Australians at War Film Archive

Well, I was born in Sydney in the old Crown Street Hospital, 27th September 1921.

I know very little about my early life. I seem to be one of these people that between, up to about six years old I've got little or no memory. So really speaking, my memory starts from when I was admitted to the Burnside Orphanage in early 1927. I stayed at Burnside Orphanage,

got my early education there till 1937 when I went out to work on farms. And the first job I had was Moss Vale, ten bob [shillings] a week and your keep. And from there I went to Tenterfield, I worked on cattle there, and the war started, et cetera. I came back down to Moss Vale, I was working

there for a while and I was working for old D. B. Reid, Vanderfield & Reid, timber merchants, Sydney. He had two properties there, I was on one of them. And I got a call-up, went there in 1942, early 1942, from there to North Head barracks with a draft of people that came in from what they called Ellis Sea area

and we went to North Head Barracks in the artillery. Eventually, from there I went to, I was drafted to New Guinea, and I went into one of the gun factories in Milne Bay. Whilst I was there I managed to get a transfer from the heavy artillery to Army Water Transport, and they were engaged in

ferrying small detachments of troops and supplies up and down the coast of New Guinea. So I was with them up till the end of the war. And I took my discharge at Lae, went to work for administration there, civil administration. From there I went across to Port Moresby and I joined Australasian Petroleum Company and was with them for twelve years.

Eventually, I won't say they folded up, but they slowed down their operations and I joined the Bureau of Mineral Resources and I went from the tropics to Alice Springs, which was a big difference. I was on seismic work there, oil drilling again, up till - it was 1961 when I came down from New Guinea - up till 1966. I transferred across to the

Forestry and Timber Bureau at Canberra and I went from manual work to clerical. I thought, “Well, I'm getting a bit old in the tooth, I'd better start using my head instead of the muscles.” And I was with them up till 1972, and then for health reasons - I'd married in the meantime - and for health reasons we came up here

to Hervey Bay. I couldn't get a transfer with the government, so I thought, “Well, right, I've got to employ myself.” So we bought a shop here, a gift and souvenir shop in the Bay. We ran that for about fifteen years and the government kept whacking the taxes on wholesale, so we thought, “Well, we're only working for the government, we'll get out and work for ourselves.” So we retired and so we've been retired ever since. But we've had three moves of residence in

the Bay, which each one has been to an advantage, and finally we ended up in Brighton Street, and here we are.

Oh well, mainly, we did our rookie [recruit] training at North Head Barracks, Bulldust Castle, as we used to call it.

I was drafted into, the group of us, we were drafted into what they called repository squads, and in repository squads you went round doing the installation of guns. Now, we were on heavy artillery which was coastal, which meant anything up from 4.7's right up to 9.2's. Now, we did the six-inch, I think it was six-inch guns,

at Malabar, the installation of them. When I say the installation, the civil construction mob put in all the concrete work, the foundations and that, but we did the assembly of the guns, brought the pieces in and put them together and assembled the whole gun. And then the coastal crowd artillery took over then. Now, we also put in the 4.7 on Bowen Island. Now, that 4.7 came off the old

Canberra. They updated the armaments on her, and the gun we put in down there had the old Naval shield round it, big Naval shield. We also did, the biggest job we did was putting in the 9.2's at Mount Drummond, which is just near Coniston, outside of Wollongong, and that was a job and a half because the barrel, or the pieces they call it, was thirty feet long and it weighed thirty tons.

And we had to go ahead of the trucks, there were these Diamond T trucks carrying it, and we had to go and shore up every bridge along there because they were old timber bridges. And if they weren't shored up well she was going to go through. And from there, it was whilst I was down there that I volunteered for New Guinea. And I said to my father at that time, I said, "Well, if I don't go and take my chance at the front when things are going

bad,” I said, "I can't look anyone in the eye later on, so,” I said, "I've got to take my chances.” My father gave me his permission and away I went. And from there, we got the boat at Townsville, the old Taroona across to Milne Bay across the Coral Sea. Now, there's a funny thing. In my papers they quote that we called in at Moresby. We never did, so that's completely incorrect.

We went into Milne Bay . We were dropped off there. Now, we were split up, strangely enough, and most of us went on to G Battery, which was the inspection battery going into Milne Bay. Now, all ports had to have a gun coverage at the opening of the port, or at the mouth of the port, whatever it was, and they were controlled by the navy and the navy gave you instructions.

If a ship came in and didn't give its clearance signals or vice versa when it was going out, you were ordered to fire a round in front of the ship, make it hove to until such time as it cleared itself. And that was the job of G Battery in Milne Bay. I was there at the time of the Bismarck [Sea] battle. And from there we came back on leave. I had transferred to Water Transport, which was

small ships, and I was put into their repair shop which was opposite Samarai. The China Straits. Well, we did our stint there and they brought us back on leave and we regrouped down at Mount Martha in Melbourne. After we'd had our leave, we were sent back up and this time we caught the Taroona again at Townsville and we were landed

at Lae and that was just after the Finschhafen turnout and I was put onto a boat called the AM5, the Gloria, and we went up to Wewak. We were doing the casualty run there and we would come down each morning with a small barge, a 38-foot barge, which would go in because there were no jetties, and the wounded would be brought down to the foreshore, taken on board the barge, the barge would take them out to us, they'd be

transferred across from the barge to us, they'd go back in and pick up another load and then we'd both proceed up along the coast and we'd go up to a place called But - there were two places close together and I was never sure which was which - But. And Dagua was the airstrip and they would be flown from there to Aitape. Anyway, I was in at Rabaul, one of the trips we did, we (UNCLEAR) into at Rabaul later on and

from Rabaul back to Lae. I took my discharge there at Lae. It was one way of getting out of the army quicker instead of waiting another twelve months, and I got the, I was working for the civil administration. Then I switched across to Moresby and I was working for the oil company there up till 1961, then I came back to New Guinea, not to New Guinea, to Australia,

and I lobbed myself in with the Bureau of Mineral Resources. So the Bureau of Mineral Resources was a really good education. It took me all around Australia, they paid for it and I got my wages out of it. And then eventually, as I said, I joined the Forestry and Timber Bureau in Canberra, and from there we came up to Hervey Bay, retired – well, we had the shop for fourteen years - and retired,

and we've been here ever since. So we've had roughly 30 years in the Bay, which has been pretty good going. And it's been good to us - we've enjoyed it.

Yeah, well, my mother, strangely enough, my mother was educated

at Vaucluse, at the big Catholic convent there, and her father was German and he was interned during the First World War. Now, apparently my mother was a very clever person, she spoke four languages, she was a very good pianist; and my father, he was into music too, he was a violinist.

And they used to play, I think at one stage they played a lot for the old silent films when they had their orchestras, et cetera. And I've got various pictures of them. I don't know a lot about them because being in the orphanage for such a long time you don’t get to know all your family background. And one of the surprising things, I said to my father one time,

"What about the Larters? What can you tell me about them?” And he looked at me and he says, "You don’t want to know the buggers.” So I let it go at that, but he never ever did tell me. He was a bit of a, I won't say an outlaw or a renegade, but he was a very strong-willed person and he looked at things in a different angle. I got on well with him, right throughout our lives,

I constantly corresponded with him. I would write to him maybe once a week, once a fortnight, but wherever I went, we always had this constant mail. Well, as I said, my mother died from peritonitis. At that time they were living out at Kingsford out of Sydney there. Dad at one time was working for the different breweries, Resch's. He played in with Seppelts. A lot of the old companies had their own orchestras, see, and if you worked

for them you were automatically commandeered into their orchestra. And Dad was a leading violinist. He was good, there was no argument about that. But music, particularly round about the years of the Depression and when the talkies [sound movies] came in, that threw all those musicians out of work and Dad ended up on a pick and shovel out on the Nepean and the Haven Dams. Now, for a man who's a musician, to be swinging a pick it goes against the grain.

As a matter of fact I've got his diplomas: Trinity College, London, teacher's diploma; and – oh, some other one. I've got them out in the garage there. And they really did have to know music those days, really know it hard. But anyway, that was the way it went.

Well, as far as I know,

there was no diagnosis of her ailment. As far as I, if there was a diagnosis, it was wrong. And by the time they realised that this appendix had burst it was too late, and those times there was very little hope for anyone who had a burst appendix, that was it, it was finished. I often look down at my life and I think, “Well, would I have run my life better if I'd have had a family

behind me?” because it's something that I tell my wife, that if you haven't got a family behind you you really don't know what you're missing. And when I see people today whose families break up over some small tiff, I think to myself how bloody stupid they are. And Alan Jones [radio commentator] this morning was just saying that, you lose your job and your company can replace you in a week or a fortnight; you lose a member of

your family and you never can replace them. And I thought, “That's good speaking, very good.”

Yeah. Well, the strange part was, after the thirteen months in hospital, my father's words were he used to come in and visit me and all I could only roll my eyeballs. I never knew, and Jean got it out of him years later in Canberra.

She said, "Well, where was Bob between when he left the hospital and when he arrived at Burnside?” And he said, "He was in orphanages.” And what they used to do in those days, the orphanages, one orphanage would keep the two to three year-old, then the person would be transferred to the next orphanage which kept the three to four and the four to five and the five to six,

and that was the way it went and you were just sent along like a pack of cards, you know. “Oh well, you go into that slot for this year. Next year you'll go into that slot,” see? Pigeonhole sort of business. And the strange part of it is that I've got absolutely no recollection. All I can ever remember is being on the lawn outside the Ashfield Hospital and apart from that nothing. So, talk about lost years!

Mine was gastroenteritis. Well, that was fatal. My father said they had a coffin made for me, so it must have been a very close go. So how I was able to pull through it I don't know. But you often find that people who go through that sort of setback early in life are the stronger for it

later on, but they generally suffer one way or another, either in their physique or something like that. Well, in my case, obviously my shortness is the result of it, and it's typical of animals, et cetera. You see an animal that gets a big setback when it's small, well, all right, it doesn't develop to its full capacity. Not physically, anyway.

Anyway, I'm quite pleased. I'm still going.

I would have been nine months old. You know, it was critical. I was fortunate. Somebody must have been looking after me, anyway.

Well, that's what I said. I was nine months. My mother -

at the time my mother died I apparently took on this gastro - whether it was a change of food or change of nursing or what it was, I wouldn't have a clue. And my father never offered any explanations about it, and he probably didn't know anyway. So that's the situation. But I'm still here.

Yes. Well, it was coincidence, or one might have been the result

of the other, that's what I think. I think the fact that my mother died and I think that whoever took over looking after me or anything like that, I haven't got a clue, but the fact that they had the coffin made for me at the same time, well, that's indicative of the seriousness of the situation.

He was a very caring person.

He wasn't an aggressive person at any time. He was very intelligent. He was well-educated. He was educated at Fort Street High about the same time as Tubby Stevens, who ended up as Premier of NSW [New South Wales] . My father mentioned knowing him, et cetera. But he never really, he didn't get on well with his own father. His own father

was a bossy character. Actually, the family history on his side goes back round about the 1850's, because there was a Larter had a warehouse out on the Old South Head Road around about that time. Dad's father married into the Melly family who were also

well known in Sydney around that time, and Rankins, there's a connection between Rankins.... But the grandfather was left one side of a street in the Vaucluse area of houses and his sister was left the other. Now, Nelly Rankin apparently was a very good singer. Now, that's

my father's aunty, and he went out to see her one time. Now, being a woman and very astute, she hung on to her block of houses, et cetera, whereas my grandfather, he boozed and drunk the lot. And apparently he was pretty hard on my Dad and there was no love lost between them. And it's a pity in a way, but that's the way life goes. And yet on my mother's side, her father, who

was German and his name was Seisan, and I've got the old letterhead where he wrote to my father offering his sympathy when my mother died and he wanted to see the child, and Dad never replied to him. There was some sort of aggro between them, I don't know what it was, but these are where families can do the wrong thing by their children, because he had the money to have kept me out of the orphanage,

see, and there were other people who possibly could have kept me out of the orphanage and given me a good education. I never got it. Well, the education I got has stood me in good stead, but I mean if there was any chance of going to a uni [university] or anything like that, it's gone. That was it. But again, then again, if my life had gone in that direction, would I be here today?

He didn't actually send me to that orphanage, not to Burnside. Musicians have, like anywhere else, sport and that, they have a group of people they congregate together with, with similar likes, and particularly all the old music hall stuff and that, and my father got in with a family by the name of Lear. They used to live in Kathleen Street,

Leichhardt. Matter of fact, I was staying with them after my grandmother died. At the time that I first recollect things, we were living at Annandale and I was about five and a half at the time. The grandmother died and I was moved across to Leichhardt to stop with this Aunty Lear. Now, her daughter was a very good pianist, not only a good pianist, but she could write scores and music.

And her father, old Maitland Lear, and my father put on a musical in Sydney round about 1925, ’26, and between them they wrote the lyrics, et cetera. I think it was called Verona. And it paid its way, but the music was a bit ahead of its time and so they didn't really make anything out of it, but because of that connection Aunty Lear,

as I called her, it was her that got me into Burnside. You see, they were a Protestant family, where the Larters and the Mellys were Catholic, see. But it was a good thing for me. It gave me a good background, et cetera. So that was the situation there. So it was old Aunty Lear that really got me into Burnside, so I just went on from there.

Well, Burnside was good. Now, I compare it today with the different stories that we hear of the orphanages, state homes, Catholic homes and whatnot, and Burnside was good. At the time I was there, they were building additional houses. Each house held about thirty to thirty-five children. It was brought up under the Presbyterian Church at that time.

A Dr. McIntyre, who had been the Moderator General of Australia at one time, he was the superintendent. Now, each house was run by two women. Now, I think this is the critical thing where you don't get these physical problems because having two women in charge there was none of that come in. They had their own dairy, they had their own vegetable garden, which was about twelve acres.

They had their own tradespeople for the maintenance of the place. There were approximately eighteen houses in it and houses for each of the tradespeople. They had a herd of about fifty cows, which they milked. The way it was, they had an infants’ section which took up to, they take them from about two years old up to about six years. There were different houses

allocated for them. From the six up to about twelve years old or tens year old there were houses allocated for them. As you grew up in the age group, then you were transferred to another house. Then, when you got to fourteen, unless you were exceptionally bright, and there wasn't the demand for it, you were put out to work with one of their tradespeople, a bit like an apprenticeship, so you could be working with

their carpenter, you could be working with their plumber or their painter. And these people were responsible for the maintenance of all the buildings. Or you could be working with their storeman. Now, all these stores came in in bulk and then they were broken down, and each week, they had these big barrows, and the head of each house would write out their order for how many pounds of flour, sugar, coffee, tea, et cetera, that they wanted

to see the house through for the week. The meat would come round daily - when I say “daily,” five days a week there would be fresh meat come round because those days the most you'd have in the house was an icebox. There were no refrigerators. The older boys at fourteen would be sort of sent off either to the tradespeople or to the garden people who looked after

lawns and the plantations, the vegetable garden where there were six boys and two men running that, or to the dairy where there were, I think, there were eight boys there and three adults there. Now, they milked fifty head of cattle and the milk was distributed daily, twice daily, round to each house. So you'd go round with this milk cart

and the milk would have been put into these big tanks and lifted onto the cart and you'd go round and you'd have the old galvanised buckets, one gallon, two gallon buckets with the lids on them, and you'd fill them up and you'd had this list, or by that time you got it off pat, parrot fashion: “Eight pints to this house, six to that, one pint to this tradesman,” or something like that,

and in you'd trot with these containers. You'd tip the milk out into their container and back to the cart and off again. And that was done. The boys on the dairy had to get up half past four every morning, rain, hail or shine. And it wasn't fun in winter, either. It was a good education. The education was pretty good. I would say that the standard

of arithmetic, sums, mathematics, was equal to what a lot of kids are getting today, and I never struck any of those kids who at the end of their time could not read or write, et cetera, you know, reasonably. Even those who were a bit dumb, they still came out in front. The dairy was good. They grew their own corn. We would have to cut that corn, cart it down to the dairy,

put it through the chaff cutters, it would go up into the silos. You'd mix it with coarse salt, et cetera. All the cattle were fed at the same time as they were being milked, which is taboo today, you'd never do that. And at one time, I remember when the first tests came through for tuberculosis, we lost half the herd because they all had TB [tuberculosis] and they had to get

more herd in, and, the donations to the Burnside were very good. There was one crowd that had the Denbigh [?] breed of cattle, and they donated so many cattle to make up for the shortage in the herd. Oh, and in the main, all the ploughing and harvesting was done with horses. We had one old Fordson tractor which was always breaking down, the gearbox would collapse or something, but it was all done by manual labour

but we were none the worse for it. And we had an old Bolander crude oil engine, we used to have to put the blowlamp on it at half past four in the morning to have it hot enough to start at seven, and the whole flat bevel drives, you know. And it was, a lot of it was like a Heath Robinson [eccentric inventor] creation, you know, bits of this and bits of that, and yet we learnt to get along with it.

Well, we didn't know any better anyway.

This is North Parramatta, between North Parramatta and Pennant Hills. Now, we used to walk the dairy cattle, we used to walk them down the main road there and the cars would be weaving in and out. You imagine trying to walk a mob of cattle down there today - you can't even get across the place. I've been back there a few times and, as matter of fact, I've contributed

some poems and things. Parramatta Heritage is running a show on orphanages and schools around the Parramatta area, and at that time, in the early ’30s, there was a bevy of orphanages: Westmead Boys' Home, Carlingford Girls' Home, the state homes up on the Pennant Hills Road, there's the Bexley Homes.

Gawd, there must have been, I'd say it wasn't a case always that the parents were dead; often it was a case that the parents couldn't keep them, and that was it. I've got some good memories of it. I go back there and, as I said, I've given these articles to Burnside. I've got copies of them there if you'd like to have a look. I got a copy of kids learning

life-saving, and this is about 1928 – anyway, they're doing the exercises on the edge of the swimming pool. And they're doing the old push, you know, where the chap grabs you and you put your hand under his chin and force him backwards, sort of thing, but the only trouble is from a photograph point of view, very few of us had cameras or anything like that and the chances of getting any pictures were very remote.

The only way you'd get pictures of it would be to get on to their old annual reports, which obviously they'd have some round the place.

Yeah.

When I was at Burnside I was just barely six,

because about a month after, I must have gone in there in August 1927, because not long after the Lear family came up on a Saturday. Saturday afternoon every fortnight was visiting day in which parents could come and see their children in the afternoon for a couple of hours, and invariably they brought them sweets and fruit and all this sort of stuff. And I remember that, on this particular occasion, they brought, oh, a stack of food and we had quite a nice little picnic.

They were good like that, you know. Generally, whatever fruit and stuff was left over, it went into the house and it was distributed amongst the other kids, so they were, they had good Christian principles, that's the way I would put it. And although you were independent you still learnt the value of mateship and keeping together as a group.

Oh, we'd often have fights with the Parramatta kids, you know, there'd be rock-throwing going on and all sorts of things. But it was very keen competition. Particularly they'd have sports days on the Parramatta Park and we'd be saying, "Oh, we beat Wentworth, and we beat Castlereagh and some other group.” Burnside were pretty good. They had a football team they used to call the Ragbags, and that was because of their clothing

and the fact that they played barefooted. None of us ever had a footy boot. And yet they held the premiership for the juniors, I think, for about a dozen years running. They were a tough little lot.

Oh, at one stage, I can remember we had Speech Day and it was quoted that they had five hundred and twenty-seven. Now, of that five hundred and twenty-seven, probably

between thirty and fifty, no more than fifty, would be what we called “outsiders,” and they were children who lived in the area. The school was run, although the building was owned by Burnside and the grounds, the school was run by the NSW Department of Education, and one of their undertakings was that if there were vacancies in the school it could be filled by children from outside.

Now, there was one family I remember, Underwood. They lived directly opposite the Bettington Road golf course, off the Pennant Hills Road. Underwoods. And they were fairly, oh, I wouldn't call them wealthy, but they were well-off, and they would come down to the school. And there were different kids from the Parramatta, edges of Parramatta, that would come to Burnside School and they would go to the school right through there. The school went to Intermediate standard.

And from there on, that was it. At one stage, Scot's College offered a bursary to the brightest kid there and I think a kid by the name of Abernathy won it. There were very few of those sort of things offered, though. In the main, once you got to about fourteen, that was the end of your education, unless.... See, you'd leave Burnside approximately at the age of sixteen. By that time they'd give you

a job, get a job for you and fit you out in a suit of clothes. You were still a ward of theirs up till twenty-one. But if your parents were able to take over.... And there was a crowd at Manly by the name of Chambers, one of them played for the Manly football team, Ray Chambers, they lived in Darley Road, 52 Darley Road. Their mother,

she got them through night school and Ray ended up as an engineer, he was down on the (UNCLEAR) scheme, and the other brother ended up as an accountant. Now, see, they got the opportunity to get a trade or something behind them, a profession. I didn't get that opportunity. Any kid that was sent out to the farm, he was more or less cheap labour. I hate to have to say that, but it is the truth. They were cheap labour. And I will give you an example.

When I was at the first farm I was on, at the end of twelve months, he was obligated to raise my wages. So what did he do? He wrote to the orphanage. They got me another job up at Tenterfield on a slightly higher wage. He got another kid from the orphanage, ten bob [shillings] a week. See, that was how a lot of these people operated. And I'm not saying this out of malice, but out of fact.

Even my job at Tenterfield. I worked there, I started off fifteen bob a week, at the end of three years I was getting seventeen shillings a week.. You didn't know what was going on. Nobody told you what was going on. And because you were on farms, you're isolated, you’re not in contact with other people, and nobody's going to tell you that you should be getting more money. I went from there to work for Vanderfield & Reid

and I went from fifteen bob a week to thirty-five shillings a week and keep. Now, look at the difference there. See? And you're kept in the dark about these things. And the thing that I always feel sorry about is the girls that left there, because a lot of them went to work as sort of housemaids for people round Sydney, some of the people who had country residences

down round Bowral, the likes of Burns of Burns Philp [trading company] and the music people and Mark Foys [retailers] and all these people. They all had these country residences where they used to entertain their overseas thing. Well, these girls would go into these jobs, and they would be like me, they wouldn't have any more clue, and they were taken advantage of. It's just the sad side of it, really.

Yeah, righto.

Yes. As a matter of fact I did a write-up for this Parramatta crowd and I did it in the day, a day in the life of

one of the houses. Right. From the morning, the morning starts about five o'clock. The older boys are woken up and they go down to the kitchen and they prepare the breakfast for the thirty-three children in the house. I've chosen Glencoe because that was the house I was in in the later years. And so they prepare,

which means lighting the coal fire, lighting the heater, the hot water heater, which was fed on coke, the other was in coal. Every morning saw a big pot of porridge made, oatmeal porridge, that was made. While that's being done, the sub-matron looks after the kitchen and the dining room and things associated with that.

The head matron looks after the administration of the house and she looks after all the other facilities of the running of the unit, so she's the boss cocky and she's answerable to the superintendent of the homes. The superintendent is generally a reverend [minister of religion] of some sort or other.

About seven o'clock, I could be wrong there, but - no, it'd have to be a bit earlier than seven, about half past six - all the boys, I'm talking about boys' house, just sticking to one side of it, they're in a big dormitory. The small boys are up one end of the dormitory, the middle section middle aged, and then the bigger boys up this end. The dormitories have big shutters

at either end, so you've got two big shutters at either end, so in summertime the shutters go up and in wintertime they come down, sort of thing. There's no form of heating or anything there. This is on the second floor - oh, I suppose you'd call this the first floor, because the other'd be the ground floor. There's toilet and bath facilities there which the kids can go to, and in the morning they wake up and the first thing they do is they have prayers,

they kneel outside their bed, and they say their prayers, right, they go and scrub their teeth and they wash their face. Each kid's got his own toothbrush and towel, et cetera, And all children have got a number in the house, and I can remember mine was number 2. So all your clothing, instead of having your name on it, would just have “G2,” which is Glencoe 2, because your laundry would go to

the laundry on a particular day. The homes had their own laundry which was a steam-driven laundry, et cetera, So all right, the kids having said their prayers, done their teeth, got dressed, et cetera; each one's given a duty. Now, none of these houses can operate, no ordinary home can operate, without each kid having a detailed duty to do, depending on their size. So the small

kids, they would pick up papers on the lawns, because each house was surrounded by a fair-sized lawn, at least an acre of ground around the house, so they'd pick up the papers; the next size would be sweeping the paths; the next size up would be getting the coal buckets in, and that was a hell of a job in wintertime. You sit out on a heap of coal and you're cracking coal, because it had to be broken up into pieces, and you didn't have a hammer, all you had was a piece of,

a chunk of water pipe, and if you didn't know the skills of splitting stone, well, you're in big trouble. And coke. So there'd be, say, six buckets of coal, they'd have to be brought in and put in the scullery, and there'd be four buckets of coke. Now, the buckets were a joke in themselves. Each house in its stores would from time to time get a thirty-pound jam tin which was about this high

and about nine inches across. In fact, they were just the right size to make a good wicket when you were playing cricket and you always knew when you hit the stumps because there was a loud bang. So those duties would be done. Roughly seven o'clock they'd go in for breakfast, they'd all line up and they'd all have to show their hands were washed, before they went in, and their faces and their hair combed, et cetera.

