Australians at War Film Archive

Right. I was born in Camberwell, Victoria,

on the 6th of November, 1926. Shortly after my birth, my family apparently moved to Frankston, where my father had a grocery shop. We were there for about three or four years, during which my young brother Keith was born, and…the Depression hit over those years. My father lost his business.

And so we moved closer to my mother's family, who were in Yarrawonga, and it just so happened that my father had a brother in Benalla, who employed him for a short time, until approximately 1932, where we went to Wangaratta, where my father had another grocery,

and we were there for a number of year. I attended the primary school in Wangaratta, all five or six years of it, and from there I moved to the high school and I spent five years at Wangaratta High School. For reasons, I applied to Duntroon [Royal Military College] when I was fifteen. In my Leaving Certificate year,

but didn't get into Duntroon. So it meant that I had to go to Melbourne and live with my aunt, where I then attended the Melbourne Boys’ High School. In that year I again applied for Duntroon and was successful, and then in 1944 I entered Duntroon. I graduated from Duntroon in the year of 1946,

by which time the war was over. I went to the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan for a year, then returned to Australia and entered the University of Melbourne to do a civil engineering degree, a Bachelor of Civil Engineering. Most of my time at

university I was living in Trinity College, which is a college of the university. It was there that I met a certain Helen Ducat, who is now my wife, and on completion of my engineering degree course, obviously I went back to the army. I went to a Citizen Military Force unit as the regular army adjutant,

I think I was called the administrative officer. We married in that year, I might add, because my wife's father had decided that we both had to have degrees before we got married. That was all right for Helen, she started earlier than I did, and she did Arts, which is a three year course, whereas mine was a bit longer.

So we started that year in Melbourne, which was 1953. I then moved to the School of Military Engineering, at Casula, outside Liverpool here in Sydney, and I was an instructor there for two years. Then I moved to a course at the Australian Staff College, that was in 1956,

and completed that course. On completion of that course, I then went to Singapore, where the headquarters of the Far East Land Forces of the British Army were. I had an appointment there as a staff officer for two years. After that I returned to Australia as an instructor to the Royal Military College, Duntroon.

I was there for two years. Firstly as a military instructor, for the first year, then as an academic instructor for the second year. After that I moved to Perth, where I was what they called the CRE [Command of Royal Engineers] Western Command. In other words, the senior RAE, Royal Australian Engineers officer in Western Australia,

at the rank of major. There for two years. At the completion of those two years, I went to the Snowy Mountains Authority, where I was attached there to get engineering experience on roads and various things that civil engineers do. I was only for about fifteen months, then back to army headquarters, where I was the

senior staff officer to the Engineer-In-Chief of the Australian Army. By that time, it is the year 1964. I was to be in Canberra, actually, for five years over that period, '64 to 1969, but in that period…For example, in 1965, I was sent to England to do a special course at the

Joint Services Staff College, at a place called Latimer. It was a six month course, and I was not permitted to take my family, so we agreed that I would go and do it alone, which I did. I didn't get back to Australia for about nine months, actually, because the army found things for me to do on the way home, like go to Israel and go and do a job for them there.

And go to Singapore, and go to Vietnam…I eventually got home about March, and I got back to my old job with the Engineer-In-Chief in Canberra. I was only there for about a year or so when somebody said I was to be the CO

of the First Australian Civil Affairs Unit, and I had to raise it, train it, and take it to Vietnam in the year of 1967. I got back from Vietnam about March about 1968. Having got back from Vietnam, my appointment was changed to be a

staff officer on the staff…I think it was with the Quartermaster General at army headquarters, again. I was there about a year, and then about the middle of 1969, I was promoted to be the commandant of the Officer Cadet School at Portsea. So we moved down to Portsea, and I was commandant there

until approximately 1972. Having left there, I came back to Sydney, where I was Engineer-In-Chief here in what we called Eastern Command in those days. I was only in that job for a year, when somebody decided I should go to India and do something called the National Defence College course in India. Again, it was very interesting,

it was quite disruptive of the family. I had two boys by then. We came back to Canberra. We got back to Canberra about February, March, 1974.

I did an acting appointment before being promoted, then I got the appointment of Engineer-In-Chief and Director of Accommodation of Works of the Australian Army. I…then the army kept re-organising, changing my title…I then became Director General of the Accommodation and Works. And I was in that appointment until approximately 1979,

then I was appointed the Deputy Chief of Logistics, again in Canberra. It was then I made the decision that I had spent long enough in the army, so I then resigned from the army. But to get a reasonable job, I thought I better come to Sydney. Which I did,

we came to Sydney, because I had a job as the university engineer of the University of New South Wales. I stayed at the University of New South Wales for another eleven years, which took me up to 1991. I think it was about 1991. Then somebody found my birth certificate,

and at the age of 65, I was forced to retire. So I then changed myself, I converted myself to a consultant in facilities management. For the next six years I worked for an environmental consultant in fact, and I was getting a bit older, certain pressures came along from ‘she who must be obeyed’ [his wife],

that I should retire. So after about six or so years, at the age of 72, I think I was, I finally did retire. And since then, I've made sure I kept up my tennis, I belong to various organisations, far too many lunches, reunions, and here I am today.

My first son, we call him Jock, his name is John Hingston, because the first son of our family is always called John, you see. So he had to cop the name John, but to save any problems of names, we just call him Jock.

He was born when I was at the School of Military Engineering in 1954. My second son, who is five years younger, he was born when I was on at Duntroon, in Canberra.

Richard.

