Australians at War Film Archive

Well I was born in Subiaco, but Mum moved back up to the goldfields about two weeks after I was born, that was in 1936. Lived in the goldfields, educated in the goldfields until the age of fourteen, and well, stayed in the goldfields, and went to the army at seventeen years and eight months.

Well no, it started forty years early, before my birth, in 1896 but at the time as I remember it, around about war time, second war time, the place was really booming, it was going berserk. Gold was a big priority for the overseas effort, the war effort and all the rest of it, and mines were all over the place. Dad went into the army on his second attempt,

first attempt he was denied because manpower said he was essential for mining gold.

Underground, yes.

A firm called Paringa Mining Company, it was a British goldmining company, it had its own treatment plants and everything, quite a big mine.

No, no he was a contract, underground miner.

Hard yes, well paid, but very hard life.

He went into the army, finished up, and I think he came out in ’45 end of ’45, ’46, and went back onto the mines again.

He was transport 5th Garrison Battalion, and then he was posted up to Broome and Derby. He was doing dispatch rider work up there. Brought back to Perth on the Chung King, it was a coastal China steam navigation boat that was

doing coastal – commandeered by the Australian Government, doing coastal work here in Western Australia, and I think it was either Shark Bay, or Exmouth that the stoker fireman got hit behind the ear with a swinging block when they were handling cargo, and Dad was temporarily demobbed from the army and taken on as ship’s crew in merchant navy for the rest of the journey back to Fremantle. I have the documentation there, it’s quite interesting.

Hit behind the ear with a swinging block, one that you use for hauling up the cargo.

A stoker, a stoker fireman, from down the engine room.

…and they needed somebody to shovel the coal to keep the old boiler fired up, and Dad was seconded down to that job.

So he did service in the army and the merchant navy in the one term.

Anyhow, he came back to the goldfields, and went underground again mining, and for many years he did a lot of prospecting, our family was

really quite well known at the goldfields for prospecting. We ran the shows down at Widgiemooltha where we had an impurity in our gold, and the School of Mines couldn’t, or wouldn’t tell us, and the university wouldn’t or couldn’t tell us, and nor would the Allsop and Don Assayers, and Dad, that was in the ’48 through to ’63, Dad held that lease, and…

There was an impurity in the gold. They couldn’t smelt out, apart from the copper that gave it a reddish tinge,

and when Dad dropped the lease, within twenty four hours it was snapped up and became Rio Tinto Zinc, oh Nickel, Con Zinc Rio Tinto – nickel, that’s what the impurity was. Anyhow he continued on with his prospecting, and we ran a mine which became Paddington, which was the site of the first big open pit in Kalgoorlie. We had a shaft down there one hundred and thirty two feet,

a little mine we used to call the Pakeha, that’s what it was known as, which is the Maori name for white fella [fellow]. That was good, we worked that from Friday night through to Sunday night, and we’d get all the ore out, and send it in for crushing.

Dad and Bruce Allen and I used to go down. I was working underground in my off time with my father from the age of about ten years of age.

It’s good fun.

Yeah.

Better than doing the washing up, which all us kids had to do. Anyway, I was schooling at Boulder Primary, and my last year at Boulder Primary at age eleven I won a scholarship to Guildford Grammar. I never got there because the other half of the money, Dad lost down another mining hole, prospecting.

You have to put money in to equipment, fuel, to load your explosives, and all the rest of the stuff that you need to operate out there. You can’t take it away from the house, he used to save money and spend it that way.

No, up on the top, when we hauled the ore up and pushed the car underneath on rails, a forty four gallon drum of ore would be loaded on to there, and undo it, push out there, and tip it, bring it back, and hook it up again. The other person would lift it, put the trolley on the rope, and send it down. When it came time for somebody to help downstairs, down the hole, you’d go down there and maybe holding

something, or maybe cleaning up an area underground so that they can do some work or lay track for the trolley to go in and out with the bucket of ore.

We did and we didn’t. There were some times when you thought you were well on the track to getting the big, big one, and most other times you sat there and said, “Where did it go?” That’s the prospecting you see, it’s in your blood and it stays there. Now I’ve in the past

been know to jump in my old four wheel drive and go and do a week, ten days, sitting out on my own about one hundred and forty miles east north east of Kalgoorlie over the other side Lake Rebecca, Lake McLeod, with my dolly pot [small hand operated rock crusher used to sample for ore, and to sample ore for gold].

Crushing up rock, and then you pan it off with water. Most people nowadays use metal detectors, but I hate them with a passion.

Because the idiots use them,

they go through low salt bush areas with the metal detectors and they hear a, “Beep, beep, beep,” they dig a hole, find nothing, or find something, and then suddenly you’d be going along further, and hear another, “Beep, beep,” and they dig another hole, they don’t back fill their holes, and there are people coming through on motor cycles, or horses rounding up stock, or mustering stock, sheep and that, and they go in there. If they left camp at seven in the morning and that happens at half past eight in the morning

they could be lying there until five o’clock at night before anyone starts looking for them. You know no, there is no thought.

Lease holders at one stage were banning people with metal detectors. When I say lease holders, I’m talking about graziers, and rightly so too, because the clowns that use them are inconsiderate ninety nine percent of the time, no. Mining in those days, that was from the end of

the war ’46, to ’54, the mines were in full flight, fully, really going. There was a bit of downturn in the price of gold, and Kalgoorlie started to die back a bit, Kalgoorlie Boulder.

Brilliant.

Population of about twenty six, to twenty eight thousand in the area. We had the first Olympic swimming pool in the state, in

the southern hemisphere, was in Kalgoorlie. You had – I’m not going to talk about those places down on the other corner, the adult street.

Oh doing very well, particularly when the troop trains went through during the war. We had everywhere parks, we had gardens, we had the swimming pool, we had indoor and outdoor movie theatres. We had three movie theatres, two in Kalgoorlie, and one in Boulder, and one heck of a big social structure you know,

everyone looked after everyone. The big difference is the people were part of the town. You know from the seventies onwards the population was transient, coming in, drive in, drive out you know, fly in, fly out, and that ruined the structure, the social structure of the town. I still have family up there but they say there is no comparison whatsoever. You can’t trust, you can’t put anything down, you can’t turn your back, and

that’s the way it is.

Yeah, if you didn’t get caught.

It was a well known thing that if you managed to see something lying on the ground, underground, you could put it in your pocket, as long as you didn’t get caught.

And there was a very big gold stealing thing going on up there, in fact if you wanted to get rid of your gold, you found an

obliging taxi driver, they seemed to know where all the people were that had the money for the gold and things like that.

Oh yes, if you wanted to got to the two-up, [classic Australian gambling game, whereby bets are placed on either heads or tails and two pennies are tossed in the air] you went out with a taxi driver, because the two-up school changed locations with the police raiding it all the time, and all the taxi driver’s knew where they were, and that’s where a lot of the gold changed hands.

It was, oh yes indeed. The other thing was too, if you were a really good

machine miner, underground worker, and you got caught, and you did six months ‘His Majesty’s Pleasure’, [jail], His Majesty at that time at Fremantle – invariably two to three weeks before you got out of gaol, out at Fremantle, the mine underground manager would knock on your front door and say, “Marg, Jack’s coming back in a couple of weeks, tell him he’s still got his job.” It was a social thing in many ways, it was theft, but it was part of the life of

Kalgoorlie.

Culture.

You had to be careful it didn’t have telluride in it because telluride is only found in three places in the world, South Africa is one place, Russia, and Kalgoorlie, and that’s like a silvery metal stuff which attaches to the gold and you check for that by dropping the sample of gold straight whatever into nitric acid, and if it goes purple and

its telluride, then that has been stolen. You have to go out in the bush and light big fires and burn off the telluride and melt the gold down. Then along came, 1954 along came Huey McClune, as I say, a downturn, Huey McClune was I think the father of the private investigator here, Inspector McClune, and he took to the air in a small light aircraft looking for the fires out in the bush where the guys were

doing their smelting.

You’d take out two or three bags of charcoal, and a couple of bags of coke, and get the fire going, really get it going in a big pot.

Oh no, no.

No, no, no, my Dad wouldn’t do a thing like that. No, when I finished, when I left school, I got fed up. I lost it as

far as school was concerned after losing the scholarship.

Yeah but you couldn’t say anything. So I went off to, I went to high school at the age of just going on to twelve.

Oh, sorry.

Nine were born to my parents, but only three of us lived, the other six died with the RH Rhesus

negative blood factor.

And their ages at the times of death were aged between four to five months, back to a week, ten days with RH negative. My brother next to me he was brought down to King Edward, I think that was about 1940, ’41, and that’s the first time they tried a total, we were told, the first time they tried a blood transfusion in a baby, and it failed.

But that was it, not – as three of us suffered no symptoms, out of nine.

Luckily yes, it was lucky. As a young bloke, a young child twelve, thirteen, fourteen, I can remember Dad, Mum would go to hospital, and Dad would end up at the cemetery

sort of thing, yeah. On his own, or something like that, pretty hard life.

They battled on, that’s what life was about in those days.

I’m the eldest, yes. Yes I was lucky I suppose I got all, most of the good stuff. My father, his blood factor, his blood group factor, I’m not quite sure what it was, but he would be working

underground, and somebody would just walk up behind him, the foreman would walk up and tap him on the shoulder, and he’d just go straight up to the hospital covered in muck, and they’d swab a patch on his arm and they’d take blood for him, and he’d go back down the mine.

Fairly rare, so that used to happen with him. Yes it was a little bit traumatic I suppose you can say.

I played football

for Mines Rovers, “Go the deros, yeah!” when I was a kid. I can still remember training one night on the Boulder oval, and running to take a ball over the back of the head like that, and I went smack into a smelly armpit. I can still smell it, Sonny Mafina, one of Western Australia’s football heroes and greats. I picked myself up, and Sonny grabbed me by the hair and said, “Are you alright son?”

and let me go, and I fell over again, but that’s beside the point. I played a lot of tennis, my sister and I represented the goldfields in Country Wheat [tennis tournament], at the age of fourteen, and she was thirteen.

It wasn’t the only thing. We shifted house in 1948 from Evan Street in Boulder out to Victory Heights. It was a new housing estate created with the cutting up all the

buildings from the air force camp that was up there, and they turned them into houses. It was built up by the air force, and we had to put fences around, so Dad used to get the forty four gallon drums, steel drums, and cut the ends out, split them, pull them apart, and then get my feet one side, and my hands the other, and push them out as flat as I could, and then roll them flat with a cyanide drum full of concrete. It was a good fence, in the ground about,

about a foot, and standing about six feet high. No nails, no bolts, it was all done with wire. I would punch holes through, and twist the wire onto the posts and rails, that was part time. And there was the hundred to five hundred chickens, day old chickens and roosters Dad used to get up there. You’d have to grind up the grain for them, chop up all the greens for them, clean out their little incubators

we made, bring them up until they were about ten to twelve weeks and then it was a delightful job of knocking them on the head and plucking and cleaning them, that was all in spare time too. Thirty six fruit trees in our back yard.

Each hold was dug with a crow bar because the clay was too hard, and we mixed all the clay soil with horse manure, and backfilled the hole. The horse manure would ultimately decompose and leave porus soil, open spaces in the

clay, so you could water. Each tree had a hole, or a piece of pipe about six hundred, nine hundred long, seventy five mill, and it would be out of the ground about two fifty mill and we used to pour water down that, and that’s how the water went to the roots instead of hanging around the top surface and doing nothing. We had quince trees, we had apples, apricot, plum –

A quince is a, to look at, like a greenish yellowish, like a pear, a

real acquired taste. They’re lovely stewed with a heap of sugar.

You can buy them, there was a little bit of a rush on the market I heard on the ABC a couple of months ago. Quinces were in stock, and people were running, the older people, my era were running down buying them, to make quince stew, stewed quince, they’re beautiful.

You can, yeah. We had citrus trees and grape vines.

No we just carried on doing what we thought all kids had to do you know. Apart from that, I was going over to my uncle’s dairy, and helping out there, and he had forty odd cows, milking each day forty to fifty, twice a day. That was four o’clock in the morning. So you’d finish milking, clean up, and then go to school, or come home and feed the chickens and then go to school.

I liked maths, English and geography were my favourites. As I were saying a bit earlier, before I jumped the gun, having became quite in a way, in a manner that I was upset about losing that scholarship when I was at high school, I used to just disappear for a day, or two days. I had my own

horse and that, it used to follow me around like a dog, and we’d just go bush, I just had three bags, a saddle, bridle, a rabbit trap, a bottle of water, a box of matches and away I’d go. The rabbit trap you’d catch a rabbit, the water you’d get out of the dams or whatever, and with the box of matches you could cook the rabbit. That the way I lived, the horse would sleep, and I’d sleep alongside the horse, mad but –

If the horse never came

home they knew I was alright, as I said, it was like a dog. The aboriginals used to bring cows over for change over, like the fresh, the young cows that were just coming on full milk and the old cows were dry and we’d swap them over from down Smith’s paddock, down by Norseman, and they used to bring them up there and take the old cows back, and when they came up with the new cows they’d sort of bring five, ten, fifteen brumby horses, wild horses which they had part broken, and

they’d take those across to the Kalgoorlie stockyards and sell them. You’d have all the station owners and managers and that, and they’d see the horses, “How much do you want for the horse?” and they’d say, “Oh five quid boss,” and you’d say, “No way, I’ll give you a quid,” and the reason being, is they weren’t white, white ridden, they were ridden by aboriginals you see who were good horseman. A lot of the jackaroos and jillaroos on the stations were pretty ordinary horse people.

So Pollards dairy there, over the back paddock there, we used to put the horses there and I used to ride them out. I used to wag school [play truant], and go across to the stockyards, and they put the horses in, “Have the horses been white ridden?” and I’d come forward out of the crowd and I’d say, “Yeah, which one do you want me to ride, boss?” The boys would throw a saddle on whichever one they want and the aboriginals would get five quid a piece instead of one, and then give me a quid. So I was getting a pound a horse, and they were getting four.

Yeah, that’s how it was.

They were out of the bush.

Yeah, they broke them to saddle and to bridle, a fairly rough, a pretty ordinary way of doing it, but I would spend anything up to fifteen hours a horse. Just gentling it, making it do as it’s told, standing and doing that. That’s what you need for a stock horse, particular if you fell off

the thing when you were out in the bush, you didn’t want it to run away. That’s what the teaching was about.

Not a horse whisperer, I’ve been dumped on my head a few times, don’t worry.

That I do, that I’ve got no trouble. Dogs, I’ll walk up to a guard dog and it’ll just stand there, and within three or four minutes it will come for a scratch, no worries, no problems there.

No, I’ve lived with animals all my young life. You know we always had dogs around, and horses, and one or the other, but I’ve got no real fear of animals. They know that, no harm, no fear, so they just accept you as you are, you know.

Yeah, when they brought her in the first time we rode her she dropped a foal, she was just barely starting to foal.

I got very worried about her when she was bleeding, and looked after her and all the rest of it, and from there on she just followed me, yeah, like a dog does.

Yeah, it was a good horse that one, strange name for her, Bess, but no, she was good. But anyhow, that was that.

Eastern Goldfields High School.

That was a

darn good school, but a mongrel location. It was about three or four hundred yards from the creases mine treatment plant chimney, sulphur dioxide, and sulphur, and all the rest of it. It used to sweep down there, and the kids would be sitting, tears in their eyes, and these poor teachers would be standing there trying to do a lesson you know, it was pitiful. They relocated it later years, and it was about another half a mile further away from there.

It was good, but I believe that I was lucky that I left two days after I turned fourteen and I’d, that was it gone. All of my other friends that stayed on and did further studies, quite a lot of them are dead now, cancer, and heart problems.

Rightly or wrongly I believe it was something to do with that. The two of them never smoked or drank and there’s got to be some relevance there.

So that was that, and then I ended up working at the goldmines in Kalgoorlie as a cadet metallurgist, even though I hadn’t passed my junior year of studies, the headmaster, Mr Boyle wrote and said, “Never achieved the marks he could possibly have achieved. Would do well with further study.” So, the School of Mines cadet metallurgist –

He can tell you anything and everything about metals, of ores, and everything else.

Geology, it’s the refined side of geology. A geologist is more or less going out and looking for it. A metallurgist does the event formation and what do you call it? The interpretation you know, what’s coming forward.

It can be, yes it can be. I did two years of that, and then fifty years later I met my first boss who was the boss of that laboratory down

here in Perth.

It was all laboratory work, totally done in a laboratory. We used to do assay work, which is smelting of the samples. You go down to a lead pure, and then you belt the lead out, and then you burn the lead off, and that leaves the gold, and you weigh the gold off against the amount of the product you put in initially. Testing for chemicals association with

gold. Well, as another example, this same chap as I mentioned, he ended up as the general manager of the Western Mining Nickel Refinery at Guiana, that was a flow on for that type of metal refinery.

I was, and night school two nights a week, and one afternoon, but peer pressure got to me

after a couple of years.

Well, “Where are you going tonight? What are you doing after school? Where are you going? Where are we going?”

At sixteen years of age what do you do? At the age of fifteen, I –

Oh we’d go to the swimming pool, bike riding out the slime

dumps to do scramble riding.

