Australians at War Film Archive

Well I was born in Ayr, at the District Hospital – we call it the District Hospital in 1927 – 13th of August 1927. I was

the seventh of eight children. My mother had eight children. I had one brother younger than myself and I had three elder sisters and three elder brothers. I was the second child of my mother that was born in a hospital. All the other children were born – well she was either in the bush or away from a place where hospitals

were available. So only my eldest – my next sister and myself and my younger brother were born in hospital. All the other children were…

I think that larger families were more common in those days. There were several families with not quite as many, but with, you know five or six

children. It was certainly more common than it is today.

My father had a truck and a water tank on the back of it, and in the early days of the town there was no bitumen roads, and one of

his jobs was, he had a tank on the back of the truck and he used to spray the roads to keep the dust down, and consolidate the roads. Of course in the few years preceding World War II, most of the roads were bitumen, but in the construction of those roads he was also employed as a sub-contractor in the building of the roads.

No he was a private contractor – he owned his own truck and he did it as a sub-contractor to the council and to private contractors. Later just prior to World War II he went into the carrying business and had some trucks as a general carrier as well.

It – in the years just preceding World War II and during World War II he was also a shire councillor, elected to the Ayr shire council.

I don’t know really. He was just a public spirited sort of person and he was involved in public

life and apparently enjoyed it, and he spent several years on the – as a shire councillor.

Not as much. She was more a family person of course. You can quite imagine with eight children she probably didn’t have a lot of time for socialising.

No. No it

wasn’t in our family. As a matter of fact it was a mixed marriage where my father was a Roman Catholic and my mother was Church of England, so neither religion was predominant in the family and we weren’t very, very involved in the church at all. Although in later years my mother did go back to church and she regularly attended church

in her later years, but not while we were growing up. She probably had too much to do.

Well it was always a small town. It hasn’t grown very much since those days.

It – the town itself was a typical country town where we were eighty kilometres away from the major town of Townsville and transport wasn’t as good as it is these days. I mean we didn’t go from the town very

much. It was quite an expedition if you – to go to a major town like Townsville.

Well we had vehicles, because we had a car. It was a six cylinder Whippet. Whippet was a brand of car, and of course all of us couldn’t go if we were to

go to Townsville, only a small portion of the family would go. There was also a train service of course that you could go to Townsville and – or other places, but travel wasn’t high on the agenda for a lot of people. We were sort of self-centred in our own little town.

Well yes there were some things that – it was some of the government or semi-government agencies that you may have to go to a major town to see about those things – you know that – the small towns didn’t have some of those facilities, and also for a

sporting events the smaller towns had football teams and tennis teams and cricket teams, and wherever it was always a fairly big weekend if the football team was going to go in town to Townsville to play, or go to Charters Towers or somewhere like that to play – it was, and although it was only eighty kilometres away,

it was quite an expedition because of poor roads and slow trains and that sort of thing – it was usually three or four or even more hours to get to the place, and it was – to go to the football for instance to Townsville or to Charters Towers, it was – you got up quite early in the morning and spent most of the morning getting to the game and then most of the night

travelling back. It was quite an expedition.

Oh yes we played rugby league, played cricket, was a member of the life saving association, played tennis, played a little bit of soccer – most sports.

Well it was quite a – I’d say it was – we had to make our own fun. There was no television. There was very little other activities unless you contributed to it yourself. So in the summer we played cricket

or went to the beach, and the life saving association – Ayr was one of the first life saving associations in Queensland and we just had to make our own fun – even though it was about sixteen or eighteen kilometres to the beach, we still used to go down there with – in most cases we pushed our

pushbikes down there.

Well most young people went to the beach, and then the older people went as well as relaxation because there was very little else amusement or things to do, and an afternoon or a day at the beach – even as a

family was quite the thing – to take a picnic lunch and spend your day at the beach; and talking about the life saving association, my father was a foundation member of the Ayr surf live saving club in Ayr, and the reason, or one of the main reasons for the formation of the surf club was the drowning of

a very popular young man in the town, and a public meeting was called after the meeting, after the drowning, and from the meeting the Ayr surf live saving club was formed. As a matter of fact I do believe from conversations with my father that they had to contact the Bondi club in Sydney to get information because there was no clubs in Queensland

that were – had formed a surf live saving association.

Well it was – the old surf reel of course was the way that you rescued them. There was no rubber duckies or anything like that.

Well the – a practise rescue for instance – one of the life savers would swim to a hundred metres or a hundred and fifty metres off the beach and hold up his hand as a sign that he was in difficulty, and of course you – the best swimmer or whoever was available, but the

best swimmer usually jumped into the belt and swam out to the person in difficulties.

The belt was made of a type of canvas, that was a halter-type thing that – the halter would come over here and the belt went round the waist, and at the back was a

ring and a light, strong rope was attached to that, and a couple of hundred metres of this rope was on a reel. Now as you jumped into the belt and pull it over your head, you run down into the water and the reel – the rope run off the reel and you towed that out to the person who

was apparently in difficulties, and in reaching him you first of all had to reassure him that he was all right, because if a person’s in difficulties they’re quite distraught, and you had to be very careful that they didn’t grab at you and drag you down. So you calmed them as much as possible

and if you could get them calm, you could get them on their back in the water with your arm round the top – the upper part of their body, and signal your members on the beach and there were usually two or three linesmen as they were called, that would haul in the line and the man on the reel would wind the reel in – that’s the way you got them to the beach – on

reaching shallow water of course you stood up and if the person was able to, they’d walk out; if not the people that were on the line dragging them in would come into the water and help you, and you’d carry the person up to the beach.

Well it was the best available, and it saved quite a lot of lives – particularly people who went to swimming and were caught in a rip –

a rip is a phenomena where the waves crashing onto the beach, the surge of the water back out is called a rip, and people going swimming didn’t realise the rip was there and it would take them out. So that was the most effective way that we knew, because boats in those days were so heavily constructed that it wasn’t practical

to have a boat nearby. You’d require too many people to pick up a boat and put it in the water and then row out to – the quickest way was for a person to swim out.

Yeah – we had patrolled areas, and the flags were on the beach – a hundred metres apart or two hundred metres apart and that was the area that you asked people to swim – as they do today, and there was all this – several life

savers on the beach – you took your turn, your hour or two hour patrol and you were the duty patrol people at the time while the others enjoyed themselves and then when your hour or two hours was up, well somebody else took the place, and that of course the highlights of the year were the surf carnivals where the

Ayr club would later on be against some other clubs in testing their, well their skills in life saving.

Oh yes, yeah, yeah.

Yeah one of the first, and then Townsville of course had two clubs and then later on Ingham and

they were the four main clubs in this area. But that was then – Cairns and Innisfail, Tully and those places came in, so that although it was a long way away, we used to go by train to those places, but they all were in the area, and they came to our beach or we came to their beach, usually once a year. So there was several trips away per years, and then several carnivals here

a year.

There was extra skills required because although the box jelly fish is – as we’ve seen a lot more publicity lately because of the stingers, but even in those days we knew that the stingers were about and

we always had the training to recognise when a person was stung with a jelly fish, as we used to call them, and we used usually methylated spirits or something like that to treat the wound and to destroy the

stingers themselves – the stingers themselves used to shrivel up when you put methylated spirits on them.

It’s not always the case, not always – it depends on where you’re stung and how severe the sting was and how big the jelly fish was. If it’s round your body then – the torso and that sort of thing it could be a lot more dangerous

than if you just got it on your arms or your leg, and then a small one on your legs would be very painful and distressing but it wouldn’t be life threatening.

No – we never closed beaches or rarely closed beaches. The stingers weren’t given the publicity that they are now, and no we rarely closed – I can’t ever remember closing a

beach.

No well we hadn’t got a lot of surf because inside the Barrier Reef we don’t get the big waves that you do south of about Bundaberg; from Torres Strait to Bundaberg is the Great Barrier Reef, and it sort of stops the main Pacific rollers from rolling in. The only surf that you get is

created between the reef and the coast, and it wasn’t a real surf.

Well no I didn’t – we never did those things. I didn’t know about scuba diving or snorkelling in those days because well I didn’t know anything about it. Didn’t have any knowledge

of – I’d never – the only underwater diving that I ever heard about was the divers, but I’d never, ever experienced any of that.

Oh yes. We – yes we used to fish regularly, but fishing off the banks of the creeks here, the – and sometimes you’d be lucky

enough to find someone that had a small boat and you’d go in a small boat fishing. But of course there was no motors. We didn’t have any outboard motors, or if we did have them they were so unreliable that they rarely worked satisfactorily, so if we went fishing we used the oars and rowed everywhere.

The Burdekin.

Yes, yes.

The Burdekin is of course one of the largest rivers in Queensland and it’s had a – in the wet season particularly in the heavy rain it has a large flow of water and it is one of the few rivers along the

eastern coast that has a delta, whereas about five or six mouths of the Burdekin, and each of those is a creek in itself and they are all creeks that are prolific in fish, and particularly the Burdekin mud, northern Queensland mud crab is –

and when we appeared to in those days, to have more floods than we do these days, and the flooding of the creeks always seemed to invigorate the creeks and make them so that the fish stocks and crab stocks seemed to come back better than ever after they were flushed out with the flow of the Burdekin River. There’s several

fairly big creeks at the mouths of the Burdekin. There’s the Plantation Creek, there’s the Calamia Creek, there’s the Ocean Creek, there’s the Anabranch, and there’s Groper Creek, but some of the creeks are all the branches of the Burdekin that form the Burdekin delta, and possibly contributing to the fact that the Burdekin doesn’t flow as freely or as

big as it used to is the fact that there’s now a Burdekin Dam, and the damming of the Burdekin has probably contributed to some of that.

Well mainly black bream, bream, whiting, flathead, grunter,

red bream, cod – all those estuary-type fish would be in the salt water creeks. Even – although they were contributories to the Burdekin and the creeks were part of the delta, they only had fresh water in them when the Burdekin was in flood. Once the flood subsided they were salt water creeks, and there was – it was a

place where there was countless thousands of mud crabs. But it was nothing for us to go down with a few crab pots and get a couple of dozen crabs in a few hours, you know and beautiful big mud crabs – they seem to be a lot scarcer these days – whether there’s more people taking them or whether there’s – whether the population of the crabs have deteriorated, I don’t know. But

we don’t seem to be able to get them as easily as you did sixty years ago.

Oh just a hook and line and we’d use a small cast net and get small fish for bait or prawns or something like that, and just a hand

line of course – rarely did we have a rod and reel because they were more for people that had more money than we had. But as children we only had a line or a stick or wound round a bottle and a hook and we caught fish like that with a hand line.

Yes there were quite a few. Went to school with – there were several indigenous people at school. I don’t know whether you class the South Sea Islanders as indigenous. I don’t because the South Sea Islander families were brought here as kanakas in the cane

industry and I find them totally different people, the South Sea Islanders seem to be a different people completely to the Aborigine, and there was quite a few of the South Sea Islander families here. There still is, and quite a lot of the indigenous people too. But strangely enough I think

back on today and it gave the school the – those people, the Aborigines and the South Sea Islanders – we didn’t, they didn’t seem to be any different to us. We, you sort of accepted them. They were just – well they certainly were a different colour but there certainly wasn’t the racism that appears to be today because they were just people like us – you know just kids,

and we were – there was no racism that I could remember as children.

Sugar farming and milling – milling of the sugar cane through raw sugar.

Oh I wouldn’t know. I’d only be guessing. I’d say there’d be probably fifteen hundred, two thousand farms around.

There were quite a lot of small farms where they’d be one person farms, or a father and son farm.

Well I can’t remember – there were very, very few of them ever owned farms. They were all –nearly all workers. They were brought into the area by the bigger

plantations and bigger farmers, and they lived in small communities on the farms.

Well I didn’t know a lot about them because I didn’t visit too many of them. I knew – some of the people that came out of the communities, I knew them, but – and some of the children.

But no I couldn’t walk you through that at all really.

Well the thing that you always associate with cane farmers –

the burning of the cane, and something that – they were fascinating – like all fires, they’re fascinating and I can remember as a child, yeah you’d be attracted to go and have a look at a cane fire and stay there whilever it burned. But it was – and then the smell of the cane after it was burnt was a distinctive smell, and also one of

the distinctive smells around the town was the smell of the sugar mills, because the fermenting cane and the fermenting, or the fermenting juices in the mills always had a distinctive smell – not always very pleasant either.

Well

the cane was quite difficult to cut when it was cut, as they call green. Green cane is when the trash and cover on the cane has left there and they cut it there as it is. When they put a fire in the cane it burns all that excess trash, as they call it, away, and just leaves the sugar stick there itself, and makes it so much easier to

harvest, and although it does lower the sugar content slightly, it certainly made it a lot easier to harvest – particularly when they were hand harvesting before the mechanical harvesters came in.

I can’t give you an exact date, but oh I’d say in the mid 1960s they started to experiment with harvesting – 1960s with mechanical harvesting and then it just grew into the stage where there’s very, very little cane cut by hand these days. It’s – the cane cutting was a very, very intense labour –

very laborious job. It was dirty, but they made a lot of money. It was all contract and they got slightly less money to cut burnt cane than they did green cane, and they cut the cane by hand and loaded it onto small tramway trucks by hand, and these were hauled to the mill with locomotives. But the cane cutter

worked very, very hard but he earned very big money. He was quite – but most of them only worked for six months of the year and they – most of them earned as much in six months as most people earned in twelve months, so that they – most of them worked for the six months and had the other six months doing odd jobs or not working at all.

Mostly the Italians. The Italian families were very, very involved in cane cutting and the Italians got involved in purchasing them – they had a system where an Italian family’d come out and join with another family

and the two families would work together – the two men would cut cane and work very hard, save their money until one could buy a farm. Then they would work for the other person to buy a farm – that’s the way they worked. They were very, very good workers – very, very good, hard workers, the Italians, and they were very, very good farmers.

Well yes I think our eating habits changed because the Italians had slightly different

well, eating habits – menus. I mean I can remember quite early when I was only young we rarely had spaghetti or any of these Italian dishes, whereas today it’s quite common to have the Italian dishes, and I think that’s one of the things that we gained from the influx of migrants.

Oh yes you had to have Italian friends because, well I don’t know what the percentage is, but there’s probably fifty percent of the population was Italian or related somehow, and it didn’t matter, I mean they just – other boys and girls – that’s all. I mean I think we gained a lot from

the Italians and their culture and their foods and everything like that.

Not a lot.

No they – not that I – they were very

family orientated, but then so are we I s’pose. But apart from the different food and

Well not really I don’t think. I don’t – can’t recall anything that – no.

Yeah.

Not really, no. I

don’t recall any real celebrations. One of the – I wouldn’t call it a celebration – one of the big days of the year was the sign on, which was the, a probably a week or two weeks before the start of the harvesting or the crushing of the cane – there was the sign on which was where in one of the public

halls the cane cutters would assemble and sign a contract with the farmer to cut his cane for the year, and that was quite a – usually on a Saturday and after the sign on of the – as they call the signing of the contract, most of them would retire to the hotels to celebrate and it was a fairly big day for the

farmers and for the workers. They seemed to use the sign on as an excuse to have a celebration, but it was quite a big day.