Otherwise you'd get sent to the washroom. And you’d file in, you'd all stand behind your appointed chair. And we had the littlies' table, the middle table and the big table. So you'd stand behind the chair, you'd sing grace. Right. Then you'd sit down and eat your breakfast, and there was no talking at the table or anything like that. The two women would sit over in their little table and they'd have their breakfast. Right.

At a given signal, some of the older boys would get up and start collecting the plates and take them out to be washed. That would be their duties. And they would, with breakfast over, they would still have another grace to sing before they left the table. Right. There might be some duties to be done. Otherwise

they'd get dressed, ready for school. Now, at eight o'clock they had a sick parade. They had their own hospital, and any kids who were sick or had scratches, boils or whatnot, they would go to the hospital where they would be treated. And we had one nurse there, Nurse Giddy, I think her name was, I can't remember for sure, and she was known as the “iodine lady”. Everything that came to her, she whacked iodine on it. Mind you, I think there was good psychology because

none of the kids who were putting anything on [i.e. pretending to be unwell] would go and have iodine whacked on them, not for any scratches. So then, back at the house, they'd line up again and you'd march, this reminds me of For Whom the Bell Tolls, [movie] because this bell'd be rung. The first time the bell was rung would be for the sick parade. The second time it was rung you all went to prayers. And there was a big hall there

and you would all go in there, and each house as they filed in had their appointed positions. The superintendent would read the lesson for the day and they'd sing a hymn. Right. Off from that to the school. At the school there might be ten or fifteen minutes to play or something before school went in. When they went in to school

they went in to the beat of a drum, there was always a kid there drumming time, and you'd go into your different classes. They used to have a break about, I think it was about half past ten, in which they'd have fifteen minutes or something in which they'd go out and play marbles or read comics or even might have a bit of a game of cricket or football, and back in. Now, the older boys at that time who had been assigned to the tradespeople,

they would have done their work, whatever their section, and they would always come home half an hour or an hour earlier. That's right, the school would break for lunch at half past twelve, but the older boys would break at twelve o'clock, they would have their lunch over and be back before the other kids showed up. And the kids would come home from the school at half past twelve,

their meal would be on the table. The older kids would have helped out in the kitchen, getting it ready. All meals, everything was put on the plate, each plate, so that everyone got the same amount, the only difference being that the bigger children would have got a bigger helping. Then back to school for them. The other kids would work through. Now, those that worked on the dairy, because they got up early, they would knock off at four o'clock. Oh, that was a big deal, that.

We thought it was a good deal, anyway, whereas the other kids worked until half past four. In the meantime the children would have gone back to their houses. School finished at half past three in the afternoon. There was no daylight saving in those days, not in New South Wales anyway. And now, this is interesting, the mechanisms of how each house

was run. As soon as they got back they got out of their school clothes. See, you had three sets of clothes: you had your Sunday clothes, you had your school clothes and you had your play clothes and that was it, and God help you if you got any of them ripped; you were in big trouble. Now, the small kids would go down what we would call the “bush,” and they had to collect kindling wood to start the coal fires.

And the tables. Now, there were roughly eleven children at each table, so eleven of the small kids would go down the bush and pick up sticks, the girls had to do the same thing, and bring them back to the houses, and those with a bit of newspaper started off the fires. So that was their job. Another group would be working in the kitchen, et cetera, preparing the evening meal. The evening meal invariably was between two

and three slices of bread, the equivalent of a boxed loaf, although in the main they used to get the cottage loaves, the big cottage loaves. The small children would get one slice of, say, the cottage loaf or two slices of the other, and they would be spread with either jam from the old thirty-pound tin or

margarine. And I can remember the first forms of margarine came out and they were mainly copra, made from coconut, and they were very hard to spread because it was as hard as a rock. But that was your evening meal. You had two slices of bread and, if you were an older boy, a cup of tea and cup of cocoa. Coffee was in a minority, very seldom had coffee. If you were lucky in wintertime

the sub-matron might have made some soup and you got a plate of soup as well. And sometimes, come the weekend, they might have made a big fruitcake and you'd get a slice of that. And again, each time the meals.... We must have been well worth saving, because there were prayers, twice with every meal, and then when they went to bed at night there were more prayers.

Then Sunday. Well, I'm jumping the gun a bit there. The evening. Oh, between, if you didn't have duties to do, you'd get out and play with a football or something, a bit of cricket. There were cricket matches between the different houses. And the girls had vigrow which was competitive,and the football. But

after the evening meal, if it was summertime, you would probably play outside on the lawns, et cetera, and they played a lot, particularly for the smaller kids. I can remember the kids playing Oranges and Lemons and different old English games that were played quite a lot. Hiding. We had a game which we used to call “Cocky Laura,” and all the kids would line up and they had to race from one side

of the field to the other and one kid was in the middle, and once he caught one, that one had to stop in the middle and help him catch the others until there was only one left, you know. "Oh, you didn't catch me, you don't play fair,” you know, and all this sort of stuff. Just typical kids' stuff. But there was a good atmosphere between kids, and there was a fair bit of competition between the different houses. And then eventually, there'd be bath time.

And they had these big cast iron baths. To give you an idea, they'd put three kids in one bath at a time, you know, and the same block of soap. And we used to get this laundry soap. In fact one or two of the houses used to make their own soap out of the old tallow. I forget what the ingredients were, I think it was tallow and caustic soda or something like that. That was guaranteed to clean them.

They'd be bathing, each kid had his own towel, and then they'd go to bed. Then they could sit up in bed and read comics or something like that. But when it was lights-out, they'd have to kneel alongside their bed, say their prayers and then the lights would be put out. And maybe on the side where the older kids were it was left on a bit longer for them to do their homework. And that would be the end of the day. So I did a draft of that.

I can give you a copy of it later that you can have a look on.

It built up a very good, we were very patriotic towards one another and the school itself was very patriotic towards the British Empire, because those were the days, and I can remember being shown on a map the all-red route, where if you sailed from England to Australia every port of call was a British Dominion.

Even coming down through, whether you went round by South Africa, because that was rated as British, or if you came through the Suez Canal, the same thing, it was all red, all the way through, India, et cetera, right down through New Guinea. We were, and all our school teachers were, very patriotic. There was none of this communism business or individual....

Monday morning you'd have this little ode that you recited: "I honour my God, I serve my King, I salute my flag.” Well, where is it today? Gone overboard. But I don't know, I still think it was a good thing.

Well, you always had Australian and English History, they were your two main subjects. So your Australian History more or less started

from Cook discovering Australia. Oh, they did touch on the Dutch on Western Australia, et cetera, those early explorers. But they took you right through. But the funny part was they only took you through as far as, say, the end of the First World War. Now, I'm talking about 1930, so what happened in that ten years they didn't tell you. The magazines

with the education New South Wales put out, they stopped at that period. Nobody had written from that point on, the end of the First World War. In English History you learnt more or less roughly from the time of the Romans. So you were taken through, right through roughly to the period of Queen Victoria.

The Education Department brought out a magazine for each of the classes from about what we would have called third class up to sixth class, and their major exam before you went on from there was what they called the QC, Qualifying Certificate. And each month they would bring out a magazine with items in it designated

for that age or that classification, and some of them would have photos in them. And they would have poetry in them, and there might be a piece of music in the back. But all we learnt in Music, apart from getting commandeered into the school choir, was the old do-re-mi, I mean to say actually learning the notes. Strangely enough it was one of the failings, I thought, of the orphanage

was they didn't try to teach the kids drama or acting or anything in that sort of line. Or you got a bit of a class in drawing, et cetera, which was very primitive. But in the arts there was very little of that, you were more or less stuck with the three R's [Reading, ’Riting and ’Rithmetic (i.e. reading, writing and arithmetic)] and that was it. But, for all that, I found it was pretty good, and I still think, you know,

you talk to any of the kids of that period and you say to them, you know, when they're going through the check-out, "Oh, how much is that?” and they tell you straight away. But you ask today's kids and they wouldn't have a flaming clue unless they pull out a calculator.

Less than six, really.

Yeah, well, the care was good. I can remember I didn't realise properly when I was being taken there that I was taken there for good. I thought I was only just doing a visit, even though my aunty had been showing me the different clothes that had been made for me. And I can remember when she left me and she went to catch the bus back to Parramatta, and

I saw her going across the lawn on her own and, gee, did it really hit me, and I can remember, I bawled my eyes out. And of course this matron was hanging on to me, because I was going to go after Aunty Lear and that was it. And anyway, by way of diversion, she pointed out this swing at the back, down the back behind this big building, and these were mostly kids up to about, oh, I would say from about three

to about five year-olds, and of course I belted out on this swing and I wanted to play on this swing all the time. And anyway, I had to be forcibly dragged in. And they obviously decided that I was a bit out of my class there and they sent me to this second house which was called Ivanhoe, and I was in that for about four years. The care was good. The things that struck me about it was they were very emphatic

on kids being clean, being bathed regularly, washing their hands before meals, brushing their hair and that, at no time running around grubby. I mean to say as soon as they looked dirty, right, it was under the shower, whether it was cold or indifferent, sort of thing. Their hygiene was very good. And there was always a situation where there were some of the matrons that were

really well-liked by the children; there were some that weren't so much liked. I can remember different ones. We had one lady there, I remember, a Miss Allen, and she was a country girl and she was really tops. And us kids, you know, we were very saddened when she was transferred to one of the children's sections, you know, the little ones,

because we really liked her, she was very good. There was another that one I remember, Miss Richardson, I think it was, and she was very good. They sort of brought you together so that you sort of regarded yourself as a family and they were the kingpin, et cetera, and whatever they said went, and you went along with it because you didn't know any better anyway, but it

sounded right, so that was the way it went. And there were some that were pretty, a bit despotic. They used to have a strap which was about two inches wide, and it was pretty thick hide, and it was about probably about two foot long, and if you needed corporal punishment that's what you got. You might've got it on the hands, you might've got it round the legs. And I can remember I copped it a few times, but I don't doubt that I deserved it so,

you know, because you look at it this way: well, for every time they caught you at something, there were four times when they didn't, see, so you thought, “Well, I didn't come out too bad on the average.” Same with the superintendent. Now, old Dr. McIntyre, he was very liked by the kids, and he would come round sometimes of a night and visit one house. And he would know each kid individually and he would follow them around, and

when children left the orphanage, like they got to sixteen, they were going out for their first job, they'd invariably - and I know I did it - you'd go round and see the different matrons of the houses that you knew and you'd say goodbye to them, and you got a good feeling with them. But the big thing was when you left the place and you went out to the job, you were suddenly on your own and you had no support, you had nobody to go to for advice or backup,

et cetera, and I think that's where it fell down, that there was no after care. You could still write to them but that wasn't the same thing, and you didn't have anyone you could confide in, so that if you were being ripped off by the people you were working for or anything like that you just didn't have anyone. And the one or two relatives that I had around the place, they were down in Sydney. And I know my Aunty, Aunty Ellis who was out

around Bondi way, she wanted to get me apprenticed as a boilermaker at Mort Dock . Now, that would have been a good thing for me because I would have got a trade, but the superintendent at the time, because I'd won a prize in the agriculture section at the school, he determined I should go on the farm, see, and that was it. Well, there was no future in the farm. I thought as a kid I'd save up my ten bob a week

and eventually I'd buy my own farm. But, God, how many years would it take you? God, you'd be an old man before you even owned your first acre. So, you know, there were advantages, there were disadvantages.

Oh, you never got a kiss or anything like that. In fact I found

after I left Burnside it was very hard for me to show affection to anyone, to kiss them or anything like that. The most you do is shake your hand. That was the sort of family life that was missing, to have this affection of being treated as family. You were part of a group, and because there were so many, thirty-three, the women could hardly go round kissing kids.

And the fact was that, if you did get kissed, then you were regarded as Matron's favourite, so instead of being the envy of the others you became the butt. So you did your damnedest to make sure you weren't kissed. You know, talk about things being put back to front! If you were the schoolteacher's favourite or anything you were in for a hard time.

Well, there was a fair bit of bullying. They talk about bullying now and things. I know of some things, and I won't repeat them, which if I had done them I would have been extremely ashamed. I had a letter, I saw an article in a magazine where this character was asking for information about his father.

And I thought, “Yes,” then I thought, “No, I won't write and tell him,” because his father at that orphanage was a real bastard. And the things that he did, if that came out in today's paper it would be absolutely shocking. And I thought, “No, I'll just keep my mouth shut,” because, after all, I couldn't prove it. You see, that's the thing. The things that that kid did! And I

can remember what I saw in my time there, and the differing bullying tactics that he did to others was horrendous. And he wasn't the only one. There were other ones. Some not so bad, but bullying. See, with kids, particularly with boys, and I suppose the same happens with girls, they can't go to the matron because

the matron very often can't do anything about it. Even the superintendent can't very much do anything about it. So the kids just learn to live with it, see. And sometimes the kids that are bullied often turn into bullies themselves. So where do you go from there? So that was the situation there. It was pretty grim.

Oh, generally it was physical,

you know, beating kids up with fists. Because we had a lot of fights there and that and it would be all bare-knuckle stuff which can be pretty critical, because you can do far more injuries with bare knuckles than you can do with boxing gloves on. Also there was a sort of bullying where the fag system, which they had over in England, so this kid had to polish my shoes, and this kid had to do

this, and where a kid, an older kid had a job to do, he'd make the smaller kids do it for him, you know. And then matron would come round: "Oh yes, that's done right, you've done a good job,” little knowing, of course, that he didn't do it, that the others did it. Those sorts of things. I can't remember all of them specifically but it was in a low ratio, it wasn't in a

big ratio. You'd probably say, at the most, probably highest about ten per cent or something like that. The small kid who was inoffensive and couldn't stand up for himself, they were the ones that would get bullied, or a kid that had a disability, stuttering, or trouble with his sight, or deafness, they would get taken advantage of. But see, it couldn't, somehow or other it was something

that couldn't be treated, not by the people there. I don't really know how you would get round it unless you got all the bullies and put them together and kept them in one house, that might be one way of doing it.

Yes, I had my share of it, I had my share. But sometimes you're better to

put up with it rather than resist. It's okay to resist if you know you can handle the situation, but if you're not in a position to handle the situation you're sometimes better to think to yourself, “Well, he's not going to be here that long, eventually he's going to be gone.” And it's a bit the old story: wherever you are, whether you're in the army or in a drilling camp, there's always somebody you don't like,

so you have to find some way of handling them without actually coming to blows, you know, some way of handling the situation. Even today, you can't always handle the neighbour that you've got. You've got to think to yourself, “How the hell do I get round this situation?” And then perhaps, out of the blue, they get moved on, so the problem's resolved. It was one thing that was never taught in Burnside and not taught today, and that is psychology:

how to handle the situation without actually coming to blows.

Possibly the best thing was not to be there when they were looking for you. It's a bit like what was said on the business section yesterday - trying to think of who it was now; it wasn't Gerry Harvey. [retail entrepreneur]

But this chap was asking him how he made his choices on takeovers on companies, and he said, "The best choices I ever made were the ones that I never took up.” It's a bit of lateral thinking, outside the box. In other words, if he'd taken them up they would have been disasters. So by not taking those things up, in other words, “Don't jump in until you've done all your homework.”

I suppose in the bullying situation, probably the best idea was not to be there when they were looking for you. If you are there, you're in a position where they daren't do anything because there are too many others watching. And there were cases when kids got together in a group and they’d overrun the bully, so that was a possible solution in some cases.

No. There were cases where a kid might have pocket money, he's done out of it, whether it was stolen off him or whether he was sold something that wasn't worth two - well, you wouldn’t call it two bob, because those days a penny was a lot of money. There were cases like that.

What often happened with thieving, thieving was fairly rife. The strange thing was that thieving wasn't done so much within the house group; it was done between one house and another. Kids'd be at school and some kids had wagged it [deliberately missed classes] and something like that and they'd got over to the underneath area of another house where the kids had their lockers and their small possessions in them. And none of them had locks on them. You might have a stamp

collection or a card collection, and these kids from the other house would knock them off. And that was it. And there was very little redress you could do in that way.

They were quite good, because in the main you were sympathetic, particularly to another house that had matrons who were a bit heavy-handed.

You would be sympathetic and you'd say, "Oh, poor cow, he's from number 10,” or something like that, and you'd immediately feel sorry for them. We had one group, the Reid house. Once a year they started that you'd go on a trip and you had to save your pennies, and at the end of the year you needed to have two-and-sixpence,

so it took a year to get it together. Oh, some of the houses had run concerts to get the money and you'd hire a bus from Parramatta for about three guineas and it would take you to Manly or to Cronulla for the day, and they'd whitewash the windows and you'd change in the bus, you'd have a day on the beach. And these two old biddies, always remember, I can't think of their [names] -

one was Biddy Norman, I can't think of the other one's name - but anyway, I think they were sisters. They'd get the kids there and they'd be on the beach and, where they should be in swimming, they'd have them sitting down on the beach singing hymns. And it was supposed to be their day, it was their money, and here they are. Oh, we used to feel sorry for these poor kids, because it was really making a show of them. I think it was very unfair.

Burnside, they had a code of conduct which was, even though I spoke about the bullying, of trying to be fair, being upright, God-fearing, et cetera, being a good sport, et cetera, and that code was pretty strong, I still stick by it today, and

I think it gets ingrained into you. And even the old British Empire business, well, I still go along with it. I do admit, you know, that we're getting further away from the monarchy today. But I look at it this way: “Well, what are the monarchy doing today to have that respect?” That's the other side of the question. I think for that reason alone I have drifted away from the monarchy.

I go along with the British legal system, et cetera, because that's probably about the best that's available today, so I go along with that. But I do realise that in the past, there was a lot of bulldust dished out to us, and of course at that stage your mind and your knowledge is limited so you go along with it.

It sort of insulates you a bit. The big trouble is when you come out of Burnside and you get these jobs, and I probably did touch on it a bit, you have no knowledge of the outside world.

And, as I've told Jean, while you were in Burnside, you were given the impression that all the bad things happened in Burnside, whether it was the bullying, different things that happened - I mean to say, their poultry thing, it was broken into on numbers of occasions and all the fowls were taken and they lost two or three hundred fowls, which the orphanage was dependent on for their eggs - but we were given the impression

that all the bad things happened inside Burnside, all the people outside were good. Oh, they were blameless, you know. And when you came out, you thought, “Well, wherever you go to work, they're going to be treating you right, they're going to be treating you fair,” and it took a long time for it to sink in that the outside world was worse than the inside one, and it really hit you between the eyes.

And I've got to admit that my eyes weren't opened for me till I went in the army and I met other people, and you start talking with them and they're telling you what's going on and they start telling you what you're entitled to, sort of thing, you know, in the ordinary world and it really opens your eyes up. But by then you've lost so many years that you should have been getting educated. And this is why I go back to the idea where my aunty wanted to get me into the boiler-making business.

If I had gone and lived in the city and been a boilermaker, et cetera, my life would have ended up entirely different to today. Of course, again, whether I would be here is another point, too. So which road do you take?

First of all, they had their own pipe band, Scottish pipe band. I had different teachers when I was there, a chap by the name of McCulloch. They were outfitted completely with

kilts, complete Scottish dress, bagpipe, drums, et cetera, and they were very good and they used to often go to the Sydney Highland Gathering on New Year's Day and they would perform there. Some of the children would be selected to do athletic displays, and they used to do the old flag drill and they would do it to the band playing one of the Scottish tunes, Sweet May

or one of the others, Road to the Isles. The other side of it was, incidentally, just on that, I wanted to join their pipe band, but because I didn't have Scottish blood in me I wasn't allowed. You know, it was a parochial thing, because Burnside was started by Burns of Burns Philp and Scottish origin. And, as you'll notice, most of the names of the houses -

Glencoe, Cambray, Dalkeith - were all Scottish names and so that was that situation there. Now, another advantage we had at Burnside, we had a schoolteacher there, a headmaster, Banner Edwards, and at one time, he was so good a cricketer it was tossed up roughly in the 1928 period that, between him and another cricketer, as to who would be part of the

Australian Eleven going over to England. Anyway, he dipped out. Old F.A. Noble got the job and he missed out. But old Banner had contacts with the Australian Cricket Board and he used to get different cricketers to come up to Burnside and give displays. And I can remember on one occasion he got the West Indies team up there, not the whole team but he got three or four of them, and one of them -

what was it, Constantine? - I think it was Larry Constantine, he was known at that time as the fastest bowler in the world. He was down on our cricket pitch there playing away there and anyway, he took the bat this particular time and one of our kids bowled him out. I can always remember the name of the kid, Mick Simmonds. And we thought that was terrific for him to bowl him out. Same with footballers. We would have different

Western suburbs people come up. We got different visitors from time to time that would come to Burnside and give a bit of a lecture, and we would look forward to it. And the other thing was we would have cricket games with competition with maybe Bexley or Parramatta

kids or something like that. And our oval was up hill and down dale sort of thing, and the pitch was concrete, but there was a lot of sport being played and football, et cetera, it was quite interesting the different directions that it took from time to time. Even concert parties. An amusing thing, I can always remember this: there was a Boy Scout group come along and they

had their different groups going along to this concert. And this was in the big hall, it served as entertainment theatre show and we used to have silent films there, I've forgotten now, Tom Mix [cowboy star] and all the rest of them. And this crowd were putting on this concert and this kid came out and he said, "And the Lord said unto Moses, ‘come forth’ and Moses slipped on a banana skin and came fifth.” Well, the superintendent [went]

straight up to the front and closed the show down. We all went home. Very strong religious attitude at that time. Of course, we were all disappointed. We used to have silent film shows there. I can remember seeing early shows of "On Our Selection”. And the films those days, of course, were black and white, I think they were 35mm at that time, and instead of reels they had

“Chapter 1,” “Chapter 2,” and in On Our Selection, where they had “Chapter 1,” et cetera, underneath it was the old cow skull with the pair of horns there, see. And you'd wait while they changed the reel because they only had one camera [projector?] and that was it. But it was interesting, and a lot of those films that we had sort of dictated the hobbies that the kids had. If it was a highwayman the next day you'd

see kids cutting out masks and practising being a highwayman. If it was a Tom Mix film the kids were all running round trying to make lassoes so they could be a Western, you know. The different hobbies that kids had. And kids made their own toys. That was interesting. I've got a story in there and I think I called it The workshop, and we had this big block of concrete outside, and it was a cover to

a sewer main or something like that, and we would work on this sewer main and we'd make kites and we'd make catapults and we'd make little trolleys with cotton reels for wheels and we'd come burning down the path and all the wheels would be greased with the fat from beef dripping or something, and you'd get the smell of burning sausages as you came down this blooming track and they'd be smoking.

