming in all the time.

So the actually, the whole army was moving, it wasn’t just the, the blokes that were actually fighting there, but all his back-ups, were coming along. Everything went off pretty well.

We wouldn’t no, they’d,

they would still send, they’d still send a courier sort of thing. But when the, by the time the army got, the line got well forward, well there was no, there was very little resistance, in a matter of speaking. There was a lot of resistance, but not doing all that damage, it was in the first lot.

Well we had, we knew the area that the, the Japs were sort of in, a couple of tracks there. And we had,

we had our bren gunners at various points along there, you see. And as well as that, we had walking patrols around the, the tent line. Not a lot of protection I suppose if, if they came through in the, in the dark, I mean to say, you couldn’t see

them, well they could have done a lot of damage. But we didn’t have any, as I say, we never fired a shot, we had no, no reason to.

Well, we’d be keeping an eye out on the outer part of the camp, keeping an eye out there. We’d be

resting as much as we could, and life went on pretty easy for us, very easy in most cases. But and just looking after the camp area and all that, seeing there was plenty of water carted and anything like that. Just enough, like you would an ordinary railway fettlers camp or something, you know, we’d be keeping

things going. We got a certain amount of rest in, and when the infantry got well away from us, we just, we might work til two o’clock in the morning with stores, getting them in and then the next day, we might have a, five or six hours off for a sleep.

So we had it reasonably, reasonably easy after the first ten days, I’d say. Then we’d be getting ready for the, for the next, which was Finschhafen. But in the meantime we had, most days we were, we were on the go all the while. As I say not all of us, we’d rest part

of it. And we’d, a lot of transport came in off the boats for the 9th Division. We had to, and we had to, I think it was four of us, myself and Ted Pickering, I think Keith Morse, Freddie Dickey, we had to go down and ferry it,

their trucks and their Jeeps and all that, and make a big carpark for the, for the motor pool. And then as they wanted them, well they’d just come and take them, they were out of our hands.

Not while

they were out in the park, but just the normal camouflage on the trucks, you know, that’s all. Nothing, nothing was under camouflage nets or anything like that. No, they were just out, out in this big area we had there. Open slather really, if they could have got through. But fortunately our blokes up front, kept them away.

Beg yours?

Oh yes, yes, we could hear it, it, in the first day, sometimes the first two days, they, we came under attack from mortar fire a few times and as I say, with those snipers there. And

yes, we knew of, where they were going, where they were. But then, they were starting to move the Japs so fast, you’d need a racehorse to catch them, sort of thing at times, they were going very well. It got into open, more open country and they, our infantry 7th and 9th Division, 7th Division came in

from Nadzab, I think, came in on the western side. And the 9th Division came in that way, you see. They had a, a sort of a race between the 7th and 9th Division as to who could get into Lae first. I think the 7th Division made it by half a day. There was great division and

rivalry, you know. Then they went on, and then we had to get the supplies all ready for the Finschhafen attack, the 9th Division went up that way.

Which?

Finschhafen? Yes, Finschhafen

we took supplies in there, they had the, the infantry had already moved onto Finschhafen, through Finschhafen and moved onto, I think it was Hills’ Back Mission, that was a lot of fighting there at Hill’s Back Mission, as far as I can recall.

And, and we came in then with, with the supplies and we kept them going then, we kept them supplied well. Because we were getting so much stuff in, and we set up a, it’s a funny thing war. There was one of the generals coming through, and we didn’t have,

we’d only unloaded the stuff, and it was just a, a mess. Where we unloaded, everything was a mess, because we couldn’t stack anything, you know, nothing was in order, it was just like a jumble sale. One of the generals was coming through the next, two days afterwards, and we were trying to

clear an area to, to put tents and that up. Everything had to stop, we couldn’t, we had to tidy up the area, I’ve got that in that book there, too. We had to tidy up the area because general so-and-so was coming through. And actually it was in a, and naturally enough it was in a mess.

You couldn’t do anything else. He walked through and inspected it, and went back and reprimanded our captain, because it was in a mess, wasn’t in order at all. God, you could. But there you are, see. And as I say, you’re in rain,

you’re in mud, you’ve got truckloads coming in from the, from the barges. What are you going to do, say, “Oh that’s, that’s a size ten shirt, Joe, stick it over there. Size fourteen trousers, put them in a nice neat row”. It’s a wonder we won the war, in a way.

No, they’re, then we had to go and, had to go and be on sentry duty up, where was that, that was up at Hill’s Back Mission, I think, in the ambulance. We were there at Christmas time, that’s right. We had to go to, and post a guard up there on the ambulance station.

And that, Finschhafen, Hill’s Back Mission, on a moonlight night, I think there’s a, there was a million palm trees in that particular big plantation. Moonlight night, you didn’t know where the shore started, or the sea finished, oh

great, one great silver, one great silver plateau, sort of thing, beautiful. Never seen such a sight in your life. It was very good.

Oh no, there was no, no running up and saying, shake hands and say, “Good on you Joe, you did, that’s beautiful”. No, oh, some of them should have still been down in Duntroon. No, they expected us to be, to get off the boat with the stores, and

it was only, we were still doing it. Myself and Fred Dickey had to go down to the boat, oh, unload a boat and then loaded these blitz wagons up, chock a block full. Raining like blazes, you couldn’t see a yard in front of you, no bitumen roads naturally. And we came

along about, I think about two miles from camp, and the road had been the road that was there always, and it was on a real down sort of thing, top of it. Fred was in the front truck, and we were going along nicely, only doing about three mile an hour, I suppose.

And all at once, he hit a real slippery piece on the, on the road, even though he was on the middle of the road, and the next thing down he went. So I came along, I was about fifty yards behind him, I came along and I thought, Oh, Fred’s gone down the side, I’ll stick right on the very top, just in case he mightn’t have been on top,

I’ll stick right on the very top of it. Going along, and I got almost level with his truck and down I went, I went down that side. We had to come back the next day and, this was at, this was nine or ten o’clock at night. We had to come back the next day and transfer everything from there onto another truck.

But the general said, “No, no, no, that’s not right, you’ve got to clean this place up”. What about the poor bugger up there that’s not very happy about it. He wants, he wants some gear up there, what do we do, leave it. Tell him to go to Gowings and buy it. Ah no, you get those sort of blokes though. We had some lieutenants come up there from, not just there, but

to New Guinea and general. Lieutenants came up, straight out of Duntroon. They still had their polish on their boots, and God, still using their underarm and having a shower, expecting to have a shower every ten minutes. They didn’t know, do that soldier, do this soldier.

Listen, one little fellow there, I thought of his name when I was down there last, couple of weeks ago. He came along, and do this and do that. Inside, inside of ten days we had him saying, “What’s the best way of doing this?” Everything was going, he was working to the book see, what he’d learnt in college.

Different thing altogether when you get out amongst the wild animals. No doubt about it. But as I say, it doesn’t matter how serious the position is, there’s always a funny side to it, you can always look at it and say, “Silly bugger, what’s he doing?” But anyway we were there, and then we.

