Australians at War Film Archive

Yes.

I see, well in brief. Well I s’pose I should start off saying where I was born.

Well I was born in Queensland, I’m a banana bender.

It’s only a secret given to the eldest son you know about bending bananas. But however, in 1918, 22nd of March 1918 and I did my schooling there, finished up at the Toowoomba Grammar and then I went out to work for a short time. I had to leave school because of the Depression and I’d already had a scholarship

which had to go by the board and it so happens that war was in the offing and in 1938 I started attending parades of the 11th Light Horse Regiment, what was known as the Militia in those days now called the Army Reserve. I see they’re even going to have an Army Reserve Day, I saw it on TV last night. And

I spent the next few years in and out of camps. They started off with monthly camps and then three monthly camps and then I went on to full time duties in 1941 and in 1942 I joined the AIF [Australian Imperial Force]. And still in Australia of course, gradually moved north

with eventually the 3rd Armoured Division because they’d done away with the Light Horse, out of date, and we became armoured. And whilst there I attended quite a number of courses and one of them happened to be a photographic interpretation, aerial photographic interpretation course which fortunately I guess I

topped and the result of that was that I was posted to the Army School of Intelligence as an instructor. And I had a couple of stints there, broken in the middle by going to up New Guinea Force in Port Moresby and the purpose of that mainly was to inspect the areas that I’d been working on, on areal photographs.

Just to see how the photographs and the areas compared. And I did a bit of instructing too while I was up there. And then I came back to Australia on to the Tablelands and joined the 9th or was transferred to the 9th Australian Division for the campaigns in Borneo. And after that was over

I’d met Clarissa at the tail end of the war. As I told you she ambushed me, which is not quite true but it makes a good story and we were married in 1946 and I was still in the, by this time, no I wasn’t I’m missing out a bit, in another 18

months I went to a course at Duntroon [Royal Military College] and joined the regular army. And from there I was posted to the military mission in Berlin and then I came home, went back to army headquarters and somewhere about nineteen… Had a couple of different postings in the army

including being GSO2 [General Staff Officer] in charge of intelligence in Victoria and then I followed my Director of Military Intelligence into ASIO [Australian Security Intelligence Organisation]. He’d been posted as Head of ASIO and I was sent to Berlin. My job there was to

primarily assist the Immigration Department on checking the large numbers of post-war refugees who had swarmed westward from Russia and Poland and other places where they’d been at the mercy of the Germans and the Russians and, latterly the Russians and they flocked to West Germany. The Australian Government of the day,

under the Immigration Minister Calwell, had signed up with the International Refugee Organisation for Australia to take some hundreds of thousands at least, of migrants. And we were very busy doing that for some years. That was in nineteen, let me think,

1949 and in 1953 I came home again. And in the course of things I had a number of overseas postings interspersed with postings in Australia. First of all having returned from Berlin my next posting was to be Regional Director of ASIO in

Port Moresby and I had the whole area to supervise. At that time the Indonesians were cutting up rough and sending troops across the border. They’d acquired by that time the western part of Papua New Guinea which they called West Irian and

we were afraid I suppose that they would have their eyes on Australia, the Australian territory. Later on after a stint back in Australia I was sent to Yugoslavia, to Belgrade and again following a couple of years, three years over there I did another stint back in Australia and my next posting

I think was to the High Commission in London. And that’s where I finished up on the overseas side of things, totalling altogether with army service about twelve years of overseas employment. Mainly service I s’pose on behalf of the Commonwealth and

Clarissa was with me of course on all of those overseas postings, we had diplomatic status and we found them terribly interesting. Some of them were challenging, especially the Yugoslavian one which was still very much a communist country. And in 1982, 22nd of March

I nominally retired but I was asked to stay on in a part time capacity writing training manuals and things of that nature which I did until, I’m sorry I said ’82 I meant ’78. But I then went on for another five years to ’82

and in December 1982 we arrived in Noosa and since then we’ve lived in Sunrise Beach and Noosa Waters and now in Villa Number 30, here. That’s a synopsis if you wish.

Well I’ve written the voluminous paper that you’ve seen there, 420 pages of it as my wife has,

although hers is not quite as lengthy. We have written our stories basically for our descendants. More particularly for our daughters and their children and their children’s children because we’ve got great-grandchildren now, only two: one boy and one girl, but however we might have more because we’ve just had a couple more marriages of grandchildren.

That caused me in my story to go into some depth only back a generation really, to form a basis for my life story because unless I had something to tie it to, there was no real beginning and so I’ve done that. And so I’ve written it at some length. When I was…

Yes Toowoomba. When I was about six I suppose, my mother left us. My sister who was four and myself and went off. From her photographs and what I remember she was

very, very, well quite beautiful but unfortunately a bit of a butterfly. And my sister and I were then brought up together with my father’s presence, by his mother, my grandmother on his side. And I can’t speak

more highly of her than of anybody, she was a remarkable woman. She was of German descent, Prussian descent, her parents were born in Prussia and she was a complete housewife. There was nothing she couldn’t do, she could make soap and her household equipment which she wasn’t using of course when I was a boy but was down in the shed, included a lot of old

things like cooling safes. Water running down the side of a mesh enclosure in a form of early refrigeration if you like. Butter coolers and early types of stoves, camp ovens and things of that nature. My grandfather at that time was a stonemason,

well he was always a stone mason I think and he wasn’t always at home, so I had a lot to do with my grandmother. And I, being a curious child which I s’pose most children are, I asked her a great number of questions about what I considered I s’pose to be her unusual background and I learned from her something about

foreign countries particularly Germany and Prussia. She taught me to or I learned from her how to count in German and how to say the alphabet and it fed my curiosity. And I started asking questions about relatives and that got me interested in an early, as far as I was concerned a form of genealogy. I was never able to

pursue it greatly because in those days, pre-war this was, I left school before the war broke out. The situation was where very few people had been interstate, not like today I mean all of my grandchildren have spent time in Europe and they wander here and there. Financial circumstances are much

different. We went through a very bad period family wise at the time of the Depression which I may have mentioned earlier, led me to be taken away from school and sent out to work because of the pressure of paying for two school fees. Anyhow the army helped me, without their knowledge in many ways because when I was posted

interstate to attend army schools and I went to quite a lot of them, I was able to look up relatives that I would otherwise never have, I wouldn’t have been able to do. And I always had a piece of paper somewhere, or the back of an old envelope and I’d jot down things and that’s formed the basis of those 420 pages which you’ve seen, because eventually I collected all the old envelopes and the old

scraps of paper and tried, used them as an aide memoire for putting together a coherent chronological story. And I realised later on in life and Clarissa agreed, she was the same, that apart from births, deaths and marriage certificates which are the bare bones,

one doesn’t know very much about one’s forebears. In one line I can go back to about 1700s, sixteen hundred and something, but I don’t know whether they had red hair and blue eyes or what they did. The only ones I got, can put my finger on was that somewhere in the 1700s I had five innkeepers in a row in the family.

All in Prussia.

I didn’t meet my mother again until I was in the army. My sister before me, had left Toowoomba and joined up with the American forces in Brisbane. She was working in American army headquarters and my mother was then

living with her second husband and her family of five children, half brothers and sisters of mine and hers and she contacted my mother. And in due course when I was on leave at one stage I joined her and went to meet my mother. And she was, I didn’t wish to have a bun-fight or anything of that nature, and I

was normally polite but I must say that all my life I’ve never really felt a strong tie to her because I couldn’t forget that she walked out on us and left us. Furthermore she was, as I said before she was a butterfly. When one was present you would’ve thought the sun shone out of us, but thereafter one didn’t get a letter, we never got anything for our,

a letter or message for our birthdays or same thing with our grandchildren – our children which were her grandchildren and so on. Out of sight out of mind. I can’t really give you much detail either about her parentage. I’ve got photographs of them and I know where they lived, they lived in Gympie. According to family

folk law he had a juice mill which is a term that many people wouldn’t know these days, the juice in fact being juice out of sugar cane and that goes to making rum. And in the early times they didn’t make sugar here in Australia, they shipped away the juice. Where probably in the United Kingdom it was made into rum, maybe they made some here

but I never met him. He died in 1915, three years before I was born. I have met my, his wife, my mother’s mother, she lived with the Staffords. Of course Bill Stafford who I mentioned at Coolangatta, his mother is my wife’s sister and she took in her mother

and I frequently met her there during visits.

Well I wish I could be more fulsome about it but I was, I think it would be fair to say

I was very guarded but I took pains to be polite. But I couldn’t feel a need to go and give her a hug if you can understand. I’ve, I s’pose not deliberately but I’ve glossed over the fact that she deserted us, but she ran away into the arms of another man

and I had the, when my father died together with my sister we had the job of going through his possessions and I found the ‘decree nisi’ I think that is the one, the final one, the papers that had come from the divorce. In those days of course divorces were not two a penny like they are today, it was a little bit of a family

disgrace. Mildly, very mildly but not many people had divorces. But I saw the account that had been presented in court about her behaviour and that I s’pose is something that never left me. I burned it actually because, many years

later but I burned it because my children, our children were growing up and I didn’t want to have them reading it, I saw no need.

No I didn’t ever, never but I felt absolutely and completely at home with my grandmother.

She had a, and grandfather had a small farm, I suppose you’d call it that on the outskirts of Toowoomba and I remember we, they had an orchard that had fifty eight fruit trees because at some time in my youth I counted them all and I could’ve told you exactly how many loquat trees we had and how many peach trees we had and what variety

of peaches there were, and apricots and so on. They both, grandfather and grandmother had green fingers. They could grow anything at all and it was my job and my sister’s job when we were older to help clean up the orchard to get rid of the fallen fruit every year which I didn’t like because it meant we

had to get up about five o’clock and scrape up all these rotting fruit and put them away to be disposed of and then go to school. And of course there were no school buses then, one had to walk. Many years later I was astonished to find how short the distance was between where we lived and school, it seemed a long way when we were

children and it was very interesting. One got to know the names of streets which you don’t, en route, which you don’t today you drive from ‘A’ to ‘B’ and what happens in the medium it’s a street but you don’t necessarily know what the name is. But we knew every paddock, every street, some of the people in some of the houses that we’d see day after day going to school in the morning and coming home in the evening. Sometimes we’d stop with a bunch of boys and play cricket

on a vacant allotment, climb a few trees and go bird nesting, but they don’t today. My uncle left me a beautiful cabinet which he’d made, divided into little segments with padding in each and carefully inscribed names of the birds who’d laid the eggs which he had put in each of the little parts.

In those days too, I’m digressing I suppose, but in those days too a lot of children, a lot of families had birds, kept birds in an aviary. And you don’t see the birds about now days, you know there were Double Bars and varieties of Finches and one knew all of them. And

occasionally I see one or two around the garden or have done but since I’ve been in this villa we’ve got nice gardens here but apart from crows and magpies, I don’t think I’ve seen any birds. So that’s that bit I think. We’ve…

At school? Well my first taste of school was to be sent to a convent, as my mother was Roman Catholic. She wasn’t really a practising one I don’t think but however old habits die hard and she sent me off to a convent. But basically we were Anglican or

Church of England as it was called then and I, my first and only day at the convent wasn’t very pleasant for me because the nun in charge had all the nuns in the school in a room when I came in. I was first of all seated at the back of the class and then I was pulled out and became the object of the

gaze of everybody in the room and put up on the dais and told to recite the Lord’s Prayer. And I’m not ashamed of it but I’ll tell you truly but I didn’t have the faintest idea what the Lord’s Prayer was. As to reciting it, that was completely out of the question so I hung my head and I have little doubt that, although I can’t

remember being pointed out but the whole name of the game was to show the class what dreadful peoples non-Catholics were. I’m sorry to introduce that, especially if I’m talking to anybody who happens to have Catholic ancestors, or rather Irish ancestry but I

didn’t go back again. I made that quite clear when I came home and when my father came home that night, and so the next day I was enrolled at the Toowoomba State School, South State School where I stayed until scholarship year and then I went to the East State School in Toowoomba and

from there I gained my scholarship. Then I went to Toowoomba Grammar on a Queensland University State Scholarship, paid of course, or augmented by fees and passed in nine subjects in my junior. I’d done very well at school,

I’d topped the boys in East State School in the scholarship results but I didn’t work quite as hard when I was at Grammar because I had a lot more freedom. It depended on my I suppose and by that time I had a pushbike and we used to race around a bit and I collected stamps and used to go to other boys places and swap stamps and do all sorts of things so

I just depended on my memory, which was a reasonable memory I think, still is possibly I hope. And so I passed in nine subjects but not as well as I should’ve but however I gained another scholarship to go on to university level or tertiary level to become qualified to go to tertiary level, I should’ve said.

And so about that time, it was of course right in the middle of the Depression, the Great Depression and as it happened I was abruptly just one day pulled out of school. Another little anecdote about that time that might be interesting is that my good form master, C.W.A. Scott was his name,

picked me out of the form to send me down to the Union Bank. It doesn’t exist under that name now, it’s been taken over by the Commercial Bank of Sydney, or the Commercial Bank and the name has become lost. But I was interviewed there for a job and as far as I’m aware, I have every belief that I was suitable but then a couple of days later my

Dad told me that he was very sorry but I couldn’t go to work at the bank because they wanted a surety, a deposit of 500 pounds which was a lot of money in those days and that was part of the employment requirements. So that was that. Years ago, here in Noosa, Clarissa and I happened to go

to an afternoon tea party and we got talking with other people and sitting around discussing things. I happened to talk to a chap a little younger than I am who came from the Darling Downs and that was of mutual interest of course and just outside of Toowoomba he was born and worked and when I mentioned this, or he told me I think that he’d

worked for the Union Bank and I said, “Well that’s funny, I was interviewed once by the Union Bank,” and the discussion led from one aspect to another and I mentioned the 500 pounds deposit and he said, “Oh I can verify that,” he said, “that’s exactly the amount of money that my parents, who were farmers had to pay to get me a job at the Union Bank.” And I was pleased about that because,

in a small way because although I’d recounted it and I still remember it a lot of people might find that hard to believe. But that was that.

He was a self employed hair dresser and one of the earliest ladies hairdressers in Toowoomba, if not

the earliest. In those times up until the ’30s, post war, World War 1 years, we went through the flapper age and other ages and women had long hair and it was quite a blow to many of them to have to cut off, young ladies in their 20s,

18, 19, 20 whatever, to have to cut off their coils of beautiful long hair. And my wife for example, I’ve got a picture of her at 15 and she had long, lustrous, dark curls which went down to her waist and it’s a beautiful picture. And the fashion I s’pose spread from America,

it probably was much less of a chore not to have to comb these tresses out every night and comb them again and put them up, put your hair up in the morning but however the two styles they had then were shingle and the bob. They were slightly different but it meant cutting off your hair

and most of the young ladies, young women followed suit, it was the fashion. That was later succeeded by the introduction of those space helmet things that women put on when they go to have their hair curled or whatever, that followed. And this was again in the Depression time and I remember my father couldn’t afford to

equip his salon with all this new electrical equipment and from that day onwards he went from being fairly, relatively wealthy, he was earning I remember quite clearly 20 pounds a week and it’ll give you some idea of the values because in a fairly big city like Toowoomba,

a bank manager of one of the big four banks for example, used to get ten pounds a week. So 20 pounds was very well paid but he went slowly backwards and he lost his wife and my grandmother then died in 1941, some years later and he never ever, he died

a lonely man I think. But I believe still loving my mother because amongst his possessions when we were cleaning up I found some old letters which he’d kept. I can understand that even though she’d been faithless. And that’s basically

a precise if you like of my school days.

No he didn’t. I only remember him having one lady friend and that was after I was married in 1946. We were married on the 6th of May,

if Clarissa was here, which she’s in the other room I might be tempted to ask her what the date is because I, or was because I put on a bit of a play always and pretend that I don’t remember. One awful year I forgot, I really did forget and I didn’t buy a present for our anniversary. Oh no I’m sorry I’m getting mixed up, I’m ahead of myself,

I didn’t forget, I bought a present but I didn’t give it to her as is my habit, early in the morning when we first woke up or at breakfast. I kept it quiet and we went through lunchtime and I don’t remember whether I came home for lunch or whatever but we ended up in the evening time and after dinner I gave her the present and I wasn’t at all popular.

No, none what so ever. Nobody ever mentioned it to me, not, neither was I aware of it by look or deed. My father and his picture’s in

that thing-o, over there on the table and the heap of paper and my mother’s picture is there too. I put them both together in the memoirs and he was quite a handsome man and he was divorced, in other words single and he was dealing with solely with women,

and I don’t doubt that he would’ve, a number of women would’ve been attracted to him and he also, but I didn’t know of any lady friends until as I said later, after I was married and he introduced us in Brisbane, to a lady who lived there. She was a widow and they went out together for some years,

but he never remarried and I do believe he died a lonely man.

Yeah, that’s fine.