Oh the unions were quite strong yes, and the cane cutters were

very strong in their – they weren’t militant but they were quite strong and there was a set price for the price per ton of cane cut and loaded. It was sixpence a ton or something less for cutting burnt than there was cutting green cane, but – and

there was often a dispute when a cane farmer would say, “I want that cut green.” And the cutters would say, “No we want it burnt.” And the cane inspector who was an employee of the mill would be the arbitrator in that, and he would determine whether it could – should be cut green or whether it should be cut burnt, and if the dispute went any further, the

local magistrate was brought in and gave a decision on it.

The cane deteriorated quicker and the CSC or the cane sugar content lowered when you burnt it, and it was to the advantage of the farmer to have it cut green, and it was to the advantage of the cutter to cut it burnt.

But there was a few advantages in cutting it burnt also in so much as a lot of the wildlife – not so much wildlife as vermin, would be burnt in the cane too, such as snakes and that sort of thing, and there were quite a lot of snakes in the cane fields, and of course if a fire went through it burnt them, and rats also.

There was quite a lot that came here just for the crushing season and they

- quite a lot of them came from southern areas and they went back to those areas when they finished, and they returned year after year to the same jobs, you know, but several of the locals cut cane and then worked around the area and in the off season as well. But there was mostly the visitors

and the locals that contributed towards it, and then of course since then mechanical harvesting has come in. We don’t have that floating population that we had in the crushing seasons.

Well they plant usually around Easter – about depending

on the – we do have a wet season most years – around January, February, March, and the – after the wet season in say April when the ground dries out, the farmers start preparing their ground by ploughing and what have you, and then they plant, usually about Easter or

sometimes a little bit after the May, mainly because they – one of the criteria is that there’s moisture in the ground for the planting, and then the harvesting is, starts around June or middle of June or sometimes as late as July. But usually early in June, and continues until about

November or December. In the older times with the hand harvesting they rarely finished before Christmas, but now with mechanical harvesting and the increased capacity of the sugar mills they usually finish about November or sometimes they go into that first week in December. But mostly they’re finished in November.

Well liquid gold is the term used because we’re sitting on a great artesian or sub-artesian basin and it’s the lifeblood of the industry here in so much as the farmer can use a pump

and irrigate his cane, and then we call it liquid gold because it’s gold in their pocket and the black snow of course is the burnt ash residue of the cane or the cane fires once the cane is burnt, there’s such a lot of black residue in a type of ash that floats over the town. So we’ve always maintained the town’s liquid gold and black snow.

Well the main – well one of the main disadvantages is for the housewife. If she’s got white washing on the line and the

black snow comes over, you have – well I’ve even seen women take the washing off the line and go and rewash it – put it back on the line because it’s got so dirty. Before mechanical harvesting, most of the cane was burnt early in the morning or late in the evening – just on daylight or just on dusk.

But with mechanical harvesting and the allocation of harvesting areas they burn at various times during the day so that sometimes you get it during the day, whereas in the pre harvesting – mechanical harvesting times that the cane was burnt as I say, in dawn or dusk and they were the only

times when the snow would be floating about. But now it seems to be floating around almost twenty four hours a day, sort of thing, you know?

Well you may notice if you go outside that there’d be black ash on the ground, on the lawn or anything like that, and of course the housewives maintain

it comes in and is all through the house, and it takes a lot of cleaning as far as the housewives are concerned. They’re very happy with the black snow.

You don’t notice it. I don’t think you’ve noticed it, have you? Oh you have.

No I don’t, no.

Well that’s right. Monday was wash day and I can remember wash day being Monday – Sunday afternoon it was – one of us had the job of collecting some kindling wood and some

wood for the fire because Monday morning there was the old outside copper was utilised and the white particularly were put in there and you had to light the fire and have the boiler going, and it was all the whites were boiled before they were hung on the line. So it was quite a day was Monday.

Ah I can remember

we – my mother used to buy soap in a large bar, about oh fifty mill square or something like that, and about three hundred mill long, and you’d cut a piece off that and she’d shred it to put it into the container that was being

boiled and that was the detergent that you used – it was actually a soap that was boiled in the copper as we called it, because most of the boilers were made of copper.

I don’t know whether you remember the forty five gallon oil drum, the two hundred litre

oil drum? Well they were about that size. I s’pose they’d be five hundred mills wide and probably about the same depth, and they’d hold, well particularly sheets and pillow cases and towels and that sort of thing – they’d be probably about three or four loads of that would be boiled.

Well you had a stick – something similar to a broom handle, and she would dig them out of the boiler and put them in the small clothes trolley that had holes in the bottom, and they would be put in there and they’d drain out into a bucket underneath. When they’d drain out then

the trolley would be wheeled over to the clothes line – not a hoist, there was no Hills hoist, there was usually just a couple of posts in the ground, say twenty metres apart, with some cross arms on it and some wire strung between them and she would wheel them out and hang them on these with pegs – wooden pegs of course, no

plastics those days – wooden pegs, and …

Well if you wanted to wring them you’d have to wring them by hand because there was no wringers. But lots of – yes, but you had to wait for them to cool before you could wring them, but most times they’d be just allowed to drain and of course in tropical north Queensland, there was no problem getting them dry because with the

hot sun they dried quickly and I must say beautifully because there’s nothing like a sun dried towel or a sun dried sheet.

Very much so. Very much – almost a full day. There – and of course she had to get meals as well. But it would be a full days work. And then most Tuesdays

was ironing, of course, because with family like we had there’d be quite a lot of washing and quite a lot of ironing. But I did have three elder sisters and of course they assisted – when they weren’t at work they assisted in that and they assisted in their ironing – washing and ironing their own clothes mainly, but they did assist, but it was still a lot of work for my mother to do.

Well originally we had a petrol iron, with – I didn’t remember the old type irons that apparently were in use where they had the old wood stove and they used to put the old cast iron over – iron on the stove to heat it up before they ironed – I didn’t remember that but I remember the petrol iron that

was pumped up and it…

Yeah you’ve got petrol in the tank and you’d – it was a jet of gas came out when you pumped it up and the flame was inside and it heated the iron. But then that was only used for a little while. They weren’t very easy to use and they were a little bit dangerous really, and then we had electricity after that of

course.

Yeah.

Well getting the wood for the washing on Mondays. Also getting the wood for the wood stove because there was wood stoves in every house and a lot of produce

was packed in pine boxes so we’d save the pine boxes and chop the pine up as kindling wood for starting the fire, and then we had logs that we used to have to saw up and then split and use the split wood for fuel in the wood stoves.

Yes. Yes – six

foot, or almost two metres – six foot cross cut – one person on each end of it, and a log, say three or four hundred metres in diameter, and cut it up into lengths about three or four hundred millimetres long and then split it. Mind you we didn’t split the wood or get the kindling

any more than we had to because it was a job that mother used to have to wield a big stick sometimes and say, “I want some kindling,” or, “I want some wood.” But it was a job that sometimes we’d spend three or four hours of an afternoon or a Saturday or Sunday sometimes cutting wood.

No well you could go and get

wood if you had permission from the owner of the property. But in a lot of cases there was wood cutters and carters, and you could buy the logs of wood or you could buy it cut – you could even buy it split. But there was wood carters and they would clear forests. But the main timbers were cut

out eventually.

The butcher called with a horse drawn cart. I’d think the butcher came twice a week or three times a week. The grocer came and visited the house – first of all it was the order man who came to the house

and had a notebook and he took an order and he went away with that, and then the delivery man came either that afternoon or the next day and delivered the groceries to you. The ice man came if you wished to get ice delivered, but sometimes we’d go down to the ice factory and buy our block of ice for what you’d get a small hessian

bag and ride down on a pushbike and go to the factory and buy a – purchase the block of ice and put it in the small sack bag and then put it on the handlebars of the pushbike and ride home again with it. Of course there was no refrigeration and the only reason you used ice very much was to keep the meat cold and the butter cool, and sometimes make a

jelly or something like that as a sweet. But of course there was no refrigeration so that was the only reason you’d have the ice.

Well the ice box was something similar to an esky, only most of them were upright and the ice would probably last most of the day. It was fairly well

insulated, the ice box. But then you didn’t have anything that required refrigeration really.

Well a lot of the meat was corned, and so it didn’t require refrigeration, and then if meat was delivered two or three times a week

well that was sufficient – you had meat two or three times a week – there were steaks or whatever, and the corned meats.

No, no – the, you’d buy the meat salted from the butcher.

No you’d only get it from the butcher shop two or three times a week so you wouldn’t have much storage – wouldn’t require

much storage. But if you did want to store anything like that, there was a safe – what we used to call a hanging safe, and it was a fairly large box, say five hundred by five hundred millimetres, with gauze sizes and a gauze door, and that would be hung up in the shade

in an area where the breeze would blow through and keep them reasonably cool, and that – between the hanging safe and the ice box, we got along all right. I can remember we were one of the first familles in the area that I can remember

that bought an old Electrolux kerosene refrigerator, and it was quite an event to have a refrigerator, and of course when we got the refrigerator we could make our own ice cream, and have some of the sweets and desserts that we know as today.

Whereas before that the desserts were mainly hot desserts or like boiled custards or jam tarts or anything like that – you know that was the type of sweets that we had. We didn’t have much ice cream and that type of thing.

Yeah sort of. One thing I can remember my father saying – he called my mother ‘Bid’ at times,

and he said, “Bid” – after about twelve months after the fridge, he said, “I haven’t had a decent puddin’ since we bought the fridge.” One of the remarks I remember him saying that. He missed his rice puddings and his treacle puddings and those sort of things with the hot custard poured over them.

Well the milkman – most of the milkmen delivered milk daily – not in bottles of course, you had your container and the milkman came with bulk milk and then he dished out the milk either by the pint in those days or the quart or whatever it was, so there was no litres, they were pints and quarts. But we were fortunate

- there was a spare allotment of ground adjacent to our house, which my father purchased, and he purchased a cow and we had a cow, and he used to milk the cow, and a cow in town of course these days would be – they wouldn’t be allowed, but in those days if you wanted a cow you kept a cow, and we kept our own poultry of course. We had

eggs and milk – fresh.

Oh yes, yes – we were in town on a quarter acre allotment and this allotment beside it was – of course we had to hand feed the cow most of the time, but that’s another by product of the sugar industry – in the crushing season when the cane cutters cut the cane they took what they call the top off that, the green

bushy part at the top – well you go out and get those and feed them to the cow.

Yeah – chop-chop. We had a small hand worked cutting machine that fed the things through it and cut it into small pieces like that, and that’s why we called it chop-chop. This thing came round and chopped this stuff up and made it a sort of a mulch out

of the cane tops. It was part cane and part green stuff in it and the cows used to thrive on it.

Well of course you own your own cow, and when the milk settled you could scoop the cream off the top and you had cream – fresh cream. But you got it

daily so it – the milk was only kept in the icebox, so the – little or no refrigeration as I say, and we just had fresh milk or fresh cream, or make a custard. But a lot of the custard was hot anyhow because you – when they made the custard it was kept warm and poured over the dessert, the jam

tart or rice pudding or whatever hot pudding that you had. So it was hot custard, and they were our sweets as far as we were concerned.

My father milked the cow. But most of the time he did teach us to milk but we avoided it if we could, but he didn’t seem to mind – he milked the cow, morning and night.

No we just drank it straight away, but sometimes they did boil milk to – that, boiled milk didn’t taste as nice of course, but it was done to preserve it sometimes. But as I say we had fresh milk all the time, but other families may have done that.

Well I think it’s richer and nicer to drink. But then again when you’re young, your tastebuds and everything tastes nicer than it does today. I think I can remember things tasting wonderfully well when I was younger. I think – I don’t know. I just think that you seem to enjoy things more when you were younger.

Yes. We used to go and chew – we knew varieties of cane and we’d – one variety

was a black cane that was supposed to be very good as far as the millers was concerned, it was called Bodilla. We knew if we went out to get a stick of cane we’d always try and get some Bodilla because it’d always tasted better than the other cane, and we’d chew it, and of course you’d chew up and spit out the pith sort of thing, but and just swallow the juices.

No,

no, no – you’d only take a stick of cane – and one stick out of millions, so it wouldn’t worry you much. But – take a pocket knife and break off a stick of cane and just shave the outside skin off it and just chew the pith – spit out the pith and drink the juice.

Oh I can’t remember, there was Bodilla as I’ve spoken about, EK Clark seedlings, oh and there’s –

later on they started to classify cane by numbers and that sort of thing, and I can’t remember- well there’s Trojan – that’s another one I can remember, but most of them were classed as letters and numbers then.

No they were – no we didn’t play in the cane fields very much. When

the cane was smaller – no it’s not a place to play I don’t think, and when the cane got bigger of course there was always the risk of snakes or some vermin in there, so we never bothered about playing in the cane field.

Well there’s no central water supply, and the water

being so close to the surface and beautiful water, everyone just put down a spear, as they call it, which was a gauze covered pipe with holes in the pipe and the gauze covered, and a windmill and a tank – a tank stand. The tank stand would be about four to six metres high and the windmill would

pump water into that and of course use gravity to put water into the houses. But about – I can’t remember the year but I think about 1958 a cyclone came through here and blew a lot of the windmills down, and then – from then on most of the

people didn’t replace the windmills. They bought small electric driven pumps and pumped into their tanks, and then with the introduction of sewerage the part of the construction of sewerage was the construction of a reticulated water system and it was discouraged to use underground water when

there was a chance of leakage of sewerage and that sort of thing, and treated water was reticulated to all the houses.

No – one of my brothers did. Two of my brothers. I remember one particular

went on a tour of the tableland – Atherton tableland on his annual leave with another fellow work – from the same workplace, and he told me about going to Parrodila Park, yes and I have seen it but I haven’t been there as a tourist or anything like that. I’ve just seen it a – going past it, that’s all.

He was quite impressed, yeah.

It would’ve been

pre World War II. I’d say in the late 30s – 1937, 1938. It was quite in its infancy then as far as I know. I think that’s about the time he went up there.

Yes it would’ve been, yes, yes.

Not very much at all, no. No – there was a couple of the lakes

around on the Atherton tableland that were quite well thought of. Lake Moran and Lake Eacham – two of them, but the Cairns area was a tourist attraction because of the scenery of the tableland and that. But of course there was never the – there was no dams or lake

or none of the tourist areas then. It was mainly just going to see the scenery.

I don’t know because the Depression was what the early 1930s and I wasn’t born till 1927, so I was pre school age when the most of the Depression was on. But apparently I have heard – my parents and the elder brothers and

sisters say that there were quite a few of the hobos as they used to call them, or the people that were on the – sustenance, I think they called it – it wasn’t the dole in those days, it was sustenance and apparently there was quite a few of them because one of the conditions of a lot of these people was that once they got paid or some help from one area they

had to move to another area, and that’s what kept them going, and apparently the police department were the ones that used to make sure that they got their sustenance, or whatever it was, and then they made sure that they moved on. So that was why so many of these people were – what do they call it? Jumping the rattler, was the term used for hopping on a train when they didn’t pay their fare – they’d jump in one of the goods

wagons or something like that and – jump the rattler to the next town. But no I don’t know, probably our people, my people didn’t have a lot of money. I don’t remember but at that age you; as far as I know my father and my elder brothers and sisters were all in work, so they weren’t greatly affected by it.

Not in World War I, no. Two other brothers served in World War II.