But we learnt to make all our own toys. There was no such, very seldom was there a bought toy in the place. And I think that gave kids initiative to do their own thing. We would make kites out of bits of deal wood that we would shape. The old butter boxes that the butter would come in, you'd split them down with a knife and pare the wood down to make the two cross halves, and then you'd

get a piece of string or cotton to run it round the outside. You’d get a sheet of newspaper and we would make glue. The common glue was just made out of flour and water, but we used to make glue out of wattle gum. Now, the old wattle gum, because we were always hungry as kids - I mean to say, those meals never satisfied you, and you'd go through the bush and you'd pick little berries that you knew you could and wattle gum was one of the things that we would chew on. Well, you got a handful of wheat

and you'd chew that. Well, that's common tucker if you go on a bit of a hike somewhere. And you learnt different things that you couldn't eat. Out around Parramatta there was a creeper called the sarsaparilla creeper and you'd get those leaves and chew it and they were just like sarsaparilla. I don’t know what they make the sarsaparilla drinks from today, but we would chew that sarsaparilla. There was a little plant, called the, we used to call it the wild carrot. Had a top on it like a carrot

and it had a white root, same as a carrot, but it had a slightly different taste. And we would get a stick and dig them out from the crevices, because Parramatta's all sandstone country, and we'd dig them out. Now, incidentally, just going on a little bit further, I always had a feeling whilst I was at Burnside that I would like to leave some memento to show that I'd been there. And I toyed up with different ideas, you know, what would you do,

write your name on a scrap of paper and bury it somewhere or put it in a crevice or something? Anyway, I hit on this idea. Round Parramatta and anywhere round Sydney were a lot of places where convicts had put their names, or sometimes they'd just put their number and a broad arrow, no name, just the broad arrow. Now, I know round North Parramatta there, I know of half a dozen places, if they're still there, where these convict names are there. Obviously, a convict party had gone out there

and been sent out to test the stone whether it's suitable for building. A lot of the buildings around Parramatta were built of sandstone, all Sydney sandstone. Anyway, I got this idea, and I got hold of this old tent peg and I cut my name into this rock, and it took me a whole afternoon to do it, and I didn't have a hammer, I just had this tent peg, and I was bashing away with another rock. Well, you should have

seen the heap of broken rock that I had from cutting this through. And I went back there later and I found this name on this rock and I took a photo of it, I've got it here. And I must have been a little bit arty those days because I cut out this figure of a bird, it looked a cross between a kookaburra and a willy-wagtail, if you can imagine such a thing. And the last time I was at Parramatta I went to have a look

at this and the whole rock had gone, somebody had come in with a flaming bulldozer, and so much for me putting my name down for posterity. God knows where the blooming rock ended up. The only thing is that on that house, Glencoe, I did cut my initials - if I'd got caught I'd have really got a belting - I cut my initials, R.L., just into the sandstone. Most of these houses had a sandstone foundation and about four foot up

they became brick, two, what do you call it, twin brick walls anyway, with a cavity brick wall, and that would allow them to go up high, and of course they had tile roofs and the floors would always be big heavy beams, so the foundations had to be good. And the other point is Parramatta, like most of the Sydney area, is on clay. Now, unless the foundations

are good you're in big trouble. And a lot of the houses you see round Sydney have got these cracks running right down, and the old "S,” iron plates, trying to hold them together. It was quite interesting, that side of Parramatta, you know, the history of Parramatta. We would go down, Burnside would often go down in the summer months and they'd go down as a house group and they'd pre-cut their lunch, which was sandwiches,

and they'd take it down, and they'd carry it down to the old Parramatta Park near the Governor’s Residence there, or we used to go to the Parramatta Lake. We used to call it the waterworks. Well, that was the original water supply for Parramatta, I think even for Sydney at one time, and the dam wall was about 60' high, that's right, because the depth of water was over 60'. There were quite a number of drownings there, even while we were there. And it'd be 120 yards across

or more. We used to paddle across with a heap of reeds under our arms. Most of us couldn't swim a stroke, you know, and we'd dogpaddle across. I can remember I had my pants chewed, I had them in my mouth, I might have just as well because they still got wet. And I remember I opened my mouth and my pants started to float away and I had to lever the reeds, swim after my pants, grab them, grab the reeds and back to the shoreline. If the women had seen us, what we were up to, they'd have had a heart attack.

And we used to chase possums, rabbits. Oh, there was nothing out there that we couldn't handle, whether it was a red-bellied snake or what it was. They were a tough lot of buggers, those kids.

We had a lot, particularly in the school holidays. The funny part was the women subconsciously used to encourage us to go walkabout because then they could have a sleep in the afternoon,

we weren't running and screaming around the place, playing pirates or bushrangers. And we would go, particularly from this house at Glencoe, we would walk right through to Dundas, Rydalmere, and there wasn't an orchard out round that area there that we didn't know. And as for fruit, green plums, or whatever it was, we would eat them and I don't think we ever got a bellyache, we were too damn tough. Rydalmere and what they called The Rocks.

And they used to have a period up there, Empire Day, 24th May, and we would have bonfires, and one of the antics that we used to get up to was running around Parramatta lighting everyone else's bonfire before the day. We'd send two kids out like scouts and we'd sit on the back fence looking for them. And we could see them wheedling their way through the bushes to get up to this target, the bonfire.

And the bonfires were always stacked so they burnt up, they were like an Indian wigwam. And next minute, they're alight, away with a puff of smoke and these kids racing off. We did get up to some tricky little jobs.

Oh yeah, there was a stigma. Any kid who was an orphanage kid -

there was a degree of stigma because it went two ways, (a) that you were an orphanage kid, but (b) being an orphanage kid, you could be taken advantage of, because your outside knowledge, and the fact that you took everyone as being good and above board, that's where the weak part came in. It was bad enough for the boys, but God knows how the girls got on, but I think a lot of the girls got into trouble

because they had faith in human nature and they took everyone as being the gospel and of course, the buggers weren't. So of the girls I don't know many of the stories of any of them, of what happened to them, et cetera. Well, you lose contact with them, that's it. And there was an attitude in Burnside I never brought up, and that was that the girls and boys were very much segregated:

in the classrooms, girls on that side and boys on that; you did not play together. The only time a boy had contact with a girl was if it was his sister and he would go and talk with her, something like that. And when the visiting day was there and the parents came, well, they were brought together. But to have anything to do with the girls, for a start, there was a lot of this male chauvinism and you were taught that you were superior, and if you were seen

talking to girls or anything like that, that was a weak point. That was bad. You were a sissy and that was it. It was something very hard to get rid of. I know after I left Burnside I found for a long time I could never talk with girls without getting embarrassed, and yet I didn't understand why. That's the danger of those things. And yet in a way, probably it was a safety point

because, as I said, there were no sex problems I ever became aware of up there. We heard of things. I remember there was a case down in Parramatta where there was an Italian girl that was raped - this was, I'm talking about 1930's - raped by this pack of youths. That was the first instance I think that we ever knew of anything like that.

And even up to my periods in the army, I never struck anything like it. The most I struck was when I was at Wayan [?] , they grabbed these Negroes for having violated this woman. I don't think she was from the Australian Army, I think she was from the American. Her body was dumped in a 44-gallon drum or something. Anyway, they got these Negroes for it, they hung them all there and then, there was no going back

to the States or anything like that, they just hung them and I think it was done more or less as an object lesson for anyone else to take note of.

Oh, I don't know. There was a paper up there, I think it was called The New Guinea Gold, and we used to occasionally get a copy of it if you were lucky, or you got it passed

by word of mouth, probably more likely by word of mouth. How much truth there was in anything that you received like that or how much it was exaggerated was anyone's guess.

Oh, they'd always been separated, the boys, except from the very small age, say up to about three or four, when they were kept together, but thereafter they went into separate houses.

And the girls’ houses were always grouped close together and the boys houses were grouped together. The same applied when you went into the church hall for prayers, you were segregated, the girls on one side the boys on the other. Generally the numbers were, approximately there would have been two boys for every girl there.

You would sometimes be accused of having So-and-so as your girlfriend. And of course in the macho thing you would very strongly deny it. But all it ever consisted of was writing a note, “You be my girl,” or something like that. But you never really got around to conversation. And if you were ever seen

hanging around one of the girls' houses, the matrons (UNCLEAR) would soon chase you away, and not only that, you'd get reported to the superintendent and you'd get a talking to or something like that. But see, the funny thing is you were taught that sex - whatever you knew of sex, and you had practically no education on it - that sex was a bad, filthy habit and

that was it and it shouldn't be contemplated in any way and that was the finish. And I suppose, being boys, you're more wrapped up in adventure and that sort of stuff, whether it's pirates, cowboys or what it is. See, the First World War was still very much on kids' minds, et cetera, so you were either fighting Germans or somebody else like that

and that's the way a lot of your games went. So the interest in girls, not only it wasn't popular there, you just left it alone. What the girls' attitude was I haven't got a clue.

It was Presbyterian, and we used to call [it] “press by trains”. But it was very staunch, very solid.

And Sunday, for instance, besides the ordinary prayers that you'd have for your meals, et cetera, you'd have Sunday church service, you'd have Sunday afternoon Sunday School, and if you're unlucky, and I'll use that word, you'd probably be selected to march down to St Andrews' Church in Parramatta round about seven o'clock in the evening

for another service down there and then you'd march back again. So it's small wonder that once kids left the orphanage they threw their religion overboard because it was overdone. It was, whilst it was good, also it was forced upon you and the natural inclination is anything that's forced on you, at the first opportunity you dump it.

Consequently, I know when I went to Moss Vale, the chap there that I went to work for, he was Presbyterian, and once a month we would go up to the small Presbyterian church at Burrawang, and I can remember after the Church service we would come out and I'd be standing outside and they would be standing in their groups, and there was only one old lady would come

over and talk to me. And I remember thinking back to myself at the time, I thought, “If that's Christianity for you, you can keep it.” When I left there and I went to Tenterfield they wanted to coerce me - in this little rural community, Sandy Hills, it was only about three or four families there - they wanted me to come along to the service that they had there occasionally, and I said, "No.” I said,

"I'm not going.” I said, "You only want me to put something in the plate, that's all.” And so they were probably well-meaning, et cetera, but I’d just had a stomachful of it, because even with the ministers that I saw at Burnside, one minister there, his family had two grown-up daughters and anything that was round the place that they could get their hands on, if there was a bit of a tea party on, they’d make sure that most of it went along to their house.

You know, it didn’t go to the houses where the kids were hungry; they latched onto it. So there were different things like that made you start to think about things, so there were quite some interesting aspects of it. I guess you learn the hard way.

Dad ended up on relief work on the Nepean and the Avon Dams and, as I said, he was a musician. And they put him on swinging a pick, et cetera, and that area was pretty tough going. And he would come up occasionally to see me. When I was first in there he came fairly regularly. When I say fairly regularly, probably about once a month. Something went wrong with the relief work and there wasn't any of that and they were just

on a, I think they called it a subsistence, the dole, and they'd be given one week's work in four or something like that and they'd still be given, they got a chit for this money to hand over when they got their groceries and whatnot. And I went for a period of six years in which I didn't see him. He was good, he kept contact with me. As a matter of fact, he used to get

English comics. He was stopping in a place in Quick Street, Lakemba, I can always remember it, 7 Quick Street, Lakemba, above this shop and he used to get these English comics, and they would wrap them up and they would send them to me at Burnside. I think they used to come through once a month. Comic Cuts Chips and I forget what the other one was. I think it was my favourite. And of course I'd read them and they'd get handed round the house. Goodness knows where they all ended up.

But he always kept that up to me. And, as I say, I didn't see him from about 1931 till about 1937, but we always kept in contact, and of course there was no such thing as the use of a telephone or anything like that. And he did it pretty hard, but there was a very strong bond between the two of us. I got no

actual explanation for it. He was a good man and he was very fair about things. He never at any time ever laid a hand on me and he never ever had a bad word for me, so that was quite good. He was ninety when he died. He died in 1980. And he was a very good musician. But he was one of these people who was a good artist

and yet he was unable to manage his own life. When I say manage his own life, when he had opportunities to get jobs and that, for some reason or other he buggered it by, like all musicians he liked a drop and he'd turn up drunk, see, and he wouldn't get the job. He just didn't have enough discipline, self-discipline, for his own good. And at one stage he was a bit communistic and that didn't help him

because as soon as he opened his mouth he lost his job. And it comes back to what I said about being bullied: there are times when it pays you to keep your mouth shut, you know, particularly if you want to survive. But he was good and I miss him.

No, he ended up, he had a job at Howards.

During the war they came out with a thing that you would be employed by - I forget the body that controlled employment, there was a word for it, a government department - and they got him a job out at Howard Auto Cultivators, out at Westmead – Northmead, I should say, Northmead, and he was working there for quite some time. And he was a sort of a yard man and he was handling some stuff, I think it was broken pottery or something,

and he got cut with it and he ended up with a poisoned arm, and he had to go on compo [workman’s compensation] and when he came back they fired him. Now, during the war years the department that was responsible for employing of people and all that, just forgotten the term, they maintained a rule that you couldn't leave a job that they put you in and they couldn't sack you. Well, they sacked him all right.

Anyway, he ended up he went to Commonwealth Engineering. Now, Commonwealth Engineering at that time used to be Waddingtons Motor Body Builders and he ended up working for them, and he worked up with them as a cleaner right up till when he retired. I think at the time he'd been so depressed by the way music went, and

he re-married and his second wife was a very good pianist - not pianist, violist, whereas Dad was piano, violin, banjo, piano accordion, et cetera, he was very good, not wind instruments - but I think that they got all initiative knocked out of the two of them and they were just bent on surviving.

And they lived very frugally and they ended up with a place out at, they were living at Paddington at one stage, and then they moved out to Cabramatta and they were there up till when the old lady died about 1964, I think, when she died, the stepmother. And strangely enough, again - get a sort of a reincarnation, if you like to call it, not the word - but I had a letter from this character who had seen my name

in the national seniors' paper and he says, "You wouldn't be my Uncle Bob, would you?” and he quoted a few things and cor blimey, that's who it was. And he and his brother were living with my stepmother and father at the time I went off to New Guinea. I used to take them out on different trips, et cetera. Now, one of them, the one that wrote to me, John,

he ended up as a boilermaker, which was the profession I was supposed to get into, and he did very well out of it. He's out at Penrith way, Prospect really. But the other brother has ended up as the councillor, I think at one stage he was City Mayor, for Liverpool. As a matter of fact I've just written to this John, because Liverpool Council has got into a bit of

trouble and there's an administrator being called in, so I've written to John to find out whether the other character - I can't think - Colin, whether he's mixed up in this and whether he's in any spot of bother over it. It's funny how these things come out of the blue, different characters from your past. And I always think to myself, “Thank God I've kept my nose clean because no matter where I go there's somebody got the finger on me, somebody knows me.

Whether I go to Alice Springs, Darwin or where it is, there's some bugger got the finger on me.”

Well, for a start, I went to this farm at Moss Vale.

The young couple that I was to work for, they were about to get married and go off on a honeymoon, so I was put with the parents who had a farm alongside. Now, these farms, in the main around Moss Vale they were small dairy farms with about forty head of stock and they might be running, most cases they ran pigs and did a bit of cabbage growing and things like that for the Sydney market.

Well, the old couple I went to work for - and these were an English family who'd migrated out, by the name of Saxtons, and they were quite good - anyway I went to work for them, this was around about 1937. Right. You'd get the cows in of a morning. You'd have to be up by six o'clock, maybe a bit earlier, bring the cows in, milk them, get the milk out to the road for the truck to come and pick up.

You'd be sloshing round in mud and stuff because Moss Vale's a very wet area (UNCLEAR) and the dairy yards were obviously muddy from the cattle walking through them back and forwards twice daily. You'd have pigs to feed. You'd also, they grew oats for extra feed for the cattle, and you'd have to mind the cows on the oat paddock and you were only to let them move across

the paddock so many yards each day and you'd ride the horse back and forwards. Well, Moss Vale's got that horrible sleety weather that comes down and even though it's fine, it still penetrates. Well, of course, in the suit of clothes that Burnside gave you - you didn't get an oilskin coat or anything like that, you didn't get a weatherproof coat and you'd be sitting on a horse's back with a cornsack over your head and another one round your shoulders and one round your waist

and hoping to God you didn't get wet through. And of course in wintertime, I remember it was August, that was one of the worst months to be out on a horse's back. And of course, wherever you rode the horse it was greasy, so you had to watch that the old horse didn’t slip and fall and all the rest of it. You were fed well, there was no doubt about that, you were fed far better than what you got in the orphanage. In fact, it was the first time, when I went to work for the Saxton

older family, that I sat down to a hot breakfast. All right, normally at Burnside you got porridge, that was hot, yes; but I got a hot meal which could be bacon and eggs or it could be some meat dish or something like that, but you got a hot meal and you got your three meals a day. The meal that you got was quite substantial

compared to what you got in the orphanage, and I would say that that contributed in Burnside to many of the kids that came out of the orphanage being stunted, because they didn't get the full calories that they deserved and that they needed. It's not intended as a reflection on the orphanage but as reflection on the period of the day, you know, the Depression, the lack of resources. But back

at Saxtons’ place, I worked for them for a fortnight, I think it was, or a month. Then I went over to what would be his father-in-law. Actually he was marrying the niece. But he married the niece and I went to work for the old couple there and they were very good, equally good. Their property was bigger, I think it was about 120 acres and it had very big timber on it at one time.

And they were putting in a new dairy. At that time all the dairies had to be updated and made hygienic instead of being old slab walls and all that stuff, and they were also putting in milking machines, which was a new innovation. So I worked for them until he came and took over with his new wife. So twice a day you would be milking seven days a week.

There was no such thing as a weekend off. The only time I got off was Saturday afternoon from midday till milking time, say three o'clock. And you generally did your laundry, like your outside work clothes. Your sheets and that would be taken in by the housewife, she would wash them and maybe your good shirts, your good trousers, but that was that. I was billeted

not in the house with them; what was the old dairy, which was the room where the cream separator was put in and where the milk was carried in and where the washing up of the buckets went on, I was put into that. And that was a slab wall, corrugated iron, with a little bit of a veranda on the outside, a water tank outside and an old fireplace where they used to boil the water to wash the machine, and I

was in that for the twelve months that I was there. It was fair. One humorous incident that was said to me I can remember: I used to watch eagerly at mealtimes, and if there was some food left over the wife would say to the boss, "Would you like some more, Eric?” and I used to fix my eyes on Eric and I'd sort of say, "Say yes, say yes.” And if Eric said “yes,” she'd ask me. If Eric said “no,”

it was put away for the next day. And I can remember this particular thing, I must have been very brave this day: I got my piece of bread and I spread butter on it and I reached out to get the jam, and Eric looked at me and said, "You don’t put jam on top of butter, not in this house.” And that was the finish of that, I didn't dare do it again. They were quite good. They would take me, sometimes they would go for a run down to

Wollongong, this is like on the Sunday between milking times or something, and be back for the milking. I remember us going down to Shell Harbour on one trip. I think we went down the old Bulli Pass and that was quite good, and that was in an A Model Ford with a dicky seat at the back, [folding seat outside the cabin,on the boot] and of course those dicky seats can be cold in winter when you're travelling. We'd go into Moss Vale occasionally. They'd go in there

to do some shopping and that. I'd wander the streets of Moss Vale, you know, looking up and down, thinking what I'd buy if I had any money. That was the funny part, too. Burnside insisted that when you first went out to work that you were only given five shillings of the ten, and the other five shillings was banked on your behalf. And even when you worked in Burnside as the apprenticeship side of it you were given

two and six, and of that two and six one and six was banked and the shilling you had, and you could go down to Parramatta and see the pictures or something like that - I think you got in for sixpence or ninepence - or go and get a haircut, et cetera. I remember when I left Burnside, I think I had twelve pounds in the bank. And after I left what’s-the-name, I don't think I had much more, when I left Moss Vale, either.

I would say honestly I got none whatever. The most I ever got to meet was a couple of, two brothers,

Minahans, who lived on the farm next door. I got to know the postman, Chris, can't think of his other name, and a chap Charlie Watts, who used to share farm on the farm. What they did with a lot of these farms was if they couldn't use all of the acreage somebody would come in and plant a paddock

of potatoes or cabbages and they'd share the profit with the owner of the land. But I never ever went to dances there; apart from going to that little church service I got to [meet] nobody. And that was the danger, that your education really stopped from when you left Burnside. And I would

say my education stopped, apart from farming practices, until such time as I went in the army. Really, I've said it the other day, Hitler did a good thing for me. It sounds funny but he did. [Had there] been no war I'd have been still stuck there.

You'd have a radio and after the evening meal you might sit round the, particularly in wintertime,

sit round the fireplace and listen to the radio. And I can remember the beginning of the, well, it must have been about the time of the abdication of Edward VIII and the takeover of George VI. I can remember the consternation and the radio announcements coming over, and of course I think it was London was relayed through the radio

so you got the actual London broadcasts. But that's as much information, because the boss never got any newspapers in, so I never saw them. And you were actually more restricted in your outside knowledge than what you were at Burnside, because the women of each house would get a daily paper and somewhere along the line you'd get to see some of it. They'd give you the bits of

what they wanted you to read and that was it. And at Burnside, also, your schoolteachers would pass on information to you because it would tie in with part of your history lessons. Even when I went to Tenterfield it was much the same. I got to know the few families there and, true, they did have dances in the local school. And, see, that was another thing: Burnside

never ever taught dancing - I said before they never taught, very little got involved in concerts or anything like that. Some houses put on the concerts as a means of raising money, but few and far between. So your social life was practically nil.

Oh, by the time

that war was declared, I was up in Tenterfield then. I remember I didn't know a lot about it. One of the chaps, I was on this place which was a guest house-cum-country store, dairy, piggery, and they also had a run of five thousand acres of lease land down towards Drake. This was on the road from Tenterfield

through to Tabulam, Casino. And I was engaged there to plough and milk and feed the pigs, and you'd go out and do what we called ringbarking and sucker bashing [cutting out small trees] and all that stuff. And when war was declared naturally we were all very patriotic, et cetera, having been schooled that way, and all right, we were all for Hitler being put in his place, et cetera, but little did we realise how

unprepared our side was. Because I can remember the Chamberlain fiasco, and when you look back on it, the Chamberlain fiasco was simply a means of giving the British time to get themselves ready for what was the inevitable, because prior to that the disarmament business of 1927 and all the peace

business with the League of Nations was a lot of codswallop [nonsense] and really that's what put Hitler in such a strong position was he had armed whilst the others had done nothing. And of course the point was he wasn't going to play the game by the rules, whereas our mob were determined to play by the rules, and you've got the same situation in Iraq today.

No, it was an education. And there were various young chaps from the little area, Sandy Hills as it was known, who volunteered. To give you an idea how far behind we were, he was enlisting in the Light Horse, see- now what the hell good would horses be against tanks? And I remember we had a farewell party for him, a sort of a dance-

cum-presentation, and away he went – “God speed,” and all the rest of it. And at that stage, too, in the army, they only wanted the biggest and best, sort of thing. You had to not only have two arms, two legs and two eyes, but you had to be six foot and you had to be the real hero type. And of course, by the end of the war, as long as you had one arm and one eye they grabbed you. It was a

ridiculous situation. But everyone was very strongly patriotic, and of course the thing was they thought it was going to be over in a few months and all this sort of stuff, and they didn't realise what they were walking into. I think about 1941 - of course things had gone very bad in '40, '41, with the fall of Singapore - and the boss said to me

he couldn't continue to run the farm and neither could he afford to pay me the high wages. Oh, the place got burnt down while I was there. I didn't do it. It was such a shock, it had just been done up, painted and goodness knows what, and we still don't know what caused it but I suspect that it was a chip heater that had been put in and hadn't been

insulated properly. It was either that or it was an electrical fault. The young chap that was there, he was older than me, he had installed this electrical system. He had been doing Science at uni [university] , and he'd had to back out of it because he didn't have the money during the Depression years to continue. He put this electrical system in and I think that there was a short in the electrical, because where the fire started was in the vicinity of the switchboard and not where the chip heater was.

Anyway the place got burnt to the ground and we lived for eight weeks in the barn after that, and some of the neighbours, the neighbours were very good and like country people they brought over cooked meals and whatnot and they helped get the first half of the house back up, the old boarding house if you like to call it that, and then later on there was a contract mob came up from Casino and they built the rest of the house. But there was

a better contact socially with the people there and they had bits of dances and we used to play cricket. In fact, I knocked up a cricket bat out of a chunk of willow. The idea of buying sports gear in those days, there was no money for it or anything like that. I go back though there and I often call in on the people that I know there and I get a nice welcome.

Oh, he said that he couldn't employ me any more. So I wrote to a crowd that were over the road from me when I worked at Moss Vale, did they have a job for me, were they interested, and they said, "Oh yeah, we can give you a job.” Now, the words he said to me were, "Oh, I can only pay you a pound a week.” Now, I was -

'41, oh, this was before '41, say 1940 approximately, I can't be sure of the date - but I would have been about nineteen, and a pound a week. And his words to me were, "But you can trap the rabbits.” Now, I knew that trapping rabbits you could make good money out of it, and I thought, “Okay.” So I took it on and I started to work for him. So it was all right, it was much the same work, you know, milking and planting cabbages and cutting cabbages and digging spuds

and whatnot. And he only had about half a dozen traps and I scrounged around and I ended up I got about thirty traps, rabbit traps, which I repaired and got working. I'd go round of a morning, reset the traps, take the rabbits out and whatnot, and skin them during the day and help with the milking and do the rest of the jobs. And I overheard him one day, I'd got a cheque back from Wilcox Mofflin

I think it was for about twenty pounds for the skins, and twenty pounds, of course, was a lot of money, and I overheard him saying to the wife, "And he never offered me any of it.” And I thought to myself, “The writing's on the wall, you want to get rid of me because I'm starting to make a few bob out of the rabbits.” Now, he said to me, a day or two later, he says, "I don't think you're getting all of the rabbits,” he says, "I want some of the traps

so I can put them out.” And forthwith he took the traps. Now, I thought to myself, “The writing's on the wall, get the hell out of it.” And I had a contact through Burnside with this Vanderfield & Reid, D.B. Reid, who was a captain in the First World War, and they had relatives in Moss Vale which I used to call in and see, and a chap by the name of Reynolds,

and his wife was sister to the Premier of NSW, Tubby Stevens that I mentioned Dad went to school with: this is how these things come back and tie in. And anyway, I got this job out at Foxgrove, which is out from Sutton Forest. You cross the Goulburn and you go down what they call the Canyon Lea Road.