We were at Finschhafen for about two months, I think. I know we had seventy air raids in, seventy air raids in thirty days. Come in night time they’d come over, that’s where we were, that’s where we had two lots of bombs came straight, straight across our tents. They,

injured one fellow, he just got into the, he flopped in on us, it was just his foot sticking up and the shrapnel went through. Three others got, got hit the same, in that same raid, because you could count the bombs coming, you know, boom, boom, boom, you know. Coming straight along, and you knew they were coming for you. And

but we had them, we had seventy air raids in the one, in that month, shocking. Then after Finschhafen, we didn’t set up another, any more, that was our last camp. We used to supply, the Americans had a small boat company, just on a little island off

shore. And we’d go over and we’d load the barge at the, down at the beach. We’d load their barge in the afternoon, then we’d go over, or it was usually only one man at a time, or one of our blokes. We’d have the evening meal with the Yanks,

and we’d settle down on the barge til two o’clock in the morning. They’d take off and they’d go right up to a place called Sio, S-I-O, and that’s where, that’s where the troops were fighting, all the fighting had gone away from Finschhafen, or spasmodic. But then,

up to Sio and we’d get there about seven o’clock in the morning and unload. While we were going up, an American plane came over and looked as though he was going to strafe us, but he didn’t fortunately. Then when we got up there, they were only fighting from here to the next

street up, away. And we had, we had four or five, might have been a half a dozen mortar shells come over and land beside our barge, and just up a few yards, a hundred yards I suppose, or less, in front of us. They were trying then, they were trying to land them,

land their mortar shells onto where the Americans had a camp. You wouldn’t believe it, but our, we unloaded the barge after two or three of the mortars came over. We unloaded and the skipper said, “We’ll go and have some breakfast, Aussie”, and I said, “Good idea mate, we’ll do that”. We went up to the Yanks tents,

where his kitchen was, and the skipper said, “Have you got any, have you got any breakfast, mate”. And he said, “No, our blokes have had their breakfast”, he said, “That’s them up there”. Well you could see them up in the kooni grass, and they were, they were doing their fighting up there. He said, “The only thing I’ve got, I can give you, I’ve got,

I can get you some coffee, that’s alright”. He was boiling the coffee on a, on a gas stove, he said, “The only thing I’ve got to eat is a bit of that cake over there”. Well, you saw my stove, the normal stove, his was, oh I’d say that wide,

he had the cake that he’d only just made, it was a plain cake, but it was on the full tray of this stove. That’s why, up, up, I thought, God, my rations that I had to carry with me, was a tin of beef and a package of dog biscuits,

and the water bottle on my side. I thought God blimey, fancy, up here, they’re shooting at you like blazes, and you walk into a kitchen that you’d get at the Hoyts. Oh terrible. Yeah, they were the hard done by, they were hard done by, they were doing it terrible. Anyhow lo and

behold, it wasn’t, only about another half an hour when we’d had a cup of coffee and that, that the, one of our Aussies came along, he was only a couple of hundred yards up the beach. And they were bringing him in on the stretcher, he had all his jaw blown off, they had to send

him home to, I knew him very well too.

The Japanese shooting him, that’s how close they were to the, and this poor old Yank, he was, nearly had his morning tea spoiled. You get the impression that I hate the Yanks, without the Yanks we’d have been lost, no doubt about that.

But when you saw the way they were actually fed, they’re sitting, I’m sitting down with a, with a lamb chop or something, and he’s sitting there with a big baked dinner. Anyhow, that’s got over that part, that’s alright.

You don’t have any protection when the mortar shells are coming over, unless you’re in a. When you’re in the open, you don’t have any protection whatsoever, not a thing. Anyhow, the CO [Commanding Officer], Finschhafen business finished, and they put us

on a boat to come home. It was a seven thousand tonne little Dutch boat, Anui, very old boat, and we didn’t know that we’d make it home in it, we thought, oh God, we’ll get out here, out in the open sea and it’ll sink, because it was, it was a little old thing, but that was the only boat that was

available. And I think it took us seven days to come to Townsville. We stopped in, stopped in at Buna, we stopped in at Milne Bay, then we came across, down and through the Whitsunday Passage, through there

and into either Rockhampton or Townsville. It’s all in that book that I’ve got there. Then we came back, we had leave. Then we went, we went back to, up to Cairns. Well we didn’t stay in Cairns, we went to Edmonton, which is

nine miles south of Cairns. And that was a picnic altogether for about six months, I think, that’s where we were doing all our stores up, we were waterproofing them and everything. But that was really good because we, we were on, just outside the gate of the, a sugar cane mill. And the

boss’s residence was just, oh, two hundred yards away from where we were. His residence was one of these up high, it had a beautiful grass court, tennis court. And so he’d invite us over to anyone that wanted to come over and play tennis at the weekend, when we had time. Over we’d go and play there, and he’d, he’d call James

out with cool drinks or whatever. Oh it was, it was royalty. But then we went back after that, we had to go, had a few dry landings and then we went around, we had to go to Morotai, and Biak and then Morotai. And

End of tape

Right-o.

We were, we were at Edmonton just out of Cairns, and we had to waterproof all the motor parts, and gun parts,

and that took us, I think about six months to do it. We had forty four gallon drums and they were split down end ways so we had two, two drums. I think we had three, four of those actually, and we’d melt this,

oh great block of wax of some description. We’d wrap the parts individually, we’d wrap them in waterproof paper, waterproof waxed paper. We’d seal that, then we’d, we’d dip it into this wax

and to do that, we had to use the ordinary primus, household primus. We went through twelve or fourteen primus’s all together, cause we had two going all day every day. And we’d get this wax and we’d, when it was real melted,

we’d dip the stuff in, and with the name on the outside of it we knew what was in there, and everything. And that’s why I was saying earlier on about the nine, nine rows of twenty seven to a row. And that’s all that. And in the meantime, every now and again, every few days, we’d have,

we’d go out and we’d do amphibious landings, dry landings as they called it, and we’d have to practice that. And the only thing there we didn’t have, we didn’t have stores on the boats, we had transports though. And it wasn’t only us, it was, we’d be on boats on our own, but then the, the mob that was,

infantry mob that was going to go to Morotai and Tarakan and Balikpapan, they were, they were all on their own boats too, you see. And we’d come in and we’d do a landing, and sort of mimic what we were going to do when we actually got there. But that’s, that’s how we filled in our time there.

And of a weekend, we’d, didn’t work on the Saturday afternoon, I think we knocked off at midday, and we’d, we could go into Cairns or we could go for picnics with the girls and that, play tennis, just a relaxation.

They were, they were the landing crafts, the actual LST’s [Landing Ship Tank], and LCM’s [Landing Craft Mechanised]. LCM’s were the smaller ones with the nose comes down on it, they were for carrying the troops. LST’s were the ones that, the big, oh probably carry,

five hundred tonnes of stores and transport and all that sort of stuff, they were the big fellows.

Well the only thing we knew was that we’d have a beach similar to what we had at Lae. That, it’d be wide open,

no protection whatsoever and just the beach, you’d run up onto it. We went to, we went there and then when we finished that preparation, we went through to, we went over to Milne Bay for a start,

then up to Finschhafen, we didn’t land or anything there, we just stayed on boat for twenty four hours, I think. Then we went around to the island of Biak, which was only very small. Went to Biak, we were there for a day and a night, still didn’t unload and then we went onto Morotai.

Morotai was quite a, we didn’t have to land or anything, the Yanks had already settled in there. But we had the, we had to unload all our, our stores there, and there was also, already a, an Australian advanced ordnance depot on there,

so we just had to unload all our stores in a separate area, and wait then until the attack on Balikpapan and Tarakan, which was over at Borneo.

They had at Morotai, they had quite a big battle at Morotai. I think there was

three airstrips on Morotai, and the, there was some big battles there with the Americans, they lost quite a number of men. But then, the Japanese all moved to the northern part of the island, went up into the hills and that, and a mistake

that the Americans made there was that. Oh, they went on about their business and everything, they were right, aeroplanes coming in and that. But after they were there for a while, possibly a couple of weeks or something, the Japanese unbeknownst to the Yanks, there was so many thousand Japanese up in the hills. But they,

they were away and they weren’t doing any harm at all. Then all at once, the Japs all decided, boom, they’re settled in, they think they’re right, and they came down and there was another big battles there. But, but the island itself, as far as, as far as we were concerned, and as far as all our

Australian troops were concerned, it was free. But the Japs were still up there in that corner, but they never caused any trouble while we were there. I think they, I think they lost so many men, that the remainder of them thought, we’ll stay here and be safe.