Well my first recollections was – there was no bitumen road, it was a dirt road, and as I said earlier, my father – part of his work was to water the street. Then they bitumened the streets and put in guttering. There was

one of the council employees – I’ll always remember him – his job was – he had an old white horse, he probably had more than one, but I can remember him with an old white horse and dray wagon – you know the old wagon, and he had a hard broom and a shovel and this horse and cart, and he’d go along and sweep the sand out of these gutters

and clean the gutters, the length of the street. The – no the town was a lot of smaller shops. There’s the – there was the saddler’s shop in the town, which was the fellow that naturally did all the leather work and that for horses, and

there was the blacksmiths and those people that aren’t, well they don’t seem to be about today, do they – the saddler or the blacksmith. Quite a lot of small corner shops. One of the things that I remember about the corner shops is most corner shops were run by the Chinese. There was,

well I can think of a dozen I s’pose – ten or a dozen small corner shops – all run by Chinese or Chinese familles.

Small shops, yeah – be a dozen or so, yeah. Oh yes I can think of, yeah at least ten or a dozen, yeah – Chinse, run by Chinese families too.

No Asian products at all. I

don’t remember any Asian products, there was only – but of course everything was in the corner store. You – anything you wanted you – certainly sometimes the grocers’d come round with the order once a week, but the perishables or the things that you didn’t remember in the order, you’d go to the corner shop.

Yeah, yes

it was too. Yes the – when you see the old Smithy making things – you know from the (UNCLEAR) with the red hot iron and that sort of thing, or even taking the horses in there to shoe them – the farrier is the person that shoes the horses, but a lot – most of the blacksmiths made the shoes and fitted them too – for horses, and of course the – a lot of the horses were used

in the cane industry for hauling the small trucks from the cane paddock out onto the main line before the locomotives picked them up. So there was quite a lot of horse.

Yes. Yes.

On one

area, Gumlu area, Gumlu mill, sugar mill, used what they called a portable line. It was a very light line, rail line, steel – line with steel, welded spreaders and it would be carried by two men in lengths, and they would carry it and

lay it one beside the other and have temporary bolts in them for the length of the paddock, and they would load the cane onto there, onto the truck and then the horse would pull it down this portable line and the portable line had what they called riding points, and they’d place that on the main line, pull the horse, or the horse would pull the wagon up and it would go on these temporary riding points onto the main line

and then they’d pull it back into the siding. Then they’d have to shift that when the locomotive came along. But as they cut the paddock, it’d be too far to carry the cane from the ground and load it onto the wagon, so they would shift the line over then a couple of –

twenty, fifty metres, whatever was required, and it would be temporary and they’d call that portable line.

My father was born in Ravenswood – that’s the mining town, it was a gold mining place and also my mother was born up there too. My father’s parents – his father came from

England, and his mother – I don’t know what nationality she was. She came from Ireland but she was born on a ship in Auckland harbour and before – on their way to Australia, so I don’t know what nationality she was, but being born on the ship – I don’t know what happened. My mother’s parents came from England.

Yes, yes. Well yeah as I say both parents were born in Ravenswood – that gold mining area and my father worked in the gold mines up there and when the gold mines closed down he worked on cattle stations

and well before I was born, and eventually arrived in Ayr and then he – as I say he was a – did a lorry driving and contract truck driver sort of thing, here.

Well we were always very, very close and you were self sufficient. You didn’t have to go outside the family for fun, that sort of thing. I had three elder sisters and they were – I really loved them. They were really – they were good to me.

For instance my elder sister was eighteen when I was born and my second eldest sister – the next one was sixteen. So they mothered me and they looked after me and I was very, very close to the both of them, but – and they were close to me because they more or less reared me because Mum was so busy with the rest of the family, so – but it has its advantages, and it has advantages to have bigger brothers.

I enjoyed the family very much.

Never sit in the middle of the table, because at meal time if you sat in the middle of the table you were passing all the time – they’d say, “Would you pass the butter?” “Would you pass this?” “Would you pass that?” So one of the things you learned was never sit in the middle of the table in a big family.

Oh yes – my elder children, elder brothers and sisters had all gone to school but by the time I was going to school a couple of them had finished school and were working. One of the things I remember about school is we lived

about two and a half to three kilometres from school, and I walked to school every day, and my brother – younger brother and my elder sister – we all walked to school. There was no such thing as transport, and we thought nothing of walking to school, and some of our friends from the faming community rode their horse to school, and at the

state school where I first went till I was about twelve I s’pose, there was a horse paddock and those that rode to school put their horse in the paddock for the day and went to school, and then went out after school, saddled their horse and rode home, and that was something that

not a lot of areas had, you know sort of thing. But because of the farming community and some of them lived eight, ten kilometres from school, they had to ride a horse to school. It was just too far to walk I s’pose. But I walked two and a half, three kilometres to and from school. Started school when I was four and a half years of age, so we were quite young.

Yes, yes, yes we had uniforms, but most of the boys didn’t wear shoes to school and it wasn’t until we were older that we were forced to wear shoes. But as younger ones up until about eight or ten years of age we never wore shoes to school. The girls did mostly but the boys didn’t.

Most of the time didn’t

wear shoes.

Well if you were going out you were forced to wear shoes, but at work or play, rarely wore shoes. I remember one of the disadvantages of shoes and having roads that weren’t paved, was – we used to get stone bruises. I don’t know whether you know what a stone bruise is, but if you have bare feet and jump on a stone, it bruises deeply into your feet and they

were quite painful and they – I can remember my father saying to me, “You’ve got a stone bruise.” And I’d say, “Yes.” And he’d say, “Well hop up onto the bed.” And he’d have his pocket knife and put it in boiling water to disinfect it, and then slice it to allow the rubbish to come out of this darn bruise. So I never admitted to having a stone bruise very often. I kept it to myself if I could.

But we was always kicking your toe or stubbing your toe or something like that. But – our feet were probably pretty hard.

Yes there was what they called the District Hospital – that was the main hospital, but there was two

private hospitals, which were run by individual doctors. There was the Rosalind Hospital was run by a Doctor McDonald, and the Delta Hospital was run by Doctor Emmett and Doctor Murphy. The main hospital was the District Hospital.

Yes, yeah. In those days the doctor, if

you could, if you were sick the doctor would call for house calls. But we did have a family doctor, yes – but sometimes you’d visit the doctor at the surgery, but if you were really sick the doctor would make a call.

Yes, it was – I think

about grade four or grade five – it would make me about ten or eleven – a girl in our class contracted polio, which was infantile paralysis in those days – supposedly, well it was highly contagious and the whole class was quarantined, which meant that we had to stay at home, and

I think it was about three weeks we stayed at home, and the government appointed a doctor who would visit us nearly every day to check on our general health and make sure that we didn’t have polio. But we were kept away from the rest of the school and the rest of the town because we were in the same class as this girl that’d contracted polio. Of course there was no vaccines in those days for infantile paralysis, as we called it.

So one of the advantages was we didn’t have to go to school for a couple of weeks.

Well we had a lot of home remedies. I remember

Mum used to say that if you had a sore throat or that she could paint your throat or tonsils with kerosene and – that was quite unpleasant but it worked. Or I don’t know whether you would admit to having a sore throat, but no

there was – yes there was a few home remedies I s’pose. I can’t recall any others at the moment. Oh I can remember- yes I can, I can remember having earache. I don’t know what it was, but Mum’d make a poultis, which would be sometimes

oats or something or wheat even, and heat it up in a calico bag and place it on your ear to keep your ear warm and that sort of thing, or even put oil – oil in your ear, in an eye dropper – what sort of oil – warm oil. I think it was castor oil. I think it was warmed up and put in your ear, for sore ears.

Yes, as a matter of fact when I eat oranges now, which is not very often, I can always taste castor oil, because I can remember nearly always of a Saturday morning Mum’d get out

the blue bottle. The blue bottle was a blue bottle with castor oil in it, and we’d – and there’d be three or four or us, or the younger ones, would have to line up; Mum’d give us a teaspoon of castor oil and a quarter of an orange. So you’d gulp the castor oil down and then you’d grab the orange and take the taste of the castor oil out of your mouth, and now every time I eat an orange I can taste castor oil. But that was the home remedy for keeping you

healthy inside.

Yeah – the blue bottle, yes – castor oil.

Wasn’t as pleasant as tequila. But – yeah it was supposed to be good for you.

I can remember the brother next to me had a hernia and

he was operated on, and I can remember in the – he was about two or three weeks in hospital after, and then when he came home he was six weeks in bed. I mean today you have an operation and they get you up and walking about. In those days it was complete immobility when you had an operation like appendix or anything like that, you weren’t allowed to get out of bed for three or four weeks, and it was – you know it was just totally

different to what they are today. I mean just imagine two or three weeks in hospital and six weeks lying in bed to get over an operation. But there was – I often think back on that and think, well you know after an operation today they have you on your feet and walking about, because they say the sooner they get you on your feet, the sooner you seem to recover from it. Yes.

Oh – I can’t recall now. There’d be, there’d have been – oh there’d have been fifteen or twenty teachers I’d say. There was a full class of

grade one’s through to grade six I think, and there’d be two or three classes in each grade, so there’d – it was – yes there’d be that many teachers I’d say.

Ayr state high school.

Mmm.

Oh that was the primary school.

Yeah – oh I’m sorry, I’m sorry – the state school. Ayr state school, and then later on I went to the state – the Ayr high and intermediate was a different one, yeah, yeah – the state school was the first one up until grade six and grade seven and eight, nine and ten were the high school – high and intermediate.

Well we didn’t – the first three years at school we didn’t use pen and paper, we used slates. They were the – you’ve ever seen a slate have you? They were a piece of black sort of, well I think it’s a slate material with a wooden cover round the outside of it,

and you had a slate pencil that marked on it, and you wrote on that, and if you moistened a sponge or – you could wipe the slate clean, as the saying says, and it was clean and you dried it and then you could write on it again, and it was – we were in about grade three or four before we started to use paper and pencil and pen, and then of course the pen was a nib

dipped in ink, which we made our own ink at school. There was an ink powder which you mixed with water, and made it into a small bottle, and then the ink well was in the desk, and you dipped your nib into the ink and you wrote. But pencil or ink, but the first few years was just slate and pencil – slate pencil.

Yes – it was a dangerous occupation all right – making ink. You could make it black or blue by the amount of powder that you put in the water of course.

Yes, you had to write properly. It was – it wasn’t like a ballpoint. You had to –

and there if you – I was never a very good writer. It wasn’t my strong point. But the good writers would have a light touch up and then a heavy down, so that the up stroke was lighter than the downstroke and a good writer – it was good to watch them.

I don’t know. I don’t think I had very

many strong points.

I enjoyed physics, chemistry – talking about physics and chemistry – this is getting to World War II, but we were in high school World War II – we had no equipment for physics or chemistry and they had to cut the chemistry out of the curriculum because of lack of equipment, and the physics

was all theory because we didn’t have any equipment to do the practical experiments, or very, very few experiments. We did experiments on magnetism and that sort of thing because you had magnets and iron filings, but during World War II there was little or no equipment for you to do chemistry or – and while I didn’t do any there was one of the

subjects we were taken, was tin smithing and woodworking and that sort of thing, and the people that were in the tin smithing classes couldn’t do tin smithing because there was no tin plate available during World War II – it was being used and they – to develop batons and to make things that you would’ve normally done with

tin plate and soldering, and made out of paper or cardboard, so that they could develop the patterns and fold them and do that sort of thing because of the lack of equipment and material. One of the disadvantages in going to school in wartime I s’pose.

Well the physical punishment, the teachers used to – mainly the boys, they’d go and physically punish you by giving you what they called the cuts, and the cuts were – he’d have a bamboo type stick about so long, and you

held your hand out and he hit you over the hand with six cuts with six – three on each hand, or twelve cuts with six on each hand. Very rarely did they hit you round the body, although I have got smacked across the bottom, but usually the cuts was either on the hand, and punishment for some bad misdemeanour was six cuts or twelve cuts.

Unfortunately yes. Being cheeky to the teacher or I was never physically violent, but I have seen some of our – some of the boys throw an inkwell at the teacher – full of ink too of course – that earned twelve cuts. As a matter of fact I think if you did it more than once you might’ve been expelled or at least suspended

from school for a while. But I have seen boys throw inkwells at the teacher.

Yes – it was quite good. The teachers didn’t enjoy it I don’t think. But – yes I didn’t see any physical with the girls. They caned the boys, but I didn’t see the girls get

any cane. But some of the teachers were quite cruel. Most of them were men teachers too.

I think providing it wasn’t

cruel, I think they agreed with it. Physical punishment wasn’t frowned upon like it is today, and they think providing there was no permanent damage done, I think if they only give you a smack across the backside or across the hands it didn’t do us any – really any harm. I don’t think it did.

I don’t think so, no.

I never held it against the teachers although one or two of them I think went over the top a little bit. But – especially with – not with me but there were a couple of other of the boys I think – the boys were- maybe the boys deserved punishment, but some of them got more than was really necessary I think.

Can’t

remember. Can’t remember.

I – it wouldn’t have been, or it must have been for some reason. Probably for not paying attention or talking in school or something like that – you know or doing something to some of the other kids that wasn’t supposed to be done – you know you’d dig them in the ribs with a ruler or something

like that.

Rounders was a game. I don’t know – do you know what rounders is? Rounders is a type of baseball. You’d have a stick and a ball and someone’d throw a ball to you and you’d hit it and you’d run round and – but it was a variation of baseball. But not as sophisticated as baseball,

and Bedlam was another game – you’d have a prisoner – you’d put him in a ring and he was the prisoner and he’d – they’d have certain people that would be guarding him and certain that were trying to get him out, and if you ran through the ring you could – by running through the ring you’d release the prisoner, and you’d run through and you’d yell out, “Bedlam!” And that – and see he could go and that – they’d get somebody and put them in

in the ring and try and keep you out of it – that sort of thing, and that was Bedlam and that’s where they get the name from – Bedlam, because it is Bedlam.

Oh I don’t know what bulrush – and we played marbles of course.

Oh yes, yes, yes, yes – if you had a bag of marbles they were prized possessions, and then you had the – we used to call them bloods –

they were a type of marble that was even better than the ordinary glass marble, and if you had a blood it might be worth twenty five marbles or fifty marbles or something like that, and played different types of marbles. There’d be ringing, which would be a big ring with all the marbles inside and then you’d fire at them and whatever you knocked out you gained, or there’d be holy – that’d be three or four holes dug in the ground and you’d have to try and put

marbles into the hole. Ringing and – there was another type – mooney – they had a moon like that and you had to get – knock them out of the moon. But there was different types of marbles; and as you say you had your bag of marbles – you have your twenty-five or fifty marbles and whatever else in a calico bag and they went with you wherever you went too. They were prized possessions.

Oh yes I had my share of marbles. I lost me share too of course,

a good marble player’d finish up with most of the marbles because he’d win them off you, and of course marbles wasn’t very popular with your parents – particularly with your mother because you were down in the dirt playing marbles and your clothes’d be a mess when you’d come home – filthy. But still.

Yes, yes.

Yes, yeah – well we had two types of history: Australian and English history, and we didn’t do a lot of history on other countries – mainly England and Australia – Australian history.