Anyway, I got this job with him, thirty-five shillings a week, see, and I could trap all the rabbits I liked. So naturally I gave notice at this place. Now, I knew so little about world things, I did not know you had to give a week's notice. I only gave him about three days' notice. I told him on the Saturday I was leaving on the Monday, had

Saturday lunch and I went to do something and he says, "Right,” he says, "You can pack up now.” And I said, "But I wasn't going to leave until Monday.” He said, "Oh, no, you're not making use of me, off you go.” Now, that meant I was stuck. I got outside his gate, where to go? I just had a suitcase and I had a bike, I'd bought a pushbike. So I went across the road to this

Saxton chap that I'd worked for and I said could he put me up for the weekend and I'd get the milk truck in on Monday morning. And he said "Yeah, you give a hand with the milking,” and I said "Yeah, okay.” So I gave a hand with the milking and away I went and I got out there all right. But the funny part was I was cutting across the paddock with my case from this first house and I went past this big old tree, a dead tree, and it was hollowed out and I happened to look in it

and there were all these rabbit traps. This bloke had deliberately taken the traps off me just to spite me, and he'd thrown them in that tree trunk. Well, I was that wild, and I thought, “God!,” and I had half a mind to go round and burn his bloody haystacks down. I did, honest. And the only thing that stopped me was I thought, well, they'd come to me and I'd say, "Yes, I did it, the bloody old stingy bugger,” you know, in other words

all I'd be doing is getting myself into more trouble, and I just had enough restraint to realise that I wouldn't do myself any good by it. So off I went. Anyway, I got out to old D.B. Reid’s. Now, strangely enough, his manager, Jack - can't think of his name, Jack not Lonegan but something similar - anyway, he had married

the daughter of the people who used to run the toffee shop, the lolly shop, by Burnside school. Now, my father had got to know them very well. And they had a daughter, Jessie, Jessie Dick. And Mrs Dick, besides making lollies and selling them at a penny a bag to the kids, et cetera, she used to fill in when they were a matron short at Burnside

and she'd work for a fortnight or something while the matron was holidays, and somehow or other she had a soft spot for me, and of course I go to work for this Jack and the Dick girl, and they had two small children. And there was another boy from Burnside there, Penne, Penne Bellamy . So we were working there and I was doing the heavier

of the work, and you never saw such poor country. Look, if we'd had a crop of oats that was six inches high you were lucky, and we'd run the reaper and binder over it. Well, you imagine cutting oats six inches high and trying to make bundles out of it of hay. Anyway, it was good experience. But of course I got my call-up there. I'd been working for him for, I think, about twelve months at the time, and he was a good boss

and Jack was quite a good boss and Jessie, I got on well with them. But old D.B. Reid, he was a real old military bloke, see, and he'd come back after he'd had a look around the property and he'd say, "Bob,” he says, "I was up the back paddock and I saw two rabbits, why haven't you caught them?” You know, I'm not sure how big the property was, but it went right down to the Wollondilly [River] . And it was a big property.

And the reason it was such poor country, it was bauxite country. All through that area BHP [mining company] had lease notices pinned up on mining posts, and it was a sort of a red gravel. The bauxite was in this gravel; apparently it was the white streaks. And, as I said, it was absolutely poor country, and with these people

they had these properties as tax deductions, see, so whatever they spent on the farm, whatever they liked to cook up, nobody could argue with him. But he had two properties. One was Evandale, which was out on the other road, I forget how it was, it was the road to Sutton Forest anyway. Oh, that's right, you still passed it on the way in back to Mittagong, Bowral. And Evandale was

a stud, an Aberdeen Angus stud. And they were good stock. And he had sheep there, et cetera, and we used to have to drive the sheep across from Foxgrove over there at shearing time so that they'd all be done in the one shed. But he was a good boss. At Christmas time he gave you a present, and he talked to you, one-on-one, et cetera, and I got on quite well with him. As a matter of fact, he wrote to me when I went into

the army, saying that my job was still there when I came back. Of course I never went back to it because I realised that my future didn't lie in the land.

Well, they sent you a notice - as a matter of fact I would still have my original call-up card - and it told me to report, I had to report for a medical examination in at Moss Vale. So there was no transport,

you went in by bike, on your own bike, went in there and I remember this doctor looking at me and I'm standing there and he says, "Gawd,” he says, "Look at the shortness of his arms.” And I thought to myself, “Oh, doesn't look as though I'll get in.” Anyway, I was five foot and half an inch and it was enough to get me in.

Well, they put articles in the paper and radio that all

males, I think it was over eighteen years of age, had to report, I'm not sure, you must have had to report to the Post Office, I think, the nearest Post Office, which for us would have been Moss Vale. And from there they filled in your details, et cetera, and then that went to the Manpower mob, that's the mob that looked after the labour side, the Manpower mob, and then they decided

who they would call in. Say there were three of you on the farm, well, they’d probably take two and leave one, see, particularly in a family situation. Where there were two - well, there were three of us on the farm so they left Jack, who was the manager, they left Penne, who was probably only about seventeen, and they took me because I was the older one. And of course from there we did

the medical examination then that decided whether you were fit and proper. And then later on you got this call to report at Moss Vale Railway Station, and what they did was all the crowd, roughly from Albury up through Wagga Wagga out as far as Griffith, Leeton, Condobolin, and following the coastal area

too, Nowra, et cetera, up as far as Liverpool, you were brought in in a draft. Now, I think the way they worked it was, right, this particular draft would go into the artillery, and that would give them enough conscripts, whatever you like to call them, to train in that batch. Maybe the next draft would go into the infantry, or they might be

for navy or something like that. I don't know the complete workings of it, but that was just my guesswork. And the Sydney Showground was turned into a leave - not a leave and transit depot, but a recruitment area, where Marrickville was a leave and transit depot. So you had these situations all the time. So that's the way that came together.

Well, it was like an adventure, really. It was a change of environment. It was something new. And I can remember we were all like sheep. We just got herded into these trucks. That's right. They put a ticket on all of us just like so many pigs, I won't say being sent to the slaughter, but you were just like sheep, rounded up, right, in that cabin, shut up. And I can remember when we got to,

we went across by ferry eventually to Manly, and then there were buses there or trucks to pick you up and then you got inside the barracks there. And here's this mob of rookies [recruits] that had only been in a fortnight, up on the top, singing out, "You'll be sorry,” and we didn't even know what we were in for. And the initiation the next morning when you went down on the bullring and you were all lined up in your civilian clothes, et cetera, and we were all a motley lot,

the tall ones, the fat ones, and the different clothes, and I remember this sergeant major out in the front and he says, "Right,” he says, "From now on,” he says, "you're part of the army and that's it.” You know, no beg pardons, nothing. "And all,” he says, "look after your rifle because that's the only friend you've got.” But somehow or other they knocked us into shape. We were a pretty ragged-looking mob, that was for sure.

Not really, I think we were such a varied crew. And the funny part is a small bloke for some reason or other always seems to chum up with a tall one. I remember I had this big Doug Evans alongside me. He came from Goulburn and he probably made two of me and yet we'd always get round together, you know, we went on leave or something like that.

Not continuously, I had other mates too, but you sort of sit down together. You sat down to a meal table, you'd sit down together. It was just a sort of an unconscious acceptance of each other.

They recruited us into squads. Now, they broke us into two squads. One became a Bren gun [light machinegun] squad and they were taught the Bren gun, and the other squad was brought, which I was in, was broken into two sections, one and two, and we were a repository squad. Now, a repository squad was a sort of an engineering unit in which you were trained, we were trained for a start over in Middle Head,

and they had these five-ton gun barrels from the Queen Victoria or earlier decade. Some of them were even old muzzle-loaders. You'd move these around a given area and by use of ropes, leverage and different other man-made contrivances, you'd learn to handle these things, all with manpower. There was no such thing as a bulldozer or anything like that,

a mechanical hoist. The most you had was a tripod and a capstan on it. After we'd had this bit of training we did various jobs. I think one of the first jobs we did was we were sent down to Jervis Bay and our job was to put this 4.7 gun in which came off the old Canberra. [navy cruiser] They'd modernised some of the guns on the Canberra and they'd taken this 4.7 off with the old Naval shield

round it. So we were bivouacked in an old shed down the bottom, which was really ship's chandlery, anchors and ropes, cordage and whatnot, and we were all billeted in there. There was a bit of a shed at the end where our cook did the cooking for us, which was mainly bully beef and “dog biscuits” [dry biscuits] anyway, and we would go over on this tug across

to Bowen Island, Jervis Bay, and we'd be dropped off at this jetty which was made up mainly of four-gallon drums with planks on it, and you’d stride along this precariously till you got to the sand. We had these gun pieces, this gun must have been on a carriage of some sort, and we had to, they had a small tractor and we had to drag it up this hill

and put it in its place, and the different pieces of it, the shield and that, and put it all together. And it was to guard the entrance going into Jervis Bay. I think we were there for about a fortnight, three weeks, doing that job. And I can remember we used to come down of an evening to get the tug back, and you'd be walking out on this thick line of drums and underneath there's blooming sharks going in all directions

and you think to yourself, "Gawd, if I fall in there I'll be mincemeat in no time.” So we made sure we didn't fall in.

Well, the basic training, I can't remember. It was pretty mediocre. We spent more time, apart from marching around the bullring and forming different geometric patterns, we spent more time digging slit trenches round

North Head and the funny part was I think it was a sort of an idea. First of all, they had to discipline you into a mood where you accepted orders as a body, as a group, you did as you were told, and you were put into a sort of a culture. Looking back on it now, I can see this point. And one of the points of the bullring business was to make you become sort of

automatic; and secondly it was to occupy your time and the same with the digging of the slit trenches, because we would be digging one lot of slit trenches and we'd be throwing sand over into the ones we dug last week. The ridiculous side of it was absolutely amazing. I was down there for the attack on the Harbour, the sub [Japanese submarine] raid.

And I remember I’d just got back off leave. Leave extended generally from 2400 hours [midnight] to midnight and you had to be back, so whether you went to a dance or whether you went to Luna Park or where you went, that didn’t matter. I'd just got back off leave and I climbed into, we had barracks there, you weren't living in tents, and I just climbed into my barracks

bed and the next minute there was this “woof, woof” and the sirens going and whatnot and somebody yelling out, “Down to the slit trenches!” Put on your gear and your webbing and stuff and grab your rifle and away you go. And you belt across the hallowed bullring, no worry about going around it, and we had to pass the officers’ mess, and there was a road behind the officers’ mess

that went direct up to the quarantine station and up to the gun pits, and the slit trenches were on the other side of the road. So we all get down there and this lieut [lieutenant] is singing out to us, "Right, in the slit trench, men, in the slit trench.” And we said, "We can't,” and he said, "Why?” and I said, "Well, the barbed wire's on the wrong side.” And it was, and we couldn't get into the slit trenches because the barbed wire was on the wrong side.

So somebody's got to dash up to the transport and get a pair of pliers and cut the wire. Next minute he yells, "All into the trenches, into the trenches.” And silly me goes and jumps into the trench. The damn thing's half-full of water. I wasn't very happy with that. Anyway we're all there. Eventually they get the all-clear. We didn't know what was going on in the harbour, we just heard the booms

mainly of the gunfire, more of it was the depth charges going off that the (UNCLEAR) had been dropping. So, next morning we're on parade, see, and of course I'm very unhappy because my uniform and everything's got soaked through and not only that, my rifle's got in the water and sand and that's going to take a lot of cleaning. And this sergeant major's berating us, you know, for the way we behaved, et cetera, and he's telling us "You mob of nongs [fools] ,” he said,

"You'd have been mincemeat,” and one character at the back rank says, "Yeah,” he says, "We would have been mincemeat,” he says. "We didn't have a round of ammo between us.” We didn't; we didn't have a round of ammo. These are, you know, some of the stupid things that came out. There was such panic in Sydney at that time that people round Rose Bay and Vaucluse, et cetera, were selling their houses, their mansions, for a song

and buying up land, property out round Moss Vale, Bowral, where they thought they'd be safe. You know, it was panic stations. They could have taken Sydney, you know, with a platoon of men, pretty well, the Japs. The panic was unbelievable. It was frightening, really.

Didn't, we didn't have a clue, all we'd been told was word of mouth,

“The Japs have landed.” We knew nothing about submarines or what the harbour defence was doing. It was only the next morning on the radio, and even then you've got to remember that war news was heavily censored so they didn't tell you anything they didn't want you to know. It's a bit like the raid on Darwin: they gave out that twelve people were killed. It was a damn sight more than twelve people.

Of course, mind you, the country was in a state of the jitters. [nerves] At one stage there the Japs were being regarded pretty well as invincible. When they not only lost Singapore but they lost those two heavy battleships, et cetera, and the rapid advance that the Japs made, they were being regarded as invincible, and it wasn't until they were stopped in

Milne Bay and the Kokoda Trail that we even realised that we had a chance of beating them. And we certainly didn't have a chance without the help of the Yanks. So whatever they say about the Yanks today, we needed them. And we still need them today.

Well, the thoughts that we had were where had they landed?

We sort of imagined below the Quarantine Station, which had a jetty. We didn't know whether they'd come in by troopship or what, all the words were they'd landed, so we would imagine them coming ashore somewhere on some of these small beaches around there.

So we were directly above the beaches around from Manly. The gasometer, round from where the ferries used to come in, there's a gasometer and there was a rocky outcrop: well, round from that were a couple of nice little beaches, because we used to go swimming down there, so we just imagined it was going to come from there, because the other side, which is the ocean side,

unless they came ashore on Manly Beach itself, there was no hope in the world that they could come ashore around that rocky headland. I've been, there's a place called Blue Fish where we used to go fishing, and you had to climb down this cliff face to even get to the ledge where you could fish from, so there was no chance in the world that they could land there or anywhere round from Old Man's Hat. The other point is

if they did want to land they could just as easy have landed, say, round by Nielsen Park, South Head any of that area, so it would depend on what they had in mind of taking over, would they try and take over the Powerhouse or something like that. In that case, they have to probably be looking at Botany [Bay] .

Not that I know of. I think the main thing that suddenly became obvious was not only that we were at war, but we were in it. We were no longer spectators. See, we were spectators just taking in the news and what was going on, et cetera: "Oh yes, we're losing,” or, “We backtracked there,”

or something like this, or, “We've lost this ship,” or something else, and we were just taking in the information. But suddenly you become aware, "Oh Gawd, somebody's going to start shooting at me next,” you know, and you suddenly become aware that you're mortal, so it frightened the hell out of you. And it was a curious change of outlook, that I suppose you

might suddenly say you become grownup or something. But it was a dramatic change, but really, in the establishment itself, I didn’t see any dramatic changes except that probably people became more conscious of blackouts and of military procedure, secrecy and going along with what the rules were

that were laid down, that you couldn't turn round and start doing your own thing. You had to be part and parcel of the machine and that was it.

No, we still, up to when I left there we had no ammunition. I never got,

we never got ammunition until we got into Milne Bay, pretty sure of that. You see, the trouble is you always get - no, wait a minute, there must have been one case. When they were on guard up at North Head artillery, the battery, they had ammunition there. I think possibly you may have been given ammo [ammunition] when you were on guard duty.

Otherwise, no, you didn't have ammo in your pack even though you had an ammunition belt. Because I can remember a case up in the gun battery. Now, down below, particularly on the big gunship, you've got a big pit and that allows the gun to pivot around, and down the bottom is a set of tracks, which, when the shells are brought out from the ammunition,

they're on this little trolley and it goes round and it follows the gun and the shell is rolled into the hoist and the hoist takes it up to the barrel, et cetera, into the breech. And there was an incident there of a Saturday afternoon when somebody was on guard and they discharged their rifle. And this area being circular, this shell, the bullet was going

round and round in this shell because it just kept glancing off the walls, see, and these characters were lying flat on the floor because that's the only way. There might have been only two of them there, but, so obviously they had ammo. But that's the only incident. The only other time we were given ammo was we went out to the Chatswood rifle range and we all had to do a shoot there. And I can remember the RSM [regimental sergeant major]

coming up to me and he said, "You shot very well,” he said, "but what happened to you after you left the hundred yard range?” And I said, "Well, I've never been used to a rifle this heavy,” like .303, because I always had a .22. It was only a peashooter anyway, just as a single shot, but I never had to shoot more than a hundred yards for rabbits, because in the main your .22 rifle wasn't good for more than that.

"But,” he said to me, "You went off.” "Well,” I said, "I hadn't been used to it.” I think what they were looking for was people they could use as sharpshooters. I missed out on that one, probably just as well.

At North Head itself I was mainly a rookie just being trained. When we came back from the gun business down at Wollongong we were retrained and regrouped.

We were being prepared for going to New Guinea. But the funny thing was true, we were artillery, but we did little ore nothing in the line of battle training in regards to bayonet practice, all the other things, communication, things like that, that tie into it. And really our training was sub-standard, because when we got up to New Guinea and if anything had

happened, say at the gun battery, if there had been a landing there, we didn’t have the knowledge to cope with it, to fight with the unit. We put in machine guns and all that sort of stuff, but we had no knowledge of what we were up against. It’s all right now to look back at it, but we were really just cannon fodder.

Mainly it was just

marching, rifle drill, port arm strength inspection, salutes, all this sort of stuff, parade ground stuff which wouldn’t have been any good to you in a battle. You weren’t taught anything about guerrilla warfare or communications or survival. In New Guinea, if you got cut off from your unit, how were you going to survive without any knowledge of the country

or how you could exist? It just wasn’t there. To my mind there should have been lectures, I’m looking back at it now, there should have been lectures, there should have been up-to-the-minute training, and we should have been getting told what was happening and why were we losing in Malaya, and why did Singapore fall? Because we outnumbered the Japs in Singapore, yet they beat us hand over fist. Yet you look back

to it and I think what happens is that some of the people up the top are inadequate in their jobs and they cover up by just glossing something over and saying, “Oh yes, everything’s all right, our men are well-trained.” And they haven’t got a bloody clue.

Oh well, at one stage we were sent over to Obelisk

and Casemate, which is around from Middle Head, and we were gun crew there and we practised loading. And you do do that, you do do a fair bit of artillery practice, which is good, and in the artillery practice you learn to work as a crew; and you’ve got your line layer, your elevation layer, you’ve got the safety officer and then you’ve got the other men down below who are passing up the ammunition, bringing the ammunition forward.

You’ve got an observation crew who take the range and traverse for you, so you’ve got a clock on the gun, two clocks, one which covers the traverse and one which covers the elevation and range, et cetera. So you learn to work as a crew there and particularly if you were working on breech-loading guns, quick firing, you’ve got to be very

nimble because when you slam the shell into the breech, if you don’t get your hands back quick and you punch it in with your fists, you’ve got fingers sticking out, this thing comes along and takes them off like a chopper and there had been quite a few accidents and that. So yeah, we did get a fair bit of practice in that. So you would have to maintain gun crews on standby if you’ve got a, generally a battery is two guns

and one crew is on constant and the others are stood down and they alternate round. There was a fair bit of that. I think that, really speaking though, a lot of it was lacking in survival tactics.

I

couldn’t say for sure whether it was after or before, but certainly after the sub raid business I was stationed at Obelisk. Now, that’s one of the markers. As the ships come into the harbour they line up on different markers on the shore and they follow a bearing up to a certain point, then they pick up another pair of markers which are over by South Head, they line up with them. That brings them in a zigzag

to miss the reefs like the Sow and Pigs. So the particular guns that I was on were twin six-pounder anti-tank. They were capable of firing 70 rounds a minute and they were designed for dealing with fast motor torpedo boats. See, your bigger guns would be useless against them. Your rifle fire would probably be useless and even machine

gun fire would be useless. So you had to have a shell that was capable of sinking one of those ships, and it had to be capable of being angled down to the water. You see, your big guns, you can’t angle them down. A lot of guns on boats are in trouble for that reason, that people can come in under the range of fire and they couldn’t be got at because the guns couldn’t be tilted,

you couldn’t tilt the barrel down so that was it, they were useless. We did a fair bit of practice on that. Now, I came into the army in March 1942. I was in Milne Bay in March 1943. So, really speaking, I only spent twelve months back in Australia from when I was recruited to going out on these different jobs.

So most of the time, more or less, was spent on this repository squad and the early training rather than anything else. Certainly there was time spent on the Obelisk gun and there was a similar one round the corner by Casemate which was getting near Bradley’s Head.

No. Well, apart from the Jervis Bay turnout and the Wollongong,

I didn’t do any duty outside of Sydney. After those episodes I went straight to New Guinea and I didn’t do anything elsewhere.

Well, Wollongong was the assembly of the 9.2’s and that was a big job. You’ve got a gun all up that weighed over 300 tons with the armour plating and everything else, and you’re not including concrete foundations or anything like that in

the gun itself. And so they were quite a long job. Actually I was engaged in a bit of a mutiny down there, of all things. Looking back on it now I realise it was a mutiny; at the time it was a strike. We refused to go on parade one morning because the cook we had - you see, we were living in tents, it was very primitive,

and the cookhouse and the dining area was just a big tin shed with one end siphoned off for the cook house, et cetera, right, and this cook was giving us the same old tucker day after day and it was getting rough. And this particular morning, I don’t know who started it, but none of us fronted up on parade. Now, see, army-wise it’s like a roll call, you get down there on parade before breakfast and that identifies that every man is within barracks

and if there is anyone that’s AWOL [absent without leave] , right, that’s when they find out . We refused to go on this parade. Well, from the parade you should go down and have your breakfast, and then you parade again and then you go off to different jobs that you were assigned to. Well, of course we didn’t show up. Anyway, we had a British major in charge of us, he was

more or less the gunnery officer. He was a nice bloke, Jock Allison. He came down to us at the cookhouse and he said,” Listen, boys,” he says, “I want you to come on the job.” He says, “This is not going to do you any good.” He says, “I know what’s wrong, it's your food, you’re angry about it,” he says, “I’ll get something done.” We took his word for it and we all fronted up. But under strict military

discipline it was equivalent to a mutiny. We could have all been hauled over the barrel for it. So I won’t say that people have been shot for less, but we did, but we were all kids and as kids you don’t realise the implications of that. As far as you’re concerned you refused to turn up because the tucker was crook and it was one way of bringing it to their attention.

It’s funny, that. I never thought of it as mutiny. But when you look back on it, it was.

Well, we were living in tents while we were doing this construction business. Over in Middle Head area there they had two types of huts: one was the Sydney Williams, it was a prefabricated thing, and the other was the

old Quonset hut, the igloo-type thing, and they were all prefabricated and they were cold in winter and damned hot in summer. You just had a stretcher in there and a straw palliasse and that was it. You had a communal-type shower. Really speaking, what it boiled down to was you lived and ate army. You were part of the army

and that was it. There was a big distinction between army personnel and civilian personnel, and of course where the army looked after their people, and they did. Many times I went out with the ration truck and we’d go somewhere out Middle Head way to pick up supplies, and you’d come back and you’d have cases of butter, all the things that the civilians were looking for, and we had the whole flaming lot of them.

It was a bit unfair in a way. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Well, each person in a gun crew has a specific job. In the case of the twin-barrelled gun you would have two on the breech,

you’d have a left hand and a right hand man, so one’s looking after the right barrel and one’s looking after the left. The shells are coming up generally on a hydraulic type hoist, electric-driven, et cetera, and I forget what the shells are on a six-inch but they’re probably about a 60-pound shell. And the shell and cartridge are really two pieces but they’re joined together, they go in the gun as one piece.

They’re like looking at an oversized bullet. They’ve got a rim edge on them. They’re centre-fired and all this sort of stuff and they’re generally shot off with a percussion thing which hits the cap and explodes them. You have a line layer, because both barrels are pointing in the one direction and they’re on the one carriage, you only need one line layer,

and you need one elevation layer. So, roughly speaking, on the gun itself, if I remember right, I could be corrected on that, you’ve got five people standing on the plate which is generally above the floor which that gives [points,aims] your gun barrel over the parapet and they can see everything that’s going on. See, in an emergency with a gun,

instead of using your instruments you can fire open sight over the barrel. But you would only do that in the event of them either being that close, or that’s the target, or the instruments have been damaged and you can’t follow the electronics. See, the people up in the plotting room, you see, it's not just the people on the gun itself, there are people in the plotting room. Right, they’ve got the binoculars and the range finders on the target

and they measure the range, and they tell you on what degree of traverse you’ve got to set the gun to. That comes down electronically down to the clock in front of each of these people and generally speaking, instead of being given orders, “Range of twelve thousand this that and the other, do that,” the indicator, you’ve got two indicators: one is controlled from up there, and your job is to keep

the second indicator directly over the top of their one. So for elevation there’s two indicators, theirs and yours, and for line laying there’s the people up top again, so they are in control. Only if they are knocked out, if the plotting room happened to get knocked out.... They’re generally in a higher position than what you are, they can see what’s going on, whereas you’re down below, you mightn’t be able to see anything.

But they give you the directions and that’s what you go on.

Well, in the main the 9.2s we put in at Wollongong, I remember that they had 52 holding down bolts.