We were told to expect very, very

heavy resistance. That it would be very, very heavy. Anyhow, the convoy formed up out at, out of Morotai, and it must have been seventy boats I think, of all descriptions. Then we had two or three,

what they call, dry landings, practice what we were going to do when we got to the beach, you see. We’d actually land around on the Morotai Beach and go through the whole rigmarole. And we had to do that right, oh about three times, all those dry landings. And then we set off

for Tarakan.

Those LST’s, those flat bottoms, with all the, you saw photos there, with, where we’re on top of them, with the, yeah.

There was good escort, there was American

warships. There was a couple of battle cruisers I think, yeah, must have been, yeah. There were, there were many aircraft and there was a lot of small, like destroyers and corvettes and all that, warships running around.

And we had plenty of protection that way, and we had no trouble. Our aircraft kept things down pretty well. We had no trouble on the way. At one time, we, we did get a bit of a scare, apparently there was, they must have thought there was a Jap submarine about. Because all

at once, the whole convoy started to zig zag. I think that went on for a couple of hours, but then it straightened up and then we went along quite normal, until we got there to the landing.

Felt

like the old saying, “A shag on a rock”. Just sitting ducks. If they’d of had, if they’d of had a good air force, we were sitting ducks, because we had our own air force flying about. If these other blokes had of taken, you know, if they’d have had

fifty or sixty planes to come and attack, they could have, they could have made things very uncomfortable.

Well, there was nothing to do, only sit around and play cards. And just wait and watch,

and hope that nothing would happen until we got there. Because there was no, nowhere we could run and hide behind a tree or anything.

Oh yeah. Well we got to Tarakan, I think we got into

the, within sight of it, and it was almost, I think, almost four hours before we were able to, before we actually got into position to send troops in. Tarakan was a, was a terrible beach, it was, the air force came over, and

bombed and bombed and bombed. And the naval, the boys, they, they blasted away with everything, especially the big, the big ships. They, they put barrage never stopped all along. And it was a big oil,

oil place, only a small island but very rich in oil. And the beaches were all barricaded with stuff in there, iron and pipes and bars and things in, to stop the landings. And oil was, of course, from where they were bombing from, they burned all the big tanks out.

All around down into the sea, and made oh, real, you can imagine sloppy oil everywhere, and in amongst the sea water, and the sand, before it got into the sea water, oh, shocking mess. And our blokes had a bad landing there, there was a lot of them,

as you see in those photos. A lot of them had to wade, wade into the beach, and they were up, chest deep in, in this sloppy oily mess. And it was bad, it was really bad. But the air force, the

American Air Force would fly in from Morotai, and they’d come in, in waves of nine. And the Mitchell bombers would come in, particularly in waves of nine. And they’d bomb from a very low height, there was no ack-ack over there by the Japanese, see.

And they’d come in from, possibly three thousand feet, I suppose. And at the back of the beach and one particular knoll on this left hand side of where we landed, there were Japanese dug in on that bit of the knoll there, oh I suppose the knoll would be four hundred foot high and quite large.

The B-25’s would come in and they’d just fly round and they would, they were dropping parachute bombs. So they might, might drop a dozen every time, and they’d just circle this business until there was absolutely no-one could

have lived on it. And that went on, that held us up, held us up for over an hour, before our troops could land near it. Yes, and then they, we went in and we made a temporary camp, we landed, I think we landed there an hour after the first landing, because of this bombing on the

hillside. And while we were transferring our stores from the, from the barges to the little village where we were going to make our depot, that’s when snipers attacked and held us up for quite a well. That’s where that

fellow got shot, that I was telling you about this morning. Yes, and then we set up a, set up a temporary stall there, we stayed on Morotai for, on Tarakan, stayed on Tarakan, I think for two weeks. Not very long anyhow,

I’m sure it was two weeks, and another ordnance crew came in and took over from us, and we went back to Morotai, to form up again, for our attack on Balikpapan.

Lucky you struck such a good day, you know.

To attack?

No, no. When we were going to Biak, yeah between Finschhafen and,

and Biak, we got a scare but they weren’t after our boat, they, they were coming straight towards us and they veered and attacked a, a Corvette I think it was, one of our small warships. Corvette, or a Destroyer.

And they, they dealt with him accordingly, they brought him down. That’s the only time we had a. Oh, we were going, now, we were on the ship, the Sea Barb, where was that? We were going on the Sea Barb which was a big ship. And we were only a day,

a day out of, about a day and a half out of Cairns, and late in the, oh about four o’clock in the afternoon, there was a mine in front of us. The, we had the protection of a Catalina flying boat, was with us all day. And

we could see, this lamp blinking a message, and we were the lead ship, don’t know what they called it, but anyhow, we were the King Pin. It was an American boat, Sea Barb, and apparently they signalled us that there was a mine,

going across in front of us. And they, the big, they had a four inch gun on our deck, up at the back I think they had one on the front too, if I remember rightly. And they were shooting at it, and the sea was reasonably rough, and when they’d fire,

it was a cat and mouse thing. The mine would go down in the swell, and they were shooting straight enough, they were shooting right over the top of it, for the simple reason that when they fired, the mine would go down in a well. Anyhow, that’s the only actual scare that we got.

And the captain reported later on, oh about an hour later, he reported that the Catalina had, had blown up the mine, so that set us at ease a bit too. But there was no, we were in no danger whatsoever, it was a couple of hundred yards away from us.

The troops landed and we went in twenty minutes later. And they were just at the back of the Biak, when we were on our way in.

Yes.

Yes.

It says in Alan’s story there too. They landed, we were about two hundred yards out from shore.

That was at Balikpapan. And they mortar shelled, and a couple came along that side, and a couple

on that side, and one directly in front. And the, we were showered, explosion, showered with the water. And the skipper, I’ve never seen, anyone reverse so fast, he just dropped where we were going in slowly, he just hit with everything in reverse,

going back. And there was so much mortar shelling then, that they, we were another, oh about another hour I think, before we were able to go in.

It was alright there, we were able to get right in.

Onto the beach, we were able to get right into the beach and just run off, or drive the vehicle off. And we had no trouble there really. They were still fighting just up, over the back of the beach. The, actually we didn’t land at Balikpapan

in the port itself, that was around the corner. We were, oh what, we were about three mile up along the coast, that’s where the main landing was. And they were still cleaning, or sweeping,

for mines when we got there. And we eventually made our store just up at the back of the beach, in an old schoolhouse, or school yard. And it was riddled with mines, as a matter of fact, where we were, where we set up camp, there was one, one mine, just outside

of our tent actually. And luckily it was in, it was rusted in or clogged up, the, the wire was gone off of it. If we’d stood on it, we couldn’t have exploded it, because it was, been there so long. But yeah, that was a terrific pounding that the navy gave,

terrible. And they had a, there was a cruiser on either, oh about two hundred yards on either end of our boat. And every time they’d put a broadside in, I don’t know whether it was a cruiser or a battleship, it was big, every time they’d fire a broadside, our boat would lift out of the water. Gosh, they put

force of it, our boat would lift five or six feet out of the water. They pounded that, they burnt all the oil tanks and everything there. And the landing wasn’t bad, it was on to a sandy beach. And they had to sweep where we were, they had to sweep the, for

mines. But unfortunately, it was on the bank of a creek and there was a, well we went down, oh I suppose we went down eight or ten feet to the creek, two of us after we landed and brought in our stores for the loading.