Yes

mainly we learned on explorers and discovery and that sort of things – Burke and Wills are here, and Sturt and Stuart and all those people – they were the ones that we learned most about, and English history was nearly all about kings and queens and the evolution of laws and that sort of thing, you know English law and that. One of the things that – I just remembered

we did at school was copybook writing. They had a copybook and it was – you had to, it was supposedly to teach you to write correctly, and the copperplate writing was – is the correct way or writing and you had to write in this copybook. We had three lines across and

and the capital letters went to the top line and the lower case letters went to the middle line, and you had to write them correctly and in copperplate writing, and I wasn’t very good at that, and if you didn’t do it properly you had to repeat it, and I got quite a lot of repeats. But it was supposed to teach you correct writing – copybook. Old English copybook writing.

No they – yeah – oh Gallipolli yes, they talked about Gallipolli and the trench warfare in France and that sort of thing and it; a little bit about, not a lot about the naval history, but, and a little bit about the

evolution of flying in the World War I, the development of the aircraft and bombing and that sort of thing and aircraft, and the – as I say the trench warfare and the fields of Flanders.

Yes they did, but not as – I don’t remember it as much as it has since World War II. I don’t recall it very much at all. There may have been but I don’t remember it as well.

Yeah we didn’t have a great German population in this town but I think everybody’s general opinion – they were suspicious of Germans and Germany from World War I and I think the Turks were, weren’t very well thought of either because of the Gallipolli campaign.

No it didn’t seem to be. Didn’t seem to be. The main thing I can remember about English history is the Kings and Queens and trying to remember, you know they’d

teach you Magna Carta and that sort of thing, and also what king married what queen and in what year and that sort of thing – it all seemed pretty pointless to me. I couldn’t really get a handle on the use of it all, but it seemed to be more important to know what king reigned from such and such till such and such. But

I was never really interested in English history as much as Australian history. The explorers and that were always very interesting weren’t they?

No. No.

I don’t, I think that people thought that it may be coming, but it wasn’t – it wasn’t widely spoken about to my knowledge. But of course I was only twelve when World War II broke out, so I – it’s

not the discussion that a twelve year old gets involved in much, politics is it? No I don’t think.

I remember about seven o’clock at night, oh around about dark anyhow, the announcement came over the radio, “We are at…” – I think I can remember

I think it was Menzies, was it – was he the Prime Minister, Bob Menzies? “We are…” – made the announcement, “We are at war with Germany.” I can remember that announcement fairly vividly you know, and talking about Menzies I can remember that there was quite a lot of discussion about when we went and we were gonna go to war

with Japan – pig iron Bob, because Menzies has supposedly sold a lot of scrap iron to Japan, and they reckon that the scrap iron that they sold to Japan was gonna come back as bullets – was pig iron Bob.

Yes, yeah. I can remember there wasn’t a lot of radio about. I can remember one of the things was listening to the test matches from England and – at night. That was probably

in the 1930s.

Bradman days, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can remember listening to the wireless when Bradman was making so many runs or O’Reilley was doing this or something, (UNCLEAR) was doing that – yes I can remember that on the radio.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah – very much, yeah. We all – it was a family gathering too. You’d sit round till

late at night or early hours of the morning listening to the cricket and it was – we didn’t seem to take as much interest in the cricket when it was in Australia as when we could hear it on the radio from England, you know?

I don’t remember. I don’t think he was – I don’t remember his exact (UNCLEAR), so I can’t

remember, nup.

I don’t think people realised at the time it was going to be such a long, drawn out and the struggle that we were gonna have, you know because I think most people remembered World War I, but only those people that went overseas were involved in it. Whereas World War II

we were a lot more involved in it eventually, weren’t we?

Yes, yes, yes I can remember. Well my two brothers did.

Oh early in the war I think I was – about

1940.

Both in the army. Both went in the army. Both of them started off – because they worked in a grocery store before the war, they both went in the army and they were allocated into the

supply unit and, but the elder one of the two, Bill – he was always interested in boats and fishing and that sort of thing, and he was transferred into the, what they call the port craft company – that was barges and that sort of thing, and they – he – they went to Victoria and were trained,

and then they took their barges from Victoria right up through – into New Guinea and were involved in the operation of barges in the New Hebrides, I think it was. I remember it – he was in New Guinea and then – Ron,

the other brother – he was in the supply company but he finished up I think in New Guinea with the infantry, and then we had my elder sister’s husband – he was in the navy. He had a very distinguished naval career. He joined the navy when he was – in the

early 30s when he was only about fifteen or sixteen and of course naturally he was in the navy when the war broke out and he was one of the people that had the highest amount of war service in the Australian services, because he was on active service the day war was – broke out, because they were in the Mediterranean on the Sydney – in the Mediterranean

and he – for the whole of the war he was on active service, because after he was on the Sydney, he was transferred to the Shropshire, and he was on the Shropshire in the – when it was sunk at, oh I can’t think of the islands, it was – where the Shropshire was sunk….

It was near Guadalcanal, but I can’t think of the name of the

battle there – Servar Bay? Savar Bay? [Savo Island] But he was on the Shropshire – as a matter of fact he was commended on that because he helped save the captain of the Shropshire when she went down. I’ve got a cutting from the Brisbane newspapers there I can show you later, of where he was commended for that, and after

the Shropshire he was – after the – no that was the Canberra, I’m sorry – the Canberra he was – went down on, I’m getting ahead of myself. The Canberra that was sunk at Savar Bay [Savo Island] and he went – after the Canberra was sunk he was sent to England with that contingent that brought the Shropshire back, and he was on the Shropshire when the Shropshire went through and was attached to the American task force when they went to the battle of

the Philippines, Lingayen Gulf and oh there’s a couple of other battles in those – and he finished up as chief petty officer on the Shropshire and was discharged after – almost as soon as the hostilities finished he got out. But he was selected as one of those that went to England for

the victory march in 1946, because of his service with the navy.

I was at high school, yes, yes.

No, no – not really no. I,

no. There was very little said about it, but as boys we talked about what we were gonna do, you know if the war was still going we were gonna join up and do this and do that. But not a lot, the politics. I don’t think we understood the politics of it very much. No I can’t recall being very much involved in politics

at all.

Yes, oh yeah, yes. Most of them – oh my particular friend had three brothers and a father in the services. His father was in the Middle East as a matter of fact, and his three brothers were all – two in the army, one in the air force. So he was my particular friend and most of the,

most of our friends had someone involved in the services.

Well I think everyone was proud of it and yes you were all concerned about it, and when

someone that you knew or was involved with was injured or lost in the war it sort of was very traumatic, where you know people that you knew – I remember one particular friend of my brothers was lost in the North Sea – with the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force], and

he was in one of the bombers that was going over to Germany apparently, and he was lost over the – and to they – all we ever got was, “Lost, presumed dead.” And there still – to this day we don’t know. He’s just lost, you know, and that – those sort of things – there was two or three of those incidents where it did effect you all right.

Oh

well you were certainly saddened by it when you think that someone that was in his middle twenties and his life was – it was such a, the one I’m particularly thinking of – he was such a happy go lucky type of person and you think that with their life in front of him and he didn’t have it any more, you know? So that sort of thing

was, I think was very saddening.

Yes, yes.

Well they just, I remember one particular one, just a little bit older than me – he just said at the tea table that he was going to

join the army. He and a friend strangely went together to join up and he thought they were both joining the army, and his friend had joined the air force and he’d joined the army, and he didn’t know and he expected he and his friend to be going together, and of course that didn’t happen at all. One had joined the army and one had joined the air force.

Oh she wasn’t very happy about it. My father wasn’t happy but he accepted it.

The thing that, well I think boy – men were expected to go sort of thing, you know, and it – mothers are never very happy about it are they?

Oh, no, no, no – there wasn’t, I don’t remember any argument about it, but there was – my mother

was upset and it wasn’t, wasn’t looking forward to losing the boys away. But she accepted it, Mmm.

No, Ron – oh, ah no actually, Bill and Ron was….

Yeah. Bill was the first…

Yeah he was the eldest, yeah, yeah.

…Yeah, shortly after that, yeah, yeah. Yes. They, but Colin, our brother in law – he was already of course in the navy.

Yes both of them went to Townsville in, and no – Bill went to Townsville, the youngest, and Ron went to Sellheim, outside of Charters Towers, yeah, and that’s where they did their training, yeah. The showgrounds in Townsville was one of the training areas and Sellheim outside Charters Towers was another.

Oh

yes, Townsville was the hub of north Queensland as far as the war effort was concerned, and the big presence of Australian and American troops in Townsville. Another concentration of troops was on the tableland too. There was quite a lot of Australian troops on the tableland at training.

No it was mid war, because a couple of my friends, older friends trained up there in the parachute battalion in Atherton on the tableland.

Oh yes, yes, yes, yes. There was another army camp outside Bowen – Windermere.

It’s a few kilometres south of Bowen. It was another area of training – quite a few went down to there. This area was part of the 31st Battalion, and the 31st Battalion trained in Windermere. But Ron – that second brother of mine that trained in Charters Towers – I don’t know how he finished up. He wasn’t in the 31st he was in

the 26th Battalion – that was centred round Cloncurry and Eungella and Charters Towers. But he got into that battalion for some reason – he wasn’t in the 31st that most of them around here were in.

Oh yes, they…

Yeah that – they came back on a few occasions. You’d back us – it wasn’t quite so bad when they were

training in Townsville or Charters Towers because we could get back – until they were posted overseas of course. But it was quite a celebration when they came back because we were very happy to see them, particularly mother.

I think they enjoyed it to a certain extent, but

I think they’d have preferred to be in civilian life, but they were, accepted the fact that the army was – they had to be in it. Somebody had to be in it and they accepted it and went on with it, you know?

Well yes. I’ll get onto the VAOC [Volunteer Air Observers’ Corps] later, but one of the things that – I think it was opposed for a couple of reasons – one was that he had trucks available and the second was he was a councillor and well known. But one of the things that we were asked to

do – I think it was in 1942 when the Japanese invasion was imminent, he was asked by the senior sergeant of police here, who was in charge of the police area, to prepare himself for the

taking of Commonwealth Bank currency, mainly coin I think, and records, and records of the courthouse in case of invasion, we were to load them up on a truck and head for southern Queensland. We didn’t realise at the time and we discussed it at the, you know that

we hadn’t heard of the Brisbane line, but apparently it was being considered and I don’t understand what we were going to do, but the police allocated us two, two hundred litre drums or three, two hundred litre drums of petrol, which was at a premium – you couldn’t get petrol. You – I think you were

allowed four gallons a month as a ration – but we had two or three two hundred litre drums of petrol, several spare tyres and various other things stored at our house and – down in our back shed for that purpose, was to take records and money. I don’t know whether every town in north Queensland or Queensland was in the same position. But anyhow that was one of the things we had to

prepare for. We had to map out a couple of various ways of getting down there because is the Burdekin River was in flood we wouldn’t be able to cross the Burdekin here and go south that way – we’d have to go through Charters Towers, and if the Japanese had gone to Mackay or somewhere like that, we had to skirt them and that sort of thing. But that was one of the things that was gonna happen during wartime. I don’t know – I’m

pleased it never ever happened, but I don’t know whether other people were involved with that. But that was something we were told to do.

I don’t really know, no I don’t:

short of volunteering for various jobs, I don’t know anything about organising it. I know my father was asked to be in the fire brigade, which was only a volunteer fire brigade, and of course having a truck with a big water tank on the back

and that sort of thing and yeah, the, no I don’t know of any other organisations that they – well they were expected to be leaders in that sort of respect, you know – the air raid wardens and that sort of thing you know – they organised those people I think as

well.

Yes, we dug a – there was a trench at the front – in the front yard of the house.

Well it was a trench about a metre or a metre and a half deep, and about a metre wide, and probably five or six metres long and a v-shaped

so that if the aircraft were flying down this way you could get in that side of it or so forth. But there was bomb shelters built in the town itself, but the council were responsible for those.

There were quite a few bomb shelters, yeah, were built in the town, and it was two or three years after World War II before they were pulled down.

Well I don’t know whether you know the town, but there’s

a town clock in the middle of the town. If you’ve seen that, well just between – up beside the post office, just up from the town clock there was a concrete block building built for an air raid shelter. There were several of those around the town – you know that was one particular there and – for people that were in the town that could go and shelter in there in the occasion of a bombing.

They were above ground, yeah. Well anything over a couple of metres in this area, if you dig down you’d be in the water. So you couldn’t have had underground shelters very well built, you know? It – a slip trench was all right because it was only about a metre, or a metre and a half deep.

Oh the wardens – yeah. Oh yes they …

Well they were volunteers

that were volunteered to patrol the town and make sure that people were complying with blackout restrictions. You were expected to have blackout curtains on every window and that sort of thing, and not show lights very much at night and that sort of thing, and air raid wardens were also as assistants or

in the fire protection and fire – if any fire broke out because of a bombing.

I think so. Yeah I wasn’t involved with them, but they were all – yeah they had practised some drills and they had – and lots of public buildings and schools had sand boxes and that sort of thing where, and

fire blankets so that if there was incendiary bombs dropped and there was fires, you could put them out with – if you didn’t have water or you’d have sand or blankets or that sort of thing, you know?

We had slip trenches at school, and we had practises that they would sound the bell and you’d have to

orderly march out of your room and go to your allocated slip trench and sit in there. Luckily we were never asked to use them in actual practise.

Mmm, Mmm – yes, oh yes, and I think it was ten o’clock in the morning they’d sound the air raid siren. It was only a practise siren, and you knew at ten o’clock that it wasn’t serious. But the sirens went off at ten o’clock in the morning and no – there was only a couple of occasions when they were sounded when there was actually

Japanese bombers about. They happened on a couple of occasions because they did bomb Townsville and we had air raid sirens here to warn us.

You know that howling sound that they have, that air raid siren with the up and down waving of a siren?

Oh, no I’m not – and then the all clear was the

straight sound, you know just the high pitched sound. You’ve heard those air raid sirens haven’t you?

Oh no well I don’t think I’ll give you a demo. But it was an up and down sound for the warning, and then the all clear was a different sound.

Well

we were to take the trucks and this stuff to the – I don’t know whether the other banks were involved. I know it was the Commonwealth Bank and maybe the other banks were involved too. But it was money and – I, they – I don’t know whether it was correct, but they did say they were going to burn the paper

money. I don’t know whether the paper money was going to go in the trucks or it was only the currency. But it was records and court house records.

Well we weren’t gonna leave ‘em behind. We’d had two or three trucks to take the stuff and there’d be a couple on each truck, and we weren’t certainly – well whether that was in the plan or not I don’t know, but we certainly weren’t going to leave our mother and sisters.

I don’t think we would’ve.

Yeah.

Well we had the job to do and we weren’t doing anything we weren’t supposed to do. We were doing what we were supposed to do, but we certainly wouldn’t have left our family, I don’t think.

Yes, I think so, yeah I think so. Yeah I think so.

I think so. I think so. I think we realized that it was serious and, but I think – I always had the impression or I

always thought anyhow – well most of us were bush people and we could sort of survive in the bush, and if we’d have gone and gone into the bush country, we would’ve been a long way better equipped than some of the army – the Japanese army who’d follow us. Or that’s what I had in mind anyhow.

But … I may have been wrong.

Well yes, yeah, well yes we were all – we knew the bush and we knew certain skills, and as I say my father was a man that’d been in the busy and

we didn’t realise at the time of course that north Queensland was gonna be sacrificed. Apparently it was.