Yeah, slime dumps, fifty or sixty feet high like this, and we used to get up there on bicycles, and come charging off the top, and straight down, and up the other side, and try and fall off, and slide down, it was great stuff. Slide down on a sheet of corrugated iron, and then get your mother to put something on the blisters on your bottom when you got home. Another thing we used to do was,

going back earlier, you never wore shoes to school, you were a sissy if you did, but Mum used to always insist that we did.

So you’d put your shoes on, go around the corner, and take your shoes and socks off, and go to school, come home, and put them back on. We got dobbed in one day, and Mum said, “Take you’re shoes and socks off.” I don’t know if you know Kalgoorlie Boulder, but it’s all red dust, sweaty feet, and ankle all red – bang, clobbered. Another thing

we used to do, was we used to steal all the girls skipping ropes, we used to knot them together like that, and we’d go in the open cut and mines, we’d go from cuttings you know. Some of them were about a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet, a hundred metres deep the big ones. All the wild pigeons used to nest in the walls, and we used to swing down off the edge of these things, and get the pigeon, and put them inside our shirt or inside our singlet, the young ones, the squeakers, and come back. The girls would dob us in, and Mum would say, “Have you been up the

cuts?” “No Mum,” “Take your singlet off.” Inside you’d be covered in squeaker poo, bang, you’re gone again.

Train them and make them into homing pigeons, every boy had a homing pigeon. We always had a coop down the back. Kalgoorlie was very famous for pigeon racing.

Pigeon racing, and cycling, yes.

Cycling, bike riding, we had quite a few champion riders

coming out of the goldfields.

Yes.

Yes it was, on the Kalgoorlie round, the racing round, that was very big. Sir Scobbie Beasley as he is now known before he passed away was – his last ride in Australia was at Kalgoorlie Cup. He won the race on a horse called Thunder King. He came down and caught a boat, that’s, how long ago, 1948, and

he took off to the UK and was riding in the UK. Anyhow in 1951 I thought, “I’ll try and go into the army, so I went into the recruiting depot, and this old sergeant, I knew the face, but I didn’t know him, and I said, “I want to go to Korea,” and he said, “You’re Jack Burgoyne’s boy, aren’t you?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Go home or I’ll tell him.” So that was the end of that, I was not quite

fifteen.

The papers were a bit full of this police action in Korea you know, and a lot of the guys who had been in the army in the second war were signing up again for the, what they called K-force, Korea special you know. You saw guys who were twenty five, twenty six

in the goldfields, signing up again, and going back, everybody was talking about who’s going in the army or whatever, so right away you go. So in 1954, I was talking with all my friends, three or four of them, and they had just received their call-ups for national service. I said, “What are you going to do when you finish nashos [national service]?” And they said, “Oh we’re going to stay in, there’s nothing much going on here.” Because 1954’s was when McClune had almost killed

the town with his gold detection, a big aeroplane up in the air stopping the gold stealing. Of course all the money, if a guy was going to the two-up with ten quid from gold stealing, all of a sudden if he wanted to go to two-up he had to take it out of the housekeeping. If he wanted to go to the pub he went there on his gold stealing money, otherwise he had to take it out of the housekeeping. So once McClune had stopped the gold stealing, it just tightened the money so much in town that people just moved out.

It’s strange the repercussions down the track. So anyhow I said, “Right, I’ll come in and do nashos with you.” When there, and it was the same old sergeant, and signed the other three up, three of them there were, and I said, “I want to go with them and do my nashos,” he said, “You can’t, you’re too young,” I said, “I’m only a year younger then them,” he said, “No, you can’t do it,” he said, “But what you can do, you can join up for six years.”

He said, “I’ll give you the paperwork, and take it home to Mum and Dad.” So I went home to Mum and Dad, and I think Mum met me half way up the street with a pen in her hand. I went back and handed it in at the tender age of seventeen years and eight months, I went and took an oath to the Queen, allegiance to the Queen.

Yes, I dropped out of it, I’m sorry, I missed a gap there. I went working with

Burt Rogers Engineering, it was steel fabrication cranes and things like that, and stayed on with him until the downturn of business. That just happened towards the end, at the end of ’53, the beginning of ’54. I think he had to let me go, and that’s the reason why we’re all that sort of thing. But working with him, we did everything from putting the big overhead cranes, travelling cranes in the engine room at the Mount Ida

Goldmine which is up past Menzies, and also we put the fire escape stairs at the back of the old Maylands Town Hall on Guildford Road there. The actual steps on the fire escape were the treads from the old trams which they decommissioned up in Kalgoorlie Boulder, two years before. Little things like that stick in my mind. Other things, going back a bit

earlier, with Mum in hospital I got sent down to an aunt’s place – this is during the war, I’m jumping all over the place now – and lived in Hollywood, and got sent to Hollywood Primary.

Yeah, yes, Dad’s Mum came up from Norseman to look after the girls, and I was sent down to Perth. I can still remember towards the end of 1944,

Dad had just gone in the army, that’s right, sorry.

Sorry?

Yes, yes I did, yes.

Well the newspaper reports were there, and whatever came through, you know, as close as you could. You were as aware as anyone, because everyone had somebody in the services during the war, even up there,

and something would happen, and if you missed it on the radio and you’re folks missed it or something, ever kid in school knew about it and would be talking about it and acting it out, you know, as boys would. It was a different lifestyle, a totally different lifestyle to what we have today.

Yes the, go back further then that, the 16th battalion, Australian AIF [Australian Imperial Force]

First War, that was very largely Kalgoorlie and country people of Western Australia. The 2/16th, they started off again, the goldfields, and country, before they’d let metro people [metropolitan people] in. It wasn’t until they lost over three hundred men that they allowed eastern staters in, but goldfielders mainly in that 2/16th, which was a very, very famous battalion, fought in the Middle East, and went through

New Guinea, and Borneo, Kokoda Track –

Yes, yes, it was very much out in the open, everyone was a part of it. I think 1946, ’47, as a boy scout, we had a fancy dress costume, and I was covered in burnt charcoal from hairline to toenail, and

a big, black, cottonwool wig on, and I was a fuzzy wuzzy angel [indigenous Papua New Guinean who assisted troops as stretcher bearers, guides, etc], typical of Kokoda. That’s how this sort of impression that was up there. Oh you lived it, you lived it!

That, and I suppose you could say that it was always in the back of my mind, but my friends all going into the national service, that pushed me

to the, that pushed the button. As a matter of interest, I went in for Eastern Stations to do my recruit training, and then I, about three months later, I got a letter from my Mum saying, “The other three buggers had got out and left me in there, they didn’t like the army.” Pardon me, I shouldn’t be swearing.

Yes they were, yeah.

The first thing was, there was a party amongst the four of us. We went to Neville Maynard’s house, and we had a big party. Those other three and myself, they were going to nashos and myself, and his father put on a party

at the house, and that was it. Then I came down here, and I was actually into the army before they were. I came down to Perth, I was sent down to Perth to have a medical, and swear in. I was sworn in on the 2nd of March, 1954.

Whether you’d had a cough, TB [tuberculosis], polio, that sort of stuff, yes basically – anything that could limit your

movement, heart problems, or kidney problems. Normal things like measles, or if you’ve got chicken pox and whatever, they weren’t phased at all about that.

Yeah, and also broken bones, where you had broken bones and things, but that’s basically about it, yeah, medical wise. Check for hernias, and I think everyone that’s been in the army will know what I’m saying there.

No, it’s fairly basic, fairly straightforward.

Out to Guildford depot, Queens Road in South Guildford, and we moved into barracks there. We were issued with clothing.

Just the standard khaki drill.

Two or three sets of khaki drill, I can’t remember exactly now. Hat, boots and underwear and socks and things, and then we just hung around and waited around the depot until they formed up a big enough group to send over east.

Open barracks, quite good you know, we were all there, wide eyed and sparkly eyed, you know,

it looked brilliant, we were all guys together you know, so you tendered to gloss over any short comings, or roughies. You were supposed to be, you know –

Just the old wire, just the old frame cots, and a wire frame mattress with an ordinary fibre mattress, yeah. No different to what you had at home.

A bit strange at first, anytime that you had anything to do with bathing in front of other people, was when you came out of the swimming pool, but there you were bathing in front of people, changing in front of people, shaving in front of people. It was just all a privacy thing, it wasn’t long and that all went on the back shelf.

First day I though, “Oh God – oh, ok.” That’s it, and turned off,

and just go with it. It was, first off, at that age, it was a bit of a shock in those days because you live very private lives. If you had a problem, you didn’t go and tell anyone or everyone about it you, it’s a big failure with my generation, you kept it to yourself, you didn’t want to appear to be a sissy, or a sook you know. It is, that was a big mistake, a big mistake, and that’s the way it is, the way life

is. End of tape.

Up, shower, shave, dress, breakfast, fall in, count, general duties around the depot as they were waiting to make up a sufficient number to put together one personnel to ship east, and the evenings you were pretty much on your own after the evening meal. And

being newly uniformed youngsters, we used to like to skite [show-off / brag] and go into town, and into the dance there, into the old Anzac House, there used to be a dance there on Fridays and Saturday nights, and wander around. At that age I can remember drifting into the Alambra Bars downstairs with some older guys, and the Barman said, “You’re too

young to drink,” I said, “Who says?” He said, “I say,” I said, “What are you going to do about it?” He said, “I’ll throw you up those stairs if you don’t get out,” so I left. That sort of thing you know, all of a sudden you’re a big time because you’re wearing a uniform, but it gets knocked out of you. So after about two and a half weeks of this, they decided they had enough personnel to make up a consignment to ship east, so I sent word up to my father, I said, “Can you organise – ” This was in Kalgoorlie,

I said, “Can you organise a few bottles of beer because my mates and I were coming through.” When troops were moving around, and invariably MPs [Military Police] or somebody senior would be in the area to make sure the guys in transit would not be racing off to the pub, or carting beer on board trains and things like that, but they seemed to forget that my father was up there. We put our gear, the four of us put our gear into the dog boxes,

they had a door each side, no corridor, it was just door to door each side to the platform, and we moved away, and Dad and his friends put in a crate of beer for me. I don’t know if you know what a crate of beer was in those days in the goldfield, but a crate was five dozen in a wooden box with straw, and it would be just packed in. So it was a pretty silly trip for quite a while until next morning we woke up with stinking

hangovers. From there on it was a quiet run. We used to sing out a beer from people up and down. Every time we stopped for a meal or whatever along the line, along the Nullabor.

Places like Zanthus, Cooktown, and places like that out there. When we got to Melbourne, I thought, “My God, this place it’s just too big. I’m not going to wander around here on my own.” I’m from the bush, and Perth was just a magic city to

me, and Melbourne was five times the size I think. So we stayed basically around Royal Park, the personnel depot again, waiting to make up another lot to ship north to Kapooka, and Wagga Wagga. And word went out that the Inter Service Force, the army, needed some runners for the hundred metres. So we had a little bit of a run off at the back of the depot, and they said, “OK, you, and you,” myself and another chap, “Down the Point Cook, and you can represent the army against

the navy and the air force in the hundred metres.” I got down there and I think I finished about fourth, and he finished about fifth or sixth or something on the first day, and we spent the next seven days in the kitchen washing gear. I think it was just an excuse, they wouldn’t have got volunteers to go down there and dixie bash, they grabbed us stupid raw recruits and conned us, not to worry.

That’s right! So away we went, and up to Kapooka,

Wagga Wagga.

I think it was forty or forty odd of us in movements, and up there, and again it was another eye opener. We were in Nissen huts [fabricated hut of corrugated iron].

Quite comfortable in terms of the country, the state of the country, it was more like wheat belts, straight goldfields, it was happier there, there weren’t

big, big heaps of people around. Wagga was much the same sort of place I come from, fair enough, no drama if I came into town here, I’m not going to be worried. I was a little – (UNCLEAR) – at that stage. We settled in, and got into the routine. We were issued with all the rest of our gear, proper gear, and bedding and all that, and were set up, three to a room in these nissen huts, a door on each end, and a door from each side.

We had to look after, and maintain our own gear, everything was inspected each morning, each room, each barrack area, all the outside areas were all done. The routines were the same; up, shower, shave, breakfast, muster, parade ground, parade ground, parade ground. We knew who all our instructors were, hard, newly returned, or not long back from Korea. Consequently they

had points to prove, they were really good.

Lined up and told which platoon and which section we were in, and introduced to our respective leaders who assured us there would be no hanky panky or nonsense in terms that I won’t use now. As I said,

they were not long back from Korea most of these guys, they were up front.

Very good, very good, they were still, the only way – looking back the only way I can compare, is that they were still part of the mateship thing right, rather then standing off too far, or too aloof. They would have in come – in another couple of years, or another six to eight months I would say, they would have been more aloof, but they were still bonding a

little bit you know. They had only just come out of their own units as instructors, and they were quite good that way. We would go out on the riffle range, I always shot left handed as a youngster, but I was informed by Corporal Andrews commonly known as ‘Yak Yak’ that, “You will fire the rifle right handed.” The reason being that when you fired the rifle right handed

your elbow didn’t come off the ground when you were working the bolt to put another round in the chamber, and you could still hold the rifle on site on the target. While he was watching I would fire right handed, when he wasn’t watching I would fire left handed, it was as simple as that. I shot marksman fairly often, and I had discussions with people that said, “Well, you could be off on the school for

marksmanship as a sniper,” and I thought, “Beauty!” So it came the time for postings after we’d finished our training, I found that I was the only one in the platoon that was posted to transport, everyone else went to infantry, and I asked for a reason why. Well I was told that I wasn’t eighteen years of age. I was too young to go to infantry, he goes, “We’re still doing troop rotation out of Korea.” South Korea, after the war there,

so for me to go to a marksman school there would be posting the infantry part of the battalion meant that I could not go with them if they were to be posted overseas, you had to be nineteen. Well that was that so I was back down to Puckapunyal.

The actual scoring on the target.

The chaps, the people in the butts behind the mound

marking off as each shot was fired through.

I was shooting forty eight / forty nine out of fifty consecutive, no drama at all.

Four foot targets from two hundred three hundred metres.

Just a square thingo with an outer, inner, and ball, and they were using the .303 rifle, beautiful firearm

I don’t care what anyone says, it’s too slow for today’s warfare though. Effectively you could kill at three mile with a misdirected shot landing on somebody, but regular at six hundred metres which was far in excess of most things that you’ve got around the place now.

Yes.

I had a specialty, these guys, instructors, they were very keen on this assault course charge where you’re all saddled up all your gear and everything, all your rifle, and whatever, and you go over the coiled barbed wire, through the mud and one thing or another, and then you do about two mile or three mile forced march and back again. Being from the bush and working

with barbed wire as a kid for a long time, if you’ve worked with barbed wire you’re not frightened of it. So what I used to do is, I’d volunteer to throw myself on the barbed wire and then everybody comes along and puts their foot on the middle of the pack on my back and leap off over the barbed wire and they’d get out of sight and I’d just roll off the barbed wire and go and sit underneath the tree and go and have a cigarette. Three or four times I got away with that, and I got caught and

I was made to do that run myself with a very fit instructor three times in four days. I made somebody else fall on the wire from there on and did the run, to heck with them. If you go onto the barbed wire if you’re tensed and the barbs hit your skin they will prompt through the muscle tone that holds the skin tight. If you are relaxed and flop on it just goes like that, very few punctures except where it hits the rib area or

solid bone, but apart from that.

Too much work, too much to do. Would you sooner be sitting underneath the tree having a cigarette or running three miles.

Well I declared myself as being dead on the wire.

Well, there is no way in the world the enemy is

going to leave you laying on the wire alive, just in case. They’re going to put a round into you at least, you get taught that. I declared myself dead so I couldn’t partake in the run. I was a casualty, but they wouldn’t listen to reason. But no, that’s all part of life, and I look back and I smile, laugh, and giggle and so on about it. But we went on from there, and the routine was

very physical, yes, and it has to be. It has to belt the sissy out of people, and start straightening them up, and if you don’t do that, well you haven’t got an army.

Firstly in the morning after you’ve finished your breakfast, you had an inspection of your area, then you were out there marching, PT [physical training], weapon familiarisation,

learning written law and understanding, learning to respond to an order without really questioning it to a large degree. You had to be able to react immediately. There wasn’t so much swimming or anything like that, that was a non-event.

How did I react to it? I didn’t mind it, it came to me that this was for my own benefit, nobody else. If you can do it you had a chance of whatever is coming in front of you in the future. You know you don’t know what’s in the future, you don’t know, at that stage I didn’t know that we’d ever go overseas because Korea had finished on the 27th of July, ’53, and here I am in July ’54.

While there was a rotation of troops overseas I couldn’t go for a year and a half because of my age. But you had to, mentally, you were conditioned mentally to it, and you learned that it was in your own interest and your mates.

Not really, we had quite a diverse mob of people in recruit training. We had Thursday Islanders, we had an aboriginal guy from Darwin,

it was a real mixture. We had a Dutchman, a German, you name it, we were all there, and we all accepted it and went on with it. There was no comparative degree of who took it or who didn’t take it, we all just accepted it, you had to. It does not create a mindless being, it makes you respond, to react quicker. You

were still taught that you had to think for yourself, but to react, when you were told to duck, you ducked, when you were told to jump, you’d jump, whatever, like that sort of thing, yes. You weren’t told to go to sleep, wake up and that sort of thing, no. That’s the way it is.