And Tom Wrigley and myself, we went down into this creek to just see if the, see if everything was clear down there. We walked along about thirty yards I suppose, just got near a, Tom got near a bridge, he was about fifteen yards ahead of me. There was a lot of reeds,

about that high, in there. And all at once, he sung out to me, “Freeze”, which meant you to stop. So I stopped. I said, “What’s wrong, Tom?” He said, “We’re in the middle of a minefield”. He said, “Look down where you are, before you move a foot, and you’ll

see the wires going across”. How we missed going down, I don’t know, but we were lucky. The wires were about that far apart, and they were all connected up. But that, that’s what you call fate. We stood there, trod very cautiously coming

back, I can tell you.

We just tred, looked down, see if you could see a what’s her name. With your rifle just, with the rifle down by your foot, and move it along and if it touched something, well you stood before it. You had to walk in between

these wires. And there was, I think the engineers came along and counted about thirty of these big bombs, that’s why they did it. She’d have made a good sort of explosion, if we’d have set one off, the whole lot would have gone.

Well they had,

oh headphones, like they do on the beaches, have you seen them on the beach with a.

With a detector, yeah, only they’re much bigger and more powerful there. One of our chaps, used to be one in our unit, and he transferred to the 2/2nd Engineers, Pioneers, and,

I’ve got his photo sweeping the, sweeping the mines for mines, just near our unit, this was before that happened. But he didn’t go over where the, where we were. He went this way where the main landing was. Rather interesting, but not very funny.

Sleeping arrangements for the first couple of nights were on the groundsheet. And then we, as the town was taken and they moved away, well we, we got to and made stretchers, very good.

Well some of them were made out of, out of canvas. Some were made out of, out of folded tents. We’d fold, fold them up and put a, put a rail through them. Put a rail

here and a rail here and another rail there, and yeah, yeah. But then after a while, after, oh about a week I suppose it was, we got, we got camp stretchers, I think, and we were in luxury. We used to

go down the, cause I say we were just at the back of the beach. Salvation Army bloke by the name of Cappy Radford, I followed his story up, since I’ve come home. He was down on the, set his tent up down on the beach. And he used to supply, supply the

troops as they’d come through with coffee, biscuits, tea, he had a knapsack on his back. And he, when the troops, the first troops landed, Cappy and his mate would go along, they’d crawl up to wherever the troops were, and they’d have a cup of coffee. He’d get his, get his mug out,

on his belt, he’d get the mug out and have a cup of coffee, go along to the next one, he did a marvellous job, wonderful. Didn’t have any protection whatsoever, and as well as that on the beach, as the troops would move inland, the Sallys would take their supplies in, oh in for miles, and into rugged country too,

wonderful people, really good. On the way, when the war finished, 15th of August, and oh, six or seven of us, the CO gave us, said, “If you blokes want to go”, it’s not often you got

Mass, got to Mass, but he said, “There’s a padre, American Padre, down, oh about two or three miles down”. They’re having a Thanksgiving mass, this morning. He said, “Now if any of you want to go, you can go”. So we, we had them sitting on the bonnet and standing wherever they could on the Jeep, and away we went, down to Mass. And the Padre down

there, he told us that the war was over. When we came back, Cappy Radford was serving out his coffee as usual, he had a pair of white Bombay bloomers. Have you heard that, Bombay bloomers? The big wide legs, they were white, and he had indelible pencils.

And he’d get everybody that went through, to sign our name on it. By lunchtime that day, you couldn’t even get a name on it, I don’t think, they were signed everywhere. I’d say it was, it was the best souvenir any, any soldier ever took home.

He was a Melbourne bloke. And poor old Cappy, he was, he was really good, extra good. But as I say, all of the Sallys were the same. Yes now. So that was on, about the 2nd, that was on the 15th of August. But going back, a

stride or two. After we landed and we made all that, set up our proper stores, business we could do with tents. On the morning of the 5th of July, think it was the 1st of July we landed. On the morning of the 5th, just on,

you could barely see, and we were just camped, still asleep. The only bloke that was awake was the guard on duty. And I just heard this plane, and I thought he’s out early, I thought it was one of our regular planes going along the shore, you see.

I thought he’s out early. Anyhow, next thing, I’d hardly heard the plane, and next thing, I was just awake. Next thing I heard was whoosh, whoosh, and I thought God, flashed through my mind, this is it. Fortunately where he landed his two bombs, was about oh,

half the width of this room away from our tents, where our blokes, where we were all lined up, you see. And we lost six that day, that morning. We were lucky. If he’d landed this way, where he landed and was in a sandy, the sandy creek bed from where the what’s

his names were on the other side, and they were in the sand. He just landed two. They landed, landed under two of the, oh, virtually underneath two of the, two of the tents there, and six of our blokes got done in, just like that, not very good, really.

Shocking, but as far as, he was shot down, they did shoot him down. It may have even been our own plane that I heard earlier, you see. And he may have chased him. But yes, things after a while, it took us,

it took us a while then to settle, settle down. It took us another, oh, couple of hours before we could settle down. Bad, you know, we were lucky. That’s all you can put it down to. But as far as I know, that was the last air raid

on the Borneo.

End of tape

We, we did, we buried them that day. There wasn’t much service attached to it, like we go to a funeral now. It was just up, up along the

the road a little bit, where they bringing the infantry blokes in, from further afield, and just buried them along there. But we, we couldn’t have a service for them, there was no Padre’s or very

occasionally you had a Padre who was able to be on the spot, sort of thing. Things change, don’t they. But yes, we got, lost six of them that day, that was a sad day for us all. As well as that, it was,

we just, all young and never, never seen anything like it before. Bang, it’s a hell of a shock. But life went on, and we had to. And we, we then we, we sat the rest of the war out, it was well,

that was only a fortnight before the war finished. But we still had to go on working and send supplies up to the front, and all that business. So then, I think it was about a fortnight after the war finished, that they called for volunteers

to go to Japan.

We got news that the war was finished, two days before it finished. We were told that there’s, keep your heads down for the next twenty four hours,

forty eight hours, and the Japs are finished. That word must have come through from General Macarthur’s mob or something, he was up in the Philippines. But that word must have come over the air from there, but we got, we got word then two days before

it actually finished. Keep your head down, the Japs are tossing it in. Even after that though, there were some of the Japs that were still fighting spasmodically up in the jungle. Not only in Borneo, but the Philippines. They were still fighting,

because a lot of them, they were spread out so much that they didn’t have the unit headquarters or anything there, you see, they were just into it. No doubt a few blokes lost their lives after the war finished, but that’s the way, that’s the way it turned out.

The atom bomb, we, we just got word from our officers that the Americans had dropped an atom bomb, an atomic bomb, on a place called Hiroshima in Japan. Of course no-one had heard of Hiroshima and where it was or anything. And we just

our officers had the, that was a week before the capitulation. He said, “The Americans have dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima”. And of course we all said, “Oh gee, an atomic bomb, that’ll be the finish of the war”. We were sort of, pardon me, we were happy that the war had

finished then, but it hadn’t. And then the next week of course, I think it’s about four days later that they dropped one on Nagasaki, and that, that’s when the Japanese decided that was enough. Terrible thing, terrible bombs, absolutely shocking.

You’ve got no idea, you can’t visualise, you can’t even think. You know, what could a, what could a bomb, how much damage could that one bomb do. Terrific. But we were all happy that it did happen, because when we got to Japan, we had to

search and destroy any war stores that they had. And you don’t know how many islands are in that inland sea, going into Kure, their naval harbour. You’ve got no idea of the number of islands there, and they were all hollowed out, and war supplies in them, that

was our job in Japan.