Oh I s’pose apprehensive more than anything,

yeah, yeah. I don’t say I was looking forward to it.

No not really – not angry.

Well all I knew of the Germans is what I’d read about them and any of the propaganda that we’d read was all I knew of them, and the same with the Japanese. We didn’t

really know them. I couldn’t say that I’d ever known very many Germans or very many Japanese, so I s’pose I couldn’t form an opinion except what I’d been told and read.

Yeah but I didn’t know them.

Well they were the enemy, but I mean I

didn’t actually know them at all except that they – you know I mean how do you dislike a person that you don’t know?

Well that’s the point, yeah I s’pose, and we’d have been prepared to do that too of course. Yes.

Oh yes, there was quite a few of the women were involved in making of various things for comforts for the troops and some of the women

were involved in the Red Cross and the Australian Comforts Fund and various things like that.

No Mum was involved in this VAOC – the Volunteer [Air] Observers’ Corps, and as I’ll point out to you later, it was pretty well a full time job. My other sisters worked – worked two jobs and they – one sister was involved

in helping with this VAOC and the other one was doing other work, you know so …

Oh yeah – women did work that they’d never done before, and we did things that we’d never done before. I was driving a truck when I was fifteen and

never, never spoken to about the police or anything like that because there were just no men about to do it. That – I was driving a bus at sixteen.

I was driving a truck when I was eleven or twelve years of age.

My Dad taught me and when we’d go – sometimes if we’d go out to do a job, he’d say, “Well you can drive.” But when it came

to some of the things during wartime that had to be done, well we did it and girls were doing jobs that we never thought girls’d do and boys were doing jobs that would’ve been done by men.

Well the land army girls were here for a start, and they – that was one of the jobs I used to do. When I finished school

or even when I first started work, I was only fifteen when I started work – we’d go out in trucks and pick up – take the girls out to work on the farms, and then after we’d go and pick them up and bring them back after they’d finished their days work. It was only on a flat bed truck too – there was no comforts or anything like that, and these girls worked very hard. They were picking tomatoes and they were picking potatoes; they were picking cotton and doing all those manual

jobs and there was quite a lot of land army girls here.

Yeah – I was…

Yeah but somebody had to do it. What could you do if there was no men here?

Oh yes, yeah.

Oh yes you’d enjoy it, yes – you thought

you were doing something and – oh I think contributing – you felt you were contributing something but you also thought, “Well I’m doing things – doing a man’s job.” And yes – no that, some of those girls were working very, very hard. They were – did a wonderful job during the war, some

of those land army girls. A few of them settled here after the war – you know – some of them even married and came back here.

Well it was an organisation – I don’t know who created it, but it was – the had a uniform and – when they went out, it was a khaki type brown

uniform, and hat and everything like that. But of course when they went out to work they were only in working clothes – they worked in shorts or some – things like that, but it was an organisation – the women’s land army. But I don’t know who organised it, but they were living in barracks and tents – that sort of thing

you know, and some of them I think even were boarded privately. But they were young women – oh most of them in their twenties and it was …

Yeah, yes – they were doing hard work and they did it well without any complaints too. They were – they always had my admiration, those girls.

Oh I don’t know what – I think they were, they were in an army situation, I think they were probably paid, but I don’t think they were paid handsomely. I think it was just like a conscripted – not a conscripted but a voluntary army, that’s all.

Yeah.

Well there was some farms that were – there’s a one of the Queensland government experimental stations was growing various things, various crops, and then there some of the private cane farms had – I remember an in area we called ex-pec – there was two or three farmers out there growing cotton, and then there was one on the

Kalamia beach road out here – Alva Beach Road – one or two farms out there were growing cotton and other vegetables – potato, pumpkins and that sort of thing – tomatoes, and that’s what the girls were doing – harvesting them.

Oh an experimental farm was a Queensland Government-run farm, were doing experiments with various crops and that sort of thing, you see

they – growing of crops and development of different species of crops – plant breeding and that sort of thing.

Plant breeding.

Yeah.

Well more or less refining crops that were being grown to cross breed to get the

best type of plant for this area, you know?

Yeah, I did a couple more years until I was fifteen, but at fifteen in Queensland we had

senior, well the classes went to sub junior. We had scholarship – you passed scholarship and then that entitled you to go to secondary school and that was junior – sub junior and junior. At junior level the next level was senior, and the Ayr high school only went as far as junior. I was going to go on to senior, but because of the lack of teachers and lack of facilities

they had no senior classes here so you had to leave to go to another town to Townsville or Charters Towers or somewhere like that, if you wanted to do senior. So what I did was I left work, left school to go to work, and I went to one of the sugar mills as an apprentice fitter and turner at fifteen.

I would’ve preferred to go on and do more schooling.

I don’t know what I was looking for. I was, I just thought I’d do another – I’d go for – I’d do a senior if it was available but it wasn’t, and an apprenticeship was available so I took that.

Well we were

doing general workshop and maintenance in the sugar mill, but also World War II was right – it was 1943 when I started to work and sugar mills were utilizing their machinery to build various things for the war effort. For instance our sugar mill out there – we were building ships winches for ships, so we

were, and the machinery that the sugar mills had for their maintenance was being utilised for a war effort, you know because different sugar mills and different organisations were building different things. But the thing that we were doing was building ships – winches for ships, and that

was the contribution of the workforce out there. We did the maintenance of the factory but also did the war work as well, you know?

No – normal work, although there was some overtime work for the war work too. But there wasn’t a lot of maintenance and they’d done in

the – and a lot of new machinery installed for the sugar mills because it wasn’t available anyhow, and once for a couple of years instead of the sugar mills working twenty four hours, three – twenty – three, eight hour shifts for twenty four hours, they were only crushing for two shifts and they’d stop work at midnight and they’d use the facilities for other things, you see because the amount of sugar being

produced was limited anyhow.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It was all just training as far as we were concerned, and learning our trade – that’s all.

Yeah that was all right. Yeah I enjoyed it, yeah, yeah.

Well I didn’t think so, but I enjoyed it and then

I went out of the fitting and turning and went into the motor vehicles, and then I progressed from motor vehicles into diesel engines and then I went into the locomotive side, and I finished up supervising the repair and maintenance and that on the locomotives.

No at that – at the…

Sugar mill, yeah.

Yeah, mechanical repair of the trucks and tractors.

Well the first thing – one of the first things I got involved with was the conversion and maintenance of motor vehicles running on producer

gas where they had the gas generators, and instead of running on petrol we’d run them on gas – that was, well for instance a car or a truck would have a cylindrical cylinder that was – it had, it was a generator, a gas generator where you

burnt coke and converted the coke into gas and the gas went into the internal combustion engines to the petrol and several of the trucks, one tractor and all the cars out there were converted to producer gas. We’d – one of the jobs for the mechanics and the apprentices

to get the cars going would be to start them in the morning and get the fire going in the generator – the gas generator, then when you got some gas produced, you’d start the car on petrol and then switch it over and it’d run on gas, and it’d run all day on gas because unless you had petrol you couldn’t start it again. So most of the time they’d be just left running

all day and, but it saved petrol.

Oh yeah – purely because there was very little fuel.

Yes, yes – quite a large cylindrical cylinder – so big and they were bolted on the ….

Coke.

Well it’s

a processed coal isn’t it?

Yeah – when coke – coke is a type of processed coal and then when you had this generator it’d let off these combustible gases.

Oh well – something, yeah something similar.

Well first of all the VAOC is the Volunteer Air Observers’ Corps. To the best of my knowledge it was formulated in wartime England in the Battle of Britain and what they did was they

created various outposts around to report on aircraft. When things got hairy in Australia they put out the same system and they had observer posts around most of the country, as far as I know. In most cases the observer corps was an organisation

where they had a chief observer and they recruited volunteers to come on a volunteer basis to man the posts at various times of the day and week – both men and women, boys and girls. But in our case I don’t know for what reason but they – we were asked to set up an air observers corps post at our place. Now I don’t know

how it came about. I suspect that it was because my father was involved in the council and maybe he was the one that was contacted – I don’t know. All he – all I know is he came home and he said, “We’re establishing a post here.” And then we were visited by the RAAF – R.A.A.F. people and they organised the post.

But as I said to you before it was – I think he was a flight lieutenant – either a flying officer or Flight Lieutenant Westmore is all I can remember him, and he came down, and I’m not even sure of the exact time of when we started. I think it was December 1941, I think. But if you go through our log books now you’ll see that the first entries there are early 1942, but

we were going a little bit before that. There were – it was supposed to be secret and we weren’t to divulge our activities to anybody. As far as I know there were several other reporting stations in our vicinity. There was one established at Alva Beach, which was manned by the Americans

and they called it an RDF – a radio direction finder station, and that was a reporting station. There was one on a grazing property about twenty, twenty five kilometres west of here, or south west; there was some to the north of us and some to the south, but I’m not sure. I only know from rumour of the other people and we didn’t have any contact

with ‘em. It was purely – the only contact we had was with the fighter control in Townsville, the nerve centre of the RAAF and the American air forces in Townsville – that’s all I know, and as I said when we wanted to report an aircraft we just rang on the phone to our local manual exchange and said to the radio, to the

telephone operator there, “Air flash” and we were connected straight through – first priority through to the station in Townsville. But I just suspect that it was because of my father’s involvement. I don’t know – he didn’t elaborate as far as I know, to me anyhow.

Well we were quite pleased to be able to get involved in the war effort. I mean it was, it, well we had a couple of boys – first sons, my brothers, away in the army and it was just that we thought it was the right thing to do anyhow; and as a fourteen year old I was a bit excited about aircraft and service

life and that sort of thing, so I was only too pleased to get involved in it.

Well it did to a certain extent, but then there was a spin off from that, because on a couple of occasions people queried the fact that we might’ve been doing something for the enemy. We were fifth columnists or something like that, because our neighbours and people going past’d see Mum or I or somebody run out and stare at an aircraft with

binoculars and then run inside and there were rumours at time that we were doing something subversive, but – as a matter of fact I think some of the rumours might’ve been started by the telephone girls at the post office because well – rumours were rife at one stage that we weren’t doing the right thing, but that didn’t make any difference. We knew we were doing the right thing.

No they were interested and, “What are you doing?” And everything like that, and I just said, “Oh it’s just a job we’re doing, you know and that’s all.” But you couldn’t divulge it, and we were asked to keep it to ourselves, and we did.

Well yes you’d certainly like to go and boast to your friends, but I

didn’t and I don’t think any of the family did.

Well somebody had to be home at all times. When I – my Mum and I were the main ones in it. Mum because she was home all the time and I s’pose I was the most enthusiastic, so I took

over that part of it. But then I went to school at eight thirty in the morning, and didn’t get home till four or four thirty in the afternoon, so I wasn’t there all day to do it. My sisters who were older, were at work and another sister and my younger brother were at school, so Mum was on her own – she had to do it, so that’s a disruption to the family, certainly

but when I come home or when one of the others were home, they’d help out.

Well if we were all home and if we heard an aircraft, one of us’d go out, you know?

Well you’d have to hear an aircraft.

Well you – it would be pointless just to sit out there looking round the sky all day,

so you’d wait until you heard an aircraft or saw an aircraft, but usually you’d hear them first and they had to be close enough to see them if you could hear them, and the idea was to warn the RAAF that there was an aircraft, but they were plotting the aircraft as they – they knew that if a Stinson was coming up – the mail plane was coming up, it would’ve been

plotted all the way to Townsville and they’d keep an eye on it, but they knew where every aircraft was. This is in the days before radar of course, and the only information they got was from the observers.

A telephone and a pair of binoculars, and the paperwork – the log books

and the aircraft recognition books and the other correspondence that we got from them. But the only training we did was, well they came down and gave us basic training in it, but the rest of it was learned from bulletins and from instructions we received from the RAAF.

Oh yes she was in ….

Well he explained the purpose of the whole corps and what they required us to do, and if we would undertake to do it, and more or less guarantee that we, you know we wouldn’t do it sometimes and not do it other times –

he asked us would we be prepared to put it in fulltime so that there would be the post – would be manned twenty four – seven, sort of thing, you know, and then, then gave us the instructions on how we were to ring, say, “Air flash.” Speak to the air force personnel in Townsville and

just say what you had to say, but it wasn’t a chat line or anything like that. You just reported the aircraft as you saws it and shut down again.

I’ll get it….

We were having dinner and we hear an aircraft, and I say or somebody says, “I’ll get it”

and you go out and have a look, see if you can find it. You even reported that you only heard the aircraft. You could ring and say you heard it – you couldn’t see it – didn’t know where it was, but it was heard. Or else you saw it, identified it, or if you couldn’t identify it, give a description of it. Now the description was a coded system that the air force had evolved in

telling you that the formation of the aircraft was A) was a low wing or a high wing or a mid wing or some type of wing – was the description of an A), and there was one, two, three, four, five – what type of wings they were, and A-one was a low wing mother plane. B was engines, so

a B would’ve been a one, two, three, four engine, so an A-one, B-two was a low wing and twin engine mono plane, or it could’ve been a bi-plane, which was a two – so with the C was a different low section, I think it was, and D was wheels and so forth – so by the time you’d gone through an A and a B and a C and a D, you’d given a reasonable description that they could identify the aircraft

if you couldn’t. But if I knew it was a Douglas DC-3, or a DC-2, I would say, “It’s a Douglas DC-2.” But if I didn’t know, I’d give a description, and at the end as I – at the end of the description there was markings – whether it was a swastika or a German cross or a Japanese red sun or something – if you got to that stage well you were too close to see and they

weren’t very well received then either. You hoped to see the round dolls of the RAAF. But I never saw any foreign markings on any of the aircraft.

Well weekly or once every few weeks they’d send down a circular

saying that the week of such and such – the code word would be Cobra, or the code word would be something and – to identify that you were a genuine person you had to know the code word and you said that when you were greeted by the girl in the flight centre you would give the code word for the week, and then she’d know it was

a genuine call.

Well usually they just ask you to identify yourself, and you would, and you’d say, “Air calling.” You know, and she’d say, “Yes.” And you’d go ahead and give the message – that’s all. “So many aircraft.” There’d be three aircraft flying in formation to the east

or whatever it was – it was all in the description, flying at the east and so many – you’d say they were flying low or high.

During the daytime – more so than – there wasn’t a lot of activity at night, but they’d start early of a morning. Especially some of the aircraft like the

mail planes or the passenger planes. There wasn’t a lot of them but there were some and they’d usually be travelling early in the morning, but during the day there was often training flights of – particularly the Americans – they had fighter strips, they call them, away from the main airport in Townsville on the

road towards Charters Towers, and the road to Ayr via Woodstock – at the side of the road they had fighter strips which were tarmacs paved out in the bush, and the fighters could use those as landing and storage areas so that they weren’t at the main air force. Well those fighter pilots

used to take off on training places, training runs and they’d fly over here and buzz the town and on several occasions they’d fly down and practise their machine gunning – of course not machine gunning but you could tell they were doing practise runs, and they weren’t supposed to fly at so many – so low over the towns – they were supposed to do their practising over other areas, and when we reported

them to the air flash people in Townsville, we didn’t report them as sky larking, but we had to report them as what they were doing and how low they were, and apparently the RAAF contacted the commanding offices of the American fighter squadrons and we weren’t very popular because they’d blamed us for dobbing them in sort of thing,

flying over. But however that was our job was to report any aircraft flying and what they were doing. But the girls from the RAAF in Townsville told us that we weren’t very popular with some of the American airman.