Well, Wagga Wagga was a strange place, one minute you’d have floods and you’d find the community and everyone else would be calling the army out to go and help them move stock and

do this and do that. Another part of the year they’d have fires and the army was called out fire fighting to save the farmers crops and all the rest of it sort of thing. For the first seven weeks of recruit training he might have been out fighting a fire or a flood depending on the season but you weren’t allowed into town. When you did get into town you were treated like rubbish by the town people because they’d seen so many thousands of these yahoos go through the camp

and you didn’t blame them.

With indifference, with indifference even though you’d walk past somebody who’s farm you’d just saved the day before, and I’d just nod and just keep walking, there was no camaraderie or response. Sometimes, after working with the floods and getting things done, you didn’t even get a cuppa [cup of tea], you were mustered and thrown back on the truck and taken back to camp,

but like you accepted it.

As I said, the first seven weeks you couldn’t, and I went to town twice after that in the last three or four weeks training, and I didn’t like it and I thought, “I’ll save my money to go down to Puckapunyal for posting.”

What happened? At that stage we were just called in one by one

and told our postings, “You can appeal if you wish, but in your case Burgoyne unless it’s transport, you’ve got no appeal.” In other words, they knew I wanted infantry but they wouldn’t let me because of my age, and that was it. There was no alternative because I had stated that I would not go to medical, I would not go to this or that or anything else, I wanted infantry, and second and last chance would be transport. So I took that option,

that was it.

It was a bit hard, yes. I’d been, my mates said to me, “Oh God, you’re off to marksman school, you’ll be right, that’s the best job of the lot. All you do is hide behind a building and kill some bugger walking past, good fun,” that was joking you know. No, I resented it for a few weeks and got over it. You make the most of what you have,

particularly when I got to the new unit and I was with quite a few older guys, and one guy I’d met over here, he was a Korean veteran, he was in Perth on leave on his way back to Puckapunyal when we went across to go training.

New unit, in Puckapunyal. It was 1 Company Service Corps 109 Transport Platoon. Took on all; general duty driver,

from relief ambulance driver, to signal dispatch run, to demolition on the armoured fighting vehicle range, demolition of unexpended ammunition, lying it out there and blowing it up. I was driving the vehicle, I wasn’t doing the ordinance work, to general trucking of national servicemen and freight, and stuff. Teaching national servicemen how to drive, a driving instructor,

bus driving, a semi-trailer, the whole lot. In fact in Victoria in 1955, the beginning of ’55, there was a legal action between the Victorian Government and the Federal Government over my driving a bus, because the age of a bus driver was twenty one and I was only just eighteen, and the State

Police said, “You can’t drive it,” and I said, “I’m authorised by the Australian Government, I’ll drive it.” So I drove it, and they charged me, and the Federal Government tore the ticket up and sorted the Victorian Government out, silly things.

Oh yeah, you did all your training, yes, in-house training, the whole lot, yes.

Yes, there was a very big school there. Another time with the bus, it was decided they would take

children, forty odd children from the married quarters they’d take them up to Donna Buang to see snow, play in the snow for the first time, and old Captain Randall, the 2IC Admin [second in charge of administration] at brigade headquarters, and he said, “Ok, well let’s go,” and I said, “Do we need chains on the bus in the snow and ice conditions?” He said, “There’s no waring on it, we better just get going.” We got up there and the children had a great time in the

snow. Coming back down I noticed that there was like black ice started to form on the road, a bit of sleet. I backed off because I was only doing about three, four mile an hour I suppose, and all of a sudden the whole bus slide sideways and dropped the right hand wheels over, it looked about a two three hundred feet drop and of course quite a bit of panic me having first view of this sitting up front in the drivers seat. So anyhow, we got all the kids quickly over to the left hand side, and

got them off the bus, and an army, they were going the other way in a four by four, and I asked them to go on up to the army ski camp and bring down the two snow ploughs, two big GMC six by six trucks. They brought them down and then they steel roped and chained me back onto the road and they came round and wanted me to take the children out again, and I said, “No, I won’t take them.” I put them in the snow ploughs, so we put them in there and he came down with me. I remember getting down

at the bottom of the mountain, I remember loading the children, and I don’t remember driving the eighty miles or whatever back to camp and the next thing I remember, from loading the children the next thing I remember is parking the vehicle in the hard. I still have a total mental block on that, I suppose you can call it shock, but it was just another day in that sense.

It was, it’s not exactly a nice feeling,

you’ve got no control, and everything is sliding sideways, and it’s just going like that, straight down.

You’re worried for yourself and all of a sudden you think, “God the kids, kids, kids,” goes screaming through your head. They were children from about the age of five to about nine or ten, too young to be knocked around like that sort of nonsense, so that was that.

No, we had a great, it was a great posting. We were driving everything, anything and everything, and then it was about July of ’55, they said “Oh, it looked like we were going to be called in and going to Malaya!”

Yeah, if you’re on general duties driving, the routine was much the same. Up, tidy up your room, shower, shave, go to the parade ground, muster, get your duties for the day, general duties, or if you were a driving instructor for the national serviceman you’d do that, or if you were hospital duty you were packed off to the hospital. Sorry if you were hospital duty, you reported into the hospital.

If you were signal dispatch, you reported to the brigade signals office. The signals dispatch was a morning run from Puckapunyal sixty miles down to Albert Park in Melbourne, and then you come back. It was a hoon’s delight, you got the SDS [Signals Dispatch Service] one, and away you’d go. It was an old FJ ute [Holden Utility Truck], and you could sit on sixty five mile an hour and nobody could touch you, until the police worked it out, and then they put a stop to that. Nobody wanted to do the job after that.

Those two postings you reported straight in, if you were doing armoured fighting vehicle range demolition work, you collected your vehicle went across to that headquarters and then took them out there. Your duties finished, you came back, you cleaned down your vehicle, refuelled, maintained your vehicle, and signed off and went back to your camp. We were living in quonset huts [similar to a Nissen hut] again,

and this time we were one to a room, regular army, away from the three to a room with the national service.

It was. Once again the majority were Korea and World War II veterans, so it was strange how many of them were ex-Korea.

Great, great. There was one guy particular, he was

for what they now term as post traumatic stress disorder, Jimmy Cain. Sorry I shouldn’t have said that name. He used to react badly when he got on the wallop, on the alcohol. He used to get on the wallop, and he’d stress out, he’d race around, wanted to shoot and kill and murder everyone, and my job day in and day out and night in and night out, just to get old Jim, get him

down on the ground, and sit on him for four or five minutes and cool him off. The majority of the guys say were pretty good, they new what the scheme was with us coming through, and they knew the next time anything starts we’d be part of it. But this was happening in July and we thought, “Beauty Korea’s finished, this ones ours.” We all raced into the orderly room and put our names down to go to Malaya, and

we were told that, “The decision hasn’t been made by the government yet, so you’ll just have to wait.” So we waited, and waited, and waited, and it all happened.

National service, yes. I believe that we should have a national service scheme, we should. It’s becoming more

essential now as I see it, in my personal observation, but the young people of today do not have as much self-esteem or acceptance of self control and that sort of thing, and if anything goes wrong it’s not their fault, it’s the systems fault. They’ve got to be taught to be more self reliant, and more, a better person in the social part of the world you know.

Society is falling apart the way you see it happening now, particular with the drugs and the people like the Dr Spocks who produced a generation where you’re not allowed to beat up your own child to sort them out. I’m not talking about being vicious or anything like that, I’m talking about moderate discipline which we were brought up with. I can remember when Dad chased me with a piece of firewood, he never caught me, but he chased me, I tried to set fire to the house. Anyhow, but no,

they don’t respect one another, or respect anyone else or anyone’s property or anything, you know. If they went through something like this which taught them a bit of discipline and self respect, respect for others, I think they’d be a lot better off.

I thought they were quite good. Once they settled down and got over the initial shock of having been drafted in, they settled

down the majority of them, and seemed to want to do something about it in terms of accepting it and making something of it. The vast majority seemed to want to make a go of it you know, and that’s one of my observations, and I thought it was a good one the way they go about it.

No, not really, there were some who were taken out of, pulled out of good apprenticeships, and things like that, work where there were chances of money, recompensing one thing or another was severely dented by being called up, but basically they got around that, and they went back to it ok because one of the conditions was the employer had to hold your job position open for you,

can’t go wrong there. All they lost was three months, plus the inconvenience of their routine camps or annual camp which was no real hardship.

Oh boy it was the biggest party that canteen had ever seen. There was about eight or ten out of my unit, and then the others were drawn from

Western Australia, well from all over Australia. The initial strength for our unit was about thirty six, forty, which ballooned out to seventy something. We were transport, our unit posting was as a transport platoon in a British Army Transport Company, and that’s all what we were, we had virtually nothing to do with the rest of Australian Army

serving in Malaya, unless we were carting them or transporting something for them, but other than that we were basically British Army, and that’s something unto itself as well.

Well it was a part of the carry over from 28 Commonwealth Infantry Brigade which served in Korea where the integrated battalions were

mixing, and other units mixing. The same thing applied, also, I think it was with the two inf [infantry] workshops, the army mechanical engineers up at Taipei, they were part of a British unit as well. The medical units, they were part of British, they were smaller units they couldn’t send a company in, there was no requirement for a company of one hundred trucks plus to go in, thirty trucks was considered

the size unit to go in there. We were paid – sorry I’m getting ahead a bit. So that was us, and we had the posting stretch of thirty odd, and then we were made up to seventy odd with what they called relief driver increment. There were guys as I said who were relief drivers for the vehicles. Formed up in Puckapunyal, had the big speech by the

GOC [General Officer Commanding] southern command, and were taken and placed on board a train to go to Sydney, I think it was around about 6th or 7th of October, 1955. We boarded the MV Georgic. Now the MV Georgic as a pre-war liner, a luxury liner, and it was taken over by the British forces during the war. It was sunk twice and rebuilt

both times.

Yes, you could stand on sea deck, and somebody would stand with their back against the wall of the companion way, and you wouldn’t see them because of the buckles in it. It was one of the largest liners to come to Fremantle, it couldn’t come into Fremantle, yes it could barely, but it used to do the migrant run from the UK out to Australia, Fremantle, Melbourne, Sydney. Its last voyage was to take the Australian Army

contingent to Malaya, from Malaya it went back to Saigon and took the French Foreign Legion to Marseilles, and then they scrapped the vessel, it went into a brokers yards. Anyhow, were trained up to Sydney, boarded the Georgic, and from there we went on to Pinkenba, Brisbane’s wharf, and took on the battalion, two battalions, Royal Australian Regiment, plus 105 Field Battery, and a couple of other units associated with the

infantry.

Our transport vehicles, they would have been sent on the other vessels. We had an advance part of five or six guys up there, and they were organising that to come through and be unpacked. Our vehicles were ex-American lend lease second world war, they came out of Bandiana in Victoria, in New South Wales, and shipped up there, and they were taking our packing cases, and fuelled, and

oiled, and away we went. A big mistake, because a lot of the seals had dried out in the engines, and the axles and gearboxes and things anyhow.

There was no oil going past them, they were just sitting there still. If they move, they are getting lubricated by oil in the components in them like gearboxes, transfer case, and axle and things.

A lot of the seals on the shafts dried out.

Yeah well, they had to change the oil, they had preserved storage oil in them, so before you go into full time duty, you have to put the proper oils in them right through, and commission the vehicles again. So we had thirty four I think it was, GMC six by sixes, two brand new Willys jeeps [military jeep], and two Harley Davidson motorcycles with the old, not the bikie

model, these are the ones with the foot clutch and the gear change on the left hand side of the tank, that was our unit. So we disembarked, no, so we never touched at Singapore, and I think it was the HMAS Arunta, no I may be wrong here I think.

Oh it was, all you could see hanging out the side of the vessel were all the guys with their clothes bouncing along in the sea water

on angle ropes, trying to get them bleached so they wouldn’t look brand new when you landed on shore, you look like old soldiers and not new ones. The routine on board was lots of jumping around exercises because you couldn’t do much else, and a lot of the guys spent a lot of the time leaning over the fence looking at the English nurses who came out on the, who were a part of the crew on the migrant voyages. Some of the guys organised an expedition and pinched a big heap of beer,

I’m not saying we were a part of that, it must have been another unit – and that sort of thing, it was mainly PT exercises, and routines. We were given instructions and lessons on basic words for thank you, and how are you, and things like that. A bit of geography lessons, they had areas on maps and screens and things like that.

They were communists, end of story. Back in Boulder one of my family friends, old Alf Sampson, the tailor in Boulder, he was the boss of the communist party, the political party in Boulder. So communist were, were not a big thing with us in that sense, but these were armed communists coming down and causing all sorts of drama, so that was good enough to get in there.

People – it was not a war, we were going to an emergency, and a lot of discussion, conjecture, about the term, ‘emergency.’ There were two sound reasons why it was not a war is; (a) Lloyds of London and the London Stock Exchange could have virtually collapsed since war had been declared because Malaya was the world’s biggest tin and rubber producer, secondly Malaya, being a British

colony, and the population were British citizens by colonial, and you cannot declare war upon your own citizens. You can declare a state of emergency to put down insurgency, but you cannot declare war, and that was a very bitter point with a lot of us guys from Malaya confrontation, and the confrontation rather, because it was not a war, there was no nominal roll in veteran’s affairs.

You can go there and access World War, say Boer War even all the say Boxer Wars, World War I, World War II, Korean War, Gulf War, Vietnam War, anything of a war has a nominal roll, there was nothing for Malaya confrontation which was bloody stupid. It makes you quite bitter that you can’t access anything you know, so that was that, now I’ve lost myself again.

Department of Veterans’ Affairs. They could do one, they could do one by just putting a list together, and the people off their pension cards, it’s so simple.

Who knows, who knows. Korea used to be known as the forgotten war, Malaya is the forgotten people, that’s it, finished. The only roll that

exists to my knowledge, is one compiled by Lieutenant Colonial Neil Smith, and it’s called, ‘Mostly Unsung,’ and it’s a list of thousands of army people who served ’48 – ’60, and that’s it, there was no air force, no navy or anything like that, it was just army, and that’s the only thing we have to work on.

Yes, I have gold card

entitlement. I draw my pension from them, yes. Depending on the time factor you were there, pretty much all of the people who served up to ’60 were outright gold card, then I think there are others which have some qualifying service shortcomings in amongst them.

No roll.

To access, to check on people who see – how do I put it?

To determine who was there, also eligibility for certain things amongst our communities, ex-service organisations. We do have creeps running around wearing medals they are not supposed to be wearing.

I’ve got a set of metals out there belonging to somebody which we have just ripped off a chap, and he could end up in court.

We hold a watching brief over, amongst the people we see around the place, yes, incorrect medals and awards, non-earned. There is an internet site which is really hard on them,

and we check in on that to see how many names that come up who are known to us, and we pin them.

Yes, three thousand dollars, or three months in jail, Federal Court.

Quite, quite common, there is one chap whose only service he had overseas, he was a full-time CMF [Citizens Military Force], and the last cast almost of the Vietnam War, he was in a warehouse in Baria in rear echelon [Vung Tau], discharged two shots

through the roof of the warehouse, careless of handling a weapon, but he was wearing Korea medals, and Malaya medals, and also the combat infantry man’s badge. He was never ever a combat infantry man for a start, so he was living on the peoples – the chap whose medals I’ve got, they belong to a guy in New South Wales, we’re trying to find him to return them.

Are you going to believe him?

As I say are you going to believe his story?

All sorts of stories.

I don’t want to go into that, no, in all honesty –

…because just right now he’s in the balance of the litigation court.

Sometimes they come through the back door, like people steal them

and sell them around. Some medal collectors buy them –

We, well we had the revelry sort of thing, and mustered to get ourselves cleaned up, and we were doing breakfast and meals in relays because they couldn’t take us in one sitting. After the meals, there were exercise PT,

and then basically into smaller groups for discussions, and try and learn something about where we were going.

Don’t point, its offensive, don’t use, ‘come on,’ signs like this, that’s offensive, how to say thankyou, how are you, just general little conversation pieces just so you could find out initially whether the person could

speak or understand any English or not. Once you started speaking, I think they knew darn well you couldn’t speak the language, so they’d make an effort to come to you. Fairly lucky in Malaya with most of the people, when I say most, a large proportion could speak English in those days, and you could always find somebody in the village or wherever, that could speak enough English to get by. We never had translators or anything with us, it was all off the map and what you found or asked

for around the place.

The people, they told us they were friendly. We were also instructed we were not at any stage to leave the camp off duty in uniform, we had to always wear civilian clothing. So if we were gathered in a restaurant or a bar or something like that we would not be an immediate target for anyone who wanted to lob something in amongst

us, which seemed a bit bloody stupid. When you stoped to think of five or six to eight young guys sitting around having a beer or a cup of coffee or a meal, if you thought they weren’t army, what were they, they weren’t civilian you know, and there we are, but that was the way it was, the laws were such.

Yes and no. I

don’t think it was expected we would have a lot of interaction, or time for interaction with people, civilians, other than those who were working or employed around the bases. In all honesty, it turned out that we did not have a lot of time, and when we did, in the first, particularly in the first six to nine months, we did tend to look for Australian civilians working up there in the tin mines and things like that. It was not unusual

for two or three of us to hire a car and drive thirty or forty miles out to a tin mine with a group of Australian ex-patriots there, and have a luncheon, and just talk Australian, and of course they were interested in talking to us because we were new in country you know, and caught up on all the latest news that was happening and all that sort of thing, a different outlook.