I think my first memory…I'm not a hundred percent sure, because I've been told things through my life, but I thought I had a memory of when we were actually living in Frankston. I would have only been three or four even when I left.

But I do know a firm memory that I have was when we were at Benalla. Benalla was a country town close to Yarrawonga and Wangaratta; it was the town in which my uncle, Dad's brother, had the butter factory there. And I can still remember the house; vaguely remember the house we lived in.

I believe I went to school in Benalla. I have no memories of it, but Mum tells me that I went to school in Benalla for a short time. And Dad drove a truck for his brother, going around and picking up milk or cream from various farms and properties, because he had lost his business and this was

the family helping one another, to survive the Depression. Why I remember that house in Benalla, it had a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK [chicken] pen. We didn't have WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s. It was a maze. I used to go down there and fiddle around and had great fun there. From there, my other memories, we went to live with my mother's parents,

because Dad then had a job…He had some sort of a temporary job in Yarrawonga. Again we were there for only a short time; it might have been six months. And I do remember spending a bit of time at a school, the Yarrawonga State School, before we actually moved to Wangaratta, where Dad got a firm job in the grocery business,

and we then moved to Wangaratta, and we stayed in Wangaratta for…that must have been about 1932, my parents stayed in Wangaratta for the rest of their lives. But of course I left in 1943; that was when I went to Melbourne to school, then to Duntroon and then the rest of my life.

Not really. Possibly the main memory I've got is what my mother told me as to why Dad lost his business. You see, he had been to the First World War, he was a returned soldier, and Mum reckons he could never knock back a returned soldier if he came looking for food, because he was in the grocery business.

Mum was a bit hard-nosed, I suppose, "If you give food away, you're going to go broke." which he did. So that is what happened. So as far as the Depression is concerned, I know it was one of movement. Because I can still remember when we were staying at my grandparents place in Yarrawonga.

There was another cousin arrived in a car, and there was what you might call discussion as to why he'd come, because he'd also been affected by the Depression. He arrived in his car and so on. My grandfather couldn't do anything to help him. My grandfather was a builder, I suppose you would call him a building contractor, he owned the brickworks at Yarrawonga. And he had been

mayor of the town, so he was a reasonably important fellow and pretty stable, and he wasn't affected as much by the Depression as my own father.

He was a great fellow, he was a great bloke. My youngest brother described him as being a God, King and Country person.

He was interested in the religious side of things. In Wangaratta, he made sure that I went to Sunday school with my brother, every Sunday. He and I would turn up at the eleven o'clock service. For the King bit, he was terribly loyal to Australia

and Australians. He was one of the original members of what they now call the RSL [Returned and Services League]. I think around 1936-37; he was the president of the local branch of the Returned Soldiers Association in Wangaratta. I know he was on the vestry to the church; he was in the Masonic Lodge.

He was a good citizen, and he impressed on myself and my brother…We were to get a third brother in 1940. You see, Dad went off to the Second War in 1939, so that is why I more or less…I didn't lose touch with him, but he wasn't living with us, you see.

But he was the sort of fellow, you had to be honest, you could never tell a fib [untruth] to your father, not my father. He would work it out pretty smartly if I was trying to put something over him. And I think he was always military, "Stand up straight. Look at me in the eye." That sort of stuff.

He'd take me to the footie [football], and my brother of course. We were very close, me and my brother, he was only sixteen months younger than me, so we did most things together. We fought like cat and dog, but that's okay. He made sure that we could swim, he taught us to swim at a very young age. I don't know what age it was when we were actually permitted

to go to the swimming pool by ourselves, big deal. Dad was a great bloke.

No. He talked about some of the people, blokes that were with him, but he spared us the detail.

It must have been horrific, I only found out about it later, really. There was an occasion, it was somewhere before the Second World War and Dad was listening to the radio, and he was crying. I said to Mum, "Why is Dad crying?" And he was listening to something to do with the First World War and it was where he was,

on the Battle of the Somme or Pozieres or something. I had never seen him cry. I think it affected him, quite a bit. I still remember, in the 30’s…and let's face it, in the 30’s was ten or fifteen years after the end of the First World War, and I heard all this

moaning going on. I couldn't work out what it was, so at breakfast time, I quizzed Mum, and she said, "Oh, your Dad has nightmares." But she said, "I just roll him over and he stops." He was having, I think, nightmares of Pozieres because he was pretty badly wounded. He went there when he was seventeen,

he was an orphan by that time. He had been living with his uncle at Gunnedah, and of course the war came, in 1914. In 1915, he started making moves towards joining the army. Of course everybody knew who he was and how old he was at Gunnedah, so his uncle, his uncle is a great bloke, too,

he sent him down to work on a job in Sydney, with a friend of his uncle's. So while he was down there, a) he was too small to get into the army, he didn't have a big enough chest measurement, and secondly he was too young. He was only seventeen. So he took himself off to a gymnasium, Snowy Baker's gymnasium, and after a period of…

I'm guess about a few months; he got himself nice around the chest and presented him to Victoria Barracks down here, and got himself listed in the First AIF [Australian Imperial Force].