I didn’t walk. Well, we, we went from Borneo, they called for volunteers for an occupation force. And we all went over, the, a boat, oh it might have been three of four boat loads of us,

went over to Morotai and we formed up there, August, September, October, November. We formed up, and not, not from our unit alone, we were the only two from our unit. We went to, we went up to Japan,

early January, I believe we landed there, Kure. And it was cold, and going from, from the tropics to the snow country, we felt it. And then I had, I had the opportunity of coming home every twelve months, on leave if I wanted it, like everyone else.

I said, “No, I fought the little buggers for, for three years, I’ll go and have a look, stay and have a look at how they live”, which I did. Two of us stayed, one chap was from Melbourne. Oh several of them stayed, but one bloke that I mated up with from Melbourne.

And we decided we’d see as much as we could, of Japan, which we did. We went from north of Tokyo right through to Shimonoseki and Karatsu and Hamamatsu and all those places down on the south island. At, it was very good job in Japan as well as looking for war materials.

Jobs there also was, to ferry Koreans from up around Tokyo where they were POW’s [prisoners of war], ferry them by train down, down to Karatsu on the southern island, where they went into a staging

camp. They were deloused, they had that delousing powder sprayed all over them. And they were sent back to Korea then, back home by boat. But we had, we used to go to Tokyo every three months,

see there was 65, 66 and 67 Australian Battalions there. Well I was in 65, we’d do a month on Tokyo and then 66 would relieve us, 67 would relieve them, and then it was our turn again. And we’d stand guard duty on the Imperial Palace,

and the British Embassy and anything of importance like that.

What made me? Well the two of us, when they said they wanted volunteers for it, we decided, we talked amongst ourselves, most of the crew. As I say, we were the only two out of thirty five,

ah lets go over and see what they’re like over there, have a look, because we’ll never get opportunity of going to Japan again. And that was it. Said right-o, went down to the orderly office and put our names down, and Bob’s your uncle. We had no, no idea of what we were going to do or anything, we’d never been told. No idea in the

world, just something different, we’ll go over and see how. Tokyo itself, the inner city wasn’t, well it was. Tokyo Station was, Tokyo station was burned, fair bit of damage there, railway station. The rest of it,

I don’t think it was touched at all, the main city. But I suppose you could say from, if it was Sydney, you’d say Redfern, for as far as you’d like to see in an area of that, was all burned, flattened.

Tokyo itself was not touched, not touched at all. May have been an odd fire, but the suburbs. Of course they were, they were all shanties, the frame was up, frame mostly of bamboo or very light timber. Mud packed,

and oh this room, oh yeah about half the size of this room, and a little, just a little room at the back there, with five or six foot long, wide, I suppose. That was the home for about four or five.

Single storey. Through that wall where my car is, was a neighbour. See and when one of these buildings started, there was no hope in the world, whooom, flames just went everywhere. But as I say, one,

one of our Japanese workers got hurt at work, and I had to take her up to, up to the hospital. You’ve never seen anything like it. Burns, broken bodies, twisted, just, never again. If anyone else drops a bomb on anywhere,

they should be shot before they pulled the trigger.

Hmm?

No, no that’s at Hiroshima, that was at Fukuyama, up from Hiroshima. Horrific. You’ve never, swollen, make you sick, swollen arms, burns, legs, feet

that size. Faces nearly non-existent, shockers. I’d never ever wish to see anything like it, anywhere. And still they talk about atom bombs. Should have said, the ones that talk about it, want to be flown over and dropped by parachute

and let them have a real good look to see what happened. Horrific. But fortunately, that was the end of it, but had we landed there, had the Americans landed, which was the proposed, we’d have had, I think more casualties there, than they had in the whole of

Europe. There were, they’d have never, never fought them out. See there’s about, there’s about a hundred and sixty million people there, and every one of them said, “You’re not going to take my place, mate”. That’s it. Shocking.

Went to Hiroshima in January of 1946, got a photo of it there too, show you. Yes, we went to Hiroshima and I was in there several times, actually. We had to go down there on duty, and they did warn us early in the piece, oh when we were still on the boat going over. Atom bomb

has been dropped on Hiroshima, as they thought at the time. It would be death to walk in there, you know, the rays and everything would still be there. But we were there in 1946 and several times after it. And the people of, I will say,

I was talking to quite a few over there, the, most of them, a lot of them could speak broken English. They did not know where any of their soldiers were. They didn’t know that they’d, the war was on down this way. No idea, they were never, ever told.

You went, you went and you fought for the Emperor, like the kamikaze pilots, they didn’t, they knew that they wouldn’t come back, but they fought, and they were prepared to go in that plane, and crash it into a warship or what. And they knew that was the end of the line for them, but they never bailed up,

and that’s the way it would have been had they, had we invaded Japan. But the people themselves were very nice, very polite. In the three years I was there, we never had one instance of, just fighting against you, sort of thing. I don’t know that they even realised there was a war

on. Funny.

I remember destruction. You couldn’t imagine without seeing a photo of it, I’ll show you a photo shortly. Just the destruction that one small bomb made. Anything

round, light poles or that, didn’t get damaged, they got burned some of them, but they were never, they weren’t damaged. Anything round must have just come and, around the sides. Strange, that that should happen. But they’ve built a modern city now,

no doubt about that, I’ve seen photos of it. But only a few, oh, couple of months, not very long anyhow, after the atom bomb, they were building up again.

They were

POW’s of Japanese. And they were held, most of them up, I suppose they were put to work, up north of Tokyo. And they’d load, I’ve got receipts there from where I’ve delivered two hundred in one particular train, I had five hundred in another train. Delivered them down to, to Harkarta,

Harkarta was the base, the closest base to send them back to Korea.

Well they seemed to be in reasonable order, they weren’t starving and that. They were quite subdued, but they weren’t, like the Malaysians. I wouldn’t dare show you those photos, of those

at Tarakan. The other people, the ones from Tokyo, they were like us, they were reasonably well fed. But the others were starved, the Malaysian lot.

Saw them at Tarakan. When we went into Tarakan the village was burned, and they,

there they were. Disgusting, to think that anyone could deprive another man of food. It’s just like looking at a skeleton in the laboratory. Shocker. However, please God, we’ll never see it again.

They were sent back, the POW’s we took at Tarakan and Balikpapan, they were all shipped off, back to Tokyo, or to Japan.

Oh the Malaysians, well they, well Indonesia and that, they were,

only just close to their home sort of thing, close.

They weren’t, they weren’t POW’s, they were just, wouldn’t give them any food. They weren’t POW’s, as we know a POW, he’s someone that’s captured. But these blokes were still, were still there, but they were, they were free to move about, they had nowhere to go,

and they didn’t have the strength to go anywhere, anyhow. And they’d, they just, hopefully, they would have been, well they would have been well fed when we took them over, when the Allies took them over, they’d have been fed up and put back into the workforce.

But anyhow, that’s, well now, that’s just about my, my life story.

You carry on.

I don’t care how long you go, I can still talk.

Based?

We landed at Kure, that’s the naval

base. We went to a little village called Kaitachi, which was about fifteen miles away. We were there in old Japanese barracks for about six weeks. Then we were moved from there down to Fukuyama, which is quite a, oh seventy mile away, I suppose.