Oh yes, a lot of them were employed in the tin industry. In fact one chap I’ve not spoken to in

almost fifty years, but now is a very wealthy man around here, his name is Bill Wiley. Have you heard of that man? Owns the big shares of the Casino and the Convention Centre. In 1955, ’56, he was a workshop supervisor for the Holden, the distributorship in Ipoh, in Malaya, a bachelor boy, and the record with three up. Myself, and Les Bedson, and himself from Ipoh to Gopeng, eleven mile in twelve minutes

in a TR2 sports car [Triumph]. Can you image you know, at nineteen, four feet between the ears of solid ivory and ten foot across the shoulder and bullet proof. I haven’t spoken to Bill about it but you’d walk in to his house in those days and the dart board was behind the front door, you had to be careful when you walked in. Apparently he’s a multimillionaire, there must be something in that dart board business. But no, we

did not have very much to do with the people, we were the workhorses. We got most of the work, the long range work, it particular went to us because our trucks were better suited than the British trucks, better suited vehicles, bigger carrying capacity, faster, and more reliable, and consequently it was not unusual for us to be doing eight to twelve hours behind the wheel, day in, day out,

Six, seven days a week.

No, almost all, well all of us went through a conversion course in Puckapunyal to acquaint us, those who hadn’t driven before, driven that vehicle before, so everyone was quite proficient at driving it. There were no, there was nobody in our unit that had had

less than twelve months general driving experience, heavy, and general driving experience.

Oh we were confident, left hand drive, and no dramas.

A bit good with us, in fact we had no cabin over our truck, we had where the canvas flopped over the top, and that was it. Yes, it got a bit

wet, and it got a bit hot, you didn’t notice it all that much really. It’s just another muddy down pour, “Oh, we’re going to get wet,” and away you’d go, and keep going.

You dried out fairly quickly. In humidity you had a tendency to perspire more than suffer from that, and the associated things like tinea, and dermatitis, but they didn’t worry about the rain you know, being wet that way, it was a lot more

uncomfortable with the perspiration factor, high humidity.

Fungus.

Perspiration, and sometimes you’d go two days without a tub. Tinea and dermatitis and that, it occurred, yes, amongst the boys in the jungle too, the infantry guys they had the same. They were going five or six, seven days without having a proper bath,

clean up.

When we birthed and disembarked?

“Boy, it pongs,” that was on Penang Island.

That weren’t all that far from the markets, from the fish markets, and just the location itself, East Asia.

A totally different start to having the last eight to ten days on board a vessel, you’ve got no smells other than what was around you once you come indoors. Then we were on a ferry back to the mainland across to Butterworth, and we were tracked down to Ipoh, a hundred mile down there, we picked up our vehicles, issued our vehicles, and then moved into our, sorted out our accommodation. It was all, “Must move, move, move, move!”

About three hours, and then we were away. About a three hour, four hour trip down to Ipoh, and into our barracks, issued our barracks, and our bedding and everything else, and then across to the vehicle park, and issued with our vehicles.

The barracks were of attap, which was platted palm frond. Low,

the roof pitched so the eaves hung down to about four feet from the ground. The walls were stepped in from the eaves, a drop off of the eaves about four feet and the walls themselves were only about three and a half, four feet high, and then there was about a three to four foot air gap. There was no windows, no screening for anything like that. To stop wind and rain being blown into – the overhang of the eaves to stop it being blown, no water could get in, very cool,

very good accommodation, with the exception sometimes you’d have lizards or other things drop down from amongst the, attap beetles, and things like that, but most of the time you had mosquito nets you had to, you had to have mosquito nets, everyone had one.

Atebrin, yes, yes, you had one a day, good fun.

I’d generally take it at the breakfast time. There were times

when we didn’t take it, when we were out, you know, sometimes we’d be on remote outstation work, and if that area didn’t have, or didn’t issue them to you, you didn’t take them, you didn’t think about it. When you came back to base, is when you went back into it again. But you could do a posting up to Grik, up near the boarder, you could be up there for two weeks, or Cameron Highlands for two weeks, or

another one is Brigade of Ghurkha [elite Indian soldier regiment] up at Sungai Petani, you’d go up for two weeks, and you’d come back, and you’d lost all track of what was happening at base until you came back and picked it up very quickly, and just moved straight on again.

None that I know of, and I also – during my time up there I did a ten day at the base hospital and took up medical first aid

army courses. They asked us, and stressed for us to keep watch for malaria and what we were supposed to be looking for and all that. I never ever sighted anything, not amongst our guys anyhow.

I wanted to, I thought, “Well, there were no outstation postings coming up, you’re hanging around the camp outside town for two

weeks and doing what, you may as well learn something,” so I went up and did the medical course, up at Taiping.

Personal ablutions, it was just communal row of showers on one side, and the other side was mirrors and a continuous bench and basins for shaving, one after the other like that. One thing I

didn’t mention, under the British system we also had what were called, ‘bearers,’ being local one per half, who looked after polishing your boots and doing your webbing, and tidying up, and looking after your accommodation, and we all kicked in for that.

We were still colonial.

Very much.

Someone running around picking up after you.

It makes a bit of difference to Mum, because Mum used to swear at me.

Back home when I was a kid, Mum used to swear if she was running around picking up after me.

Yeah.

Very easily, very easily, I even purchased another set of boots so that I could have one clean all the time.

Then we went into the rubber and canvas boots which came up to the upper part of our calf, and we didn’t need a lot of polishing, but they had to be scrubbed, and get the powder to get the dermatitis and fungus infections out of them, because you can’t breathe, you’re feet can’t breathe, and that’s the trouble.

Yeah, they were local people, the majority of them

to a large degree were Muslim Indian, like Pakistani, and around that part of the sub continent.

Basic, yes basic, we also had what was termed a dhoby wallah in the old colonial terms, and he was a laundry man. He’d come along, and your greens would come back, and they would stand up, and you paid for that.

The canteen, or in that place was NAAFI, which is the British Army equivalent. Australians were allowed to book up meals and drinks, grog at the NAAFI, and the British troops couldn’t. Go back a bit further, when we arrived there, we were informed that the British ration scale was vastly different from the Australian ration scale,

and to compensate for that, the Australian Government were paying us five and nine pence per day towards our rations, which allowed us to go into town and buy a meal of our choice, like meats, and stock, like that. A majority of the British troops serving there, were national service, they were only on about five and nine pence a day for being there. So we were getting virtually paid almost as much as they were, just for a meal allowance, plus nine and tuppence a day for overseas allowance, plus our

salary. So we were ‘king of the wazza,’ [at the top / king], when it came to money to spend, it was mad.

We considered that we fed better, ate better, than the 2nd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment. They had one company eighteen miles south of us, and they used to come up, they used to sneak away, and come up, and try and sneak

in and have a meal with us. They reckoned we had better food, and they were not getting paid the ration allowance. Our units also ran the ration depot. When I say our unit, the Brits component of it, we didn’t.

With the British rations, not a lot of meat, if you did have meat, a large component of it was more like stew type thing.

Fresh eggs were a non-event, that was all powdered egg, bread, you could have as much bread as you wished with margarine, there was no butter, vegetables, plenty, so we ate reasonably well you know, but you had to be prepared to accept the fact that it was not Australian tucker. There was no steak and chips and eggs and things like that. Chips they did, and yes we’d have fish occasionally, most times on a Friday, but not every Friday. We had two

Australian cooks with us in the unit, in the kitchen.

Quite good, I didn’t mind it at all. I quite enjoyed it, no drama at all.

Breakfast could be anything from baked beans on toast, to salad

at lunch time, and a warm meal in the evening. Sometimes you’d get a poached egg on toast, or poached eggs and a bit of bacon. Porridge was available not much in the line of cereals like we eat. There was porridge, poached egg, scrambled egg, sorry not poached, and beans and things like that, quite good.

Oh that was another thing, part of

our duties, when the government or the upper echelon decided that a village – no, I’ll go back a little further. A village, what they call kampungs, and they’re away from the main cities where double fenced ten foot high, barbed wire, with light towers, they were like stalags [German prison camps], but the population lived inside, and if they wanted to go out to work in rubber plantations or the tin mines, they had to pass through security who

checked them to see if they were not carrying food or ammunition or anything that could be used in the jungle. Even their cup of tea was tasted, if it had too much sugar, they weren’t allowed to take it back because they would evaporate it and get the sugar. You can’t get sugar or salt in the jungle, so if there was too much of that in the food, no, you’re not taking that. So anyhow, if the higher echelon decided if the village was assisting the bandits in the jungle, they would organise a battalion, or two battalions to completely surround that village in the middle of the

night, at three or four in the morning completely surrounded it, and then about five thirty we would turn up with our trucks. Every single living thing that was breathing here from fleas upwards was put in those trucks was taken and dumped in another village, anything up to fifty, or sixty mile away. That village was put back in there, and you broke up the liaison between the communist terrorist groups, and the villages, and it would take them weeks and weeks to make

contact and get any interchange between them.

It was pointed at you, “Move,” you moved, otherwise you were locked up.

In prison camp. Under the emergency powers in Malaysia you could be locked up for two years before you even get called up for trial, and then the prosecuting

authority could still – that we still do not have an advance for another eighteen months, twelve to eighteen months as common as ‘sympathisers’ as we labelled as such, that’s where you went.

A rubber plantation worker, or tin mine worker, it’s no different to anyone working out on the construction site as

a labourer, it’s the same basis.

No, if you’ve just taken one village away from a rubber plantation and you put another village into that area, the work sites are still there.

You just change the work force.

That’s all it was, so there would be no contact, no direct relationship, no familiar relationship between the people in the village, and the blokes in the jungle.

They would not ever comment. No, if they wanted to go to a shop and buy a tin of condensed milk, a tin of beef, tinned beef, canned beef or whatever, any tinned item whatever to take back to their house, before it left the shop holes were punched in it, in the top,

to stop it being taken or smuggled out, or it would go off, in other words, it had to be eaten. That sort of control was in effect, it was very, very regimented. There was no debate about it, and they would not express their pleasure in sighting you, your displeasure in siting you, you were just something that’s there, and just make the best of it and ignore it, and this attitude. You could not elicit

a comment about how good or how bad the other guys were, or how good or bad you were.

Yes, I saw one woman who had her arm cut off, chopped off, a rubber tapper. She was alleged to have spoken to police about people in the jungle, so they took her arm off at the elbow. That’s the only direct one I saw,

that would have happened about four or five days earlier, prior to me seeing it. That’s the only one I actually saw as a direct result of fresh. The others you saw around the place, there were reports and there were factual reports about women being disembowelled, pregnant women being disembowelled and things like this, it’s not a nice thing, they were fighting for their lives, anything, and everything.

The Communist Party in Malaya, one of the, possibly the top organiser for the Communist Party before the war, was actually a Vietnamese guy, and he kept going through. When the Japanese came through of course, the Japanese being extremely right and dead anti-Communism, and they treated the Communists as much as

the German’s would the Jews, so the communists went into the jungle. The British forces having been captured and imprisoned, the British government realised that they had to have an underground movement going. The only thing which was anywhere near an organised underground movement, was the Malayan Communist Party which had gone into the jungle. So they were flying in, and parachuting in troops, advisors, and arms, and ammunition,

and it was called, ‘Force 136,’ the infantry lunker [?UNCLEAR]. They organised the Communists, they gave them arms and ammunition, taught them better battle factors, one from the other, and they kept them going, that was the start of it. During this time, one of the top organisers for the Communist parties, the Malayan Communist Party, was a man who became very, very famous, and he beat America, Mr Ho Chi Minh,

he was actually in Malaya leading the Communist Party just prior to the battle of Dien Bien Phu, in Vietnam, where they kicked the foreign legion out, so it’s a small world.

They were village, yep, a lot of them from Singapore as well. They were people who, because see nothing had – you know, colonial masters, and they could see nothing going on for themselves.

Sometimes they considered that the local people, the bumi putra, [‘children of the earth’, Indigenous Malaysians] the Malayans, they were getting a better deal, there was nothing in it for the Chinese. There was a lot of wedge politics played amongst them, to gain people to go up to them.

Yes, well we, even the civilians, if we went to, as I said, the tin mines, if we were leaving the metropolitan area, we had to carry our own firearms. When we were at work, yes, I carried my Owen machine carbine [9mm OMC gun – Australian sub-machine gun], we all had Owen machine carbines. You could not carry a rifle in the vehicles, so we always had the carbines.

Length, size, a machine carbine overall

there, overall height, that with a magazine, and that was the reason, and you could squeeze a lot more shots off if you had to.

We would know, we would know, we got into the routine, particularly in my section were we would check with the local police as we came through, the first village we would come, we’d

just go and see the sergeant in the village. The police at the gate, you’d just shrug your shoulders like that, and you’d, one way or another he’d get a message to you that there was something going on, or not going on. They would hear the gossip, and they’d have a fair idea if it was going on even if they did not know exactly where, or when.

The police, the police force, yeah, quite happy, yes. The Malaysian Police, they

actually then formed their own equivalent of an army which was the police field force, and they used to do a lot of the jungle forts. They used to put forts in the jungle where troops could work in and out of, where they could resupply out of them jungle when they were coming in from the jungle, or going out you know, and they did a lot of that. They also did a lot of maintaining of the guard structure around these villages, the security structure, they were very, very efficient, yes,

yes, very good.

It did when, and I’m not being racist in any way, shape or form, in the goldfields where I came from, there were virtually, there was no Chinese up there because they were virtually banned because of the

gold. There is the odd one or two you’d possibly see, nurses, or the odd student at the School of Mines that came there under the Colombo plan, but all of a sudden you’re dumped into an environment where you are the bloody minority, totally and utterly you are the minority. There is nothing like you there at all, and that’s the start and finish of it. You have to come to grips

with that fact very quickly and start learning about the cultures and the customs you know, and you do that quietly. Chatting with the bearer who cleaned up in the huts, and you learned various things, and others that worked around the camp, the staff in the canteen and that sort of thing, you learn, you pick up.

Well, two years in the army and I suppose I could speak about twenty words.

When I went back up there in 1960, and I went underground as the mining supervisor in the gold mine, three months, and I was fluent, you had to. The only person who could speak English was my foreman, and the only English he knew was, “Good morning,” and it didn’t matter what time of day it was.

One hundred and thirty men, you had to learn how to speak quickly, anyway, that’s getting well ahead.

You had no reason

to. If you really had to talk serious to the police, you’d find a European police officer, and most of the senior – the police sergeant above could speak English, and they were the ones you were dealing with at army. We did not have a lot of interacting with the civilian population as such, you just couldn’t, we didn’t have the time, we just did not have the time to do it. We’d

be on constant demand with the 1st, and 2nd Ghurkha, that referred our trucks, we were faster. It’s better than the lumbering old slow things that the British Army had, which were always considered by them to be prime targets for ambush. We got through quicker, from point A to point B.

Well, no police there, well – if it was an open road, we’d be sitting on fifty

mile an hour. The British trucks would be scratching to do thirty to thirty five, we’d just open up and go. As I said, thick between the ears, solid ivory, and go for it, you can’t get hurt. We never ever lost a man at work, or lost a vehicle at work, “Thank you,” up there [God] looked after us very well. We lost, something else, happened it was after hours in a private

car. There are things, like you say with speed now, to go up the to Cameron Highlands it was four thousand seven hundred and fifty feet, and around about thirty seven miles, and it was all hairpins like that, and everything, every vehicle that moved up and down that road had to be going with armoured escort called a convoy, armoured car, about eight vehicles, armoured car, eight vehicles, armoured car, and armoured car at the back. They could hear them coming, these old trucks and things, from five

mile away, and these was a British trucks going up with two tonne, going up at ten mile an hour, and we could go up with four tonne, doing twenty, twenty five mile an hour. So in the end, the police used to lock off the road, thirty seven miles apart for two stations, and no-one was allowed on the road, not a single thing while we were running free, and we’d just yo-yo up and down two and three trucks, one truck, two trucks, mostly two trucks, or three to four trucks, and we were king of the road, we’d go up at twenty, and come down at forty five. You want

to try doing that on hair pins, that would test your skills a little bit, but no, that’s the way we were. About that time I seem to recollect there was a mad American movie came out, a war movie called the Cannonball Express, same trucks, but in Europe, different things, and there was, actually I think there was a movie featuring negro soldiers, and we called ourselves the Cannonball. Crazy, you know we were all young, we were all young

except for some of the old blokes, second war guys – No, we didn’t have a lot of time to mix with the people.

The Brits had about fifty or sixty vehicles, and we had thirty three, thirty four as I remember it.

Yes, yes, they were in sections of five vehicles in each section, we had a recovery truck and two spares.

Most of our big moves were in sections of five, you know, five vehicles, five vehicles, five vehicles – they’d go along like that with a corporal, it worked very well, the vehicles were fabulous for the job except they were bloody wet, and sometimes when you went out on jobs, like we did, the Win Chin Peng and the boss communists came out of the jungle for discussions with Twogroarma [?]

in 1955. We went up to Grik which was up on the border, and he was guaranteeing safety, and out, and we took troops in there, and we lined the streets with troops for security, the others all went off into tents to sleep, and we all had to sleep in our trucks. That was a standard thing with us, we had no bedding, we just slept on a blanket on the floor of a truck, and if you were gone for four or five days that was your lot,

you know you never bitched [complained] about it, young and stupid. As I said, young and stupid you know, it was a great experience. Odd things happened there, when we first arrived there and went down on a training camp down by the ocean, set up in tents to get an experience what it was like to be out in the jungle without our trucks and that,

and on guard, and I can’t remember who was on guard one night, and all of a sudden, “Brrrrrr,” we all jumped up and guttered out, “What the hell, what’s going on. I heard something over in the bush, I heard something over in the bushes there!” So we camped out, and just watching that area, and all of a sudden it came up about three hours later, and we had a look, a big wild pig. He’d killed a pig, so we cooked it. You’re supposed to be security thing, and down the track –

there is a newspaper clipping in there, I’ll give you a copy if you wish, there’s this photographer, and his wife came bumping down the track to set up and take photographs of everyone, this is Malaya.

