Australians at War Film Archive

I was a conscriptee.

I was called up. That’s the only lottery I think I’ve ever won. That came through. I deferred for a couple of years until I finished my degree. Very quickly in early in, I suppose February of 1970, I went into the national service. Spent some time at…..

Puckapunyal, yeah. So in February of 1970 I went into Puckapunyal for a couple of weeks. Didn’t really like it there so applied to go to officer training, then went up to Skyville for six months. Graduated from there. Back on leave. Invited to go to Vietnam as the agricultural officer. Then back up to Canungra for a little bit of pre-Vietnam training and then over in Vietnam in

September 1970. And stayed there as the agricultural officer in Civil Affairs Unit until late August ’71 when I came home for discharge.

I was born in Adelaide, Ashford Hospital here in Adelaide. It’s still there. My family had a rural background.

We had a property in the Adelaide Hills at Mount Torrens which was a livestock property – wool mainly in those days which transformed into beef cattle and dairy cattle as well. That really came through my grandfather’s side of the family. My father managed that for a while, but I was educated in the city.

There were essentially two homes. We lived in the city to educate the kids.

So Mum stayed in town with us – my three sisters and myself. And I was the youngest in the family. And so I went to Black Forest Primary School, Urrbrae Agricultural High School, finished off at Adelaide High for Leaving honours and then into university. And on weekends and holidays went back up to the farm where Dad was managing the property for my grandparents at that stage.

Two thousand acres.

It was pretty good country. It’s one of the sad things that happens in generational change in rural Australia that often the farms have to be sold up because it doesn’t work out between the siblings and the families, and that’s what happened in our case. Whilst my father would have liked to have kept on with it, the two brothers wanted some recompense out of it and Dad didn’t want to take on the debt at that stage of his life. So we sold it.

I guess it would have been. I’ve never really asked that question. It was pretty damned old, the house they lived in. But it was terrific. The lovely big wood stove. So I still have fond memories of cold morning in the county, warming yourself or cooking your toast in the nice wood oven. And the lovely lamb roasts that come out of that and soups and things. So yeah there’s a lot of good memories

about the time up at the farm.

Yeah. Dad had this wonderful thing. He said, “Look, son, go and get yourself educated in agriculture and then you’ll take over the farm.” Well by the time I got through the degree they’d sold the farm; also that was pretty interesting. But responsibilities up there were to basically help with a lot of the hay carting and a lot of the menial tasks that go on in looking after livestock and things like that. But I was pretty young in those days.

I didn’t have a managerial role at that time.

Oh yes. I think I probably learnt my driving skills running around the farm as most young kids in rural Australia would learn to drive quite well by driving farm implements and tractors and old utes and things like that. We had a 1928 Dodge buckboard which

if you could keep it going was a bit of fun to drive. There was no power steering in those days. But we used it to cart hay and things like that. So I learnt to drive up there.

dad. He was a soft, gentle fellow, but pretty determined. He had a terrific empathy with livestock. I mean I think that was really the love of his life.

And I suppose he was regarded quite highly in the way he managed his stock. We’ve seen movies about horse whisperers and things like that. Well Dad’s broken in horses and looked after his cattle in a similar way. It was just by gentle gaining their trust and managed to do some wonderful things. In the latter time up there after we sold the property Dad was kept on as the manager and the fellow who

bought the property had a strong interest in polo ponies, so Dad broke in a lot of horses but was doing it with the gentle tactics rather than the old style of basically breaking their spirit. I think it worked very well for the proprietor of the property and the polo stud he had going.

Basically gaining the trust of the animal and becoming friends. So it’s

gentle, slow, but there’s no abuse, no whipping, no belting and just gentling coercing the animal pretty much like you’ve seen in those Horse Whisperer movies. Very similar. Just gain the trust of the animal. And they don’t fear what you’re going to do and you just do things gently.

Gee. It would vary between

the animal. Just quite a bit. But it might take weeks and months to really gain the trust. But a lot of it on the property was where these animals were born so the trust was started to be developed from a very early age. It’s probably a bit more challenging when you have an animal that’s been abused somewhere else and comes into the place and then that’s much more difficult to do. But when you can bring them up and basically they’re almost farm pets, the break in process is much easier.

Gee, I can’t remember now. But it was several thousand head of Merino sheep for wool at one stage. Over the years it made a bit of a transition with Dad taking an interest in beef cattle. And so maybe the sheep went back a bit and we had several hundred head of Murray Grey beef cattle. And then during my early family

life essentially we survived on running a dairy stud of a hundred or so milking cows. The arrangement with the grandfather at the time was that he assigned my father some land to run the dairy on it. My immediate family survived on that while he managed the entire property for the grandfather.

Yes.

Yes. That became part of the history of the place because it was one of those old sheds that had been there for a long, long time and they’re terrific places really. There’s a good sense of history really that you have in the shearing sheds. And that had been maintained by the new owners of the property. It’s pretty typical of a farm shearing shed where there’s often things tacked on. They’re galvanised iron

additions, some of which are pretty and some are not. But in our case I think the ambience of the place was really maintained and was quite a feature of the property.

Yes. But just occasionally. Occasionally I was there for shearing, but that really depended whether it was in school holidays that it happened. I certainly helped out with the crutching of the

sheep and learnt to do that, but I never learnt to shear. I’m not really sorry about that anyway.

Crutching is basically taking the wool from around the eyes of the animal and then around the backside of the animal to remove the soiled wool and get them ready for, or at least protect them a bit maybe from fly strike, if you do that and then preparing them for shearing anyway.

No. That’s usually we call that tailing, where you do cut the tails off. And in the male animals you castrate them as well and turn them into wethers.

No. That was – my grandfather did a fair, well my father – certainly at that age I was observing a bit and I still have this memory of my grandfather whose technique was to cut the scrotum and then

put his teeth in and pull the testes out with his teeth. And then spit them out and the dogs would run around eating testes. That was a pretty impressive sort of thing. But that was the way the grandfather liked to do it. Pretty clean and his teeth were sharper than his fingers obviously.

He didn’t serve actively overseas. But he was an engineer and essentially

was involved – he spent some time over in Victoria I think maintaining a lot of the four wheel drive or the track machinery and vehicles for the New Guinea campaign was part of what he was doing. So yeah I suppose engineering was his forte in those days.

No. It really wasn’t a participation. He was here in Australia, so he didn’t go overseas. So he was back here. So there wasn’t an active participation. The only stories I can remember were the sort of funny ones where at one of the army camps here in Adelaide which is now not an army camp any more I don’t think, but the fellow trying to march the troops ended up having two groups going in different directions.

Dad waxed lyrical about that. And as happens with fathers, they tell the same story over and over again, but curiously I’ve forgotten it now. Haven’t heard it for a while.

She was a lovely, soft, gentle, caring, loving person and basically the heart and soul of the family in many respects. She had pretty tough. We certainly did have a

privileged upbringing and living in the city we didn’t have a huge amount of money and Mum had to survive on whatever Dad could provide through the dairy operation and she did it really well. She certainly instilled in us some ethical values and respect for others and taught us our manners. Yeah. I have the highest regard for my mother.

I suppose it was my mother in a sense, but in a gentle way. And I suppose being the only son in our family and three sisters I probably got away with murder. So maybe I wasn’t disciplined too much. Though they certainly instilled in us the values that I believe

believe are important.

It was a suburb called Forestville which is – it would be on the south west corner of the CBD [Central Business District]. It’s not in the CBD, but just past in the south west area and it's now probably transformed into reinventing itself into another popular

suburb because it’s quite close to the city, trams and trains and things like that.

It was enough to sleep three girls and a son. So I reckon it was probably a three or four bedroom home with the lounge room and what we had as a big billiard room as well and a cellar. That was something I didn’t like to let go.

After Mum died in ’69, I was only reasonably young still then, I lived on there for some time after that with one of my sisters and then later lived there by myself on my own.

Oh no. I developed an interest in wine and so having a nice cellar there which was very cool temperatures, it was

ideal settling conditions, and I had some nice wines down there at one stage.

We had the traditional in those days. It was meat and three veg was pretty standard. I still remember us using the dripping and you’d keep the fat and the high fat content cooking in those days which probably is against the conventional wisdom

now. She did a pretty mean steak and kidney pie. But we were also into the sago puddings and all that sort of thing. Bread and butter puddings which don’t seem to have much popularity these days. So pretty standard fare. That’s in those days also we had the greengrocer might come around with the horse and cart. This was in the really early days. To provide a bit of greengrocery and stuff. We had shops up the

corner where there was a greengrocer and an ordinary grocer. Almost pre supermarket days. The baker had a horse and cart, so he’d come around. And also the milk was delivered and just poured into a tin out the front. That was the way life was in those days.

Yeah. Also in the early days we had ice delivered. I can still remember that.

That was really quite early. We ended up with refrigerators, gas fridges and things like that, which made things better. And then gradually as society developed the corner shops drifted away and they turned from being dedicated greengrocers to being delis and supermarkets emerged and things transformed. The horses in the bakers’ division were substituted by

vehicles and trucks and things like that so things moved on. I suppose I’ve been observing that over the years.

Mainly tram. Or I used to ride my bike. I went to Black Forest School which was probably a couple of tram stops away and it was either walk there or catch the tram part of the way and then walk along.

We didn’t have a car in the city. My father had that up at the farm. So we’d see Dad weekends when he’d come down. That was the transport in those days.

With Dad. So when I’d come down school holidays he’d take me up there and bring me back. So that’s how that worked.

There were railway lines that went up there. But they were almost getting to the end.

They’re one of the sad indictments of some policy that we’ve basically done away with a lot of those railway lines. I can understand I suppose. The upkeep of all those things. But it’s a bit of a sad loss that we’ve lost that infrastructure. Yeah. But a train went up there. All that really used to do was take up the fertiliser for the local farmers. It really wasn’t used as a commuter train too much from my memory. I certainly didn’t catch a train up there. Remember it was only

thirty-five miles from Adelaide so it used to take an hour and a half or something to get up there through the hills through the old roads in those days so it wasn’t too bad.

Sometimes pretty hairy [hair raising; frightening]. There’s a hill in the Adelaide Hills which people of my vintage and older would remember called the German Town Hill. If you get caught on that behind a slow moving truck you could be there forever trying to get up the top of that thing.

Very frustrating. And it was windy roads and it was the main transport thoroughfare from the eastern states through into the city, at least part of it, so it could be quite congested and slow getting along there with all the traffic.

German Town Hill Road it was called. It’s right near that little township called Hahndorf. The road still exists, but now the freeways have taken over all of that and bypassed roads.

It’s much more convenient now. Whereas the old days it might take us an hour, hour and a half to get to the farm, probably we’d get there in about thirty-five forty minutes now.

Yes.

Yes. We had the occasional little dog. I’m trying to think. Pluto, I think. Was it Pluto?

It was a little brown sausage style dog I think. I can’t remember. It was probably a mixed breed. Yeah. We had the occasional little dog. But they didn’t loom large. Most of my memories of dogs were the working dogs up at the farm. They were always terrific animals. Dad had two types of animals or dogs up there. One was the working dogs which were generally border collies and

then he’d have a couple of miniature fox terriers as his little pets, and they were good at scurrying the rabbits out of the rabbit holes and the working dogs rounded up the sheep beautifully and Dad trained the sheepdogs as well. It was always good to watch those animals perform the way they did.

Yep. Gee I reckon there’s probably

about two years between each us roughly. If you’re asking me to remember my sisters’ birthdays, forget it, because I can’t. I have trouble remembering my own let alone theirs. So it’s about two years between each I suppose.

Yeah. So I guess I was probably spoilt a little bit because after three girls in those days particularly for landowners there was a bit of a

philosophy going around that you needed a son to hand over the property to or whatever. So when I came along I suppose Dad felt pretty pleased about that. So I guess I got fairly spoilt in the early days.

I think there was a little bit of sibling rivalry there from time to time and they would say that on reflection that I got a pretty easy ride as a kid in the family, yeah.

No. They went to Black Forest

Primary School, then they went to Adelaide Girls’ High school mostly I think. But I because of Dad wanting me to take this agricultural pursuit I went to Urrbrae Agricultural High School. Even came dux there in ’65 which surprised me as much as anybody else I think. But that was a good life there. Irbrai is still a very innovative school. It has emphasis on agriculture

and the environment and it still provides a very sound secondary education. In fact I was on the foundation there for a little while a few years ago.

There was a teacher there, a Mr Mitchell, I have strongest memories of. He was a bit of an innovator as a teacher because he encouraged

the students to be involved in public speaking. And I can still remember him taking a group of us into the Adelaide University where we all stood up on the stage and he invited anybody in the audience to ask anyone of us to make an impromptu speech. I still, I can’t remember the face, but I can remember it was a woman in a nun’s habit asked me. And in those days I had lovely curly

hair and I supposed looked a little bit angelic, which obviously is not quite correct. Anyway I gave this spiel which you just learnt to make up on the trot which was about my mother going to the hairdresser and a space helmet coming over the top of her head and so you just make up a story for five minutes. And it seemed to impress everybody that this teacher, Mr Mitchell, is trying to do something extra with education and

trying to expand the skills of his students. And he got quite a reputation for that. And he was also one of those teachers who is very supportive. I think he understood our family circumstance where Dad was away a lot so he provided a little bit of a fatherly influence, I think, at that stage. And so I valued his input very much. The only other memories is the occasional fight where curiously the only time I got the cuts [corporal punishment] I think was I was trying

to protect somebody else because somebody was trying to bully him in the schoolyard and I had a go at this other guy; and as usually happens, the second fight is the one who’s seen. So I was the one who got into trouble. Even though I was trying to defend some kid.

Corporal punishment in those days. You’d either get the steel edged ruler over the knuckles or the cane on the hands or whatever. But never got that from this Mr. Mitchell.

He was, I think, very advanced in his teaching philosophies.

Yeah. I think he had a bit influence over me. It certainly helped – I’ve never really had a fear of public speaking because of that early educational experience at primary school and so that was very valuable I think. And it gives you a confidence to communicate with people. So I think providing that to kids early in their life

is really terrific.

At the university? Yeah. They were all university lecturers and other teachers around the place and it was basically a demonstration of this guy’s philosophy on what he’s teaching his kids in public speaking and communication.

It was just like that. His philosophy really was to encourage kids to express themselves and

give them the confidence to do it. And have confidence in them to allow them to say what they believe and think without trying to basically dictate, you will think like this. He basically turned that around and said, “You are young people, you have your own views, think about things and express yourself accordingly,” and I think that was terrific. In those days.

It probably was in those days. And that’s

why we had this event at the Adelaide Uni I guess, to demonstrate that sort of stuff. He had other philosophies too where I suppose he encouraged people who scored good marks. At the end of every week and after all the tests and whatever the person who got the highest score could choose where they sat in the classroom for the following week. So everybody was out, cleaned their desks out

and they’d go and stand outside and you’d go down the ranks and whatever. So usually if you got the highest score you’d go down the back right-hand corner of the room, or something like that. If you didn’t do too well you were up the front. So you tried a bit harder. So you could get down the back. So he had some of these little competitive things, but it was all done in a way that was encouraging. So he had a very strong influence I think on not only me, but most of the members of the class.

There was no clear ambition I think, because of the farm influence. I anticipated there might be something on the farm I’d be moving towards. I guess the first time I really was stimulated was about sport. I started to play football and cricket at primary school and really enjoyed that and I seemed to have an aptitude for sports to some degree, and then

moved into men’s basketball, which I did reasonably well at over the years. So the early ambitions were basically sports dominated, when that started to come in.

Sometimes I surprised myself with maths. But I’ve never been one of those who could readily quickly add up things. I mean, my father in law now and my son are numerically very quick and sharp.

I’ve had to struggle with all of that. So probably the better subjects are those where a bit more of the – not so much the arts, but logic – the logic type subjects, the biology and things like that, where I did reasonably well.

I can’t give you the

size. I suppose it was several acres – probably ten, fifteen or maybe twenty or thirty acres. I can’t really imagine what it was in those days. It still exists. The school is still operating and there’s the mandatory vegetable patches and livestock and horticultural patches and now they’ve even adopted wine making as well. But in those days it was you’d have your agricultural subjects mixed with the

English, Maths, Physics and Chem and all the rest of the stuff that went on, and just gave it an agricultural flavour.

There were a few sheep around. There was the vegetable patches. A few trees. There was the machinery shed, because you’d learn a bit about fixing tractors and a bit of mechanics, stuff like that. There was a bit of woodworking. The woodworking

wasn’t on that campus. We had to go down to somewhere else to do a little bit of woodworking. But those sorts of facilities. The school in the middle of Adelaide, and Urrbrae Agricultural High School is right – it’s what we call the Waite Institute Precinct – where there’s a piece of land bequeathed to the state for agricultural education. That’s where Waite Agricultural Research Institute is housed and as another

piece of land that was basically the tertiary academic, training and research facility. And on the other side of the road there was the secondary education area so they’re both bequeathed by Peter Waite as one of the great landholders, or wealthy landholders, years ago. So all that land is still there. There’s now a big arboretum and the research activity is even stronger up there with a lot of co-location from different research organisations. And so

it’s probably one of the most dynamic rural or agricultural biology research facilities in the country now. And linked with the secondary education through Urrbrae. So it’s a good feeder from one place to the other. And TAFE [Technical and Further Education college] is also set up over there with their horticultural things as well. So it’s become a consolidation of things agricultural, horticultural,

biological in terms of education and science.

I never thought myself as being a very smart kind of character, so somehow I must have jagged the right marks or at least the rest of the guys must have done pretty terribly. It just came out of the blue. I thought I always had an aptitude for some things.

But I allowed myself to be fairly distracted with my sport because I was pretty strongly into men’s basketball in those days, playing junior state teams and things like that, and then later on in senior state representation. So that was a pretty major focus in my life in those days. And often, as a lot of kids do, they tend to put the studies probably second to the sport which I probably did too much.

Academically. Once again I go back, I think, to the subjects which deal with a bit of strategic thinking, a bit of understanding of systems. I think I have a bit of an aptitude for biological systems and things like that. And systems thinking. I’m not into mathematical statistics in terms of research. I just – a. I didn’t like it and

b. because I didn’t like it I was probably never going to put the hard yards into understand it well, so I was very pleased when statisticians came around. So the numbers never really excited me too much. But I really liked understanding what happens, and how things happen, in a biological or physical sense in agricultural systems from soil through to plants to livestock. Things like that. So I suppose the strengths were looking at systems.

Irbrai. In those days you needed to do another year to get your, what they called, Leaving Honours to get entrance into Adelaide, to the university. And so Urrbrae didn’t go that far, so I had to go to Adelaide Boys’ High School and did a year there, which once again basketball took over. I don’t think I did all that well there. But I still managed to become a prefect there.

But then, after that went to uni.

No. Not in those days I don’t think. It is now. I don’t remember any girls there. I would have remembered that I would have thought, but I don’t remember.

That was interesting because it was just one year. It was made a lot easier by being a prefect and then

finding refuge in the prefects’ room and finding a little bit of authority I suppose and responsibility, which sort of helped. But there were some good teachers there too. And I can’t remember his name; the biology teacher at Adelaide High was one of the guys who was quite stimulating. He ended up running the Adelaide Museum for a number of years. He was a marvellous fellow. There’s a few of the characters. One back at Urrbrae was a geography teacher who took us on trips

all over the place and some of those sorts of characters – I’m sure they’re still around these days, but they’re the ones that basically give you a little bit more than just running in the classroom, giving you the lesson and then disappearing into the ether. These guys just put in a bit more. And some of them can really stimulate your interest in a range of areas. I suppose those teachers were the most helpful. I’m not sure whether I answered your question. I think I drifted off there.

Agriculture went out of it and it was basically the standard secondary school subjects in the final year which is your physics, chem., biology, English and whatever. So we did that. And then off to uni. But it was only the one year.

Okay. That was part of life. There was no problem. I managed to fit my sport in around that.

There was an old mate of mine called Robert Beard who I think I ended up playing with him until a couple of years ago,

suggested I go out to Forestville Basketball Stadium, and that was really where basketball in South Australia was one of the birth grounds of that. There are few other stadiums around the place, but South Australian basketball really started at Forestville which was just around the corner from where we lived. And my mate, Robert, said, “Come along and try out,” and I really enjoyed it so I stuck with that and developed with South Adelaide Basketball Club and went up through their junior ranks. So I started

in primary school.