Well yes, because my grandmother, probably came out

or her parents may have come to Australia due to the interminable wars and also religious persecution. A lot of Germans came to Australia in those days including of course the best known of them, the people in the Barossa in South Australia where they grew wine. But they did on the Darling Downs too in those early times. I know because

opposite our house, my grandmother’s house, there was a hewn stone, sandstone container, a big one possibly eight feet long and about four feet wide with a bunghole one end in the bottom where I believe the grapes were trodden. And it was there

for many years, the walls were all of, as I say it had been hewn from a big block, were all of four inches thick and it would’ve been a tremendous job to get it away and take it away but it was in the corner of a big area of paddock opposite the house. And we children used to sit in it and play in it but years and many years later, after the war I went back to the old house which was still there

and of course the whole area is now urbanised. In fact not long ago I read in the weekend paper, although I was aware of it to some degree, I read figures and statistics about the fact that that area of Toowoomba now, which had been a farm-let when my grandfather built it, has become

the most expensive area of Toowoomba almost. Well it was claimed to be the most expensive, an area where built what today, or lived what today is called acreage, lived in acreage or on acreage.

Well yes, I’m sorry.

No I went to the Church of England. My father was brought up as Church of England so I was baptised Church of England and christened Church of England, well that’s the same thing isn’t it. And

confirmed Church of England by Archbishop Halse, H A L S E and Halse Lodge here in Noosa, named after him. You know Halse Lodge? It’s down near the end of Hastings Street.

Yes, Clarissa was Church of England and so we’ve been Church of England. I was brought up Church of England. But

in those days there was much more feeling in the populous generally about religion. It doesn’t exist today I’m glad to say, it never affected me apart from what I mentioned to you, in fact I hesitated a little as to whether I should talk about it, I don’t wish to offend anybody but

some of the children used to go home in the afternoon from school on one side of the street and the catholic children would be on the other and they’d pick up what we called a goolie or a gibber or a stone, and throw stones at one another. That was quite common back in the late ’20s and early ’30s, pre-war.

But you don’t see it today. We had a big Irish populace here, we still have a lot of people of Irish ancestry but fortunately they don’t, haven’t brought, carried those feelings through into the year 2000.

That’s right. Well I can say this that I, one of my first girlfriends in Toowoomba was a lovely girl and I still respect her and have feelings for her. Not in any way feeling guilty about it because she’s well married

and I haven’t seen her probably for 50 or 60 years but I remember, and she was a good catholic and her two sisters were good Catholics and I used to go with them quite often in their father’s car to catholic dances and balls around the Darling Downs for some two or three years before the war. And I was hesitant, I wasn’t in any position to get married anyhow,

had no money and but I used to just think occasionally when I wasn’t dancing and being light hearted that if I didn’t watch myself I’d end up having to change my religion and become a catholic or something. And there was still sufficiently remaining

my feeling that, a feeling which was part of the era that that was a big step. But my very best schoolboy friend that I took to school, the very first day went to school, I used to pass his house and his mother came down the stairs off the front veranda one day and asked me, “Little boy, do you go to the South State School?” And I said, “Yes.” She said, “Would you mind taking my little boy with you?” So

we were schoolboy friends until he died, and later of course until he died a few years ago. And he changed his religion and I was best man for him, to be. And I got leave from the army when I was on the Tablelands and went out to Charters Towers where he was working in the Public Works Department, he wanted to join the air force but he had something wrong with his heart

and he wasn’t accepted. And when I got there I found that I wasn’t to be best man because the priest the night before told me he would sooner have a non-Anglican as a, the best man. And one of our friends, we used to play tennis all together, was the groomsman and the groomsman was promoted to best man and

I became a groomsman. And that was in nineteen, about 1943.

Well yes that’s right.

Well, here we go, Pride of Erin. That’ll get a flicker of interest over there. My grandmother used to talk about the lances, where they stand in two different lines and walk backwards and forwards but we danced in a fashion which you

see in films still. We clasped the girl with the left hand, on the waist and no, right hand on the waist and left hand out and we danced together. And now days they go wandering around the room and every 20 or 30 seconds they come back again.

Yes I liked dancing, I was a good waltzer.

My wife will tell you that. Yes I liked waltzing and I liked dancing. We danced the Fox Trot and Tango and Pride of Erin, not Pride of Erin, what was the one? Name just escapes me. Escapes me, no I didn’t dance the Pride of Erin. A dance

that I’m trying to think of is the one where you walk around and change partners.

And every successive time when you come back again you have a different, the girls have moved one way and the boys have moved the other and you have a different partner.

But it used to be good and in those times 99.9%

of the boys had dinner jackets and a few had tails. Particularly out in the country. The country folk used to wear tails.

Well these were balls. Balls we used to go to, you know where you’d have debutantes and things like that. They were a regular thing and during the season

early part of winter probably, when it wasn’t too hot, there’d be balls on somewhere every night. I remember for a fortnight at the Toowoomba, sorry the Brisbane Exhibition and that the Toowoomba Grammar Ball was held in the Carlton Hotel in Brisbane on Mondays. Tuesday was the Police Ball,

and I’ve forgotten what Wednesday, Thursday, Friday was but they all had their place and you weren’t allowed of course by law to have alcoholic liquor but you were allowed to have suitcases. So if you took in a suitcase to the, somebody’d take in a suitcase, that was all right. So we drank

Gin Slings and all sorts of things.

Well how it’s made I couldn’t tell you dear, I’ve got a recipe somewhere in the house but it was of course largely gin, but it would’ve had something sweet in it as well I think.

Oh yes. And you’d always buy, pay for your partner. Always.

And you’d buy a whatever you call it, a little orchid or something to put on the lass’s dress.

Corsage that’s right. And it was, you didn’t have much left over if you, at that age that time.

Today of course a lot of girls seem to offer to pay their way. I’ve seen that actually with my girls. I went out once with both the girls and a couple of young men, I can’t remember who they were and the girls were going to pay. And I spoke in front of the theatre at the front of the ticket box

and I said, “C’mon boys, come on you don’t do that. You pay.” And that was that. But now days I think, I lived in the wrong age.

Yes, excellent. Food, we bought

the cheapest cuts. She was as I mentioned earlier she was a good housewife, very good. She used to say to me sometimes when I was a little fellow, that her name was Wilhelmina, was her Christian name and she’d say that her friends would, with an embarrassed giggle sometimes, she’d say that they, friends used to say, “If you go to Milla’s house, you could

eat your dinner off the floor,” because it was so clean you see. She was such a good housewife. But however she cooked anything and everything. Used to make drinks of cordial every year and she preserved fruit out of the orchard I mentioned. We always had plentiful supply of preserved fruit. Made jam every year.

Made brawn, you know what brawn is? It’s a compressed form of meat and jelly, it comes out like a loaf and you could cut slices off of it.

It’d be boiled I think. Like what?

No it’s not like a sausage at all, no it was,

it had little lumps of meat in it which obviously had been precooked, but they were all held together by the jelly out of the meat. It’s called BRAWN - brawn. But however, we used to go, my sister and I sometimes together, sometimes separately down to the local butcher. His name was Venaglia I remember.

And if we were buying saveloys which we used to, they were a penny each, we’d always get 13 instead of 12, butchers dozen. Bakers had a bakers dozen too, if you bought buns you’d get 13 instead of 12. If you went to the corner shop the children would be given a little white packet, you know where they turn the corners and do

twist it like that and full of little sweets.

Yes lollies that you, again I can’t remember the names of but they, you had to suck them. If you bit them they’d crack and you’d run the risk of breaking a tooth, so you’d have to suck them. ‘All Day Suckers’ or something like that.

That’ll do anyhow.

We used to get, my sister and I about sixpence, and as we got older about two shillings. Two shillings was pretty rich to get. In those times the basic wage was about three pounds. When I got my first made to measure suit it was three pound

ten with a waistcoat and an extra pair of trousers, for three pounds ten and that was a week’s wages. We got the, my grandmother was a bit of a magician as a cook, we never went hungry, not at all in the Depression but we had topside steak

instead of rump and sirloin and things like that, beef steak and she’d, as I said she was a bit of a magician. We never went hungry. We had a garden of course full of vegetables, lettuce. I used to often eat a lettuce, just put it under the tap when I came home from school and crunch it up and eat it. Shallots which were small

onion type things, and we had fruit trees.

Yes. She died on Australia Day this year in Melbourne. And I’m sorry, in Sydney. She has lived in Melbourne. Yes and I’m expecting her son

up to see us sometime around about now. She had an unfortunate marriage, a very rich man he became, her husband but he was a cruel husband. I was always afraid that she might get hurt.

And I was inclined at times to become physical with him but his son used to say to me, “Don’t you do that Uncle Howard, because he’ll only take it out on Mum after you’ve gone.” But he became a millionaire and she lived in Bellevue Hill for the last 20 years of her life

in Sydney, which is a quite salubrious area. And when she died the unit went for over a million dollars.

That’s right, she was a beautiful girl too. Kieran will see in what he’s reading, he’ll see two photographs of my sister and she was a dazzler.

Betty. Betty Wilma Clare. She had her photos taken by Metro Goldwyn Mayer at one stage for advertisements for some particular picture, which were prominently displayed in the foyers of the theatre at the time. And one of them is in that heap of paper I keep talking about.

Yes more my grandmother, yeah.

Yes that’s right. And talking of our daughters, Jenny said to me, that’s the elder one, the other one is Sally, Jenny is the one that’s due here this morning she could turn up any

time, she said to me, “You know Daddy, you’re very lucky. You’re lucky that Sally and I are squares.” But they’ve been tremendous girls, most supportive. Both Clarissa and I were unwell as we still are to some degree, when we moved in here in January, came in on the 14th of January this year and the girls moved us, actually.

And Sally, there was Jenny’s eldest daughter came down from a property which she and her husband own up at Longreach, also to help. And Sally came up from Melbourne, she’s married to an ex-captain of the Royal Australian Navy, a sub-mariner who now is manager of a division of P&O [Peninsular and Oriental shipping line]. And he’s

also Chief Executive Officer, or Managing Director I think of the subsidiary of P&O that are making our patrol boats at the moment. Sixteen of these they’re going to make in Adelaide.

Yes, yes, my grandmother and yes they, we had a series of young ladies

some country girls. I remember one of them named Tibby Barwick, she’d been a, worked in a hotel. I don’t know quite what she did, might’ve been a waitress or something out in Cunnamulla and she was quite a card. Character. Used to tell me it was known by the term the three G’s, I was then about twelve or

thirteen or fourteen I suppose, the three G’s stood for girls, goats and glass bottles. That was Cunnamulla. She was with us for many years Tibby, but we had a total I would say over the years of more than a dozen, and they used to live in and my grandmother went to my father’s business and she

was receptionist and sold things in the reception area, hair things to the women folk, hair pins and lotions and things of that nature.

Yes I was a boy scout for some years, yes. Nothing momentous about that but in my, when I was 15 I was out on school holidays on the Darling Downs at Southbrook with a family named Murray. And having done physics at school,

Ross was his name and myself rigged up a form of amateur telephone from the barn to the house and I was on the house and the edge gave way and I fell down on my stomach and got up with a pain in my belly and was carted into Toowoomba and put into hospital. And I lay on my back,

on my back the whole time for three months. With a raging temperature for the first few weeks, 105, 104, 103 [Fahrenheit] every day and every night and they thought I’d die and I’d have groups of three or four doctors sometimes around the bed because they were afraid that I would get septicaemia. And of course it was

pre sulphur drugs and pre antibiotics and all of those things, but however I pulled through.

Fifteen exactly. I was fifteen on that birthday or just after. I got a bike for my birthday I remember and I wasn’t well enough to go to the break up of the school, the East State School where I would’ve learned that I topped the boy’s class. Two boy’s

classes actually and I didn’t find that out for years later. Somebody said, “You topped it.” And I said, “I didn’t know, all I knew was that was,” I had been in hospital of course, “that I’d passed.” But some mother of one of the other boys had just dropped it off, she thought I knew and so that was that. But

to talk just a little more about the Depression, my father had to, I s’pose he would’ve been called up. He had to go on the dole on what was known as on relief. And his first job was working in the Toowoomba Botanic Gardens and he worked there for some time and then the next thing was that

he was sweeping leaves in the gutters in Toowoomba. And that was a blow to me, foolish pride I suppose but most of the chaps that I’d been to school with had come from good families and I don’t know anyone else whose father had to sweep up leaves and go on the dole. I felt it very keenly.

Nobody ever said anything to me but I did, I felt it, I felt for my father too. He battled on and he was then called up into what was known as the Civil Construction Corps. Ever heard of that?

No not so. They, somebody might’ve done that, some of them may have done that but this lot were government organised of course and they were mainly in outback Queensland, Northern Territory building roads to Darwin for defence purposes. Building airfields and father became a clerk in the office which was much better

than of course having to be a road builder. And he came though that all right and years later, not all that many years ago the government decided to recognise Land Girls and other people who’d helped the war effort and he got a medal,

which again, a photograph of which is in the heap of papers and of course he was long dead by this time, he never knew it, which I’m sorry about.

He died in forty, about ’51, after I’d come back from Germany,

from the military mission.

No. Yes he was, yes he came to our wedding. There weren’t, our wedding was a very quiet affair because it was, we were still under wartime restrictions. In fact when I came back from, in ’51 from the Berlin stint, I got my car off the ship, the Strathmore

in Melbourne and went through all the customs and all those sorts of things myself mainly to save money and furthermore because it would take three days for somebody else to do it and I did it all in one day by getting taxis from one government office to another. Main Roads and registration and all those sorts of things. And the petrol had been taken out of the tank of the car before the car was shipped,

and I wanted to go, we were due to go out to Clarissa’s sister who lived in Melbourne for Sunday lunch and I had no petrol. And when I went to get petrol they said, “Where are your coupons mate?” And I didn’t have any coupons and I was absolutely staggered, this was early 1951 and I’d been of course in Germany for four years

and to think that all that time after the war that we still had coupons to get petrol, and no doubt other things, clothing possibly. They wouldn’t have all been lifted at once.

Well that’s a fact.

Oh yes. We, to some degree that was my motivation for joining the CMF [Citizen’s Military Force – militia]. I felt that I’d get in on the ground floor.

I wish I could say it was because I wanted to, I was eager to go to the war, I wasn’t really at all, but at least I thought that I might gain sufficient rank and experience to make things easier. And so that’s why I joined. And of course I had other

colleagues and friends who did much the same thing. And I can remember well the night that we heard not Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain talk about the declaration of war, that would’ve been September ’39. And sometime during that I was

then in the CMF, we were in the office of a man named Campbell Robertson who was a lifelong friend of mine and he happened to be my lieutenant at the time and the army had just started to in a mild way, mechanise the light horse and they formed a car troop. Instead of being dependant on horses, the one troop, a troop is only a small

group of about 35, 36 people, men. And our job was reconnaissance, in other words to get out ahead and get information. And that was really the beginning if you like of my half-century career in intelligence.

The which?

Yes, oh yes I think so. This is of course the AIF pre-war didn’t exist. It was only recruitment for the AIF only started after war sometime, not long after war was declared. I remember when Menzies the then Prime Minister

followed suit, because I mentioned Neville Chamberlain, well the very next day maybe the same day I can’t be quite sure, Menzies declared Australia was at war and we had the proud position of being the first in the British Commonwealth to join with the mother country. And the war, it was

quite normal and natural to us, not that wars are normal but it was quite normal for us and the general populace to feel part of a family, of the British family. And our passports were for many years, my first passport I ever got was called a British passport

and underneath just inside, it was ‘A Citizen of Australia.’ And it might be illegal, but I’ve still got it.

Well I can’t, it’s got ‘cancelled’ in it. But that’s right, well it, they then just without any announcement or anything else they just changed it and we became,

it became an Australian passport not a British passport. A British passport was highly respected throughout the world, it was much more than lesser countries if I can call them lesser countries, third world and so on. But could I just mention a little more, I’m sorry if I digress but go back to the…

The Depression.

I spoke of my father and sweeping up leaves and so on but one of my most vivid memories is of queues of men. We lived in Toowoomba and as you probably know it gets very cold up there, but that aside, it was common for people, men then and women to have overcoats. And most of these men that

were in the queues getting sustenance, a cup of soup or something of that nature, wore overcoats. Nearly every man, every man wore a hat or cap, but almost all had hats and there were these long queues of men shuffling forward to get a handout. And

wrapped up in the cold and there’s another picture again and sorry to mention it, in my memoirs and he, the situation was something that has never existed since, we’ve had recessions but nothing that was so devastating as that and it lasted for many years, the only thing

that, well not necessarily the only thing because I’m not an economist, we got out of it because of the war. That there was an upsurge of industry as a result of the war and it gradually became a thing of the past. But in Toowoomba the queue went from one street right through to the

next street, ending up at the police station. In other words a whole block and the men would’ve been four or five or six wide or deep, one behind the other. And they were all sombre and dark coated, great coats of various states of repair

and you, it would be something I hope we never see again but people wouldn’t believe it unless they’ve seen it.