The pedestal was made in two halves, there were two big castings like a big flowerpot except upside down. The larger part of the flowerpot spreads out and the fifty-two bolts go through that, and each of the bolts is as thick as your water container there. They go right down into the concrete. When

the original construction people do the foundations it’s their job to put those bolts all in according to a template made out which they had to conform to. When the base goes in, it goes exactly in, everything is right and there are no bolts out of line or anything like that, on top of that goes what is called the traversing section,

which was 18 tons. It’s like a big circular disk with roller bearings in it, they’re all tapered, so as it revolves round it carries the whole gun above it, so that’s the rotating section. And over that again is what’s called the “cradle”.... Wait a minute, there’s a carriage

piece that goes in first. It sits on top of this. Now, the carriage carries everything above it, which includes the “cradle”, the “piece” - they don’t call it the barrel, the “piece” - sits in that, there’s another, the cradle is what the gun pivots on, up and down.

The “roller” is the radius business and all the armour over the gun is carried on that, too. Now, in the case of the 9.2s it was two-inch armour plating. And it was a big square. The big trouble, they had similar guns over in Singapore and the big

trouble with those guns was – the same trouble occurred down in Wollongong, although fortunately we never had to use them - the guns could not be fired landwards because they had a big concrete canopy built over them as protection against bombers. Now, that meant you had roughly about, somewhere about a 180-degree arc of fire, or even less, maybe 160 arc of fire.

But you couldn’t swing a gun around 360 degrees, and that was the trouble in Singapore. The Japs attacked from the rear and the guns were a dead loss. And it would have been the same down there.

Well, we were put to, you do a lot of dummy practice.

What they do with the dummy practice is they make up a replica shell, only it's a turned timber piece, and you pop these into the breech. We did it with those twin six-pounders, and all that happens is, as you keep practising, it depends on the number of dummy shells that you’ve got, and eventually they’re popping out the end of the barrel like peas in a pod sort of thing, it's comical

in a way. You were saying about the base of them. Now, some of the guns, the guns that I was on in Milne Bay, they were a mobile gun, they were a 155 mm, it was the American version of the French 75 which was very successful in the first World War. You had what they call “trailer legs”. These legs, as soon as you popped the guns down you open them out, the same principle

as your tripod only horizontal to the ground. You pop them out and they’ve got a spade end on it, and that digs down into the ground so that when you fire the gun the thing doesn’t shoot backwards, the spade digs into the ground and they hold it there. The only snag is, again with that type of a gun, you’ve probably got, I’m not sure, a forty and a sixty degree arc of fire,

and if the target moves out of that area it's all hands to these legs and you’ve got to pull the gun around. The gun is still mounted on its original towing wheels. They’re generally duals, on either side. You’ve got to manhandle them around if it comes to that point.

Well, you do nothing because you are controlled. And I’ll give you an instance of it. The last time the Canberra left Sydney, I was in hospital being treated for this pneumonia which I had very badly and I hear this “whoosh”, and I thought, “Oh hell, what’s North Head doing?” And I think this was after the sub raid. And I was thinking, “What the heck is going on?” So the word got back to me

later that the Canberra had left Sydney. It had cleared the Heads, both North and South Head, and it had failed to give its clearance signals. Now, this is part of your security in wartime, every ship going in and out of reasonable size or of accountability had to hoist its pennants up with the code for the day.

Now, the code is changed every day. They have to give that code whether they are entering port or whether they are clearing port. Now, in this case, apparently the Canberra for some reason or other didn’t give its port clearance signals and as she steamed out of the Heads - the navy controlled this, not the army - the Naval officer on Port War [?] , which is over on South Head side, he telephoned or radioed through,

I think he telephoned through to the gun battery and told them to fire (UNCLEAR) two rounds. Now, it's not the gun commander who gives that instruction, he simply passes it on to the gun crew. Now, the gun crew who were on duty that day, I think it was a Saturday afternoon if I remember rightly, they panicked because they’d never done a shoot. See, the crews that had done shoots had probably been passed on somewhere else and there

might be three or four different crews being trained, taken over in the meantime since a shoot was done. So in the majority they didn’t have practical experience other than training. Anyway, they panicked and they sent up, this is what I was told, and they sent up a half-charge. In the 9.2’s the shell is separate from the charge, and the charge comes up in two sacks, they’re silken

sacks, and when they’re exploded all you've got is a bit of carbon at the back. So they set up these two charges, but what they did was they sent up a half-charge, which was ninety pounds, they sent up the shell, which was 387 pounds - the shell stands this high - and they sent up another half charge. Now, that gave the gun a range of possibly twenty miles

and they were given the range, et cetera. And of course the range was set to fire ahead, that would have come through from the plotting room, and the shell was supposed to lob in front of the boat, say about half a mile; anyway, they fired this charge and there was that much panic that they never took off the muzzle covers off the guns. Anyway, what happened was she went “Boom!”,

out came the shell, took the muzzle cover with it, dropped over the cliff and the bloke on the Canberra sent this signal back using Morse, the Aldus lamp, “Five thousand yards short, have another try.” So that was the end of that little episode, but quite amusing. I wasn’t involved because I wasn’t on the gun in the second occasion, either. In

Milne Bay we had a similar incident when Admiral Nimitz was coming in, and he was coming in on one of their motor torpedo boats. Apparently, for some reason or another, he disregarded giving his port entrance signals. Now, at that time there was a lot of shipping going on and what the Japs were doing,

they would follow one of our flights of aircraft coming in and pretend to be a part of this flight coming into the aerodrome, and they’d come in on the tail end and shoot up all the planes that had landed just before them, because they were accepted as part of the thing. Nobody took notice. So a similar thing could happen in shipping. Nimitz came in in this PT [motor torpedo] boat and he didn’t give his clearance signals so our battery was given orders to fire two rounds in front of him, which they did. Well,

he came to a sudden halt because he realised he wasn’t going to get in. The PT boat was just below our guns. Anyway, he came to a blinding halt and he gave his signals quite promptly then. But the Naval officer who ordered it, he got barrelled over it. I don’t know the full ramifications. He was only doing his duty, but this is the situation where the hierarchy can do the wrong thing

and get away with it.

Well, there was a, you had a sort of a stature with the public because you were one of the army or navy or whatever it was and also you were there to defend them, et cetera.

And of course a lot of the blokes who were coming back from the Middle East, a lot of them were badly wounded and bomb-happy and things like that. There was a pretty fair amount of respect for you. And there were cases where army characters got full [intoxicated] or something like that, there wasn’t a crime thing or anything like that sheeted home against them,

it was all right, they got a little bit full and people would say, “He’s had a tough time over in the Middle East,” or whatever it was. But you were there more or less to help protect the place and you were given a degree of respect for that. Now, that was the way we looked at it.

Well, I struck quite a number of them. In our artillery,

heavy artillery such as ours wasn’t used over in the Middle East so we didn’t have many people like that, but we had respect for them because they had battle experience. And when we had the Kokoda Trail going it was suddenly bringing those troops home. See, [British Prime Minjsiter Winston] Churchill, he wanted to keep them there and [Australian Prime Minister John] Curtin said, “No, we’re having them home,

we want them to safeguard Australia.” Well, Churchill’s idea was, “Oh, the Japs can take Australia, we’ll get it back later.” And Curtin says, “No, none of that, we don’t want them to take Australia and then have to fight back for it.” So he won the day and he brought them back. Well, it meant, like I was saying, we had people with battle experience – true, what was in the desert,

which was a different style, but they still had battle experience and that was what was needed to shore up the Australian Army. You needed somebody with both experience and backbone.

Well, it was just a feeling that you could see all these characters that were going off and taking their chance

as to what was going to happen and whether they had a future or not. And I suppose it comes back to Burnside more or less. It's a case of one in, all in, you don’t stop back. And I said to myself, “If I don’t go and take my chance, I can’t face the normal crowd and say I did my bit.” I thought, “Bugger it. I’ll give it a go,” and that’s it.

Oh well, I can’t remember a lot of it. All I can remember is that there were several of us from the unit, I wasn’t the only one, there were several of us who went up in a group up to the office, headquarters office which we had there, the administration section, and just told them that we wanted to change over to AIF [Australian Imperial Forces] . If you weren’t AIF

the government of the day couldn’t send you out of Australia. When I say “outside of Australia”, there were militia in Papua, but Papua was regarded as Australian territory and they could be sent there. But over in German New Guinea, which was administrative territory - that’s not the right word for it – it was outside of Australia therefore you had to be AIF to go into that area.

The obvious thing was sooner or later the fighting was going to get outside Papua and once they got into the area like Salamaua, Lae, well, that was German New Guinea or the old German New Guinea so therefore you had to be AIF. So that was just my idea, it wasn’t any idea of heroics, it was just a case of saying to yourself, “I’ve got to do the right thing.”

No, really no difference. You got the same food, the same routine, the same officers, the same equipment, just that you could be used up at the front line where you couldn’t really.... The others, the militia were in the front line in Kokoda. They were also bound by Buna, Gona, Sanananda, et cetera,

because that was Papua, whereas the Solomons were outside Australian territory, Bougainville, so they had to be AIF there. There was no great difference about it.

Well, I didn’t know a lot about New Guinea. I found that there was a

terrific difference in the climate and one of the things we found was that the clothing and the equipment which was suitable for the Middle East was not suitable for New Guinea. For instance, we had heavy drill. In New Guinea, particularly where it's very humid, you perspire a lot and the heavy drill doesn’t let the air get to your body, consequently you sweat a lot. We got big problems

with what they call “prickly heat,” which is sweat under the skin and the pores aren’t able to let it out and consequently you get all these pimples which irritate and burn. Tinea was bad up there amongst the troops and there were things like ringworms, malaria, dysentery. Dysentery was very bad. See, in army conditions your

hygiene is not always the best. And the military hospital that I went into in Milne Bay, it wasn’t very good. All you had was a sac-sac roof, which is another name for coconut or pandanus leaves, open sides, maybe you had a bit of airstrip matting put down on the floor which was mud, and

you had these iron bed frames and you didn’t have mosquito nets or anything like that. If you wanted to go to the toilets, which were a dugout thing out the back, you had to clump at least a hundred and fifty feet to the latrines, which again were not very hygienic. You’ve got to remember if you dug a hole anywhere up there it immediately filled with water, so you can imagine what the hygiene was like. We were on chlorine tablets,

and everything you ate or drank was saturated with chlorine, and they were supposed to have de-taster tablets but they didn’t do much good. I can remember for years after the smell of chlorine just about turned me off. The medical business was very poor at the time. The most they would give you was the old Atebrin [anti-malarial] tablets which sent your skin yellow, and the skin would peel on your hands.

The women used to complain about the troops coming back all looking like Japanese because they had this yellow skin. The funny part about the women was they’d say to the blokes, “Do you have any Atebrin tablets, you got any?” You know what they were using them for? Dyeing their curtains. They were dyeing these curtains with these Atebrin tablets. What was the name? Lyons, Enid I think, it was Enid Lyons, the Prime Minister’s wife. She made a rash statement

in the Women’s Weekly that the troops in New Guinea should not be allowed back home because they would bring back all these tropical diseases with them. Well, what the hell’s the good of going over there to fight for the country if you’re not going to be allowed back in? She copped some blasting over that little lot. You know, it was just an ignorant statement. But it really did stir up things.

Well, we were formed into a draft in Sydney, back at North Head Barracks. And, right, being artillery, we were going up to be a relief gun crew for Milne Bay. Now, we were taken by rail through to Townsville. We had to change at Wallangarra, if I remember right,

because that was the break of gauge. I think we stopped a couple of days in Brisbane and then we were sent onto Townsville. Now, the funny part was the railway. Every time there was a cattle train or sheep train, the troop train would be put over to the side whilst the cattle train or the sheep train went through, and we were given second-class citizenship to the sheep.

Anyway, we got to Townsville. We had a camp out from Townsville called Oonoonba. It was a very big camp, a staging camp, and there were Yanks and everything there. Anyway, we ended up being put on the Taroona, which used to be a Melbourne to Hobart ferry. She was about 4,000 tons and she rolled like a beaut. Apparently she had water and ballast tanks in her for the Bass Strait crossing.

Anyway we went via that to Milne Bay. We were off-loaded at Gilli Gilli, which was the main jetty there. Alongside it was the Anshun, which was a Chinese boat which had been sunk by the Japanese a couple of months earlier. And we arrived in March ’43.

The Jap raids were coming over a hundred planes strong, and they were quite sizeable amounts. They sank two boats in the month we were there. I think one was the Gorgon and the other was the Van Huysen. Dutch ships. One of them I know had been loaded up with sheep and I think the two blokes who had been looking after the sheep got killed. What I can remember of it, we were put into a transit camp at Gilli Gilli

and we were held there for a couple of nights and then we were shipped across the bay. The bay is thirty miles wide and twenty-five miles deep. It is huge. The deep water goes straight from the water’s edge. Liberty ships can tie up directly to coconut palms on the shore, that’s how close it is. The Yanks had put in about five big wharves for unloading their stuff,

they’d really been working. And you've got to give it to the Yanks, when they go to do something they don’t do it by halves. They had jetties here and Liberty ships coming in right, left and centre. And we were taken off, from the transit camp we went down to - G Battery was the inspection battery for Milne Bay - to a little place called Kanukopi [?] , you can see it in the blue book.

And we were stationed in a rubber plantation up above this Yank PT boat base. We had to use their jetty, they had a jetty there, PT boats to be loaded up and fuelled, et cetera. We went up the hill, there were a couple of hills up the back. The guns were on the first hill, directly above the Yanks. In fact, we had to let them know whenever we were firing a shot because they used to panic, they used to think the Japs were there.

It was no reflection on them, really. So the two guns were there and we were in tents up the back.

End of tape

It was really, it's like being taken into another world, really, because I had no previous experience of that. My travels in Australia

hadn’t really taken me outside of NSW. Well, I mean to say from Burnside to Moss Vale to Tenterfield, that would have been the extent of my travelling – oh, apart from just prior to going to New Guinea we had gone out to Leeton. Some of the mob were from out there. The idea was that we were going to pick grapes for a week. Got this sudden call that the draft was leaving so we dropped everything and hopped

on the train. We were keen to go, that was the funny part. I think what you’ve got to look at with a lot of these things is, all right, there is a degree of patriotism but also there is a pretty big degree of adventure. And even if you look at the blokes who went off to the Boer War and the First World War, a lot of them went for adventure. All right, patriotism too, but adventure was probably the guiding point. And I suppose we looked at it the same way,

as new fields, as something new to look at and all the rest of it. I suppose the other angle is, too, you think you’re invincible. Nothing’s going to happen to you. So if anything happens it was the other bloke: “He was being stupid. He stuck his head out,” something like that. That’s the way you go. The other interesting point was meeting the natives and finding out what made them tick,

how you got along with them. And in New Guinea we were suddenly put in the position of handling native labour because we couldn’t have won through in New Guinea without the assistance of the natives. And the natives, they were smaller - when I say “smaller”, I mean lighter built than me. But in the main the Papuans are not tall people.

They’re light-skinned, they’re pleasant to look at. We had them carrying coconut logs. We were chopping down coconuts palms and we were making gun pits out of them, and we’d get six of these boys and they’d all pick up these ten-foot logs between them and it was a case of “ally-oop!” and chant away as they carried this log up to where you wanted it. Most of us being country

we were pretty good, not only with a rifle, but we were pretty good with an axe, so cutting logs to form a barricade didn’t present any problems to us. The only snag is, when the Bismarck [Sea] Battle was on and we were supposed to man these gun pits, we’d camouflaged them so well we couldn’t find them. We couldn’t find our own gun pits. What you do round the perimeter, while you can, you

clear what you call “firing lanes”, they’re the equivalent to roads. They could be thirty yards across or something. You chop every tree down and every bush so that if anyone steps across or moves into it, they can be identified. If they’re the enemy, right, OK, you open up; if they’re not, right, you can call them in. Particularly around gun pits,

artillery pieces, you’ve got to have these firing lanes and it means that your gun crew who isn’t on duty have got a man, in time of action they’ve got a man in these gun pits.. Of course, Lewis guns, old Vickers and all of that stuff, we had a lot of very antiquated stuff. I don’t know how we would have got along if it had come to a stoush. Plus the fact that we had the Americans down below us,

well, they had their PT boat base and that would have been a prime target for anyone coming over, particularly bombing. Their boats were running on high-octane fuel, so any spark in the wrong direction could be really bad. So it was good education for me, so it wasn’t only a case that I got to know the natives. You’d learn a few words of their language.

They speak, the dialect that’s used commonly along there is what’s called Motu. It's a trading language so you could go from one village to another and you could talk in that language and you can talk with them. They’ve got their own dialects, but the Motu language is paramount in Papua. You learn that with the natives. And on top of that it was my first contact with the Americans.

And we used to do, on the gun crew, you’d do every third night full duty. You’d go on at 6 o’clock in the evening and you’d go off at 8 o’clock in the morning. This was the stupid part about it was that, all right, there was only one gun crew up, but you were made to sit up all night; you could not go to sleep. Round about four in the morning, and that’s when most actions take place,

you've had it. So you’ve either got to look over gun sight or you've got to stagger round the back of the gun with a shell and whatnot, you’re in no physical condition; whereas if they’d maintain half the crew up and let the half have a kip, that would have made more sense. The same thing applied to the observation post up top and things like that. But I got to know the Yanks

down there and I got a bit cunning because when you stood down at 8 o’clock in the morning I would sleep until about midday and then I would go down to the Yanks and I got to know a couple of them in the armoury section. I used to help them belt up 50-calibre ammunition. I got well looked after down there. What they used to do was take me up to what they called “chow”, and you should have seen the food that they had!

They had ice cream, they had chicken, they had turkey, and that was everyday meals, you know. And us up the top we’re living on bully beef and army biscuits, and I can remember army biscuits put out on primitive tables which the natives had knocked up, and I think it was ten tins of baked beans which had

a little cube of pork in them which is what they had to serve ninety men. Ten tins! You know, you can imagine how much of it was water, so we were living on the smell of an oil rag! So here’s the Yanks below living like kings. Well, I didn’t mind belting up that 50-calibre ammunition. This Yank said to me one day, I think it was after my third helping, “So, Aussie, you must have hollow legs.” I said, “It’s all right for you, I have to make it last a fortnight.”

So that shut him up. They were very generous, the Yanks, I’ll give them that. They had good conditions. They were in the position because of their money. As soon as any piece of equipment gave them trouble they could just throw it out, grab another one from the store and that was it, whereas the Australian Army, we couldn’t do anything. And even when I joined the Army Water Transport

and I was working in the workshop, we took an engine out of a boat and that boat was idle until such time as that engine was repaired. It could be as long as three weeks or a month and that boat’s doing nothing. The Yanks would just take the engine out and slam another one in the same day and the boat would be off in the morning. It was the difference of organization and backing.

Oh yeah, the tents were up on high ground and there was a creek up the back. The natives would come along and do your washing for you for about a shilling a time, sort of thing. They’d flow your clothes up and down on the rocks until they’re wasn’t a button left on them. They were just tents. There were about four men to a tent. You had a dirt floor

which was invariably wet and soggy, it might have been grassed at one time, and you had a bit of a stretcher which was a tubular type steel with like cyclone wire across it, and you had what you call the palliasse which was like a mattress but it was really an oversized chaff bag stuffed with straw. What they did when they moved was they either dumped the whole thing and moved it or

they’d empty the straw out and you’d just take the outside sacking. You didn’t have anywhere to put your gear – well, you only had a single kit bag and the most you were carrying were a few photographs, maybe a notebook. I’d doubt whether you had a camera. I had a camera, but I could never get any film for it. You just had a few personal possessions. The majority of the articles you had were army issue.

Every now and then, when they did a kit inspection - we didn’t get them so much in New Guinea but back at the barracks you did - and you had so many singlets that you’d been issued with, so many underpants, so many shorts, so many shirts and you had to have those intact, and if you’d lost any they would be deducted from your pay book and you’d go to the store and draw a new one.

The crux of the matter was, if someone knocked off your singlet, you’d knock off the following bloke’s and so on down the line, and the last one was unlucky. The mess, they had a storeroom at the end, I can remember that because we used to do guard duty. When you weren’t on the guns the second night was guard duty and the third night you got a let-off there.

Well, they had this storeroom down the back and the rations were taken down there. And everything had to be moved by four wheel drive with generally a jeep with a trailer on the back, and all the four-wheel drives had chains on them. You couldn’t go anywhere in that country without chains on the wheels. You can’t do without chains on the wheels. All your flash four-wheel drives could be a dead loss there. Even the big GM [General Motors] trucks that the Yanks had had chains on them.

They never went anywhere, and they would all be axle-deep in mud. I never saw anything like it. And Milne Bay, you could bet on it, four o’clock every afternoon there would be heavy rain come down. You might have sun in the morning if you’re lucky but otherwise the heavy rain would come down, and if you hadn’t got your washing dry by then it was obviously wasn’t much, you had to be prepared for it.

Oh, it was a good education. One of the biggest coconut plantations in the world was in Milne Bay and it was owned by the Lever Bros [Brothers] . There were also rubber plantations there, too. Of course when the army moved in they just chopped them down. Whenever they wanted a building, a row, ‘bonk, bang!’ went the trees.

A lot of the plantations got repatriation monies later for the trees and stuff that they’d lost. I don’t think they all got it.

The Americans had no gun installations in Milne Bay. Although we were using American guns. The 155s were Yankee guns, hence the name, 155-millimetre,

where our guns were 9.2s or six-inch or 4.7s. There was no Yank artillery. Milne Bay was only a transit camp for the Americans. What the Americans did prior to the landing at Lae, they brought in an armada of Liberty ships plus naval vessels. When they were ready

they all moved out en masse up to Lae. The navy went in first, including the Australian Army and the Australian infantry, they went in and secured the place. Then the Americans came in. The Americans were mainly up around Finschhafen, which was sixty miles further on. The Americans had a big base there.

The Americans were based on Macarthur’s policy of “island-hopping”, so, instead of cleaning up all the areas in between, they just took this area, bypassed that, took that area, and cut that area off. So they starved and kept these series of island hops. The most the Yanks did was they went right up the coast via Finschhafen and Langemak,

their next thing was Hollandia. I’m not sure what they had in Aitape. Any section they stopped at was simply a storage area for the next step. They went into Hollandia, I’ve forgotten what they call it now, Indonesia’s given it another name, and Biak, which was right up the head of New Guinea. From there they went across to Morotai and across to the Philippines.

[US General Douglas] Macarthur’s policy of island-hopping. Actually it was quite good, because if they fought every inch of the way they’d have been there until doomsday.

Well, we had to use their jetty to unload our supplies. See, our supplies

would come from Gilli Gilli, which was right down in the deep end of the bay. Our supplies would come up by our own boats, army boats, and they would be off-loaded there, and we were using the same jetty that the Americans were using for their PT boats. Now, whether they put the jetty in or not I don’t know; it could have been originally there or they could have improved on it. It was quite a good jetty.

You wouldn’t tie a Liberty ship up to it or anything. But all their MTVs [transport vessels] would be coming up and they would be fuelled up. Most of the fuel was transported in 44-gallon drums. None of these big tankers were coming in, not to my knowledge anyway. And that would go into holding tanks, et cetera, and from the holding tanks it would be

gravitated back down to the jetty. The MTVs would load up there. So constantly, you know, passing the Yanks and talking with them, which you did do, I got to know a few of them and for some reason or other the next thing I found I was in the armoury because I was interested in guns, and they had me belting up these ammunitions.

I quite enjoyed it and I got a free feed out of it. I’ve got to admit I missed it when I left the area.

Oh, whilst I was up that area, no, but when I moved. I got a transfer. When I got malaria and I had to go up to

the army hospital in Milne Bay I ran into a chap that I had met in my rookie days up at North Head. And he said to me, I was talking with him and he said, “Who are you with now?” He said, “Ooh, I got out of artillery, I didn’t like the mud. I got into this water transport group.” And I said, “Who are they?” And he says, “The army have got their own small fleet of ships and they take supplies up and down the coast

to small detachments.” Now, the navy wouldn’t take it on because it was too small; it was a difficult thing and it wasn’t in their style of work. So the army formed their own water transport group and they were running supplies in to their troops where there were six.... You see, you had

these six - what were they called now? - they were wireless operators who operated behind the Japanese lines, so they had to keep supplies up to them. And sometimes if they were crook or injured they had to bring them out and send in replacements, but very often it was detachments of six, ten or twenty men that you had to get supplies into. So the army formed their own fleet of boats. Now, to form their own fleet of boats when the war was declared

the navy went in all the top-class vessels, they commandeered them. So they used them. The air force came in second and they took anything that suited them, which was obviously second-best to the navy. Well, the army was left with all the rubbish, you can’t use any other word. But they were an old flotilla. It reminds me a little bit about what happened with, not D-Day, when they had to evacuate

France, everything, dinghy or anything that they got they had to use. Well, our mob was like that. And he said to me, “Why don’t you come over to them? You’ve got a bit of mechanical knowledge.” Not that I know much but I was interested in mechanics. And so he gave me a few more clues and I went and saw this officer. They had their office at this Gilli Gilli wharf, where there boats used to go back and forwards.