Yes, he was with the 1st Battalion, which was a Sydney battalion. He was wounded in July, 1916,

at the Battle of Pozieres. And he doesn't remember much about it. I think he was blown up, and he woke up in England. I got his military records, and he was evacuated back through the system, got on some sort of a ship that took him back to a hospital in England, and he went

for some months, recuperating, until he was fit enough to get onto a hospital ship to take him back to Australia. He got back to Australia about December, 1916, and then he was discharged medically unfit. And at that time, I think he had just had his nineteenth birthday. My Dad was a slow learner. What did he do? Within a year he goes and re-enlists again and goes back to the war,

with the 13th Battalion. So he saw the latter part of the First World War with the 13th Battalion, in that fighting around Villers Bretonneux, and Peronne, and so on. He finally got back…I don't think he was badly wounded. I think he had some nicks [pieces] out of him. I think he got one in the shoulder and something to do with shrapnel on his legs, but he got back to Australia

in 1919, because they had to stay back until their turn came to come back to Australia. So by the age of 21, he had had about two and a half years overseas service with the AIF.

I think he had a great love for the army, I think that was the main reason. My assessment of it really is, you see, both of his parents died by the time he was fourteen, and he was the third son, and he had a little sister just after him. The two elder brothers were just old enough to have jobs, whereas he

was still at school. So he was taken in by his uncle, this was down in Victoria, in Melbourne, and he…That's right; he must have been about fourteen. So his uncle George, who was living in Gunnedah,

and had a rather large business, grocery, hardware, you know what the country towns are like, they sort of have a big general store, I suppose you would call it. So he joined Uncle George's family, and Uncle George had more or less the same sort of family that he had come from. In other words, he had three sons and then a daughter.

Dad fitted in at the end of the three sons. He was the youngest of the boys. And so he went to school in Gunnedah, to about secondary school, and then….he started work in his uncle's business…he must have started work there, because he had left school.

I know he was in some form of cadets that was going on. This was before the First World War, there were school cadets. I know that he was in that. He got to the rank of second lieutenant or something or other in the school cadets. He would have been about sixteen then, nearly seventeen. So he had always had this love for the army. And of course

when the Second World War came around, he sought of felt that he had been there and done that, and he was a pretty fit fellow, because when he came back from the war, and when we were at Frankston, he was the captain of the lifesaving club. So he always kept himself reasonably fit. So about 1938, I think it was, he determined that there was going to be another war. So the local infantry battalion,

the 59th Battalion, this was at Wangaratta, and so I'm not sure how…anyhow, he ended up getting commissioned in the 59th Battalion and he was the officer commanding the mortar platoon, these three inch mortars. That is how it all started. Then 3rd of September came along, we were all listening to the radio, and we heard a fellow called [Sir Robert] Menzies, the prime minister, say,

"That Britain is at war with Germany, and ipso facto, so are we." Of course by that time, he is supposed to be too old to go to the Second World War. So, I don't know what he did, but he fiddled his age, and he eventually got selected to be what they called a 'Voyage Officer,' when we were sending troops over to the Middle East.

So he got himself into the AIF, which is what he wanted to do, because people could go overseas, the 2nd AIF, so he got into that, and then what the devil did he get there? Oh, he misfired. You see, I always knew that what he was going to do, he was going to get over to the Middle East and then talk his way into a job in the Middle East and stay there, get into a fighting unit.

But the Queen Mary, which was quite a big ship and took an awful lot of troops, and he was on it, he was part of the staff, so we said farewell to him on his final leave, and so help me bob, six weeks later he is home. And what had happened was, the Queen Mary went to the Middle East, but there were German bombers hanging around over Egypt at the time, so they had to discharge

the ship in about twenty four hours, then turn around and came home. He didn't have time. So he blew it. So he went back into training jobs, that year would have been 1941. He'd had training jobs before that, because when David was born, and that was in October, 1940,

was on the training staff at the 2/24th Battalion at Shepparton, so it wasn't far away. Because Mum's sister came over, unmarried, and she came over and looked after us while David was born.

Well, to start with,

…I don't know. I know where they met. Dad had come back from the First War, and I think he was having trouble settling in. By this time, his brother had the butter factory at Yarrawonga, this is the one he had before he went to Benalla and this would have been in the early '20s.

So Uncle George was very good with Dad. He said, "Look, you better go and stay with Jack, and fiddle around there." He was moving around the family. Anyway, he ended up in Yarrawonga. I think as a temporary measure, he got a job at the local general store called 'Bowles.' Bowles General Store.

It was the old story, another big one, just like his uncle had at Gunnedah, and that's where he met Mum. Because Mum by that time was in the office and she was a typist, or whatever. Mum was seven years younger than Dad, but they had a sort of affinity, I suppose, because Mum's eldest brother was killed in

the same sort of battle where Dad was knocked, at Pozieres. Dad was knocked somewhere about, say, the middle of July, 1916, and Charles was killed when he was with the 22nd Battalion about the second week of August. It was only a question of some weeks later. Of course, Dad wasn't to know that his future brother in law was killed. His cousin, one of Uncle George's sons,

Harley, was with Dad in A Company. When Dad was wounded, Harley was killed. They never found his body. So I suppose a bit of the slightly older man, returned soldier, he's working in the shop where Mum was and that is when they got to know each other. They were married…

It was something like about 1925, '26, they got married. Then Dad got this job in Melbourne, and that is how my little history starts….How did she handle the…Well, she had always been required…what, with going through the Depression, and she found sanctuary I suppose,

with my parents in Yarrawonga, there was always someone in the family somewhere, and they all helped each other. During the war, well, her father just said to me, "You're the eldest son; you've got to look after Mum, do exactly what she says." But Mum was in control, she didn't seem to

worry about it. Since when he was overseas, she used to get a bit worried, but that was just natural. Like when he went over the second time…Remember I told you he went on the Queen Mary, I think that was 1940, '41, and the next time he worked the fiddle

to go over on the Mauritania, and this time he did get off the boat and he got himself a job in the Middle East, and by this time he was a captain, and somehow he…I've never worked out how he did it, but he ended up on the headquarters of the 9th Division at the Battle of Alamein. This was somewhere about…we're talking now August, 1942, and…