Well most people I suppose, I don’t recall many

comments from my elders or from the general populous, that is the people whom we associated with. I could say however that I think my grandmother’s upbringing or her parents upbringing had rubbed off on her sufficiently that, assuming that the interminable wars

during the Napoleonic times and before that which had criss-crossed Europe were one of the reasons why her family upped-sticks and came to Australia. She wasn’t keen on my joining the service at all, not a bit. And however she, although I was well aware of that she didn’t even criticise me

or object in any way at all, she just went along. And Cam Robertson whom I mentioned as my lieutenant troop leader, he came to the house one evening and sat down and talked to my father and grandmother about my joining up and he was well received and had a cup of coffee or something.

I joined, I was very keen on it actually. I mentioned earlier that I had been in hospital and not long before and that prevented me from joining the, or being able to join the school cadets, which was a disappointment to me. It also stopped me from playing tennis which I was very keen on. It stopped me from participation in rugged sports of any kind and

for many years I wasn’t even allowed by the doctor to play tennis. Probably three or four years after I was discharged from hospital. However it prevented me from joining the cadets but I made it up I suppose in some degree by joining the light horse. And I did well there. I

used to attend parades at the drill hall in Toowoomba one night a week and once a year we’d have a fortnight’s parade – no, camp. I didn’t ever participate in one of those because by that time we were on the monthly business because war had broken out not long after. But during the time I was approached by the

adjutant at one stage, I was a lance corporal by that time, one stripe. And he asked me would I like to join the permanent military forces as a sergeant major class 2? They had an instructional corps called the AIC, Australian Instructional Corps, they were regulars and they were specialist instructors on drill and small arms,

machine guns and mortars and things of that nature. Typical infantry type weapons and he must’ve thought that I would make a reasonable instructor so he asked me. And I make no secret of the fact that by that time I had the bit in my teeth I suppose, and I thought why should I be settled for being a WO2 [Warrant Officer Second Class], I might be here forever as a WO2

training people, I might get a commission if I stay on. So I did. I refused and in 1941 I was commissioned. I was out in the camp at Warwick at that time, a three months camp and then the adjutant, another one this time came out to me in the staff car and I was in the field with a lot of other chaps training on something,

judging distance I think it was. You need to be able to judge distance to bring down fire on certain things in certain circumstances. And he said that I’d been accepted at a military officer’s training school in Sydney and that was the first time that I’d ever been to, interstate. I went down to a three month course at Liverpool on just the outskirts of

western outskirts of Sydney and graduated as a lieutenant. And my father was very proud, he always was very proud of me and but no, I never noticed any discussion or any

dissention even from anybody. It was rare indeed just to hear occasionally of somebody who was a conscientious objector. Very rare, I can’t really put my finger on a recollection of any one particular person. It wouldn’t be the case today I don’t think. I don’t think the young

people, unless Australia was directly threatened would go to the colours as they did then.

It didn’t worry me at all because, I don’t wish and please believe me I don’t wish to boast in any way but it came easy

to me. I was fit and young, conscientious I suppose and I found, and proud of being in the services. I took care of my uniforms and equipment and I did everything that I had to do reasonably well. I topped quite a number of courses

over the years. For example towards the latter quarter of the war, latter half anyhow, the reason I became an aerial photographic interpreter which was still in the intelligence sphere was because I topped the course at the school of military intelligence. Whether that

was the main factor I don’t know but I didn’t find it difficult in any way at all. And no strain, I was quite happy, quite happy. In fact after the war, I was dead keen to get into the regular army which I did do, I couldn’t think of a better career.

And my general at the time, I was a brigade intelligence officer by that time, I used to go out with him in his staff car on a reconnaissance up in the north, middle-north Queensland when we expected the Japanese to land about Harvey Bay in the sheltered lee of the island, Fraser Island. That’s where we expected them to come if they landed at all in Australia. They were thwarted of course by the Battle

of the Coral Sea. But I used to talk to him because he was a regular Duntroon graduate and I could see no way in the wide, wide world that I could become a regular officer but as a career I thought it was the tops. Any thought of course of any other career had gone by the board

when I was taken away from school in the close of my secondary schooling. My father had wanted me to become a dentist, I think that was because he had a particular friend that he used to attend the races with sometimes who had a big Packard [automobile] and my father used to drive with him down to Brisbane to the races now and again. And he was a pretty wealthy man and father thought that dentistry

was a good calling and possibly better than medicine because you don’t have to work the same hours, you work from nine to five or something like that. But however that had all gone by the board and I had no qualifications.

Why? Finance. No money. The Depression.

Well what work? My grandmother sallied forth and within a couple of days I found myself working in a shoe store which eventually became Mathers. And that was that. I wasn’t terribly happy about it but nothing I could do. Jobs were hard to get in the

Depression. Probably to some degree the army was a way out. I haven’t thought of that before but seeing we’re engaged in the whys and wherefores, it might well have been.

No not really, I think that she was past it but I think that her parents had suffered a little during, not greatly but there was some ill-feeling certainly before, in the First World War. Marburg, on the road between Toowoomba and Brisbane,

it had its name changed to something like Birdwood and Minden, which is a town in Germany, I’ve been to both places, it’s not far from Marburg, it had its name changed also to an Anglican name, an English name. And it’s since gone back to Marburg and Minden and I can’t remember precisely what the names were but I think one of them was

Birdwood who was the general in Gallipoli, British general. But grandmother’s brother, who owned and operated a quarry, he changed his name from Schmidt to Smith by deed poll around about that time. This is post the event, I mean I

never discussed it with him or anybody but I’m sure in my own mind that that was the reason why he went to change his name, for business purposes or whatever. And I’ve seen ABC films, I’ve got one somewhere on a tape based on the dreadful affects that it had on some families in South Australia from amongst the German populace down there.

There was a big German populace on the Darling Downs and just south of Toowoomba, not south of Toowoomba, to the east of Toowoomba down the range. You’d know enough about what I’m talking about when I say down the range, Toowoomba’s 2002 feet high above sea level, you come up about 1500 feet in a few miles, just as you enter Toowoomba from Brisbane. In those days,

of course in my time the road was not bitumen like it is now, it used to take almost all day, it would sometimes take more if it was raining because the cars would get bogged. And now days you could do the trip in possibly a couple of hours.

Well I was in this reconnaissance troop, light car troop and our job was reconnaissance which involves going out and getting reports about the topography that you’re supposed to fight over: bridges and streams and things which are likely to impede

your own forces and similarly impede your enemy. And that’s when I started writing reports. Before this session started I mentioned that I’ve had a lifetime of writing reports and letters in the public service one way or another. And of course we had to be trained in weaponry the same as everybody else, in what was known

as the bull right usually in those days. You’d be formed into a large ring, each individual soldier possibly ten feet apart and you’d have to follow the instruction and shout out commands and the recipient of the command would have to do something, perform a drill movement

or do something that was relevant to the drill. And we had to dismantle machineguns and put them together again. If you got really good at it you could do it blindfolded and they’d have competitions to find out which troop and which chap could do it the fastest. And you see it sometimes on films today of the

tattoo which is held in England every year. There’s sometimes one held here too. Wandering around in the countryside inspecting bridges and streams and the depth of streams and speed of the water and where the crossing places were and amending the maps. The poor maps of those days.

The maps that we have now of course are tremendously detailed but the normal one inch to the mile map that we had in those times was very limited in its distribution. I don’t mean distribution of the finished article but there were about six map sheets fitted together around and including the metropolis of Brisbane

and no more until you got to Cairns or Townsville, I can’t remember which. None at all and by then there were another six up there and this is talking about 1941, ’42. Until the advent of the aerial photograph and particularly the arrival of the Americans with their masses of expensive

equipment and many more aircraft than we possibly would even dream of, we didn’t have any good maps at all. And 90% of my job in the armoured division and I finished up there as the intelligence officer of the division, was taking bunches of men out around the Harvey Bay area and Bundaberg

really making maps, not survey maps but working together with a survey detachment and gleaning information about what we called ‘going’ in inverted commas, ‘going’ which meant the state of the countryside on roads or off for the passage of vehicles,

armoured, tracked or wheeled. To augment the four maps we had to depend on maps which we got from the town councils in many places and they were devoted to things relating to the town councils, the blocks of land that they had and the sales of blocks of land and which or what part of the village,

town or whatever had been opened up for urbanisation, and the water supply and things like that relating to that particular town. They weren’t much use for finding out the height of mountains or ridges or whether the soil was hard or soft and so on.

Why? Well ‘why’ must only be because the carry on in a way from the fact that an adjutant at one stage in Toowoomba when I was training at the drill hall had asked me to join the instructional corps. He just must’ve picked me out as

having some little qualification or likely qualification for training to be an officer. No other reason.

Well I don’t know, I was efficient at what I was doing. Whether I was a good leader or not is a very important facet of character. Some people

can be leaders by virtue of how they, the genes that they carry and others have got to learn it. I don’t know which category I fell into but I spent most of my life in the service on the staff, that is directing staff, doing staff work in headquarters. I’ve served on

almost every headquarters that existed in the Australian army at the higher level army, First Army, I Corps, II Corps, 9th Division, 6th Division, 7th Division and so on. A seat warmer, shiny bum some people rudely might call it. I held, been on, I

took part in a landing in Borneo. It was hardly an opposed landing but there was a bit of shot and shell flying around here and there but I never got wounded, I never got malaria unlike many people. And I didn’t get any gongs for bravery. I once got a gong for

what we used to jokingly call 20 years of undetected crime: a good conduct medal.

Well I had a lot of personal thoughts about it because the light horse as you might know is made up or was mainly made up of countrymen. And almost all of the

men in it were, the officers were station owners or someone in the hierarchy of station and farm life. The men were their employees in many instances, all men from around the district. 99% of them had practically grown up on a horse and I certainly hadn’t.

I bought a horse or my father did, bought it from another officer who was getting long in the tooth and too old for active service and he had a horse named Scott which was a, as well drilled as he was and knew

all the commands. I didn’t even have to guide him. If we had to change formation from ‘a line ahead’ to ‘a line abreast,’ by the time the echoes had died the horse would be there. And I would just hang on for dear life. But however I made it, I determined that I wouldn’t baulk at anything no matter whether we were riding at night

along, up and down ridges or across country, I just decided that if my job was to stay ahead of them I stayed ahead of them and they followed. That caused me of course quite a bit of worry. I had to well really get used to it. That might’ve been why

I ended up in the staff I don’t know, maybe they decided that I’d be better off as a staff officer than riding a horse, although horses were done away with very shortly afterwards. My first job after leaving the light horse was to go to cavalry brigade headquarters which was then

in Brisbane. 1st Cavalry Brigade and I was sent there to be a learner, offsider to the staff captain who was in charge of all administration in the brigade. A brigade is made up of three regiments, and each regiment is made up of four squadrons, and each squadron is made up of about four

troops. So I went from a troop right up to brigade where I started off as a staff captain learner and in due course became the intelligence officer of the brigade. And from there I went later on to be the divisional, that’s the next one up. A division normally had

three brigades. It doesn’t have to have three, it often has sometimes two maybe but it may well have four or five but normally everything else being equal it has three. And now days anyhow, and so I became the brigade intelligence officer and then the divisional intelligence officer. My work by that time, as

we were expecting a Japanese, possible Japanese landing, was of course bringing the maps up to date and making sure we had enough maps and we had enough reports to inform people and lecture people on. Let them know what the problems of movement were etc etc. We were very lucky in one sense of course

the people I don’t think today realise it, to have the Americans here because if they hadn’t been, come here, probably a lot of the people you see around in the street today would have slant eyes.

I’m not racist, I don’t mean to paint that

that picture.

Where was it?

At Liverpool just outside of Sydney and we were put through the hoops there. The instructors were members of this Australian Intelligence, I’m sorry the Instructional Corps that I mentioned, they were

hardened sergeant majors and they knew there drill movements and their small arms and everything absolutely backwards. They’d send shivers up your spine if you saw a group of them drilling they were so precise, just like English guardsmen. Irish guardsmen. And

we did all the normal things, we started off on individual training and then we went to troop or the equivalent in infantry terms, platoon training and then to company or squadron training. One is a squadron for cavalry and infantry is a company. And then

we did make believe regimental or battalion training. Creek crossings or river crossings of the Georges River at night. One of the chaps would have to swim across in the dark, bit of rope and then we’d get folding boats and unfold them and get in the folding boats and paddle our way across the Georges River.

And then all by that time, the contents of all the instructors notebooks would’ve been assessed and in due course they issued a list of who passed. Then we had a break-up and a bit of mayhem. A lot of skulduggery one night. People would just like

bastardry at school would have to be put through all sorts of indignities. I decided that if you can’t beat them join them, so I joined a bunch and we went around shaving moustaches off. And I went to bed about half past four, I couldn’t keep going any longer and woke up about twenty to five and being pinioned to the bed, the stretcher, army stretcher by about

six hulking brutes who shaved off one half of my moustache. And I said, “you can go to so and so, I’m not going to shave the other half off.” So I got on the troop train and went back to Brisbane to my unit with half a moustache. And I’ve kept it ever since, my wife’s never seen me without one.

Nobody ever said a damned thing.

Not a thing.

I don’t know, I s’pose about three weeks or a month something like that, I don’t know. It probably was a fairly weak one in those days because I was quite young but however, nobody said anything to me.

Yes, yes it

seemed to be a carry over from the First World War I think. Used to clip them. You know, keep them very short and anyhow I’ve just kept mine and my daughters have, when I threaten to cut it off sometimes, my daughters have said to me, “Don’t.” I started to grow a beard

because I was ill at one stage and I let my beard grow and they didn’t like that either.

It’s just being a, learning to do the job. Training, you were in training really, by observation and the

staff captain would naturally be expected to teach you the ropes. But the term was a normal term, staff captain learner, or brigade major learner or whatever. Well I’ve never heard of a brigade major learner but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be.

Say again?

The role? I wasn’t all that happy about it.

I wasn’t given, I wasn’t over enamoured of administration. Dealing with petrol and supplies and foodstuffs and equipment in large lumps. The supply of the whole brigade is quite a job. You’ve got to start it the night before and get it out for

breakfast time tomorrow. Got to be delivered and broken down from bulk into portions suitable to the size of the unit or sub-unit that it’s destined for. Quite a job but my bent was mapping. At school I used to draw maps, I loved drawing maps. At the state school even,

when I was quite young there were half a dozen of my maps up on the wall. And at grammar school, Tibby Martin my form master at the time, used to get me when we were having geography, he used to get me to draw the maps on the board before the class. And I still love maps.

Only because a vacancy came up for intelligence officer with a brigade and I was almost, I’d been to an intelligence officer’s course at which I’d done reasonably well. And I just found myself transferred to the intelligence office and I was quite happy about that.

Intelligence school?

I went to about a dozen I s’pose, at least a dozen in the course of five years. Courses of various kinds and eventually became an instructor myself at times. I

didn’t mind being an instructor, I quite enjoyed it actually in many ways because I feel a certain pride, largely a private feeling I don’t think many people would even share it because they don’t know about it but I mentioned the paucity of the quality and the

numerical shortage of maths. If we hadn’t had the air forces and the aerial photography to, and the survey, topographical survey people to print maps, make new maps with new equipment. You know we produced, we had to use aerial photography really

to supplement the maps and in some cases in the jungle or in the islands where there were no maps at all of the interiors, a few around maybe in the ports and harbours. The troops had to fight from photographs, vertical aerial photographs mind you. In the later campaigns in Borneo, my unit

on 9th Division probably would’ve issued about a quarter of a million photographs in the period of six months say. And largely they came through the aid we got from the Americans who were tremendous in their willingness to provide equipment

and to help. I’m not necessarily, absolutely pro-American to a fault, I’m not. But people in Australia should be eternally grateful to the Americans.

Only in the vaguest way because

Prussia is up on the Baltic, it borders the Baltic and it was right over in, it would’ve included some of Lithuania and Estonia in its heyday. Back in the days of Bismarck [Prussian leader] and so on. And probably lumps of Poland and it’s changed hands so many times. The Swedes have attached down through there and ruled down as far as Vienna and it’s just a hotchpotch,

the cauldron of Europe.

No, no I wasn’t. Only just by reading. Pardon me but I’ve got a,

I’ve just pulled off, am I on the tape?

Yes.

No well you see my grandmother wouldn’t have known anything about Nazism either, naturally. They were worried

about the fact that the young men of their countryside and their families were being continually impressed into someone or others army. And the devastation that the, what do they call it, the, when the whole area is devastated to deny the – scorched earth.

They sometimes set fire to all the houses and all the crops. The first time in history that it’s really been recorded was in the American Civil War, it was a way of defeating the enemy by cutting off their foodstuffs.

That’s right.

No, I don’t really think so. It wasn’t a thought that ever occurred to me. I don’t think that I was intolerant anyhow and I know

you’re not implying that. No, no I don’t think so. I’ve always been interested in other countries. One of my long held desires, an over-weaning one probably, was to go what we used to call ‘home’ to England. Although, while half of my background is English, maybe Irish even but

because I had a grandmother who came from Liverpool and I suspect she was Liverpool Irish because it’s only just a hop, skip and a jump across. And I always wanted to go back, well to go there, not go back. Castles and knights and the Wars of the Roses and Robin Hood and all of those things that we were

fed on. We, all of our comic cuts as they were called were all English and I don’t say that as a criticism it’s just that automatically they came out here. Just as automatically we sent back a lot of our produce to England. That’s the way it was. Of course if one was politically motivated,

somebody would hop in and say well of course we were bled dry by the English who made money out of us. We made money out of them too, it was only natural.