And that was our base, that was an old, a Japanese sea plane base. And a very nice spot, too. And we were there, we did our patrols and all that there. The air force was there,

the army and the air force. Air force actually was at, were at Iwakuni, which was only possibly, might be ten mile down. Then we went on, and we were on, Onamichi, oh for a couple of years, that was on the river too, on the seaside. And

we just did all those things, looking around, finding out where things were hidden and all that sort of stuff. And we had Japanese working for us, kitchen hands and the women would come in and go through our barracks, and

do the laundry and ironing and all that, clean our barracks out. The men would work out in the gardens and do all the manual work outside and what else? Well that was about the extent of that. I did go from Onamichi, I did,

I got weekend leave, and I went over to an island called Sadogashima. And not a big island, but it’s got, it’s a Japanese Museum, but it goes back all the costumes and everything, goes back, and it’s over a thousand

years or more. Gee, it’s marvellous, real, it’s really great to. If ever I went to Japan, I’d go back to that place and see it. There was a fellow painting scenes up on the ceiling, with a brush, with just one hair in it, putting veins in

leaves. Marvellous, absolutely marvellous and the, when Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, when they got engaged, their engagement, yes because she wasn’t, didn’t become

Queen until late, did she. And we sent a contingent over from BCOF [British Commonwealth Occupational Forces] which took in a platoon of Australians, a platoon of New Zealanders, Indians, all had to go, all picked men, all six foot or more, just, oh right, the pick of the bunch. And

we all had to put in one yen. Now don’t ask me how much a yen was, but it wasn’t worth anything to us. One yen to buy the, a glory box, box for her. And that, you know this baked, sort of a baked enamel they have in Japanese and

stuff, it was all that. It would be, oh nearly as big as that settee, and it was one man’s work, his life’s work. He’d been on it for years and years and years. What for, no-one ever knew, but that’s the one that the Japanese picked out for

Elizabeth. Gee, it was beautiful. I’d like to have, well no I wouldn’t like to have, because I’d never sleep thinking, well how am I going to pay the insurance on it. Great.

Well it was, predominantly a darkish colour, a lot of , you know, reds and

that, flowers on it, beautiful, gorgeous. Elizabeth would be saying, “Silly bloody Australians, you’re silly enough to pay for it, I’ll use it”. Yes. That’s the way it was.

Yes it did, it did, yeah. You were, you were one of the troops, you, you had English, New Zealanders, Indians, some Ghurkhas, you had them all there. And you all worked as one. We all played sport against one another.

And absolutely an experience on its now, you know, to know that so many countries could come together, and work in unison.

Hmm.

Where did the ammo go?

To the bottom of the sea. We used to load it onto the barges, anything military would go onto the barge and be dumped.

In perfectly good condition, but how did we discover it?

Well just, they were cooperative, go to the island, they were told that we were coming and that was it. They are coming, you will give. The islands are tunnelled out, oh

massive tunnels in some of those islands. I suppose they use them for peace, peaceful purposes now, terrific. But even in, in Lae, now when we landed at Lae, just at the back of Lae where we were, there’s one big hill, you wouldn’t call it a mountain, just a big hill.

And you know that was tunnelled, tunnelled out and they had everything in it, they must have. Of course working was no trouble to them, they had to work or be flogged or something. If you were told to do something, you did it.

Well the, the kingpin on each of the islands, would, would know it was there. And he was sworn to tell. This is the conquerors, you do as you’re told. We didn’t miss anything. Go in and, they were terribly polite

the people. But no trouble at all.

Well, it was dark, it was lit, and I don’t know where they got their power from, but it was lit, from little generators, I suppose.

And just like walking into an ordinary tunnel in the train line between here and Sydney. You know, just big, stored everything.

I think, unless they dropped another few atom bombs. Or, if they hadn’t of dropped the atom bomb, I think they would have still been fighting, we’d have still been going on, I think. They had everything, everywhere, you’d got no idea. Real fanatical, because the Emperor says,

go out there and repel. And that’s the way it is. Fortunately the warlords or someone told the big fellow that, to pull the pin, we’ve had enough. Because they knew that they would have lost in the long run, they’d have, the, the Yanks, Yanks would have blown it to pieces, you know.

But there still would have been, I think, there would have still been, like they are in Iraq now, still, still fighting on. I don’t think they would have ever given in.

Oh rifles, rifles and all that sort of stuff, just the same as we’ve got. They were prepared

for anything. But fortunately, they stopped when they did. But I’d have hated to have been there if they’d landed, D-Day [Allied landings in Europe] wouldn’t have had anything on it, it would have only been Play School. They,

they had to in the finish, they had no, didn’t have a big air force. I mean the Yanks, the Yanks could have outrun them there, for one thing. Even there, when the B-29’s, that was our super bomber, would go, fly over Japan, the,

the kamikazes threw everything out of their planes. The only thing that they had in their planes of any weight, was the pilot and the engine. They had no guns or anything, so that they could get up to the height of the fortress, they had no guns or anything, and they’d just dive straight in on them. That was the only

one they, that’s the only way they could beat the super fortresses. Well then they run out of planes themselves, that was it. No, don’t want another 1945 war anywhere. That’s what I dread about this one here at Iraq. God knows what they might have hidden anywhere in those

hills, you know, in those sand dunes. You never know.

Was it ever, going from the tropics and landing in Kure was like walking out of a

steam bath into a freezing chamber. Oh God, you could feel the cold too from as soon as we left Luzon in the Philippines, we went to Manilla Bay, we went past that and that was as rough as you could get it. And we came up on the other side of the Philippines and it was cold. There was no

running around in shimmy shirts then, I’ll tell you. Yes.

Well I thought, it had the makings of being a beautiful country and I, that was built on when I was there, through spring, with their

cherry blossoms and, and then the snow still up on Mount Fujiyama. I thought, really a pretty country. The hills are all terraced, they don’t waste a speck of land, the hills are all terraced right up, and they grow, they grow a patch of rice, or whatever, wheat or. They’re only about that wide the terraces, but they’ve got a

full crop in. Not so much rice, but.

End of tape

Glasses off, I knew there was something wrong.

I think they’ve, I think they’ve done a good job really, they were quite happy about the occupation. They

they never caused any trouble, I have heard of some isolated cases, but not getting up into riots or anything. But I was there for three years, never left the place, and I travelled from north of Tokyo right down to the bottom island. And I never once,

saw any agitation with them, they were all very, very friendly. And no mention of war or anything else, not a thing. But I, I think that they took themselves, even after the occupation finished, I think they just took it in their stride, sort

of thing.

Well I thought, apart from the soldiers, of course we never met soldiers, or we may have met them, and didn’t know that they had been soldiers. But

the Japanese people themselves, what I could see of them, they were very, very, very placid, very polite, nothing, nothing to stir you along at all, you know. Nothing to say, “Oh gosh, these are Japanese”. I will admit that they, I don’t know where their economy comes from,

but they’ve bought most of Queensland I think. And they’re everywhere, they’re buying places everywhere. But as a, as a people, I couldn’t see anything wrong with them. It’s like, to me, it’s like the, the world all just says

right, we’re going to take that place. Not tell anyone about it, this is it, this is our objective, we’re going to take it, and that’s all there is too it. Don’t even tell anyone where they are or anything else. And I spoke to several and a few of their interpreters over there, and they told me the same thing, that they,

nobody ever knew. Once their son went into the armies, they’d lost him, they had no idea where he went, not a thing, not a. Didn’t know that he, they didn’t know that they’d been through the, through the Philippines or come this far to Australia, or anything. But I find them,

I certainly wasn’t with them when the war was on, I’d have, I’d have killed a dozen of them myself if I’d had the opportunity. But oh I don’t know, I suppose my, my way of looking at things is as if, you’ve got to do what the boss tells you. No need to go into, you know, if, if he’s, if

you know that its outrageous and he tells you to go and kill this bloke and kill that bloke, that’s, well for no reason. But their thing was, they were sent by their spiritual leader, the top notch. You’re in the army, they wouldn’t have known where they were going until they actually landed on the place.