No. South Adelaide Basketball Club, but the stadium was at Forestville, in the suburb of Forestville.

Yeah. I went to their trial events and obviously the first times you go out you don’t know anything about it, so you join the junior ranks.

I suppose I was pretty fast in those days and seemed to have an aptitude for ball handling skills which basketball’s a very big part of. And I grew to like it a lot so I trained a lot and managed to develop some pretty reasonable skills in that sport.

I was first time in the under sixteen

state team. That was the first representative team. That flowed off into the under eighteens. I was captain of the under eighteens one year, the state team. There wasn’t any grade after that. After that you were in with the big guys. So then it went into the men’s state team after that for a few years.

In the state team, competitions say –

well their under sixteens was up in Toowoomba. There was another comp [competition] in Sydney for their first under eighteens. And when I was captain for the under eighteens it was in Hobart. In the men’s competitions, usually one of the capital cities that wherever it happened to be that year – Perth and whatever.

That’d be an annual thing. So you’d play in your local competition all year round and then the state comps would be on and you’d go away

and represent your state.

Yeah. There was a selection process. Generally for the junior teams there were quite obviously trials that they’d try and select kids because they try and give everybody an opportunity. The time you got to the league level, selectors pretty much chose you on your performance during the various games during the week. And so you got selected on accumulated performance, I suppose,

not so much a trial aspect. So basically that team was announced, and away you went.

Well it was a few. When I played for South Adelaide we held the record for a while and I was playing in the district team. We won fifty-six games without a loss, which took in several premierships and things like that. That’s obviously subsequently been beaten, but it was a bit of a record for a while.

Along with that came trophies. In those days it was mainly little flags they’d give you. I suppose they were a lot cheaper than trophies. So there were a few around. When I was captain of the under eighteens’ team in Hobart I did get the most valuable player award down there which is quite an interesting trophy for an under eighteen year old, because it was basically an ashtray with a little

thing sitting out of it which spins around and gives you, tells you what the thing was. But to give a young kid an ashtray,I thought, was pretty interesting in those days. Nice silver ashtray.

I was at Adelaide University and it was agricultural science. Once again it was pursuing the interest – I was encouraged to go into agriculture by my father and assumed

that there’d be a role for myself at the property eventually. So agriculture science was the way I went. In those days when you started, the first year was in the Adelaide campus in the city and then the second to fourth years were out at the Waite Institute campus. That was a pretty good time. We had pretty small, close knit group of students. We all drank together, played bridge together

and had a good social life together and had a bit of fun.

They came from diverse backgrounds and I really don’t know. Some of them were city based people who had an interest in agriculture. Some obviously came from the traditional farming background of people so it was quite diverse. Some people were

from interstate or on occasion one from overseas as well. So there was nothing really all the same. Everybody was quite different I think.

The Waite Institute still is…it’s a beautiful place to work and study. You’re basically like a beautiful building out in the middle of the country almost. But it happens to be in the city. Lovely big gum trees

and big expanses of lawns and experimental plots around the place. So there’s plenty of fresh air. So it’s a beautiful place to work and study.

Adelaide Uni? I prefer the more open spaces, but that’s obviously more closed in with many more buildings close together and the facilities

are various levels of either modern or pretty old. But it was pleasant enough. Close to the River Torrens there, so you could always get out there for a bit of a stroll along the Torrens if you wanted a bit of fresh air. So it was fine.

A lot of my time then was taken up with basketball and that really was quite a significant amount of time. To give you an example, when I was still in the junior ranks I suppose I’d been training about four nights a week playing a game, plus on Saturday there’d be an early morning training at six a.m., then there’d be play for the school or wherever, then in the afternoon play for church

and then in the evening’d be state training. So I really committed a lot of time to basketball early in my life. The sort of things you did to socialise off campus was in agriculture, go and have a few beers together later in life. The hotel in Adelaide which has really become a very busy hotel is the Edinburgh Hotel. In the days when we were going to

uni it was a few wire mesh chairs stuck out in a rustic old beer garden, and you’d go to a side door to get a beer. And so it really wasn’t the salubrious place it is now. So yeah we’d do those sort of things, but I was still pretty much committed to the sport which I think was pretty helpful because it kept me pretty fit and motivated and I enjoyed it a lot. You made a lot of good friends through sport and I still have a lot of those friends now.

Yes. Because women played basketball as well and also there was some people who took an interest in people playing sport at the level I was playing at, at the time. So yes. I wasn’t hiding from the girls.

There was a little bit in those days. The way basketball developed in South Australia was really quite unique and I’m telling you this because it

adds to the flavour of the basketball mix. Because after the First World War there was quite a migration of people from the Eastern European countries, from the Baltic states. The Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians. And they formed or started up their own little basketball clubs. And so when I started to play basketball there was a lot of those ethnic types of groups as being the nubs of the various basketball clubs. And that was

terrific experience because I made friends with a lot of those people, and through sport you learn a bit about the Latvian way of life and what they experienced back home, and the Lithuanians and the Estonians, and there’s a whole range of them. But the whole basketball scene came up from there. Over the years, the next generation, all that dissipated and they couldn’t sustain that sort of ethnic basis. So that was a fascinating

part of my life coming through that sort of era. Then I forgot your question.

Girlfriends. Yes. Well there were some nice looking people too amongst those groups.

Junie. I had an Austin A70, black car, leather seats. It was a hand me down from my grandfather essentially and it was

nicknamed ‘The Limo’. And it used to get a fuel block at just about every road crossing. Every time you stopped you’d have to get out and blow back in the fuel lines to unblock the fuel. But we had a lot of fun in that.

I suppose I started to get interested in The Beatles and things like that. But I’ve never been one for the heavy rock types of things. In those days, yeah, I suppose

The Beatles and the Merseyside sort of stuff.

In terms of being a marble coming out and the subscription?

I didn’t mind it too much. I thought

at the time there was a logical argument to fighting that war up there. So I had no concerns about doing that if my marble came up. So I didn’t complain too much. As it turned out it was another adventure anyway. But yeah I understand the other people’s attitudes as well, who were resisting all that. But no I had no major concerns.

I just went with the flow I guess.

You might remember when this all started in the early '60s I suppose I was still going to Uni and having a good time and Australian life was terrific and I wasn’t a political animal in any sense. I never took a political role at uni or whatever, mainly because sport dominated

my life. But in the bit that I did understand in those days I had the feeling that there was – it was worth trying to – I mean, the domino theory had a bit of credence in those days, but maybe there was some wisdom in trying to prevent the drift or the charge of the Communists in overtaking other countries. So I had some sympathy with the philosophy of maybe participating in that war.

But I was pretty naïve in those days and you really don’t know what’s really behind the political motivations of all these things, of what’s true and what’s not. And I think we all learn those things in hindsight.

No. Not a lot. No. I didn’t take a huge amount of notice. But I mean the only thing I can really remember is the Domino Theory having a lot of credence in those days and if we don’t stop the communist thrust up here,

then it’s going to be worse later on. That is really about all I can recall.

It seemed logical rather than being an in your face threat. I think that’s probably typical of life in Australia at those times in the ’60s, post World War era, that everyone was reasonably comfortable and had a good, safe, healthy lifestyle and things like that. So a lot of those

things didn’t worry us too much.

No. I have no idea. I think I got a letter saying that it’s come up. That was before I graduated so I deferred for a couple of years to get through the degree. And when I graduated then I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll try for a PhD’. But then they wouldn’t let me go on with that.

They said, “Nuh. You’ve had enough. Come in.”

The army said, “No. You’ve graduated. Let’s do your national service now and maybe do a PhD later.”

In those days it was a couple of years. But I didn’t see out all that time because I was at that era when the big transitions happened.

There was an army base at Keswick. So in February of 1970, I went down there. Marched in. Got dropped off I think. My father and mother saw me off. I’ve got no recollection whether they shed a tear or whatever. Just walked in with my bag and started the whole concept of learning how to line up and march.

It didn’t worry me too much, but I do recall that nobody

was in step for the first little while. It was all pretty foreign. And it was pretty interesting seeing the corporals and sergeants demonstrate their inherent authority over new people.

Well when I got to Puckapunyal I didn’t appreciate that too much. A lot of kids that got in there seemed to be highly stressed by it.

I do remember Friday one morning, we were going for the run or the march which was the way they got us going, and this corporal yelled out, “Get your arms up. This is where you’re supposed to lift your arms up as you’re marching. Lift your arms up or I’ll pull one off and hit you with the soggy end,” or something was the terminology he used. And I do remember thinking, ‘Maybe there’s something better I can be doing with my time’. And that was really that one little moment

was the thing that stimulated me to try out for the officer training unit. I thought, ‘Well if I’m going to be in the army, might be a tad easier if I’m an officer’. So that’s the track I went.

It was pretty intense. It was a dramatic change in lifestyle. You go from an open university or whatever where you’re basically doing what you like and you’re going in and

being told exactly what you’re going to do and you’re yelled at a lot. If you don’t perform, if you stand by your locker and haven’t got your shirt folded correctly or done your bed correctly, you’re on a charge, or some kind of reprimand. So all those things were a bit foreign to a lot of people. I don’t have a sense that it really worried me too much, other than that what I considered to be a dumb response by a – I think he was a corporal – when we’re marching along.

I thought, ‘If there’s a way I can get out of this I’ll try to do it’. So that’s what I tried to do.

At Puckapunyal? I reckon it was only two or three weeks before they started having – I’ve got a sense that it might have been only a fortnight or so. It was probably longer than that. But certainly they had interviews and physical tests with respect to this officer training and I’ve

been coming off my basketball and probably what I haven’t mentioned – I had a bit of a background in gymnastics as well. So I was pretty agile and physically I was able to do just about anything that they set challenging tests for. How I stacked up with the interviews and those sorts of things I’ve no idea, but anyway they let me into Skyville, so it doesn’t matter now.

Sort of pretending to climb

ravines, traverse ravines. There was a whole lot of obstacle courses that you’re asked to negotiate. So you managed to get over those pretty well. And I had pretty reasonable balance and I was pretty physically fit and I was able to do that quite easily from my memory.

No. Not a one.

That was very strongly disciplinarian. In my memory of it at that time, there was no walking anywhere. You had to run with all your gear or whatever. Only running between – anywhere you went you ran. I was there for six months. I think the instructors there were excellent.

They were rigid and certainly disciplinarian if you stepped out of line, but still pretty fair I think. And so I reckon in that six months I was probably the fittest I ever was, notwithstanding the basketball I was playing in those days. And they did instruct you in a whole lot of things about strategy and weaponry and tactics. And a bit on the

war that was happening in Vietnam and some of those sorts of things and the theory behind that. The Domino Theory. Some of those sorts of things. So that was, I suppose, a good well rounded education. I learnt to appreciate it really. Curiously one of the things I enjoyed was the marching on the parade ground. I don’t know why I enjoyed it, but I did. But anyway, that was a bit of fun. I didn’t really enjoy firing the weapons though. I was never

a gun jockey. But life at Skyville was tough. Ended up being put on a charge once because early in the morning you duck out of your room – when reveille went – you duck down to the ablution blocks to have your quick shave or shower and then scoot back to your room, get dressed and off to the parade ground. This one particular day I’d pretended to lock the locks, but didn’t quite and so some

young captain came along and found the doors unlocked and things were in the room and insecure so I was on a charge. But that was about the only occasion where anything untoward happened.

The door lock to my room. That’s all. We had individual quarters at Skyville. So that was the only transgression I think. Other than that I basically

did everything they asked of us to do. Some of it not so well. Some of it better than some of the others. But we all muddled through.

I think Skyville was much more structured in their discipline, but that might be an unfair analysis because I wasn’t at Puckapunyal long enough. I spent six months at Skyville essentially. But they were trying to train

officers and so there was a much more rigid structure about it I think. More professional, I would have thought. And the other part of the training was how to behave in the officers’ mess and all that sort of stuff. And the sort of the dress up that you used to go through in those days. My instinct tells me that the quality of the education and training at Skyville was quite a bit better

than that at Puckapunyal. But as I say, that might not be a correct analysis because I wasn’t at Puckapunyal long enough to make the judgement.

In those days it was basically the rifle. Every now and then you get to shoot something other – maybe a mortar or something like that. There was a few times we went up to Holsworthy Barracks to do some weapons training. But essentially

it was centred around the SLR [Self Loading Rifle] rifle which was standard issue in those days.

On the firing range. They had their targets up the end and you’d lie down or stand up or do whatever they told you to do, and shoot at the targets which are in front of a big mound of soil or whatever. So it was quite a secure area and safe.

Yeah. That was an education process, I think that was basically trying to explain what’s happening up north, and talked a about a bit of the history of Vietnam. The French influence. And a bit of history about the communist regimes and what was happening up there. I do remember the mention of the Domino Theory and things like that. So it was some sort of a backgrounding I suppose of that.

I suppose the major thing was that it became obvious that a lot of the people who were in training at Skyville at that stage were very likely to go up there. The other thing that stood out to me about it was that a lot of the officers who were the instructors

at Skyville either had been to Vietnam and wanted to go back or – and one in particular I have in mind, a guy who’d never got to Vietnam and was very frustrated that he was an officer and that was his role, and he should have been up there, and he was frustrated he never got there. He was the bloke who put me on the charge by the way. So there was a lot of I suppose

philosophy that your raison d'etre for being at Skyville was to feed into a support role or some sort of role in the Vietnam conflict, I suspect. So I guess I had that sort of sense. Other than that the time at Skyville was just a big adventure because you’re out on these five, ten day camps and learning how to live and all those sorts of things which I found was really good. I enjoyed the outside

stuff. But once again I think I was helped a bit because I had the physicality to be able to deal with it quite easily and so that was – so I enjoyed the time at Skyville in essence.

I think it was the outside stuff. They could be pretty tough when you go out on these exercises and you go on your navigation exercises

and try to get to the end points and sometimes make it, and sometimes not. But the exercise work I think was good. I had a pretty strong sports structure there too, which I dovetailed in pretty well. We played in the basketball team. I ended up winning the blue [award] I think for the basketball, and there was cross country running and all that sort of stuff. The other thing about it was you were under constant assessment, so people were watching your every move. And it became

a total thing. So they were looking at basically a character and not only what you learnt, but your character and how you carried yourself and a whole lot of those sorts of things. And if you weren’t performing you’d get some sort of review saying, “We think you need improvements in these areas,” and it became I suppose, the idea was to put you under a fair bit of pressure and I think that was beneficial in hindsight.

There was a few of them. I’ve forgotten most of their names because they all drifted away in different areas. I developed some good mates. We were only there six months and then everybody went in different directions so it probably didn’t cement in the long term. The mates that I’ve maintained are the ones I spent time with in Vietnam mostly.

So there’s really nobody that I could identify at Skyville who remained a good mate after a long period of time.

At Skyville? Not that I recall. I might have had some. I had curly hair in those days. Could have been something like that. But no I don’t recall nicknames in those days.

When did I graduate there? That was in – when was it? Yeah it would have been in July of 1970. So the sequence of events was, I graduated at uni in 1969, December. I was called up in February of ’70, then to Skyville, graduated as second lieutenant by the middle of the year.

It was all pretty fast transition over a six month period; essentially you go from being a uni student as green as they come to basically being a second lieutenant with expectations that you could manage a platoon of people. So it’s a pretty fast transition that they put you through.

You had your examinations of the subject areas but a lot of it was based on this

ongoing assessment of people observing your behaviour. So a lot of it was based on that. Then the adjutant, the boss, a guy called Studdart I think, and his 2IC [Second in Command] who I got on pretty well with, and I can’t think of his name, but he had experience up in New Guinea – it came down to those people decisions about who graduated and that. And during

Skyville there were a lot of people who they didn’t think were going to cut it, and so they were culled during that period. Which became a bit of a stress for people because they really wanted to get through. But then you get the nod saying, “Well you’re not going to make it,” and off you go. So you see these people drift off. It was a pretty interesting time.

Yeah I guess.

I guess one of the problems I – if there was a major problem at Skyville – is that I wasn’t one who sought to stand out. So I remember the 2IC at the facility saying to me once, “We’re not seeing you. You’ve been invisible.” So it was pretty hard for them to make an assessment of what was going on. But I guess I’ve never been one to try and champion me or be a self promoter. So

that made it a bit interesting, I suppose. And when he told me that I said, “Well that’s the way I am essentially. I do what I can. I do it to the best of my ability.” But I guess what they were trying to find is, who are those guys who stand out and take charge and control and whatever. Maybe I didn’t have the leadership capability – or at least the demonstrable leadership capability or

inclination that the others did. Some of the others were obviously saw it as they wanted to be seen to be the leaders and behaved accordingly.

In Skyville, yes.

On graduation I think – crikey, I had six months of training –

green as they come. Probably lacked confidence to really think that I could manage a platoon of people and then the probability of trying to do that – I’d have a platoon sergeant who probably have a hell of a lot more experience than I would have, and have a heap of people underneath me in a platoon I would have to try and manage; and here I am just a young, early twenties, limited life experiences in terms of

understanding human psyche and all that sort of business, so probably I felt a bit insecure at the time, but willing to take the challenge on if that had come about. So I don’t think I came out of there with a huge amount of confidence that I was going to be the next big general of the Australian armed forces. I thought I could probably play a role

in some areas. But I didn’t see myself as being one of the great ones.

Some of them were quite strong. They obviously wanted to stand out so they tried to be demonstrative. If ,every now and then, you might get an exercise where there’s a team of you where you’ve given a sort of

a task of crossing a stream, and you’ve got this gear and you’ve got to get across there. And so part of the task out of your team of five people is they’re looking for, who’s going to be the one to stand out and said, “Righto boys we’ll do this, this and this. You do that.” I did a little bit of that, but there were others who were trying to push themselves into that position. Which had a couple of interesting reflections I suppose sometimes

amongst the others. That was obvious. So they basically didn’t get the support of the others because they were trying to be too demonstrative. The really good ones are the ones who basically were able to gently coax people to do things and showed some gentle, almost subtle leadership. And I think in hindsight these days the true leaders are the ones who basically are almost invisible and the ones who can get people to do things and let the troops

believe it was all up to them. And it was their accolades. And I think there were a few of those at Skyville. But there were a few who tried to stand out a bit too much. And maybe that’s what they were looking for. Now whether that was the right way to assess people, who knows? But there was a whole mix of people came out of all of that.

I guess I think there was an expectation that maybe some of them would go into the career army. I do remember at the time, it goes back to an earlier question you asked, that I had a sense at the time that they tried to break your spirit right down to rock bottom and then build you up. Sort of break you first and then build you up. I think that was a process that went through because there was a lot of pressure thrown on. I reckon anybody who can get through that has got some capabilities.

Whether they wanted people to go into the regular army; that was never overtly expressed to me. I really felt as though it was a national service term. And I really had no clear view of what the future held with me in an army capacity. But I never really had an ambition to stay in the armed forces for the longer term, but some of the guys did. They really took to the army and enjoyed it.

And I’m talking here – I’m saying, army. I really mean armed forces. And went on to stay in the armed forces. But I don’t recall them really trying to push that line; they’re basically trying to shape a group of young men into young soldiers with some leadership capability who could lead some men within relative safety.

It was a big pass out parade where you do the marching again and do the old salutes with the rifles and all that sort of jazz. Stand tos. Stand to attentions. And march around. My father came over for that. My mother had died in 1969. My father came over with one of my sisters to watch that, so that was a bit of fun.

It was really that and a grand dinner in the officers’ mess.

1969, yeah.

Yes she died quite suddenly of a heart attack. That was an interesting transition for a young person, yeah.

The family was – there was one sister

and myself at home with Mother. When she died it was basically my sister and myself. We had to live on our own. I was probably old enough to be able to do that and my sister was a couple of years older and so we did that.

Yeah. I had some experience of being independent.