Everyone had a British passport.

Probably about Whitlam days.

The Labor Party of course is probably the most evident central

aspect of it. Motivating or it’s just a natural progression or attraction if you like that people who feel that way, join the Labor Party or at least adhere to it. I don’t mind admitting I’m a monarchist. I believe in the central

thingo, saying that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Don’t try to mend it or whatever it is. I can’t think of anything better, it’s been perfect but what else do we get? I mean what else can you do? I don’t think that the republics of the world are any better off than we are. Most of them have been people that have had

so called freedom from the colonial days, most of them had revolutions and blood and gore everywhere.

No I didn’t. The Americans didn’t look at us I don’t

think, not as far as I’m concerned as colonials. They did display an abysmal ignorance about Australia. You know they thought we were subjected to English rule. They didn’t know that we’d been a Commonwealth since 1900. They had all sorts of weird ideas. They are ignorant in many

ways they are insular, insular. If you go to Utah or the middle part of America they know east and they know the west but that’s about all.

I felt it keenly, very keenly. Oh yes, I felt a certain amount of shame about it too. I did yes. It was unfortunate of course but nothing my parents, my father wouldn’t have wished it and neither would have my grandmother.

Not in any way. But I was, belonged to tennis clubs and I went to balls with young people and they were all bankers or worked in the wheat board or, when I say ‘all’ 90% of them did. Or might have been farmers or whatever. But I was conscious of it,

probably false pride to some degree. But I, for what it’s worth I felt better than that.

Not particularly so but I s’pose in some ways yes.

With girls? My father did.

I don’t recall what he said but he was more concerned with sexually transmitted diseases than anything else in his advice.

Oh no, no

in my life. You know this is I s’pose only just a manifestation of where do I come from, cabbage leaf business. Yes. That was about it I just got, I was very embarrassed about it actually, I didn’t say anything but you know it wasn’t just a man-to-man talk with

me being entirely at ease. I was a bit embarrassed that my father was talking to me about such things. And it wasn’t new to me but - not entirely new anyhow, I wasn’t an ignoramus and I hadn’t had any experience to speak of.

Not in those days, usually we used to, when we were learning the classics, of course you can get some very nice interesting poems in English poetry. And some of them were written by people like John Donne of course

who was himself a Bishop and he must’ve enjoyed himself. “Come live with me and be my love, And I will to thee all pleasures prove.”

With silken threads and golden hooks.

No, not entirely no. Clarissa does, she can, she sometimes four times a day or five times a day, she’ll spout

a bit of poetry. She can tell you bits and pieces of Omar Khayyam. You know Omar Khayyam don’t you?

Don’t you?

Oh you don’t? He’s tremendous.

Persia. Centre, Iran, centre of civilisation in those days, ancient days.

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam?

It was of course Mesopotamia, they knew a great deal about astronomy, mathematics, our, I think a lot of our numerals come from there. Our letters are Roman I think, letters are Roman.

No, I didn’t know a great deal about navigation but it’s possibly worth mentioning that although I’m no expert on it, but we learned a much wider number of subjects at school

than what I believe they learn today. I mean I have grandchildren, I’ve helped them all as best I could with various things during their courses. One of my daughters got two degrees and a granddaughter’s got two degrees and so forth and so on and it’s a bit hard going trying to keep up with them.

But all my university is limited to the university of life. But I, my life has been long and I have, I take an interest in a great number of things and I find in some ways that I’m more qualified if you like to use the word, misuse the word, than some of the kids

that have got honours degrees. I was on a selection board at one stage in recent years and we wouldn’t take anybody else than somebody who had a very good university pass. And I would set them during their induction period, reports to write and other things and god almighty, you’ve got no idea. The spelling and syntax and the, unbelievable.

Truly. But then I used to hear about some schools saying, “Well don’t worry about the grammar as long as you can make yourself understood, that’s the main thing.” Have you never heard that?

But you learn much, for example some people say they don’t want to need to know it but I drew maps as

I told you. Well I knew the countries, I collected stamps I knew the countries from collecting stamps. We did geography. We did history, English history and Australian history, European history. Now days, people, many people unless they’re specialising they don’t learn anything beyond, well they don’t even learn

the three Rs as they’re called: reading, writing and arithmetic.

Yes I felt with some valid reason that in the army there was an ethos of non-politicalism if I could use that. Most of what you do is real and earnest in terms of

‘if you don’t do it properly, somebody will get killed.’ And you can’t afford to just look for kudos, some people do or try to but when I went out of the army or regular army into the public service, it was a totally different – a shock to me the attitude of the public servants as a whole. Compared to

the subjective attitude – non-subjective attitude, objective attitude in other words of the average army officer. The, we used to have in the public service people who spent their lunchtime reading the Commonwealth Gazette. You know what the Commonwealth Gazette is do you? That’s where they announce the promotions in the Commonwealth public service and advertise

jobs. They were anxious to leap from one’s loyalty to your department – it didn’t matter. The main job was to get yourself more money, to get another position even if you didn’t like it sometimes. I couldn’t understand that. Esprit de corps, you know what that means of course,

was very powerful in the army and I’ve been asked to, was asked by my Director General at one stage to write several papers on esprit de corps because moral at the time due to the Murphy raid and a few other things was, do you know what that is, the Murphy raid?

Senator Murphy got his bit in his teeth

and decided to “visit” if that’s the word, in inverted commas, “raid” also in inverted commas which was commonly referred to in the press, to raid headquarters ASIO believing that ASIO wasn’t giving the Labor Government the information that it was prepared to give to the Liberal Government. So he got a bunch of Commonwealth Police as they were then called in those days, they’re now the Federal Police, they’re much better of course now it’s federal and not commonwealth.

Costs money you know, those things. I know I’m digressing.

Like this word Ms, I got an instruction when I was in charge in London, from headquarters, political correctness of course, after one of the Labor Governments came in to – I had 28 girls spread around in different places and

I had, was asked to get in touch with all of them and circularise them and ask them or instruct them to change their – not use Miss or Mrs, but to use Ms. And I drafted a short letter to them all, circular and asked them what they wanted to be and there wasn’t one, not one who

wanted to be Ms. Well, I don’t mind a certain amount of feminism at all, I can see it inherent in all ladies – women and I joke about it a bit but taken too far it’s a bit silly in think.

I was writing in my

thing the other day, in my editing and I came across the word typist “T.U. I. P.I. S.T” for my wonderful typist I had in London. We’re still friendly with her, I talked to her on the phone only about a week ago. And I put an “E” on the end because I’m sure I put an “E” in when I did it first but I must’ve missed it out, my computer’s got a gremlin in it, it misses little

letters like this. So I added an “E” because I just liked to know the differentiation. For example I read once, this is going to be a funny sort of recording that you’ve got here, I read about I don’t know but let’s just say Alice – Alex. Alex so and so and Alex was in the film business and it went on

and on, it was quite an interesting little thing, enough for me to read and it, in the last sentence, right down at the end it said ‘she’. And I realised the name must’ve been Alexandra but she was called an actor and not an actress. And I’m old fashioned enough, I like to know who I’m talking about. What I’m talking about.

Reconnaissance?

Yes.

Yeah in a truck.

Fifteen hundred weight trucks.

Well it wasn’t anything extraordinary, it was normal because I’ve mentioned that our maps were dreadful. We didn’t have maps. If you see for example a plan on the maps on a map of Queensland, it’s divided up

into little squares that looks about the size of a postage stamp. Hundreds of them and they’re all numbered so that you can ask for map number such and such. Maybe there was a letter and a number but however, same thing. There was just this little bunch in Brisbane and a little bunch up in the north of Queensland, Townsville possibly and the rest was blank.

Blank. And so we would take out sometimes one of those sheets. Myself and a bunch of, a dozen men and a couple of trucks. And we’d go around marking roads in using plane tables. That’s a basic survey, land survey method and using triangulation

and compasses and things you’d do your best to make sure that what you were writing, what you were transposing to paper was an accurate rendition of the situation. You’d have to measure the distance by the speedometer or mile-o-metre on the car if that’s the right word, and just in, so that the army

could operate. And that was what we did. And all of this country here, Sunshine Beach and all of this area, that was an artillery range Sunshine Beach, it was all Wallum scrub. The roads that came up to Queensland went from centre to centre like Eumundi and then Koroit and then Kuran. And in each place there was either

a butter factory or a cheese factory because at that time the timber had all gone and the land was opened up and people went into dairies and they supplied milk. And then they went in, as well there’d be some people producing butter and we’d need a factory and a co-operative and so on and so forth. And that same country today, there’s a few cheese factories and it’s been thrown open

for settlement for acreage, with the passage of time.

Well it was topography basically, it was the features of the ground. That’s what the army had to operate on. We weren’t concerned with

streets in the town, you could get that from the council map. They were interested in streets but we were interested in how we’d get from A to B with a squadron of tanks and whether this was good open tank country or whether it would be so precipitous that you couldn’t run tanks in it easily, it would be infantry country. And the height of the mountains for defensive purposes.

If you can get higher up for example in a battle situation, you’ve got an advantage over the enemy who are lower down. You always had the heights of Badajoz or the heights of so and so in history. I’m talking of the Wellington campaign in Spain. The bloke who is up high has got the advantage.

Not particularly at the time. But I’d become aware later and particularly since I’ve been writing that, that it’s something that has not been highlighted, publicised. It’s not secret at all but

it just isn’t epic enough for people to take an interest in or the papers to take an interest in.

No about using in the end, aerial photographs to get the detail to make maps from. The shortage of maps was unbelievable

and that’s where I have to thank the Americans because what we got from the RAF [Royal Air Force], they used obsolete cameras, RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force], that’s not their fault, that’s just the way it was. F-24’s that big. The Yanks made them that big. F-18s [fighter jet], eighteen inches by nine, and also nine by nine. They produced

them in vast numbers and we couldn’t have done without it. And that aspect to me is tremendously important and I, it’s all me, my own feeling because I’ve got no-one else to share it with beyond talking with you, and I’ve laid my heart out in those, that for the first time

it occurred to me what an important aspect it was. Which hasn’t been publicised at all. Not that I expect it to be but it was crucial to our operations in Australia, or expected operations in Australia and of course in the islands of the Pacific it became even more so, because

of the fact that they were jungle clad and uninhabited and, or inhabited by natives.

No because they

were supplanted very soon afterwards by an upsurge with the advent of aerial photographs in our survey and topographical printing capacity. The survey corps in the army became much larger, more money spent on it and very quickly we had those, a great many of

those deficiencies in a course of only a few years overcome. But here we were in 1942 with no maps to speak of.

I was in Brisbane at the time, I was the intelligence officer about that time of I Corps. Not I Corps, 1st Cavalry Brigade and I was one of about possibly 20 officers who was selected and sent down to the Hamilton Wharves when the first ever convoy of Americans came into Brisbane. They had been bound for Corregidor

in the Philippines and it fell and they were turned around and zigzagged their way, dodging Japanese submarines and landed in Brisbane. One of the first things they did and I’ll never forget it is - nothing extraordinary to them but it was to me at the time – they couldn’t get some of their heavy vehicles out of the wharves, the gates weren’t wide enough.

And we had lovely big iron gates and big posts on the, big pillars made of cement or whatever on the side and they just got a bulldozer and just took them out. Boom. Straight in to them. A fat, bit Sergeant Major with a cigar out of the side of his mouth, “Get on with it guys, get the god damned things out of the way. We’ve got to get this here equipment out.” And away they went.

They almost treated us at that time, whilst we were, they were very friendly, they were so generous with their PXs [American canteen unit]. You know what a PX is? Post Exchange. It was stocked like Coles or Myer if you like compared to ours where you could buy cigarettes, writing paper and razor blades I think.

But they would give you things right, left and centre. Cigarettes that burned, I went home with, back to the unit with so much loot, well nothing really but cigarettes and things like that. But it was unbelievable but they really, they had two ribbons when they landed in Brisbane. They hadn’t been on enemy country – territory at all.

They got one medal for leaving America to go on overseas service and they got the other medal for being in the Pacific War or something and they landed with two ribbons. We had chaps home from the Middle East who’d never had a medal in their life at that stage. And then some of them even had the Purple Heart because they’d broken their leg or something or been wounded I think, wounded I must be fair.

Somewhere or other at sometime they’d got wounded somewhere. Anyhow they treated us almost like an occupied country. Not an enemy country but an occupied country. Hence their lack of concern about knocking down the gates on the Hamilton Wharf. And to answer your question yes, I was in Brisbane at the time, I wasn’t involved I wasn’t in the city when it happened

but I read about it and somewhere amongst my memorabilia I’ve got some paper cuttings of the time. The Australian troops, particularly the ones that had been in the Middle East had come home, in many cases to find their affections supplanted by the better dressed and higher paid Americans.

It was only natural on both sides, the feelings about the women folk. They looked after the mothers too of course, Mum got nylon stockings and chocolates and sometimes more. But the main problem

with that was the fact that the Americans have a different way of fighting, squabbles that is, than we do. I mean we never think if we’re having a fracas outside a pub, of pulling out a pistol or a knife. When I say never, you hear more about it today, some poor fellow gets stabbed here or there or somebody gets bashed up in Brisbane

walking home from the university or something. You remember a couple of dreadful cases they had there. But it was probably the mixed races that they had in America at the time, a lot of Mediterranean people and South American people and Mexican people and knives were second nature to them. And some silly American shot an Australian and that was the beginning of it. The boys got together

and decided that the next night, that they’d teach the Yanks a lesson. I was at a dance at Nerang one night, when I was at the School of Military Intelligence situated in the Pacific Hotel which had been taken over by the Australian Army and we had the School of Military Intelligence transferred from Melbourne up to there and that’s when I, I was an instructor there and I went out to a dance at Nerang, you know

where that is I’m sure. There was a bit of a fight outside the dance hall, it was only just a little country dance hall, there was a fight of Australians. It was an Australian thing, no Americans there but the Americans had a, they used the Gold Coast as a rehabilitation and leave area and they had a lot of American MPs [Military Police]. They used to chromium plate their helmets and white

Blanco, you know what Blanco is?

No. It was a white cake of stuff that you used on your sandshoes. They don’t clean sandshoes these days. And they’d whiten their belts and chromium plate their - and their bayonets and the Yanks came up with sirens blaring and jumped out. They got there before the Australian MPs. The Australian MPs would’ve just gone in and kicked a couple

of bums and that would’ve been that. But they came out with waddy sticks about that long and sailed into the fight and a few other fellows around the place and got them together and frog marched them in, threw them into the back of the vehicle and zoom they were gone. Well that’s just a different attitude and it was in a, a reverse situation or different situation of course

in relation to using weapons in disagreements in the city. They are different in that respect.

I must be honest and say that there are, there is an element here

that would knock the end off a beer bottle and not so much these days and use it as a weapon in those sorts of things. In my early days I remember my father talking about what was called the, they were actually gangs if you like. But where my grandmother’s house was was called the South End of Toowoomba. That was the South End.

And the South End people, young men would at times get caught up in a bit of a problem with another group from another part of Toowoomba and they used to fight with palings. They’d go up to a fence and pull a paling off and they’d get stuck into each other with that. And that was about the limit really, of what they did.

Well it’s a little difficult for me to be precise but suffice to say I think

the equipment was more modern both in the use of cameras, the developments and particularly film speeds, the advent of coloured film. Infrared of course had been used in the First World War but we used that too.

But in addition they had a lot of survey equipment, big stuff that could be moved around in a static situation. Not so much in the field, for example they used to have ships called command ships, one of them only say in Borneo and it would be a floating

Command Headquarters. It would be full of radar going round and round and dishes, every type of radio that you could think of, they could talk direct to Washington just like picking up a phone and talk to London and have a looped, hooked up big top-level conference, all from the ship.

And it had laboratories and a big photographic section and in there it had sufficient equipment to churn out the maps that I’m talking about just like ‘boompety, boompety, boompety, boompety.’ Just coming out like sausages. And some of the equipment of course was calibrated and this is what I find hard to describe,

they introduced a camera which was a composite camera which they used in their aircraft which took triple exposures, one vertical and two obliques. Obliques ones of course would be dissorted which you would quite imagine, whereas this one would be a true plan, the vertical one. And the equipment would bring those pictures back on

a negative level, back into almost three verticals and they were called tri-metrogons. Tri-metrogon was the name of them. And that’s the sort of equipment that I’m talking of.

Trigonometry, well I had a bit of that at school but the main tool

of course of an aerial photographic interpreter is a stereoscope. It’s an instrument for allowing an impression to be gained looking at a flat photograph through a stereoscope. It allows you to see not only length and breadth but you get an impression of height. So when

you look at this photograph the buildings stand up and the mountains stand up and the valleys go down and that’s what you get.