I can remember Mum reading a letter out to this, that Dad had written when this battle must have just been starting or it was on, or what not, and I remember he mentioned the huge horde of aircraft just moving over the lines, towards the German lines, and that is really as much as I remember. He didn't get caught up in the fighting; he was actually a staff officer for a very brief time on the headquarters

of the 9th Division, from what I can make out. Then of course, the Japanese had come into the war. The 8th Division had already gone, or was going…I think they had gone back, the 6th and the 8th Division had gone back, and so he was with the advance party of the 9th Division…I always remember November, 1942, because he had to come home about the time I had to do my Leaving Certificate exams, didn't he?

Oh, and he brought all these gifts for Mum and all this stuff.

She was very protective of us.

I was the eldest, then sixteen months younger was Keith, then fourteen years younger than me, anyway, was David. So in 1942, he was only two years of age, and that was when Dad came back from the Middle East. Remember that was when I did my leaving certificate, I didn't get into Duntroon, and so the next year I had to go and live with my aunt in Melbourne.

That's when I left home, about January, February, 1943. Apart from coming home to pick up my kit and staff to go to Duntroon, I didn't live at home after that. For example, as far as schooling was concerned, he said, "There is no money in the family, so make sure you do damn well at school, because if you're going to get anywhere,

you've got to do it yourself." I tried to do it, but I wasn’t a terribly good student, but I was good enough to do most things.

Well, he was slightly younger…we were talking about the church.

Mum was a Presbyterian, actually, but not an Anglican, but she turned to be an Anglican somewhere along the line, because I can remember going to her first communion. Of course, we always went to Sunday school, then we got into the choir. The only reason we got into the choir was my younger brother had a very good voice. He could sing solos and all that stuff. Me? I'm hopeless.

Anyway, I was there to make the numbers up. So Keith and I were in the choir. We were only there for a couple of years because there was an incident. We had a funny choirmaster. I've got to be careful, I'm not going to mention names. But we went to choir practice one day,

and Keith was playing up a bit, he was a soprano, I suppose he was only about eleven or twelve years of age, and he decided he was going to sing alto. The choirmaster got very annoyed with him and hit him over the face. I thought, 'Well, this is not on.' so I just stood up and grabbed Keith and I said, "We're going home." so we went home.

My father was at home, so it was definitely before he went away to the war. So it must have been '37 or '38. We explained to him what happened and he said, "Oh well, that's the end of your choir days, I suppose." But he was terribly supportive, but he always told me to protect my younger brother, so I did. I used to get into a few fights over Keith, and lost most of them.

Well, whereas I was not having any great problem graduating through the school curriculum

in the high school, when he got to high school, he got to the end of second year, and then…I don't know who decided…anyway, they decided that he would go to the technical school. We had a technical school at the town in Wangaratta, and they had a farmer's class.

And Keith's best friend was a young bloke whose dad had about a thousand odd acres just outside the town, and they had a sheep property. And Keith and young Ian, they were as thick as thieves; they were in the same class at school. A lot of weekends, he's out there, especially when the crutching of the sheep's on and all this dipping of the sheep,

so he just got into the groove, and of course, riding horses and all that sort of thing. He did that for about two or three more years, but then he got a job as a jackaroo, on a local property, and he stayed there

until he got to the age of eighteen, of course the war was over by then. He talked Mum and Dad into signing his papers to go into the 2nd AIF. The war was over, and the 2nd AIF was still in vogue. I remember it, because by this time I'm in Japan with the Occupation Force, and

I got a phone call one day. "Is that you, John?" "Yes." "It's Keith here." I said, "Keith who?" He said, "Your bloody brother, mate." I had no idea he had progressed so far. So we arranged to meet. He was a driver with the headquarters over at Eta Jima.

The next weekend we got together and had a lunch and a chat. He was able to get a vehicle; I went over on a ferry, so I had transport. But I didn't see much of him, because he was only there a few months, and he was selected to be a driver for the…There was General Roberston, and he was the British commander of the Commonwealth Occupation Force in Tokyo.

So Keith joined his transport staff. I think he had a transport sergeant, a transport corporal and then there was Keith. ‘Red Robbie’s’.

Oh, well, I was interested in any sort of sport.

As a matter of fact, as a younger boy, I had no ambitions to go into the army. I wanted to be a bank clerk. Because it didn't matter where I went, if I went to the cricket nets, if I went to the football ground, if I went to the swimming pool, if I went to the tennis courts…Guess who were always there first?

The bank clerks, because they knocked off at three o'clock in the afternoon, whereas I didn't get out of school until four o'clock, and I thought, 'Hey, this is for me. It seems to be a respectable occupation, on the staff of a bank, and what's more I'll knock off early and play sport.' That was my main interest. Of course,

I had a bit with my church business; I had to be a member of the Church of England Boys’ Society.

We used to meet at the church hall, and once again it was geared to sport. That is where I learn to play basketball,

in that local hall. And that local minister, he was no sportsman, he didn't have a clue, but he would try to referee the games and what not. And the other thing was the church had tennis courts, so I always had the use of the tennis courts. When I was younger, I was a member of the Cubs,

but that only goes from the ages of eight to twelve. I then started to get a bit more interested in schoolwork, and decided that I wasn't going to join the Scouts, which I could have joined at the age of thirteen. Of course, by that time, Dad was…If I was thirteen, that was about 1939, so I was the man of the house,

I had to chop all the wood and keep the home fires burning, and run all Mum's errands.