Well when I graduated from Skyville I was told that I was assigned to one of the battalions and I still can’t remember whether it was 5 or 7. But I think it was a battalion in Queensland, so that’ll tell you which one it was. But I never quite got there because after Skyville we went home, went back on leave and I’ve been back up

on to the farm and within a week I got a phone call from the 2IC of Skyville saying, “Look there’s a spot come up in the Civil Affairs Unit, there’s the agricultural officer,” and I had an Ag [Agricultural] Science degree at that stage and he asked me if I’d be interested. So I said, “Yes.” So I never quite got to the battalion. So things from there,

it might have been a week or two weeks of learning to speak Vietnamese at Woodside Army Base, of which I learnt absolutely nothing. Because I’d just finished six months of hard training and my interest in learning anything else at that stage – I was back into the social life. So it was pretty hard to concentrate on learning anything in that stage. So it progressed from there. It was a bit of an irony really because one of the guys who went through Skyville with me is a

guy called – he’s now Professor Alan Robson, who’s the vice-chancellor of the University of Western Australia. By the time he was going through Skyville he already had his PhD and he was married with kids so he was well advanced, this boy. He was the preferred candidate to go to Vietnam, but he declined it. So I really got it on default. Alan would have been excellent. He was a very bright man, as attested now by him being vice chancellor of the University of Western Australia.

No. I visited. Because I lived at Mount Torrens during that recreation leave – I think it was about a twenty minute drive to Woodside where this training was on. So I’d drive there each day

for it. And they’d take us through trying to learn foreign language and it’s clear to me that if you want to learn a foreign language, start really young because I just didn’t have an aptitude to learn Vietnamese, at all. I really struggled with that part of it and it was pretty lucky we ended up with an interpreter over in Vietnam. You pick up a few little phrases and words. But not much sunk in at all. Now that may have been my lack of aptitude or I just had a lot of

distractions at the time, having just been through pretty rigorous officer training.

It’d start at nine and go through to about four-ish, something like that. So they were pretty full on days. My recollection of it anyway.

A week or two weeks. Something like that.

It was trying to give you a smattering of Vietnamese over a couple of weeks essentially and a few lessons. With me I don’t think – there wasn’t much success there.

They expected I think, for me to go over to Vietnam and be able to communicate with local people

or at least understand what they were saying. That never really translated into anything. Maybe I knew more than I think I did. But when I went through the training I just have a memory that I didn’t think I did very well. I’ve got no idea what assessment they provided for me on that because I was going to Vietnam anyway. But I think I passed the test that they set, but I just don’t remember anything of

any note coming out of that was any value to me.

My sisters didn’t express much at all. I think my father was pretty nervous about it because by that time there’d been plenty of news about some killings up there and people not coming back. So I think that got him pretty interested. But Dad was never one to express himself.

So he basically internalised all of that and never really expressed anything other than support I suppose.

It was a mixture of a bit of excitement. It was an adventure. And I think that probably gets to a lot of guys when you’re young and you’re heading off. You have a feeling that you’re bullet-proof and pretty confident in your own capabilities.

So it was a mixture of excitement about the adventure, but also some reservations that, “Yeah, this is starting to get a bit serious now,” and you’re going into a war zone. That was softened a bit by the fact I knew I was going to an agriculture unit which was not a combat unit. So yeah I suppose a mixture of feelings.

Yes. There was a few days. But I had to go after the

Vietnamese training – I had to go to Canungra for I think it was about ten days. They took us through there and then I think it was a few days off after that and off I went ‘cause I was over there late August 1970. So within eight months of graduating from uni I was over there as a second lieutenant in Vietnam. So it’s a pretty fast transition.

When you think back on it.

Amongst the permanent or the regular army people?

I don’t recall

any. There probably was a few. I don’t recall that being overtly around the place though. My memory of O.T.U. and Skyville was a bunch of guys trying pretty hard to do the best they could and accepting the challenge. In a lot of ways they kept you so busy you didn’t really have time to think about all the negative stuff that some might have. And I guess that those people that did start to think the way

were probably, in their ongoing continual assessment process, probably weeded out early in the piece. That’s my sense of it. But I don’t recall it being some disparate sort of characters saying, “No. I don’t agree with this whole philosophy.” You probably wouldn’t have got in there in the first place, I would have thought, in part through the selection process. If you had some pretty strong views about not wanting to be part of it. That’s my guess. People

who know the system much better than I, or my memory would allow, might have a different suggestion. But that’s my sense of it.

Duty to the country? I don’t remember having an ingrained, ‘look this is threatening Australia, duty to Australia’ sort of thing. I had a more of a sense of going to help a neighbour

than anything like that. Because I didn’t really perceive Australia to be under direct threat at that stage, so I really didn’t feel as though it was going to stand up for Australia per se. Does that make sense? That’s my sense of it anyway.

That’s only my views.

There’d be others with entirely different views, I’m sure. But that’s my sense of it. That I really felt as though we’re going to help the neighbours than basically protect the Australian way of life, although politically that’s probably one of the political rhetorics that was used. “Do some defence up there and defend Australia from maybe a possible incursion in the future.” But that really didn’t carry

a huge amount of weight with me, I don’t think, at that stage. But remember we’re all pretty young and caught up with the adventure of it as much as anything, in those days.

That was pretty interesting. There were a range of little things I think. That was where I first got a taste of a bit of resentment –

bit of regular army – for conscripts and people fresh out of officer training unit. Some of the instructors who weren’t at officer levels in particular, we weren’t necessarily welcome in an officers’ mess at Canungra. Some of those little things. But nothing really terrible. But I just got a sense of those things happening there. The other things about Canungra was

it was pretty hard work. We were living in tents. And I thought, ‘Well gee, Canungra must be pretty close to sub tropics, but it was pretty interesting how the fire buckets froze over in the mornings’. It still got pretty cold. Yeah. It was an interesting time because it was maybe an exposure to maybe what the real threats are up in Vietnam. I think the way they’d set up Canungra was quite good for that. They really gave a demonstration about the

booby trap type things that the Vietnamese or the Viet Cong were good at. So they got a good sense of that. Certainly the ten day on the marches and the exercises, once again, my physicality helped a lot there I think. I remember we were on a ten kilometre run and I carried the machine gun. And I was at the head of our

platoon and I got into a bit of a rhythm. Every now and then I used to be able to get into this rhythm and I just kept going at my pace and then suddenly a sergeant came screaming up beside me and told me to, “Bloody slow down!” because everybody was left way behind and I was a bit annoyed at that because I thought I was doing pretty good. But that was only a bit of fun up there. And yeah so nothing terrible about Canungra. It was just

a fleeting moment really. It went like a flash.

As I said, there was one occasion we tried to get into the officers’ mess and I think we were told it wasn’t available to us. I think. Things like that. And

just the occasional little subtle comment about Nashos [National Service soldiers] and things like that. But I don’t want to make too much of that because that was just some odd remarks and obviously we’re up there in a training environment, so people made mistakes and on occasions they didn’t do things as well as they should, and so probably attracted a bit of criticism and that was reflected on the basis,

“You’ve only been in the army five minutes. And here you are going over there in these sort of capacities.” But I'm just indicating that I did get a minor sense of there being some of that there at the time.

My memory’s pretty bad about Canungra because most of the memory’s about just the doing stuff. Going through the demonstrations of the various way it had been set up, like maybe some Viet Cong infrastructure. And the marches and the practice ambushes and practising radio work.

My memory’s not good enough to tell me whether we had structured lectures and things like that. It was really more of the doing stuff is my memory of Canungra. Now that might not be correct now. But I guess that my memories of Canungra are pretty dim.

I have a philosophy about degrees. I think that a university degree gives you the bookshelf and then experience puts the books in. And I reckon I knew that I was a graduate in Agriculture Science in temperate agricultural systems and here I was going into the Vietnam environment and a totally different environment. So I knew my degree

was really not going to contribute one hell of a lot. I reckoned I was going to be underdone in terms of expertise. I don’t believe you come out of a university degree knowing everything. So I felt when I first got there pretty embarrassed, I thought. For myself I thought, ‘Crikey, they’re doing a whole lot of things which I know nothing about. I’ve never had any training in’. So I tried to upskill myself

as much as I could in some of those areas. But I did feel some empathy with the other people in our little agriculture unit because there was a captain, Gordon Pound, and I came in as a second lieutenant and then there were a couple of corporals. One of which had some agricultural qualifications I think. And a couple of other guys who had some more experience there. And I’m coming in a rank above these guys.

So I felt a little bit uncomfortable about that because I thought I was as green as green going into that environment. A young guy. But there were some expectations that I had an Ag. Science degree and I should be able to contribute. I think ultimately it turned out okay, but yeah that’s my feeling of things.

It was a plane from Sydney. I remember I had two nights, I think it was, in Sydney before I caught the plane away. So I spent one night at the army camp there and then I decided I had my last night of freedom so I went and stayed in, of all places a dingy old motel room in Kings

Cross, and it’s probably the thing I regret most because I just wanted to get out of the army environment for one night before going overseas. Anyway my family saw me off at the airport in Adelaide. I flew to Sydney, had a couple of nights there and then caught the plane off to Saigon. Remember feeling pretty toey [nervous] as the plane was coming in to land because it was the realisation you’re heading into a war zone.

Things like that.

Yes. I think I was in summer uniform when I went over there. Pretty sure I was. I can’t recall. I do remember it was a Pan Am jet though.

But that’s about all. There must have been a few others of us on the plane. I have a sense of being pretty lonely on that little flight, but yeah I think I was in uniform.

Yes. So it was a big adventure.

Yeah. On no we dropped into I think it was Singapore or something on the way, and then up to Saigon from there. I think it was an overnighter. Not an overnighter, just a short stop. And off we went again. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. I’m not sure where it was. I think it was Singapore we dropped into on the way.

I was the only one going as the agricultural officer, civil affairs. So I wasn’t in a platoon of people or a group of people going up. I was basically going up as an individual going to a unit. So there wasn’t a team – I wasn’t with a team of people. So I was just put on the plane and off I went. That’s my recollection of it. But once again that’s pretty hazy now.

Yeah. A little bit of a briefing, but I really didn’t know

much about it until I got there and learnt what they were doing when I got there.

Well it’s the first time I’d been to an Asian country and when you’re going in to land and you realise, ‘Well gee we’re heading into a war zone here’ there’s a little bit of nervousness that goes with that.

I’m sure a lot of people that went up there under those conditions would have felt similar. First impressions off getting out was just how busy the place was. We landed at an airport I suppose, yeah, there was just a lot of people around. Sub-tropical environment in August. And then things were just pretty busy. So it was a matter of getting a plane out to Nui Dat. Out on a Caribou

which I was put out on one of those.

Yeah. My recollection, I flew into Nui Dat by Caribou aeroplane and rattled in there with the eardrums humming and was met at the airport I think by Gordon Pound, the agricultural officer there, the guy in charge of the ag unit at that stage.

He took me round to the sorts of things that they’d been doing and introduced me to the various people in the team and things like that. The civil affairs unit – this might be pre-empting some of your later questions – seemed to have started around about 1967 and agriculture didn’t get much of a feature until early 1970 and they realised that they didn’t have enough,

they think, people there. That’s why my job I think came up over there. So the structure of the unit was Gordon Pound as captain, me as a second lieutenant, then there was a couple of corporals and a couple of privates. And there were two Chinese guys attached to the unit as well from the – what do they call it? – the Chinese agricultural technical group I think it’s called. But they

were terrific. But they were part of the team as well. So I was introduced to all those guys. Whilst – also introduced to the other duties I had to perform. So I mean you need to realise that it wasn’t just an agricultural out station. This was a war zone in a war camp and so I had duties in the command post on occasions checking map locations.

So I had the various allocations of tasks along those lines around the place. So it was a mixture of things. But the familiarisation was basically an explanation – we’re doing these sorts of things – and took me around to see some of them.

It was a little headquarters

building for civil affairs. It was I suppose, right next to 8 Field Ambulance, near the medical guys and we shared tents with some of the 8 field ambulance fellows – or our tents were intermingled with theirs. So I got to know a couple of doctors there and the dentists. So it’s pretty much in the centre of the camp essentially.

Tucked away in a nice little headquarters building.

It was a building. A roofed building in my recollection. I can’t remember what it looked like now but my sense of it is there was a few rooms in it and just enough rooms for meetings and things like that. But our accommodation was

in tents with either sandbags or some structure around the perimeter of each tent – corrugated iron walls, if you like, filled with soils or sand to provide the barriers that you need. We were in the officers’ area there so we had a tent each in those, which is one of the privileges you get for being an officer.

In my case I had the tent to myself. I don’t think I did. No. I don’t recall. Some of them had shared tents, some of the other officers. Yes. So some of them did, so maybe I was lucky. Although it wouldn’t have worried me if I had to share with somebody.

Just a wire based bed which sagged in the middle and a mosquito net over the top

of it. But adequately comfortable. And everybody set to with whatever timber they could find to build a little wardrobe or at least try to make something of a home of it if you like, because you knew you were going to be there for twelve months. So there was a fair bit of that activity went on.

Yeah. It was a wooden floor.

In the officers’ mess. Which was not very far away. It was just a short walk from the command post being central in the whole place. So we’d eat at the officers’ mess. At least I did. Well all the officers ate at the officers’ mess. So that was pretty basic. And the food was okay. It was based on American food supplies and some of our stuff. And yeah it was quite adequate.

I tried to build a little wardrobe and after I’d been there for a while I managed to buy stereo gear, play a few records and try to home it up a bit. I don’t recall whether I had any pictures of anybody I stuck up. I don’t recall.

I don’t think. It was pretty spartan. I’ve really never been one to be really all that fussed about the trappings where you live. So it was quite okay.

Yeah. There was some power supply to have a little light going in there. Just a one exposed globe that you’d turn off from my recollection. So it was pretty rudimentary.

Which you’d expect basically in a command post in a war zone which, okay, the war was not as severe and as fierce as it was earlier in the '60s, but still there were some actions going on. So you wouldn’t expect great comforts in that sort of environment.

Yeah. Nui Dat.

Gee. You’d have to look up the stats but it was I suppose a couple of kilometres or something like that as an estimate. That’s only really guessing and that might be well off the mark. But it was big enough to have an airstrip in it and a lot of armoured personnel carriers, around the place and the tanks and what have you. And the mechanics and all the infrastructure you need

to run a thing. So yeah it was a pretty sizeable place.

The first task was basically to try to get

to know the local agricultural service. Principally what we were trying to do over there was to support them. When I arrived, there was a very strong view about what was called Vietnamisation, which was really, “let’s not do everything for them, but get them to support and help themselves.” So it was basically to try and build up relationships with the local agricultural service people. And there were

some projects there which were ongoing when I arrived. There were some chicken coops which had been set up for the agricultural area. Also I had to go around and speak to various villagers to see what their needs were. So there was a bit of a needs analysis as well, I think, that went on at the time. I guess in the early days, my memory’s a bit dim, of exactly the sorts of things we got up to.

But certainly we were trying to, as a unit, setting up demonstration plots of sorghum or different varieties of rice or things like that. But I’d like to spend a bit of time when you’re ready to talk about the Chinese people that were there, because they were really the strength of the whole unit.

Yeah. He’d been there for a while and he was the guy who had the overview of the command of what was going on in the agricultural area. So he was quite supportive. He was a nice guy and informed,

taught me about what was going on around the place. And tried to give me particular tasks that I could do. It takes a little while to assimilate. You couldn’t realistically expect a brand new graduate out of the southern, South Australian University, to walk into a subtropical environment and within day one start providing A class services. So there needed to be a bit of nurturing. I think

did that quite well – Gordon Pound. And he left. I reckon it would have been in the first half of – I reckon it would have been about March of ’71 – which then left me basically looking after the show. But that was enough time to assimilate. I’d been there for a few months by then and I understood what was going on. In terms of

assimilating with the others I felt pretty sensitive about the guys that had already been there. Particularly the corporals and the privates. I got on very well with my driver, a guy called Mick Appleby, who has since died. He was a really lovely fella, so we really got on well together. And I had an interpreter which went with me everywhere and I can’t remember his name at all. But I really felt – probably

embarrassed is not the right word – but I felt a bit of empathy I suppose for the guys who had been there and I rock up as a second lieutenant and have rank over them and I suspect that they probably had better – particularly in the early stages – skills and had been adapted more the environment. So I would have expected a bit of resentment about a new chum coming in. Particularly in a semi command role. So I was always a bit sensitive to that.

Tried not to overplay the smart lieutenant role. But I think overall things went okay.

I knew I had to learn and in my view part of leadership is learning from people who might be your subordinates, because you’re not the only one with

wisdom and expertise, so I tried to do that as much as I could. Whether I did it well or not I suppose was up to them to judge and make comment on. I’m just trying to paint the picture that there’s a new guy coming in green as green, and I would have anticipated and expected that there might have been some reservations by the other ranks there that this new guy, an officer coming in, who had some authority over them

who might not have the capability that they’d developed at that stage. So I tried to manage that sensitively I suppose.

Pretty much yeah. I think Mick was the driver for pretty much the whole time. He was an affable fellow. A really nice, down to earth, guy. We got on really well together. Became good mates although

once we left Vietnam we never saw each other again which is a bit sad because – we did speak on the phone occasionally, which I’m pleased we did because he died a few years ago now. But that was a good relationship. It’s one of those good things that come out of being close together for a long period of time. It could have gone the other way. Could have not got on at all, which would have been uncomfortable, but as it turned out we had a good time really.

I really can’t say. He was there when I arrived and I don’t have a recollection about how long he’d already been there, but his would have been a twelve month posting so it probably wasn’t all that long before I turned up, I would imagine.

Just an open top jeep. Just drive around in that. And there was a couple of those you might get access to from the unit to go where we wanted to go. Transport was always an issue

to get around. We had to be mindful also, that we were in a war zone so it wasn’t just strolling out into the countryside for a bit of fun. So you had to be mindful of that. So, yeah, an open jeep, vehicle, standard army thing.

No. None was ever offered.

I don’t think I really would have needed one. That was something about the officer stuff that I thought was all a bit curious. But it was never availed to me, so I never had to manage that situation.

Yeah. I didn’t have any problems with that.

You’d do your own laundry or put your shirt in to the laundry and get it washed and starched and it’d come back and put it on and it’d feel like a board and things like that. So there was a washing service provided, but other than that the other ablutions I did myself. And the washing the undies and whatever.

That’s quite okay.

It was a slab of cement with a bit of corrugated iron around it and some wire mesh to keep the mosquitoes out and you’d get in there and have a shower. Didn’t take long. Water was generally chlorinated to keep it healthy. And there were some

facilities to play a bit of tennis and all that sort of stuff so it wasn’t all that hard around the place. They even had a basketball court. Ended up playing a basketball game or two.

Yeah.

It was nearby. I don’t have a clear recollection of how far it was. It might have been a bit of driving distance in those days. But a bit of tennis.

occasionally. When you had a bit of time off. But I suppose in terms of, if you’re trying to get to how the people get on, we ended up, or at least I ended up, with a mixture of fairly close friends. One was from the 8 Field Ambulance and was one of the doctors. And then there was another one in the civil affairs unit who was basically the

medical officer in civil affairs. We had a pretty good relationship. In fact, I’ll catch up with him in August. He’s in London now. Then there was another guy who was the liaison officer for the brigadier at the command post – Craig Mitchell – who’s become I suppose my closest mate since Vietnam. It was really around that nub of groups now – Craig was ex cavalry so he was a commander of a troop of APCs [Armoured Personnel Carriers]

and had already been in the country for a year and he’d been blown up and rehabilitated and then took on a role as liaison officer in there. So he’d seen quite a bit of conflict. And the other guys, the medical guys, I developed a huge amount of respect for. The television show, MASH, is really quite a graphic representation of the reality of what happens with these guys where they’re going from not doing a lot

to really saving lives in a hurry and dealing with some horrific things. And my guess is that their training in the Vietnam environment would be as good as you’d get anywhere in terms of emergency room management and operating. So those guys really did a marvellous job. I’m sure there’s a lot of people who would attest who’ve had their lives saved because of their activities.

So our social life evolved around those. There were some others. The civil affairs unit was not only just agriculture. It had some engineers and had some education officers. They had the medical officer. And a few others. So it was quite an eclectic group of people from different disciplines which was probably helpful. Everybody had different tasks but the same mission, if you like, of trying to help the locals.

So that brought a diversity which I thought was pretty useful. There was one little thing that we did to try and help ourselves as we couldn’t get approval to build a little recreational centre. Sort of a bar environment. So we got authority to build a volleyball court. So we put down a slab of cement to the size of the volleyball court, then the engineers found some timber to put walls up around it and then a roof over the top of it

and it became a little social club in our officers’ area. So we called that The Court and it turned out to be the bar and drinking place of the place. A bit of subversive activity to get to an end point that we all – it was a very welcome place though. It was a place where we all relaxed. There was a lot of good, nice people. The other thing, in civil affairs there were a couple of Australian born linguists

who had a liaison role with the various local Vietnamese people. They had a strong role of not only rolling out the policies but also in getting them to understand what’s happening with respect to the local Vietnamese in terms of war environments, and maybe picking up a bit of intelligence along the way.