Yes exactly, 3-D. Yes that’s exactly right, the three dimensions. Now by the end of the war we had stereo-scopes that we could issue to people in the field that were about as bit as one of these, I can’t go,

a CD. It’d fold up and you’d put it in your pocket or whatever you had to carry it in. And you could use that in the field whereas initially we were limited to things as big as a small typewriter, portable typewriter I s’pose. It had folding legs too but you had to use it on a table in a static

situation. You see and I don’t want to get too technical even if I’m capable of it but your eyes give you stereoscopic vision. Each eye sees a different picture, you mightn’t be aware of that but you’re seeing, not only the flat surface but you’re seeing with that right eye, you’re seeing a little bit of a side view and that eye is seeing the flat,

straight-on view and it’s seeing also a little bit of the side. It’s seeing a different side to what that eye’s seeing because you’re coming from two different levels and your brain is melding them together and you see one picture. And when you look at say my face, it’s in 3-D and that’s the principle behind using a stereoscope. They take a picture, it’s all got to be worked out before hand

according to the speed of the aircraft, the height, the focal length of the lens and you take a picture from there, it’s straight down, got to be vertical. And one from there and another one there on a run. And they, these two that I’m talking of and the successive ones, both sides overlap by 60%, that’s the way it’s worked out. It’ll work on 65 or 70 if you want to do it.

Or 55 for that matter and that part of the two photographs when viewed separately with one eye being directed to that photograph and the other eye through the lens is being directed to that photograph, the same principle occurs in your mind, in your brain they’re put together

and you see the height.

Can’t do it.

Got to use two eyes, binocular vision. You’ve got to have two.

What does it look like?

Well you just look at the photograph…

You put the photographs on the flat, you put them on the back of a satchel or some of you, what you were carrying on your back or on the ground. You know in a jungle situation or a field situation. And take this thing out of your pocket, this is the little one, folding one and you just look at it then and you put them down so that one

lens is looking at one and the other lens is looking at that one and you get the impression right in front of you. It’s not there, it’s an illusion. If you take one picture away it disappears. Does that answer your question?

And depth.

Well you can’t do that individually but they have, there is equipment that will do that, optical equipment. In the survey field, most surveyors of course you’d

as you would realise have got big clod-hoppers, boots and big bush hats and they climb up and down mountains and they build those things on top of hills which are called trigonometric points. And the whole of Australia for example is interlaced with triangles, triangulation so that by using these points as data points

you can build up accurately. As for distance, you use a clinometer, an Indian clinometer. It’s called Indian because the British army in India probably used it more. I think it was a Brit who found the height of, original height it was altered slightly later, of Mt Everest. So you can gauge heights but you don’t do it

with just by looking. You can of course if you’ve got a known object next to it like a telephone pole and you estimate that the telephone pole is 20 metres high, you can make a pretty good stab at something.

You would have to from time to time but the estimation of height didn’t come into it terribly much because if you’ve starting to talk about, if one is starting to talk about estimating the height of a mountain, that’s, it’s too large an expanse. They don’t just stick up in a vertical pole. But on the, in

many cases there are other guides that you can use. Known heights of known mountains, most of the world today anyhow, but even then I’m sure that the highest mountain in New Guinea was known. Which is, would be about thirteen or fourteen, maybe fifteen thousand feet high.

Yes.

Not really no. I was instructing in this and I had to be instructed too initially to start off with. And that’s how I got in the business I came top I think of a course.

But it fitted in with my love if you like, of maps and I’d also done an army air course in army cooperation. For three months I used to fly around in a, not as the pilot but as an observer and a photographer in a Wirraway.

When in the training. It was held in Canberra, based in Canberra. But later on I’d flown up in New Guinea again as a Vultee Vengeances [dive bomber] and other aircraft that were used for that purpose. The army used such aircraft and they’ve got a detachment up at, quite a big one

up at Oakey, outside Toowoomba which was a good bicycle ride away from the city in my day but it’s now virtually a suburb. It’s 20 miles out of the centre of Toowoomba. And the army’s main use is for reconnaissance, spotting and for artillery use directing fire. You’d talk through

a radio to a man in an artillery regiment maybe fifteen miles back and watch where his shell falls and then you’d tell him up four hundred yards and left two hundred yards. And lead him to the target. Not a, you wouldn’t get an insurance policy for the job, of course they shoot them down as quick as they can. The enemy that is.

Sometimes written exams. The army used to seem to have a habit of making a written examination last three hours, a paper,

and it would have five or six different questions on it. And I sat for promotion examinations which last a fortnight on half a dozen different subjects. Not everyday, it’s just the way that the attendant comes out. One day it would be a certain subject and your particular subject mightn’t come up until two days hence or so on.

Japan?

Well my reaction I suppose is what you want. Of course I was not enamoured of the Japanese

and particularly of their attitude to human life. They, Japan had refused to sign the Geneva Convention as I imagine Iraq did, hasn’t signed it either. And one might be forgiven in thinking that some other western nations haven’t obeyed it even if they did sign it. I’m talking now of the

recent prison pictures. But generally I don’t think the Americans, they’re not given to torture but, it’s a question of, first of all definition of torture. I don’t think for example that deprivation of sleep is actually a torture. It might be in the purest sense but it’s a well known technique of

questioning. Police use it and nobody writes about torture, well maybe they do, people do get kicked in the bottom and knocked around a bit by policemen obviously. We got stories of course, true stories and pictures of beheadings, that’s quite an anathema

to our approach to things. We don’t think of, we think of hanging or shooting but not beheading. The Japanese I think liked to blood their swords if they had never killed anybody. So they took it in turns to have a go at it if they had a number of prisoners of war. They’d pass the sword on to the next bloke and that repelled us, all of us.

I don’t know whether that line fits your question?

That was real enough. I would say that it’s quite understandable

that, it would be forgotten by many of the younger people, they mightn’t ever have learned about it. The young today however, Clarissa and I until the last couple of years, we’ve marched in the Anzac Parade. The last couple of years Clarissa hasn’t been as well as I was until about

12 months ago and we’ve ridden in a car, open car, jeep or something of that nature from the forming up place to where the cenotaph is or whatever. And it’s noticeable that children, not only little fellows but ones who are old enough to understand, school children are very, very interested and it’s

increasing every year. I’m a Legatee, I don’t know if you know what Legacy is and one notices that sort of thing. I got a letter yesterday, just a normal report from Legacy with pictures in it of the Legacy banner and a bunch of 50 or 60 people, mainly war widows and some men,

marching at the head of the parade in Brisbane last Anzac Day, April. Clarissa nursed, my wife nursed a number of Japanese wounded. I don’t know that we’ve ever heard of any Japanese nursing Australians because at the end of the war, or as it

appeared that he end of the war was approaching, they, prisoners became a nuisance. Before that prisoners were only good for their muscle power and the work that they could do.

Not at all, a number of people, a number of chaps I knew of course, and I’d gone through various schools with they were, at the officers’ training school for example there was quite a lot of young fellows there who were bound to go into the 8th Division and the 8th Division was raised to go to

Singapore. And as it happened when I went to go to Berlin, the head of the military mission was Major General Galleghan, Fred Galleghan, nicknamed ‘Black Jack’ and he was an Australian of the 2/13th Battalion of Sydney, Scottish, they wore kilts at home. Battalion and they were very successful until

the surrender occurred which came from higher up the line, very successful and I think they conducted the first noticeably successful ambush of the Japanese advancing down towards Singapore.

No, we were doing them only for our own purposes. If we didn’t have a map of a certain area of course the thought occurs to me that it would’ve been a good thing because the Japanese wouldn’t have had them either. But it’s widely believed, I didn’t ever experience it, that a number of barbers or

waiters or other Japanese that were working here were gathering information and probably sending back RACQ [Royal Automobile Club of Queensland] maps or other such things which are readily purchasable of course. And I don’t doubt that went on.

Well they wouldn’t be shown of course on the RACQ maps would they.

We automatically I suppose included those but and they’d have to be marked on the map, but

one could perceive them of course driving around the country. The whole area would have been, by other people apart from me would’ve been doing a reconnaissance, right from the lowest level up. Every battalion commander and equivalent sized unit would have to look at his own area and work out what he’d do in certain

eventuality and where he’d go and which way he’d go in case he had to retreat. And which would be the best land to occupy to beat the enemy.

Yes, not terribly much but enough to know that it was logical that the McPherson Ranges on the

border of Queensland and NSW [New South Wales] were a logical place to make a rampart, use a rampart that nature had provided. That probably was a barrier in the days of selections and occupation of the land in Australia, why people didn’t go much further north.

When they got up to about Glen Innes or somewhere they started to think well that’s too rough up there for me to make a living, I don’t want a sheep station in the middle of all that. And for some years it probably formed a natural boundary and equally the fact that that natural rampart if you want to call it was there, I think was the obvious place. The

Brisbane Line of course was a term I think invented by the press probably. The aim of the planners, the top echelons of the Australian army and the government would’ve been to protect the vital factories and vital centres of

operations, army operations to stop them falling into the enemy hands so that Australia would be able to carry on the defence of Australia. And all the centre of industry of course was Newcastle steelworks and the area down and around Wollongong, Australian Iron and Steel, other factories

that made wire and things out of copper, they were all down there and shipping was down there. That was the industrial centre of Australia from possibly Adelaide around. Up until certainly up

as far as Newcastle.

No, it was just again a logical thing because I you were based in Queensland and you were thinking about withstanding an attack from the Japanese, you wouldn’t pick a nice flat area. You’d go back and get into the hills

and say, “Well we’ll meet them here.”

That’s a long way hence, it’s well post war.

I thought you meant while I was….

To New Guinea, well I went up to New Guinea

because I wanted to increase my knowledge of the situation on the ground in New Guinea. Up at Sattelberg where the 9th Division were, the 7th Division attacked Lae at about the same time from a different direction than the 9th Division had.

And I’d done so much work on photographs of Japanese airfields and Japanese installations and Japanese artillery divisions and Ack-Ack guns, anti-aircraft guns, positions and other defences that they had built, and I wanted to see them and just

as it were mentally compare them. First of all visually and then mentally with what I expected them to be like from the photographs. That’s why I went up. And they also decided that you know that I had done a lot of instructing, that there were a few blokes up there in the forward lines who needed to know more about aerial photographs. So I ran a few courses when I was up there.

No, no I don’t think there was, it was useful to me but there wasn’t anything significant I don’t think. No. It was an interesting experience though, I went to, after Port Moresby and that area, I, in between I went to hospital with acute appendicitis, I mentioned that to you off the record a while ago

when they used the, when I was in that situation between two chaps who had, one had powdered penicillin, the other had injections of penicillin. In between time on the third day after my operation I was up and on the fifth day I was climbing up a trail at Sattelberg about 400 miles away and it so happened that two days earlier, that

particular mountain, Sattelberg, ‘berg’ in German meaning mountain, there was a German mission on top run by German monks, anyhow clerics and there were, Digger [‘Diver’] Derrick who got a VC [Victoria Cross], I could see his footprints where he’d scrambled up a steep hill and in turn knocked out three

Japanese machine gun posts. He got a VC for that, Victoria Cross. And that was interesting to me. One of the most pleasant, unpleasant part about that was none of the dead had been buried and in the tropical heat they were bloated and it wasn’t very nice at all. It was hard to keep your stomach

down.

Stench. Dreadful.

Stench like? Well I can’t do more than just say bloody horrible.

They weren’t, they hadn’t had time to bury them. The Japanese didn’t bury

them, it would’ve been done by the Australians. All of our dead were gone and I got up to the top and I felt knackered and I sat down, leant against the wall of the mission and one of my chaps said to me, “Would you like a cup of tea?” And I said, “Yes,” so I had a cup of tea and I of course knew I was only five days out

of an operation down in Port Moresby and to my amazement when I had a cup of tea, in about 20 minutes I was as right as rain. Felt no ill effects at all afterwards. But when I first, I really felt ill when I got up there. Mainly from the exertion and I was a bit weak I s’pose.

No it doesn’t worry me. I know that your letter that you sent me mentions some people get upset. I don’t for a moment question that, but then a lot of people had very much worse experiences than I touched upon.

Well it was always tented, that’s the first thing. Sometimes we’d be working on operations to come further down the track and we’d work in a guarded hessian surrounded enclave if you like,

again in tents, marquis tents at this time. And the, even the, even we weren’t trusted because all the photographs that we got had the captions cut off. All aerial photographs taken have the date and the time and the squadron and the height and the focal length lens and all those things on there, and they didn’t want us to know where we were.

But we knew enough about maps and ordinary six penny atlases to soon find out where it was. It was an island in the Philippines and Australians were intended to go there. And then the Americans and the Australians fell out at a very high level over how the Australians were to be

disposed. The Americans wanted them to be under American command and the Australians wanted to take their whole force in, in its entirety and have one Australian commander working with the Americans. The Americans wanted to break it up and put a little bit of Australia in a lot of American divisions. Much like the British had done during World War I. And it wasn’t

until the end of World War I, until getting towards the end that the Australian commander in those days, General Monash, you might’ve heard of Monash, there’s a university named after him. He was a German Jew, he’d been a CMF officer in his time, an engineer, he was a, by trade an engineer in the coal mining business at Yallourn

outside Melbourne. And he persuaded his British commander that the Australians fought better under Australian control as one formation and the result was that the Australians went through the German defensive and you can look this up if you wish, like a knife through butter. They advanced 15, 20 miles in one go, bang. Before that they’d

been used as shock troops to bolster other formations, non-Australian.

Not really, we were only interested in what we could see under the stereoscope. Not exactly where it was, we were of course very intrigued as to where it might be. And the plan as I say had been to,

in their advance towards Japan, the Americans wanted to take the Philippines and of course I s’pose, retake the Philippines, I s’pose MacArthur, having been hoicked out of there earlier in the war, he had a personal interest in retaking it. And thereafter we, Australia didn’t feature in the further advance up towards Japan.

Except in terms of the air force and the navy. But the Australian army no.

Okay.

Did I bury them?

I just had to walk through half a mile of them that’s all.

They would’ve been buried of course, but I’d say the Australian War Graves people buried them or the Australian troops. Not the Japanese, they’d been pushed out and they wouldn’t be able to come back.

No, no they buried them all right, if they get time. But they had to flee because they were being defeated.

No. Not at all. I think you realise when you’re in the army r in the armed forces that that’s it. I’m not being brave or anything, that’s just the way it is.

You don’t want to die of course, don’t even want to get wounded but you know it’s just part of the game. And I don’t mean to call it a game for any, you know it isn’t a game.

A couple of my,

I was mentioning earlier about, part of it was in your hearing about the first use of penicillin, well both of those chaps were from my old light horse regiment. They were now infantrymen in the 7th Division. They were both badly wounded. And another man from the same unit named Roland Wilson from Warwick, he was a particular friend of mine

and he was killed. I’ve been to see his grave in New Guinea, he was buried in Bomana at Port Moresby. And a few others, but those were the most significant ones.

They were very good. The country blokes were the best. I have said I s’pose dozens of times in Clarissa’s hearing that if I ever had to choose a platoon or company or group of men, I would always choose

not necessarily Queenslanders but countrymen because they can do anything that’s humanly possible. They can pull bogged trucks out of bogs, they can even now, Jenny’s husband, the young jackaroos, some of them are in their twenties, they’ll turn a vehicle over in a bore drain. You know what a bore drain is? The drain, the bore comes from artesian bore and the

water is reticulated over the property for the cattle to drink. And they immediately get on the phone back to the homestead which is maybe 20, 25 kms away wanting to get a tractor or something out to get the vehicle out. And Austin who’s 50-odd, Austin will turn up and take one look at it and he’ll

make a pulley out of ropes. Each rope represents another wheel on the pulley and with a bit of help and a good anchor on a tree or something he’ll pull it out, get it back on his feet and drive the damned thing out. And I’m not exaggerating. It happened, that happened just a little while ago.

No, but I saw it in Borneo and other places and I’ve seen it in the army generally. Even in the light horse I mean, not in action in the light horse of course but they can mend engines and fix windmills, you don’t have to worry about that in the army of course but engines go bung and wheels come off trucks. They can drive a truck with

three wheels, they cut down a suitable sized sapling and lash it like a sled, one end fastened and the other end on the ground and drive it along with only one driving wheel on the back and the other one is a sapling. That’s just a simple example but not only that they can shoot and they’re used to being out on their own and being, or with other men and they’re easy to

get along with. They pull their weight. When I joined the army first, my first camp I had to wake up to myself and realise that if we wanted water in the tent or if we wanted something else that it didn’t just appear somebody had to do it. And of course it was somebody’s turn. And when I realised that I was coming up for my turn it

taught me a lesson. I was a city boy, I hadn’t had to do that before and I make no secret of it. You’ve got to live with men, if you’re living with men or anybody you’ve got to pull your weight. And country blokes are used to it, they’re used to roughing it and I could even go so far as to name

another, I won’t go any further I’ll name another area of Australia from which we got good troops and that was Western Australia. But Northern Territory would fit into the same and chaps at the back of NSW would be the same and so on. South Australia.