No, no, no, no – but they didn’t like the people that reported them. Oh no they didn’t know who we were.

Well yes – they gave us recognition manuals and they were mainly recognition manuals and procedural manuals that were what we were to do as far as procedure and contacting the RAAF and letting them know about aircraft.

And then during the course of the war every so often – month, six weeks or whatever service bulletins would come out and they would report various things and also update aircraft and procedures and that, and tell stories of some of the things that happened at other stations and more or less an information

bulletin.

Silhouettes mainly. There were some stations that I believe, I’ve been told – where the volunteers used to go to a station and they used to build model airplanes

for recognition, but they were in stations where there was volunteers and they were only filling in time, sort of thing. But whereas in the family situation well you weren’t just sitting round waiting for an aircraft, you were doing your normal days work and or normal activities until you heard an aircraft. But most of ours was just silhouettes and photographs in service bulletins so that you could recognise various planes.

Well it was purely for recognition purposes. There wasn’t much performance information given to us. They’d say it was a light bomber or it was a heavy bomber or it was a

fighter or a fighter bomber or something like that, but they wouldn’t give any capabilities or anything like that because they weren’t supposed to know or even find out what the capability of the aircraft was. All our job was, was to recognise it, and if we couldn’t recognise it describe it well enough so that they could recognise it and determine whether it was one of theirs or one of ours sort of thing, you know?

They were a beautiful pair of binoculars – Carl Zeiss binoculars – I don’t know where they came from, but they were issued to us and they were very, very good. One of the points that I was disappointed with – at the end of hostilities is that we never got paid and we didn’t want to get paid for anything

that we did. We did it voluntarily and we were only too pleased to do it. But they come back and took the binoculars off us, and I thought that the least they could’ve done was let us have the binoculars. However that didn’t happen.

I can’t remember now. They were top grade binoculars. I don’t know whether they were – I’d only be guessing if I told you what they were. They

were good, but you want to know were they 4-X or 6-X or something like that – well I’m not sure, but they were good binoculars.

Yes.

Well we had a lounge towards the front of the house – the front of the house, bedroom to the side, and kitchen was out the back, and in the lounge area there was a

fairly large telephone table with the telephone on it, and the log books and binoculars and necessary equipment was left on that table right beside the phone, so that if you wanted to go – find an aircraft or look for an aircraft or do anything, you went there, picked up the binoculars, went outside and came back – put the binoculars back beside the phone and either consulted the book if you needed to, to try and recognise it or give some

recognition and then use the phone, or else if you knew what it was, you used the phone and then filled in the log book of what your description was – what the time, model of aircraft, direction, height – all that was put in the log book. We had a log book supplied by the RAAF which we filled in, and which I had until a few months ago, and I said to

this chap that’s doing the history of the VAOC that I did keep the school exercise books that we kept – that we filled in for our own benefit – I’d kept them there as well. But the official ones I sent to this chap that’s attempting to do a history of the VAOC during World War II – as well as sending him a lot of other stuff that I had.

Well yes, but somebody would have to particular go over to this table and look for it, I s’pose, and I never thought of it very much, but I don’t think anybody ever had a look at it. They may have but I can’t recall anybody.

Well either the front or the back of the house really the – depending on where you thought the aircraft was. But no normally the front of the house.

Not a lot. There is now but there was very little in those days. Any of the shrubs were quite low and we kept them that way so that the

observation post wouldn’t have any obstructions when we were trying to look for aircraft.

No, I didn’t – sometimes you could recognise the aircraft without the binoculars even, you know – the binoculars weren’t of, and they were

only of use if they were a long way away – you’d have to use them, but no – the sun reflecting wasn’t a big problem.

Well there was a couple of Australian aircraft that – their engine sounds were totally different to Wirraway and the Boomerang in particular had a different sound completely to the other

American aircraft I think. It’s hard to describe but you could just sort of pick the different sounds. But I don’t say I could recognise an aircraft from the sound, just the same. No I think that’d be stretching the story a little bit. But you could definitely tell the difference.

Well the

main American aircraft were the Kittyhawk, the Airacobra, the Lightening, which were fighters, then there was the B-26, Boston B-26 and the Mitchell B-25’s, the Flying Fortresses – they were

made American ones. We didn’t see a lot of British aircraft. We saw the odd spitfire or some of those, but not very much – nearly all American aircraft we saw. A lot of Kittyhawks and a lot of the Airacobras and those double fused Lightnings – a few thirty eight Lightnings.

62 Canberra Street, Ayr.

Never had any contact with any of them except as I told – said to you that that American pilot rang me that night after he was saved, and thanked me for my help.

Christmas night 1942 I think – yes – it was a stormy night – not a lot of rain but a bit of rain and we heard an aircraft stooging around,

and we contacted air flash, and we said that this chap was flying around and he didn’t look as though he knew where he was going, and they suggested that I signal the aircraft to give him some instructions – where he was and where to go. Now I had a very, very basic knowledge of Morse code. I’d learned it as a boy

scout, so I didn’t know a lot about it, but I had an ordinary two cell torch, and I went out and he – I signalled with a torch, and he – and I signalled A, Y, R – go north, with – in Morse code, like – just kept sending that. He circled and he came straight at the house, fairly low and he flew straight at me, and as he was flying at me

he put his landing lights on and they were too bright – he apparently couldn’t see the torch, and he switched the landing lights off and he came straight over the top of me. As he lifted away, he waggled his wing like that and he just headed off north, and about half an hour later I – we got this phone call and he’d asked could he contact the person that spoke, ah gave him the signal – he thanked me very much and said he understood

the signal, or his – one of his crew understood it as well and they realised – apparently it was an aircraft that was flying, I believe, from Fiji. There was about five or six American aircraft flying over and in the electrical storm, the instruments that they had had gone haywire, and he’d got lost and he couldn’t find Garbutt airport, and he – that’s how he finished up down here about

what is it, fifty if sixty Ks, air, miles, air kilometres from Garbutt airport and when he got the signal that he was over here – whether he had that on the map or not, I don’t know, but go north and when he flew north he found Townsville, and as I’ve showed you off camera, there’s a service bulletin describing that – or his description – there’s a description they gave it and

then I’ve given you my description of what happened. But the bulletins said that the aircraft was worth a hundred thousand pounds for starters, but more important that than, there was about six or eight fellas with – lives were on it too. So we were happy to save the aircraft but more happy to save the fellows – their lives. So I was quite happy with that.

Well I – when you’re that age, you’re bullet proof, aren’t you? You’d say, “I can do that.” And I did, but it was only dot-dash-dot-dash sort of thing, with the torch. It wasn’t, what you’d call very – I don’t know what you’d call it – scientific. It was very basic.

Oh yeah – oh I was excited, and I was more excited when he rang me up – the – I don’t know whether he was a lieutenant or a captain in the American air force rang me up and thanked me for helping him and that was quite exciting, and I was very pleased with that, and I couldn’t run and tell anybody. I’d like to have gone round and – but hundreds of people around town saw the aircraft. Whether the others were flashing torches at him, I don’t know. But he apparently

picked mine out anyhow.

Fifteen – 1942.

Not a lot.

Well the main impact on the family was the fact that we had two brothers not there, and the rationing and shortage of different things and you know the inconvenience I s’pose, of shortages and rationing and what have you. See, well you all knew about coupons and rationing and we had so many

ration coupons for meat and so many for flour and so many for butter and so many for sugar, which didn’t make any difference when you worked in a sugar mill, but we’d still – you know things were – but we never – we weren’t deprived of very much. The basic things were, you know, available. It’s just that you didn’t have meat as often as you used to have it, and

you didn’t have as much butter sometimes as you might liked.

No, no – the only, no the only thing was that if there was a phone problem they very smartly made sure that the lines of communication were left open and you know it was a priority

as far as keeping that working. But no – we never got any special treatment – didn’t want any really.

Well actually my mother was the one that struck up as the friendship of these girls,

because apparently there’d be a little bit of banter going on after the air flash message was given and they’d reported it – they’d apparently had a little bit of a talk after. I was never as friendly with the girls as Mum was, and apparently they got to know her and like her and as I say three or four of them – three of them

I think came down each weekends, for weekend leave – just to meet her and – oh to get out of the city I s’pose and go to – in a country area, and they were very nice girls.

They stayed for the weekend, yeah, yeah.

No, she took it all in her stride. There was never – she was a very capable woman and she didn’t believe she was doing anything out of the ordinary. She thought she was just helping out, you know? She didn’t – she didn’t want any recognition or thanks or anything for it. She was just doing her job, she thought.

I think she enjoyed it, yes. I think she enjoyed it and she enjoyed

the fact that she was contributing towards things, and she enjoyed the contact with the girls, and yeah – I think she did. I think she got something out of it. I think that was the satisfaction she got – she didn’t need, require anything else.

I think she felt she was contributing to helping them, yeah certainly. Mmm.

He didn’t do very much at all in the – in fact he was normally the chief observer, but he wasn’t involved very much at all. One of my other sisters did a bit. My younger brother – when he got a bit older, did a bit too, but and myself and my

mother – we did most of it you know.

Well in the service bulletin that came out towards the end of the war, they reported it in the RAAF service bulletin that the post had sent over ten thousand signals in the, what was it nearly five years, four and a half years so – ten thousand

signals was the figure given by the RAAF. So there would’ve been more than that over the full period. But that gives you an idea of how many signals, and how involved it was and how much time it must have taken, you know – because one of us had to – and you couldn’t say it was only take you five seconds or something. It was probably from stopping what you were doing and going out

and finding it, and coming back and reporting would’ve been at least five and probably ten minutes by the time you got back to what you were doing. It did disturb the usual run of things, but you never worried about it because it was something to be done and did it as well as we could.

Ten thousand times that

you rang the phone and got through to the air force in Townsville and gave the signal – gave the..

Identified ten thousand flights or planes. There might’ve been three on a flight, or four on a flight. But that was only one phone call –you’d say, “There’s four aircraft.” But at least ten thousand times the phone was rung.

Yeah but I didn’t do that much, and if I didn’t do my turn then somebody had to do it. If you’re not going to do the job well – if you’re not going to do it properly don’t do it at all, eh, and as I say I was only helping out in the times that I could, because from eight-thirty in the morning till say three-thirty in the afternoon – unless it was a Saturday or a Sunday

my mother had to do it, unless someone was home for lunch or something. You know, but I mean it was something I didn’t mind doing – or certainly the others didn’t mind doing just to give Mum a bit of a break.

Oh no it was done within the family and it was done all from manuals and bulletins that were sent to us from the air force, although in doing the recognition

course that I showed you the certificate that I got – the officer that came down to see us at periodical times, he came down and I said I was ready to sit for the examination and he gave me the examination – an oral written examination at the house, at – it was

all – I did all the study off the bulletins and off the magazines and that sort of thing that they gave us.

Not a lot, no because it, no I don’t think so, although if one of the other family members wanted to know something and you knew it, you’d help them. But the books were available to them too, so it was just a matter of reading up

if you were interested enough, and if you’re not interested well of course you wouldn’t do it.

I don’t think so. I don’t know about my younger brother – he may have, but that’s the only certificate that I’ve seen that – I got that one and the other one. I’ve only got – only retained one. I don’t know where the other one got to. Another thing that they did issue us

with was a badge, it was supposed to be – well it was a secret organisation and yet they gave us a badge – a lapel badge with Volunteer Air Observers Corps on, and observer underneath, and one was chief observer. But if it’s an organisation you weren’t supposed to talk about, I don’t know why they gave us a badge that we could wear on our lapel.

Well I haven’t but I’ve still got one there. I can show it to you later. But I’ve got one there, but I didn’t see any point in wearing it out really.

No, not really. I didn’t – I felt as though we did – we did it for the right reasons and – oh I s’pose I could’ve worn the badge, but …

Yes – recently, oh within the last six months or so, there was a chap from Victoria who put an advertisement in the Townsville paper asking for any people that’d been involved in the Volunteer Air Observers Corps during World War II, to contact him because he wanted to write a history of it, and he’s being

assisted or assisting the history of the RAAF and this department of the RAAF for the war memorial people in Canberra. He – and I answered his letter and I’ve had correspondence with him half a dozen occasions. I haven’t heard from him for the last

couple of months, but he asked me about – he had most of the service bulletins that were published, and he asked me for some that he didn’t have, and I was able to give him a couple. But the majority of them – as I’ve said I’ve given to my nephew in Proserpine, and he got them. But I sent this other fellow some recognition books that he hadn’t seen or hadn’t heard about, also log books

and also he was appreciate of that in, and he told me that he hoped at the end of this year to have a book out on the history of the AOC. But I haven’t contacted him so I don’t know how far advanced he is with the book. But he’s the only one that I’ve had any contact with. There were a couple of families around here that had connections with VAOC and other areas, but I haven’t

talked to them about it. I haven’t contacted them at all.

Well not now. There was post war apparently, but we were a bit isolated here. But apparently post war in some of the cities and areas in New South Wales and Victoria they had associations,

but I’d never been invited to join one or I never joined one. But some of the posts apparently had twenty or thirty volunteers. So you know – but of course we’re talking over sixty years ago now. So unless you were a reasonably young person you’re no longer with us. The – well the war’s

1939, sixty five years now isn’t it? So …

No, no – they never invited us and we weren’t – I did meet some Americans, but they were from the base down here at their RDF station. I met some of them but we didn’t discuss is because as far as I was concerned I wasn’t going to discuss what we were

doing and I don’t think they were going to talk about what they were doing. But I knew who they were and what – whether they knew us, I don’t know. But I met them more or less socially.

Well there again, as I told you before my father had the carrying business with the trucks, and I used to help him some afternoons, and go down to the railway station, and the American contingent

that was supplied from their headquarters, and their food’d come down on the train that we used to meet to get some of our stuff off, and there’d be an American truck or two there with several of their drivers and they’d be there to meet the trains most afternoons and we got to know them and met them socially – as far as that’s concerned you know – and that’s how we got to know them.

No they –

most of them were white in this area. But half way between here and Townsville at Giru, there was a camp and there was a lot of American Negroes there, and there was a lot of them driving vehicles and around transport vehicles and that sort of thing. But the contingent that were here – most of them were – all of them were white. There were a few American Negroes came down here on leave at different times, but they were never working in this area.

Well, yeah – one of the things that a couple of the black Americans told me was that they’d never see the United States again because the white ones didn’t want ‘em back in America and they’d sink the ships rather than go back. I don’t know whether they knew what they were talking about, but they – they said that white America didn’t want ‘em. But – they seemed …

Yes. They were – as far as I know they called themselves an RDF station – it was a radio direction finder, and it was reporting aircraft, and also it was on the coast, but I think they were sort of coast watchers as well as aircraft plotters and that sort of

thing. They had – it was, we’ve got a small beach resort down there at Alva – probably a hundred or so houses, and they closed the area off and wouldn’t let anyone down there, and confiscated three of four of the houses, or half a dozen of the houses and they were just an army unit round there and they – but you weren’t allowed to go inside the perimeter at all. It was fenced off

for a few miles around it. But as far as I know it was radio direction finding and coast watching and aircraft reporting.

Yeah, I think so.