Civil affairs was not a military combat unit at all. It was there really to provide support for the local Vietnamese in whatever way and some of those were infrastructure, construction of things. The engineers put up Southern Cross windmills for instance to help pump water out for people. They’d build

schools for them. So the education officer would help with the development of education programs there so it was a lot of basically just trying to support the local south Vietnamese to develop in some areas where we felt as though we could be supportive. And the successes were mixed because we were dealing with foreign cultures and

ways of doing things which were not necessarily easy to change and often when you come from a western country the natural instinct is to impose, or at least try to impart, what you think works back home, which might not be appropriate for their environment. It might not suit their culture or their past practices. Things like that. So it’s quite an interesting exercise. I think we probably made a few mistakes trying to get them to adopt

practices and technologies, which really weren’t suitable for them. And got a bit frustrated if we didn’t have some success in those areas, because we could see that if they did that they’d make some achievement. So I think there was a bit of naivety in it all, with respect to that. That doesn’t belittle the effort in any way. I think everybody who was involved really tried to do as much as they could to help and support the South Vietnamese. It was the bit of enthusiasm and maybe just

a lack of understanding of how you go about that process, which made it a bit challenging on occasions. But the policy of our unit was really just to support the locals and at the time I was there as I said, I think Nixon called it, the Vietnamisation program. Essentially we weren’t doing things for them particularly, other than providing them with resources to help themselves. So there was much more emphasis

on trying to encourage the various services available in Vietnam to help them out and develop those.

Part of our role there I’m sure was to help win the hearts and minds I suppose of the South

Vietnamese and so say, “We’re over here to help and we’re encouraging,” and things like that. So part of it is, and in the Vietnam War the bad guys were all over the place, living in a society during the day and out doing bad things at night. So if in some way we could encourage them to a view that maybe the Australians and what the Americans and the Australians were trying to do against the communism,

the communists, weren’t all that bad. So trying to secure a little bit of the hearts and minds I suppose is the easy way of putting it.

Other than the early stages when I was a little bit nervous about being in a war environment, I didn’t really feel at any stage under any direct threat at all. And I was never in a combat role, which is an interesting issue you might want to raise later on. But we managed to get around. I guess we were at a time when there was a bit of a lull

in things. I think most of the combats were well out in the scrub and the general road infrastructure was pretty much secure – during the day at least when we were travelling around. So there seemed to be – I didn’t have a sense that we were under any direct threat at all. I felt fairly comfortable. Now, that might have just been being silly. Or naive. But that’s the sense that I had of it anyway.

I’d need to start to bring in these Chinese guys or the Chinese fellow shortly because it’s an important point about what we try to do in the agricultural section. I said earlier that I came in as green as anything, and most of us came in from basically entirely different environments or agricultural systems. So we really had to try to adapt

to the local thing and understand the culture and the language, and we managed to as part of the unit when I arrived there. One pretty much fulltime at Nui Dat – he lived at Nui Dat – was a Chinese guy who was fluent in English and in Vietnamese. A guy called Mr Chu and one of the most delightful people I’ve ever had the pleasure to know. And he just understood much

better than any of us just how to go about this job of trying to help the locals. We came in from broad acre mechanised farming systems into subsistence agriculture systems, and I was naive at this stage and I suspect most people, the Australian based people in our unit, were really taking a considerable amount of time to develop that sort of nuances you really needed to know.

But Mr Chu – I’ll just call him Chu from now on – had an instinct for what was going to help them make a few dollars along the way. Just a thing like mounting up some straw beds and growing mushrooms, for instance, straw mushrooms. Getting some of them to grow flowers because there was some money to be made in that. All the sorts of things where the locals could have a bit of a go at without having –

because they didn’t have much money, they’re subsistence agriculture, to invest in new equipment and whatever; and fertilisers was very difficult, and you’re in a war where supplies are always very difficult. And also young guys are either fighting the bad guys or they might be the bad guys. So it was quite a complex social culture there at the time and these Chinese fellows understood that

so much better than we did and were able to communicate with them and win their trust much quicker than us. I’m sure the local Vietnamese appreciated what we tried to do, and they said to us many times that they appreciated the sorts of things we were able to try to do, but it was the people like Chu who really made the impact. And I think had they not been part of the agricultural unit – and there was another guy, a Mr Yang I think it

was who was the animal husbandry fellow. Chu was the horticulturalist. He used to come to the province I think about once a week or something like that. These are the guys who made the big difference there. Had we not had access to those people I think the achievements of the unit would have been fairly minimal, I would have thought because we would have really struggled to – cause you’re only there for a number of months. To try and assimilate all those

cultural issues and to win trust is a long term thing, so you really needed to be imbued in it I think. I’m telling you this now because I think it’s all in hindsight. When I was there I was probably green as chips and naïve, and didn’t really understand all these things. But I do remember it was marvellous having Chu around. And just to come up with these simple little ideas of getting people who are struggling for money to grow a few flowers and sell them at the local market or something to pick up a few more, a bit more money,

is really terrific. And he did a lot with young schoolkids too, and set up little vegetable plots for local schools. So he was outstanding. So I just can’t compliment those guys enough. My one regret is I really lost track of Chu. I knew when I left he was heading off to the Mekong Delta. So whether he survived that I don’t know. But he was a marvellous man and just added so much

to the power of what we were able to achieve.

No. Chu – we provided him with a tent, so he lived at Nui Dat. Mister Yang, I’m not sure where he lived. He visited on a weekly or a regular basis. So where he lived I’m not quite sure. I can’t be precise about that. But Chu lived on the place and basically ate at the officers’ mess with us.

How we found them? Don’t know. They were there when I turned up and so I really don’t understand how they were recruited. But I do know that it would have been wise that if there was any long-term commitment to Vietnam in terms of helping the agricultural development it would have been better

done by these guys than us trying to do it. And so I imagine if anything did happen it would have been with them.

Yes. His background was horticulture. So he understood. He understood broad acre. He understood growing rice and sorghum and he knew about flowers and fruit trees and vegetables and all that sort of stuff. But

the most important thing and one thing – we could figure out how to grow rice and vegetables and all that sort of thing. It was putting it in a cultural context and understanding that a little local South Vietnamese or a family, they might have a small patch of paddy fields and a tiny little bit of land and a tiny house and they might have a little enclosure where they might put the pigs and maybe one cow. And there’s basically that. That’s it. And they didn’t,

in a war environment, have resources to go investing in expansion or investing in new varieties of crops. So Chu understood the social and cultural context of what he was trying to do much better than we did.

Well we had some. Some of the ideas were implemented before we got there.

One of the ideas that wasn’t Chu’s, which didn’t come necessarily from me, but from the unit, was to introduce this artificial insemination. Develop some high quality, I suppose genetics, in the pig population in South Vietnam. That worked pretty well I think. I’m not quite sure who suggested that in the first place but we ended up essentially buying a top flight Yorkshire and a Duroc

boar and housed them. Our engineers built a stye for it, the local engineers’ service, and it was housed there. We introduced an artificial insemination program once again using Mr Yang as one of the key characters in that. We ended up getting eighty percent conception rates for that process which was better than – I was familiar with the Northfield Department of Agriculture

in South Australia pig research unit, and they were trying to develop artificial insemination programs and what we were doing in Vietnam was better than the results they were getting here. Which I kept telling them when I got back from Vietnam, how good we were doing up there. But we weren’t diluting the semen at all. So the exercise was that we’d extract the semen and then we’d check it for its viability and this was all done by the agricultural service, and a jar of semen would go on the back of a little motor scooter,

motor bike, and off it’d go and we’d inject it up a sow and scatter it around various districts. It was basically trying to lift the quality of the produce because it was so inbred at that stage. So that was one that was working at least, but we all left, and one doesn’t really know what happened to it after that.

No. I suppose towards the end it was one of the main ones because it was really the activity of trying to get that up and going, and when Gordon Pound left I suppose it was left to me to try to manage that process. So I suppose that was the main one. A lot of the chicken coops that we’d built for them – there was about seventy or eighty of those the engineers built for the local community – they had mixed success.

The idea there was to buy in quality little chickens from Saigon or somewhere and get these going in chicken coops locally, so they’d develop some brighter chickens so that gives them a nice protein source. But that was fraught with issues – not understanding well enough the diseases that start to emerge in that, and the expertise of farmers who are doing something different. This is where the Chinese guys

understood those sorts of things and we probably might have done that a bit differently. So there was the chicken coops and then there was the pig stuff and then with Chu and the horticulture stuff we’d run some demonstration trials in sorghum and rice paddies, different rices and then the straw mushrooms which was very much Chu, and then the flowers I mentioned. So there was a range of those sorts of activities that we got involved in. Occasionally tried to run

little field days for the local farmers about new crops or sorghum and how to use fertiliser and things like that. Also occasionally for the schools there was a sort of a rural youth group network that set up, so I remember running a few little very simple classes I suppose or field days

for those young kids to try and identify a few pests and diseases and things like that. So we did a mixture of things like that. But ultimately our responsibility was not to do it but to encourage the local agricultural service to develop the capability, and that’s really what we were trying to do. The temptation is to, if you want to set up a field day, just go in and put in the plots yourself and do it all yourself

and run it, but that was going to be counterproductive so we backed off from that sort of thing. A lot of that sort of stuff happened over the period of the unit, I’m sure. More and more we needed to encourage the local agricultural service to take responsibility, develop their capacity to run that service better.

No. They were the equivalent of a department of agriculture as we’d know it in Australia, with a group of agronomists and whatever who are giving advice to the local farmers. Once again, we’re in a war zone and all those sorts of issues and resourcing that, and getting technical people with technical capability to do that, well was difficult for them. It was quite challenging. And some of those

guys who may be seen to be educated were maybe done a part diploma or something. So they were pretty much underdone in terms of the expertise that they had. And it’s not through their fault. It’s just that was the way they had. So part of what we were trying to do was to help in whatever way we could to help that capacity building thing. Once I come back to these Chinese guys like Chu, they were extremely valuable resources for those local agricultural

service people. So we weren’t – I wouldn’t put us in the conduit if you like. It was our ideas. Trying to impart those ideas and trying to implement those through the local agricultural service. What we were trying to do is to find out what sorts of things the local communities wanted done and encouraging the local agricultural service to maybe take responsibility for doing those sorts of things. So

there was a lot of that sort of nurturing type of activity without it being belittling, because these are very proud people and what they were doing in very difficult circumstances I think, was quite marvellous. Plus they were trying to help people who didn’t have the resources to make change rapidly. So it was a very difficult time for them all. So I just admired them all for giving it their best shot and being so dedicated. And you can understand

if they had the occasional times when we’ve tried all this before and nothing’s happened or somebody’s blown up something or whatever. You must get sick of pushing hard. So it’s a matter of encouraging I think. And that was our role. That’s the way I saw our role anyway, as doing that.

We might buy some seed. And help. Then Chu would go down and show them how to grow the seedlings. And then transplant the seedlings out. In new sorghum varieties demonstration we might buy the seed and provide that to the local agricultural service. The United States Aid

organisation also had a presence in Phuoc Tuy Province. So we might link with them and maybe purchase some fertiliser and provide a bit of that. So they’re the sorts of things we tried to make things happen. But tried to do it in a way where the agricultural service was seen to be running the show. So it was their projects rather than being the Australian projects per se. At least that’s the way I would like to think that we’re remembered.

That’s the way we went about it.

That was the way. They wouldn’t come to us. We might do some liaison and we might go to a local village and talk to the local people up there and get a sense of what their needs are and then maybe encourage the local agricultural service that this is an area that might need some support. How can we help

them support the locals?. So it was really trying to encourage the local agricultural department if you like, to provide that support. And we’d also listen to their advice too and their suggestions and see what they needed and try to be, do it in such a way that it wasn’t just giving them everything all the time, but basically helping them to encourage development on their own. And about the best I think we could do was offer

some of those physical resources, like building a bit of infrastructure here through our engineers and the civil affairs unit, like chicken coops and pig pens and things like that. And providing a bit of seed, some fertiliser and a lot of encouragement and people like Chu and Yang to provide some of the solid technical support that they needed which were beyond the capability of what we could do.

Did we get some things wrong? I don’t think we did too much wrong. I think probably the earlier

experience in Vietnam, there are some examples of where things may have been imposed on people where maybe the support wasn’t there. I give an example. The Southern Cross windmills which are good for water pumps and you can put them up and the engineers can put them up. But if there’s no backup in terms of supplying parts to maintain the things, and teaching people to maintain them. Pretty soon they fall into disrepair or somebody knocks off the tap and so all you have is a windmill pumping water

into the street or onto the bare ground. So some of those things, there was some weaknesses in that, in providing the backup support I suppose. Or maybe not having the infrastructure, the local service infrastructure to be able to maintain those sorts of things. But once again, we were in a war zone. So some of those things just weren’t available. And it’s probably hard enough trying to help underdeveloped country

without the war going around, but that just added a dimension of complexity which made it more difficult to make achievements I think. But in terms of the sort of advice that we gave them it was just really suggestions about what could be done and where, and things like that. And it might be that if we might go to a remote village and they might say as a community that they reckon they need a windmill or something like that

and our guys might investigate that a bit further and find that the windmill they’ve already got only pumps water for part of the year, and so it dries up for part of the year; so you might question whether another windmill’s going to do it or whether there’s a relocation issue or something like that. So you might start to look at some of those issues. But by and large I think the chicken project had mixed success inasmuch

that there was a problem with marketing the chickens after you grow the things, and there was probably a little bit of corruption got into the thing as well. Now, I don’t know. But I do remember there being discussions about growing some chickens – what are you going to do with them once you grow them?. This comes back to westerners coming into a foreign culture trying to with the best will in the world to help, but not understanding the cultural and the social

context that you’re going into. So I think that was where the Chinese guys helped much more with that. I don’t think that they were there in the early days of the agricultural stuff and probably had they been there might have been a probably a shift in thinking a little bit. But from what I understand, when the civil affairs unit started in ’67, the emphasis was mainly on helping with infrastructure, building schools and school houses

and things like that, so the agriculture didn’t really get much of an emphasis until later when I think there was an expectation that maybe this was a way to help the local people and win a bit of support over from the locals by helping them that way.

Gee. I’d reckon it

varies a lot, but on my memory it’d be about three times a week probably. Almost daily sometimes. We’d be in there having a chat about something and how we could help. And it might be as simple as taking one of their extension people out somewhere to visit the local things because transport was a problem. It might have been helping in those ways.

No. It was in Ba Ria. It’s a little town which is just outside

Nui Dat out of the camp. So it wasn’t very far away. They lived and worked in there. Had an agricultural office there.

I can’t really recall. I only interacted with a few. But I think there was a structure mentioned somewhere that they had quite a few people there attached to it. But that might have been an earlier structure. I don’t know.

It might have been transient because once again you were in a war and they could only get the people who were available around at the time. I could hazard a guess but I think it might be wrong, so I think it might be best if I don’t say. There were a few people there and I dealt mainly with the chief fellow in there and a few of his guys around him. They were all very nice people.

No. Relied very much on the interpreter I had with me. Occasionally you could exchange some very basic terminology, but the interpreter was very important from my perspective. Yeah. For the Australian guy. For Chu it didn’t matter ‘cause he understood Vietnamese

fluently so there was really no problem. That’s what really made them so they could assimilate so well and do so much good there, within the limitations that the war environment would allow them to do.

No. I felt that I should have concentrated more when I was doing my fortnight at Woodside. Yeah. Yeah. I felt

as though I was a bit silly not spending more time on it there. But even so, I didn’t, in retrospect I doubt whether it would have – it’s not only understanding the language. I keep coming back to this. It’s understanding the social, the cultural context that you’re trying to deal with. And understanding, whilst the words might have one meaning but the sub context around that might be different if you know what I mean. So

and that’s where I think we, from the outside, had some limitations into what we could really achieve over there. That’s not belittling the huge effort that everybody made. But I think there was a barrier for us to really make big steps forward because we struggled a little bit with a. the language and the social and cultural context and how to

provide support in those sorts of environments. A subsistence farming environment in a war. And having an understanding of all that and how Vietnamese in those environments were willing to change or the capacity to change – a lot of the young guys were gone. So you were basically with the older people trying to look after a property. We all know the older we get the less willing we are to take risks and

invest in new things and that sort of stuff. Probably got in the back of your mind, well if I do try something new and be seen to be collaborating with the Americans or the Australians that the communists will take a dim view of that in due course. So there’s a lot of that sort of context that I think was flooding around behind it all, which they don’t display overtly. I think it takes a while to understand all that so that

you’re sensitive to it. So that the sorts of things that you can do to help are put in the right context and generally that comes down in that environment, just little things which they had taken, little steps at a time.

No. I don’t think it was

an overt resistance. I think it was just their capacity to do something new because they had no money. Just fertiliser. Part of their problem was trying to get enough fertiliser to grow decent crops. Basics. So as much as we would have liked them to have manifested and changed South Vietnam to a horticultural garden, there just wasn’t the capacity the infrastructure to do that.

So you just make little steps at a time. The ones that I came across very receptive, very nice, very pleasant, just lovely, warm people. Other than the fact that sometimes those nice warm people might have been a bad guy at night doing untoward things in a war environment.

Probably the soil types weren’t all that of a problem. We’ve got similar soil types in Australia. The “crasms” and the “zems” in northern Australia. So you understand a bit about that. But their environment – they have basically a wet and a dry season. The wet’s from I think roughly, if my memory serves me right, from May to about October. And after that it’s pretty dry.

And so it’s a matter of understanding how those agriculturals fit into there. I’d never, before I went to Vietnam, been exposed to anything to do with rubber plantations. Now rubber and rice were essentially the main crops in South Vietnam. And it cascaded through things like sorghum and a few ground nuts and sweet potato and vegetables and fruit and things like that.

But the dominant crops were rice and rubber in those days. So it’s a matter of learning all about that I suppose in an entirely different – a tropical environment which was foreign to everybody in our unit, that I was aware of. So it takes a while to adapt. And to adjust. You do the best you can. But I learnt a lot. And once again I go back to these Chinese guys.

Any understanding I did develop in those environments was fast tracked by learning from Chu and Yang about how things can work in those sorts of environments. Because they’d been in working in that area for many years. So I probably after my period there came back still not knowing all the intricacies. I think I learnt enough to help us do what we were doing at the

time which was really a support role but I don’t think I would have ever been a competent extension officer, if you like, in that environment even then after that period of time because there’s so much to pick up and learn and understand.

Yeah. But don’t ask me what it was. I’ve no idea. There was some money to buy supplies and things like that for the local people.

Sometimes we negotiate some donation from the United States Aid organisation which might come in the form of fertiliser or seed. That’s about all. We might purchase hardware supplies to put a roof over a pigsty or build some brick walls or some cement which we might give to the local service. And there are examples where we might purchase these goodies and send them out to build a chicken pen and

put them somewhere for them to be utilised, and then they’d be pinched [stolen]. So a bit of that went on. So there was a bit of a security issue about preserving those so they could be used properly. So the budget was really just providing those sorts of resources. And I suppose if you include in the budget everybody’s pay and whatever, that came from the Australian government budget

as an overall contribution.

No. It was pretty tight. I mean it wasn’t a huge amount of money going around. It wasn’t unlimited. We could just provide little bits and pieces. For instance if we wanted to buy these boars, the male pigs, for the local service, that was a special requisition and that was approved.

So there was an additional budget if I recall went to pay for those. I drove down to Saigon to pick them up and we brought them back and put them in the styes and away they went. I think one pig, the white one, worked and the brown one, the Duroc, was a bit lazy.

We were out there pretty much most days. Unless there was a security issue which stopped us going to a particular area. If there was a contact up there somewhere or some intelligence that it was not safe to go. And some of the places we’d fly to by helicopter to visit and that might be an

American outstation. So we’d be out amongst it doing something on a daily basis unless there were in camp duties that I had to perform. Some of the other things that I had to do was to on a roster basis, do the documents run if you like, which is a very early morning flight in a helicopter taking documents around to the various outposts in Phuoc Tuy province and that was on a roster basis.

And then I’d have to do my roster in the command post, in largely checking the position of all our troops on the command post map, and checking communications and things like that. So there was a range of other duties that went along with it, so on occasions you wouldn’t go out if you were rostered on to some of those duties.