No they’re very self sufficient and plenty of initiative. A lot of them were good enough to be officers and didn’t want to be. Wanted to be just with the boys.

I didn’t ever feel that. I was ambitious I suppose and not to a degree that it was obvious or would’ve offended

anybody but no, I didn’t ever feel that. Not at all personally. Some people would’ve I guess and they did. Some of the chaps of course owned properties, stations. I remember a chap named Steve Rutledge who was in the light horse and the Rutledges owned about three or four properties out around Charleville, Cunnamulla somewhere and

here was a man you know sitting on a couple of million pounds in those days, or one million or whatever it might’ve been and he was a trooper. That’s all he wanted to be.

Well I wouldn’t say that he could’ve been, I don’t know whether he wanted to be or not but he was only an example of a lot of people, a lot of men in the AIF both wars

didn’t want to be officers. They just wanted to go to Egypt or go away, do their bit and come home.

I occasionally got a Christmas cake or something like that and a few letters. Getting close now you’ll have to watch this.

…57 years married. 58, jeez.

Yes.

Only in a general sense, I can say that the pictures that you saw the Japanese always had yellow teeth and they weren’t exactly portrayed in the most favourable light photographically or photogenically. And I s’pose the emphasis was on their cruelty which goes back again to their liking

to chop people’s heads off with samurai swords and they were a different culture. In many ways they were remarkable, well they are remarkable people. They, look at the equipment that you’ve got there, Sony, I don’t know whether that is Sony, yes that’s Sony. They’re, you know the top of the heap.

And their motorcars. I’d never seen a Japanese motorcar until, probably getting close to ’45, or more than that, getting close to ’50, 1950 and I believe they, the Brits gave them an Austin of some sort and they got a Chev [Chevrolet] engine from the Americans and they produced Toyotas.

And look at the Japanese cars now, they’re all over and they’re very good cars too. Before the war they were renowned in a sense for making brummy stuff. Brummy? You don’t know the term. Brummy is a corruption of the word Birmingham and during the height of the

industrial revolution in England a lot of brummy stuff was made and it wasn’t much good, it was cheap stuff that was sent out to India and other places, maybe not India but around the world. But the Japanese used to copy, they used to get something that was produced elsewhere and copy it and it wasn’t terribly good. Up until the war anyhow, but then of course they turned out with the Zero fighter,

aeroplane, which was a wonderful machine and lots of things that were very good. And so they’re not to be underestimated. I remember speaking in the Dutch East Indies at the end of the war, to an Oxford educated interpreter who was attached to us after the Japanese had been defeated and I used

to tell him about amphibious trucks and vehicles and about aircraft that didn’t have propellers and he’d look at me as much to say ‘you’re having me on old chap.’ Spoke perfect English, and he didn’t say it but I could tell and he’d tell me very formally that he’d report back to his superiors and he’d talk to me tomorrow.

The answer came back, “I’m afraid Sir, I hope you’re not offended, but we think it’s propaganda.” That was the jet engine that I’m talking about now, aeroplanes without propellers. But they soon learned I suppose, but I never had an opportunity to talk to him since.

No. Towards the end of that period I got myself or I was attached to a,

after Sattelberg, 9th Division came back and went to the Tablelands and 3rd Division took over and advanced further up the coast and around to the westward, towards Madang and going that way. I went a couple of hundred miles with them I suppose, behind the retreating Japanese and we saw thousands of

wrecked aircraft and bombed buildings and all of which of course I’d seen on photographs. Apart from the vertical photographs that I discussed earlier, the aircraft, a proportion of the aircraft and all the bombers had a fixed camera on board so that when they dropped their bombs

as they flew away, the rear facing camera would capture the explosion of the bombs and where they hit. And of course I’ve seen hundreds of these, thousands of them probably, some of them were tremendously interesting because you’d see Japanese standing there with their mouths open or men running and, see them you know from just virtually a height of, a distance of 50 feet. On the back decks of ships and you could see

bombs coming down through the air and a chap looking at it. And they were graphic, really graphic. Anyhow that’s beside the point but it was interesting and professionally useful for me to go over the ground that I’d seen so much on photographs.

The air forces. Mainly

Americans but also RAAF, Royal Australian Air Force.

No, they would’ve been just ordinary, they’d be trained in the air force that’s all.

No. No you see when I did my course down in Canberra that I mentioned earlier, I was operating the same sort of cameras in that case in Wirraways. It had a little hole in the back underneath, just there underneath the seat. And the seat was fully rotating, it was rotatable and it was a fair way down because one would be sitting up on top of a

parachute up about here, and the camera was down there. So you’d have to bend your knees and get off your seat sometimes and get down over the eyepiece to operate the camera. We took photographs at night of Burrinjuck Dam, drop a flare and photographs of the Goulburn railway yards. Lights were out of course a lot at that time but we’d drop

flares, sometimes we wouldn’t. And in the daytime of course we didn’t need them. A few of my colleagues were killed during that course. One in particular, my tent mate, he came from Winton in North Queensland and we came back from a training flight one day and the air force chaps were pretty gung-ho and they had arranged between themselves, the pilots

to meet over Lake George outside of Canberra. Do you know of Lake George, heard of it?

It’s only full of water every so often, intervals of years between. And in the meantime they run sheep on it. And of course the have wire fences in between. The air force pilots on this particular day had arranged to come back ten minutes early, and all to

meet over the top of Lake George at a certain height, about six or seven thousand feet I s’pose and have a mock dog fight. And of course they had camera guns, only cameras and they could, they’d like to get behind some bloke and shoot him down on the camera you see, mock. And they’d chase one another and I was in one of these aircraft and my pilot was a fellow named Fred Fowl and

the aircraft in front of us did, went into a spin, the Wirraway had a peculiarity, they used to flick, it was just a quick spin and of course he got out of control and the story is and I think it’s true you know, you can get out, if you don’t get out in three spins and

get level flying again you’re gone. And he just got out and he went across the ground with one wing down at an angle and the wing hit one of these wire fences and boomp. And I had with my pilot, a chap by the name of George Hocking from Rockhampton, we had the unpleasant job of identifying the

roasted remains. And it was made the worse by the fact that they had an official enquiry and they found that in the rear pilot’s seat, the observer’s seat that the joy stick was in, fitted, not sitting in the spot on the side of the cockpit. In other words the air force

decided that it was possible that the Australian army man was flying the aircraft and not the pilot. And that would’ve been dreadful, it would’ve complicated, it would’ve been an offence, although I’ve done it, we all used to do it. The air force chaps would put their hands up like this and that meant you’re sitting behind them in the next cockpit, you’d know that they didn’t have control of the aircraft

so if you wanted to fly it you had to grab the joystick yourself. And it was all prearranged and anyhow we had to go back the second time, into the morgue to this unpleasant task. I gave up smoking for six months, couldn’t stand the smell of a burning cigarette.

No, we only, when I flew it, all of us probably the air force chaps were quite happy like you go out in a new car and you say to your

friends, your father, your brother or your girlfriend, “Would you like to take the wheel for a little while?” But you don’t let them do wheelies in the main street. You know it’s all very sedate, so when we flew we used to fly around in great big circles, there wasn’t any leaning over and just going straight down or anything like that.

Well that’s an aside really it’s…

I don’t talk about it much.

Twenty-one shillings a day,

as a lieutenant.

Two dollars.

It was. Oh it was good pay and you got your clothing and your teeth fixed and if you got sick you had an army, regimental medical officer to look you over and an army hospital. You got

certain allowances for certain types of uniforms and a pound coming in every day, plus one shilling, a guinea a day. That was jolly good because the troops only got about six shillings a day. In the First World War I’m not sure of this but I think they got a shilling.

No, only, I was saving up but for nothing in particular. I wasn’t thinking of getting married or anything else but I had never had so much money before.

Bank? The Commonwealth.

Mmm. Clarissa,

Clarissa and I had a certain percentage of your pay was in deferred in a sense it wasn’t called deferred pay, yes it was, it was called deferred pay. The army knowing full well that people, human beings have a tendency to blow their money, kept a certain percentage back and they wouldn’t give it to you until after the war was over with a view

to enabling you to have something, a lump sum to help you to re-establish yourself. And Clarissa and I both had some hundreds of pounds of deferred pay and probably a little more besides. And when we got married we just had enough to spend about half of it on a little standard ten motor car.

And, second hand it was it’d been up on blocks during the war. Most people because of difficulty in getting petrol, petrol rationing and when the people went away, they’d lift their, have the car up on a jack and put blocks of wood or bricks underneath it, under the axle to keep it off the ground so that the

tyres wouldn’t just go down and flat. And this car reputedly belonged to a little old lady as most cars do when they’re sold second hand. But however it was a nice little car and it was the first car we ever had. And we drove to Queensland in it from Melbourne, we were married in Melbourne.

Yeah different people depending on what type of unit they were in, what the specialty was. If you were in the artillery of course you’d learn how to put projectiles in the breach of a field gun.

And you wouldn’t learn that naturally if you were an infantryman or whatever.

Well I was the best man to my sergeant major who was a sergeant when I first met him. He ended up a lieutenant because I gradually helped him along, not unfairly he was worth it. And he asked me when he got married after the war to be his best man. He’s dead now the poor chap, worked for the Queensland and State Insurance, Kevin Tobin.

And I had, yes I had a few good friends but no one specifically. I’ve got lots of army friends scattered around. That paper there, I call it the heap of paper, it’s full of allusions to former colleagues or this that and the other. But

I wasn’t, compared to some people, you know some people came from a particular location and they were together with the bloke who lived in the street or had been to school with them and they stayed in the one unit all the war. But I had a staff job and I just moved on one promotion, not always on promotions, from one unit to

another.

Well that time not very long. Only something like between six and nine months on that occasion.

I went right back to where I’d come from. They gave me another six months as an instructor…

…on photo interpretation.

No, not then but shortly afterwards yes. I went to Southport again to the Pacific Hotel, which is not there anymore. Southport and after that was finished I went up to the Tablelands. And from there skipping ahead a bit I went to Morotai in the Dutch East Indies and that was a stepping stone to

North Borneo.

No, not particularly. No I, it was just one of those things. I would’ve been quite happy to stay there you know, for a reasonable time and take my

whatever turned up.

Yes, yes I was I s’pose. I was but I punctiliously took my Atebrin, which was about all we got in those days. Clarissa didn’t get malaria either. That’s right, she was

a, the skin colour, pigmentation, Clarissa went quite yellow. She used to wear a hat in Borneo which was a China, yes that’s right when you were on the beach but it was a native hat like a Chinese Coolie hat. Plaited and made of palm leaves of something or other and at 50 yards you’d swear that it was a Chinese woman in a bikini or

whatever you wore.

Yes.

No just a continuation. You still needed a lot of mapping you still needed reference to maps, very much so because the photographs were of areas which were and should’ve been anyhow, on maps.

Except for the man-made objects that sometimes war installations, like anti-aircraft guns and things like that which had been put in by man-made or efforts of the enemy.

Could I?

Where?

Well no I didn’t but I heard them in Borneo in the landing and afterwards.

No, Kokoda was earlier, I wasn’t in Kokoda. Clarissa was.

Clarissa wasn’t on the…

Clarissa wasn’t actually on the trail, she was at the end of the trail.

Where there were wounded and sick and there were a lot of sick brought back. Sick from scrub typhus and other tropical diseases, hookworm and you name it.

I didn’t carry any because all the, when we went to New Guinea I together with about half a dozen of my men, we were given a Douglas C-47, that’s a biscuit bomber

DC-3 in civilian terms. There’s still a couple of them flying around in different parts of the world. And we had a lot of, not a lot of equipment but sufficient heavy equipment to warrant being carted up on our own and that’s how we got up there. Took a while to get up there we had engine trouble, I don’t know whether it was

real or not but the air force chaps if they tell you they’ve got engine trouble and they want to stay overnight somewhere, it’s not always due to engine trouble. It’s some sort of trouble but it’s not necessarily engine trouble.

No mother hadn’t died no.

Oh my grandmother, she died while I was still in the light horse. At that time stationed in Cabarlah, just outside Toowoomba, there’s still an army

camp there and our unit went into a paddock and made it into an army base with the help of the engineers of course, but we were the first to occupy it and the army took it over and they’re still there.

No, my sister, well yes. Yes I would’ve had that yes. Betty was in Brisbane

working for the Americans, American army and my father depending on when I came back I can’t remember precisely, I think my father might’ve been still up in North Queensland, North-west Queensland working as a clerk in the CCC, Civil Construction Corps.

I mentioned of course, I know I’m repeating myself, it was a great pleasure to me to know that even though he wasn’t here to receive it, that he was as it were posthumously awarded a recognition by, in forms of a medal.

But a lot of people of course would’ve got it. It wasn’t, he wasn’t just chosen, the army, the government many years after the event of course opened up their hearts, under the Howard government I think, to repay the efforts of a great number of people who hadn’t had a great deal of recognition before.

The unit at this time, not the overall formation was the

it was one of three that were formed, not all at once, called an AAAPIU Australian Army Aerial Photographic Interpretation Unit. ‘Apew’ that’s a mouthful isn’t it?

I commanded one of them. In turn I commanded two,

numbers Two and Three. And a colleague of mine that I’d been in the army with, he got number one, but there was no, one wasn’t a, they were all equal.

Well first of all I suppose you had to have good eyesight.

And you had to be able to work out what you were looking at. It sounds easy but a lot of factories in places like Saura Bay or some of the installations were very difficult but we had textbooks which showed us certain views from certain angles and certain heights and different scales

of certain factories and so forth and so on. But fortunately for me most of our work was not of industrial areas.

Not map, do interpretations of.

Jungles and areas where these

battles were going on, Buna, Sanananda, they were on the other side when the Japanese were forced back over the range. The Owen Stanleys, they got within 30 miles of Port Moresby, they could see it in the distance I s’pose and then they were gradually forced back. They over-extended themselves

and of course the Australian resistance stiffened as they got closer and more troops were rushed in, (spoon UNCLEAR) troops who’d been in the Middle East. Some of them were former CMF units who’d been posted there before the Japanese arrived.

Yes, it was something which wasn’t really taught to us, undoubtedly other people would’ve become aware of it but I introduced it into my courses at the school,

School of Military Intelligence. I found that the vegetation that grew for example some of the palm trees only grew in brackish water, other palm trees needed fresh water. Other trees could grow in salt water and it followed logically that allowing for the

non-scientific aspect of it, that if you could, if you saw a photograph for example that had a complete canopy on it, if you could follow the vegetation you could follow to some degree what was on the ground underneath the canopy. The easy example of course would be swamps.

I mentioned brackish water and fresh water, sago I think if I remember rightly grew in fresh water and some of the other farms I’ve just forgotten exact names of them grew in brackish water. And the palm trees looked much the same. After a while you got used to telling the difference.

So I tried to at least introduce the thought to infantrymen who were working, fighting in those areas that they should also take notice of the canopy to try to determine what was underneath. Of course ordinary jungle luxuriant, big heavily timbered areas would’ve been

on dry ground. And that was one of the things that I most wanted to find out in New Guinea. We did some training up in the Tamborine Mountain and Beechmont areas behind the Gold Coast and seeing that the school was at Southport, I arranged for the RAAF

to take a number of photographs, runs which I mentioned before forming a series of runs, side by side overlapping which is called a mosaic and single ones and also verticles, not verticles obliques for training purposes. And probably the same sort of photographs would be used today in the Canungra Jungle Training School.

Black and white yes. We did see the odd colour one but black and white. Colour wasn’t widely introduced ever to my knowledge, but when I was working on the photographs for the attack on Tarakan which is, I didn’t go there on the ground at all but the 26th

Brigade, one third that is of the 9th Division went back there, or went there and they took the area back and the same Digger [‘Diver’] Derrick that I told you got a VC, he was killed there. One night when I was on the other side of the island, I was duty officer and I picked up the phone when it rang in the duty officer’s tent, had to stay awake all night of course,

and they were sending in from the various units spread around the duty statements, not the duty statements, the casualty statements for the day and it came as a great shock to find that Digger [‘Diver’] Derrick had been killed. He insisted on going back even though he was highly decorated more than once, I think he thought if he stayed back in Australia which is what the

army was pressing him to do, he’d been brought back once but he got himself back, he thought they’d think he was squibbing it. That’s my, that was the general feeling.

Just by the gradations in the white at one end and black at the other and all the greys in between

and the design, if you call it a design. Certain types of trees all, they all show different.

Well by annotating the photographs, if they were black and white photographs and the portion that you were wanting to put an arrow on and a little caption,

you had the choice of using white ink or black ink. If it was a light part you’d use black ink and if it were a dark part you’d use white ink. And if you wanted to of course you could always have something typed out and adhere a little piece of paper on it. But most times the annotations were done using a fine pen and a draftsmen to do it.