Very little, very little.

I was vaguely aware that there was trouble somewhere over in Europe, but it all just seemed to be a long way away and it didn't affect us. But of course, the big crunch came on the 3rd of September, 1939, the Prime Minister got on the radio on a Sunday night, and said Australia was at war.

I know my father immediately put his hat on, his coat on, and immediately reported to the drill hall where they used to go, and said, "C'mon, we're on the way."

Yes, I remember listening to it. As I say…

I suppose it was about the seven o'clock news, it was evening, Dad went off to the drill hall…Most of his friends would have been there anyway, I think, because they would have heard it, and I suppose they wanted to discuss it and what was going to happen now. Before that came out, they had been in camp for about two or three months. Normally, they went to camp for about two weeks,

each year, but then the year of 1939, most of the Militia battalions were called up for a period of about two or three months, if I remember correctly.

It was…basically certain restrictions.

Bear in mind that it started in 1939, the first year or two I don't think it impacted much, except that Dad was away. I think it was when the Japanese came into the war, in December 1941, that things started to get a bit more serious. One of the things that I remember, we lived on a bike. Your bicycle was your mode of transport,

you went everywhere on a bike. And to get a new tyre on your bike, you had to get a voucher, it was getting that serious. There was a time when they had brownouts and blackouts, in Wangaratta, down in Victoria. When I was in my final year of school at Wangaratta, I was fifteen years of age; we were required to dig air raid shelters,

down on the river banks, just past the school. The other one was, and I can't remember the year, it must have been 1941, because…We had finished school some time in December, I was walking home…I happened to be down in the main street

and the headmaster had told us that most of the men were off in the war, and we boys would have to help, and do certain things. So I was just walking past the local hardware stores, Steele’s I think it was called, and I saw a notice up, 'Boy Wanted.' I walked in, with my cap on and my school bag, and the first lady I saw

was a lady I knew from the choir, and she said, "What are you doing here, John?" I said, "I want the job." "Oh," she says, "We'll have to go and see Mr Steele." So we went and saw Mr Steele and I got the job. So I fronted up, it was over the school holidays, and I know I got paid fifteen shillings a week, and that was a lot of money for then. I was the general factotum, you know the roustabout,

with the hardware store.

I reckon ice creams, milk shakes…Somewhere along the line I know I got a new bike, but I don't think that money went toward the new bike.

Yes, I had a bad habit. I liked rabbiting. My grandfather started it, because whenever I went to visit my grandfather with the family, he always had something to do for us boys, Keith and I. I remember one of the things we had to do; he had a plague of cats.

So we had to devise these traps to catch these cats. My Mum was quite disgusted because we'd trap them and put them in a bag, and then my grandfather used to go and drown them, then she found out, and she was not amused. So my grandfather then presented us with some rabbit traps. He had plenty of rabbits hanging around his brick kiln,

so we would catch the odd rabbit. But after that, we took them home to Wangaratta. And from the rabbit traps I graduated to ferrets. My mother was not amused at this at all. First of all, they smelt. The second thing was, we lived with other people, houses around, and some of those houses had WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s. And ferrets love WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s, if they can get out and get them.

And Mum was always afraid that the ferret was going to get out and pinch the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s. I made a few bob [shillings] on Saturdays and Sundays, I'd go up to the Warby Ranges. It was about six or seven miles away on the bike, I'd take the ferret, have all these nets, might catch anything up to six or eight rabbits. I'd take them home, take them down to the freezer,

Stan Plumb was the bloke that used to run the freezer. He used to give me…one and eight pence, something like that, for each of them, so I would make a few bob.

Oh yes, yeah. Dad always had in the house a double barrelled shotgun and a four-ten. We never had a pea rifle, he disliked pea rifles.

So when he was around, Dad would take us out shooting. The main aim was that he taught us all the safety requirements of handling a gun. I learnt the hard way once, because I only shot vermin. I had the gun, Dad was behind me, Keith was behind me, and I was going along

and I saw a bird in the tree and I shot it. And all I got was a clap over the ears for my troubles. It was a quite harmless bird, a parrot, something like that. He said, "You don't shoot things like that, you shoot rabbits." So that was just the learning process. Of course, when he went off to the war, that dried up. To start with, I couldn't get ammunition. There wasn't much ammunition to get.

So yes, we used to shoot.

Well, I suppose we did have a sort of a fear that the Japanese were coming down to Australia. By which time of course they got down to Singapore. The 8th Division

had been captured. A lot of people were prisoners of war. One of Dad's friends, who was in another grocery store in Wangaratta, he was the manager of a rival organisation, a bloke called Bill Barrett, and he was in the 2/2nd Pioneers and they got caught in Malaya. And he spent three and a half years

as a prisoner of war. He was married and Mum and Mrs Barrett were great friends. They didn't have any kids. Of course, in many ways, the Barretts looked on Keith and I as more or less their kids, too. That was one thing. And this business of brownouts and blackouts,

it impinged on your movements. Where we lived, to get to the main street, you had to go through this rather large park, with no lights. You'd navigate in the dark, very smartly. You just had to look up and you followed this path that was going through the high trees, and as long as you could see the sky and make sure

you didn't fall off the path, you'd make it. When I was at school, I was also a member of the school band, we had a brass band, and of course with the war, the town band as such more or less ceased to exist because all the fellows were off at the war.