I delivered documents to

the outposts. Let’s say there was an artillery section out there somewhere and part of my job was to fly the documents out to them, which might be their orders for the day. Whatever was in them, I never read them.

That’s right. I was one of the officers in Nui Dat and part of my rostered duties was to

do those things. So I delivered documents to people early morning and a range of other things that might come up. For instance, I had to investigate I think it was a stolen battery or some damn thing. So I had to investigate, do the odd investigation. So there’s a lot of those sorts of duties that came up from time to time.

On the documents’ run which was an early morning thing that was generally by chopper, yeah. But other stuff was basically by car, by the jeeps. Actually it’s a Land Rover. Better not call them a jeep or all the – anybody watching this movie probably be horrified that we’d be driving around in Yankee gear. So it was the Land Rovers we were knocking around in.

Yeah. I had a side arm and also a rifle which we carried with us at all times. Our interpreter didn’t, but we were not in the stage at any place where we were ever in a contact, at least in my time there. About the only time I fired my gun in Vietnam was when I had to organise a practise shoot

for the unit. So that’s the way it worked.

No. Not on the documents’ run. There was no need because that’s going to Australian bases. The interpreter always came with me when we were going to speak with the local Vietnamese. Interpreter also would have been, he would have considered that to be a bit of a security 'no no' anyway, taking a

non Australian on that sort of process. No. They didn’t come on that.

Oh yeah. That was mainly when we were carrying our fire arms; was when we were out and about mixing with the locals. That wasn’t overtly. We’d keep them in the vehicle. I tried not to walk around with a big rifle in my hand all the time. But they’d be in our vehicle at all times and then

Mick would keep an eye on those to make sure they were secure while we were there. It really wasn’t necessary – well on the documents’ run, yeah you take your weapons with you I think. It’s probably only the sidearm that I took on that. But that was just a quick run in the morning. Took about an hour I think at dawn. Had a bit of a fly around and dropped the documents off, but we had our weapons with us on other these occasions. But in turn, you asked about the security thing,

mentioned before that I had no sense of any overt security threat at any time while I was there anyway. I really felt for the guys who were out there doing the hard yards. I had a good mate who I used to play basketball with who was out there in one of the battalions fighting in the contact part of the war.

There were some interesting dynamics that happens when people are stuck on a base versus those out on combat roles. But I had no sense that there was any overt threat to me at any time. There was only one occasion where some gunfire pretty close to me went off but I just watched the eyes of the people I was talking to and

they didn’t shrink, so I figured I was okay. And I didn’t want to show any weakness at that time. So I just went on as though nothing had happened. But that was about the only time.

It was really nothing that I saw. The sense was most significant when I was flying in so it was the unknown. It was the little bit

of hesitation about the unknown that you’re flying into and you know that you’re about to land in a war zone, so there’s really nothing there in a visual sense immediately, but once you got off the plane you saw a lot of military vehicles with a lot of weaponry and all that sort of stuff, so that reinforced the whole concept. But that didn’t concern me overly. I just make the point as a young guy on an adventure first time overseas and dropping in pretty much

without a team around me, as one bloke going into a war zone. So there was a little bit of uncertainty attached to that.

No. We liaised with the Australian embassy which had an outfit in Saigon and some of our medical people liaised with the head office – there was some military headquarters

in Saigon obviously, for the Australian military headquarters, so there was some liaison there. But I didn’t spend much time there at all.

No. Not really because we had Chu the Chinese guy, and I had an interpreter. The liaison officers in the unit were Australian guys who were linguists and so

they were fluent in Vietnamese, so they had a range of other tasks. We didn’t need them . And so they didn’t take much of a role, at least while I was there. They may have had a stronger role before I was there. But not that I was aware of.

Within the agriculture unit?

Oh right. Well there were when I arrived the captain, Gordon Pound. He was in charge of it. Then there was myself as a second lieutenant, then there were two corporals and two privates one of which was my driver. I also had an interpreter which came around with me. He was a local person who came in on a day by day basis to ride around with us. So that was the strength of the unit at that time.

We might get some suggestions coming in from the liaison officers – anybody who’s out and about. The engineers might be out building something and been speaking to somebody and say, “We’ve had a suggestion that this might be useful.” It could be anything. The liaison officers in the unit might get some information which they’d

pass on and we might follow that up. But largely it was to do with liaising with the agricultural service, which is the equivalent of a department of agriculture if you like, to see how we could help within he constraints as I explained earlier under the Vietnamisation program that was in train at the time. So intelligence – call it intelligence if you like, but suggestions of what we can do, and where,

came from a variety of sources really.

Yes. They’d already established the chicken project. That was as I said that had some successes and some failures. They developed around about eighty chicken coops where the engineers would build a chicken coop and then we’d buy some chickens for them and put them in there.

Some of the farmers were supposed to have gone through some sort of screening process to determine whether they were capable of managing the chickens, and that was basically to grow them for food consumption, not to grow eggs. That was broiler chickens. So that was already established and going and there was a range of demonstration plots. Different sorghum crops and maybe a few different rice varieties, a few things like that were already in train.

But my memory of it was mainly focused – they put in a fair effort on the chicken project I suppose which was up and running when I got there.

I think the civil affairs unit started in ’67 I think. I could be wrong there. But that’s the broadest civil affair unit. I think initially the focus was engineering and maybe education and maybe health

aspects and it was in I think around about early 1970 where the decision was taken that maybe more emphasis ought to be placed on the agriculture side of things. Up until then they just had two people I think, trying to do something in agriculture without much resources. So then they built this team which was Captain Gordon Pound, myself, and the two corporals and a couple of other

privates. And brought in the Chinese guys.

I think they’d certainly developed strong relationships with the agriculture service there. It seemed to me they were always very welcoming. But I suppose you would be because usually you got something you’re going to give them so it’s

possible, but I think they made quite a bit of progress within the limited constraints they had. The chicken project had mixed results because you had a range of issues. Chickens suffer from disease so there’s a vaccination follow up. It’s not only just delivering the chickens and everything happens. They had to be looked after and then there were problems with diseases being in that what would you call it – the humid atmosphere. Diseases building up in the

litter that was put into the chicken coops. A few things like that. So animals died or birds died and things like that. Some were quite successful. Then there were the marketing issues which may not have been thought about well enough or how do we if we end up with all these broiler chickens, what are we going to do with them? How are they going to be marketed and how can we do it where there’s no corruption and things like that. So there was a whole range of things which I think we were learning. But I’m not trying to paint it as though it was a failure. I think it was a really

a valiant effort, but just recognising that on some occasions the results weren’t there. Where the farmers were good a chicken husbandry they did very well. Where they weren’t, they didn’t.

They were all brand new. So it was a very

steep learning curve. And as I said earlier, on the basis of probably not a science degree which gave me a background to work within a southern Australian environment, going over to subsistence agriculture in the tropics. Well I mean there’s quite an adjustment to be made for anybody, let alone one who’s just come out of uni and is green as anything. So yeah it was a steep learning curve. How successful I was at that I suppose I’ll

leave it to others to judge.

I think the seeds of that, I think, were sown before I got there. I think the idea was going around. My sense of it was that there was a recognition

that in the subsistence farming environment basically the capital assets of a local Vietnamese family were the little plot of land, their little house and the number of animals that they had and the quality of the animals. And we knew that there was a lot of inbreeding between the local pigs and whatever and so the quality of the animals was declining. So one way to overcome that was introduce some decent genetics into the

pigs over there, and that was the intent. So it was really a recognition that we could add value I think, by providing the service through the local agricultural service. The other thing, which I’m not sure that came into considerations, but it obviously meant that the local agricultural service would be seen as providing something quite significant to their local community, and so that was really helping them advance their cause quite considerably

as well. So how it came about, the idea was generated before I, I think, got there, but I had a strong role to play in the implementation of it. And it seemed to work pretty well. As I said earlier we were getting eighty percent conception rates for these things, and you will have seen some photographs from where it’s been successful. Some quite healthy little pigs coming out. So they get maybe better litters and better quality pigs out of all of that, and there’s

some good prospects for building up their little bit of assets, if they like. If they can sell a pig at the market for a bit more money they’re in better shape.

It’s a bit like you breeding with your brother, if you like. After a while all the genetic flaws start to shine through –

with these pigs, the same old boars were going over the same sows, and then their progeny. You just get a slow decline in genetic capacity for the animals. So you need to introduce new genetic things to broaden that out and that’s what we tried to do.

Just declining in quality. But you don’t wait for those things to happen. You know that there’s an inbreeding situation going on.

So before you get down to the bottom of that you introduce genetics to prevent it happening. So it was as much preventative as anything.

We purchased two top quality

stud boars. They were bred in America. We picked those up from Saigon and drove them back to Boruya, the agricultural headquarters. Our engineers established a pigsty there for them, dedicated for these two animals, and then we instigated an artificial insemination process where it’s essentially extracting semen out of the boar and

collecting it in a jar. And testing, looking through a microscope to test the viability of the sperm counts, if you like. And then taking that semen up to a range of sows which were on heat, which the agricultural service knew about, and implanting the semen in the vagina of the sow on the farm. As I said, we were getting eighty percent of them pregnant.

No. We tried to get the agricultural service to do all that. We went along for the ride and maybe took them sometimes, but where it was possible we got them to do that on their own. We were pretty keen to make sure that they in fact were seen to be – it wasn’t us seen to be doing this, but them doing it. Because it’s important for them to develop their own presence in their own community.

It’s best to take a photograph I think. But essentially what you do is you build a little, let’s call it a horse, if you like, a hessian mounted horse. And you put some urine from a sow on heat on there which gets the boar a little bit excited and then you hand stimulate. Once the boar climbs up on that you hand stimulate

the penis of the boar and get it excited until it ejaculates. And you collect the semen that way.

The brown Duroc didn’t perform all that well. But the white Yorkshire, that was very interested in performing every time. So that had a good track record. And the Vietnamese guys gave them a couple of eggs after each

time to replace the protein which I thought was a nice touch.

There’s a big syringe which you suck the sperm up into the syringe and there’s a big long rubber tube which you poke down into the vagina of the sow, holding the tail up and then push the syringe and push the semen into the uterus.

They got a very concentrated dose, so I can’t recall exactly how many. Depends on how much semen you extract. But my recollection is that you might get about 150 mls. That might do three or four sows, maybe, at a go. So it might take you a while to work your way through a whole village.

Absolutely no excitement whatsoever.

You get to know when a sow’s coming on heat and start to display those sorts of symptoms and so they’re ready. We left that up to the locals in consultation with the agricultural service to identify which of the sows were ready to receive the semen. I didn’t get involved in that part of it

at all.

It would have been new but I think – I don’t recall anybody having any complaints about it. And certainly when the word got around that the first litters were on the way and in fact we had ended up some piglets,

I think the word got around pretty quick that technology was well worth it. I don’t recall now what level of expression of interest to the local agricultural service – how that grew over time. I don’t recall that information now. But it seemed to be adopted pretty well. And it was something which cost – there was no investment required at least at the time we were there.

Whether the ag service charged for it in due course, I don’t know. But the time I was there I don’t recall there being a fee charged. If they did, they didn’t tell us. And so the investment required by the owners of the pigs was minimal, and they didn’t have to do anything other than basically have them at home, corralled, so that they could receive it and it worked very well.

They could go in a number of ways. Either way it grows the herd. So you grow them up and sell them a bit later on to eat. You consume them yourself. A whole range of things could happen to them. Sold at market. Sold on to the next village. They were basically grown for meat consumption, these things.

Over time you keep upgrading your genetic stock. Ideally it would have been nice to bring in some high quality sows too and breed those up and distribute them, but we were stuck at the level of introducing the boars.

So it wasn’t the full pathway that we needed to go. But over time, just like any animal husbandry person, you keep trying to constantly improve the genetic base of your livestock. And that’s introducing over a period of time, in a cattle context, introducing a new stud bull, putting him over your cows. Maybe bringing in new cows from other studs somewhere to upgrade. That’s the sort of scenario where you’d need to go. We were

in a war environment, subsistence farmers, and so it was limited to the extent we could progress that. So it was really half the equation essentially because we’re implanting into sows which are probably not all that high a quality, but at least their offspring was improved considerably through that pure breed stock semen that was coming through

for them. So that’s the way you do it. And we can only go part of the way really given the limited time that we were there.

They just don’t have the weight gains. If you’re trying to grow animals for market, things like that, you want them to grow pretty quickly. You want them to have good muscle configuration for meat consumption.

So the inbred ones don’t grow all that fast and they don’t put on the weight that you want, so basically they don’t get as heavy as you want them to be. So you’re on a slow decline. They’re the sorts of things that intervene there.

Well I only saw a few little piglets. So I mean they looked all healthy and robust and big and they started to grow quite quickly. But

we weren’t there really long enough to see to many cycles of that thing happening. Essentially when I left we were still in the first crop of piglets, if you like. And it was really up to the agricultural service to keep that going after we left.

As I said we set up the boards in their local service. We supported them,

transporting it around. They had all the equipment they needed. So basically when we left it was over to them to keep it going. You’ve got to remember that the communists came over and took over the whole place not long after everybody left, so just what happened I don’t know. Whether the agricultural service, the people who were seen to be colluding with the free world forces is another matter too. So one knows what we did was simply hand it over

to the local service and they maybe would have had some liaison with the foreign affairs department and maybe there was some supervision there. I’m not sure how that manifests.

I don’t have a sense that we were given a task of strongly political nature. I think there’s a subtext about what we were going about

to do was to be seen to be helping the local indigene if you like – if you can call them that – and try to win some support for the free world force effort and wins the hearts and minds that we talked about a bit earlier. But I don’t recall ever having an instruction from a superior officer in terms of a political context. It was really just doing the practical stuff. But as I argued earlier in this interview, it was really simply

that was the subtext to it all. The whole rationale of having a civil affairs unit is really to try and support the locals, to win over their support and encourage them, and maybe make it a little bit harder for the insurgents to come through and take over. And encourage the resistance to that. But we didn’t have any orders in terms of an overt political nature.

They struggled in terms of the qualifications that they had. Some of the people were pretty much inexperienced. I think one or two might have had a rudimentary diploma which probably only gave them a very basic grounding. So that was one of the challenges, for that service was to try to attract or develop basically a human capacity of expertise there across a range of things.

That’s where the Chinese guys became very valuable in mentoring and helping some of these people to support them in learning. But as I said earlier, we were in a war zone and young people were out doing other things. So it’s not necessarily to find people who weren’t distracted by the war, able to complete a degree or a diploma and then come out and work in an agricultural service. That was one of the constraints

they had amongst their community. But the people who were there tried their best, and would have benefited from a better academic or educational background. But the way I saw I think that they would probably benefit best, was have more of the Chinese people over there in the various disciplines to really encourage them during that context. That really would have worked quite well I think.

There was a little village that we set up called Atsui Na where we tried to set up irrigation schemes. It was very rudimentary where it was basically trying to create rock pools, if you like, which water accumulated in, so that the locals could fill up their watering cans and go and water their

very small plots. And quite an irrigation network that we tried to help them with, that got belted around a bit on a few occasions. So there was a bit of sabotage that went on around the place. I suspect some of these Southern Cross windmills were sabotaged from time to time too. Yeah there was a bit.

That was I think in terms of the windmill

program one of the problems that I don’t think there was enough parts, people didn’t know where to get the parts. There wasn’t probably enough training in how to maintain the windmills. I think that was probably a bit of a weakness. But that’s only my observation. There might be other factors intervening there. The sabotage one and things like that, which I might not have been aware of, which others might argue for.

But I think it’s one of the challenges in any sort of aid program, when you’re trying to help develop countries. If you can’t provide that little bit of backup I think in terms of parts, supply and training and a maintenance role, some of the infrastructure you might put up can fall into disrepair pretty quickly. Because people don’t know how to use it and how to look after it.

In the context of – this is in Vietnam?

Well I mean that was an observation of mine. I don’t think there was much follow up on the windmill stuff. In terms of what we were trying to achieve with the chicken and the pig activity, it was really the follow up was trying to educate and support the local agricultural service to

fulfil that maintenance and ongoing role, so it wasn’t just in the hands of the Australians to look after these things or to repair them or whatever. So that’s where it needed to go I think. The follow up needs to be – you might put some parts in a maintenance department somewhere in one of the local regional centres and help the locals understand how to maintain the various bits and pieces around the place and encourage that. So that's the sort of follow up.

It goes back to this Vietnamisation thing. They needed to get to a stage where they’d be looking after their own stuff. So that’s the point we were trying to get to.

We all left pretty early. Because we all got pulled out. When I left in ’71 I think it was all over in ’72. And the communists were all over the place. So you didn’t have the opportunity to stay there. So it wasn’t a typical aid program where you could stay there for five

or ten years without the threat of war hanging around. This is a war environment with an aid program going on in the middle of it. So you had to basically do the best you could within those circumstances. I think it’s fair to say that everybody who was part of the civil affairs unit did extraordinary well, given the circumstances.

My personal challenge was really just understanding this

I think, the cultural, the social context in which we had to work. I was a young guy, probably naïve in a lot of ways, under trained for the environment. And first time out of the country. So I think the challenge was trying to develop an understanding of all of those things and trying to act sensibly according to that. I think that was probably the biggest challenge and it would have been made a lot harder if we didn’t have our little Chinese

fellows and Chu there, to help us along the way because that was a huge help.

We developed relationship with the local village leadership. Sit down and have a bottle of beer with them and have a bit of a chat through the interpreter about the issues and things like that. But tried not to push ourselves as being “We’re Australians and we’re here to change your lives,” sort of thing, because that was never going to work. It doesn’t happen that was in aid programs, I don’t think. It’s a matter of trying to create a mindset

where they motivate themselves towards change and you support that process. Sounds all very wise words now but it takes you probably after you get home you realise a lot of these things rather than being right in the middle of it. So it wasn’t trying to project ourselves too overtly out in front of everybody and saying, “We’re the champions here to help you.” I think it works a lot better when you encourage the local services and give them the support to do it.

But developing relationships – everybody knew that we – or at least where I went, that the Australians were there supporting and we had that supporting role. So I don’t recall anywhere being unwelcome in a village where you might sit down and have a chat with the local leadership and visit the various sort of houses and farmers, that they’d take you around to see where they might show you a few things.

So it worked okay.

They put on the odd lunch or whatever. I can still remember my first experience of eating I think it was either eel or snake. It was a bit of a Chinese steamboat and they took the lid off and about five centimetres away from my face was this big open mouth of a – I think it was a snake or an eel. Might have been an eel. It scared the living daylights out of me.

I’d never seen anything like this before and then I realised I had to eat it as well. So yeah, there were some pretty challenging times in terms of mixing with the locals. They also had a fish sauce called Nuk Mam which is basically putting a big heap of fish into a cement vat and when it rotted down you drained the juice off the bottom and that was their fish sauce, and that was pretty hard to get down I have to say. There are a couple of times when you really don’t want to offend anybody

and you’re sitting around these little banquets and some of these things come out and you’ve got to eat them. That was pretty challenging for a young bloke. Anyway.

You just consumed it and then tried to stop yourself gagging. But by and large they were very good. In fact they had a terrific barbecue system where it was on the table. It was a ceramic tile sitting on top of a ceramic little bowl and underneath that would be a red hot

coal and they’d get tiny little slivers of meat and you’d put some pig fat or some fat on your tile, take these little pieces of meat and barbecue your little pieces of meat at the table. Tiny little slivers. Some of the food was superb as well. The other interesting thing about food consumption, I suppose, is that they like their dried fish a bit and when you go down to the fishing villages and you walk through

the big mesh tables where they put all these fish out to dry, you walk through there and these big swarms of flies would take off and you’d think, ‘Oh next time I’m sitting down with one of the locals eating a bit of dried fish, I know where that’s been and it’s been covered with flies down here. It’ll come from here’. So it was a matter of adapting to a whole range of things. However you could always get a Coca Cola. Anywhere. It was incredible how

distribution of Coca Cola got around.

Going from a western society into a subsistence agricultural environment with market places with open sewers and the smells and all those sorts of things. They were the sorts of things that made a big impression. I remember when my wife and I went on our honeymoon to

Bali. As soon as they opened the door – this is in Indonesia of course – the first smell I smelt just reminded me of the Vietnam aromas around at the time of the open markets and those sorts of things. It was quite – just brought it home very quickly. So in terms of culture shocks that was the main thing. The thing is you’re in a war zone and you’re dealing with American cultures, as well as

the Australian blokes, so there’s an interesting mix of dynamics I suppose going on in the whole place.