Well, I, I think that, although the rural people were a terrible backward people, they, they’d never,

now for one instance. Laurie and myself were going to see where we, as much as we could in the one day, because you could get a train every ten minutes at a station there then. Didn’t matter where, so we’d go from say, Orange to Molong, or Molong to Wellington,

they wouldn’t be that far apart. But they’d stop every ten minutes at the next station, and we sort of saw the, we saw the lot, and I thought they were placid, they were backward. The people, we’ve even been walking through the back alleyways of several villages,

and one we, we heard this yabber yabber going on, and we went up and pushed a gate open in one of these villages, and there were six old women trying to shear a, a sheep. Not, not with the big hand shears that we’ve had, but only just a

little bit bigger than scissors, just like your dress making scissors, not as big as that. And that was only one instance, and we saw several others that were. I guess they were just so backward, not, you wouldn’t think that these fellows had been frightened, they’d been flying aeroplanes,

sailing big warships and all this business, how could they do it. The, the rules were, as we’d say, real bushies.

Well they looked like, just thatched roofs some of them, some of them with the wooden, I think they had wooden tiles.

But as I say, you’d walk out your door there, and that was a little, what we’d call a goat track. But that was your, your main street was only a, only as wide as this room. And all dirt, there was nothing, no cement, no bitumen or

anything in any of the, all those little villages seemed to be the same. As I say, you walk out your day, you step out your door and you’re onto the main thoroughfare. And people then in those days, they were just pushing a little two wheeled cart around, not, no-one in a hurry to go anywhere.

And the only thing I saw was they used to sing as, probably the, you might class him a night watchman or something of the village, but he’s going, he’d be going around the village singing, “Inaorgy”, or something, that was what I always thought.

“Inaorgy”. And I asked one of the interpreters and he said, “Yes, that’s keeping the evil spirits away from the village”. And they’d go around singing that, and that was the only, he might go only a hundred yards and sing out again. But you went into the shops and everything

was polite, and all that sort of stuff. But even when Jeff went down now, he went, he was picked in the Australian Youth Group to go over there about, oh gee, after he was married, I think. And he went over there, and they were there a fortnight or

something. He said, “I never paid for anything”. He said, “I’d go in and say I’m”, you know, he’d want a brooch or whatever, and he’d, someone else would pay for it. “No, you don’t pay, I pay”. I wish they’d do that here.

Japanese home, yes, we used to go in, and we weren’t supposed to, but we used to go in. And of course they’re, they should have their bedrooms here, actually. Not the tatami mats on the floor, I’d

bar that, but they’ve just got their tatami mats on the floor, in, this would be their main living room and this is where they sleep. But they have eiderdowns or doonas as we call them. You get up of a morning and roll it up and put it in a cupboard, your beds made, your room’s tidy.

Then for their heating in those villages, they used to have a, oh it was charcoal, about as thick as your thumb, about that long. And they’d have a, oh I did know the name of them, it’d be like about that size flower pot with the holes in it.

And you’d put these sticks of charcoal in it, and get it going. And that’d, that’d heat this room, and that’s where you’d cook your bacon and eggs or whatever you wanted. You could just put, put that on the top of it, and there was no flame in it, it was all the heat of the charcoal itself.

And I will admit, in all of those villages that we saw, it wasn’t all that pleasant, but just outside the, the back door, oh a couple of yards from the back door would be their toilet, which would only be a big hole in the ground, full of water. And

strangely enough, any of the places that we went into, there was no smell in the house. At, they’d just have a board top on it, and you squatted there and you did whatever you wanted, and the sanitary carter would come along, oh I don’t know how long, but probably every day or something, he’d just come along with his, his

wooden barrel and a big, big scoop about our ordinary dipper size on it, on a, on an arm, like a broom handle. And just empty, what we’d call empty the pan. Well, real backward, real, way back two thousand years,

sort of thing. And that, that then he’d take away, and that was her fertilizer on his crops and that. All those little things.

Hmm?

The only time I had Japanese food was, we were with the interpreter, an American interpreter.

He was an American Japanese, or a Japanese American, and when he would, he’d come and he’d do the interpreting for our workers. And anyhow, I had a,

I had a meal with him, that was, we were allowed talk to him, because he was an American, you see. You weren’t allowed to fraternize in general or in public, or what not. But gee, what’s his name, I’ve got his named there in a book. And

Sukiyaki, Japanese sukiyaki, oh it was beautiful, proper sukiyaki, I suppose. We went into one of his, one of the good eating places, apart from that, I didn’t go on their food, I didn’t even try it. Laurie and myself were walking through one of the

villages one time, and there was, we just looked into, the door was open and we just stopped and looked in. And the old lady was cooking something, she looked to be boiling something. Anyhow we just, you’d walk in, you’d walk in about a metre, or a bit more than a metre,

and then the floor would be up here, you see, and she’s over there. And we’d just walk in, the door was open, so we just walked in, “Oh ho ga saya mus”, that’s good day. And yes, she looked around and she, she could speak a few words of English. I’m sure she must have been or she looked to be seventy, eighty. I said, “What are you cooking?”

She said, “You eat fish?”, I said, “No”. And she’s cooking, cooking the heads of the fish with the eyes still in it, I thought God I wouldn’t eat that anyhow for a start, and said, “Waurey that, waurey”, lovely. They eat them, eyes and all.

I thought blimey Charlie, I couldn’t come at that. Then by the same token, now we go into a Chinese or Japanese restaurant, what are we eating? Do we know, do we know what they cook in the kitchen.

I remember that it was very, very nice.

It was like our pan stew, just the meat cut into about that lengths, and roughly that thick, and a few beans, and probably a bit of, I think a bit of cauliflower was mixed in with it, if I remember rightly. And just like

eating one of our pan stews, you know.

Yes, you sat down onto the floor, and you just had the little table like that one we took out of here. Just sat down and come up at your, you wanted a cup of tea, well you got about a mouthful in a cup,

all those little, with the little handles on them. That was, and he said, and I believe him, it was a very good eating house, they weren’t called restaurants, they were called eating houses. And of course now I think they’re much more modern, a lot of them are similar to what ours are. But no,

everything was good there, and he knew, well he was born and reared in America, and oh, he’d have been a man, he might have been ten years older than me, I suppose. But nothing was wrong in any, any form at all.

They’ve, well, the ones in the Royal, of course everyone you go in and everyone you bow to one when you meet, and they bow to one another, that’s good morning, and then you greet them, very polite to one another. Very polite, they were. And

although even though where you went, if there were five or six in the group, at least two of them would be able to understand what you were saying. They all had a certain amount of broken English, with them, like our pidgin English with the, in New Guinea

people. They could converse with you in a little way, you had to read in what they were saying.

Well, well of course I never ever knew, knew any of their laws, but of course you do. In themselves.

We, we must not fraternise, we must not show them in any way that, more or less that we are on their level. We, we must act properly, we couldn’t go around and just bash someone up. There was a hell of a trouble, a court martial if you did that.

And you just acted as you would, act in your own village. You weren’t allowed to break any of their laws. If you were just sightseeing or that, well you could just walk around, you could see. As I said, Laurie and I just walked in this, because the door was open, and we could see the old lady cooking.