So our band, for example, would be playing at recruiting rallies and that sort of thing of a weekend, and especially on Friday nights. Friday nights was shopping nights in those country towns.

Oh, the band would play and somebody would make a great speech about King and Country.

As one of my friends told me, this was after the war, when I was at university, I said to Charlie, "How did you get tangled up in the army?" "Oh, Mac," he said, "The bloody bands marching up and down the street and talking about the war, I just had to go."

I think it meant something. It washed off from my father onto me. You felt it was your duty to do something. Like, for example, I was knocked back getting into Duntroon, in my leaving year. The trouble is I have a November birthday. I was only fifteen, and to get into Duntroon you had to be sixteen, that was the minimum age, and the oldest age was twenty. They could pick anybody between sixteen and twenty.

So my interviews in September, 1942, down in Melbourne…Of course, I'm not a big person, and I don't look very old, especially when you're fifteen. They kept saying, "How old are you?" I said, "I'm fifteen, but I will be sixteen when the college opens next year." So that was okay. But of course then…

In fact, I thought I'd got in. We were on holidays down at my aunt's place in Camberwell, and it was January, so it was Mum, myself and Keith and David…Anyway, sometime in January Mum got this letter to say that I had been knocked back. But with the suggestion of maybe trying again next year. That is when Mum and her sister decided that I'd go to

Melbourne Boys High School, which had been evacuated from its school at Forest Hill, the navy had taken the buildings. So they had to go to a new school that had been newly constructed for Camberwell High School. That is where I went, out there, and it was quite close to where my aunt lived.

It's stupid, but I felt that my father didn't need to go to the Second World War, he should have stayed home, and I was the eldest son, so if there was a war on I could go and replace my Dad. It was as simple as that. Pretty naïve. Of course, when I went to Melbourne High School they didn't have school cadets,

but what they did have was an Air Training Corps Squadron, and I thought, 'Well, there's no military cadets, so I’ll join the air force cadets.' Which I did, and of course that prompted a few questions, too, when I fronted up the second time in 1943. They said, "But you joined the Air Cadets? You want to go into the air force, do you?" So I had to talk them out of that.

But I couldn’t be sure that I was going to get into Duntroon. And a few of my mates at school were in this air force business. Most of them were older than me, and a lot of them went straight from school into the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force]. But they were the older ones.

Yes. You see, I was only that school for a year, and I suppose I was only in the Air Training Corps effectively for about ten months. But it was good, they made me a corporal. And on a Friday night, I'd doll myself up in this air force uniform, and on the trams going into the city,

I used to have to only pay a penny, because that's what the servicemen's fee was, on the trams. But I used to go in there on a Friday night to do Morse code. In Russell Street, there was some sort of an air force training thing, and it was all to do with Morse code, so most Friday nights I would go in there to learn how to do Morse code.

Well, it was quite similar to the other one. I think we reported to Royal Park, it was a personnel depot. We got there, I think we had medical examinations, we had psychological examinations and we had interviews.

I think it was all over in a day. The actual interviews were held in the city. And I still remember, 339 Swanston Street, opposite the library, it was a big army headquarters of some sort. I fronted up there and they asked me all sorts of questions. I can't remember the…I thought I better learn something,

so I read the papers for about a week beforehand, so I had a fair idea about what was going on in New Guinea, and they asked me a few questions…Why did I want to join the army? To replace my father?

I can't be sure, I would be guessing.

But they certainly quizzed me as to why I was in the Air Training Corps. But I just said that my father was in the army, I wanted to go to the army. Simple.

Oh, it was great. I received the news…During the war; schoolboys had to do…not all schools, but our school, Melbourne High School,

had a fruit picking camp up at Shepparton. So at an appointed time, I got on my bike and rode to Shepparton, which is quite a long way, actually. I cheated a bit. I took a train to Benalla and then road from Benalla to Shepparton. I went into this camp, and of course you knew all the fellows, and halfway through the camp

I got a telegram from Mum saying, "You're into Duntroon." Of course, I told all the fellows and we had…We didn't drink or anything in those days, I think we just ate a bit more food.

Yes, turned up to Duntroon. I think the date was the 26th of February, 1944.

Well, it was an interesting trip. The first impressions of the place…I got off the train at Queanbeyan, having travelled all night from Victoria. And it was a very sparsely populated area, going from Queanbeyan up towards the Royal Military College.

The farms, the little farms, but in the distance I could see this and somebody explained to me, "That's where Duntroon is." Mount Pleasant I think was the little hill behind the college. And we were actually met at the railway station by the transport officer…and the padre.

And we had this busload….presumably, it was only Victorians. You see, there were only four Victorians coming back to the college, to join the college, for the first year, but we also had the older cadets, who were in the senior class…Of course, they didn't come near us. But they got on the same bus and went up to the college. When we arrived at the college, we were allocated to rooms.

We had to go to the Q store, pick up kit and those sort of things.

Oh, yeah. Everybody was very helpful. You went up the…The only thing was, I got a bit of a shock, I had it all worked out, that I was going to be

a lieutenant at the age of eighteen. This was when I tried to get into the army that first time, in 1942. Because if I had got into Duntroon in 1942, I would have gone into Duntroon in '43, I would have graduated in '44 because the course was only two years long. They cut it down from four years, and finally got it down to two years by that stage. And I had it worked out.

I would have had my eighteenth birthday approximately a month before I graduated. Perfect timing….Well, of course, I'm a year out. I got to Duntroon and you had to go to what they called the attestation session. You've got to sign papers to say that you are going to serve King and Country and blah blah blah and stay on for X number of years, and sign your life away.