So I went and saw this officer and he said, ”Can you decoke an engine?” “Yes, yes, I can do that.” And so off I went, you see. I hardly knew one end of a spanner from another. So I was transferred from being a gunner to being a sapper. Now, at that time Water Transport was part of Royal Australian Engineers, as a (UNCLEAR) of being part of the artillery. So when I

got down there I was assigned to their workshop and all their boat repairs et cetera were done at this what was an old slipway. The army had taken it over and they were doing their boats there, repairs et cetera. They had two of these slipways. One was Belisama, where they’d put the Fairmiles [motor launches] up, the Fairmiles are about 120 feet long; that was the biggest slip. And the other

slipway down from it, which was about two miles round the corner, it did the rank and file of boats, anything from 25-footers up to 75-footers, see. They were a motley lot of craft and one of them was at least 30 years old there and then. A lot of the boats were launches, should never have been taken out into the open sea,

but things being as they were they had to be and that was it. They were a good crowd of blokes there and they showed me a lot of things, I was grateful to them, and they pulled together. In fact in cohesion they were at least a step ahead of the artillery crowd. Well, I’m still in touch with the skipper of our boat.

When I’m down in Sydney, I go to their marches. I haven’t been the last couple of years. You know, there is a degree of affinity between you, which is good.

Well, all we got was this word, and it was just on dusk that this Battle of the Bismarck Sea was on

and we had to stand to, which means instead of having one gun crew on you had to have on two gun crews. Now, what we were instructed to do was we had to take those of us who weren’t, you see they had a relief crew, you always had three gun crews, one on each gun and a standby crew. If anyone gets injured among the original crews, that person is

replaced. So the standby crew had to go up and they had to man these firing lines that I told you about, the gun pits and that. And I can remember, as I was coming out of the camp - and I had my equipment, you see you take your full equipment, and you had ammo, I think I had two hundred rounds of ammo - and as I went out of the camp this bloke threw two boxes of grenades on my shoulder and says, “Here, take these up with you.” Well,

you’ve got to remember that the track up to the gun crew, these guns, is just a path cut in the hill. It's just a dirt floor, leaves and goodness knows what rubbish on it, broken limbs and what not and it's pitch black, and you’ve got to find your way up there with all this equipment on you plus your two boxes of grenades. Plus it's steep, it's slippery and if you go over the side you don’t know how far you’re going to roll. And

anyway I remember getting up to the top and I remember saying to this bloke, “Here, take these damn grenades before I drop them.” They wouldn’t have gone off because the fuses hadn’t been put in them, or detonators. I don’t remember much about it. I think we stood on duty right through to the morning and by morning we had the radio news that the Australian

air force, particularly the Australian Air Force, had more or less decimated this convoy of Japanese ships and they’d really played havoc with them and the threat was over. But there was another interesting thing there. Because of my little bit of mechanical knowledge, I was selected to go on this Japanese barge which had been retrieved and got working, and we were

over on the far side of the bay, we’d been taken over there, and we manned this barge. And this barge was towing a target for our gun battery to fire at. And, as I said, these guns could shoot between 12 and 15 miles - anyway, somewhere round about that. I was put on as crew on this Japanese barge. Well, all the

instructions on the Japanese barge was in Japanese, so that wasn’t much help. The barge itself, and I’m not tall but I even had to bend, you know, down in the engine room. The Japanese barge is a funny thing. It’s got like a twin bow on it like a catamaran. What the idea is, when they go in to the shore, the two bows dig in and stop the barge from swinging round. And they also had what they called a screw-type propeller. They don’t have the

individual blades, it's screwed like a worm. It’s got good factors about it. There’s less danger of it getting damaged. Anyway, we got out and we’re towing this target. Now, this native lakatoi [canoe] has a big screen put on it, like your thing here, equal to the size of this wall, maybe bigger. It was marked with camouflage ribbon so it could be seen from the shore. Now, we were

towing it about a thousand yards behind us. They were shooting at it from the battery, see, that was their practice, and we get about halfway through the job and the blooming engine conks out. And of course the guns are making allowance that we’re still travelling, and we ain’t. And, of course, instead of the shells lobbing behind the target they start to lob in front and they’re getting closer to us. Well, we pleaded to this engine, we did everything. You’d be

down below and the fumes would get you, so you’d come up to the side of the boat and you’d have a perk and then you’d go back down and you’d get stuck into it again and finally, by guess or by God, we got the damn thing going. Nobody was more pleased than me. It was a good education. And of course at Criabla I was more or less put on as

an engine hand which is much similar to a “greaser” on the engines. You don’t do anything technical, you just do the lubrication, things like that, although as time went on they were putting me on to more interesting jobs. It was a good education. But you were talking about the social side previously. We used to, the Americans had across from us

the island of Samarai. Now, we were on one side of the China Straits, the mainland, Samarai was on the opposite side of the China Strait. Now, all the boats going though to Milne Bay or going up north have to go through the China Straits or they have to go further out to sea and it puts a lot more mileage on. The Yanks used to have a Catalina base on Samarai. Catalinas [flying boats]

used to take off every evening and they used to go bombing over Lae, Madang, Rabaul, Tarakina, et cetera, and they used to do bombing raids and they would be out all night. Now, Catalinas are all painted black for camouflage at night and they would arrive early in the morning. Some of them would be shot, they’d lost some. And the Yanks used to invite us over once a month or something

and they would have a picture show on. They were the old silent pictures – no, they were talkies, that’s right, Gentleman Jim Corbett, but everywhere I went was Gentleman Jim Corbett or Gunga Din they would be showing, wouldn’t matter where you went. They must have worn those things out. And it was on one of those trips over there, we were being towed

out - we only had a small boat available for this and it was about a twenty-footer. If we had too many we’d tow a big dinghy behind and put half a dozen blokes on there. On this particular night we had an extra mob so we put another dinghy on behind, and we had about fifteen blokes in the first boat, I think we had about eight in the second and we had about four in the last boat, and the darn thing was

only a cockle shell. Well, we saw the pictures all right, and when we came back for some reason or other we ended up with four extra bodies, and I don’t know how it happened. It must have been someone from some of the other bases, the one round the corner, Belisama. I think they put two more in the main boat, the one with the power, they put one in the big dinghy and they put an extra one with us. Now, we’re in this little

cockle shell and there’s five of us in it, and we got halfway across the China Straits and I thought, “I feel funny, what’s wrong with me?” I suddenly realised we’d got the water up around my neck, we’d sunk. Because what had happened, the first boat weaves a little bit, the second boat weaves more and we’re going like this at the back, the last one. Fortunately, a mate of mine, Jim, he always carried a big bowie knife with him and he just cut the rope, the tow rope, straight through; otherwise we would have

pulled the lot under. Anyway, we had to swim for it. They picked us up and we picked up the dinghy about a week later. Nobody was lost but it was a bit funny paddling round. And I had a torch in my pocket: the funny part of it – the torch worked! I don’t know why. Anyway we got picked up and that was it. Quite an interesting experiment.

One of their quirks was the Americans were mad on souvenirs. You could sell them almost anything. I remember, slouch hats, anything Australian they’d send, “Oh I’ve got to send it to my Ma,” you know, souvenirs. At one stage, because being in workshops one of the things was

making rings of things out of what was purported to be Jap Zero planes, probably came off a Liberator or something like that but nobody could argue on it, and they’d buy these rings to send home. I’ve got one here. See that? That’s made out of duralumin. That’s set with pearl shell.

I made it.

Duralumin is the aluminium alloy that most planes are made out of. The propellers are made from it, most of the aircraft, plane, and different things like that. It's a fairly strong material. So you could sell these materials to the Yanks for 5, 6 dollars a time. Or, one of my boasts was all the time I was in New Guinea I never ever touched my pay because

I used to make enough pay on the side out of the Yanks, you know. You’d give them a fair deal, you wouldn’t put anything over them. One of my best antics was I used to make “genuine” native walking sticks for the Yanks. What we used to do: a mate of mine used to cut them out on the band saw, being in the workshop, he’d cut the outline. I’d carve them into shape and generally you had a figure

of a girl with a ball over their head, that was the top of the walking stick. Then we’d drop them into the bilge of the boat, leave them there for about a fortnight and they got old oil in them, put about fifty years on them and made them very “genuine” and off we’d go and flog them to the Yanks. I thought, “If you want to throw your money around I’ll take it.” That’s another one. This was better value. We made these out of the old coins. It's out of the old shillings.

I made that during the war years. It's made out of a shilling. The old silver coins, particularly prior to 1946, had a very high silver content and you could beat them out, you could work them out and work the metal to form a ring. If you got a two-shilling piece, equivalent to your 20 cent piece now, you’d got it in your fingers, you could go about tapping it with like a spoon

and the metal would gradually flare out, and then you’d drill the centre out and you’d have a coin with the inside writing of the back of the writing and the inside writing of the front of the coin on the inside of the coin. You could work the silver into that position. The souvenir trade was a big psychological advantage for a lot of soldiers.

It took their mind off not being able to come home, it took their mind off the dangers, and the souvenir industry was a very thriving industry up there. At the fighter strip Higita , which was known as the number 1 strip, you could go down there on a Sunday - you had to be in the Milne Bay area to do it; we couldn’t do it where we were, but when we were in the transit camp waiting to come home on leave

towards the end of 1944, we’d go down to Higita - and it was a black market. You could get anything from American cigarettes, Longine, Bulova watches, gold-cased, you could buy almost anything there. And there’d be people there with ornaments made out of pearl shell, some of them made things out of the perspex from the aircraft

because after the plane crashed the material was no good. It was a real trading section and every Sunday it went on. I don’t know about Lae, I didn’t strike it at Lae, but in Milne Bay it was prolific.

Well, the old shilling piece

had a ram’s head on the back of it. The sixpence had a shield, the NSW coat of arms, the penny had the kangaroo on it. Before that it had simply “one penny” in big figures and the head of King George the Fifth on the front of it.

The two-shilling piece had the Commonwealth coat of arms, if I remember correctly. There used to be a two-and-sixpenny piece, I can’t remember ever seeing it, and there was a five-shilling piece as well. The coins were much different and of course they had a very high content of silver in them. Its silver content was worth more than what its normal value was on the market.

The souvenir trade, particularly if there was a Japanese flag or a Japanese sword, they were fantastic. Some of the blokes were making “genuine” Japanese swords out of jeep springs. Well, you’ve got people who were very skilled with their hands and with their trade: anyone who was a good blacksmith

could soon make a Japanese sword out of a jeep spring. The only problem was in making the handle, because the handle of the Japanese swords were sort of studded with like small pieces of quartz. I know I ended up with a Japanese sword at the end of the war with no handle on it so I made one. I think I sold that off to the Yanks too, got rid of it.

The thing was it kept people active. They didn’t go off into a coma and think war all the time. It took their minds off these sorts of things.

Well, at the time I was doing an army correspondence course in farm mechanics and I was trying to get myself knowledgeable in that area. As kids in

Burnside we used to make our own toys and all things so I had a bent in that direction. When this opportunity presented itself to me and the fact that they had put me on that Japanese barge, they’d recognised what I was doing. Of course my correspondence courses had to go through the office, the gun battery, so they were aware of what I was doing, because all your letters were censored before they went on, so naturally they

were aware I was doing the course. So I thought, “Well, here’s an opportunity to learn something instead of just doing correspondence,” - bolts and nuts, see. So I’ve got to admit it was a con job, I knew practically nothing. When that bloke asked me did I know how to decoke an engine I didn’t even know what the word meant. But it was one of these things

and I took a gamble on it and I got into this group and I learnt as I went along. I think that’s sometimes the way you need to go today. You’ve got to talk yourself into the job and as soon as you get in there, all right, work like hell to make sure you know what it's all about and justify the action that you’ve taken. So that’s what really drove me to it. I enjoyed working with machinery,

stripping it down, putting it back together, hoping to God I didn’t have too many parts over when I finished. I still do it today. The only thing is you’ve still got to have a certain amount of care. Well, a lot of machinery today you daren’t touch, particularly the computerised stuff, you’re really asking for trouble unless you’re trained. So it was a good step ahead for me, for looking toward the future.

No, I don’t think I was actually nervous about it. I just had enough confidence in myself that by watching others I would learn from them, and also I wasn’t frightened to ask. If you don’t know something, all right, ask them. They’re complimented by the fact that you ask them, and you’re doing yourself a good turn at the same time,

you know, why be dumb and ignorant? It was a step up because instead of getting five shillings a day you went onto six shillings a day and you had the chance of improving yourself as you went along. It gave you the feeling that you were doing something worthwhile. You just weren’t marching back and forwards or pushing shells up a gun.

Admittedly, the gunnery had its advantages if you could get far enough in it. But I didn’t like my chances, not in that direction.

Well, we had a big variety of small craft, and they were the greatest mix of odds and ends that you could ever lay eyes on. You ever heard of “make and break” ignition? Make and break ignition was the early form of

electronics to put the spark into your spark plug. I don’t know it very well myself but one of our boats which was thirty years old, it had an old Union standard engine, revs to about six hundred revs a minute. It's what we call an open sump, a dry sump, you didn’t have oil in the bottom; you had a drip feed up top which the oil came down to the bearings

and the journals , you could watch the crankshaft going around. These were the early forms of boat engines, you got to learn about them. This particular boat, one of our chaps who was an electrical character, he’d changed it over to high tension ignition, so from using maybe a six-volt

battery system you went up to 12 volts and you had your coil and your spark plug, et cetera, your distributor and he changed the whole thing over. He was quite a genius. You learnt on, you would go from one engine to another. While I was in the workshop they would give me an old engine to pull down and put it back together again. I had nobody working with me, I

had to learn as I went along. And the number of times that I got a bit heavy-handed with a spanner and I broke a bolt or something in the bottom of the boat and I got abused for it, because if you break a bolt off where the shaft goes through the hole it’s pretty hard to get at and to take the old one out is more difficult. So I got abused for that a couple of times. You learn just how much tension you can put on a piece

of metal before it will go, which is very important because otherwise you’re going to strip threads right, left and centre. And during the war, when time was essential and when materials weren’t available, or replacement parts, it was essential you did as little damage as possible. It was good experience.

Out workshop was Kwiara

which is, as I said earlier, directly opposite Samarai on the China Strait. But Kwiara was on the mainland. It was a slipway which had been put in by this plantation owner, he had a plantation of coconut palms there, but his slipway was servicing other boats in the area,

which took bigger boats. The different - we had shipwrights there, we had electrical engineers, we had welders, fitters and turners, painters, all these things which are needed to keep a boat in the water and keep it moving. Our biggest trouble was getting spares. And in those days, like if you took a head

off the engine, nine times out of ten you had to make a new head gasket for it. You couldn’t go to the store and say, “I want a head gasket for a Ford V8,” or something, though in the main you could get Ford V8 stuff and you could get Chev [Chevrolet] head gaskets. But if you were looking for other types of engines, particularly the old ones, you’d have to get a sheet of copper and cut it out, cut the holes out for the bolts for where the valves go through, for the

pistons and all this sort of stuff. You had to anneal the copper so it would be soft, so when you tightened the head down on it it would make a waterproof seal, et cetera. It was all a learning process, it was good education, and that was one of the reasons that made me realise that I could never to back to farm life because that sort of thing did never come into it. Not in those days, anyway.

Well, we lived in tents. We had a common mess hut and most, there were some huts there. There was the original house that the plantation owner had, Queensland style, 7 or 8 feet above the ground with a set of steps up, and they all lived on the top floor. Well, that constituted the domestic area for the CO

of the unit, and down below they had built in an office. So the office records of the unit were done there and other details pertaining to the unit there, and the ordering of stores and supplies would be done from that office, administration. The workshop itself was over to one side, alongside the slipway. There were two jetties:

one was a jetty for the unloading of stores and personnel, et cetera, which was closer to the office building, and the second jetty was only a very narrow jetty with a wheel track on it like these cane tracks, and the engine and things would be put on a trolley and taken out there and then there would be a jib to hoist the engine across and whack it into the boat or take an engine out.

As I said, the big problem was the lack of spare parts on time, so consequently boats were held up for quite an unreasonable time, mainly because Australia didn’t have the facilities and that was it.

A lot of the chaps were quite innovative. Well, that electrical character,

I think we used to call him - it wasn’t Wombat, it was after an Australian animal anyway. Warrigal. This Warrigal was very clued-up, as I said, he made this changeover from low tension to high tension. And there was a case when one of the native boats came in and it was due, it was to go into Lae ahead of this flotilla, ahead of this invasion flotilla, and it was to go

in and sound out the way in as regards any reefs or channels. I think it was called the Watcher and it had trouble with its exhaust box up on top and the exhaust box had holes in it, which meant that it was making, as the engine was going, undue noise which could give it away when they wanted to sneak in early morning.

So our mob was given the job of repairing this exhaust box, the “pong box ”, as we used to call it, repairing it so it was more or less silent. At one stage there they got a bit ambitious and they were building a boat of their own to be included in the fleet, and they had it half-built at the time that we left there to go on leave so I don’t know what

happened. All the ribs were there and the hull had been put together but it hadn’t been planked. So that was probably a dead loss. But it was a beautiful area through Samarai. Really picturesque. It looked like, as they say, “As the sun slowly sinks into the west we say goodbye to Papua.” We were quite keen to say goodbye and move on.

Good. There was a good attitude amongst, everyone was on more or less good terms, right from the CO [commanding officer] down. Except I got into trouble there. I think it's my only claim to fame. I got barrelled for being AWOL twice. The first occasion was not long after I

had arrived there or some time after. We had a little area that we put a half concrete pitch down for playing cricket and they only had a few items of cricket gear. I think they had a ball and a bat and that was about it. I volunteered to go back to the old unit because I knew they had cricket gear and I thought, “They haven’t got an area to play cricket: I wonder if I can bludge [scrounge] some equipment off them –

wicket, gloves, something like that off them - and bring them back to this unit.” So the weekend boat left on the Saturday morning to Gili Gili to get stores. I had to do this roughly thirty-mile trip up and thirty mile trip back in the day. Of course the boats aren’t very fast moving anyway. So I went up with them. I got permission to go all right and I got up to the unit,

and I stepped off where this American camp was and I went up and saw them. Well, as talk as I might I could not coax them to give me any of this equipment. So I was supposed to catch the boat back at four o’clock when it came back to drop off supplies and stuff and somehow or other I missed it. I couldn’t get back on the Sunday because there was no boat, so I couldn’t get back till Monday afternoon.

All that time I was declared AWOL because I wasn’t there on any parade or anything like that. So I got back on the Monday afternoon and to my dismay we had a new CO, Commanding Officer, and he must have had the idea that a new broom sweeps clean. The next thing, come Tuesday morning, I’m hauled up on parade and I’m hauled

up to the office on a charge sheet for being AWOL as from Saturday morning till late Monday. He says, “What have you got to say for yourself, soldier?” I said, “Well, you put me on a charge sheet,” I said, “you’re going to try me, what hope have I got?” He said, “Fined five pounds.” Well, five pounds was a lot of money because I was only on six bob a day.

I think he was determined to show the unit that he wasn’t going to give any favours to anyone, see. And I didn’t plead that I’d gone up for this sports gear or anything like that, I was so irate. He’d put me on a charge sheet and he was going to try me and what hope did I have? I got barrelled for that little lot. Some time later I was still doing this education course on engineering and I had to do an exam

at night. I couldn’t do it during the day, I had to do it in my own time at night. We had a lieutenant we called “Splinter,” he’s a long streak of misery, and he was quite a good bloke really. Well, he was to supervise my exam so I didn’t cheat or anything. So that evening I’d forgotten all about it and

the boat was going over to Samarai for the pictures over there, the American pictures. Of course I get on board of the boat, I go to the pictures and come back and I’ve missed this, they termed it as being “on parade”. You were supposed to be there for this attention, the exam. You didn’t front up for it. Bang! I’m on a charge sheet again. Same thing again: “You put me on. You’re going to charge me. I’ve had it.” Another five pounds. So that

was my two claims to fame in New Guinea being “ack-willy” [absent without leave] , as we used to call it, and I ended up with two red lines in my pay book. It seems a bit funny when you look on it. I was talking to a bloke over the road, an ex-solicitor. He said, “You could have asked for a” - not a retrial – “extenuating circumstances that caused the situation.” I don’t know, I was probably pig-headed.

Anyway you don’t know about these things. You don’t know that you can turn around and ask for a re-trial or somebody else to adjudicate on it. So I just took it on the chin all right, so I was ten quid down the drain. So what? Just keep going. It was an interesting learning experience for me. Stick your neck out, you get it chopped off.

Well,

I joined them somewhere about May 1943, we came down on leave somewhere down on September 1944, that was the period I was with them. Then we came back on this Liberty ship, and there were about six hundred of us and we were offloaded at Hamilton Wharf in Brisbane.

We came down to the LTD [leave and transit depot] at Marrickville. Oh, those that were from Queensland went on leave from Brisbane, the NSW went on leave from Sydney and the Victorian crowd went from that area. We were a mixture, we weren’t all.... Different from the artillery crowd, who were all from the one area of NSW. In this crowd there was Tasmanians, South Australians, West Australians.

I think the only area we didn’t have anyone from was Northern Territory, otherwise they were all there. I had this bit of leave but I had a funny incident come out of that. I reported back to Marrickville LTD and I was told, “Your unit’s in Brisbane.” The information that we’d been given prior to going on leave was

that the 31st Maintenance Company that we belonged to was going to be disbanded, was going to be taken over by the Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, they were going to take that over. We, those of us that weren’t workshop personnel, like riggers, painters and that, the riggers, painters and that would be taken into RAEME [Royal Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers] and the rest

of us who had been the Royal Australian Engineers, we’d stop with Royal Australian Engineers but be absorbed into the Water Craft people who were kept separate from Workshop - they made these definitions - so I would understand that we were to be regrouped at Mount Martha, Victoria, down by Franklin. Now, to my horror they sent me up to Brisbane: “Your unit’s in Brisbane. Don’t argue, soldier.”

Right, so I get to Brisbane. “Your unit’s in Townsville.” Again I tried to argue with them. “No, your unit’s up in Cairns.” So away I go up to Cairns. And even up at Cairns they sent me up to Innisfail. And I kept telling them, and I ended up in the camp up at Redlands out of Cairns just below where the mountain track goes up, and I’m there for a couple of days and finally they saw the light and they said, “Yes, oh, yes, your unit’s in Melbourne,”

whacked me on a train and hotfooted it down to Melbourne. Of course I had an ulterior motive, too: the Melbourne Cup [horse race] was coming off. And, you know, I got to Melbourne and I got out for the Cup - on a Saturday, I think it was a Saturday - and I got out to the Cup with about an hour to spare. So I backed the wrong horse. But you know the things that pop up in the army. I’ve heard of people in the army who spent nearly

their whole life in the army being transported from one area to another, they managed to engineer it so their unit was always ahead of them so that they never caught up with them, so they spent, I don’t know how much time, I did hear tales of these characters who more or less travelled around Australia doing nothing other than travelling. Well, they got away with it.

Oh well, Mount Martha, that was another one of my gimmicks, too. I went and put up three hooks down there. We were more or less being held on standby down there; apart from doing a few route marches around the place and doing a bit of exercise, we weren’t really doing anything much. The army did have three boats there, tied up at the Mornington Jetty, I can’t remember the names

of them. But they were known as the “never-go-outs”, they’d never been known to leave the jetty. We weren’t crewing then, although they were the same personnel. We were just being held there until such time as there was a boat available to take us through to Lae. I know I put three hooks [sergeant's stripes] up there and marched into the sergeants’ mess and got promptly thrown out, so that didn’t do me any good. I don’t know what was behind it,

it was just one of those larrikin things you do on the spur of the moment. We eventually were whacked back on the train and sent up to Townsville. Picked up the same boat again, the Taroona. The Japanese never caught her, strangely enough, not like the old Centaur. We were lobbed off at Lae, and the.... See, Milne

Bay had now become background, it was no longer required, and Lae was the main base then, and Lae had become captured a few months previously. We took over a place called Labu, which was the sea end of the Wau Road. Now, all the transport that had to come up to Wau had to come across from Lae, across the mouth of the Markham River, which they went by barge.

They dropped off from the shore at Labu, and from there they made their way up the edge of the Markham River. And it was all done with corduroy and airstrip matting. The logs would rot through and the trucks would break through and they had all sorts of problems with it, but they kept that area open. The army had an agricultural unit up at Wau that were growing vegetables for the supply of the Australian Army

in Lae. I think it was the 6th Div that were in there. There were two Div’s I was associated with: one was the 5th Div and the other was the 6th. And I think both of them were in Milne Bay at one stage and then they moved on to Lae, et cetera. I was put on a boat from the Labu section and we went up to Finschhafen

and we went across to Arawe. It was a same type of trawler, plenty of free board on it and quite good engine, et cetera. It was one of the few boats that the Water Transport crowd managed to get hold of. We went up as far as Jacquinot Bay. Now, Jacquinot Bay had a small boat there, fishing trawler, that I was put on board. It had already two crew on it so I became the third

member of the crew. We had to do duty runs in Jacquinot Bay and we were attached to the same unit, 55 Port Craft. The [future] Governor General of Australia, Sir Ninian Stephen, he was in that unit. I never saw him.