From a town about four or five mile away, a fishing village, and he heard there were troops down there, so they come in to see if we wanted to have photographs taken, this photographer. Then, not long after that

the British artillery had been doing a heavy drop down into what they called the Blue Valley, because there had been reports that there were communists in there, and we’d been going for about twelve, fourteen hours, hauling non-stop, two and three trucks, and we called it a day, and the skipper said, “Well you guys, the British SAS [Special Air Service; British special forces] want to do an insertion in behind this trough where the artilleries firing see, and they’ve got to get in there quickly, can you guys take them?”

It’s going to take another two hours to get another batch of trucks in, so we said, “Ok,” and away we went, and we got up to the twelve mile, and all of a sudden an ambush started, we were getting stuff thrown at us all over the place. We all jump out and we’re all, I’m trying to fight my offsider for my owen gun, he’s got his between his knees and trying to take mine, it happens, and away we go, and over the edge, and he’s sliding over the edge with about a sixty three

angle, and about one hundred feet down, and grabbing grass, and trying to fire at the same time, and all this silly nonsense you know, it’s a moment of madness when you look back at it, and I remember seeing this British sergeant major, he was walking down the road with a shot gun, a pump action shot gun on his shoulder, going, “Boom, boom,” with a bit of a smile on his face, about six three, magnificent man you know in his own right,

and you could see stuff bouncing off the road all around him, and there was ammunition going mad all over the place, and when it was all over we went down there, and there were big heaps of blood but no bodies, and because the communists, they always took their injured and dead away so we didn’t even know what their strength was. You could never work out who was dead, and who wasn’t, but like I can see him now, he was a brilliant man.

No, walking, walking down to the ambush

position. The ambush position would have been about from here to those letter boxes across the road, and he was just walking around pumping his, he stood there in the middle of the road and refilled the magazine on the shot gun.

I learned later that he was famous as the only person in the British Army allowed to carry a shotgun as a weapon because it was against the Geneva Convention the use of shotguns.

Because

it’s indiscriminatory if they’re on full burst, it maims rather than kills.

British SAS, 22 SAS.

That was his weapon. We never lost any, we had one [UNCLEAR ebun a dire?] tracker, [UNCLEAR a manly remnition?] was shot off his stomach, and it went through there, and another guy got one through the arm, and

the first truck got a few holes in it, luckily one of the bullets came through and it didn’t get through the back of the seat rest with it for the driver of that truck. I was on the last truck that just came around the corner to see everything bouncing down the road, and everyone going everywhere and thinking, “What the hell?” We’d only been in the country about six weeks, and it was on.

That was the only time we were directly involved in

a war-like operation.

…and then we’d just turn around and come out.

To go and do that?

Get them up there when they want to stop, drop them, and get back here, that’s how it always was.

Oh we’d been going twelve and fourteen hours up that same road loaded with ammunition.

I think they were setting up the ambush to try and knock us over for ammunition and explosives, but instead out jumped fifty SAS which was a big shock. Not the sort of sight I’d want if I was doing the ambush.

We came, about a twelve mile peg [distance], we came around the corner around the left hand, squared up to do the right hand pin back

again, and as the first truck went around the corner they opened up, they got in the back of the seat of the first truck, second truck had a couple of holes in the front, and then everyone just locked, when I came around the corner we all locked up, and guys, SAS, were piling up both sides, and out from over the power gates, sorry, apologies, because the tarpaulins were over, our guys were going out over the sides with their firearms

and they were trying to get undercover across the back. You couldn’t get cover off the left hand bank because you, they were firing straight down that alley, that line, so we went over the side, most of the SAS as well, and just this one guy, this sergeant major just walked down pumping shots into the ambush position, everyone else was putting ammunition into it as well, there was a lot of ammunition went off. There was fifty SAS, and plus our guys, ten of us.

I honestly don’t know, I was firing, I was hanging on and firing, but I don’t guarantee that my ammunition was going anywhere near where the position was at. I thought it might have been, but you don’t know, you’ve got, you’re virtually going over, and you’re firing like this, and you know –

No, hanging over the side of the embankment.

Where the road dropped off the verge, and that’s where everyone else was too, it seemed a very good place to be.

They estimated that there were about twelve, twelve to fourteen. Just looking at the positions where people had been static, and one thing or another, and movement, and calculated like that. But they were very good at concealing their numbers of who was wounded, who was killed, because a lot of them where known to the authorities, they had names, and price and photographs, and things like that, but they wouldn’t let them be able to cross them off.

If one of the executive Communists died, nobody knew unless they actually recovered the body. Another time I came down from the Camerons, and I was stopped around the eighteen mile by a British SAS, and they said, “Here, can you take this down to the base hospital,” and launched a Communist into the back, a dead commo into the back of the truck, and away I went down to the base hospital. They got that one, he was fairly high up too, that one, because they got him, they could identify him.

They stopped me on the side of the road and they said, “Are you going down to tucker?” I said, “Yeah,” they said, “Well take this with you will you, take it to the hospital.” Fairly decently placed it into the back of a truck, they didn’t throw it any more than about three feet, and I looked, and it was a Chinese Communist guy in the remains of the uniform and the pack. The biggest thing that drew my attention was the fact that

his skin had a touch of green to it, and it intrigued me, and when I got down to the hospital to go to the morgue I asked the morgue attendant, “Why is skin a bit green?” He said, “It’s the chlorophyll, living in the jungle all the time, and no sun contact, and the vitamin factor that you get from sunlight is not in his skin,” and blah blah...“Oh fair enough, that makes sense, chlorophyll being green,” and that was the end of that, and then I went back to

Ipoh, which is where my old base was another thirty five mile away, but odd little things happened from time to time. We rubbed two battalions, Royal Australian Regiments noses in the dirt by informing them that we had been through active service while they were still running around the jungle playing cowboys and Indians, that’s training camp. Did you think that didn’t get some snarls out of them,

they don’t talk about truckies anymore.

A lot of good camaraderie, and a lot of good stuff, yeah, they knew if they wanted something on the QT – on the quiet – we’d organise it and drop it past. If we had to detour fifteen miles out of the way, we’d organise something for them or pick them up or pick something up.

We knew that if we were in town and we got into trouble with some of the other conflicting forces i.e. the British Army, we always knew the battalion would be around to help us out. It was a bit hard, we were thirty odd, or seventy odd at those stages, not always in town at the same time. If you went into town you had the fifteen, nineteen missiles who were about four hundred strong, and you had the Royal Scots Fusiliers, that were about another six hundred strong, plus a few

other British units, and there was an element of resentment against the Australians, the same as there was here during the last war, you know, “They’ve got too much money,” that’s it. Basically, we didn’t get on too bad you know. We also knew that the Ghurkha were very much on our side, they very much appreciated us. It was a bit unusual, but

from time to time one or two of us, we had a few days off, we were known to occasionally be permitted by the Ghurkha to go out with the Ghurkha on a short patrol, so we’d get out like the Ghurkha, and go wandering around the scrub with them, it sounds stupid but –

I went out twice with them you know, we never got anything, we never sighted anything. The best thing about it was the fact that the Ghurkha, each night they had a

drink of rum, they took out a one gallon tin, four litre tin, and it like golden syrup or treacle, and it was very thick, and you’d have a spoonful in half a cup of water, and you had that, and it kept you warm while you were in the jungle. People say it doesn’t get cold in the jungle, well they don’t know what they’re talking about, I think you’ve heard people tell you that before.

Mainly transporting them around, these odd trips, and also I did do a couple

of detachments to the brigade of Ghurkhas up at Sungai Petani, and the brigade of Ghurkhas as we knew it, was like a military college for young Ghurkha boys out of Nepal. They’d come over there, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years of age, and they’d do two to three years learning how to be a soldier at this depot. When they came out of there, they were gung-ho [brave], brilliant. The only problem I

had with the Ghurkhas was the fact that in those days their discipline factor was such that if they lost their British officer, they were almost headless, a British lance corporal could walk in and take over the whole platoon, thirty men, and they would follow him, that was as it was there. But towards the finish there, in the latter part of the ’50’s, they were bringing through their own subbadas [leaders], and

officers who had had British Army officer training, and they were starting to accept those now, then, now that’s the way it is. The Ghurkhas, as I know it now, the Ghurkha Police are in Singapore, Brunei, and Hong Kong, very good for when you have racial riots, or whoever – (UNCLEAR)…those mercenary bodyguards like Lee Kuan Yew with the Ghurkhas, and also those racial riots that we went through.

Oh yes, yes, they wanted us to do all their transport, and no drama, we were free and easy and it seemed to suit them.

Very good soldiers, very good, in all honestly I think, and this is not a silly burst, I would put the Australian guy who

had gone through Canungra as being almost on a par with the British SAS, who were highly trained and just behind the Australian SAS. The Australian soldier would probably be one of the best jungle fighters in the world coming out of Canungra, they breed – it breeds a bloody good jungle fighter.

You learn the disciplines, you learn how to move, you learn how to look. You know when you say disciplines, you’re talking about

days without, with virtually just hand signals, and no talking, no smoking, no radios like these Yanks do, no washing in streams with soaps and things, the smells carry for miles down stream, all that sort of stuff. No, it’s a very strict, and very tight school, I’ve seen the others in operation, and I put the Australians up there.

Discipline, total discipline – if they are told to do something, there is no respect for personal safety, just charge, go at it, finish, bloody good soldier.

It was mainly a three to four day, we’d go out about nine

to ten mile away from the big city, and do a sweep through just looking for sign, looking for movement, looking for what may be the start of a track where couriers and people like that would be going through. They were known not to be hot areas, but you’re looking for movement in the area, you know, people transiting, and stuff like that.

Total, no talk. In the evening you

had your little meal, you used your – I’m trying to think of the correct name, to heat your little meal up, and it was smokeless and all the rest, and your little cup, vatican of wine, oh rum, and get your poncho [raincoat], and just huddle down, not all in a row, not all, but in a break up group, so nobody could go and take the whole lot out, there was always somebody left standing,

and just settle down, stand your bit of guard, move out to the post, if somebody come on the move, you’d just move quietly, move over very slowly.

At that time I was, I’d met a lady who became my wife, the day of the ambush, and we carried on up to the Cameron Highlands that day.

I parked the truck, and I was standing there, and I saw all these teachers from the Ipoh Convent, two of them were playing badminton, and one was standing there watching it, and that’s her, the one out the back there, the second ambush in the one day, collateral damage, it was December 1955.

“G’day,” no, there wasn’t a lot that went on. I went and spoke to one of the civilian

employees in the base, and she had been staying with them, and I asked them how I’d be able to talk to her sort of thing and she said, “Well it could be very difficult, she comes from a very strict family, and she’s a convent, they don’t like this stuff.” So that was that, and anyway I persevered, and found where she lived in Ipoh. Her father’s shop, it was a children’s shop, her father had passed away actually, and her mother was running the shop, and

we carried on from there, and the Reverend Mother of the convent, Mother St Reid, she tried to break it up, her grandmother came up from Singapore, and tried to break it up. When I was courting my wife her mother used to make a meal of curry, and it got hotter, and hotter, and hotter, and I just sat there every time and just ate, I love hot food. I wasn’t going to tell her that though.

Oh whenever I could in town, when I was in town two or three times a week. Then the Reverend Mother of the convent up there wrote to the Catholic Priest in Boulder, who should have known better because our family at one stage were Catholic, but my grandparents had a big blow up with the church, and decided they would never be Catholic again and became high Church of England, and I think he may have realised then the difference between high Church of

England and Catholic is no confession, everything else is almost line ball. Of course the poor Priest arrived at our front door and my mother informed him of all sorts of ancestry problems he might have had, and he departed and said, “Not a very nice reception at that household,” but that was beside the point, we married and –

Oh, that was a beauty, we had,

I can’t remember how many, but we had the majority of our unit, plus the married quarters, the wives went up through our guys later, plus all my wife’s school teacher friends, plus family friends. Two priests to tie me down, one army, one civilian, there are photos there. Really great, really was a lovely day. I’d forgotten we were going down to Pangkor

Island for our honeymoon, and I’d forgotten to pick up my pyjamas, so we went back to my friends house where we’d left our stuff, picked up a bag and thought, “Oh, no pyjamas,” so we went back to get the pyjamas and got inside there, and the house was a mess, apparently after the reception the best man and two of his friends went down the Ipoh markets, and were pinching wickerwork crates of ducks, and they were taking them home, and they decided they’d have a barbequed

duck night, and there was feathers and junk all over the place. The police come for them while they were loading the ducks up into the 1948 Buick. While they were pinching ducks, the policeman was hiding around the corner writing down the numberplate of the car, and they got knocked off that night. They blamed me for it, but nothing to do with me, I was down at Pangkor Island, it was beautiful.

Oh it was a full on, straight

up, Anglican wedding. There was no difference between that and the standard church wedding here in Perth as of today, line ball, everything was done that way. The church was Anglican the same as British padre, or priest, and the Australian Army padre, because if I showed the service they ran different sections of it. I was the first

Australian soldier permitted to marry a local person in that time.

I had to request permission from my British Army Commanding Officer who was very toffee nosed, and we argued him to a standstill and went to my Australian Officer Commanding, who was Captain Goodall, and

he argued my case, and it was approved. I married, well we married.

Well, when I made application for it I was under twenty-one years of age, we married twelve days after I turned twenty-one, that just stopped all that argument, no drama.

No, not really, once it was done, my wife’s family accepted it, came back here.

No, there was a little bit of reserve, but no problems at all.

No, they were quite ok with it, there was no drama, the wife got a little bit of insight into army wife living. Prior to our coming back here, we spent about six to eight weeks at what they called the Australian Army Hostel.

You’re getting a bit personal aren’t you?

Oh yes, it was a government rest house built again, a palmed thatch attap, a beautiful place. The government ran rest houses all over the place, all over the country, for British civil colonial servants to rest up, or to go and have function at, and this one was on the beach about forty metres off the beach waterline, and you’d wake up of a morning, and you’d see the

fisherman going out in their boats, rowing out, loping out the net, and in the afternoon they’d come back, and they’d be pulling the net up on the beach. You go down there and give them a hand pulling in the net or sorting through the fish with them, and just things like that. Beautiful, idyllic setting, Pangkor Island itself only had one motorcar on it, a fishing village on the eastern side, and we’re on the western side, the main seaside. Nowadays it has two or three massive,

big hotels, and a little airport on there, and it is nothing like it was. At that time, there was a British Police Officer and his wife and two little children who came there, and he was holidaying at the same time, and we got to talking, chatting, and approximately, see now that was in July 1957 and approximately five or six years ago I got a telephone call from Queensland,

“Is that Garry Burgoyne who had his honeymoon on Pangkor Island in July ’57?” I said, “Yes it is, what’s it to you?” He said, “My name is Tom Turnbull,” I said, “Sorry the name doesn’t ring a bell,” He said, “Policeman, Pangkor Island, with wife and children.” I said, “Good God.” Now how’s that? I’ve been looking at a guy, this is about 1998

from 1957, and he happened to be going through the membership list of the National Malaya and Borneo Veterans Association, and saw my name in there, and I needn’t say that I got the telephone number to confirm that it was. Now that’s not the sort of policeman you want following you.

Yeah, no, brilliant man, lovely man.

Well we didn’t, as I said,

we went up to this hostel, it was like living in a, almost like a hotel. It was a transit camp for married couples, we were there until the time we flew out, we didn’t come back by ship like the rest of the – most of the married guys, they flew out with their families. The rest of them, they went back by ship, back to I think, on the 8th MV Australia, back to Sydney, they did a march through town then.

We went on board the super USS Consolation, the three tailed monster at Butterworth at the air force base. Before we went on, we were weighed, all our luggage was weighed. We got to Singapore, we all disembarked all our luggage was taken off and re-weighed, we were re-weighed, then boarded, embarked onboard the aircraft again, and next stop was Perth.

We were virtually stood down from duty almost at about that time, August, September, we lived in the married quarters with the best man and matron of honour, with them for about six weeks, and then we moved up to Penang. The married quarters in Ipoh itself, we were living

in the other place the old folks place, that was the same as we were basically back to seven to five, five and a half, six days a week. When we went up to Penang we had no duties, we were stood down on duties, and our vehicles had been taken back to workshops and things like that. The unit was closed, we never ever used again, we were the last of them.

In Penang?

It got boring, it got totally and utterly boring. You know, you’re married, you’re all locked up together, everywhere you looked there are women and kids and blokes all standing around scratching their head and scratching wherever else there’s an itch you know, wondering what they are going to do next. You went sightseeing around Penang. I actually don’t have much time for Penang, it’s a sleepy hollow you know, it always was,

apparently it’s a lot better now, but once you saw the Hill Railway, and you saw the Snake Temple, and two or three other places, that was Penang. The shopping was supposed to have been duty free, it wasn’t really – you just hung around you know.