The United States Aid organisation.

Porky.

With the Americans? There’s an American group called USAID [US Agency for International Development] that’s a United States Aid organisation really, and they had a bit of a presence in Phuoc Tuy province and it was really through them that we brokered the purchase of the pigs and they brought them into Saigon. We then transported them down.

We got on reasonably well with those people. They had head office in Saigon and we socialised with them a bit and had them out to camp for the occasional barbecue for some of them when they were round. So yeah we had a pretty good open relationship with the Americans there on the aid side of it. I didn’t mix much with the military side – their operations were outside of Phuoc Tuy because Australians were the operational people

in our province.

Maybe because they were available quite quickly from the States. And maybe the States were providing them. I don’t know how the finances were arranged. Maybe they donated the things. So it might have been that. Anyway that was the way that it came about. I can’t answer the question about why we didn’t get them from Australia.

They got involved in some of the advisory. They were almost like a hardware store when we were there, just handing out seed and fertilisers. I don’t think they did a huge amount other than that. I may be wrong in this because I wasn’t that close to all their activities. I think they did support

local – almost a rural youth club network. I think they called them the Four T. I’m not quite sure what that means, but essentially it’s getting young people interested in agriculture and teaching them some stuff and it was based on a rural youth education model in the States. So I think they sponsored a bit of that activity as well.

First of all you had to keep them alive. And then they’re likely to be conscripted off into fighting for the good guys or the bad guys. So they had a lot of difficulties once they got up to a pretty modest age before they started to get taken away. So that was pretty challenging for the Vietnamese to manage

that. It must have been devastating for a lot of the parents to have a young son who got to the physicality where he was off into fighting the war.

I’m not sure what you mean. I really don’t know. I don’t know how that worked in their society. Others might be able to give you a better insight than I can.

Not something I can answer I don’t think.

A typical farmhouse was almost a little thatched roof shack with pretty much open walls and tacked on the side was a little corral for the livestock. And very modest cooking utensils.

No ablutions. Those sorts of things. They lived a subsistence agriculture life and they did it very well and very proudly. They had a lot of character so I admire them immensely. It wasn’t their fault that they were like that. They had those conditions thrust upon them. It was almost a trap that they couldn’t get out of in a lot of ways.

And the economy really couldn’t grow to help them out of that while in the middle of the war so it was difficult times for them. So the clothing people had was modest, although it was amazing how some of the young ladies presented extremely well. Very beautiful young ladies that I remember over there at the time. So often even in poverty, there’s those contrasting things where they dressed

up and looked after themselves well. I think it just added that touch of class to the sort of people they were.

At the agricultural service. It was on their premises. So it was taken from the boar directly – I think I showed you a photograph of them sitting at a desk with a microscope set up there and they put

it on a slide and have a look at the viability of it and package it away. So it’s done all in the one place. So the time between extraction and infusion into the sow is minimal. It’s only a matter of fifteen, twenty minutes or so, possibly.

They were kept in a little, what would you call it, a modest

little esky with some warm water around it to maintain a temperature environment – it wasn’t stored overnight, it was dispensed that day. So however far it got them, and with quite a bit of success.

It was as good as you’d find in any dairy that you might be familiar with around the place when we collect milk. It didn’t have stainless steel gear and wash down hygienic stuff, but they looked after the place and it was maintained okay. Everything was cleaned. All the vessels that contained the semen were all

washed thoroughly and sterilised so there was no risk of infection and that sort of thing happening.

The agriculture service people. It was important that they ran this program.

Count how many are wiggling.

Well it would be, but that never seemed to happen so it was just a standard little check to make sure that the semen that was going up there was okay. Just a process they went through.

I think they sponsored its development. Whether they ran it per se, I think they sponsored its development through the agricultural service once again, trying to get them to look after their own program. But I think they probably encouraged the local agricultural service to follow the model that they used in the States, which is basically groups of children

or young kids and giving them instruction on a range of agriculture or field days and outings and things like that in agriculture. Try and get them a bit involved and learn about what a plant disease looks like and what insects look like, and what sort of chemicals you might use to control them. Some of the more basic stuff. What fertiliser looks like, how to put it on, how to sow crops. Those sort of things, just basic crop and animal husbandry techniques they

instruct them in. So I don’t think the USAID organisation was running it per se. I think they provided the supporting role and sowed the seeds initially about the model that could be used. That once again is my sense of it because that was up and running before I got there, so it might not be the way it turned out, but I think it was.

A little bit. Every now and again I was invited along to have a bit of a walk through a few paddocks of corn or sorghum or something with a group of children and try to point out a few things through the interpreter. But once again the best people to do that were the Chinese technical people who were fluent in Vietnamese and understood the context of culture and things, who did

that much better.

Yeah. The only women were in fact those farmers’ wives essentially at the other end. The husband may have been off fighting the war and she was trying to look after the family home.

I mean there were women around the place, but they tended not to be part of the network that we moved in, so much within the agriculture service. Once again I suppose that was one of the cultural aspects of how things were in South Vietnam at that time. There were roles for women and roles for men. Women certainly got out there and threshed the rice and planted rice and they did a lot of manual tasks.

And we came into contact with some of them in the family context, but they didn’t seem to have a dominant role in what would you call it – the bureaucracies of the agricultural service.

Only the Chinese.

And I suppose they were supported through – I’m not quite sure how they were funded. We provided infrastructure and maybe it was the USA aid programs that provided money for them, or maybe it was [Department of] Foreign Affairs paid for those guys. So the Chinese contingent provided – their presence was a contribution. How that was funded I’m not sure. The US aid was there and us in

Phuoc Tuy province. They were the only ones that I was aware of. There may have been others that I wasn’t aware of. What happened in other provinces I’ve no idea.

I think

the Red Cross would have had a presence in some way through the medical side of things ,which I didn’t come into contact with much, other than socially with the doctors I mixed with. So I really can’t say to what extent the Red Cross and other organisations like that came into play, so I’m not sure. It didn’t seem to be a very dominant role but I wasn’t mixing in that area so that might not be correct.

Yeah. There was a dentist there – I’m not quite sure of the details of the Dentcap program. You probably know more about it than I do. But I do remember we had education people there and trying to develop and support the development of education. What success they had – I’d sit in on some meetings and hear a little

bit about what they were doing, but it seemed to be more about building classrooms than anything. The engineers clearly had a dominant role because they were building things. The liaison officers moved around doing a whole range of things I guess, across various programs. There was a dentist with the 8 Field Ambulance, I remember, and he probably went out and did some local dentistry

bits and pieces early in the piece for the locals, as would have the medical people. There was a guy that we had, a medical officer attached to civil affairs, but he seemed to largely work through hospitals and existing infrastructure to try to support that in some way. So yeah there was quite a diverse range. And I think the emphasis within the unit changed. It

started up with one sort of mind set about how things could be best done in ’67 and by the time we left the emphasis had shifted a bit more towards the agriculture, and other things declined. So it was trying to fit where resources and people and different programs, where they could have the best impact, I suppose.

Grudzinskas. Gedis Grudzinskas, yes. What would you like to know about Gedis?

He was a gynaecologist by training. He ended up being professor of gynaecology

in London and had a private practice – he’s still in private practice over there. He was based in Adelaide – I think he was Latvian. Probably from one of those people who came out post world war. I think he was Latvian or one of the eastern European states anyway. He was there as a bit of a medical liaison officer. We struck up

a pretty good friendship. There was a group of four of us, I suppose, that really got quite close. He helped out in medical emergencies and things like that in the 8 Field Ambulance from time to time and fulfilled a role liaising with the hospitals, in terms of how they could support supplies and services and expertise that’s needed to do whatever had to be done.

The fine detail I’ve never really gleaned about what Gedis was doing. He did spend a fair bit of time in Saigon. He had assumed a leadership role, a sort of a medical over seeing role for a period there so he shifted down to Saigon for a while before he went home. He got married over there by the way.

Which, if you want to get to some of those social interesting things, we can get to those in due course.

No. She flew into Saigon and they got married at the Australian Embassy.

Yeah.

We were all in the one province.

In Phuoc Tuy province, so he worked around the various areas that we went around but probably spent more time down at Vung Tau in the hospital down there; and there was a local hospital in Ba Ria, so his circles didn’t cross over with ours directly, though every now and then we did. His was a medical emphasis and mine was agriculture and often they didn’t cross over much. So the relationship really became

through friendship, because we lived adjacent to each other in tents, rather than professional interaction.

I guess so. I think we all had a sense, or at least my understanding was

that we all pretty much had a sense that we were there to support the local services develop, rather than to take over and become the local service, because that was never going to work. Sooner or later we were going to go home and when we leave we leave a big hole. So it’s better to try and reinforce, encourage, stimulate the local networks of whatever they be – medical, agricultural or education to try to encourage them to advance in their

own cause for themselves. So that was really the whole emphasis of the whole unit. At least that was my sense of it.

I suppose it’s fair to say

that when beer was only twenty cents a can in those days, there was a fair bit of beer consumed – socially when you were off duty. We had some good times in the officers’ mess. In our little Court that I described that we constructed, we had some pretty good times in there as well. And like all young men I suppose every now and then we overindulged. The other thing which is probably useful

in terms of social life – every now and again we’d go down to Saigon. The one New Year that I was there we went to the British Embassy in Saigon. They were looking for some young officers to go and help balance up the numbers at their embassy New Year’s Eve party. So we went down there. So there was a few upsides to the whole exercise. We stayed at a hotel in Saigon and went to the New Year’s Eve party.

Then caught the conservative British out a little bit because we started celebrating new year from every time zone, from New Zealand right through to Western Australia, and they couldn’t understand why they had so many new years in one night. I’m not sure. I don’t think we made a lot of terrific friends out of that night. But nonetheless we socialised a bit. Occasionally we’d visit the United States Aid Headquarters in Saigon

and mix with them and had a couple of parties in some of their apartments. They had pretty good facilities. The Americans seemed to be well supplied with just about everything. So yeah we had some pretty reasonable times I suppose. The guy who engineered a fair bit of that was this Craig Mitchell I was telling you about, who’s an interesting story in his own right. And he was the

liaison officer at that time and a brigadier I think was developing a friendship with a woman in the British embassy, so it was through that relationship they rounded up a few blokes to go down to help celebrate their new year’s eve party. I’m not sure the brigadier would get us to go along again. But nonetheless….

To me you see, Craig, I suppose he’d be my best mate now, but he epitomises to me

a whole lot of the things about Vietnam. See, Craig went over there as a troop commander in cavalry. So he went through the experience of fighting the combat war. He’s lost a lot, some of his mates in some of those combat events and been through the situation where he’s had to basically try to gather body parts off trees and bits and pieces to find

enough to send home and write letters back. A young guy, he’s only my age. He’s been through a lot. He got blown up and nearly died in Vung Tau. Didn’t want to go home so he came back and stayed for a second tour over there as a liaison officer of a brigadier. That’s where I really met him. So there’s a guy who’s been through the combat side of things, but since Vietnam he’s come back and he’s

been very helpful to a lot of the guys who’ve suffered from whatever trauma they might be going through. And he’s done a whole range of things, and tried to help other guys pick up the pieces even though he’d been through such terrific trauma himself. And I only single him out because I know of what he’s done and what he continues to do. And I’m sure there are many others who I didn’t know who have been through worse and have done more.

But he seems to capture the spirit of the guy who done it tough, been through the hard yards and is very supportive of that sort of brethren of Vietnam vet. So I think people like that deserve a fair bit of respect for what they do. We meet quite frequently and still have a few beers. But we don’t talk about the old days and the war these days. But he’s one I think which epitomises that Vietnam,

vet in the best possible way, where he’s given a lot back after he’s got back from Vietnam – to support the other guys.

No. Not directly. His drinking ability was of use to the civil affairs unit on occasion and that’s about it. It was in a social context we came together and we had

a bit of fun together. But he had been around too, and a lot of the places we visited he knew, so he was able to get me a bit of background information about the true circumstances out there. But a very generous bloke in a lot of ways. He’d been through the hard yards.

No. Not really. I was a bit unusual.

I don’t recall feeling homesick anyway. Maybe I was having too good a time at some stages. So Vietnam itself in a social context wasn’t all negative because we do have a social life and when you weren’t working. And if the contacts, people weren’t dying and you were able to relax a little bit, you could have a bit

of good fun. So there was a mix of that. Occasionally incidents happen, like one night we were in the officers’ mess. I think it was Christmas Eve or something like that. An incident had happened at one of the sergeants’ messes and a few guys died, and I was sitting with the doctors and they all immediately got up and left and I went and attended to things. So that was the sort of world you were living in. You might go from having a nice pleasant dinner to being urgent action.

Very much like the MASH [Television program] thing. So I had a lot of respect for the doctors who worked in those environments. Another thing was that every now and again we went on R&R [Rest and Recreation] – it wasn’t called R&R – we went on leave down to Vung Tau. There was a little camp down there which had a bit of accommodation and a swimming pool and basically had a bit of time out. So we’d mix around to a few of the restaurants in Vung

Tau as well. Lovely little French restaurant I remember down there. Because Vietnam had a lot of French influence through it, so some of the cuisine is quite superb and that French influence stuff in particular which I appreciated. So yeah, I mean it would be wrong to paint everyone’s experience in Vietnam as just being facing the bullets and fighting, those things. There were some social aspects to it as well.

Although the guys who were out in the combat roles, they really did it tough when they were out there. They knew they’d done a day’s work when they were out there and lucky to get back.

Yeah. And I met up with a couple of the mates I knew – people I knew from South Australia for instance that are over there. One I played basketball with.

If he was in camp I’d try to find him and socialise with him a little bit to say “G’day”, give him some encouragement. So yeah you’d come across those sort of guys. And you’d understand if they’d been out and doing it really tough they’d come back and they’d have a bit of time off and they’d play up a little bit, which is quite understandable. So the little bit of larrikin behaviour comes out of that, that’s fine by me.

Yes.

You saw occasional bits of behaviour and people used the brothels down there if they hadn’t seen women for a long time, so yeah, all that happened.

But I don’t remember anybody really getting terribly out of hand too much. It’s usually if you have too much alcohol you go to sleep, so it’s only a short period of time that you might be aggressive through that period, then the fog takes over and you go to sleep. I was never an aggressive one with alcohol anyway. I just quietly

drifted off. But I don’t think there was all that bad stuff going on, but everyone would have their own stories and maybe I was mixing in the officers’ mess and things like that, so those sorts of behaviour weren’t really appreciated, so you needed to behave yourself a little bit.

There was a sense – this is in Vietnam – when we get back from Vietnam in the follow up I’ll say some more about it. But I found that some of the experienced

soldiers had a little bit of hesitation, I guess, and probably quite rightly, at having young inexperienced people coming in and either having a command role over them or whatever. So I think there was a little bit of a sense of that. There was also a sense that people like myself who weren’t in combat roles were regarded as the base wallahs and that sort of – what do they call us? Pogos.

Things like that. People who weren’t out there fighting. So there was some of that. You can imagine when these guys are out there doing tough and dodging bullets and mines and whatever, and when they’re doing it really tough and they run out of rations and we’re back there sipping on a beer and having a nice meal and having a shower, I can understand that they’d rather be back there than out there. So it was a little bit of that

where the people who didn’t have a combat role were given a little bit of negativity. But I don’t want to over play it because I understand the circumstance that that would arise.

Just that you were stuck at the base. I’m not sure how the name, the genesis of pogo came about but my mate, Craig, used it just a few weeks ago. I haven’t heard that for a long time.

“Bloody Pogos.”

Base wallah. Yeah. You were wallowing around on a base and not going out there and doing the real work. So there was a little bit of that. I mean, it’s worth documenting, but I wouldn’t make too much of it.

Yeah. But I wouldn’t like to see it blown out of proportion.

Because there were good reasons. If I had been in their role and I suppose one of the things is that I had no choice on where I went. I mean, I was assigned to where I went and that was the role I had. I could well have gone to one of the battalions and ended up there trying to be a platoon commander of a group of guys going out and doing the fighting. I suppose it’s just the way the draw went, with respect to that. So there are people who have worked on base

were there for no other reason, and that was the job they were assigned. They could just as easily have been out there. So it wasn’t by design that we were there. We were just allocated tasks. But I can appreciate that when you’re crawling around trying to dodge bullets and you’re covered in mud and slush and it’s pouring down with rain and you’re bloody cold and you’re hungry and you’re tired and you think about all the boys back there just having a nice beer in the mess, you think, ‘Yeah.

I’d rather be there. Why can’t they have a turn out here?’ So it’s eminently understandable. So not something to be made too much of I don’t think.

In the wet sometimes when it rained it rained really hard, so you might be stuck in your tent for a while and you couldn’t get out and do anything. Sometimes the roads might be impassable

and so you end up just stuck. So you had to find some other things to do. So it was a bit like in any environment. Right now in Adelaide we’ve had constant days of rain and that sort of thing. People get a bit of cabin fever just about. They like to see a bit of sun and get out and they get stuck inside. So it’s the same sort of thing that you’d feel up there.

You’d do some reading and do some listening to records or you’d try to socialise with the blokes and do something. Try to do something constructive anyway. The other thing which we did get involved in was a basketball tournament which you might like to know about in due course.

What happened was the free world forces decided to have a basketball

tournament. It was in January of 1971. The Australians decided to put in a team and I think we had about a week or fortnight’s training before this tournament began and most of us hadn’t played before and I ended up captain of this team. Gedis Grudzinskas was playing as well. We went up and played against the South Koreans. Each of those players had a black belt karate.

So they were supreme athletes. And then the Vietnamese had a pretty much a professional team. Then we played against the Philippines guys, their little team I think it was, the New Zealanders had a team – we played a tournament in Saigon in January. And the Americans had a team of course with a whole heap of ex professional players and the Harlem Globetrotter

types and all that sort of stuff. And we didn’t win obviously, but we did okay. Had a bit of fun. But that was a good ten day break up in Saigon playing basketball which is probably not what the guys out in the fields shooting bullets and facing them want to hear, but it was a fact of life. We ended up going to play a basketball tournament up in Saigon. And I think it really worked well. I do remember developing a very close relationship with the South Korean

basketballers. We couldn’t communicate at all, but once we’d had a few drinks, somehow the body language – we seemed to be able to understand each other enough and they were very friendly and they gave me a flag which I rather treasure these days. In fact they were instrumental in saving some of our guys who were in Saigon in one of the markets during the day, and some of the bad guys were seen to be

shaping up to try and have a go at our fellas and then these big, tall South Koreans came across the market area and the bad guys disappeared pretty quick. So they came back to the hotel and had a few beers and got to know each other without being able to understand each other. It’s a bit surreal. But they were terrific people.

They had a combat role somewhere. Some of them did. They probably would have had a whole range of roles in liaison or whatever. Maybe even the South Koreans brought them in just for the tournament. I don’t know. But none of them had a presence in Phuoc Tuy. So all of these guys we met were operating outside of Phuoc Tuy province. But it was useful and I suppose the South Vietnamese

government were using it as a bit of a PR [Public Relations] exercise, staging a tournament and getting people along.

They used a basketball stadium and I can’t remember the name of it. A cement basketball court which just had a round robin tournament on it. We’d drive along to that and people came to watch us play which was quite remarkable.

Anyway. That was a bit of fun. And helped us understand a bit of the lifestyle in Saigon then too which was probably not all that dissimilar to what it is now. Wall to wall motorbikes and very busy roads and things like that and some lovely French restaurants. In fact Gedis negotiated his wedding reception at a French restaurant in Saigon.

He and Jackie were married at the embassy and then we had the reception at a restaurant in Saigon which was beautiful. It was one of those fish bouillabaisse dishes that we dined on when we negotiated the deal. And I think it was a couple of cases of Australian champagne paid for the reception or something like that. So it was pretty handy in those days. So yeah lovely

contrasting sorts of things. You could have these really top flight restaurants and also the quite poor roadside store people pushing out little bits of food and whatever. So that was the experience up in Saigon – basketball.

I think it was the Embassy Hotel, I think it was called in those days, which is probably just over the road from

the palace where if you remember in ’72 the tank came through and the communists took over the place. We were over the road from there when everything happened. Not when. We stayed there in ’71 and in I think it was ’72 it all happened. Twelve months later or so.