See, we never went ashore to eat with this crowd; we cooked for ourselves on the boat, just the three of us, and it had an old Southern Cross engine in it, the greatest lump of iron that you ever saw, pig iron. They were fairly reliable but they could give you problems. They were really built as a farm engine, they weren’t built as a marine engine. Diesel, of course. Anyway, we were there for a number

of months. I think we brought the Lady Betty, AS 55 - they had an army number, army Ship AS 55 - we brought it back to Lae, transferred to this other boat, the AM5 which I showed you the picture of, and we were sent up to

Aitape. We had to get repairs done there, then we came back down the coast and then we were used as the ambulance boat. Each morning we’d go down with the barge and the barge would go in because there was no jetty, put its ramp down and the walking wounded and stretcher cases would be taken on board. They’d bring it out to us, load us up. They’d go in a second time and pick up more stretcher cases. They

could carry sixteen stretcher cases, we could carry seven. But we could also carry between 25 to 30 walking wounded. We would go back up the coast about thirty miles, we’d drop them off at the beach and we’d do the reverse operation getting them ashore. They would be flown up from the airstrip there to Aitape AGH, general hospital.

They would be looked after from that point. We were doing that right up until the end of the war. We used to come down six days a week. We didn't come down Sunday. Oh, we had various incidents up there at times. We only went ashore once to climb up into the hills to have a look at, you know, what the troops were putting up with. And there

was a Japanese general,Hatazo Adachi , and he was crippled and yet he was being carried from place to place and the troops could never catch up with him. You know, they wanted to capture him. They never got him right up until the end of the war. At the time that the peace was declared, the Japanese surrender, we had gone back down to Alexishafen, which is near Madang. Now, the Catholics had a big mission there but they also had a good

slipway and a floating, I don’t think they had a floating dock, the floating dock must have been brought in by the American Army. They could put Fairmiles and things either up the slip or on this floating dock. We were to get the hull cleaned, we were to go up o the slipway one way or the other. Whilst we were there we were going to go fishing. The usual way with a handful of grenades,

very sporting type. We walked across, these boats were tied up, navy Fairmiles, they were all tied up, Fairmiles and different other boats. And there was a boat second from the end, Lolita, she was a pleasure cruiser which had been commandeered from Rose Bay, Sydney. Anyway, we walked across her, got down in the dinghy and we were rowing away and making over

towards the reef where we knew the fish were, and I supposed we got about a hundred yards away. No outboard motor. Next minute we felt this whoosh in the water. We looked up and here’s this second boat, the Lolita, there was just a sheet of flames shot up, the cabin’s up in the air, claps down, and smoke and more flames. We thought, “We’d better get the hell out of this!” So we rowed back smartly for the pontoon where our

boat was tied up. Now, we got into the boat, there was ammunition going off into all directions because of the ammunition on the boat itself. One boat had towed this burning craft out into the stream and cut it adrift, and it was drifting with the tide. Fortunately it wasn’t drifting in our area, but it ended up sitting on a heap of coral there. Of course the ammo’s going off right, left and centre, and we’re hiding behind the big

steel casement on the floating dock. There were three blokes killed on it. It was a real tragedy. We found out later, it had petrol engines in it, apparently when they went to start the engines up for lunch, just after we’d gone across, the spark from the starter motor must have ignited the fuel. See, if you've got petrol fumes down in a boat, invariably they’re very hard to get rid of, and that’s your

danger point. Anyway, there were three blokes killed in it. It was a tragedy that shouldn’t have happened. Fortunately it didn’t happen when we walked across it or we would have been in trouble.

Again, it was an adventure. I liked the idea of it,

we were moving. The only thing is when you’re in some of these boats, the fishing trawlers, they’re good sea boats; now, when you get out into the open sea with a motor launch that’s got a well deck that’s only got about 18 inches of free board, your bilge pump is a semi-rotary hand pump, when the water comes over the side you get gallons at a time

so you’re pumping madly. And when we did that trip across, that last trip we did was a boat crossing, it was big seas, escorting a flotilla of barges, we were pumping every half hour to keep that damn thing afloat. And we were loaded up with gear, we had personnel on board, we had their gear, we had drums of fuel on board, it was quite a hectic thing. And these big seas, particularly at night,

you can’t see anything. You can’t see the sky, you can’t see nothing, all you know is you’re going up and down and you’re hoping to God you’re going in the right direction. So, you know, it was hair-raising. For all that it didn’t cross your mind that you wouldn’t make it, that was the funny thing about it.. I think it's the confidence of youth. When you’re older you think, “Will I do it or won’t I?” But you don’t think about it, you think, “It can’t happen to me.” Probably

fortunate, anyway.

Oh, well, our normal crew was five. If we were carrying casualties, as I said, we’d be carrying between 25 and 30 walking wounded, there would be barely room to stand. And then we’d have seven stretcher cases laying down in the well of the boat. We didn’t have to provide meals for them or anything like that.

Generally there used to be a Salvation Army bloke with them, or some sort of welfare character - I wouldn’t call him actually a welfare, but a medical attendant that would go around and keep an eye on how they were going, particularly the stretcher cases. And there would be packets of biscuits or something handed round. There was no sort of cups of tea or anything like that.

All right in the main, probably about a three-hour journey, but the facilities weren’t there. See, we were cooking on that boat - did you ever see the kerosene lamps for cooking on with a circular wick which came up from the kerosene container? We were cooking for five men on this apparatus, which only had two burners on it. Now, there was no

pressure feed or anything like that, just ordinary gravitation feed to the lamp, and you got kerosene fumes and everything. If it was a rough sea you couldn’t cook at all. That was it. It was only when you had a chance to anchor in a quiet area or tie up on a jetty that you could really cook for yourself. And toilet facilities were none. If you wanted to go to the toilet you hung over the boat and that was it. You know, things were extremely primitive.

If you wanted to have a shower you threw a bucket over the side with a rope on it, you got a bucket of sea water, and they had a special salt water soap that they used to issue and that was the only soap that would give you a lather. And you’d shower out on the back of the open deck at the back of the boat. Later on, when we did get a new boat, we had a toilet on board, an oil-fired galley, we had all mod cons.

That was only after the war had finished. That was really too late to have the benefits of it.

The Lady Betty, well, even the Lady Betty didn’t have toilets on it. It did have a bit of a cooking galley, but it was a fishing trawler and it had a fair bit of free board and the engine room

was down below deck, whereas the launch was simply a well-decked river launch. It was not designed for the open sea, it wasn’t designed for it in any way. Fortunately it did have a diesel engine instead of a petrol engine. But our electrical system was the greatest confusion out. To start off, we had a jeep, six-volt jeep

generator being driven by the engine while we were at sea. We had a twelve-volt lighting system and our radio was twelve-volt. We had a twenty-volt starter motor on the engine and we had a petrol-driven battery charger which was sixteen-volt. You had these conflicting

things. And when you wanted the particular section you had pull out this knife switch or put this one in to get the right combination of voltage for your charging. Talk about a heat bothering creation. So somehow or other we managed to survive, but it was a case of you had to; you didn’t have any alternatives.

In most cases in the fo’c’sle,

in the bow of the boat, just below the deck, we had bunks in there. We had four bunks, two on either side. And the skipper, we had a wheelhouse up on top which allowed the skipper or whoever was at the wheel to see the bow of the boat and see ahead without any obstruction. Well, he had a bunk alongside the wheel. It was

like what they called a “flying bridge”. He slept up there. That was the five of us catered for there. When we got the new boat, we had bunks for the crew; and the skipper and I, because I was engineer, we had our own bunks, our own cabin each. We were quite comfortable.

The three of us we were pretty good, really. You know, it seems a bit hard to express it, although it was wartime and we were in the fighting area, et cetera,

you still had time for humour. At one stage we were tied up to the Liberty ship and our duty was, during the day, to patrol back and forwards from the bow of the Liberty to the stern to ensure that there was no customs invasion - cigarettes and stuff like that, even drugs - and we had

to make sure that there was no contact between the crew and somebody coming round the back of the boat to pick up contraband or anything like that. On this particular occasion, the old Southern Cross in these boats were pretty unreliable and we had just more or less cast off the ropes to move up and

the engine cut out. There was a bit of a current running there and the boat was being swept away and I had to climb up the side of this Liberty ship on a single rope. Now, don’t ask me how I did it and the Liberty ship was towering up above me about twenty feet. I only had a towel wrapped around me, because I’d been sunbaking or swimming. And anyway I had to shin up this rope and make it,

I had to throw another line down, that’s right. I was on the rope, the boat had drifted out, they couldn’t reach the rope. I was still on the rope. I had to climb up and reel the rope in and throw it out to them so they could make it fast and stop the boat from drifting away. It was one of those cases where the consequences outweigh your own risk and you just think, “If the boat drifts away and has got no engine where’s it going to end up?

Is it going to be on the reef or what?” So circumstances dictate “Do it,” and somehow or other you have the strength for the occasion. It's fantastic when you look at these things. Somebody asked me, “Would you do it today?” And I said, “Not on your flaming life.”

Well, they were, you’d have to, on every hour or two hours, it was

dictated to you by the staff at the headquarters, “Right, your duty for today, Wednesday, you will go up to the jetty and you well patrol up and down the length of the Liberty ship and you will make this trip every two hours during daylight.” There wasn’t much you could do at night-time because you couldn’t see anyway. Whatever lights were on the jetty would have been minimal and there would

have been nothing on the far side of the boat. The curious thing was in Jacquinot Bay there was a big reef stretched out parallel with the shore. Whilst you were anchored behind that you were protected from the surf and you had a good anchorage whether you were tied up to a jetty or whether you just threw the anchor down. If you were outside of the reef, you had the breakers coming in. We had one of our boats coming in, a three-hundred-tonner,

and they saw us tied up and they thought that, they didn’t realise there was this big reef between us and them, and we had to yell like mad and, oh jeez, did they slam the brakes on. And they’d have ripped the bottom right out of that ship. It was a bad blue because they did not consult their charts. If they had consulted their charts they would have seen that to enter into this part of Jacquinot Bay

they had to go up to the more or less middle of the harbour, go round this bit of an island that was at the end of the reef and come round the back of it. Of course, obviously it was indiscretion on the skipper’s part. Anyway, fortunately they didn’t wreck the ship, but they came damn close to it. As I said, that was the nearest I got to seeing Sir Ninian Stephen.

I wrote that first poem which is in that book, Homeward Bound. I was coming back in that Liberty ship from Milne Bay. Well, you’re all on deck because you were deck cargo

more or less, it wasn’t worthwhile being down in the hulls because it was too flaming hot. As we got further south coming down through the Coral Sea you started to get this cold air and the cold wind sort of stirred you and you got this nostalgia feeling that you were coming back to Australia; no longer did you have this humid heat, the rain,

and this sweaty feeling; that you were coming back to reality. That stirred me to writing the poem. It was published in one of the Cabramatta papers, The Biz, at the time. This is when I got back on leave and I know that they wanted me to recite it but I was too embarrassed at the time and I didn’t do it. I thought, “No, not me, they’d only think it was rubbish anyway.” But it came together good, but I didn’t

do much more after that. I think the major part of the writing I started was when I joined the Bureau of Mineral Resources and I was out in the desert. And that really got it because when you've got time on your hands you think, “What can I do with it? Are you going to just sit in a tent just drinking or smoking or are you going to try and put it to some use?” I just got the feeling. The thing was we were brought up

at school at Burnside on Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson, [Australian folk authors] , you learnt to recite; and not only that, if you can recite, play a musical instrument, if you can entertain anywhere there’s always an opening for you whether you recite or play mouth organ or what. So I’ve always had that sort of ability, that

a Saturday and you have a few beers or something, you pull the mouth organ out and start playing. You’re sitting in a truck going somewhere and you pull a mouth organ out and you get the mob singing. It comes together and it makes you feel useful.

Well,

what happened during the war, the incidents that happened, I kept them in my memory and years later when I found that I had the ability to write - you see, I didn’t think that I could write. I wasn’t good at English at school and I didn’t give myself any credit for being able to do anything like that and it was only later on, more or less accidentally I think, that I could put two and two together and make something

that was plausible and acceptable. That really started to come through when I was out in North-Western Queensland. The result of it was that then I remembered the incidents that happened during the war so I started to write for them. Even though the article happened in the 1940s, et cetera, here I am in the 1980s putting it down in print.

Jean was doing a lot of the typing up for me. Well, I thought it wasn’t fair to push her all the time to do the typing, so I went to the college here and learnt touch typing. We got computers. We started off with, our first computer only had 4Mb [megabyte] capacity and we’ve progressed from that, and people say, “You should get on internet, you should get on this,” and I say, “No.

I’m using the computer for my convenience, I’m not interested in internet.” All right, it would probably help me sell my poetry and things like that. Somehow or other I’m not ambitious in that direction. I’m more ambitious to put something together and just publishing my own work.

The Lady Betty probably wasn’t more than six months.

The boat for some reason or other was called to Lae. The crew was broken up. I think the boat was more or less condemned as being unseaworthy, which sounds good. Then I was whacked onto this other boat, the AM5, so my incidents of working in the Wewak area came from that

point on, up till the end of the war. I’m talking about the Japanese side of it. Then, when you’re signed on in the army you’re signed on for the duration of the war and twelve months thereafter, and so in that “twelve months thereafter” period we got transferred to this other boat, the AS1808 which, the Proubee

She was a fishing trawler. She had been built down in Melbourne. Sixty-six foot long. She had a terrific set-up on it: an oil fired stove, good radio equipment, a toilet, we had a hull that would carry forty tons of cargo, we had the latest in diesel engines, et cetera. We had all these facilities we had dreamt of but had never ever got near, even to

have a good mechanical bilge pump, et cetera, and it was a pleasure to travel on it. It was really good. As I say, on the AM5 we had gone into Rabaul and we had escorted the barges from Finschhafen hp the coast of New Britain and we were part of the rescue attempts, as you see from those photos

of the Lutheran Mission, the German Lutheran Mission at Kokopo. Kokopo is quite famous in history. I don’t know if you’ve ever read the story Queen Emma? There were two of them, Queen Emma and her sister Pure, something like that. They married Europeans, they were Samoan ladies.

They were well-gifted, when I say well-gifted they were knowledgeable and they were well-educated. And one married, Queen Emma married a German trader. The other girl, I can’t think of her name, well she married this illegitimate son of Denmark, I think it was Denmark, royalty. And they had these plantations there and Queen Emma set herself up in real style. She used to entertain,

and she had all the notable people coming there and she lived a very grand life. Anyway this Kokopo was where her headquarters had been, the mission had been set up there, and Germans, the fact that they were Germans, the Japanese left them alone but by the same token they never helped them. So we went in and brought them out. So they were emaciated

and they were taken down to Australia and sort of got their health back and came back. I was speaking to someone who was there recently, I think there’s one of the nuns that was there when we rescued them that was still alive. This is a couple of years back, so she’s probably gone now.

Well, actually the army went

round by road. They located these people and they radioed for a boat and a barge to come down and pick them up so they could take them back, and the obvious thing was that their health had suffered and they needed medical attention. We didn’t really rescue them; we were

merely the means of transporting them back to Rabaul itself where they could be flown out and looked after. We had this Australian Army photographer on board and of course I barrelled him to take a picture of our boat. Of course, where I fell down was that I was then inside cleaning the engine and I’m not in the picture at all.

Well, I was engineer on the boat and I was responsible for looking after the engine, servicing the engine if there were any errors that needed correction. You had to look after that you had ample fuel on board, that the engine was running properly, that the right temperatures were maintained,

that the batteries.... Because the batteries were not only responsible for keeping the engine going, but your lighting system, your radio depended on the batteries, your radio contact. See, you’d have to call in at least once every day to confirm where you were with headquarters, you spoke in code, et cetera. We had a radio operator on board so he did that. The mechanical

condition of the boat, you had to look after that. The guns on board, we had a .5 Browning up front and a Vickers down aft, we had to look after them and they had to be serviced. The fuel, the bilges, things like that. The mechanical condition of the boat was your responsibility. The skipper, he looked after the navigation; he dealt with the paperwork as regards the boat,

the stores and stuff like that. Everyone had their job but, by the same token, we worked as a team so that you took turns on the wheel, particularly if you travelled at night, and you took turns at looking after the engine. The radio operator, his time was variable, so he looked after that all the time. The only other bloke who didn’t get a break was the cook. We worked on a

basis if we went ashore, scrounging was an army tradition and if you could, for want of a better word, if you could knock off a case of tinned peaches you did it. But you brought them back to the boat, it was put in the boat and it was everyone’s property. Whatever you found you brought back. To give you an idea, one of the islands off Wewak, we went over there one Sunday to try and collect some fruit, some bananas

and paw paws, and I went through this abandoned native village and I found a bag and it had sixty-one New Guinea shilling pieces, one-shilling pieces, they had holes in them. I’ve got one put away somewhere. They had a hole through them so the natives could carry them on a string and wear them around their neck. I brought them back to

the boat and we just shared them out amongst the five of us and that was it. And you did that with all sorts of things, it didn’t matter what you got, whether you managed to scrounge a couple of bottles of beer, it was shared and that was just a common thing. That was common particularly between the Water Transport group. They had this sort of fellowship, mateship. And there was one night there,

this was with the AM5, now, there were pictures on at Wewak. The funny part was that you couldn’t all go ashore, two had to stop on board the boat. Three of them went ashore in the dinghy. The picture show, there was a big swamp right behind the beach so there was only a narrow strip that you could negotiate, but you crossed over this

swamp and the picture show area was up the back, and I believe the Japs used to come down and watch the pictures! Now, this is common knowledge, this happened a lot through the islands, the Japs used to come down and sit on the islands and watch the pictures. What they used to do, you had to have what they call the “Meri water,” which was mosquito lotion, and you had to rub it on you arms and on your face. If you got it in your eyes it stung like hell.

That was to keep the mosquitoes away. Now, there was just this little narrow bridge and you had to pass these to provos, military police, and they would lean over and sniff you and if they couldn’t smell this lotion on you “Out!”, see. They did have bottles of lotion there so you had to whack it on whether you liked it or not. The only thing was with your watches and the old plastic covers on them, if it got on them

the glass dissolved. It wasn't glass, of course, it was plastic. Anyway, we were on board the [AM5] , Hugh and I, on this particular night and there was a fairly rough sea running, and we always put, when we anchored, we always put two anchors out; we’d put one out ahead and one astern and kept your bow into the waves. Anyway, we were sitting there and we’d hear this yelling and the next minute thump, thump, our boat had actually dragged both anchors

with this sea running and we were up against this Yankee boat. So they weren’t very happy with us, we were knocking the paint off their boats. I went down the stern - Hugh started the engine up, took us away from the other boat; I went down the stern and pulled in the stern anchor and then I went up the front and pulled in the front anchor. This boat was so primitive we did not have a winch

to pull up the anchor. When we wanted to pull up the anchor it took two or three of the crew to pull up this anchor by hand, hand over hand, just pulling the chain. Anyway this particular night - again it’s what I said, desperation makes you do these things - I pulled up the flaming anchor on my own. I went back to Hugh and said, “Right, you can take her forward now.” And he says, “What about the anchor?” I said, “I’ve got it up.” He didn’t believe me at first. Anyway

we shot off and we put the anchors down again and put out a bit more chain. It comes back to the fact that you do things that you didn’t realise you can do. There’s another case down in Lae, a similar sort of thing. Off the Markham River there was a big jetty there that the Liberty ships used to come in and unload called Milford Haven

It was on the mainland but on the opposite side to Labu. This night there was a pretty good storm running and somebody had come in and said, “Ay, the AM88’s broken away.” That was another one of our small boats. So we went out after it and we didn’t know where it was going to go. Oh, it was a dirty night, you know, this sea was rolling and everything. Anyway you always had an Aldus lamp and

the Aldus lamp was a spot [spotlight] that you could pick up, anyway we picked up this boat. We got alongside it and someone looked at me and said, “You’re the engineer, you’ll have to get on board and start it.” I thought to myself, “Yeah, like hell.” And the boats are rocking back and forwards. Anyway, I picked a time when the two boats were coming together and I jumped, and the snag was if I didn’t land properly we’d go over the other side.

Anyway I go there all right and got down there underneath and I started the engine up all right and brought her back into the jetty. But these are small incidents where you have to make a quick decision, have a go at it. I know when I was flying through the air I was thinking, “Gawd, am I going to make it or aren’t I?” But I think it's all part of life.

Well, the boat at Wewak, well we were controlled by a crowd called Movement Control. Now, Movement Control is a section of the army that delegates who goes back and forth, what unit. Mind you the top brass will decide, the brigades, all that, they want the 17th Brigade in

say the mouth of the Sepik Rover or the Ramu, the Ramu particularly, and they will dictate that they want them transported there. So Movement Control have to arrange it. Now, they will either arrange perhaps with the navy to take this group in, like the landing at Finschhafen, or they might arrange for a small detachment to go in on

a sixty-foot boat, see, so you get your orders from Movement Control even though you’re part of your own unit. The order comes through to your unit to supply a boat, such-and-such purpose, capable of carrying twenty personnel and their gear, so that’s the directions you’re given and you’re given the code to operate for the day, except if you’re entering port.

So you take your directions. At Wewak we came under Movement Control. And each day we’d get our directions to go down. As the battle proceeded forward we were told, “Right, stop off at Dove Bay and you will pick up your walking wounded.” The following day you might be five miles further on and you might pick up there. So always

you brought them back to the same common place where the nearest airstrip was, But or Dagua . There was never any problems with it, I never struck an occasion where you were sent down and it didn’t tie in with the operations, et cetera. There was never any confusion in that area.

Well, there wasn’t a great deal

of logistics. You knew really what your carrying capacity was and Movement Control also knew that so they would just turn around and say, “Right, you will go down there, you will take seven stretcher cases,” that they worked out that we could carry and, “You will take up to,” they wouldn’t say the actual number, “up to thirty walking wounded.” The barge

can go in a second time, it will carry the rest of the stretcher cases. It might be anywhere between eight and sixteen stretcher cases, just what happened to be there for the day. We brought out of Wewak while I was there the Indian POWs [prisoners of war] . On that trip that I did over to the island of Muschu, where I got those coins,

I picked up a Pommy [English] forage cap, and like a fool I never hung onto it. It was sort of evidence of what had happened in the past. Now, we understood that, of the Indian POWs that the Japs had taken there and had used as labour, we understood that a large number had died of malnutrition, disease and even cannibalism.

Anyway, we had twelve, I think it was. When they were rescued by the army they were brought to us, loaded onto our boat and barges and we took them up to the airstrip. Now, there was a dozen of them and they were immediately, once they picked up, they were flown down to Australia and they were interrogated by intelligence people on what information

they could give, particularly what happened to their unit and things like that. When they were sufficiently recovered they were being flown back to India. Unfortunately the DC3 that they were put on got as far as Jacquinot Bay and crashed into the mountain, Mt Kiwai between Jacquinot Bay and Wide Bay, and

they were all killed, with the exception of the lieutenant. The lieutenant had been kept back for further interrogation, he was the superior officer there with them, and that was the thing that saved him, the fact that he was kept back for further information. The other eleven died. We also brought out Koreans. The interesting point is that a lot of the troops on the boat wanted to throw them overboard because the Korean looked so much like the

Japanese, see, so how do you know who’s who? Even when we were back at Lae, they were using Koreans to help unload the ships there, the Koreans who had been rescued, especially the ones we had on board. When you get these different nationalities it's like going over to Iraq – who’s on whose side and who isn’t? The same situation in Vietnam.

You can’t tell one from another.

We picked them up from Wewak. They were POWs the same as the Indians were. I don’t know, I’ve never managed to get the full details of that, I’ve never managed to get that. Wewak Harbour. You see, Wewak was very important to the Japs because it was the centre of operations. It had a good harbour.

There were numerous wrecks there, a lot of wrecks that the Allies had sunk in the harbour. In fact we nearly crashed into one one night because somebody was out there fishing and they put the light out because they reckoned it disturbed the fish, and of course we didn’t see the ship and we nearly ploughed into it. We were fortunate we avoided it.

The Indian

prisoners and the Koreans were definitely suffering from malnutrition. Even the Japanese were reputed to be cannibalising their own people. The Japanese Army, they were so short of provisions, see, they couldn’t get anything in, and they couldn’t get enough from the native villages to keep their

troops going as regards vegetables and stuff. The only thing they could get at times, and that was fairly infrequent, was submarines, even then there was a big risk, and any shipping they brought in, because the Allies, with the numbers the Yanks had, had control of the air

so they couldn’t do anything.

We would have been totally inadequate. If a sub had come up alongside,

our .5 might have penetrated some of the hull. We would have been absolutely…. But for a sub to come up anywhere near us, once we were close to the shore there wasn’t enough draft to bring a sub in unless it was a smaller sub, and smaller subs weren’t really armed apart from carrying a torpedo and they weren’t used up there.