Normally you wouldn’t dream of doing that, you wouldn’t go and open the door and look in and see what was going on. Oh no, we were all pleased naturally enough when the war finished, and we all thought, we thought they should never have existed,

the way their soldiers went on. But in their, their own homes and villages we saw, well for three years, I guarantee every second weekend at least, we’d be away into a different village. And we never saw any, anything impolite to

us, or no-one, they never ever backed away and said, “I’m not talking to you, you’re an Aussie”. It was always, just a, a friendly culture.

When I left? I often thought I would like to go back, but I knew that I never would.

But I thought I’d love to come back here in their springtime, it’s beautiful. I don’t say it’s anymore beautiful than probably here, but it’s a different outlook on the place. But I’d never, I don’t want to go anywhere where there’s earthquakes again, I tell you that. We were in that one once, that was enough for me.

We were in a double storey building, our headquarters building at Onamichi. The earthquake struck about two o’clock in think, in the morning down at Kure, which was their naval base. And in a line, that would probably be forty miles

away. And it left a great gaping hole in the, in one of the, in one of the wharf down there, in one of the wharf areas, that you could have driven, probably a dozen semi trailers into it. And it was all underground,

under the sea in a straight line there, past the Iwakuni Air, Air Force. Came up and our parade ground had a gap in it like that, right the full length of the parade ground. Up to our, didn’t go under our building as far as I can recollect. Our building was

a hollow square. And the school, the building itself was built on this tongue and tenant they call it. Where the joins fit in like that, it’s not tongue and tenant, tenn, it’s, anyhow, its joined like that. And

it allows it then to, to move about two feet. And our building, in the top storey of it was our canteen, biggest disappointment to our, a lot of our diggers was the fact that the day before we got our issue of beer in. And they were in crates, something similar to our milk crates. They were stacked about, I think,

six high, they were in, in a big square like this. And when the building shook, it shook quite a number of the top, top layer of beer. Of course diggers were running around, couldn’t get enough tissues to wipe the tears away. All that grog going to waste. But

then everything else was OK. When the tremors finished, everything was back to normal. Funny, strange, horrible sensation. I know I was, myself and my storeman were in the place directly under the canteen, that’s where I had my store. And we had these camp

stretchers, you know, the wooden crossed leg. We were in them, and when this thing struck, we, it was going like that. And for just a second, I thought who’s pulling on my bed. I didn’t have time to speak, I just thought. I rolled over, and I knew what it was straight away. So I said to,

what was his, it was an Irish name, Murphy, Murphy, he was in a bunk on the other side of the business, and I said, called him by name, and I said, “Earthquake mate, get under the desks”, and that’s where we got. It went straight across and over the desk, but it was just like that. It was frightening.

And we then when it, as soon as it stopped, that went on there, it must have gone on for a minute, I suppose. As soon as it stopped, we jumped out, out of the building altogether and the troops were still coming down from, from up top. We wondered what hit us.

I was still the quartermaster of our

company, and that was to, just issue clothing and replace clothing, and mainly that was it. And I had an easy job.

With the shops? Oh, I can’t tell you that, that’s, that’s terrible to say a thing like that.

No they didn’t trade like that, they just went straight out on the black market. They, we’d get an issue of cigarettes, I don’t know whether tobacco was in, but cigarettes and soap. Well a lot of them didn’t smoke. And they’d,

they’d save up their cigarettes you see, and they’d go up to the shop and they’d, they’d want a watch or a camera or whatever. How much? Oh so and so. I’ll give you a packet of cigarettes. Two packets. Give you one packet. Give you two packet. I want two packet. You’d, they’d think for a while.

Open one packet. Give you one packet, and give you this, a packet and a half. All right, all right. Did they trade? You can’t say those sort of things. Blackmarket is a much better word.

It was fairly, fairly heavy I tell you.

Well I don’t know that the, well some of them traded their spare, spare uniform, their jackets and that. Because the Japs in the winter time of course, they don’t, our tunic was good. And they’d have them, heaven forbid that there’s too many BCOF

blokes that are watching this. But they’d trade their jacket and they were all, you know, khaki. And they’d give it to one of the wogs to, to take down to the laundry, it’d be the wog laundry, all Japanese workers for us, and they’d dye them. Of course they’d bring them back, and they’d whip the buttons off them,

and they’d go down and trade the jacket. Well God, they could buy nearly anything, or trade nearly anything for that jacket.

Well they used to dye them a dark, as they were a khaki, but they’d, they’d dye them a dark brown or something, you know. You still knew they were an Army, but I think that the, I think they wogs used to get them,

and alter the pockets, probably take the pockets off, I saw a few with that done. But I’ve known one bloke to go out one night, and he had cigarettes and soap, just walked out the gate, that’s when we were in Tokyo itself. And went down to the

nearest railway station. Had made arrangements with one of the workers to, they’d asked him for, “Do you have soap or cigarettes?”. We went with the business, oh just one of, one of the suburban railway stations. “Yeah, we’ll meet you over

at such and such a point”. I said, “You’ll get caught”. He said, “Oh well, I might, but it’s pretty good”. And away he went, and came back with twelve thousand yen. What that was in Australian money, I don’t know, but it was a lot, because you could go in and buy stuff with twelve thousand yen. A thing in the

shop would be a hundred yen or something like that, give you fifty, no, give you sixty, right, bang, and you got it. Yes, there was a lot of that went on. I wouldn’t dare put that where it could go in writing or anything, or on film. But oh no,

wherever there’s soldier, there will be a bit of blackmarket stuff. There’s always a way around it. Yes.

Immediately after I came back, I was met at the ship by Alan. He had a little shop at Paddington,

at the Five Ways, if you know, just a little corner shop. He wanted me to go into partnership with him, and I said, “No, not on your life Alan, I, I hate the cities, I’m a country boy”. So anyhow I stayed with him about a fortnight, and helped him in the shop. And then he decided

he’d sell. And I came back out, I came home out to home at Coonamble and Alan stayed on, just for a while and then sold it. And he went in, went on to Tech [Technical college], and I don’t think it was Tech in those days, but anyhow he went onto studies. And he became

the top tiler in Australia, they had people out from all over the world on a seminar in Sydney. He used to do the tiling, oh well the wall tiles, but at the same time he’d do mosaics on the floor of swimming pools and the walls and that, that sort of stuff.

A mosaic, he did one, one was about, I suppose 35 foot long and as high as that, as high as this room. He was given by his brother, he was given an ordinary photo and Sonny said, “Now listen Alan, I want that on the wall

of the Caringbah School”, he was the parish priest at Caringbah.

I went back to Coonamble and I went and got a job at the shop I was at pre-war. I was there for two years, tossed it in,

I went to a better job, another shop but a much better prospects, got everything at cost price there, where as I didn’t at the first one. Went to the there for 15 years, got a better job in the office at, at the Electricity Department, and I was with then for the next 20, 21 years,

then I retired, retired in October 1984 with great prospects of Laura and myself having a good retirement. Lo and behold, poor old Laura, she had a terrible arthritis and I nursed her for the next ten years, she couldn’t get out of a chair here. I just, out of, out of focus,

out of public eye and everything, for about ten years, couldn’t do a thing. But I still had her, that was the main thing. And up until then, we had a, we had a great life, you know, we used to get about, follow the kids playing football and all that. Poor old Laura, where the television is in the corner, we put it sideways, across the

corner, she used to sit there. And when the Sydney football would be on and her team would be playing, Parramatta mostly, and they’d look like going up to score. Poor old Laura, I can still see her there, she’d lean forward, she couldn’t get up, she’d lean forward, “Go, go, go”, like this, you know. And she’s yelling out, “Go, go, go”. I reckon we

put the television across the corner so she could score the try, there’s the nice things, memories you have, you know, lovely.

I’m happy that you came along.

Not for the publicity.

End of tape