No. Because they were married by the

ambassador. So it was just social. All his mates rolled up for the wedding. I was a friend so I got to go along as well. And Jackie, his wife, she’d been doing some study in Italy I think and they decided to save all the hassles of various family issues back home, that they’d get married in Saigon on the way home. That’s what they did. They spent a couple of nights together

and she went back to Australia and he followed when he left. I think it might have been a month or two later.

No. Not really. When you went down to Vung Tau

you’d be in casual gear I would think. In Saigon you messed around in casual gear. Yeah. So it wasn’t uniform all the time. If you were on duty you’d be in uniform. So I was in uniform a fair bit of the time if I went down to Saigon for one reason or another. So it was a mixture of things.

I’m not sure what they had down there. It’s not a place that I went to do any work at all very often, so if they did I’m not sure where it was, or I don’t think I visited it very much. Sort of an army headquarters place in Saigon which I visited on occasions but that was more a general operational management function which is probably above just civil affairs – they had a multi functional thing.

I suppose one was I think John Gorton came up once and then Andrew Peacock came up. He was foreign minister I

think. We took him around to show him our pigsties and things like that. He showed a little bit of interest there. I think he had the whirlwind tour – typical politician. He did express – well he wanted to know how to price the boar on a testicle basis. In other words, how much did this boar cost and then he divide it by two so that was so much per ball.

About his only comment with respect to that I think. But they generally took an interest and I suppose in hindsight the politicians needed to be seen to be showing support for the troops up there. And that’s their function and role to go up and do that. So Andrew Peacock did a bit of a swing through. I don’t know whether it translated into any extra resources for the civil affairs unit or anything like that. But I doubt it.

Only briefly. “G’day, see you later,” sort of thing. I didn’t take much notice of the pollies [politicians] coming through. I probably wouldn’t either today.

I didn’t have a sense about how much publicity happened back home. I suppose any positives would have been publicised back home. Certainly some of the photographs that we took about our pig effort were published

around the place and one of them ended up in the War Memorial [Australian War Memorial, Canberra]. It’s still there. It’s probably lasted through a number of transitions through various reinventions of the Vietnam display in the War Memorial. But the extent to which we got publicity I really wasn’t aware of it. I anticipate the politicians would have tried to take whatever positives they could out of our efforts up there to promote

those around the country back home.

There’s a little photography unit there and I suppose there was a bit, but I don’t recall being involved directly in any PR campaign. Whatever we tried to do, or the stuff that I was associated with, it was largely trying to operate through the agricultural service and the local communities and so it was really a

grass roots communication development that we were trying to get going I think as much as anything. But once again I was not all that keen in promoting our agricultural unit as being the great saviours of South Vietnam agriculture. It was more to try and support the local agricultural service and have them being seen in their local community as having a positive contribution to make. So

once again taking a bit of a back seat. So I think if any publicity came out of it, the benefits would have been best if you promote what positive things we did back in Australia, and possibly would have been a little bit counterproductive in South Vietnam, where all we’d be saying is that we’re over here implementing new things or imposing new things on the local people when really it should be just supporting and developing them, as best they could.

Not particularly. It’s really just the way at least I believe it should have been. The real people that needed to make the difference were the people that were there. We always knew we were going to come home. So it’s best if they’re seen by their local communities as to being the infrastructure to which they ought to be going to for support.

So it’s not good us running around providing an alternative to their local infrastructure, because that’d be counterproductive. So it’s just a sense of doing the job well, rather than it being a propaganda issue.

No. Not really. I ended up I suppose after a while feeling fairly comfortable. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t alert, but I don’t feel as though anybody had something pointing at my head at any stage. So no, I didn’t have a sense of being fearful for my life on a ongoing basis.

We knew that we were in a war zone. And at the time I was there it wasn’t as fierce as it was in some of the contacts in the Sixties and whatever. So I don’t pretend I was there in one of the high contact periods. So I was probably a little bit more stable at that stage when I was there so that probably helped as well diffuse any sense of direct threat.

Yes. As I said earlier I mixed with a few of the mates that I knew and socialised with them when they were back on the base if I could. Went over and visited the odd mess to catch up with them sometimes. So yeah you mixed with them. You didn’t isolate yourself from them.

I didn’t think it was smart to try and encourage them to relive what they’d been through, so we basically talked about other things. And it might have come up where they explained a bit of action, but that’d be their choice and not mine. My recollection is after a few beers it was basically gibberish.

So it was more trying to unwind rather than trying to wind up.

Relative to the other guys who were out there doing the hard yards I don’t think there was any high degree of stress that I was up against. I suppose they and it’s quite minor would be

in the command post when you’re basically trying to put on the command map the locations of everybody. You want to make sure that the guys are where you put on the map where they really are and not somewhere else. So I was under a bit of pressure to make sure that they were right. And I felt a fair obligation with respect to that. Other than that I didn’t feel under any great stress at any stage.

Command post was manned twenty-four hours a day and you’d take your shift and there’d be the officers in charge of the command post basically managing the communications between the base and the soldiers out in whatever action or activity that’s going on outside the base. We needed to know exactly where

they were at all times. So they’d call in their position and we’d put them on a map. So if there are incidents that needed to be managed we knew where they were at all times. So part of my responsibility was to on my shift, in rotation with others – I wasn’t the only one doing this – to basically put those indicators up on the map where these various groups were. Reading of the various bits of paperwork that came through the command post.

And then try to verify those. On occasions where something happened and the officer in charge of the command post wasn’t confident that all the positions were right, you’d get called back in again to revise them all and do it all again just to make sure it’s right. So that you make sure that you have the co-ordinates right for the location of various people.

That really varied.

Some nights there might be only one or two groups out and other nights there might be quite a lot more. So it’s difficult to say. In terms of numbers it varied a lot depending on the assigned task and the action and who was out and who was doing what.

I can’t remember. I reckon probably about seven or eight months. Seven months. I don’t know. But I came back to Adelaide. I’m not quite sure why I came home, but I did. Probably to attend a wedding of a friend who I’d made friends with over in Vietnam. He’d come back and was getting married so I went to his wedding. Just veged out back home. And then went back again.

I think a couple of weeks. I think that’s what R and R was in those days. A lot of the guys went over to Hong Kong or other places, but I chose to come back to Australia. I still don’t know why I did that. But I did.

Okay. Nothing had changed much. People were the same I suppose.

I didn’t have a sense of anything untoward or whatever at that stage. No.

I didn’t take a huge amount of notice of what was going on. I was up there doing a job and I was aware of the mood, of the anti-Vietnam movement starting to build which manifested Gough Whitlam in ’72 I think

it was, and then it was all over. I was aware of it happening but I wasn’t deeply involved in any of it and certainly my family and friends weren’t throwing it in my face at the time.

Yes. I would have come home in uniform, yeah. And gone back in uniform. I

was on official duty travelling. But when I was here I didn’t wear it. No.

I was on leave. So why would I?

In what sense? Are you trying to get me to say what how people reacted to me coming through in a uniform?

The reactions I got

to the Vietnam thing happened after I got home, after I’d come back. When I was on leave none of that happened. So maybe you could ask me those questions later. I had no sense of when I was walking through airports of any negativity. Maybe I was naïve to it at the time. But I don’t recall anything being a problem. I was met by my family and they took me home and we had a cup of tea and that was it.

I was home for a fortnight.

Well I was a young guy, first time I’d ever been out of the country I went to Vietnam and here am I first time I get a chance to go on a holiday I decide to come back here. I thought that was probably pretty stupid. I should have gone maybe to some other place to experience another culture and things like that. But it was just the way it happened.

I think probably the motivation to come home was I tried to bring home a fair bit of equipment in terms of stereo system and things like that. So tried to bring a bit of gear home that I accumulated. I think that was probably the main reason I came home.

Back to Vietnam? Nothing really. Pies. Is that the reason for that question? One of the

icon things in South Australia is a pie floater which is a bowl of pea soup with a pie turned upside down in it, and I think a heap of tomato sauce on top. And so I approached the local pie manufacturer, were Cowies, which no longer exist. They gave me a couple of dozen frozen pies to take back to Vietnam. So when we got back there I just rounded up all the South Australian blokes I knew and we had a

pie floater night back in our little Court area with a couple of beers and they thought it was a nice treat.

I think it was West End.

I think we ended up with South Australian beer but it could have been VB because that was mainly the diet that we were on at the time.

In terms of that little group I could only

round up I reckon there was probably ten or so it seemed to be. They were the only ones that were around at the time, we were having our pie floater night. There were probably other South Australians at different units I wasn’t aware of. So it was just the group of guys that I knew of at the time. I just rounded up those I knew. I’m sure there were others there from South Australia I didn’t know.

I thought, ‘Well I’m back for a while. I’ll just see out what we’re doing’. I think probably at that stage – I’m not sure when I found out I was coming home, they were going to disband the unit. When I left it was all going to wind up.

Planning for the withdrawal I imagine. But I had no problems. The only thing that I do remember and I still regret and I can’t remember this guy’s name, I did have a drink with a fellow before I came back to Adelaide on R and R and this guy was a forward observer for some artillery people and when I got back I’d heard that he’d been killed while I was away.

So that brought things home a little bit when I got back to Vietnam. So that was a bit sad for a while. But other than that it was back to normal duties really. That was what I was expecting. I was still on an adventure. I’m still less than a bit over twelve months out of university so a lot had happened in a short time.

No. Not really. I’d seen what the doctors had been doing. I hadn’t observed, but I knew what they were doing. I knew about Craig and his exploits. So no. There were plenty of examples. And when you’re in the command post you hear about what’s happening and things like that. So there was plenty of examples of where the impact of the war was quite real. It just didn’t affect me directly.

I paid visits from time to time. But no I didn’t got there a lot. My contact with the medical people was basically through a social context.

No. We didn’t plan anything other than this pig thing when I was there really. Because we knew, I think, we were coming to an end and there was no real point. Also once again this very strong ethos of the Vietnamisation program of getting the Vietnamese to

look after themselves. There was no point in really trying to implement any major things. Also, given the circumstance where as I explained a number of times the cultural and social context of Vietnam at that time, the rate of change was always going to be slow, particularly in that war environment. So I think we were doing probably as much as we could at that time.

And when you say the projects that I implemented – it’s very much that unit. I certainly don’t want to get the kudos of being the only one who did that. The ideas came from others and I just had a part to play in it. Certainly it’s any kudos goes to those people as much as me. All I should get out of it is an acknowledgement that I played a little bit of a part, that’s all.

I’ve been areligious all my life. Although mother tried to get me confirmed once I think. So I don’t have a religious framework. So the way I approach all

that is if others do, that’s terrific. I just accept their religious framework. So really it gave me – it was probably a positive in a way that I wasn’t affected by in any way or judgemental of any particular form of religion because that’s where my standpoint was, just plain neutral.

There’s nothing that I at least I was told of or whichever made me – not that I recall anyway. I mean, you just respect people as persons. I don’t think there was any cultural traditions either religious things –

they have their ceremonies and whatever I suppose, but you just go along with, that’s the way they do their thing. I don’t think it had any influence on me at all. I just try to treat people with respect.

It was making slow progress. Though I think there was a sense that you knew that if the free world forces left, there was a sense that there was always going to be this swing of the communist party down through, and so all that would go for nought. So that was my sense of it. That whilst we were trying to build up with all the best will in the world

that if that did occur then the communist regime would take over all of those functions. So I don’t have a sense that what we did had a lasting effect because of what happened subsequently to us withdrawing from the war.

Not frustrating because it was just reality. I mean,

I felt a lot of sympathy for the South Vietnamese who are struggling to try and build a life and you just knew that it was going to get all rolled over again and probably with a lot of reprisals for those people who had been interacting closely with the free world forces. So I suspect there was a lot of sad things happened after we left.

They were still quite a long way. You’re in the middle of a war zone and a stagnant economy. Subsistence agriculture. There just really weren’t the resources there to really grow quickly. So when you’re talking about an aid program it’s not one

or two years, it’s a long haul. So I would think that it would have needed another decade of constant support and effort, which might have been shortened if there wasn’t a war which was basically intervening and slowing a whole lot of things down, because obviously when you’re trying to deal with that, that takes precedence over a whole lot of other things politically and in a range of ways. So I would have thought it would have taken

quite a bit more. I think we made some good progress with the limited resources that they had. And so I don’t think there’s anything to be ashamed of in the effort that the civil affairs unit put in, but I just don’t see that it was going to be changing things dramatically over the near period after we left, and that it would still take considerable effort to keep that support going. You just can’t change economies

as quickly – particularly from a subsistence background where you can get change. If the war had finished and the communists had stayed where they are, and the young guys came back and started farming the land, there would have been a good long period of reassimilation and readjustment just in the social context, let alone economic development stuff. So I think there’s a complex dynamic at work there which would have taken a fair while to

make significant inroads into the progress that you’re talking about. That might be a negative view. A politician might put a different spin on it. But I think that’s probably the practicality of it.

Some areas were insecure so you just couldn’t go there.

So you were limited to the areas that you could work, those areas which had a reasonable degree of security so you could work safely. So they were the obvious limitations. Others were in terms of South Vietnam; a lot of their resources are being devoted to the war effort, let alone social infrastructure development and economic development and things like that. So basically they were in a holding pattern

while they’re fighting a war and we’re trying to help as much as we could. So it was a little bit difficult times for them I’m sure.

No. Not in my time there. No. I think the areas that we worked were pretty well established secure areas when we were there. They didn’t retract – well, after we all left

it all got run over so would have been insecure then I imagine.

Occasionally we might stay. We might go to one of the little villages on the extremities. There was a compound. I think it was Binh Hoa or somewhere like that. We’d fly up by helicopter and we might camp at the American

compound overnight and just stay the night and come back to do some business. But other than that, usually not. We were just out for the day and back again. And the province, at least the secure areas, were all within a out and back day trip so that worked okay.

Me and the interpreter and often my

Chinese comrade, Chu. So the little team would go out together. And my driver might be the other one so there might end up being four of us if we’re in the vehicle, or if we’re just going by helicopter somewhere, he could stay back and I could go with the interpreter and Chu and the three of us would go.

First of all, they had Americans.

Secondly, they had American rations. That’s about all. It’s interesting to listen to the different way of speaking and how they approach life. Things like that. I think they tended to be a little more casual about living in a war zone than the Australians. I think the Australians were a bit more diligent than some of the Americans. But that’s only a personal view. I’m sure others’d argue strongly differently to that. But I found

that most of the Americans were very friendly sort of guys. So there was never any problems with those people.

I think that – now you’re asking me to comment about the active part of the fighting the war and really I’m not competent to do that so I’m only going to give you hearsay. But my sense was that

the Australians were much more disciplined in their approach to the technical implementation of their tasks and things like that, and much more focused on the task at hand, and much less inclined to carry a little radio around blasting in your ear while you’re on patrol and things like that; so they’d go out taking it seriously where I heard that some of the American platoons were a little more casual. So

I can’t verify that that’s the case. I’m just reflecting on what people told me.

Yeah. They were behind these big compounds. I had to say I didn’t – maybe I just didn’t have fear in me at that stage, I don’t know, but I just didn’t feel fear at any stage.

Had I been confronted by a fire fight it might have been a whole lot different.

Tinned stuff. Tinned meat. Those sorts of things. Plenty of chocolate bars. That’s about it. Biscuits and tinned meat. That’s about all I recall out of their

rations. They could cook up some stuff I suppose.

It was pretty hard for me to do that because I didn’t confront any, so once again it’s hearsay and reflecting on the comments of others, so I don’t think you want to take what I’m about to say as a record

of the reality. But I had a sense that they were pretty creative about how they got around secretively, and how they ambushed and things like that. They were pretty ruthless. They were an insurgent force, where they might be in the market place during the day, but fighting you at night and things like that. So I think they were pretty dedicated to combat or

fight for their beliefs at the time. But you really need to speak to people who are in a combat role and confronted those people directly to learn more about their tactics, because all I’m doing is talking about what I might have heard about over a beer, and that’s probably in the fog of over thirty years of not thinking about it. So I don’t think that’s probably not for me to comment on very much I don’t think.

As I said earlier, we had our weapons with us at all times. That was the only precaution we took. We let people know who knew where we were. We would have reports about

activities of the Vietcong where they were or that sort of thing. And if there was an insecurity issue that might arise. So we’d probably take those sorts of precautions into account if we were planning to go somewhere. But I can’t remember there being occasions where we didn’t go somewhere for any particular reason. And as I said, I think I was in Vietnam at the time when

the level of combat was much reduced from what it was in the really heavy days in the Sixties.

Yeah. Every now and again you see a guy dressed in black moving through the marketplace pretty quickly or whatever and you’d imagine that was somebody. But there’s not much you could do about it those occasions. If he was at the other end of the marketplace and you’ve got to get through

a whole lot of people to try and do something there was no real reason to apprehend the guy other than him looking suspicious. So there wasn’t a lot of that and I didn’t mix a lot in those sort of environments. So I wasn’t a spy or anything like that, so I just went around and tried to do the agricultural stuff which took me mainly to local village people and who were there. So I didn’t get a sense of

a lot of suspicious stuff going on. Maybe I just wasn’t looking hard enough either.

No. I didn’t have intelligence in essence. I was just there doing my agriculture work so I didn’t have a strategic role at all. I may have and only on my rotation on the command post I would have known where all our people were the night before but by the next morning

they would have all moved from there. So there was nothing I would have had in terms of intelligence to even think about trying to ascertain information from other people with respect to their combat troops. So basically we just stuck with our agriculture pursuits. That wasn’t our role. There were other people out there doing that sort of stuff.

Occasionally we visited

Vung Tau too – there were some fish farms down there which we had a look at which actually people are still trying to put up these days. It’s really where you basically grow a piggery – build a piggery over the top of a dam if you like, and then all the waste material drops into the dam and then the fish grow in the dam underneath. So you have a nice little cycling system of pork and fish growing on one small patch of land.

Those sorts of systems work pretty well down there to grow fish. Probably doesn’t sound all that nice when probably fish are feeding on pig shit, but nonetheless we had a look at a few systems on occasion. But we largely went to Vung Tau for leave.

It was a piggery structured over a little dam of water and they grow fish in the water and so it was a dual system. So you basically a bit of a closed system. You feed the pigs, the pigs feed the fish and then you feed off the fish.

Yeah. That’s it. They seem to be working quite well down there. That was none of our doing. We didn’t set those up. It was the Vietnamese that done that.

They might have got ideas about it from other places. Curiously only a couple of years ago the chief of South Australian Research and Development Institute was waxing lyrical about how his institution was helping some South East Asian country develop these piggery/fish farm enterprises and I said, “Well that was being done thirty years ago by the Vietnamese themselves.” So he was a bit taken aback at that I think.

That’s often the case in agriculture. It’s usually been done before somewhere.

I’ve no idea. I think that’s been tradition with them for a long time.

I don’t recall.

I thought it was a pretty neat idea. I thought, you don’t have much space to grow things and basically you got two enterprises on the one piece of land. And you’re

only feeding one part of the cycle. So you feed the pigs and the fish are feeding off the waste and I thought that was pretty good recycling and an environmentally friendly way of doing things. So I was pretty impressed.

I’m sure there were plenty of those. That was an example where you could adapt that technology in Australia in some form or other. I didn’t pursue it when I got back but yeah I’m sure they had things to give back if we were looking well enough. But once again it was pretty limited because of – during the war a whole lot of their infrastructure was decimated a bit.

So they were trying to claw their way back from a pretty low base, but there are still some examples of some good technology that they developed themselves. See, that might have been part of their history. It might have been a French influence. Vietnam’s had a long history of people having influence over it. So it could have come from anywhere.

No. There was nothing.

Nothing that comes to mind immediately.

It’s hard to ascertain. At a practical level they knew how to grow rice and the basic crop husbandry and animal husbandry techniques. You’ve got

to realise too that probably a lot of the farmers, so called, the masters of the land might have been off fighting the war. So a lot of it might be left to either very young people or wives or things like that. So I think there was probably a mix of skills and abilities. But there was a basic understanding of basic crop and animal husbandry. They were all able to get a rice crop in and they were all able to breed their pigs. They knew how to do that. And things like that.

So it was basic. In terms of understanding the modern elements of crop agronomy and pest control and weed management and disease management, they were probably pretty well behind in some of those aspects – what varieties to grow, some of those technologies. There’s huge potential for that area to develop had there been the ability to absorb that and

the ability to implement that both from a capital infusion, and also just if the war had stopped long enough for them to make the change. So yeah I suppose I’d say they had a basic understanding of crop and animal husbandry. But a lower recognition of the more recent advances in technology at that time.