And then sometimes we took photographs of the photographs. Sometimes we’d put grids on them, you know A, B, C, D, E, F across the top and then numerals down the side or vice versa. So we could, the troops could use that in order to send a message to somebody say, “Go to F4,” for example.

Traces yes, did a lot of traces yes.

Various types of tracing paper and we even had to use at times the paper that architects use, they don’t use it any longer, it’s back to front I think, blue prints they called them. That’s gone by the board

but we did use that sometimes.

No we were not making maps, we might’ve made sketch maps but not survey maps.

Topographical features or enemy weapons. Weapon pits, trenches, supply depots, tracks.

Tracks are very easy to see on photographs because if you, if troops go out for example in the middle of the night to gaze up at the stars against a tree or something, then you would find that they flattened the grass and it stood out as plain as a whistle the next day when you saw the photographs, you took the photograph

the next day. And depending on the angle at which the grass was flattened and the angle of reflection from the unflattened parts of the grass, they stood out one way or another.

It didn’t matter, depending on the focal length of

the lens. The longer the focal length and the lower you were, the higher the scale.

For broad brush stuff, I can’t tell you exactly but broad brush stuff for open country where you might only be interested in the mountains or the topography

it’d be one in 32,000 or one in 40,000, maybe one in fifty but if you wanted to really be able to look through windows into a building and it was of something of significance you of course increased the focal length and come down lower if you wanted to. You could obviate having to come down lower if you increased

the focal length of the lens you used.

One in 5,000 one in 3,000 something like that.

The formula was, focal length is, “F = H – H over the focal length of the camera”.

S scale, that’s what scale equalled. In other words what you had to do was you had two heights, you had the height of the aircraft and you had the height above sea level of the land you were taking photographs of so if the aircraft was up at 50,000 feet and you were taking land at ten, then the height above the affected height was 40,000.

Reports? Oh it was only putting in what you would annotate on the photograph or what you could see in the photograph. A lot of people preferred to read one’s description and other people like to, with a bit of help from an annotation, use their own

brainpower to work out what they were looking at. They didn’t have to be told. I remember talking once to, when we were here in Australia and I was improving the maps, the poor maps we had. The GSOI [General Staff Officer Grade 1] which was the senior bloke to me, colonel at the time

he queried me about this. I was trying to avoid too much written reporting and just putting annotations on the photographs and letting people work it out for themselves, see it actually in graphical form as distinct from seeing words and of course naturally sometimes one was better than the other depending on the circumstances. But we had

a long discussion about it. I half persuaded him but he was the boss.

The longest I ever worked in one go was during a battle for a place called The Pocket

in Borneo and I worked for the best part of three days and nights. About two and a half. And I was out on my feet almost and about eight o’clock in the morning I went back to my canvas stretcher and I only stayed there about an hour because canvas stretchers get a dip in the bottom of them and I was lying in my own

perspiration after a short while. But we had time off at night time of course and sometimes during the day, time enough to go down depending on the circumstances, go down and have a swim if we were near a place where we could swim. That always wasn’t the case but it was in Borneo. I was almost always

within sight of the sea somewhere. And it was within sight of the sea that I met my wife to be.

That’s a story. Clarissa’s written about it at some length and I mentioned earlier that she took a lot of persuading

to write that story of hers. It took me altogether, coaxing and one thing and another possibly up to ten years of chipping away. Not every day of course but intervals and finally I got help in so far as one of the ladies’ organisations to which she belonged called PROBUS.

Clarissa was a foundation member of the first PROBUS club here, Ladies’ PROBUS Club and they made her a life member in due course, but they wanted her to give a talk and she gave in on that, capitulated and that opened the door a bit for me because once she got through that, she wasn’t, I helped her write it out.

I will, and she gave this talk and in it she mentioned of course our meeting. And every time she gave a talk she spoke to the RSL [Returned and Services League], she spoke to Rotary, she spoke to War Widows and so forth and so on, all the women, all of the women were gaga about our meeting.

Tropical island, romance and goodness, gracious me. So so far as the women folk are concerned it’s very romantic. But how we met was after that period of working those long hours that I told you, my general, General Woodham, originally from Orange, decided that he’d give some of his officers who had

been working hard and long, a rest. And he had a bit of a sense of humour and I got a message one day from one of the officers, other staff officers saying that the old man wanted me to go over to a little island off the coast and I could have the general’s launch, it would be ready to take me. The Japs were cleared off it we though, and to be

down the beach at a certain time. And I went down to the beach in the morning complete with ammunition and weapon and I found three other officers there. And that of course made my slow old brain work and I realised what was happening because I said, “What are we doing here? What’s on?” And they said, “We’re waiting for the sisters.” And we were waiting for four sisters,

and Clarissa happened to be one. So eight of us, four pairs went off. I can hardly tell you the name of any of the others and I didn’t speak with Clarissa on the way over which is four or five miles out to this other island. I can’t remember speaking to her during the day, we spent the day swimming and shooting pot shots, taking pot shots at coconuts with pistols and rifles

teaching the girls how to pull triggers, press triggers and so on. But I happened to sit next to her on the way back and I thought she was attractive and lady-like and very nice. So I asked, “Could I see her.” She said

“Yes, but,” she said, “you know I’m pretty busy. When we’ve got time off I don’t have much spare time.” So she finally consented to give me a date about six weeks hence and in the meantime I thought of a device to get into the, go to the hospital to go to the sisters’ mess and I had a book on how to learn Bahasa Malay

language, the Bahasa Malay language in 20 easy lessons or something and that’s about the only thing I had. So I wrapped it up in a sheet of paper and took it over and asked whether she’d like to borrow it. I don’t know what she thought of that, however it ended that she upped that in six weeks time or maybe a little sooner I saw her. And about a week after I saw her I

we met at a little party they gave in one of the officer’s messes and then I got transferred away from Borneo all together, down to the Dutch East Indies to the island of Amboyna [Ambon]. You heard of Amboyna? There’s been a bit of trouble there, the Muslims have been burning the churches down and so on. Christian churches. And so

that was a catalyst I suppose. I saw her quite a few nights before I went away and then we corresponded. Then I thought she might be going, I was offered a job on a promotion to major, to go to Japan and I touched upon this with Clarissa by post, mail. All of our letters were numbered because they didn’t all

run according to, the postal service was a little doubtful at times. You’d overlap and sometimes you’d get three letters all at once and then you wouldn’t get any and that sort of thing. I thought that she was going to go up there and join the hospital, they were raising sisters to go up and man if that’s the word, the Australian hospital.

And towards the end of my posting down in Amboyna where I was looking, helping to solve the mystery of the missing troops, Australian troops of what was known as Gull Force [2/21st Batallion], which was massacred there, we found the graves eventually and we had to comb the Pacific to find Japanese who’d been in the battle.

One battalion against three Japanese marine divisions. And I’ve told you enough about the comparative sizes of formations. A division is pretty big, and a battalion is about a thousand people, a thousand men. And we finally found a bloke of all places up in the Aleutian Islands who knew exactly where the graves were and they’d all had their hands tied together with,

prisoners of war they were, just after the battle with sig wire, Australian sig wire, signals wire used for field telephones. They’d been made to dig their own, out in the jungle, their own graves which were pits about a cricket pitch long, about as wide as a cricket pitch and they had to kneel down on the side and get their heads lopped off.

Well I found after, Clarissa wasn’t going to New Guinea, sorry to Japan and so when I finished the job in Ambon I went back and I told my boss the deputy director of army intelligence that I didn’t want to go. I explained to him why and

because by that time I’d decided that Clarissa would make a good wife if she’d have me. And I might add that in our little discussion, our more privy discussion in an oblique way I let her know I didn’t go into marriage lightly, when I did get married I didn’t propose at that stage, that I didn’t want the same thing to happen to me as had happened to my father.

And I was right, she wasn’t a butterfly although she was pretty enough to be. So we came back to Australia and I met her when she got back. I went up to the matron and chief down in Victoria Barracks in Melbourne and asked her when the hospital was coming back and she told me, and she even told me the night and the train, the time,

and I was on the station when the train came in. Troop train. And about a week later we were engaged. Six weeks or so later we got married in Brighton in Victoria at an Anglican Church, St Andrews by Arch Deacon Hewitt.

I’d met all the sisters in the hospital and she was generally the most attractive to me in every way. She was, she struck me as being very genuine and that’s a quality I value extremely highly, very highly indeed.

And I’ve never been disappointed. She’s a woman of high principals, a wonderful mother and very loving and sincere, faithful and has many qualities which one can admire in a woman.

Well they were only drives in a jeep, there was nowhere to go really except down the beach and have a swim and not at night time at any case and we’d sit on the beach and probably it was romantic if there was a moon there I can’t remember that, but palm trees

and the lap lap of the waves and all that sort of thing. We had a couple of little picnics, the war was over by this time and not long over, only a few weeks. The Japanese were being gathered up into locations under the supervision of small numbers of Australians who had been put there to ensure that they followed faithfully the terms of surrender, and I might say that they did.

Excepting a few units who continued fighting and did so for possibly three or four months. Quite a number of Australians were killed after the war finished officially. But most Japanese followed the injunctions of the Emperor and of course the atom bomb was the cause of all that.

Well it came as a complete surprise to us, I knew and I’d say a great number of people who took interest in general news. We got the news on the radio up there and we got a bit of news and army papers. We got out of date Australian papers of course but we knew that

the British and for that matter the Germans and possibly others, that those were the three prime ones I’d say, were busy working on atomic weaponry. And the Americans although they probably take credit for the atom bomb they didn’t make it. They had a lot of

people helping them, including some Germans. Of course the peace was declared in Europe before it was out here in the Pacific.

I was on Labuan Island in North West Borneo, that’s where I was. I’ve got a map somewhere on which I

marked out where I’d been, but that’s where I was in North West Borneo.

Nothing in particular. Nothing much that you could do you just thought ‘well that’s good.’ No celebrations or anything. We might’ve had an extra drink or something.

We could get drink at that time but the problem was that you’d go for a long time without any liquor at all then a ship would come in and it would have liquor on it, it’d be all gin. And you’d drink gin for the next two or three months until the gin would run out and you’d start all over again, and what you’d get next time you wouldn’t know. There were more brands of

gin, bathtub gin or whatever gin than I ever saw in my life. I’d never heard of them. I think a lot of people were in on the business of making money whilst the going was good. It was obviously passed as fit for human consumption but it was a bit hard to have to put up with drinking gin if you don’t particularly like it. Although I like gin and tonic now.

No, I can, something I found that you can become inured to it, after you haven’t had any liquor at all for a while, you’d drink gin and it was nice and by the time you had three you were a bit hickey, a bit tiddly. And within about three weeks you’d find you were drinking six instead of three. But

fortunately I never got sick on it.

No, I hadn’t been out a couple of months, we left

I’m not quite sure but I think we’d left and gone up to Morotai. We were in Morotai for about six months before the expedition was launched. They had to assemble all the war ships and the supporting ships. We had ships to carry the troops in, the whole division and all the weaponry and all the supplies and we had a lot of American rocket ships.

It was quite a Guy Fawkes night if you know who Guy Fawkes is. Or Guy Fawkes morning when we landed, there were more bangs and wiz-bangs and explosions and smoke than you’d ever seen in your life.

No, just different location, different targets. I did a lot of work for the landing on Tarakan and a little bit on Balikpapan but that was not a 9th Division attack, it was done by the 7th Division. But my sister unit was working on

that and we were working on the 9th Division and occasionally we’d get a little bit of a leftover from one or the other and we’d compare notes. So I had some little hand in Balikpapan, that was in the south of the island of Borneo.

Much more heavy artillery in caves, looking out over the sea

big ones that they’d fire once and then wheel them back on railway tracks into the, they were well prepared the Japanese there. And Balikpapan was a bigger operation that the one in North Borneo, it was much more heavily defended. But there was a tidy little fight on Labuan Island and then on the mainland.

Labuan Island is in the Bay of Brunei on the southern end of the bay where the Sultan of Brunei lives today. And they live on oil money.

No not necessarily no, that didn’t strike me we just, picking out or marking by annotation or writing reports about any Japanese defences that we thought were significant. And feeding quantities of unmarked, unannotated photographs as well because they were used to supplement the maps or the

lack of maps, replace maps. I don’t know what maps we had of Balikpapan but I would say that at that stage of the war a great number of our troops and units were using photographs because the more remote jungle areas, tropic areas were not well mapped at all.

Yes at times. Yes that’s right. But we were lucky in so far as there were so many aircraft there at that time and people were really

tuned up and we many times we didn’t have to ask for photographs they’d just come. I think I’d mentioned that some time earlier, I think I did, that in the last six months we must’ve issued a quarter of a million photographs. Mainly of the big ones that I mentioned.

Basically. There was already an Australian war graves team there and a team dealing with Japanese

bringing to boot those responsible in the Japanese army and services for war crimes. A war crimes team there. And I was sent down as an additional intelligence officer to help them.

Oh no it was in, it was in the first days of, in the middle probably or the end of January 1942, 7th of December I think the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

’41 and it would’ve been in January ’42, maybe even at the beginning.

They went in there, obviously planned it all. They attacked of course Malaya and then they also attacked on Amboyna. The island is Amboyna, the township is Ambon.

Gull Force, G.U. double L, that was their code name “Gull Force.”

Only the broadest briefing.

A battalion group, because if you send a battalion in, it doesn’t have any infrastructure on its own,

it usually belongs to a division, but this was a group independent battalion sent in on its own. So it had to have small attachments of army service corps for petrol and necessary foodstuffs, ordinance for the supply, artillery to help them fight, probably a troop of artillery, and other bits and pieces.

Altogether it possibly amounted to maybe eleven or twelve hundred men. A few Dutch got caught up in it and maybe even a few Americans, airmen who’d been shot down.

Well I can’t be sure, I was of course up in the islands and I don’t know what was in the newspapers down here. It happened at the airfield, Laha L A H A and all we knew was that there’d been a number of survivors taken into a prison of war camp on the island of Amboyna. But there were a lot more unaccounted for.

And it was the unaccounted for ones that we were after. When I say after to find out what happened to them.

No, I took out a couple of teams of men, guards mainly

with the Japanese, normally one, who’d been and an interpreter I guess, who had been dragged up from somewhere around the Pacific area generally who had been known to have been, found out to have been, the whole Pacific was being combed for these people,

involved in the divisions, the marine divisions, Japanese that had been known to be in the Battle of Laha airfield in Ambon. And in the case that, two cases that I took out they led us to parts of the jungle, wasn’t real jungle it was really secondary growth that had

grown up, probably it had been cleared during the time of the war around the area. In a tropical area the trees, put a stick in and it will grow into a fence post very quickly with leaves. And the trees were by this time of course, we were four years later, they were 30 feet high.

So we went through this area, these areas stumbling over tree roots and undergrowth and all sorts of things. They’d say, “Well this is where we think it is.” “This is it.” Look at the sun and look around the place. We’d say, “Okay, here’s a spade and there’s a pick, hop in and dig.” And no doubt the guards

would train their rifles on them in case they went berserk with a pick or a shovel in their hand and in my case it was all a fizzle. They’d say, “No, it’s not here it must be over there.” We’d go through all of this and finally give up. But they finally got a sergeant major of some sort from somewhere in the Pacific, I think it was the Aleutian islands up, you know where they are

right up near Alaska and, going out from Alaska towards Japan and he led somebody in the war graves or somebody else but not me, to where the massacres had been. And I went out there several times. I even was so enured to what was going on that I even sat down on the edge of the pits,

sounds dreadful now doesn’t it. All the heads were down one end and the astonishing thing was I’ll never forget it but the, probably two out of four or maybe three out of four of the bodies had identification on them. Either watches or prayer books or wallets with photographs of their

family or something like that. Particularly the watches, I’m quite sure that if the Australians had been burying Japanese, they would’ve had the watches.

Oh yes, largely skeletal. Little bits of faded green

jungle green cloth and things.

Yes dreadful, very sad.

No, that was the

war crimes or rather war graves people. Everyone had dog tags. That’s an American term, you know what that is don’t you.

That’s another American term.

I’ve got ours in there, I’ve got one of mine, you get two, one to stay with the body and one to go to the war graves.

And at some stage after Clarissa and I got serious I took one of hers and gave her one of mine and I have my tags which are in there, bear the name – one’s got H.W. Miller on it and the other’s got C.F. Murie, Loland Scott’s name which was Clarissa’s.

So when they would’ve picked up my body they would’ve said, “Who is she, or is she he? Which one is it?”

Might’ve been I guess.

No nothing to do with that I just hadn’t thought of asking her to marry, I don’t think. Well I might’ve thought about it but I hadn’t determined to, I just thought that we’d continue our relationship up in Japan if she went up there and after in due course we’d come back to Australia. As it happened of course she didn’t go and so I

had to make up my mind whether I would go. If I had I would’ve been a major about six years before I became a major. But that doesn’t matter. So yes, I was given a nice job up in New Guinea.

Well I was a little disappointed, I would’ve liked to have gone to Japan but I think the call of the wild or something was stronger than anything and I didn’t weep over it.

Well she just felt that she had had enough of nursing and war.