Oh yes, yes, totally and utterly, yes. Went from an educated upper middle class

local person to all of sudden living in a European world, western world all of a sudden.

Oh great, great, they had to protect her from me, four foot ten, yes, no drama, no problems. No, she was very well looked after even all the husbands and that, you know, they used

to look after her, and make sure everything was ok if I wasn’t around, there were no problems.

No, my wife’s English is better than ours.

Oh, oh, just trying to acclimatise herself, or accustom herself to our mindset, yes, she had the odd difficulties.

One very good thing, this will make a smile over there, is that my mother-in-law told my wife after the first few weeks of marriage, “Do not argue with your husband,” very wise woman, it didn’t last very long though.

When we came

back here?

Over there no, no problems, it was just about the, we were married in July, I’m not sure, I think she fell pregnant in September, or October, before we left. She was having these urges for all sorts of food, and I remember at midnight running around looking for Hokkien mee [noodles], or something or other, and that sort of thing, but that was about it, and then, that wasn’t marriage, but no we never,

no real dramas really. I behaved myself, and forgot about being one of the boys.

Relief in a sense that I’d get back home, two yeas away. I’d only seen Mum and Dad at that stage for about ten days, seven days, in three and a half years,

and I had my wife to take home with me. It was just a relief, and you want to get back and have a look, and also it may sound strange, but when you come from the goldfields like myself, and then you spend two or three years in South East Asia, your mind gets fed up with looking at everything green, bloody green, bloody green, bloody green. Where’s a bit of paddock, where’s a dry

paddock with dead grass or whatever, you know. It’s just a monotony you know, it can be a little bit oppressive if for want of a better word if you let it, you know.

Mainly the weather, you know, the winter changes, nothing much else bothered me.

Fairly regular, about once a month, or something like that, yeah.

No drama, no.

No, they couldn’t no, in actual fact my sister was doing her nursing studies, or just finished nursing studies up in Kalgoorlie at Regional Hospital, and they won a Colombo Plan [Colombo Plan Commemoration Scholarship for students to study in Australia] student, and she was an Indian lass, and she had very strong feelings with my, or not feelings,

association with my sister, my sister used to look after her, and she used to come back, so Mum was, Mum and Dad were accustomed to seeing like an India face around the house you know, so no drama there, and there was also another Indian lad who was on Colombo plan again, doing Metallurgy School of Mines, geology, sorry, and he used to knock around as well with this other girl, and my sister, so there were no problems there.

Not that I know of, we came back here, when we arrived there was a hullabaloo, the newspapers wanted photographs, they were at the airport at midnight to get us, and then we were dragged into Hyde Park, and photographs were taken feeding the ducks, and when our son was born they were hammering on the door again for photographs, and stories.

Apart from that, there was no drama.

Oh, it gave me the willies [irritated me] I can tell you, oh, no problem.

When we first came back?

Oh it was just bang, bang, bang, dropped, gone, and we used to walk around the shopping, or anywhere like that, and people would be looking because the only Asian students Perth had virtually, lived in the

Leederville area. They went to the tech [technical college], and the schools around that area. To see her walking around with me was something else again in peoples eyes, and they’d look, and they couldn’t work it out. Somebody would point and you know, they’d remember something of the newspaper, and that was about it. There was no resentment, no come about, no bad stuff at all.

Oh well

when we married, my best friend, his mother from Melbourne, sent up a photograph in the Melbourne paper, saying, it was written on there, “Isn’t she cute,” or something or other, and that went from Melbourne, back up to Malaya. We came here, and the photographs were taken of just the two of us, and then the four of us the next day, then my son was born. Yeah, actually –

No, there was none of that going on, no, that’s something that the politicians were grabbing hold of very carefully and very vigorously in the last couple of decades, but not in those days, no.

We were in fact, it used to be almost embarrassing to have people looking at you, and now when we walk

around and every where we go and we see one I’ll say, “Bloody mixed marriage. Bloody mixed marriage.” She tells me off, everywhere you go you see them now.

No, they don’t look at us now, you may get the odd Chinese, or the younger Indian people, she’s not Indian, she’s actually Sri Lankan, Srilanese, no, we don’t draw much

attention now.

Yeah, we are members of the Sri Lankan Association, we – I’ll go to any cultural thing that’s not political, or not aligned in a diuretic [didactic] fashion you know. I’ve go no

wishes to be aligned or be part of any political thing whether it’s a – or a racial discriminatory, no way, no, if it’s not social, it’s not an event, and that’s the way I look at it, and that’s the way we have to be.

First off we went back up to Kalgoorlie and met Mum and Dad, then came

back down and stayed with our best man and matron of honour, and they’d just purchased a house in Bedford. We stayed with them from, it would have been December, to March. In the meantime I’d refused my posting to Duntroon. I was not going to go to Duntroon, I was going to take a discharge, and stayed with them, and in April

this house came on the market and we decided to buy it. I applied for a war service loan, and it was approved on the 28th of April 1958 at which stage I hadn’t even reached my twenty second birthday, I already had a war service home. I was told I was the youngest in Western Australia at that time.

Yeah well, you don’t set out in life to do that, that’s the way things happen.

We’re not out to make waves anywhere we go, no. The fact that I had this position with my ex-service organisation was because I have the equipment to do it, the fax machine, the computer, the internet, and all the rest of it, and a lot of the older guys just haven’t got the interest. I like doing it and I do it, I get quite involved in it. They’ve used me, and I’ve used them, its good fun.

Six years, just did the one term.

When I came back to Australia I still had to go to March 1st, 1960. So ’58, ’59, and beginning of ’60. Anyhow I, they put that on hold when I transferred to Duntroon, my posting to Duntroon, and I stayed at the personnel depot at Guildford, and ended up the commanding officer’s driver

while they were trying to make up their mind what to do with me?

Until around about April, April, May of ’58, from December of ’57. Then the boss said to me one day he said, “The officer commanding in Swan Barracks wants to see you,” I said, “Ok, we’ll go tomorrow will we skipper?” He said, “No, you’ll go in now, he wants to see you and you can take me to the mess.” So I went in there all grubby, and marched in, left, right,

left, right, left, right, “Yes Sir,” “Burgoyne,” “Lance corporal,” “You refused your posting to Duntroon,” I said, “I elected not to go, Sir,” He said, “Right, I see in your records you played rugby for the army up in Malaya,” I thought, “Oh yeah, what’s here?” I said, “Yes Sir,” he said, “It’s my intention to set up a rugby team in Western Australia, you’re not aware and where are, and from – ” Well I realised then he was from New South Wales, he’d just taken over

the rugby team in Western Australia, and what’s next, “Would you play rugby if you’re posted to west command?” I said, “Yes Sir,” “Right, loss of rank, change of core, 5BOD [5 Base Ordinates Depot] Midland, march out.” That was it, that was the transfer I got because I could play rugby, stupid, but the army it was full of surprises like that. So stayed on to there,

and in 1959 we decided we’d go back up to Malaya when I discharged, so I asked the wife and the mother to go back, and the bub. She went back and resumed teaching. I posted up to Nungarin, the five base orders depot up there, served out my time, when I came down on the 1st of March discharged, jumped on the vessel, and went back up to Singapore, Malaya.

Posted to 5 Base Ordinates Depot, Midland Junction.

It used to be opposite the old slaughter yards in the old Midland stockyards. I operated out there in transport section, and then ’59, I suggested to the wife that she should go back to Malaya.

Oh I wasn’t overly happy with what was available around Perth in terms of work. I wanted my wife to have another, bit more time back up there with

her family before we lived permanently down here.

Only one.

So she went back teaching in the convent, and I joined her there the best part of twelve months later because I’d transferred in that meantime from the metropolitan area up to Nungarin.

Yep.

From Merriton.

Same thing, transport there in the ordinance depot again, stores.

Oh very, very.

Well that was a continuation of the wartime ordinance depot where everything was stored, everything with the exception of ammunition.

Well it was, you couldn’t bomb it from the coast.

That was the reason, the same as twenty six, thirty, forty miles south of Nungarin, at a place called Ardath out from Bruce Rock, there was a break away mountain range, a little mountain range had a lot of caves, and that was full of ammunition and explosives.

Ardath, A R D A T H, twelve miles south of Bruce Rock.

Oh yes, there’s a lot of little places like that around. In fact at Nungarin, I ran the sergeants mess at one stage. I also used to show the movies we had there, and the canteen, a big canteen. We built a swimming pool, oh the swimming pool was built before I got there I must say, they got a loan from the canteen service

to finance, to build the swimming pool, and then they planted wheat all around, and inside an area, inside the camp, the military camp, and sold it to the farmers, and the farmers, they were on a wheat quota in those days, purchased it, and put it, and sold it, and the money from that wheat sales came back, and we paid for the swimming pool, a good system. All the farmers were members of everything in the area, they were all allowed to come in, and the local population used to

use our swimming pool. As I say, on Friday nights I used to show movies and all that sort of stuff.

Whatever we could get our hands on. Most of it were quite good stuff, Arsenic and Old Lace, was a good one, no – that was back in ’59.

Spring Hill Ammunition Depot, there is the big oil tank

down there at Fremantle, the Charles Randall at the limestones, marine fuel. Ardath, Spring Hill, Nungarin, there was another one, I’m can’t think of the name of it.

No, the ammunition at Woodman’s Point was the ammunition explosives, where they set up the immigration and quarantine area. In fact Woodman Point has only just

been deleted as an explosives storages area I think, and also there’s another one at Byford, there was a big ammunition depot at Byford right on the outskirts of town.

Yes, I don’t know how much would be there now, our family found around the Ardath area before the depression, and that’s what led to my father going up to Kalgoorlie Boulder.

The railways used to run across through the breakaway country where these caves were, and stored in there, yeah.

Well do you know Merriton?

Merriton, Bruce Rock, Ardath, on that line, that’s the line down to Narrogin.

Oh you should know where it is, Quairading, yeah.

You’re one of Byron Pickett’s boys are you?

Oh, he’s from Kellerberrin, yeah,

so you should know Ardath, yeah, good one.

Miserable, we kept ourselves going. I went into the routine at Nungarin, where I would work weekends and that, and then have about five days off, and then I’d just shoot straight up with Mum and Dad

and go out working the mine with Dad, prospect. I’d go ahead of time, and do a bit, and then he’d come out later.

That’s right, yeah, which was good, a bit of back up.

“Oh you’re back – Oh you’re going,” like you’d never been anywhere

you know, because our family weren’t very big on automotive greetings, or goodbyes, it was always fairly low key.

I bought myself a 1930 international one tonne van with a forty four gallon drum in the back as a petrol tank.

I’d drive at night time with no headlights because

the battery was gone. If any vehicles were coming the other way I’d just pull off on the side of the road and I’d switch my parkers on, 1930 or so, it was a brilliant thing, it used to chundle up and down the road at around forty five, fifty mile an hour flat out, and coming back one trip the back axle came out on the left hand side, yeah, left hand side, and there was a cool guarding, so I left it there and it stayed there for

six months. Dad ended up going down there and fixing it and taking it back to Kalgoorlie. Yes, good days, good days.

We were on basic maintenance. The only time we had what we called the light aid detachment which is mechanical engineering, and they did the things like changing points, plugs, and things like that, and we’d do all the other grease and wash

down and all that other stuff. They did the electrical and the mechanic fittings, yes.

Oh, if you put the truck in, about an hour and a half to two hours, depending on what distance we’d been travelling and what we’d been doing. We’d probably go through there about every two to three weeks, and they check them out and go on from there.

That was the maintenance

section.

Light aid detachment.

No, they were all Brits.

They weren’t Australian.

Well, a Bedford truck is the much the same as a General Motors, the same family, so the principals are all the same, the spark plugs, different size spark plugs, and same points, but the principles, everything’s the same.

Quite well.

It was hard for them to come to grips with the fact that they could be dealing with regular soldiers their own age when they were nearly all national servicemen, and myself as lance corporal there at the full age of twenty, I’d have people, twenty, and twenty one privates standing there at attention almost shaking, addressing me, it was the discipline with the recruit training in the national service, and the British Army, they were very, very hard.

It was a strange thing, the comparative age groups. We were all regular army, all volunteers, there were no conscripts in Malaya or Borneo, that was the big difference. Korea, Malaya, Borneo, the Gulf were the only ones of ours, major theatres where we were all volunteers and no conscriptions, it’s a different outlook in life.

In Malaya, Althra Marmie, Keith Windbank, a chap from Victoria. He and I we passed off as brothers in looks and everything, and all the rest of it. We were very, very close. Jimmy Cain, the guy I used to look after, who I reckon had the post traumatic [post traumatic stress syndrome].

Oh about another two or three were reasonably close, but they were the two closest ones, yeah.

Drink beer, play cards.

Yeah, we’d play euchre [card game], we’d play cards, there wasn’t much gambling as such.

Euchre, cards, drinking beer, sitting around talking. Later on when I got involved with my wife to be, there was badminton over at the Racing Club, the Ipoh Racing Club, I didn’t play a lot of that, but the girls did.

About a mile.

Yeah, not bad.

Yes,

very close to town, only about – from the centre of town it would have only been one and a half mile, about two and a half K [kilometre], yeah.

Yeah, not only that, we didn’t like to walk a lot, we used to travel by trishaw [Malaysian tricycle], pedal ones, sit in the front, and the guy would take off down town and make like a real colonial sahib, sit there, waving your arms around, giving directions.

Oh yeah, but you paid for it.

No, not really, it was pretty much set fares. In fact, one of those trishaws, you can see it at the restaurant on the corner of Beaufort and Boulder Street, it’s parked out in the forecourt opposite the big Caltex service station.

If you look you’ll see it on the left there, very similar.

That’s it.

Yeah right, it was the favourite means of transport around the place,

we didn’t use taxis all that much. Taxis, we had to go too far to hire one for a start, and the trishaws were always around either dropping people off after school, or people after shopping, or whatever, there was always one or two out the gate, and if there was more than enough, if there was say six, or eight people wanting trishaws, they, on their way into town or whatever, they would sight another and tell them to get up the gate. We probably paid a bit more than what the local people would,

but overall, quite cheap.

As I say, you chatted, you wrote, you read, the only difference with this, and being with a full Australian unit, there was no Red Shield, Red Shield being Salvation Army

people. They’re always up there with the diggers, they offer you help, and advice, you can always go in there and write a letter, and they’ll make sure the letter gets posted, and they’re very good, very good. That’s the reason most diggers have a soft spot for the Salvos [Salvation Army], because they’re right up there, but we never had it.

No, not really you, a couple of the older blokes like old Dad McKenzie, oh Dad

Menzies rather, he was ex-Second War, you could talk with him. If you wanted to be conned out of weeks wages you’d go and see another bloke called Waxie Rainer.

Oh yes, he was ex-air force in Korea, then he became army to go to Malaya.

Oh no, he gained some pride. When you lose your pride, it’s when you leave the army to go to the air force,

self respect.

No, we had sufficient older people there to help if need be.

If you felt like, but of that generation as I said earlier, you kept things pretty much to yourself, you lived with that.

Captain Goodall, no,

Jardine Wallace, good, great man. Goodall, Ansell Goodall, he was ex-Korea, he was a great guy.

You could talk to him, he was not the mad officer type, he was not standoff [reserved]. Our platoon commander, Lieutenant Anthony Hall, he’d just done two trips to

the Antarctic, and there was a full bottle on the Antarctic, and we crossed the equator, he had great delight in telling us how to take the penguins temperature.

Temperature of a penguin.

While everyone else has heard there are six other guys running around playing King Neptune, and we’re listening in the state room to this nonsense – it gives you an idea.

On the way up.

Yeah.

Sorry?

Oh we didn’t get to take part in the traditional Neptune, King Neptune apparently, and all the rest, and fire hoses and all that, but we were slowly dry listening about the Antarctic.

Yes, and he had a rather strange laugh.

Or a seal or something, he had a moustache like a walrus.

He probably was quite a good hearted chap, but he little bit strange at times. We were all tended to be of the opinion respect did not go with you wearing a brown, Sam, brown belt respect was earned, not put on with a uniform. He found it very hard

to get that respect, very hard. Goodall just went straight through him, Jardine Wallace same thing.

Hard, but fair, lead by example. The next chap we had up there by the name of McPherson, great fella. Within five to six weeks of his arrival there were no dramas at all. Everything was nice and quite, and it went along very well

as a unit should do, just the difference in personalities.

No, I had my truck off the road twice. Both times it had to go up to Taiping, fifty odd mile away to the workshops, but apart from that I was only away for about six to nine days at a time, and that was only two times it

broke down. One was with – our trucks, you had the front axle, and you had like tandem wheels at the back, and coming along one day, and I looked in the rear vision mirror, and there’s a set of wheels out there, and an axle, it had all come, it just drifted straight out. I put my foot on the brake, you’re brake shoes turn inside out, you’ve got no brakes, you lose all your fluid, so we stopped and pulled it off, jacked up that axle, took the other wheels off the other side, and jacked that axle

up, and used a steel tow rope to hold it up there with the chassis, and threw the wheels in the back, and put it into six wheel drive, and filled the brake system up with water, and then put it into six wheel drive, and finished the other thirty odd miles back to base. That cost me my truck for nine days to get it fixed, but you’ve got to get back, and that’s what you do.