They would have as part of the crop husbandry

aspects. They would have some basic elements of disease control. But that science is still going, always going and always improving, so there’s new techniques of dealing with that. Some of which are growing different varieties which are resistant to the diseases, so you don’t have to put the sprays on. So there’s some of those things where they wouldn’t be aware of, well the latest rice varieties coming out of the Philippines Area Rice Research Institute. So

they wouldn’t have been aware of those. That’s what I’m saying, they would have been struggling to get access to that information particularly in a war environment where communication wasn’t all that strong from other research institutions around the world, for instance.

There were a range of fungal diseases and insect pests up there. There was quite a diverse range. I don’t think it’s really much point in trying to specify particular ones. They are those that are typical for the tropical environments. So they had to deal with all of those.

So there’d be root diseases in their crops and foliar diseases and insects as well they have to deal with from time to time. It’s part and parcel of growing crops.

No. There’s nothing that really stuck in my mind, but a lot of them I hadn’t really come across before so it’s a matter of learning when I was up there. But there’s none of them which were dominant that I think was worth recording.

No. I stayed pretty healthy up there. Might get the odd cold, that’s about all, but I stayed quite healthy. Certainly nothing to complain about.

In Vietnam.

Not quite sure how the announcement was made that the decision was taken, that when I was to go back to Australia that the ag unit would wind down. It was part of the civil affairs unit withdrawing from Nui Dat. I think it was already on the plans of withdrawal happening and so I came back in I think it was September ‘71 and I was the last officer there and so I suppose

became a bit of a figurehead or a symbol of the end of the agricultural contribution – at least with the local community. And so there were a few little banquets and things like that where I was the guest of honour. But it was, as I try to get across I think, it’s more symbolism in me representing everybody else who’d come before me rather than it just being me. So we went through a few of those little things and they gave me a nice

certificate of commendation, which once again I think though it’s got my name on it, it’s really in recognition for the others of all of those people who contributed to the ag thing up there. I got a sense that there was a bit of reluctance amongst the local ag service that we developed a relationship with, that we were leaving. I think they were pretty genuine in expressing regret, appreciation of what the unit had done

and they were appreciative also of the friendships that we developed, I think. So there was a bit of regret that it was all coming to an end. Then I basically got a plane out of Saigon and flew back to Sydney.

There was no-one to hand over to. Because basically I was the last officer in the ag unit. So

that unit was being wound down. So the decision was taken when I left it was over. So there was no handover needed.

That was done through those little banquet celebration things. But once again I don’t want it to be seen to be that we were up there running a program separate from the local ag service and then got it to a stage where we

just handed it over to them. I go back to the point where really our role was trying to support them develop in their own sense. So all that was happening is that support was going to disappear. So it wasn’t a handover, just basically a withdrawal really of that support effort that was going into them. If I’d had a choice I would have

liked to have seen more of those Chinese people move in and take over a stronger role up there with a wider range of disciplines – horticulture, animal husbandry, land management. A whole range of those sorts of people moving through to fulfil the function that Chu and Yang had. Because they I think they just made a profound difference up there. Much greater than we could contribute.

I think there was a suggestion in one report I saw that any future effort would be handed over to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs who would try to encourage these Chinese people to have a stronger role in the technical position. I think there became a recognition that because of our training in southern Australian,

or Australian farming systems, that unless you’re imbued in training and education in the tropics you probably had a limited contribution within the time frame that you were there of twelve months or less. So the Chinese guys were a better option linguistically and once again understood the cultural and social contexts that they were delivering the messages in. So there was no official handover, but if there was to be a

following path, then I reckon that would have been the best one.

From over there I think – it might sound a bit repetitive, but I think the lessons are that if you going into an aid program then you need to have people with you on your aid program who understand the cultural and social context that you’re trying to help with,

so that whatever you do really fits in with that, so that the local people understand and welcome it and so that they're at no stage seen to be imposing something on the local people. And I think also it’s trying to – I think we learnt the lesson, or at least my sense of it all was, that we were trying to encourage the local services to develop the best they could under very trying conditions in a war environment.

And I think we were on the right track there so I think that was a lesson that we developed along the way. We probably got to there, built on an accumulation of knowledge and a number of people based on their experiences from the early days in the civil affairs unit where the engineers and others started off doing particular functions, and then we moved more to the supporting role I think rather than trying to do things for people.

Basically supporting the self development efforts. So I think they’re the messages that need to come from it. And also you need to be able to communicate fluently in the local language I think. That doesn’t mean that there’s not a role for adapting modern technology that might emerge out of Australia into an environment up there. But I think it needs to be done through the right people.

And at a rate of implementation, which is consistent with what they’re willing to accept, and their rate of capacity for change. We were stuck with an environment up there where the local Vietnamese really had no scope to change rapidly. So it was really just very small incremental steps of improvement that we were able to help them with. And so that was the difficulty. But that was a war environment. Maybe you could

make more rapid progress if the war wasn’t a millstone if you like, around progress in that sense.

I submitted monthly reports and that was about it. I suppose I put in my final monthly report and that would have been consolidated in the unit’s files.

I don’t recall writing a big final report summarising the whole bit. I think it might have been fortnightly or monthly reports that I wrote each time. But as I said, we were winding down and moving out so there was a study commissioned (which started before I got there) by a guy from one of the universities, a post doctoral fellow from one of the

universities in Australia, who was sent up there to do a study. He would have had a report of some sort which would have consolidated the activities of the unit and possibly it was on the basis of that report that they decided to wind up the ag unit at that particular time, when I left. I don’t think that was recognition that we’d all failed, by the way. It was just a matter of just the reality that we all knew that it was starting to come to an end and that a better

way of implementing aid programs is – there are probably better ways to do it with the threat of a war coming through. Or at least intensifying with withdrawal of troops. Whether we knew that then I don’t know. But maybe some people did, but there seemed to be a bit of movement along those lines that when ag moved out, that would be the end of it for our presence.

I was met by a very nice lady at Sydney and that was very nice. I got off the plane. If you’re looking for – there was no overt animosity demonstrated to me when I got off the plane at all as a Vietnam veteran. Not that I recall anyway. People were tolerant. I suppose if any of that negativity

manifested, it was a bit later where I became aware of a range of emotions. One is it seemed to consolidate, particularly when I got back to Adelaide, that there was some resentment of Vietnam veterans. It really wasn’t terribly overt and rude and in your face, but there was a subtext there where in the workplace there seemed to be some resentment that you might have got a war home loan, some benefits out of

attending the war. And there was a bit of an aftermath of the negativity that the Australian community held for Vietnam veterans. I think that was part of the irony of things where maybe the Australian public were concerned about those involved in a combat role up there, but even those who weren’t involved in a combat role were still washed up in that same milieu if you like of negativity. Then there was another curious element as

well, that when you were back home and within the returned soldiers themselves, that if you weren’t in a combat role that you were also given a lesser credence of a contribution to Vietnam as being one of those who were in the support roles, rather than a combat role. That manifested mainly on Anzac Days where, if you were a combat guy they’d tell all these stories, and if you weren’t a combat guy you were less welcome in some of those places or less

accepted. So I chose not to even bother to go to Anzac Day celebrations. We had one session amongst all our mates that we got in. We decided that possibly we’d all put in a lot of effort and then by then the bad guys had taken over and Saigon had fallen and all of that, so we decided that it didn’t amount to a hill of beans. There was a lot of people’s lives lost for no good purpose. In the outcome eventually. That shouldn’t belittle

all the effort that everybody put in on their way through, all that. There was a lot of people that did a lot of marvellous things. A lot of people were very courageous. Anyway, my sense – maybe I was over sensitive, but I felt in one sense there was the animosity from the general public if you like of being a Vietnam veteran, but there was also that curious internal thing that not being a combat soldier there was a bit of negativity as well. So it was a bit like a double whammy if you like. I don’t

worry at all about that now, but it probably meant that I have taken less interest in the reunions and all that sort of activity that seems to pervade still quite a lot of the people who were over in Vietnam and other wars. So I choose not to get involved in that side of it now. But the return to Sydney was quite amicable. I was met by friends and had a nice dinner and then flew back to Adelaide. Was met by my family and then basically tried to get back

in life.

Pretty much straight after I think, I got a discharge document. I think I was discharged at the end of September of ’71. So it was basically out of Vietnam, back home, discharge. So as I say it seemed it was quite a interesting eighteen month, two years, because I went from being a very

green uni student – graduate, if you like – all the way over there. So it was a pretty fast journey over a period of eighteen or twenty months or so. So I was discharged straight away, so I didn’t go back into the army at all.

Yes. I think I had some transitional issues. I think I was

unsettled for a good while. I think outwardly I probably didn’t show too much of a thing, but I’m sure my first marriage foundered because I married probably for the wrong reasons and wasn’t settled well enough when I was making those life choices at the time. Certainly have no regrets about the son that came out of that relationship. He’s absolutely fabulous. But it was – I’m just

trying to paint the picture that I think a lot of the people who came back were unsettled in a whole range of ways which they couldn’t quite explain or understand. And maybe made some decisions which didn’t turn out for the best. So yeah I reckon I took a while to settle down. I went back into the South Australian department of agriculture into agriculture research. And that’s where I’ve been.

I had been doing that – for another couple of decades after that. So once you get back into those sorts of projects you slowly assimilate back into lifestyle of South Australia I guess, which is a pretty comfortable life I guess.

I think

being exposed to those other cultures, or the culture of south Vietnam, seeing just the hardship that some of those people lived in and lived – what I’m trying to say is, that they lived with a great deal of pride and honour and self respect, and I think it was a good lesson that some people do it tough but they can

still have a bit of class about them, if you like. So I think that I found that I became more understanding of people across a whole range of walks of life. I probably became less attracted to the people who like to demonstrate the symbols of achievement – you know, like the flash cars and the high spending money rollers. I’m less attracted to those people and much

prefer those people who are quiet achievers and who have plenty of dignity and respect for others. So I think I learnt a few of those things out of that. Probably made me a more rounded person in a lot of ways. Had I not gone to Vietnam I would have just gone through a straight track – I don’t know where I would have ended up, probably in the department of agriculture because I had a cadetship with them to go through university. So

I suppose I learned some lessons out of that. I think I got some insights into – and this is probably retrospectively – aid programs and how you implement aid in developing countries and how you don’t impose things on people, but help them develop themselves. I think some of those insights came from my experience up there. I also think I got some insights into the general character of people. And it goes to these

understanding of those people who in the combat role who had some reservations or negativity towards myself who was in a non combat role. I don’t want to overplay this because it sounds as though I’m super sensitive to it and I probably was for a period, but I’m not so now. But it gave me an insight into those sort of dynamics of human nature which makes me quite easily take or leave people

if I think they’re over the top – I just leave them alone. So probably I’ve ended up a more complex character too. Who knows?

Look,

I understood – I felt I was with everybody else when basically it was the Vietnam vet and the general public. I guess I felt most keenly when the combat veterans had that sort of negativity to people who weren’t in combat roles. That caught me a bit by surprise because we all knew that it was basically no fault of our own that we were put into those particular roles.

But I got over that I think. I’ve probably rattled on too long about it here which probably in this dialogue would make me look as though I’m very sensitive to it. But I’ve made it known to a lot of my old mates who had combat roles that that’s how I feel and they’re understanding of it, and they acknowledge that sort of thing existed. But I thought it was a bit curious that would happen because you end up getting basically two sides in a period of your life

when you’re a little bit sensitive and unsettled to things. But I think we’re all over that now.

No. Not directly. We were aware from the communications and letters from back home that some of this sort of activity was going on. How did that

play out over there? I think we were all too busy doing the job without worrying too much about what protests are going back over here. At least that was my sense of it. Probably a bit – I don’t recall even having a sense of disappointment that that was the way the Australian public felt, because I think they get carried up on occasions and put different political stirrings which were what

get people washed away. I felt I always had the support of my family which is important anyway. So that was never going to be an issue. And indeed they were. And so I don’t think there’s much more I could add to that.

There have been the occasional ones, but nothing of

significance that required me to react in any way. But no there’s nothing I’d really want to hang your hat on that. And then most of those would have been by the combat veterans who were laying it on that you guys just had a good time back on base doing nothing. But that was the only thing where comments were made and they were done in a forum where you’d expect it to come up. But I’ve never

been in a situation that I can recall where Joe Public has come up and said, “Are you a Vietnam veteran and I cast aspersions on you for what you’ve done up there.” No. That’s never happened. But certainly in the work environment there was the sense around there, when I went back in there, of a general negativity to Vietnam veterans. People just didn’t want to talk about it or whatever. And I can understand why most veterans basically pulled their heads in and

buried their memories because nobody was willing to or interested in talking about it because of this general public negativity. That happened to me as well as it did to others. So I’m not unusual in any sense there.

No. I marched once. That was at the commemoration of the Vietnam memorial

in Canberra and I just happened to be there. I choose not to march these days. It’s not something I’ve ever done. I just don’t get into it. Maybe I could. Maybe I should. But I just haven’t got into the habit.

As a personal achievement. There’s nothing. See, everything I think that the ag unit did I think was basically a team effort and I place great store on the achievements that we did make was underpinned a lot by those Chinese technical people and we

provided a supporting role. So there’s nothing really there that I’d like to say if it wasn’t for Bob Hannam that wouldn’t have happened. I don’t think I’d be that silly to try and put a label like that on anything I would have done. From a personal sense I thing from a naïve kid who came out of uni not knowing much about tropical agriculture I just did the best I could with the limited

capabilities that I had. So I just don’t want to blow that out of proportion and I was part of the team and ended up having towards the end a bit of a leadership role and the guys who were all part of that unit contributed significantly in their own rights. So, no, there’s nothing I’d like to say. I think I get some recognition for being associated with the artificial insemination program and I suppose

I’m pleased that we didn’t let that fall over after Gordon Pound left and I had the leadership role at the time. So I’d probably take a little bit of credit for helping make sure that came to fruition, but once again it was a group of us who put all the things together. So I suppose that would be the one thing if anything.

The inspiration was really about people – this is the South Vietnamese people. There’s a couple of elements. One is the South Vietnamese people and just how they lived their life in a war zone, in a terrible environment, and often in abject poverty and whatever and how they managed to live a life with dignity

in that sort of environment. I thought that was quite inspiring. Wonderful people. The other parts of inspiration all came from the bravery from a lot of the Australian soldiers. You heard stories and I talked about my friend Craig Mitchell, and the sort of the bravery that he expressed and he wasn’t alone. There was a number of them. I think the courage that a lot of those guys displayed and I don’t know them all at all, but there was plenty of stories

about all the marvellous deeds they did, and the courage they displayed, and I think that was inspirational as well. And I think they carried on the tradition of the Australian soldier quite magnificently in Vietnam. Maybe I’m prejudiced, but I think the Australian soldier up there performed as well as any group of soldiers in the free world forces and probably better, and did their jobs much more professionally

than most, I think. So there’s a fair bit of inspiration in a lot of those things. Another bit of inspiration I think is just in the medical staff and how they managed those absolutely awful traumatised bodies and saved lives and rehabilitated people. I think the sort of things they did was just marvellous. And I think probably whilst it was very traumatic, it was probably marvellous training for their careers later on in

medicine. I think they could have handled anything after dealing with that. So I suppose there’s a range of elements of inspiration that came out of all of that.

No. I did think about it but I felt as though I needed to get a better grounding in agriculture and then in a wider range of agricultural pursuits. What I ended up doing is drifting into agriculture research and got very interested in that. So basically that became a priority, and I spent a fair bit of time in the Department of Agriculture, and ended up with a PhD doing agriculture research

in South Australia and that was quite rewarding for the time I was doing that. So possibly if I ever retire it might be nice to go back and try and do some aid work somewhere, but it’s not on the horizon at this stage.

No. There have been plenty of attempts to encourage people to go back there.

But I always had a sense which is quite curious I thought ‘I’ve been to Asia, I don’t need to go there now, so I’d rather go somewhere like Europe, because I’ve never been there, for instance. I’m getting on a bit and I’ll go over there in August of this year but I’d like to experience a few other cultures before I need to go back to the South Eastern Asian context again.

I’ve heard a number of people – the civil affairs unit and other units have had their little pilgrimages back to Nui Dat to see what they could find and things like that. I guess I’ve always had the sense of not looking back too much. I try and tend to draw a line and then move on somewhere else. That’s probably why I don’t march. I don’t get caught up in the memory industry

that goes on surrounding these sort of ceremonial events. So I tend to think about what’s coming next rather than what happened past. So I don’t have any sense of a need to do any pilgrimage up there just to relive old memories and things like that. I don’t at the moment. Maybe it’ll come.

Due recognition. It probably hasn’t been given the recognition as the combat battalions and those things. I think it probably deserves a bit more recognition in the legitimate role that it attempted to play and how it was well managed by some pretty good commanders. And a lot of good people in it.

I think it probably didn’t end up with the profile it deserved. It’s probably getting a little better now with some recognition now starting to come round the place. Some places now there’s a few plaques going around the place commemorating the civil affairs outfit. The Civil Affairs Association keeps some of those things alive. So yeah I suppose in summary of all of that thinking on the trot that

probably it didn’t get the recognition it probably deserved. I suppose it got some recognition while the war was on while the political motivation was to draw out some good news stories made it much more appealing. But in hindsight in the combat area I suspect the recognition’s always going to go mainly to those guys who put their lives on the line to fight the hard fight. So the support roles that we performed are probably much less

significant. But in the overall context of the support for Vietnam I think civil affairs could have done with a bit of a higher profile.

I don’t remember having a sense of the unit as a whole saying, “Look, we’re here just treading water or wasting our time.” I think everybody had some pretty good objectives to try and chase down and some positive things to pursue. So I’m

sure there are the days which I can’t remember now where there were some down times, where things didn’t work or we had some things that didn’t come off where it was a bit of a sense that “What’s it all about Alfie?”, so to speak, but overall I think the unit had a very strong positive ethos about it, pretty much, most times. As I recall. Maybe others in the unit have different recollections.

But that’s my sense of it. I guess I tended to mix with the one set of elements of groups of people who are some of the civil affairs people but also with the doctors and others and Craig Mitchell, my mate, in different environments. So I ended up with some different perspectives as well, which maybe gave me a balancing role. Maybe there’s some others in civil affairs who just focus on just the one area and maybe felt some

negativity. But overall I think it was pretty positive.

Only that once again I thought if you were going to do that again you’d probably say, well what can you – it’s understanding better that social and cultural context better

so that you can implement your programs or decide on what’s best to be done and then implement those in the best possible way, taking the sensitivity through the infrastructure and the services that are there and trying to develop those. I think we started to end up in that sort of field towards then, and probably when they started a little less so. But I wasn’t there then, so it’s pretty hard to comment. And then I think it’s bringing in the people who are capable of delivering the outcome. And

I suspect that using those Chinese technicians, if you wanted to do it all again you’d probably start with those people from the outset rather than in terms of agricultural advice, rather than trying to get a raw graduate from Adelaide South Australia to be seen as an expert in tropical agriculture when he had no idea. I think that would be the lesson to be learnt from that.

With respect to war or respect to aid programs or what?

Both. I have a sense that war is useless but I recognise that the human frailties mean that we are always going to have it in some form or other. We’re in the middle of the terrorism thing at the moment which

curiously and unfortunately seems to be fired by religious issues. So I just argue for young people to develop a very broad range of experiences. I think our kids of today tend to be a bit narrow and I’m certainly encouraging my kids to travel and experience different cultures to become much more accepting of others and other people in a whole range of ways so that we can become more tolerant of each other.

So I think that’s the one thing, where I think, our young people need to be understanding of a whole range of broader contexts rather than just seeing themselves as Australian and elitist in a whole range of ways. In terms of implementing aid, I think my experience goes back over thirty years and I’m sure the lessons we thought of there and the mistakes are still being made today. There are a lot of developing countries

where it’s difficult to implement aid programs because we’re trying to implement and impose change on people, where they just don’t have the capacity to do it. I think you really need a good strong analysis of that before you go in and help. So I think any aid program needs that initial analysis before you develop a strategy to do it. So for what it’s worth, that’s the message I would think.

But the final word I think is that I think war is pretty futile. A lot of people die for no good cause in the end. So it’s just pretty silly.

Okay.