But I found the course was three years, the Duntroon course was three years. And I said to the adjutant, who was a captain, "Well, I thought I had come here to do a two years course." And all he said was, "Well, do you want to stay or do you want to leave?" So being a coward at heart, I said I would stay and I signed the line. But it was a bit of a shock that it wasn't just a two year course. It wouldn’t have mattered, because

at the end…The war finished in August, 1945. Even if it had only of been a two year course, I wouldn't have graduated until the December, 1945, so I wouldn't have got there anyway. But anyway, they were just little hazards put in the way.

I think so.

It was down to basics. For example, we used to see pictures of pre-war cadets, and they used to wear these blue uniforms, with all the brass buttons. We didn't have any of that. All our uniforms were just plain khaki, and one of the years we even wore shorts.

But things like, for example, sword drill….I don't think we…We certainly didn't carry swords or do anything like that. It was all very basic. They cut down the academic side…Although, you see, we were doing the three year course. Normally it would have been four.

So we probably did a bit more academic work than the courses before us, which didn't worry me, because I had done six years at school and went to Leaving [Certificate] honours, so there was no problem with the academic work. But it was a question of learning your infantry, your armoured corps stuff, the artillery, learning to drive the vehicles…All that practical stuff was terrific, it was great fun.

It was usually in what you might say, sections. In other words, there would be certain days allocated to academic work. We did…Pure Math and Applied Math, Physics, Chemistry, English, Military Law…

They were the basic academic subjects, and you would more or less have set days when you did academic work, and there would be set days when you would do infantry, armour, artillery, or whatever…There was always drill sessions. We were a bit unlucky because we arrived in February in 1944, and some special class,

which had only done a fifteen month's course, was graduating in the April. So we spent a hell of a lot of time on the square, getting up to standard with all our rifle drill and marching and all that stuff, so we would be good enough to be on the graduation parade. So we didn't do much academic work in those couple of months, but after that it was on for young and old.

When I first got there, we were allocated to buildings, and on each floor there was a corporal responsible for we junior cadets.

I think for the first few months there was just the junior cadets. Peter Cook was my corporal, and he more or less looked after our welfare and introduced us to the things that went on. The other thing that the senior class did which I thought was very good, was that of an evening, when we had, theoretical 'spare time,'

we would go into one of the classrooms and we would be given lectures by a senior cadet on the history of the Royal Military College, who had been important people in the past, things that we were required to do. And the one that I appreciated most was that they told us we had to stick together as a class, because we were treated just as lower things by the senior class.

If you had to speak to a senior class man, of course you came to attention, he would ask you questions, you had to answer them and all this…And so, in many ways, they gave us the protective device against themselves.

Oh, protection is not the word, really.

We had an initiation ceremony….say, in the first month. We were all called out very quickly, we really didn't know what was coming on, we had a feeling something was brewing, and we were called out onto the main parade ground, and suddenly told that the initiation ceremony is just about to start.

While we were on the parade ground, the senior class had got into our rooms and fiddled with our kit, with our packs and haversacks and bits and pieces, to make sure that when we put them on they didn't fit. Of course, we were then balled out, "Get those bloody things right!" So that was okay. Then we took off on a route march, we headed towards Queanbeyan.

I don't know how long that went on for, probably a few hours. So, then we came back and you go to your rooms and they said, "Report to the gymnasium in ten minutes." So we got to the gymnasium, and of course all we had on was shorts and a singlet, I suppose, and something on our feet. And then they had

all these funny little tests. We were blindfolded, you put your hand in a bucket, errr, some yucky stuff was in the bucket, clamoured over a few ropes and what not. And then the final indignity was we ended up…and we had to sit on a block of ice, and the block of ice was geared to a little electrical device, and of course you got a charge through the bum, and you slid down this line into a big pool,

and there were a couple of the senior class down there, dunking you, "M-C-D-O…." A dunk for every letter in your name. I wished my name was Smith. Poor old John Williamson, he spent most of his time underwater. So we went through that, then we were sent off to the rooms,

and told to get changed, get into whatever kit they told you to get in, and report to the recreation room. It's all done on a time business, "You will be there by a certain time." So we got there, and there was the senior class all there, with all the cocoa, I think it was cocoa in those days, and we had cups of cocoa with our senior class,

"Initiations all finished, go and enjoy yourselves." I mean the basic discipline was there, but they had got that out of the way, so we just went on our own merry way.

Oh, I would say it was a healthy relationship. There were never any what you might call 'physical' problems.

Years later there was a word called 'bastardisation.' From what I understand, and I have been an instructor at the Royal Military College many years later, this business of treatment of the junior class must have got out of hand a little bit. We certainly knew our position, have no fear about that,

but…they didn't trouble us. They didn't trouble me…I think they did trouble one or two of the fellows, but I only found out years later, when we were actually instructors when one of these blokes, actually he had a snitch on the RSM [Regimental Sergeant Major]…

There was a thought that we would ask our old RSM to come and have a drink with us. By this time we were majors. And our RSM had been commissioned…this was twenty years after we were there. But this one particular fellow said,

"I'm not going to go to that party. That RSM…belittled me." I thought, 'Oh my God, most of us took it as a joke.' I mean you stand there and you're told you are a bum, and "Stand to attention. Put those heels together, you could drive a train through them!" and bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. RSMs go on like that, and he must have carried this dislike all this time. We thought it was a hoot.