The same as any bush kid would, a darn site more than any metropolitan kid of that era because you had to fix them up. My Dad’s cars, motor vehicles, prior to me going in the army, were all 1928 through to 1938 vintage. You just couldn’t afford to buy a new car, in fact the first new cars that came out was a 1947 Holden, and that was around about eight hundred pounds then, and that was about two years wages sort of style.

Everyone had Essex, Whippet, Buick, Austen, you name it, it was all there, all old, and you worked on them with your father.

Well the last two weeks we did at recruit training, they put me driving the rubbish truck. I think that was just after they told me I wasn’t going to, that I was going to

go to transport. No licence, and three guys on the back going around the whole camp picking up rubbish, garbo [garbage] run. I didn’t know whether that was a reward, or punishment.

Well I was behind the wheel, I wasn’t running around picking up the bins.

It arrived through the orderly room,

through the office. It had our postal address, and just came straight through, no dramas, no problems. The mail system back here was quite good. The odd time I sent back Dad a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Whisky inside a loaf of bread, hollowed it out, poked the bottle in, let the sun dry it, and it’s about the best insulation protection you can get.

No, that’s what I used to send down to Dad.

From up there, yeah.

Oh yes, yeah, Dad used to only have it for colds, when he felt like a cold coming on.

Yeah, that was before all the days of styrene [polystyrene foam], we’re going back to 1957, ’58, ’59, and a sun dried stale loaf of bread was good for packing as you get with the styrene stuff now.

Once a month, every three, four, five weeks, about – my sister would write, or my Mum would write, one or the other. One sister who is fairly close to me, she is only eleven months and twenty days behind me. So Jan, she and I were fairly close, still are, she still rings me. They live up the bush still.

It was important in that Mum had had a bad history of health, and problems. It was fairly important to keep a fairly reasonable eye on what was happening back here. I didn’t have much worry about Jan or Dad, but Mum was the biggest worry of the lot. Otherwise there was no real

drama, just a matter of keeping contact.

Windbank was till my best mate there, Kevin Whiteford, he was my best man. Ken King, Kenny King, Junior Jordon, the three of us, the four of us were not like, not Whiteford, Whiteford was about seven years

older, but Jordon, King, Windbank and Burgoyne, we were all give or take, within about eight, nine months of one another in terms of age, and that was about as close as we’d be.

Well, I have left Jimmy Cain out because Jim was somebody I looked after, he wasn’t a mate.

It was important you had mates, you always tried to work it so wherever you went you had your mates with you. Kenny King, he was my shotgun, he used to ride with me in my truck.

There was always two of us wherever we went unless it was

around about five or ten mile radius of the city. We went, one to cover the other in case of trouble. The biggest problem in Malaya, there was no such thing as set lines of battle like there was in Korea or the wars or anything like that. It was, and is exactly, it was the first of the Iraq style wars you have now, where you’re driving around, and you’re prime for ambush at any time.

That was the first of them

in Malaya, that was the world’s first one of this type of warfare.

Any bugger sticking out through the bush with a gun. Pardon me, but no, you never drove over anything no matter how innocent it appeared, in case there was a charge in it. It didn’t matter what it was, paper bag or what, you never drove over it. I still, don’t you, skirt everything, unless

you see something get thrown out of a window of a car, and you bang it or something like that. But you never drove over anything, like on the road, you were very cautious coming into bridges and big culverts. You were looking all very carefully to see what’s around, sort of thing.

Looking for anything which was not in the ordinary. In the bush, in the jungle,

anywhere in nature, there’s no such thing as a straight line. If you see a straight line, straight edge, or anything, you know that you’ve got something that’s not supposed to be there, that is fate in life.

No, you look at the approaches to the bridge and things like that. When you’re coming up to the bridge, you’re looking, as well as on the road.

Like a cable or anything like that.

Mentally you were tired. At the end of the day you were tired because you, when you went to bed at night back at camp, you didn’t know where you were going to be the next day, or next night. So you had just

barest minimum of personal belongings with you, and your firearm, your ammunition, and away you go. You know you could always get a meal somewhere, at a kitchen somewhere. If you had your truck you could camp in the back of that. It wasn’t always like that, but quite often it was you know, so it was just the way of life, you got used to it. Even now I think, Sue will tell you that I sight things on the side of the road and everything long before she realises, because my eyes are still doing it.

It’s just something I did as a kid, I did it particularly so in the army, the army trained you to do it, but I took it on naturally as a kid, but they trained me to a better degree to do it, and I still do it.

We were told where we were going to go. If we were going in a

larger group, the section commander would have the necessary information of where we were going, what routes we would travel. Some routes we could not travel, we knew them pretty well by, the bridges couldn’t take the weight of our vehicles. After about six months, three to six months, you had a very good idea of where you were about, and where your effort was going to because it was a matter of staying

awake. You couldn’t afford to drift off into la la [dream world], like you know, Sunday driving, and you took note of everything, and it stayed with you. I could walk into the transport yard tomorrow morning and they’d say, “Off to Grik,” “Ok,” Go and get your gear, and throw it in, and off you’d go, and your road map sense becomes automatic, but you’re still focusing on, your not worrying about,

or wondering where you are going, you learned it very quickly. There was no, the only surprise you had was if you got back and somebody says, “Well now you can turn around and go back again.” You know, “Oh for God’s sake, I’ve got to go back again. Why didn’t you radio up and tell me to stay there?” And that sort of thing, that all happened, but nothing else.

The police, and the British had it pretty well mapped out and they would give you – in the office there would be designated areas where you would not travel because the limitations of the road would be just of culverts and things like that. There were places where it was deemed very hard to go in because of the width of the thing.

The road, there was no turn around, nobody could move aside, you couldn’t move aside for any oncoming traffic, those silly things like that, but we didn’t lay those too often because they were silly places to go into if you’re going to get caught, you can’t get it, you can’t do anything, but no, you learned, the maps were there, and you were told, and you knew it, it just come back automatic.

Yeah, I did, once I ended up in the Malaya Regiment instead of the Ghurkha camp. It didn’t worry me but, it was only about two miles out.

Not the regimental headquarters, the battalion headquarters, they stay fixed. There was an area command for Grik, up north there was

Sungai Petani, was the brigade of Ghurkha. The south side of Ipoh was the Ghurkha regiment, not far from us was fifteen nineteen visage, and then the Royal Scot Fusiliers was about a mile and a half further over, and then from there on we were doing mostly Cameron Highlands, and Grik was a, sorry the Camerons, there was a permanent base too, there was a big military hospital up there as well.

Army GMC, six by six truck, rated two and a half tonnes by the Americans, we were carting four tonne with them.

Well, one of the lousiest things you could do would be to have the Front Upper Road to Cameron Highlands, with ammunition. Three point seven shells, twenty eight pounds each, and most times you ended up with your truck partially backed up to

the railway wagon in the middle of the night, carrying those things across, and putting them in the vehicle. I fell out my ankle, my shoulder, and that stuff, food, troops, mainly troops, and villages, people from relocation. It was a big, big cross section of just about everything you can think of.

We just move our vehicles in through the police gate, and stock in between houses or huts or whatever they are living in, and the police go

through and tell them to take out that, take that, and when you see it on the vehicle, make sure that you get as much as you can on, plus personnel. The actual entering of the village was all done by police, Malaysian Police. It was a lot better that way, we could not be accused of interfering with women or being offensive to women, with all whatever restrictions your race, and – (UNCLEAR) – were, and we left all that to them.

A dog, a cat, six or eight WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s maybe, four, five, ten ducks, three, four kids, themselves, furniture. Furniture was fairly basic for their accommodation, pots and pans and little low tables, a few little chairs, no real garbage that we as westerners have in terms of big lumpy furniture and stuff like that, they live fairly simple.

So you could get, most times you could get two families onto a truck with a bit of a squeeze, and a push and a shove here. Make sure that they were all secure on the back when you took off, and away you’d go in a convoy, six, eight, ten, twelve, fifteen, whatever trucks were needed.

Oh they were distressed, yelling and

carrying on and caterwauling all the time, it’s a fair comment too. That was the police problem, not ours, we were there to transport them, physically relocate, that was all.

It varied from two hundred to anything up to about six hundred.

Yeah, but it’s also a lot of help if they’re running feral in the bush, a lot of

help to the CT’s [Communist terrorists], if you’ve got a large fifth column working out of that village, you’ve got to keep it splintered.

Oh yes, the battalions, you know, the battalions and infantry troops around, totally surrounding the area. Nobody could get in or out, not a thing. You might have an area, a village of possibly say two acres, and you could have anything of up to five hundred troops around it, virtually touching

one another, a total circle. Going back to my taking, smuggling stuff out of the kampungs, our villages, some of the women would, I actually saw this happen, defied a male, a British male soldier to body search her, and the stupid fool,

he patted her here, and she just spat in his face, and with that the Malay Policeman knocked him to the floor, and he made a radio call, and about half an hour later there, the biggest, ugliest, weirdest looking female copper you’ve ever saw came in, and gave her a body search. She never ever made trouble again. That female took over that post, and the sergeant went on to another village. You had them like that, and you can’t blame them for being resentful,

but how much of it is just pure resentment, and how much is a show of whatever? Are they assisting, are they part of the operation, or not? Is it being done to draw attention away from somebody else doing something else? You don’t know, you don’t know those people in the jungle all the time.

When we married and came back, not really, as I said earlier, the green fever in the eyes, I wanted to see a sunburnt, sun dried paddock, and move out, have a change, just have a total change. The same thing happened to me when we went back up there as a civilian, after three years I was stir crazy to see our place back here.

It was the logical, it was the logical step.

It’s, for lack of a better term, it’s possibly the centre of the least amount of corruption in South East Asia irrespective of Singapore. Singapore is corrupt too, there’s no doubt about that, in its own little way, and it has been for many, many decades.

Yes, that exists to a degree in Malaysia, there’s no denying it, but it’s a more democratic government than any lot of the others around the place, and more than the others rather, in all honesty.

Mine specific no, but

the Australian Government offered to participate with the British, and did assist them to formulate and gain their proper democracy. It wasn’t just Australia, Fiji were there, Kenya, Africa, West African rifles were there, war colonial troops, New Zealanders, they came in after us. It was a joint Commonwealth operation to give them democracy.

It’s very hard to put a value figure on that. We did what was required at the time it was required. If there had been a requirement for more effort or whatever, and whatever, in any one way, I don’t doubt that there would have been, we would have obliged, but we did what had to be done. Sometimes a little more, and possible some of the other times places a little less,

but it was not to place anyone or anything in jeopardy at that time, no way, no, we were all keen on that.

Yeah, she’s listening I think.

No, not really.

No, not really, “Oh I won’t invite him for a beer, he’s going to see his girlfriend sort of style,” that’s about as far as the chiacking [teasing] ever went. It was up and

down, straight up and down.

A good unit, a good outfit, small, small enough that if there was any bitchiness it was sorted out straight away, it wasn’t allowed to fester.

No.

Thump, thump.

Oh there is in every unit. Not very much, very little, rarely, somebody got a bit too stupid with the singing syrup [alcohol], and that’s it,

and somebody would just say, “Cut it out,” BANG.

Oh yes, the canteen, we could buy it all on credit. The Brits couldn’t, we could.

No, no black market. If the canteen was closed you could go into town. Coffee shops were always there, there was always alcohol for sale in the coffee shops. Nothing like licensing laws here, nothing at all.

You could never be too far away from it, no, no, it was a good, it had its own social – being transport, and being in the location we were, we had better access to a social atmosphere than what the infantry guys did.

Than the infantry.

Invariably, even when we did detachments away from our base, we went to another base where there

were facilities, whereas 2nd Battalion had a company of men based at Sumo Sea Port, which was eighteen miles from the nearest watering hole, which was three miles past an Afghan on a camel, you know that sort of thing. They lived on top of one another, a hundred odd men on patrol. They didn’t have much in the way of getting out of one another’s hair.

It wasn’t an army thing, it was more of a personal thing involving my best mate, Keith Windbank, and he said to me, “Let’s go and have some beers tonight Gaz?” And I said, “I’ll go, yeah I’ll go,” and then I changed my mind because he’s a lousy driver when he had a few beers in him.

No, I’m brilliant! So anyhow, I called off, and he took Tommo, another good friend, and they went and had a few beers, and coming back Keith went sideways with the car, left hand side rear door into an eighteen inch square concrete post. Tommo was asleep on the back seat with his head alongside the door. I was delegated to go into the morgue and do the

identification, and they hadn’t waited for the identification, they’d split him, and I walked in cold on that.

It’s been with me for the last – quite a few years, and in fact I went and saw the DVA psych [Department of Veteran Affairs psychologist] about it the other day. This is the third time I’ve ever spoken about it. It wasn’t too bad, I got a fair bit over that over the years,

and then about seven years ago –

– and about seven years ago I got a phone call from one of my friends in Queensland, and he said, “Windy’s just topped himself,” and it was all to do with that accident, and I blame myself for not being there. I should have gone, but still. There we are, that was the only bad thing really. There were other

things I seen, dead people just sat on one another, but that was me.

Well that’s the problem, you don’t go bleating to everyone about your problems.

Well I’m not of that era. Same as all of us, when we came out in the ’50’s after the war, through the ‘50’s into the

early ‘60’s before Vietnam, “There’s the door, fellas, you’re finished, go,” you’re not told that you can start, if you’ve got any problems with like injuries and that, registered them now. If you’ve got any problems you want counselling on sort of thing. Away you go, you’re finished you know, and here I am forty four years later after getting out of the door. So as I’ve said before and again,

we’re not into that, my era, my generation you know, we’re stupid in that sense, it’s not the way we’re brought up.

There probably would have been a lot more happier marriages around, and that is a fact. There was as much chemical, well to a very large degree there was just about as much chemical let

loose in Korea as what there was in Vietnam, and a lot of it was supplied by friendlies. We had guys who have been in the trenches in the middle of winter thirty and forty degrees below for five and six weeks before they were taken out of the line. They walked up to the big tent, stripped off their clothes thrown in a heap to be burnt, and as they went through they got sprayed with fifty percent DDT [insecticide], carcinogenic, banned around the world in the last thirty years, and they were going down with cancer

all over the place. Reg Bandies, one of them, he had two lots of cancer, his stomach is a plastic sheet. That’s, the government has just finished their third study, mortality study on Korea veterans, and they now claim that the Australian Korean veterans are the most studied medically researched veterans of the Korean war in the world, it’s a bit late now.

There were, a very good friend of mine, young Max Hagan, he died just six months ago with cancers right through him, and they stated they were chemical caused. Now Max never ever worked near chemicals, but he had time in Malaya, later, after me. There have been two or three other guys who have

gone much the same way, but there was no obvious spraying, or no obvious system of use of chemicals. A lot of the rubber plantations they sprayed with sodium arsenite. At one stage when I went back up there, I used to manufacture that, that was arsenic in it, that when you sprayed it on you, you burned you – just your skin, just blistered with it. Other chemicals, I don’t know, but

that was all weed control in the rubber plantations.

Sodium arsenite as a weed killer.

Yes, I used to make it, my nose used to blow up until it was like a potato, and then all of a sudden it just ruptured and blow up – my fingernails were all blue with arsenic.

After I went back as a civilian, yeah.

Doing that sort of work in those conditions?

How many Department of Work and Safety operators were around forty four years ago?

No controls over everything.

It was recently, 1980 they were talking about those guys who were using 242 up north, agricultural protection people.

Purchased illegally in from Singapore, out of Vietnam. Where do you start, and stop?

How important are mates? If you can’t look everywhere and look after yourself, you’re always looking behind him when he’s looking behind you, that’s how important it is.

Very close, we’d share our, share beers, share our tucker, whatever, you were the same as with

a twin brother. If you were a good mate, you did everything together.

Oh quite good. Yes, you had to see the humorous side. Somebody had to have a sense of humour, put it that way. In a group of three there had to be at least one with the sense of humour whether it be reverent or irreverent, and totally irrelevant.

It was always important.

No, no idea, I was out of the army, and went back up to South East Asia straight away.

I bolted for the door and took off to get back on a boat. The time, my enlistment at the time had expired, and I served full term,

and just out the door, you know, “Go on out the door, away you go,” once again no counselling, no offer of assistance or anything like that, just, “Keep going, boy.” So I went back to a friend’s house and I went there and waited a few days for the boat. I’m not sure, was it Gorgon, or Karen, I can’t remember now, Karen I think. We went up to Singapore, and then from train up to Ipoh where my wife was.

No, I’ve only just started, just completed second interview, second session, I’m awaiting his report now. That was down at Hollywood Hospital, the Specialist Centre, with a team of psychiatrists down there. Well it’s all specialist, whatever you want to nominate, it’s there.

Yes, I’m having an assessment done.

I’ve had my problems, yep.

I lie there, I can’t sleep, I think about it too much, things like that.

This one I feel sorry for because I didn’t know, I didn’t ever find out. I didn’t know until I took the tests this month past, there we are.

She’s listening, she’s drummed you up on this one, yes, she’s a great girl.

I’ve not had counselling, I’ve just had an interview with the psychiatrist.

Well, I wanted to try and get something done, and my ankle is giving my trouble, and I’ve never claimed before, and my shoulder is giving me trouble from time to time, so I’ve put in a claim for a disability on that,

and part of that was the PTSD, or see, what’s – try to find out what’s going on with me. Physiologically apparently I, something’s not, I just can’t move, I don’t get moving, and I start to slow down more than I should be. I’ve always been a fairly strong person and able to do things. I don’t get started. We have problems, little problems,

and it drives me up the wall.