Not a lot in this area, but I did notice that when the Americans decided to do something, there was very little red tape – they just went ahead and did it, irrespective of whether they were stepping on anyone else’s toes or not. You know they just went ahead and did it, and I think they recognised that it had to be done and they

just went ahead and did it.

I think they did. But we didn’t have a lot of ‘em here. A few of them came down on leave and that sort of thing, but that was – that Alva beach contingent was the only real American base that was here. Most of them were stationed around Townsville and round the Garbutt airport, because Garbutt was a very important airport as far as the defence of north Queensland, because the

majority of aircraft that flew over for the battle of the Coral Sea left from Townsville and Charters Towers – all the bombers, they – most of the aircraft and it was the main northern base.

Well not very much. There’s – there was only the movies and dances and that sort of thing, you know – the old time dances but

– and frequent the hotels, I s’pose. But that’s all they really did. ‘Cause I was only a boy as I’m talking about – I wasn’t mixing with them as men – you know.

A few of the young ladies here married and went to America.

Yes, I

knew a couple of the girls, yes. But they – no a couple of them – the men returned with their wives after the war and lived in the town.

Yeah, returned with the Australian brides, yes and as a matter of fact there’s one or two of them I know now that their children and grandchildren of the

American servicemen that – but ….

Yes, apparently the story I heard – it was only second hand information of course, but apparently one of the American – white American

MPs tried to arrest a black American serviceman, and the black American MP took exception to it, and they had an altercation and as I say – it came down to – like the ‘OK Coral’. They drew their six guns and – or revolvers or whatever they had and fired at one another. I don’t know – I don’t think there was

- there was certainly no deaths. I don’t know even if there was much damage done except that it happened in one of the local hotels and there was a couple of bullets in the bar or something like that. But I don’t think anything hit flesh. But that was one – one of the stories going around the place.

No. No, no we didn’t see any. No I can’t recall, no.

Yeah, fella’s who were back on leave because there was very, very few actually on army business in the town, you know because it was only a small town and no army camps near it really.

Oh yes.

Talking about transport convoy – towards the end of the war, I think it was 1945, there was damage to the railway bridge across the Burdekin River in a flood, and they sent an army contingent down here – a transport contingent and – with local carriers who my father was involved with,

they transported lots of goods across the Burdekin on the road while they repaired the bridge and they called it the coordinated service – they coordinated between the army and the civilian situation, and there was quite a large contingent of the Australian transport and they were in the showgrounds here for quite a few months. They

brought that – they unloaded the – a lot of the goods in home hill, transported them across by road to Ayr around the Burdekin – damaged Burdekin bridge, and them reloaded them on trains here, and the transport people did a lot of that. There was some hilarious incidents apparently coming across

there because some of the goods to be transported were bullocks, and they bought some bullocks and the bullocks broke away from the – in the back of the truck and got out into the bed of the river, and it – I believe there were some funny things happening trying to catch bullocks in the bed of the river to get ‘em back into the trucks. But that’s as it may be.

Yes, but the trains came through – troops trains were endless coming through here.

They stopped for meals sometimes, and there was a few enterprising businessmen that opened small shops down near the railway

station too, and in the watermelon season and that sort of thing they did a lot of business selling watermelons and so forth – at fairly inflated prices some of them too, you know but – particularly to the Americans. But there were lots of troop trains that went through.

Yeah they were on their way north – knowing that you were going into

the – you were getting into battle, I s’pose they’d have their last wild flings, but they mainly just were trains, that’s all.

Oh yes there was quite a few. Yes there’s quite a few. Mainly the

air force – there was quite a lot, the RAAF, yeah – not a lot of army girls, but there were a few, and I think a few of them joined the land army too, but it’s hard to know just how many did.

Yeah my brother’s wife, my sister in law – she was in the air force, yeah. WAAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force] as they were, and there was

a WAAAF station – I don’t know what their purpose really was, but it was down on the road between Home hill and Bowen – Charlie’s Hill, and there was a RAAF station there, and she was stationed there at times, but I think they were more or less a reporting station too.

No, no.

Yeah – yeah the cinema and I just recall that some Sunday nights the comforts fund and the Red Cross would run concerts, and some of those American boys that were in the

Alva Beach station used to come up and join the entertainment. One – I remember one was a tap dancer and a couple of singers, and a few instrumentalists and that – they joined in on that, and the proceeds of those – a lot of those concerts that they ran on Sunday nights was given to patriotic

funds and when a lot of the servicemen were joined the service or went back on leave, were given a wallet with money in it or something like that, or contributed towards something like that. That was – they called it the patriotic fund. I don’t know whether other areas had the same thing, but local artists and – as I say the Americans down there always supply a few artists and made

a concert out of a Sunday night, you know?

In the theatre – in the theatre when the cinema wasn’t on, on a Sunday night – we had the stage as well as the theatre and they…

Well probably – yes well I don’t know whether you’ve seen the cinema – they’ve rebuilt it. But it was, I s’pose – would’ve been three or four hundred seats in it, and a

quite a substantial stage and it was a theatre for most nights of the week, but you could have concerts or something like that there.

Oh well it was a permanent screen but it could be shifted back off the stage, and there was an orchestra pit in the front too, of the stage so that you could have an orchestra.

But there was – it was a movie theatre, but it could be used as a theatre as well.

Oh yeah.

Oh yes, yes, yes – well there wasn’t a lot of entertainment, and you’d pay your shilling or two shillings or whatever else to get in and it was a good nights entertainment.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah – you’d go with your family, yeah. Yes they were – all of us couldn’t go of course, someone stayed home.

Yeah she worked – two, both sisters worked there. The eldest one, again because of the shortage of manpower, she was one of the first

women to be an operator – you know the film operator, that they – the projectionist, she was the trained and she was one of the first around, to my knowledge around the country anyhow, that was out and the other worked in the ticket box, and did a bit of ushering, as well you know – or usherette.

Oh – all I can ever remember about it was it was devilishly hot in there, it was –

no air-conditioning in the box of course, and with those old theatres – the arc lamp that used to be on the film – it was very, very hot and apparently those old films were quite fragile, and every so often it’d snap and they’d be feverishly trying to feed it and what did they do? They fixed it with a sort of an acetone or something to resplice it – they called it splicing –

they’d splice the film again so they could run it on.

Yeah, yeah but I wasn’t supposed to be I don’t think.

Yes, but there wasn’t a lot of sport played because I remember we played a bit of football, but you couldn’t buy football jerseys, and I don’t

know, but in Queensland there was a small bag of sugar was about a thirty kilo bag – it was made out of jute and that sort of thing – and for football jerseys we used to cut the holes out of those and a neck, and pull them over and use them as football jerseys, and one of them would be dyed blue and another one would be dyed red and the reds’d play the blues, and that was our football jerseys. But there was no football jerseys or socks or anything

like that. Cricket balls were at a premium. You couldn’t buy cricket balls. We’d have a – you could get a hard rubberised ball that used to be a composition ball that we used to play cricket with, but it wasn’t a good leather ball or – and there was – there wasn’t a lot of cricket bats and cricket gear about. But we make do.

I was a little bit young, but….

I was eighteen when the war finished. Two days after the war finished I was eighteen. Yeah, but I think there was quite a bit of romance about, because

as I say in this town there was a shortage of men of course, because all the young men had gone in the army and there were very few army men here in camp, so there was a lot of young women with no male companionship, so I s’pose there was a lot of romance that went on between visiting servicemen and that.

No, not me.

But no!

Not a lot because we were – we’d listen to the war news, seven o’clock, eight o’clock news in the morning and seven o’clock news at night – the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] or some of those

you know very few commercial stations and mainly the ABC. But that’s all the news we ever got and limited news in the newspapers because it was all censored, and even the news in the boys’ letters home – they were limited to what they could say in their letters. I don’t know – apparently they were censored, but anyhow they didn’t write anything that was,

wasn’t supposed to be in it.

Mmm. A little bit. Yeah.

No – well they knew, yes they’d know. ‘Cause they did come home on leave on a couple of occasions.

Yeah, yeah, yes oh yes and yes you’re proud that you’re

helping.

Well from my recollection they didn’t talk much about the war itself. They spoke about the social side of things and how they – their mateships and that sort of thing, or you know their – the good times they were having, sort of thing. Whether that was deliberate or not, I don’t know so that you wouldn’t be worried about them, but they never spoke

much about the bad side of war.

Yes, yes, yes. You had to have a sense of humour, I think. It helps, yeah.

I think so yes, yes. But well I think so. If there is something suspicious, people seem to make it worse than it was, you know elaborate on it. But I don’t think we were under any danger from people, but it’s just that they thought, what the devil were we doing? Were we doing it something for somebody else rather than the allied forces?

I think we heard about it about – I think it was about that night. I think it was pretty well as soon as it happened. It was only a few hours

after it happened I think, and if I remember rightly, Pearl Harbour was the Sunday morning, wasn’t it?

Yeah, well I don’t know whether we heard about it on the Saturday night – late on that Saturday night, or Sunday night – Sunday night or Monday morning, I can’t remember. But I can remember them saying, and I can remember in a few weeks after there was Movietone Newsreel showing some of the battleships that were sunk and on fire

there. It was quite graphic and it was frightening really, because we thought they – the Americans were indestructible sort of thing, and they lost most of their Pacific fleet in one Sunday morning.

Oh yes,

but I think we thought, well I didn’t think that Australia would be in danger. I thought that the Americans and the British – particularly Singapore and the Philippines – they’d stop the Japs before they got nearly this far.

That was devastating because we understood that Singapore was impregnable, that it couldn’t happen,

that there’s no way that that’d happen, and we thought the Japanese would be stopped at Singapore and they’d be stopped at the Philippines – wouldn’t get this far. Then they got to New Guinea and it was only the Coral Sea that stopped them from getting here – the battle of the Coral Sea.

Well all I can remember is people found it difficult to believe, because we always thought that Singapore was impregnable, that was going to stop anybody from getting any

further, that you just wouldn’t be able to take Singapore. It was too strong. Something similar to the (UNCLEAR) in France. They just, was gonna stop the Germans going into France, but it didn’t work out like that, did it, and I thought the Americans would have no trouble in defeating the Japanese

A lot longer. More powerful than I thought they were, and of course we thought the Japanese were about five foot two tall and had thick glasses like the bottom of coke bottles, and you know they were the inferior race and they couldn’t produce anything – the only thing they ever produced was cheap reproductions of everybody else’s material;

that’s what we all thought didn’t we?

Well before World War II, Japan’s exports were all toys and inferior made replicas of somebody else’s inventions, you know – and we all thought, well ‘Made In Japan’ was a saying that meant it was inferior. Well it’s made in

Japan, and we thought they were all – because the characateurs or the papers all showed the Japanese as a short fellow with glasses and not much brains or anything like that, and we thought – you know it wouldn’t take much to stop them or to beat them. We were wrong though, weren’t we, and they’ve proven that they’re not just copiers of anybody

else. They can – they’re pretty smart in their own right and pretty good at producing things.

Oh well we disliked them intensely because we heard of the atrocities that they’d – they’d done, you know?

They certainly weren’t flavour of the month, and I think when we’re at war with somebody we dislike them anyhow don’t we – really?

Yes, but not as much as there was until after the war – that’s when, but there was talk of

the atrocities and how – ‘cause a lot of it came out of China didn’t it – a lot of the atrocities, and we got some of the words of that. But we didn’t hear a lot about the atrocities in Malaya and Singapore until after the war.

There wasn’t a very big population of Chinese or Japanese in Ayr. But no I don’t think so. I think the Chinese were considered a different race completely as the Japanese. There’s only a few Japanese in this area. No – they were working at one of the sugar mills, and there wasn’t a – very many of them,

and I don’t know – I don’t think there was any – I don’t think we associated the Chinese with the Japanese. I didn’t anyhow.

Well that was to do with the shortage of petrol during the war, and I spoke to you before about the cane inspectors, the cane inspectors were the people that went round the various farms and coordinated the cutting of the cane and the transportation and distribution and all that sort of thing of empty trucks and so forth,

and they had to get around. Well they had to have a vehicle, and there was just a shortage of petrol – you couldn’t do it. So I don’t know who invented this gas system. It was – came from, oh I don’t know – it was imported from somewhere else, I don’t know. But they – there was this building of these generators and fitted onto cars, and all it was, was the gas that was generated by the

combustion of this coke let off this gas that was combustible and was able to be used in internal combustion engines. So if you started the car on petrol you could switch it over to this producer gas. But it wasn’t nearly as satisfactory as petrol. The top speed of the car was probably halved and the pulling power of the engine was halved and it was difficult – if it stopped it was difficult to start, and

it had a lot of things against it, but it could be used. So we had to use it.

Yeah they represented the mill, yes and they….

Well CSR [Colonial Sugar Refining Company] owned – well actually the mill I worked at was a company called Australian Estates, but then CSR bought the out in the 1970s.

Oh yes, yeah. Well if the crushing season was going over six months, you couldn’t have it all in there in the first couple of weeks. It had to be so much continuity of supply so that you’d be crushing twenty four hours a day, five days a week, and also at various times of the year,

the sugar content of the cane is better than at other times. Around about now – July, August is the peak period. Well you – everybody couldn’t send it into the peak period. It had to be rationed and allocated at various times and then the biggest farm couldn’t send all his stuff in and let the smaller farm wait, it had to go in proportion so that you took five percent off there and then you took five percent off him and

then you took five percent off him, and after the five percent was gone, the next round they’d take ten percent or fifteen percent till – and so that everyone was getting a proportion time of stuff, and the cane inspectors organised that, and then they’d have to go into the farm and they’d be cutting the cane, and they’d say, “Well I think, I estimate that there’s a hundred and fifty tons there,

so we’ll have to allocate the two ton trucks – we’d have to allocate seventy five trucks to come in there to shift that hundred and fifty tons of something, and so that was all organised by the cane inspectors. You couldn’t cut a hundred ton of cane and only sent in ten trucks. You’d have to send in the amount that would get that back, and then the mill could only

crush so much cane, so you couldn’t send in more than they could crush, and if the mill was having trouble in breakdowns or some other way they’d have to go round and stop them from harvesting any more until they got the mill going properly again – and all that sort of thing was all organised by the cane inspectors.

The train line.

The cane inspector’s vehicles?

Oh no the trucks I’m talking about are tramway trucks.

Were towed by the train, and the trains worked on coal.

No not really, no, no. No the only outside work that we did was that constructing

those ship’s winches, and there was very little any other war work done at all except – and we were, the rest of the time we were waiting for the factory, you know the sugar factory. One thing I’ll tell you that happened at the sugar mill:

when the threat of the war became, well became more as though it was going to come, they used to burn a lot of wood in the fires to – as well as the residue of the cane, to keep the boilers going. So they got contractors collecting wood, and they stacked wood,

sawn wood high around the vital parts of the factory – round the powerhouse and that sort of thing, to stop bomb splinters, in case a bomb landed out there and splinters came into the place; and there was this barricade of wood all around the mill. It was good planning because it not only stopped any chance of any splinters and

shrapnel and that flying in, but after the war was finished or towards the end when the invasion and bombing had passed, well they had the wood there to use in the fires anyhow, so it wasn’t as though it was wasted. But it was quite a good idea at the time.

Well it wouldn’t be as dangerous as a bomb, would it though – landing and all this shrapnel coming in. Anyhow they had these logs of wood stacked up high,

two or three metres high all up around the vital parts of the factory.