Subs require a fair draft of water, particularly if they had to dive suddenly. If aircraft appeared and they had to dive, if they’re in shallow water they’ve had it. So a submarine is always, it's got a weakness: if any explosion is dropped near it

it can leak. It's very important that a sub does not take in water, for many reasons. Once it starts to leak it can’t dive. So subs are very vulnerable.

Not really. What we would do when we were travelling, not so much with the casualties, but

when we were travelling between ports, say from Lae to Finschhafen to Madang, we always stopped within sight of the land. We did more or less point-to-point navigation. If you were going in to a banana-shaped coastline, you would just take the high point and you would make a straight point to the next high point. So you might be thirty or forty miles out at sea; if you were travelling at night you would keep thirty or forty miles out to sea because you knew that

area, that in the majority of cases there were no reefs to worry about, whereas once you were close in to shore you had to watch out for a reef or any other atolls or things like that. You were dictated more or less by the situation. As regards the casualty run, we were seldom more than half a mile offshore,

because it necessitated that you made a straight line for the shortest distance. So there wasn’t any great problem there.

Oh, I think a lot of them could have been shrapnel from grenades, some could be bullet wounds. You also had a high percentage of people who were suffering from

dysentery, malaria; and another, which was very bad, accidents where somebody’s rolled a jeep over or something like that. The day that peace was declared there was one of the blokes in this ambulance unit that we were attached to, they went swimming and he

got bitten by a sea snake and he was dead inside twenty-four hours and peace had been declared. Talk about a tragedy.

Little or none. You spoke to them and you’d hear bits of tales and that but you were more or less

interested in doing your duties on the boat, keeping a watch out for what’s going on, et cetera. We had one character there one day – oh, we always had a trawling line out the back to catch fish: well, if you could get a decent size fish there was your supper. They was really hard to come by. And I remember this character, he really wanted to take over this fishing line and he wanted to pull this fish in. He said to me, “See

the fish line? I’m going to jump overboard.” And I said, “Well, you jump over, mate, we could do with a bit less weight.” Well, of course he didn’t do it. You got a percentage of people who put on an act. I think you’ve heard the term “troppo”. Troppo means berserk - not necessarily berserk in a violent way; they’ve lost control of their minds, you know. Normally under those conditions,

if it was a proven case, they would be sent back to Australia. But there were a lot of people who put on acts of being troppo and this in particular was a case of it. The bloke was putting on an act, see, and he’d been sent up on the boat to be checked out by the medical people further up the line. They didn’t want to muck about with him down on the front line where the action was, they didn’t want him hanging round so they got him out of the way.

I’ve seen various cases of troppo. I’ve seen cases that were genuine, too, particularly with people who had very close family ties. These people, when they were taken away from their families and thrown into this man-made world of males only, they couldn’t hack it. They wanted to go back to Mummy. Now, these are characters that were twenty, twenty-two year-olds, you would have thought right,

but if they grew up in a certain atmosphere there’s little else that they’re likely to do, that’s it, they’ve got to get back to Mummy.

A lot of them, well, the stretcher cases, they were obviously the

critical ones and we would be getting sixteen and seven, you’re looking at twenty-three average each day with the front line fighting. Now, what were the actual ones that were killed, I’ve got no idea of the figures, you’d have to get that from the army statistics. The fighting was going on all the time, day to day, and even after the surrender was declared

a lot of the Japanese refused to believe it and wouldn’t come in and we did lose a few soldiers who went out to try and bring these people in as they got fired on, and unfortunately we lost a few. I heard stories of different characters. The Japanese used to lay all sorts of decoys. One of these sorts of decoys

was to leave a Japanese flag or a Japanese sword. See, the Japs would take over a village and they’d take over the huts and they would be living in them while they were foraging around the country, and while they were holding it when the Australians would come into that area there would be some sort of souvenir lying around, and of course a character would race out and grab it and there would be a

sniper waiting for him and he would be picked off. It took them a long time, just the same as the Japanese learnt to call out, make European calls, “Over here, Jack.” Of course they’d answer them and the next minute there would be a burst of gunfire in that direction. So they were very wily. I wasn’t a frontline soldier at any time but these were some of the stories that were coming back to me.

Not really. I think a lot of people, particularly the infantry people, they’d talk amongst themselves.

They wouldn’t really confide in you because you were sort of an outsider. I think there’s also the business that you find a lot of people who’ve been in the front line will not, even years later, discuss what they saw or what they knew during that period. They will button up. Whether it is because they want to forget it,

probably has a lot to do with it. Also they don’t feel that the person that they are talking to is the right person to discuss it with, you know, they feel that that person is possibly not going to have any sympathy with them. It remains a secret within themselves.

Oh, yes.

Well, the infantry bore the brunt of the fighting in most cases. Also, and I’ll give them their due, they were better trained. We had an infantry bloke who came in and joined us when I was on the gun battery and the reason he came and joined us was if you had a brother in the unit, you could transfer across or he could transfer across. And this

infantry character transferred across to us, artillery. Well, look, he shamed us. I mean to say, put us out in the bull ring and do any manoeuvres or things like that, rifle drill or anything like that.... His skill and his concentration was so good it made us look like blooming amateurs, you know. That was the shame of it, a lot of the units

did lack good training. It's a shame. I know in the artillery we lacked it; even in the Water Transport we lacked any training. We were sort of there to keep the boats running and to get on with that. There was little or no time spent on training, whether it was training or rifle drill. The only time you got hit with that was

when you came back off leave and they didn’t have anything for you to do to keep you occupied so they’d put you on the bull ring and put you through a series of route marches and God knows what, mainly to keep you from getting bored.

Oh yeah. We had weapons on board the boats. One of our

boats was shooting down a Jap Zero up around Orokolo Bay. Could have even been two. One of our boats was going round by Dutch New Guinea, the lower side, down by Thursday Island. He came onto Japanese barges and they had a bit of an engagement and that was one instance where the gun was placed in such a position, the forward gun on the bow, that when these boats came in very close he couldn’t get the angle

to fire down, he couldn’t press the gun far enough, so that put them at a bit of a disadvantage. Anyway they managed to get out of it OK. You had the guns there. There was every chance that the possibility could come in and could get taken up. There was a boat around Orokolo Bay, there was a Japanese seaplane that was nicknamed “Sewing Machine Charlie” [so named because the engine was said to sound like that of a sewing machine] ,

and he used to sit in the shallows with his floats, in the shadow of the mangroves, and he’d wait for our boats to come round the corner and he’d open up on them with a machine gun. Whether he caused any casualties or not I don’t really know. Sort of you get half of the story but you never really get to follow up with what was the outcome. Oh, somebody managed to catch up with “Sewing Machine Charlie,” and bump him off.

There were instances where you needed your armament.

I think our main danger on our small boats was the condition of the boats themselves, because a lot of the boats weren’t seaworthy, they weren’t built.... You see the AM5, The Gloria, was a river launch and you were taking it out in big seas with

big swells. It could have quite easily been turned over. We would have been finished because we didn’t have life rafts or anything like that, but all we had was a small cockle shell of a dinghy that would have been tied to the boat. Naturally if the boat sunk it went with it. There was no way in the world that you could swim to shore from those things, particularly at night.

That was possibly the main danger, from the sea rather than from the enemy. At the time that we were operating round Wewak the Allies had the upper hand. They had control of the air, more or less control of the sea, they were making good progress on the land. So really, the Japs were put on the defensive rather than the offensive,

and that was a good point in our favour and we were lucky.

Well, when we did take that convoy of barges at the end of the war and we escorted them from Finschhafen across to Arawe and up the east coast of East Britain and there were terrific seas running then, sometimes

if we couldn’t make landfall by night, which you couldn’t do from Finschhafen to Arawe, it meant you had to sail right through the night. The thing was in the darkness you could easily, the convoy could easily fall apart, because there weren’t lights allowed or things like that. The limitations were they couldn’t cook or, if they wanted to eat

anything while they were travelling, it had to be tinned food or something like that which wasn’t obviously very good, or the old army dog biscuits or that sort of stuff. You lived on hardtack. Hopefully, if you made nightfall, well, then you’d anchor by a jetty; with the boat stationed you could clean up.

The main dangers were, I would say, at that stage of the war were from the sea. The Japs had control of the air in the early days; then there was a big danger there. But we had several of our boats that had been fired on by the Japs, but if think, if I recollect right, nobody was injured. In a way it was a fairly quiet time for us.

The fighting was going on ahead of us. Coming up behind with the supplies and replacements meant that you’re not really frontline, even when we’re picking up the casualties. It was a perimeter. The fighting would be ahead of that. The perimeter was where they brought the casualties to there and whacked them on board to us. We had a pretty safe life, really.

No. The only time I knew there were dead bodies being transferred, in the campaign at Milne Bay a lot of people were killed. Particularly Australian soldiers were more or less buried on the spot where they fell. When they had resolved the Japanese landing there,

then they had I think it was the War Graves Commission, I’m not sure of the unit. They had to go round and locate those bodies and dig them up and they created a cemetery at Milne Bay for these people. The Japs, there was a big ditch dug there and I think there was eighty-something Japanese marines

buried in this ditch and they were killed at Milne Bay. The strange thing was the Japanese marines were about six foot tall, they were big men, they weren’t your little blokes that you were told to believe in. Physically they were well-built. As I said, Milne Bay and Kokoda were the first places that the Japs were stopped.

I enjoyed it. In a sense you’re your own boss. You look after the engine, you decide when it wants servicing and things like that. It's sort of like your baby. You take a lot of pride in it. You keep it clean, you tend to polish the

copper pipes and things like that, you listen for it even at night. When you’re supposed to be asleep you hear that engine going through you, you hear the throb, and if it misses a beat you wake up and want to know why. I had an interesting thing that happened. At Wewak it was the same place, it's an indication of how things can be tricky,

we had a situation where this engine, I told you about the electrical side of it, the real Heath Robinson [crazy inventor] creation. For some reason or other about four o’clock in the morning it would kick over, “brrrobb”. It was a six-cylinder engine, bigger than anything you’ve got in a car, over a hundred horsepower. The GM diesel. We’d all fly out of our bunks,

we’d go and grab our rifles and Owen gun - at 4 o'clock in the morning you couldn’t see much - and you’d run round the outside of the boat. We had this foot-wide sponson run round the outside of the boat and we’d be peering into the darkness and listening for splashing, thinking it was someone with a dinghy or things like that. We couldn’t make it out and it happened three or four mornings in a row, precisely

at the same time, four o'clock in the morning, and it just about had us dippy. We could not make out what it was about, there was no sign, there was no indication whatsoever. And finally I got the message. In the old cars they’d have a solenoid dipper switch, it was on the floor, and when you wanted to dip the headlight you put your foot on this dipper

switch, just a little button coming through the floor. The solenoid was underneath. You pressed it and that dipped your lights. It’d lift the second filament see. And then you dipped it a second time and it went back to bright. And part of this electrical thing, you’d get this twenty-four volt system that they wanted for the starter motor, they had put this solenoid

switch in between the two banks of twelve batteries. Now, what had happened, I don’t know how I managed to work it out, but during the night, the moisture [from the] steam engine or the bodies, came up and hit the canopy. At four in the morning this steam had condensed, and there was a part directly over

where this dipper switch was. The water came down onto this dipper switch, leaked inside, when there was enough water it made the connection that brought the two sets of batteries together and threw the starter motor in. The simple explanation was unscrew the thing, turn it upside down so that the base of it, which was waterproof,

which was solid metal, when the water came down it’d hit this little nipple part and it just dropped off, it couldn’t go back off, and that was the solution. But talk about panic stations! And it’s the sort of thing of thing you wouldn’t dream of. I was just lucky to work out the solution.

Yeah. Well, trial and error.

I got hold of a Japanese air-cooled engine. I think it’d been used as a generator, I think it had been used as a cylinder, and I got hold of the carburettor and everything and I was all set to fit it into our dinghy, put a shaft through our dinghy. It meant scrounging a propeller, scrounging a shaft, scrounging the bearings and that. We got the engine going all right but we still couldn’t get the parts for it.

We were going down past the Sepik River on one of our trips down and I had this engine up on top of the canopy, the solid canopy, and we got into a bit of rough stuff and I heard this “thump, thump”. I knew what it was: the engine had rolled over, I hadn’t tied it down well enough. It had rolled over, dropped onto the deck and then bounced off back into the drink and that was the finish of that episode.

We were at Alexishafen at the time that the Lolita blew up. We only heard that more or less by word of mouth. I don’t think on our radio we could really get news; our radio was simply for communication between

the boat and our headquarters as regards us being detailed where we were to go, what time we were expected there, what the weather reports were and the codes for the day, what flags you had to fly. Our main information was through the navy people, talking with the navy people at Alexishafen.

Alexishafen was a big Roman Catholic mission, it was about eighteen mile from Madang. And there’s a string of islands alongside Madang, which is a very pretty area, and Alexishafen had this boatyard and slipway there, they did pretty well there, and the navy took it over during the war years. Our

information would have come through the navy characters there, having a bit of a yarn with them. The trouble with a lot of information that was bandied around, it took a long time to work out which was the truth and which wasn’t. Some things were over-exaggerated and you only got the minor detail. You weren’t fully knowledgeable about what was going on. You knew the war was ended, right.

The atomic bomb, yes, you know vague details of it, that the Mitchell bombers had carried this across. Apart from that, little or nothing.

Well, we got the option when we got back to Lae from our last trip up to Rabaul, we got

the option of going over to Japan with the occupation forces, still in our army unit as Water Transport, or of getting discharged at Lae and taking a job at Civil Administration and working for them, and

that way you got out of the army short of doing the twelve months thereafter. I opted to go with Civil Administration to go as a motor mechanic. Now, the interesting point is to go from narine craft to trucks and that it’s a totally different game, the gearboxes, the transmissions, the wheels and all the rest of it, and again you’re put to learning.

But anyway I took it on and I was quite happy with it. Incidentally, there’s a little episode with AM5 that I didn’t tell you and it is vital, that is coming down from Rabaul on our last trip after we’d rescued those missionaries - I use the term “rescue” as a wide term. We broke down during the night off Gasmata.

Now, Gasmata is, New Britain is banana-shaped and it's the bottom section of there. It’s about probably about a couple of hundred miles off Arawa. We broke down at night-time. We had engine power, but no propulsion from the propeller. We thought at the time that the shaft had broken. There’s very little, with a 12-volt lighting system, there’s little light

to see what’s going on. It wasn’t dark night, it was getting towards sunset. We weren’t that far from the shore, so what we did, we launched the dinghy and a couple of us got in the dinghy and we put a rope on this sixty-two-foot boat and we tried to pull it in to the shore where we could get a bit of anchorage. The sea was running too heavy so we couldn’t do any good there,

so we had to be prepared to sit out the night. Now, the big trouble was that just off that area was a big reef that was standing seven miles offshore and you could hear the breakers on it, and we didn’t know if we were going to be washed up on it or not. We had absolutely no power whatsoever. What it turned out, when I was able to have a look - I did have a look that afternoon while it was still light - for some reason or other -

I’d seen it done before - but in the gearbox you had forward, reverse and neutral, those were the only gears you had. But in the gearbox, for some reason or other - they had a flange coupling; instead of having the coupling inside the box the flange was inside - for some reason or other, whether we’d hit something with the propeller I don’t know, but we’d sheared off every one of the bolts holding that coupling

together. There was no way, first of all we didn’t have the bolts to replace it, we had no way of taking the pieces out and they’d probably gone to the bottom of the gearbox anyway, so we were at a point where we could do nothing. We got a radio message out where the radio came in good. They sent a Fairmile out from Finschhafen. It came and picked us about eight o'clock the next morning.

It must have left that night after us. It came and picked us up the next morning. They were running on one engine at about half revs. It was the fastest the old girl ever went! We were tearing through the water at about ten knots. That was a very ticklish moment. That offshore reef, anything could have happened. A wooden hull would break up quickly on coral. So I nearly forgot about that incident.

That’s a strange thing. As they were bringing, they were using ex-army personnel. We took over what was the Catholic mission area at Lae. That had been a transport depot and it had a shed, some concrete floors

and everything up like that, up for servicing their vehicles, and they had ramps. I got my induction into jeeps and Chev trucks and Blitz wagons, et cetera. We decided, I remember it was Easter 1946 and we decided we’d go up to Wau, up the Wau Road. We went up with a line of trucks, et cetera.

On the way back, after we’d spent the Easter there, one of our trucks broke down. So there was an administration truck that had been dumped on the side of the road and we thought, “If we can get that going we’ll take that back to Lae, and it's their property, we’ll just bring it back for them,” and we left the other one there.

A mate of mine, Snow, he was driving it and we were coming down a very steep face and it was known as Zennag and he was driving. My mate was a really mad driver. Keith, he was the third person, he was already down the bottom and I think it was the Snake River that went along the bottom.

The army had put in a cable-type bridge with timbers across it and you had to drive across that bridge and it swayed and swung and did everything else. It had a steep dip up the other side. It was already down the other side. And we got to the first bend and Snow says to me, “We’re going over the side,” and I said, “Oh, pigs.” And they looked and, sure enough, what had happened, he’d gone to use the brakes

as we were coming down, and what we didn’t know was either there was no oil in the master cylinder or the return spring had gone on the foot pedal and the foot pedal wouldn’t come back up, I’m not sure which it was. So I thought, “Well, I’ve got to bail out.” And in those old Blitz wagons [army vehicles] the engine cowling was sitting between the two seats, because you had a sheer front on them. My leg got jammed and I thought, “I can’t go without my foot,”

see, so I reached round and grabbed my foot and I’d thrown myself out the side and I was scratching gravel, and I get up in time - and this is how steep it was - I got up in time to see the truck roll the last few feet and then drop out of sight. There must have been another fifty foot drop below that and I thought, “Oh, cripes.” And Snow was on the outside, see, and I thought, “Oh cripes, he’s had it,” and I’m standing there watching.

About thirty or forty feet below me this figure gets up out of what they call kunai grass, a grass that’s three or four foot tall or even taller, and anyway he staggers up and he’s looking a bit battered so I go down and help him up to the top. I think he had broken ribs or something and he had a big tear under his ear, but he jumped out just as the truck started to roll.

Anyway I got him up the top and by that time the mate who was down the bottom who saw the truck lob down there and he came belting back up. We got him into that truck and we went back up to Mumi, which was a first aid station where the natives were treated, the surrounding natives. If they were crook they were flown down to Lae or transported. Anyway, we went in to them

and they gave him some painkillers, and there wasn’t a lot there. He didn’t have, when I say he was injured, it wasn’t life threatening. The ambulance said, “Well, you can take the ambulance back if you like, but you’ll have to put the carburettor on it.” They’d taken the carburettor off. It was a Chev ambulance. So I had to whack the carburettor on. We didn’t have time to tune her up; that was it.

Throw him into the ambulance and hotfoot it down to Lae. When we get to Labu, take him across by barge, we put the ambulance on the barge, take him across to the mainland again where the administration was and then up the hill where the hospital was, so we got out of that little adventure fairly well. The funny part was, old Snow was a very slow mover. He was

whingeing about being in hospital: “How long am I going to be here? “And we’d go in to visit him and we’d say to him,” Look, you always wanted a good bludge, you got a hospital, now what are you going crook about?” So that was the way that went.

It was hard. I took a job with Shell company. I had a couple of jobs. The job I ended up with, with Shell company, I went

and sat for a diesel test. There was a Kingsford Smith Diesel College in Sydney back round where the markets were. I got his diesel ticket, which allowed you to drive mining equipment, winches and things like that. So I got a job with Shell and we were pumping crude oil on the Parramatta Jetty up

to the Clyde Refinery which had just recently been in the news. We used to pump it through this six-inch pipeline, a distance of about a mile and a half you had to pump it. Then you back-loaded, not that particular tank, you back-loaded it on this Parramatta Jetty, back-loaded furnace oil, which a lot of the tankers used for their a heavy engines, et cetera,

in turbines. We also back-loaded, they had two lighters capable of carrying twenty-six thousand gallons each of seventy-octane petrol, which is a very low grade when you think of it today, and it was shift work. But it was good. It paid good. After you’d do the night shift, you’d come off Friday morning,

you didn’t have to front up until Monday when you were on the day shift. And they paid good wages.

I found it hard, because you’d been used to military discipline. You’d been used to things being done for you, particularly as regards your clothing, your medical. If you were crook you just went up to the RAP [regimental aid post] and they gave you some

tablets or something. They sort of looked after you. All you did was go out and did the day’s duties, whatever they were, whether they were guard duty or what. But all that was taken care of. The paperwork, you didn’t pay tax or anything like that, you had none of that sort of stuff. I suppose in a way it's a strange thing to relate: because you didn’t have, in your army life,

relatives to see or things like that, you were sort segregated from the community, once you got back into the community you had to watch your Ps and Qs [behaviour] and your manners wherever you went; none of this “Pass the bloody butter,” sort of thing at the table. It was quite hard; and yet in a way, because of Burnside, I’d always been schooled into taking orders and doing

as you’re told and being part of a community body. Civilian life seemed to be a different cup of tea. Being on shift work I suppose got me out of it. I took a holiday from Shell and I was over in Tasmania and I was doing a bus trip from Hobart to

Deloraine, I think it was, or Launceston. Anyway I did this bus trip and the coach driver was telling me about a job going up in New Guinea. It was with an oil company. I thought, “This sounds like my cup of tea.” So I went and footed to Collins Street Melbourne and they said, “You know about New Guinea?” I told them about my army experience and they said, “You’re just the bloke we wanted,” because

[they wanted] people who had knowledge of handling natives et cetera and were used to, or knew what to expect up there. So they took me on and I got a job as rig engineer on the drilling rig. I was with them for twelve years. And they looked after you. They paid good wages, they looked after your body and so on. The only thing was it was a combination of British Petroleum and

Standard Vacuum Oil. They demanded their pound of flesh. They paid good wages. If you couldn’t front up the next morning and you were on the grog or things like that, you were out. If you couldn’t do your job you were out. They would take you to any part of the world, family and all. You got good conditions, you were looked after, any medical stuff you got. You got good holiday pay. You came down at the end of two years

you had three months’ holiday all paid for. As I say, I stopped with them for twelve years, so that speaks for itself.

Well, that was another strange event. The oil company exploration was mainly in the Papuan, Gulf of Papua. Old GAV, Stanley, one of the geologists I knew really well, he insisted that

they were working in the wrong area. Well, time proved that he was right because the oil, strangely enough, was found up in the mountains; it was not found down in the gulf country where all the gas hoes (gas hoes UNCLEAR) were . It was in commercial quantities which they are using today. So when I finished up with them, they retrenched - they were spending five million pound a year on oil exploration up there and the

source of money started to dry up, so they retrenched a lot of their staff and I was one of them. I immediately got a job with the Bureau of Mineral Resources, so I ended up out at Alice Springs on seismic work, drilling with portable drilling rigs which would go down to a thousand feet. You’re loading dynamite and all this stuff on them. You’re living in tents and you’re out

there for nine months of the year. In the first year we were from Alice Springs into South Australia across the Giles, Warburton Mission. That was hard country. We were going 140 miles for water, even drinking beer on the job one day. Yes, I saw more of Australia by being with the seismic, Bureau of Mineral Resources, than

ever I saw in my previous life. And I got paid for it. It's amazing.

Well, for a start it made me more knowledgeable about what was going on. It made me realise what I could achieve if I was

prepared to work for it. It also taught me the value of mateship, sticking by one another, but it also taught me a lot about human nature: how to pick the people you could trust and how to be wary of those that you were unsure of. It was a learning experience. I’d say I took full advantage of it.

Every day brought up a new situation. You had to learn how to handle it. No matter where you are, there’s always somebody who gets under your skin. You've got to learn how to handle it without having an actual confrontation. It was good. And certainly the tropics and natives et cetera, the terrain, learning survival stuff. It’s harder to survive in the Australian bush

than what it is in the New Guinea area because in the New Guinea area, there are a lot of plants and things if you’re knowledgeable you can survive on them. Australia has very little in that line unless you’re prepared to hunt goannas and God knows what.

Yes, it is.

I look at it this way: it's important too show the younger generation what they owe to those who have passed on, those that have given their lives, the value of mateship, but also the value of having an initiative and being able to sort things out for yourself.

Anzac day is something I think that we should be proud of, particularly for the sake of the families who have lost people in it. It's interesting to note particularly amongst young people, each year you see more of the young people taking note of it. A few years ago I remember Armistice Day - what do they call it now, they’ve

got another name for it? Remembrance Day. In Harvey Bay here you’d be lucky if there were thirty people congregated. Now the whole town turns out, so it does mean something.

Oh God, that’s a good question. Well, I’d like to thank you for your courtesy,

consideration, the way you handled all this. I felt that it’s been very nice, being able to talk normally, naturally. I haven’t had to put on any airs and graces and I haven’t had to try and make myself out to be a hero, which I think is very important. You’re just a run-of-the-mill and you’ve had these experiences, and I think to myself, “Well, why the hell have they happened to me?” But then again, there’s others who’ve had more

disastrous experiences. I’m just pleased I’m not one of them. Thank you very much.