As I said, this is the second or third time I’ve spoken about it since I spoke to him about it, yeah, other than that, I’ve told nobody.

It has made things a little easier, but I still, in there, or I get up and walk and sit out there, or whatever,

yeah.

The assessments are to see whether I can go to Vietnam Veterans Counselling Service, and I’m waiting on advice on that now.

Oh yes, I’m not going to hide it, I’ve done it now, I must go forward with it.

Well first we went back to Royal Australian Goldmine, that was a Brisbane company, a Queensland company which had been mining gold there

underground since before the war, and at the time I got there they were pretty much on their last legs, we were mining out the reserves. A very rich mine, very, very rich, and they’d been going for about fifteen months, and we were closing the mine down, and the last three months we were there they were making this sodium arsenite for their rubber plantation as a weed killer. The old bungalows

which clipped all the ceiling fans out, and the motors and the shafts and put propellers on the bottom, small propellers, and big steel pipes with big heating elements. Water, soda, ash, and arsenic out of the rest tailing for the mine, and you’d boil it up, and stir it up until it all went clear, and then you pushed it out into forty four gallon drums. That went on for just over three months, and then the liquidators took over and closed the

mine in December, ’61. February, March ’62, I started with Dunwood Mining Company just outside Ipoh, Iron Ore mining. I was mechanical and mining supervisor there. That mine, we mined that out, and the job looked like closing down, and I didn’t want to go to the main mines further out. So I was offered a job with

a firm part of the old Jardine Matheson Group, Jardine Matheson being the first people allowed to trade in China from way back, from the Emperor time, and it set up their workshops in Ampung – sorry we’ll go back to the mine, the mining one I was at. It was just outside Ipoh at a place called Gunung Rapat, and even in 1960 you still had the village, you were still surrounded with barbed wire and police,

and I drew my workforce from there, and people said, “You’re mad,” and I said, “No I’m not,” I got the biggest gangster, cum CT [communist terrorist] communist sympathised, and I made him foreman. I had no trouble with anything being stolen, I had no trouble of anything being done as I wanted it, as long as I had him for foreman. I had to go there at night time, night shift, and the police would not walk down the main street of this village with me, not even with their rifles. I’d stake

it down there looking for people, nobody, and you’d see the curtain move a little bit of light, and it would close, find the guy I want, and give him a serve, and stake him back out again. But as long as I gave them face, they respected me. After that, when I went to the Jardine Wall which is part of the Jardine Matheson Group, I was sent down to create the new workshop for every equipment at Ampung village, which is also

another notorious area, and I did exactly the same thing over there in terms of –

Sorry?

Yes, using the same basis of employment. If they were qualified as a mechanic I didn’t care whether they were Secret Society, or what they were. The boss of the Secret Society, he was my foreman. In the four years that I knew of in that workshop, there was not a single thing ever stolen out of, nor did I ever have any trouble with staff or anything like that.

Oh 37 Group, or something, 37, a big long Chinese name. I was interviewed – after about eighteen months I was interviewed by the Special Branch. The Special Branch in Malaya is one that deals with subversive activities including gangs and things like that, and they wanted to know how I controlled gangsters, “What was

my means of controlling gangsters? What was my tie in with gangsters? Are you a gangster?” And I explained the situation to them.

Called in, and, “Please explain.” Sit down there, they were the exact words, “Sit down there.” No please, Sir, thank you, or anything, “It has come to our notice that you are employing gangsters. Are you in the habit of, make it a practice of employing gangsters?” And it

went on from there and I let fly with a few choice parts of the English language, and we settled down to a knock down drag out debate, on why, and how. They accepted my story, and they also did in the end admit that since I’d done this in both these areas there had been a drop in the crime rate. They couldn’t work it out. Whilst people were

employed, they didn’t have to do criminal acts to get money. Previously they couldn’t get employment because they were criminals.

No real drama really. I was on the high ground, moral high ground, there was no drama, but there was lots of stories going around about it. The engineering director called me in, and he was a British old chap and, “What’s this Burgoyne I hear about.” I gave him the

story and he said, “Well, fair enough, you know what you’re doing,” and that was the end of it. So anyhow, we went on from there, and I ended up taking, assuming responsibility for the engineering workshops division, we had workshops in five countries. I was based out at Singapore, and then we handled the Alice Charms International Earthmoving, Detroit Diesel

Industrial Marine Engines, P and H Cranes and Shovels – I was in charge of erecting tower cranes that you see on building sites. Kue Ken Crushing Equipment, Atlas Copco Compressed Air, all the stuff we sold throughout South East Asia, our own workshops handling those.

I controlled it, I had workshop managers and service managers under my control in each country.

The other thing I would do too was our chief engineer in the firm, Mr Eric Lowe, a brilliant civil engineer, and under his guidance I was sent into Sumatra to build a wharf in a river, and as consultant to the Royal Company. It’s not bad for a boy that left school at fourteen. I had workshops in Sumatra, Thailand, Malaya,

Singapore, Sarewak, Laos, Cambodia, and one in Vietnam, but we got rid of that, we gave that to the Yanks [Americans], and in Sabah, in Lahad Datu, we had another one there. I also had one up river from Balikpapan about a hundred miles up river from Balikpapan at a place Samarinda, Indonesian, Borneo, that was about it. My area of responsibility

was the border of Burma and India through to China border, all of Asia excluding Philippines, Hong Kong and New Guinea – put it that way. Everything else was my valuable for seven years for seven months of the year.

Five months of the year in bits and patches. No, seven months of the year away. It was very busy, very interesting, quite demanding.

At the finish, we went on to twenty one month, and three month contracts, twenty one months there, and three months back home. So it gave me virtually every second Christmas back home which again was what I enjoyed because it was the middle of summer and you got nice brown paddocks, away from the green. A typical day to go into a place called Miri, in Sarawak. Miri, is eighty miles south east of Brunei on the north coast of Borneo, and you’d fly,

in those days we flew from Singapore, from Kucing in a comet, four jet airliner. From Kucing to Sibu in a Fokker twenty seven turbo prop [propeller]. Then from Sibu to Miri in a DC3 [Douglas Dakota Bomber]. Now when you floated in a DC over Miri, you seemed to be just ground zero for miles and miles and miles, but when the plane touched down it was all grass and there was jungle about one hundred and fifty feet either side of the wing tip.

You got up the end of the strip, and they gunned the left motor, the support motor, and spin her around, and you get out and the terminal’s about as big as this room. You look back down at the plane, and there is three massive concrete piles sunk into the grass area, and twenty yards behind that was the South China Sea. Now if it had rained half an hour prior to arrive time, or if there was more than a two knot cross wind, you had to fly to Brunei and then come back eighty

miles down the beach by four wheel drive. Anyhow, if you’d gotten there successful in the aircraft, there was then another five or six hours up there for the speed boat to get to Logger Camp, you got pretty tired by the time you got in there.

It was indeed.

One hotel in Miri was owned by the hadji. ? hadji is a term of respect for somebody, a Muslim, who has been to Mecca, and done the

trips, it’s called hadji. It entitled them to wear the white cap, skull cap. He had the only hotel in Miri, and if he didn’t like you, you couldn’t stay in Miri, you had to find somewhere else to stay, and somebody said to him once, “Hadji, your hotel’s not very clean,” he said, “It’s very clean. I changed the sheets in every room once a week, I don’t care how many people have slept in there.” It was not unusual to come out of Miri with body lice.

Oh it was a great place. We had lots of things to humour us. Some things are a bit sad, when you see people get hurt by accident, and that.

Not too bad actually, not too bad. One of the funniest things I saw was an elephant, they used to

follow the little logging railway lines, it’s only about a foot, fifteen inch railway line, a narrow line to bring the logs down to the river, and they put their little drums of fuel, their forty four gallon drums of fuel in there, and we were sitting there one morning and a herd of elephants came out of the jungle and one of these drums it must have been all but empty, and the heat on it went “Boong,” and these elephants, they went berserk, they stomped every drum, and one of the engine drivers came around the corner, I don’t know whether he’d

been to the toilet, and these elephants were all after him. He took off like a bullet up a tree, and the rest of us got out there and made a big heck of a hullabaloo, and chased the elephants off, yeah, but wildlife, across the straights from Singapore in Jahore, outside Kota Tinggi, a big sandpit – Singapore has no facilities for mining sand for concrete, and yet it is a great consumer of concrete, building

concrete structures, so the sand was coming from Jahore and we’d go over there and it was a crazy little place to get into, you had to go in by four wheel drive to a certain area, and then you had to go by Sampan, across the creeks and the swamps until you got to this little island thing, and there was a couple of buildings about eight feet off the ground, eight, nine feet off the ground, and the workers lived up in there, over, and camped up there, and when we went in there to work on the machinery, we’d stay there overnight, and it was not unusual

to see tigers prowling around the base of the buildings. Now that’s less than twenty miles from the CBD [Central Business District] of Singapore, fair enough!

Our son would already come down here. I had decided very early in my life that any boy child of ours would go to Guildford Grammar. He was down here at the age of nine, in 1966, our daughter

was coming to an age where we felt she should be schooling down here rather than send her to boarding school. That’s when we decided to come back in December, ’70, ’69, we came back down here in March, ’70, and that was that.

Into workshops again, I kept on with workshops. I did the extension to the Powerhouse at Fair Goldsworthy Mining, I did the extension

to Powerhouse at Goldsworthy Mining at Finnegan Island, and then I got fed up with workshops, and walked away.

In the last twenty years, yes, very important.

I’m the State President of the Korea and South East Asia Veterans Association. I am a full member of the National, Malaya and Borneo Veterans Association. I’m an associate member

of the Australian Army Training Team in Vietnam. I’m an associate member of the 2/16th Battalion Australian Infantry Forces.

In terms of – ?

The training team one is a courtesy invitation to the position I hold

as President of the Korea and South East Asian, because quite a lot of the training team people who served in Vietnam, were ex-Malaya, ex-Korea. The training team were members of the Australian Defence Forces of warrant officer rank, who were basically up in the mountain areas of Vietnam to teach the local indigenous tribes people how to look after themselves, defend themselves, and stop being used up by the Viet Cong [Communist-led forces fighting the South Vietnamese government].

They went out and fought with them and showed them how to do their fighting, they had some very heavy stuff. The 2/16th Battalion –

I’m just an associate member. Next Tuesday is an AGM [Annual General Meeting] at the house at Swanbourne, the SAS barracks, we’ll be at that one. As an associate member I can vote only in certain aspects

of the assocs [associations] operations, when it’s to do with constitutional Vietnam Veterans stuff, no, that’s for full members. The 2/16th, due to association, due to relatively having served in their last war, I claimed the associate citizen membership.

I am purely an associate stoke social member. We are not entitled to vote as an association member. NMBVA, National Malaya and Borneo Veterans Association, I’m a full, full on member there, I qualify for my Malaya service, and I’m just and ordinary member what you brief, and I liaise with the president and the secretary on various matters they might want a little bit of assistance with.

Precisely the same as the welfare of the membership, the families, and members, the bonds and comradeship, they’re basically the same thing. They are a little bit different to the Korea and South East Asia in that they take in all members who served during the emergency and confrontation, and that’s not restricted to Australian, they take in Malaysian

police, British people, British officers and police, and also British armed forces. It was originally a UK [United Kingdom] based, and an Australian chapter, yeah.

It is, it’s a very good place, very good guys, very good, well spread, a mixture of British, and Australian, and

one gentlemen, who was a very close friend of ours, he was the ADC [aide de campe] of the Sultan of Perak, so he also ran a jungle court right up on the Thai border, and he’s down here now, and also diplomatic core, the British Diplomatic Corps remembers it’s one of those as well, a foreign office. The Korea, and South East Asian veterans, we cover people who fought in Korea, Malaya, Borneo confrontation, Thai Malaya

border, Gulf War I, Vietnam, and whoever, that’s all the qualifying service as defined by the RSL [Returned and Services League], and the Veteran’s Affairs. It has something like about eighty one members all fully qualified, all ex-servicemen.

I am the president. I have been now, this is my fourth, four and a half years coming up, prior to that I was two and a half years as senior vice [senior vice president].

Very, I’m tired. We have four social gatherings per year at the time of our quarterly meetings, the AGM, and the other three quarterly meetings. We have our annual luncheon or dinner, I try and tie that in with the 27th of July Commemorative Service where

we commemorate the cease fire in Korea in 1953, and we do, oh sorry, the cease fire thingo – and then the annual luncheon. We move around with our venues, we spread them around. Three of them are at Caning Park RSL, the quarterly general meeting and barbeque we have it either Karrakatta sergeants’ mess, or Swanbourne SAS,

and our annual dinner we try to hold it at the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] association at Moore Creek, because they have a beautiful kitchen there, they put on a very good meal, and also the gentleman who is a club manager is also an ex-Singaporean, and ex-Singapore Airlines, I know him quite well. I asked him, and I left our social secretary book the luncheon for us this year,

and she told me he wanted to come along, and I was quite happy with that. So no wine, no carafes of wine supplied, so I rang him back and I said, “James there’s no wines this year on the table,” he said, “No Garry, it’s a little bit hard,” I said, “Well what about some wine,” and he said, “A bottle of red and a bottle of wine on each table,” and he went click, click, click, and then he said, “For a dollar per head,” I said, “Right, OK, I accept

that, do you confirm, do you accept that I’ve accepted,” he said, “Yes,” I said, “And make it tables of four, not eight.” He blew up! But no, there very good down there.

We do have one or two other, not official ESO [ex-service organisation] functions groups of us get together, the Wednesday mob as they’re called, they meet for lunch and a few beers

and a little bit of chiacking, about every second or third month they have a ladies day where we all get together and go to a different venue and have lunch, and we have the last Friday in the month mob, and we move, alternate between Bullsbrook RSL up at Pearce up there, Belmont RSL, and Cannington RSL. When we go to Bullsbrook, I drive the bus, I stay sober.

The beautiful thing about going up there, those air force boys know how to cook, and I don’t know whether you like lambs fry and bacon, but it is utterly magnificent, I even bring a takeaway home.

Yeah, yeah.

Very much so. I had an uncle die in the first war, not an uncle, my Granddad on Mum’s side, maternal

grandparent. No, it is important, it is Australia, New Zealand Army Corps. It is something with which we are bonded, and it’s the, I don’t know, the epitome I suppose of mateship, looking after one another, looking after your country, and it’s good, great. Right now I can make

a statement so I doubt very few people will argue with. When I say that if I was to stand two people there, a ten year old and a twenty two year old, the ten year old would know more about Anzac Day then the twenty two year old because children are now being taught it properly in the schools, not what they pick up and hear around the table, and that’s the way it should be, I feel very strongly about it.

As long as it’s observed as a commemorative day and not as a public holiday, yes. In America, when I was over there, Veterans Day is a day all the shops are open, and it’s hardly anything happening you know in terms, like we have. There’s no respect, we have Americans come over here and march with us. In 1999

we had the 187 Airborne Paratroopers come over and march with our unit, and they were totally and utterly gob smacked what Anzac Day is here. They said, “We wished to Christ that we could have something like this, in America it’s just so commercialised,” and that’s my big worry that it is not to come commercialised. They’re making the push to have the shops open and the things open at one o’clock, twelve o’clock. No, no, let’s keep it as a day of commemoration, not

as a day of commercialism.

You think of those who went. Those who you know that have gone. On each Anzac Day when we have our dinner after Anzac Day, we read out the names of all Western Australians, our roll of honour, who died in Malaya, sorry Korea, Malaya, Borneo and

Vietnam. All those names are read out at the gathering, and we take it quite serious, yep.

Well I wouldn’t have met her, ‘the Boss’. If I hadn’t have gone into the army, I wouldn’t have ever have met her, I don’t know what I’d be doing, probably staggering around the big pit up at Kalgoorlie, or

something. No, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Value of mates. Prior to going into the army, when I stated that I had mates, I was still very much a loner in what I wanted to do, but if I went into, the mates were there for the social aspect of what I wanted to do. My

loner aspect of just going bush when I got fed up and that, no mates ever came with me on that, that was my thing, that was me. Socialising yeah, ok, mates were quite important, yes.

Yes, stand up and be counted. Don’t knuckle if you feel you’re right and you’re justified in feeling you’re

right, put your point. I have been known to declare war on the Department of Veteran’s Affairs or the RSL. Everyone, I’ve always given my fair notice, and then they get worried because I fight dirty, but that’s beside the point, everyone does, you have to. When you say you fight dirty, it’s not really, it’s just that you remind people of promises they have made, and they don’t like that. No, I’ve got no real axe to grind with DVA.

In actual fact, I invited Russell McLaughlin, our state deputy commissioner, he was leaving us, and we had him out to our last quarterly meeting and presented him with a plaque, and a certificate of appreciation. Tomorrow morning I’m going there to have a cup of tea with him, along with a stack of other guys too, it’s his farewell smoko. No, he’s good value, we’ve got no drama with DVA in that sense.

Thank you.

It is a pleasure. I hope I didn’t jump around too much. It’s basically, it’s pretty much what you got is what I am in that sense. I enjoy my life, and I get along with, I don’t have many friends outside of, outside really, outside of family, yeah,

but we get along.