No, no – they still had the cane fires. But then all you’d see would be a field on fire, you wouldn’t see any buildings or any factories or anything like that. It was only the cane field

on fire, and it was controlled. It would be so many acres or so many hectares. It might be one hectare or two hectares burnt at a time, and it was quite quick – it was over within half an hour or something.

Well in those days we’d

start work at eight o’clock in the morning and just do maintenance or general maintenance work or repairs and make sure the factory kept going – you know. If there’s something broken down, well they had spares for most things. You’d shut the main part down and put the spare on and take the main part out and repair it and have it back, and that’s what we were doing – doing the maintenance and repairs.

Well the mean train itself, there’s rollers which the cane goes through to be crushed, and as it’s squeezed, the juice is squeezed out of it, well their rollers are cast iron rollers about two metres wide and a metre or so in diameter, and

they took a lot of maintenance because there was a lot of squeezing and pressure on those, you know – and also they had rotating knives on a shaft that used to cut the cane up into smaller pieces before it was fed into the rollers, and they took a lot of maintenance too, the knives and – with bluntening of knives, and then if there was any extraneous matter or pieces of wood or something that came out of

the cane accidentally got into the cane or something like that, well it might damage the knives, well you’d have to stop and change the knives; and then the pumps that pumped the juice away always took a lot of maintenance because of the abrasive and qualities of the juice that they were pumping used to be detrimental to most metals, you know?

So that was the main part of maintenance.

It is too.

No not in those days. You looked after your own health and your own safety, and health and safety was a thing that didn’t come in until much later on, and there was quite a few accidents, and there was even deaths in various mills around the

place, by what we’d consider now bad practises. But in those days it was just the accepted.

Well you took advice from some of the older men, for a start they’d – some of them’d take you under their wing and teach you the

correct thing to do and if you followed their advice you were usually fairly safe. It’s when you ignored their advice and their experience that you got into trouble – that was the sensible thing go to – take notice of the person who’d been there a long time.

Yes, yeah. Yep.

Yes – there

was two or three – one electrocution and two from falls. See the machinery and the boiling of the sugar and the – was done in higher places and sometimes you had to crawl around on piping and that sort of thing, and falls happened on a couple of occasions, and people

killed through falls. The chap that was electrocuted touched live wires when he was working on an overhead crane, and got electrocuted and fell.

Well when it’s going it was doing twenty-four hours a day it’s going continually.

Eight till four, four till twelve, twelve till eight. Three

shifts – three, eight hour shifts a day. But in the middle of World War II with the lack of manpower and lack of cane because the farmers were diversifying and growing the mill worked two shifts a day – eight till four and four till midnight, and then they baked the fires and shut down until eight the next morning. They didn’t have the men to run the three shifts, and they also didn’t have the cane because as I say – they were encouraging the farmers

to grow crops to feed the country. Sugar was not as important as other foodstuffs and things like cotton and that was very…

No really the – you did what maintenance you could while the machinery was going, otherwise you kept it going as best you could and we finished crushing usually midnight on Friday night and then you shut down for the weekend, and any maintenance jobs would be done on Saturday and Sunday and then start again at eight

o’clock on Monday morning. So you had all Friday night, all Saturday, all day Sunday to do any major jobs and replace any big machinery that was playing up.

Yes, no parts were impossible in some places to get, and we improvised or made our own, and some of the men were quite clever in their improvisations and making things go

that, but you know some were very clever.

I can’t think of anything. No. No I don’t think

so. Probably think of a dozen things when you leave me, but I can’t think of anything now.

As far as I can recollect we were at work, and the mills had

a whistle, steam whistle – something like on a train whistle, and at the start of a shift at eight o’clock in the morning and four o’clock in the afternoon, the shift, they blew a short whistle and it’d signal through the mill – if the mill was going to start they’d give two toots and if the mill was going to stop they’d give one toot for a stop and a change of shifts and that sort of thing, well when we heard the war was finished they just blew the whistles

continuously for – it seemed like hours. They just – everybody just rejoined, and instead of the whistles just being for any other reason, they were just a celebration – they just blew all the whistles.

No, no.

It just – it, as far as I know it just came word of mouth, through – someone said, “The war’s over.” And

everyone rejoiced. But we didn’t actually hear any radio or news or anything like that.

Well nobody went to work the next day and there was celebration in the streets and people danced and paraded around the streets and rejoiced, but

we didn’t work the next day. We – they closed the mill down and everyone just rejoiced.

Yes, yes they didn’t cease immediately after the war finished in Europe, but they did the moment the Japanese signed

the armistice and they just said that there was no longer a necessity. But things had sort of toned down a little bit. There wasn’t the urgency in the last month or last couple of months of the war because the Japanese were on the back foot and there was no chance of them mobbing Australia then because they were defending their own homeland, you know?

But we stopped immediately the war finished, we stopped any air flash messages or anything like that, and I think most of the servicemen and women were so pleased to get out that they didn’t care much anyhow, you know?

No not really. We all celebrated but life went on just the same because there’s still – the Japanese were still in the war. I mean the fact that it finished in Europe didn’t really effect us in Australia, did it? We were still at war with the Japanese. But the urgency had gone out of the reporting that we were still doing it, but

it didn’t seem to be as important because there was, well we didn’t think there was any chance of the Japanese bombing us anyhow.

We heard that – I don’t know that it was said, it was commented on – the first word I heard was that,

was it Nagasaki and Hiroshima were both heavily bombed and I didn’t realise or if I heard it was an atomic bomb, it didn’t register with me. I didn’t know what an atomic bomb was. It was just that there was heavy bomb damage inflicted on those, I think it was one of the Nagasaki first – I’m not sure whether it was

Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but one and then a few days later the other, and all I know is – we heard that there was substantial damage, and then later on it was revealed it was an atomic bomb. But I wouldn’t have known what an atomic bomb was ‘cause I never ever heard of it really.

I think you must have felt – or I did feel for the people – the ordinary person in the street. I mean I don’t think that you could enjoy seeing soldiers being killed or anything like that, but to see people devastated in their homes – that, I think that effected us,

or it effected me anyhow, and you see women and children what – that weren’t part of the conflict, that always – that I think effected us all, or it effected me anyhow. Another thing that I didn’t like about the conflict, that I was very much against was the use of flamethrowers. When I saw that on newsreels

too, I thought that’s a terrible thing to do to people. I know they were in bunkers and they were fighting and that sort of thing, but to burn them with a flame when they were in their bunkers – I think that’s – that must effect you. It effected me anyhow when I saw that sort of thing going on. I s’pose it doesn’t make any difference whether you kill with fire or rifles, but it seems worse to me that people would be callous enough to burn people

to death in a bunker.

Well then it didn’t seem so bad because it stopped the war, and I

thought, I believed what they said, that killing so many thousand men would save hundreds of thousands later. Well that may be too, but I don’t like the use of atomic weapons. I don’t think that’s the answer to things, but then war isn’t the answer to things either. But I don’t know how we get round it. But you can’t be in favour of mass killing, I don’t

think.

Well of course there was rejoicing and we were all very, very pleased of course. But the thing that – the first thing that when they come back was what do they do

now? There wasn’t – the old job wasn’t there to go back to. The firm was still there, still operating but the job had been done by somebody else for so long that you just couldn’t go back into it. So they – that was a readjustment. They both got jobs and both were successful later. But just at that – coming back there was

a sort of, well a worry that you’ve gotta go back into the workforce and get a job back.

Well one worked as a salesman for a while, and then he went into the family business and the two of them took over the carrying business and carried that on until they retired.

But they went into the carrying business that my father had had, and my father retired and they took it over and – he didn’t fully retire he had some mail contracts taking the mail from the train station to the post office, and from the post office back to the train station when the – parcel and mail, and also some delivery of mails to some of the outlying areas, to the smaller post offices and that. So he did that and the

other two boys went ahead with the general carrying, the carting of fertilizer and fuels and all that sort of thing.

Yes it was different. I think, well what changed forever was

the role of women in life. Women had done work that they’d never done before, and proven that they could do them – do the work, and here were all the men to come back to take those jobs back. Well it took some readjusting for some men to realise that, you know the women could do it and they had to, well to get back in the work

force, but they didn’t necessarily have to get back and do the jobs that they were doing before because they had been replaced. I think that was the hardest thing for a lot of men.

Well a few of them did because when the men come back they were married or they had been married before, and then of course the women went home to build their families or something like that. But there was a lot of women that stayed in the

work force. Well that was I thought – it took some adjusting anyhow.

Oh yes, always.

Not for very long, I think because they got another male projectionist. But she did other things, but her husband had come out of the

navy then and she settled down to be a housewife and have a family, but there was another projectionist come here anyhow, and I don’t know whether she’d have been kept in the job or he would’ve got the job or not, I don’t know. But she didn’t carry on anyhow.

No it was a time of optimism because at the time the sugar industry was booming and everything was booming and rebuilding – everybody was in full employment and everybody seemed to be happy and reasonably well off, you know?

No, no he

no – I just, I forget – around about 1943 or ’44 he wasn’t re-elected and he didn’t worry any more about that.

No this is the first time I’ve spoken about it

publicly. I’ve never.

Well I didn’t tell them because after the war they weren’t really interested were they anyhow, and there was no point in telling them because well it would’ve appeared as though you were boasting or try to

say how much you’d done towards the war effort, and I didn’t want to do that. The only reason I was talking about it now – the only reason I contacted that fellow when he contacted us was to see that the history was written up about it. But as far as getting any recognition, well it doesn’t worry me very much, and it’s too late now anyhow. I would’ve loved to have seen my mother get some recognition for the work that she did, because she was the one that carried the brunt of it.

Yes, but it’s too late now to – half them wouldn’t be here with us anyhow. They’d be gone wouldn’t they?

Well they’ll come again, because people rise to the occasion, I think and – but there’s other people who probably did as much, if not more than we did – and they weren’t recognised either.

Well we can hold our head high and say, “We did our best and we did as much

as – well probably as much as we could. We couldn’t have done much more and we did it.” And we did it, I believe without any chance of recognition or wanting any recognition – doing it to help our brothers and other members – family members and other people, and the job was there to be done so we did it. I think that’s satisfaction enough

to know that we did it.

Oh I don’t know. I don’t think so.

Well that was only because I’d been in the boy scouts, and I’d learned Morse code. But that’s – you know that was just something that I was happy that I’d done. But, and I think it’s a case for some of our younger people to get out and learn some other skills, apart from X-Boxes and Game Toys and that sort of thing. But I don’t want to preach

about it, but I think that that’s – our younger generation would be far better if they learned something of some use rather than just sit in front of a idiot box for hours and hours at a time – even if it was only learning skills like cooking or looking – you know looking after themselves in the bush or getting a little bit self sufficient or building something of some…

That’s right, and no-one’s a more avid computer addict than I am. I’m on the computer hours a day and I think it’s a great thing. But I do think you should have other skills, and it is a great communication –

same with mobile phones, same with all this – not modern technology but I think we shouldn’t use some of the other skills as – we had and should continue to have – like learning Morse code or like learning how to make a fire in the bush and cooking a meal on an open fire, or something like that – something we should all learn eh – and the girl guides.

Oh no, but I think my younger brother Bob – he came on a couple of years after me and he was too young when the reporting first started, but

then as he got a little bit older he got into it and he learned most of the skills that I learned in aircraft recognition and that sort of thing, and he probably did equally as much as I did towards the finish of it, you know – and that must have helped him.

Oh no, no.

Yes – one thing that did change was the travel. If – before World War II if you travelled to another town or city a couple of kilometres away, it was a major excursion. Now the younger people today think nothing of going to another country. We didn’t

have that opportunity, but we didn’t have that ambition either I don’t think. Our ambitions were limited. Now the younger people you know – as soon as they mature and get settled in life, they say, “I think we’ll go backpacking” or something like that. Well that was unheard of before World

War II, and I think it opened the world up to the younger generation because the older generation had seen what it was like when they’d gone away in the army and the air force and the navy.

Yes, yeah – I tried to join when I was seventeen and wasn’t allowed to, but

that’s only because when you’re that age, you thought that was the right thing to do. Everybody else had joined up – all the fellows that were eighteen or nineteen years of age that you knew had all joined the air force or the army or the navy – you thought it was what you should’ve done yourself. I tried to and first of all I wasn’t old enough to do it without my parents’ signature and they wouldn’t give it to me, and apart from that I was in an occupation where

they said we were doing such valuable work that the employer wouldn’t release me either. But if I was eighteen of course they wouldn’t have had any say, I could’ve gone. But being under eighteen I wasn’t allowed anyhow. But I often regret that – regret that I hadn’t – not that I wanted to see the war, but the comradeship and the part of being in an organisation like the armed services and the

experience and that sort of thing.

Oh I think so yeah, I think so.

Yes there was a lot of cases where you had to do something for somebody else or they had to do it for you because there wasn’t the facilities that you had when everyone was home, and

improvisation of resources and that sort of thing – you had to help one another. You – and a certain amount of ingenuity was required too. I can remember our pushbikes – we couldn’t buy tyres for our pushbikes or inner tubes for our pushbikes, so we got some garden hose and put it on the inside of the tyre and rode our pushbikes with garden hose inside the tyre,

and that sort of thing. I seen cars running round here where you couldn’t buy tyres for cars, and you’d see them with farmers had tractor tyres on their car to get into town and out of town, because they couldn’t replace their tyres and they put their old tractor tyres on. So they’re – things changed.

Pretty well, yes.

Well my work for starters, and after I finished my apprenticeship, I’d already met my present wife, my wife, and I went to live in the Mackay for eighteen months or two years until we married and then I worked down there, and then I thought, “Oh well I’ll come back up here, and find a job.” Worked in a

few different industries and then eventually I went back to the mill that I started with and that’s where I finished and retired from.

It’s all right. Yeah it’s all right, yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of things that they don’t get, but there’s a darn lot of things that they do get in the country town. There’s, you know the – a boy can still hop on his pushbike and

ride down to one of the creeks and catch a fish or a crab or something like that. He’s certainly – there’s a lot of things that he can’t do that city boys can do, but there’s a darn lot of things he can do that city boys can’t do.

I think it’s a great day for celebration and

I think remembering the war dead is something that’s very important and it should be done, and I think we need Anzac Day or some symbolic day. The only objection I’ve got to it is it’s made a day when some of them over imbibe, and I’m not a wowser by any means – I like a few beers, but sometimes they forget that they’re

celebrating a solemn day and they finish up in a – maybe that’s not the right thing to say but that’s the way I feel anyhow.

Not really, not really. It’s for returned servicemen and people that were involved in the services, and I think if that’s what the organisation is for

it should be kept for that. I – although we were volunteers, we weren’t in the services so much. Although we contributed towards it, we still lived at home and we didn’t have the deprivations and living in tents and having to go where we were told and everything like that. So no I think the servicemen and women have their own organisation and I think they should.

Well I decided that I, well I thought that the, particularly the story of the VAOC and the contribution that our family had contributed to the VAOC, and the work that the organisation had done during the war – that it should be told because not many people

knew about it, and I think when this John Davis, this chap contacted me from Victoria and said he was writing the history of it, I thought I should contribute towards it, and I think he was, I hope he does get a history written up and it’s part of the official history of the country of Australia because I think we played a part that was

necessary.

Thank you.