It was pretty tough on the girls, pretty tough days. I think I said earlier to your colleague that up in New Guinea particularly, they had rain every day, the wards were tented, marquis, they were absolutely choc full. They started off with beds

on each side of the marquis and then they got so full they had beds down the middle where you’d normally walk. And then they got so more crowded that they put them on stretchers and put the stretchers under, that far above the ground underneath the beds. And they went from a 600 bed hospital to over a 2,000 bed hospital in six weeks when the

Kokoda track battle was at its height. And no floor boards, bare ground, water running through the tent. The girls wore knee boots, rubber, Wellingtons all the time except when they went back to their mess or their tent. And they had to wear long

I’ve forgotten what they called them, the sort of clothes that Churchill used to wear with long trousers.

No not jodhpurs, anyway they had to wear long trousers.

No right down with gators on them to stop mosquito bites, or help to stop mosquito bites. And rub their faces and hands with repellent.

And they were flat out. Clarissa had at the height of all of this for quite some time, 120 patients. One orderly, a male orderly to help her, army orderly not a trained nurse. They didn’t have male nurses in those days. Kerosene lanterns, primus stove to heat

the instruments on to do the disinfection, make the instruments antiseptic if that’s the word. There’s another word.

Sterile.

Yes she did.

That was only she didn’t want to stay in the tropics nursing.

When she came back she went to a hospital in Melbourne until we got married and then after that she worked for a while in Lady Davidson Hospital, a repat hospital in Sydney and then when we went to New Guinea she got offered a job, chased up by the

New Guinea Health Department and she was working as a nurse in control of a number of native nurses partly trained. In native villages and schools and things like that. However I’m taking her, interfering in her story.

Yes, I’ve got them all, all numbered. I haven’t read them since, I haven’t opened them since. I’ve got two or three folders about that deep, letters to me and my letters to her. In brown covers, just the ordinary brown covers that we have for putting documents in.

No we left Melbourne and went to Queensland.

6th of May.

And about 18 months after that

I found out on the grapevine that I could, might be able to achieve what I had always hoped to do and that was to do a Duntroon Course and join the regular army, the permanent army it was called then. And I wrote to my old general that I used to chat to about his career and

prospects of careers and things. He was a brigadier, brigadier general that amounts to and used to be called brigadier general but lately they’ve dropped the general bit, except the Americans they still have it. And so I wrote to him and expected to be interviewed or something and I got back a letter which amongst other things said, “Yes,”

and contained a rail warrants. In those days you had to get a warrant to travel, people weren’t allowed during the war to move interstate freely, they had to get approval. And the army in any case had their own warrants for you to get on a troop train and so on. And I had rail warrants to go down to Brisbane

and when I got there they talked to me a little bit. Not as if they were investigating me in any way they just asked me out to lunch and I briefly saw the general and next thing I knew I was on a train going down to a course to Duntroon Course. It was only a short one, it only lasted three months because they took,

not only for me but for other people they organised a course taking our army service up to that date into account. And I completed that successfully and came out in the Commonwealth Gazette as becoming a fully fledged member of the Australian Staff Corps which was the elite people of the permanent army.

And that was in 1948.

Exactly and that’s what I’ve said in there.

No, no I went to Germany in, at one stage it was to be

December ’48 and it was deferred and turned out to be March 1949. I went to the, got posted to the military mission in Germany.

Berlin.

It was at the time of the Berlin Airlift, you ever heard of the Berlin Airlift?

Well the Russians had a ring of tanks around Berlin.

They were intent on forcing the allies to evacuate Berlin although it had been accepted in the peace terms by the allies, of course the Russians were our allies then, nominally. And the aim was to get rid of the allies in Berlin, take it

over, hold so called elections which would be stage-managed of course, they didn’t say that but that was obvious what would happen, and then use East Germany, what it eventually became well for a while, some years, as a springboard into the rest of Europe with the view to taking it over

as a common estate. And they did everything in their power to upset the apple cart and prevent supplies getting in. They blocked the canals, the stopped the road traffic, there were trucks on the autobahns [highways] for miles. A mile and a half maybe. And they’d make them unload all of their trucks of supplies and then they’d get them to

load them back again most times. You weren’t allowed to send troop trains through without the blinds being pulled down so you couldn’t look out, day or night and see Russian Army units on the side of the railway track or any of the centres you went through. However the allies mustered enough aircraft, they dragged in everything they could except Tiger Moths.

People like Branson, there were predecessors who, entrepreneurs…

The role was basically was to assist the Immigration Department with processing from the intelligence point of view, the

hordes, more than hordes, the masses of people that were displaced from Poland and Latvia, Estonia, Holland, Lithuania, East Germany who fled before the advancing Russians, fled westwards and they parked them in Germany until Germany was – West Germany was bulging at the seams,

put them into schools and put them into barracks and put them into wherever they could. And the international refugee organisation which was an earlier name for the equivalent which still exists under the United Nations today, processed them up to a point, put them into camps and nations like America and Canada, Australia

sent immigration teams in with medicos and people who could assess them from the immigration criteria point of view. And myself and another chap who were trained intelligence officers, were sent over in response to a request by Arthur Calwell at that time the Minister for Immigration, made to the

government who passed it on to the Department of Defence and they passed it on to the Department of Army and the Department of Army passed it on to the director of Military Intelligence who chose me and a colleague to go over to Berlin to help do the intelligence processing. To make sure that we didn’t bring back to Australia too many Nazis and or later, but more particularly when it became known, more

Russian spies.

We only knew it because the British and the Americans in particular had large intelligence organisations in Germany. Large ones. And they were running agents

into Russia as fast as the Russians were running agents into the west. There were a number of such ancillary organisations and the agents from our side that we were running into Germany, into Russia or the eastern states would report,

they ran agents in the displaced persons camps where there were hundreds of thousands of people. And all of this information was fed into I was going to say computers but I doubt it was computers, but it was fed into a central organisation called the Central Travel Bureau, CTB which was a nice little

disguised name if you like. And they had the power to refuse or grant exit from Germany. Which again was a very nice device and we had full access to all of those organisations. And every name that was passed by the Australian Immigrations teams

was passed to us and we passed the through the screening of those organisations.

And if we wished, for example we briefed the, we had briefed the immigration teams and there were probably twenty of them give and take,

we had briefed them on things to be alert for. And if they had anyone in particular they had been a bit suspicious about, and remember that they did hundreds of interviews I’m not saying they were foolproof but they often felt there was something fishy about the stories, they passed them on to us. And on a rotational basis, going around, we would interview them.

And that’s what we did. The other thing was that besides that, we had a secondary task which was then not as highly developed as it is now of passing information back to Australia about modus operandi and for example

well more on the espionage side but taking the modern context, terrorism. Passing that back.

Well yes but you must remember that there were two of us.

It was, I’ve been down to enquiries held in Canberra which have received publicity, people who like Aarons, Laurie Aarons, his son or grandson or something he had made an awful lot of fuss through the ABC

at one stage about Australia being full of Nazis and war criminals. And I had to go down to a Royal Commission and be interviewed as to what went on. He told a, he had a lot of misconceptions let’s put it that way, some of which might’ve been deliberate.

No.

We had Jenny in Australia, when we went over to Germany Jenny was 16 months to start off with, on that photograph you saw on the ship on the Strath Ed. What was she dear? It doesn’t matter.

And Sally was born over there.

No she didn’t, she was number three on the list of Australians born in Germany held by the Australian Embassy now, it was then the Australian Military Mission had control of it then, she was number three on that list. And up until the age of 14

she and or her parents were given the opportunity if we wanted to avail ourselves of it, of her becoming a German citizen or being an Australian citizen. But it wasn’t very difficult to maintain her Australian citizenship.

Fascinating.

Fascinating.

Thousands of them dear.

No I didn’t go to the east at all because the Russians knew I’m sure full well, that we were intelligence officers and it wouldn’t have been worth the risk. I wouldn’t have been allowed to go. I stole, I got across there once by accident. I went to the

first year that I was there we had an Anzac Day gathering of all the Australians we could find in the British army or anywhere else, a couple of Chaplains and things like that in Germany. And naturally we arranged to be there, my colleague and I and in the morning afterwards for some reason or other when I got into the staff car, I went to sleep.

I don’t know quite why that was after Anzac Day but however I went to sleep and when I woke up I saw, after a few minutes of wondering where the hell we were I saw a great big bridge with a piece missing out of the middle and it was over the Oder and the Oder was well on the way the Poland. And the Russians for fear that it would be used by the Allies

to attack Russia, had never repaired the middle. They only put a temporary Bailey Bridge in. So I whistled my driver around and said, “Hoi, back that way George.” Wire was his name, and every time we went past every exit and entry to the autobahn had a guard post on it and every time we went past

a bloke would come out with a, they have a stick we called them lollipops, with a disc on it about that big with a red spot in the middle and the rest was white and if they wanted you to stop they’d go like that. Just like the French do. And he’d come out swinging this stick and I’d think ‘oh my god this is it,’ and he looked out, well he probably saw the number plate which was the Australian Military Mission number plate with Diplomatic Corps on it, and

he had enough doubt to let us go. And we went past about six of these and got back into Berlin without being stopped.

I don’t know, he might’ve had too much schnapps or on the other hand, not that I, I s’pose they did drink in those days. But however

I don’t know, he’d driven on the road before the autobahn.

Wonderful. We’ve got a friend here who’s been over twice as a guest of the Berlin Council, city council for a fortnight at a time, all expenses paid airfares and everything else, together with a lot of other people, mainly Brits

although there were a few Australians and he’s of British nationality. Well he’s Australian now but he was a pilot. He did 534 or… I’m not quite sure whether it was 254 or 524 trips into Berlin. Day and night it went on for… Am I alright? What

do you think I’m. Oh no it’s all right. Just lost weight dear I’ve lost my boozies. And they flew around the clock 24 hours a day, day and night, hail and snow and sunshine. And they would land and wouldn’t stop the engines, they’d just circle around go into a line, open the doors and

chaps would run alongside with a truck and while the truck was moving and the vehicle was moving they’d transfer the supplies from one to tother. And when they got to the other end hopefully they’d be empty and they’d circle around and away they’d go. Every half minute for eleven months. Well that was half minute at the height of it, maybe they were a bit slower to start off with. They built a new airfield making three airfields in Berlin.

No, the Germans, I didn’t,

I never questioned them and I never thought about it but there was no doubt that the American forces in those areas put a lot of Jewish people into the offices. Offices. The documentation was all examined carefully by persons, Americans who happened to be Jewish and they were of course most

meticulous about looking for German war criminals.

Oh yes they brought a number of them to boot eventually. A couple of them committed suicide and they had trials in

No Nuremberg was at that time, that was the first lot. I’ve got a book somewhere about it. And I’ve been in the

a couple of the camps. I’ve seen the mounds under which, the same story as the Japanese except the mounds were covered in there. Full of, they just bulldozed people into these pits.

Not while it was going on.

Yes it was interesting of course. I learned more about the Nazi machine of course in preparation for that job and whilst I was there. I’ve got some of my notes and books here. And I know a fair bit about it.

Yes of course.

Nearly all of the barracks in Germany which had belonged to the armed forces of Germany and also the Nazi forces, because they didn’t trust the Wehrmacht [German armed forces], the ordinary German troops, they had their own party troops. Party faithful as it were and they formed their own special services.

There were two intelligence organisations for example, the SS [Schutzstaffel guards] which was the party one and then the, for example in the army case, the army intelligence. And all of those barracks that weren’t occupied by allied occupation forces were full of refugees. Absolutely and the barracks were nothing like our barracks they were great big

buildings by a dozen or more, big four or five, six storey buildings built to withstand harsh European winters.

Yes I saw at the very least hundreds and hundreds.

And Poland.

But some of them of course occasionally would be Russian and they’d be

pretending to be, they’d have false documentation.

I’d just send them back into the stream. My job was to stop them getting to Australia. I just couldn’t prove anything, I couldn’t take them to court. I’d just not accept them.

Well I had no doubt that the, what information I was getting from the allied intelligence staffs was accurate because everybody, didn’t well, were concerned to get rid of war criminals and nazis, people back here in Australia of course, the papers used to be full of

statements in the house by people like Eddie Ward and others, accusing the government of allowing Nazis into Australia. And they’d use such lurid terms as ‘you can hear the stamp of jack boots up Pitt Street.’ ‘Hitler Jugend,’ that’s the Hitler Youth and so forth. Stories right left and centre.

Well I had an in-built hatred of Russian spies for a start. And gradually of course it became

apparent long before the public knew about it, to people in the business that the Russians were running, they had more spies in the west than you could believe. And gradually the British and the Americans gave up any concern about Nazis because they got them, most of the war criminals that they were concerned about. They had no machine

to speak of, no machinery organisation whereas Russia was very much a threat. And for some years until the Pontecorvo case and the Rosenbergs and a series of spy cases hit the headlines, we in Australia were concerned about Nazis walking up Pitt Street, marching up Pitt Street.

No, the immigration people did. And I used to have, and my colleague also we had sometimes when we’d knock back somebody they would feel that, they’d question it to put it mildly because they wanted to fill the ships.

And the bloke in the Hague for example or the bloke in France, they had refugees too, they would have I don’t doubt that each chief migration officer in each of those places and others would be bursting themselves to gain kudos by getting the most people away. And they had schedules, ships to fill. And if a ship was held up and they were fifty short and you took ten or twelve

of them out, twenty, immigration people were not too happy. I was accused of reading too many spy books at one stage. I was. Sidney Hawler was the author I was accused of, the Deputy Chief Migration Officer told me that I’d been reading too many Sidney Hawler novels, he was an Edgar Wallace type writer of those days.

They might’ve done that yes.

Well I don’t think it was.

Well the army insisted I come back.

No about four. Yes, they said,

“Come on, we need a photo interpreter, you’re the only bloke around the place supposedly that knows anything about it.”

Eighteen months or so I s’pose.

Mmm.

Yeah.

No I was stationed in, overseas a fair bit of the time. Partly due to I suppose my overseas experience that I had had in Berlin and Europe. But I was in, I think I mentioned to you before but in succession I was in Berlin, then regional director in ASIO in

New Guinea, and then we went to the embassy in Belgrade and then with postings in Australia in between, and then we ended up in the High Commission in London.

’74 to ’77.

November in each case.

Well we were concerned to make sure or do the best we could to see they didn’t and I don’t think they did. It was a bit inconvenient at times but they enjoyed it and as a… Jenny became a school teacher and Sally I insisted if she was coming over with us

which she wanted to do instead of going on to university, that she at least went to a secretarial college which she did for a couple of years I suppose and got a very good job when she came out. She became secretary to the new head of the musical department of EMI [Electrical and Music Industries]. His Master’s Voice. And then she had a succession of very good jobs after that and then she went to

university all on her own bat.

I’m sure I could think of a lot of things that I could’ve done better but nothing that’s earth shattering.

No not really, not at all no. And I ended up with a very nice family and as Jenny said as I told you earlier I think, “Daddy, you’re lucky that Sally and I are squares.”

What was the best?

Well, it was what I had an inkling for, a leaning to and it all came from a love of maps which probably started as I told you, when I was at primary school when I had four or five, six maps, I can’t remember, they varied from time to time up on the wall. And I still love maps, I’ve got two or three old atlases in there.

And that was really the, what led me to intelligence, reconnaissance then and from reconnaissance to intelligence reports and getting a job in the army as an intelligence officer. There were many facets of intelligence of course, there’s listening – wireless listening and quite a number of other things and I’ve rubbed

shoulders with all of them one way and another at various times in different places.

Yes.

By the stars.

No, Clarissa reads a map upside down and then stands on her head to tell me.

Invariably she says, “You go

there, no, no, no, no, no. Yes, you go that way.”

Sometimes I do it by instinct don’t I dear.

Well I don’t really think you could, you couldn’t in any way demand that. You join the army and they assess you at the end of your, assuming you went through Duntroon, at the end of it they’d say, “Well, you should go to artillery,” or that

might mean you were good at mathematics. Or that you should go, take command of a fighting unit or maybe you were good on administration so you’d go into ordinance or something else.

Mmm. I’ve had several people come to me and despite the wishes of their or the disinclination of their mothers to

allow them to go into the army, tried to persuade them otherwise, the mothers have ended up just as satisfied as the men and some of the young blokes are now lieutenant colonels. Since I’ve been living here for 20 years. They’d just got to know I’d been a regular officer and we knew their father and mother and themselves, the one I’m thinking of particularly, he joined the

up at Nambour, he used to go and attend RAAF courses in the, as a young cadet. And he decided that he wanted to join the army and he’s now in the Survey Corps. He’s been over to Washington and been posted there. He called on me the first

year when he came back and there was nothing wrong with him to start off with, but he was about two stone heavier and he was fit and brawny and he could sit down and talk about anything you wanted to. Education had broadened, he was an admirable chap in every way wasn’t he? It made a big difference to him. Not that

he was not a nice chap before but he certainly blossomed.

Well, that’s kind of you, that’s nice of you to say that. Thank you.