The year was 1944.

We were junior cadets. The RSM at the time was a short little fellow, a nice bloke. He was quite innocuous in many ways. And we knew that there was going to be a change of RSM, and we knew the day and so on. So this particular day was the day.

The drill was that somewhere about eight o'clock in the morning, we would all assemble, somewhere near the flagpole, and the class orderly of the day, or whoever, would call us onto parade. The orders were given, and we had only just started to move onto parade, when we heard this frightful voice on the right flank,

"Stand fast!" So we all stood fast. "Stand fast," means that you stop, stand to attention, straight to the front and await further instructions. And then this creature came along. Black beret he copped from the Armoured Division and this big swagger stick, and immaculately dressed, it was in summer time,

and he berated us about how slack we were, then he said, "Carry on." When he says, "Carry on," you just move off and do what you were going to do in the first place. And that was our introduction to G.J. Watson. And you couldn't move anywhere in the vicinity of the cadet blocks, without being under his observation.

Something would be going on, and then all of a sudden the window of the RSM’s office would go up and this head would come and would issue instructions. So, we just had to learn to live with it. He was just so perfect, so clean, neat and tidy. We swear that he changed twice a day. He probably only wore the same clothes in the morning and then changed them,

because everything was so perfect. One other little anecdote was that we had been on exercises; this was the year after, another year on, because we were then the senior class and we had the junior class with us. We were out on exercises and we had been in the hills. And we decided that the exercise was over

and we were about ten or fifteen miles from Canberra, so we thought that we would break the rule a little and when we marched back, we would just march back direct. The usual drill was that you would march for fifty minutes, have a rest for ten minutes and so on. So we had the junior class with us, so we thought we would just see how good they were, so we kept marching.

We got to the Royal Military College and we were entering the parade ground, lining up to finally get the final formation, so we could break off and have a good shower, which we hadn't had for days and days, and up went the window of the RSM's office, "Stand fast! Do it again!" So we had to march off…

But I can still remember a mate of mine…We were in the senior class, and we were all tired, the cadets, the juniors, seniors, the lot of us….We were the senior class. Anyway, my friend Pete said, "Men have been killed for less than that." But we always took a lot of notice of Pete because he was the oldest chap in the class, and Pete actually had

served in New Guinea before he became a cadet. He was one of those fellows, like me, I came straight from school, and I just got in on the age. His problem was he turned twenty a matter of three months after he went into the college, and he had served in New Guinea with the Signals Unit, so we always looked on him as an old man. Anyway, it was G.J. Watson…

Oh yes, one more tale about G.J. Watson. The year would have been…It must have been about 1964, '65, and bearing in mind that twenty years had almost gone, I was a lieutenant colonel, and G.J. Watson had been commissioned in this time,

and it just so happened that I'm walking into army headquarters and the Captain G.J. Watson is walking out of army headquarters. So all of a sudden, he throws me the old salute, "Good morning, Sir." I thought, 'How nice to see.' So we exchanged pleasantries, and his last comment to me was,

"Your uniform could do with a press…Sir." The bugger…I nearly dissolved in hopeless laughter, but I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to insult, he was that sort of fellow. He never let a thing go by.

Not really. I can't really. That one happened to me. You're supposed to have your heels right together, and apparently they were about that far apart,

and of course I'm standing straight as a die, and I thought I was bloody perfect. And he just stands and looks in your eyes. "You think you are a good soldier? No, no, you haven't got your bloody…" No, I don’t he ever swore. "You haven't got your heels together. I could drive a train through those heels. Now get them together!"

It was a hoot.

I didn't get many extra drills. When you are a staff cadet, that's when you get your extra drills.

When you get rank, they usually give you stoppage of leave, that sort of thing. I had a few extra drills, but whereas some fellows can get twenty or thirty in a term, I only had about two or three. Maybe I was just a goody-goody, I don't know. We had to go on the square…

I can remember doing it, but I can't remember the reasons. It could be as simple as…We used to have BC inspection, I think it was every Thursday, and all your kit had to be laid out, your bayonet, rifle, all this stuff. And it would be inspected. They called it the Battalion Commander's Inspection, but it was quite often done by just the company commander, who was a major. And if there was anything wrong he just left the fact that it wasn't good enough,

and you were on the square, it was as simple as that. You didn't have to have a court case about it, it was summary justice. And that was just the way it went. But when I was an NCO [Non-Commissioned Officer]…And in fact, I was an under officer, and I was at the pictures, they had this picture theatre [cinema], and it was Sunday night,

and we were supposed to back in our digs by a certain time, and this show went on late. And so I started, so I was coming back and getting through into what we called 'B Block,' and the cadet orderly officer is there, an old mate of mine. So he apprehends me,

and then I had to face the company commander. He was a corporal, I was a warrant officer. But I had to face the company commander the next day, and I think he gave me…he worked it out, to keep in the barracks for two weekends, he gave me ten days stoppage of leave. And of course, you lose marks,

they had this mark system. So that was one occasion. And there was another occasion and again I was an under officer, we were on an exercise and I don’t think I was wearing the correct badge of rank. My badge of rank was a sort of warrant officer thing here, as an under officer, they called us, but for that particular exercise I think I was a private or whatever,

so I just took my rank off. And I got caught. They reckoned that I shouldn't lose the rank, maybe they were just trying to teach me a lesson, so I copped another ten days. But I didn't have many run-ins with the system.

One of the good parts was that we still had horses, and I used to love going down…we did lessons; they called it 'equitation.' How to look after a horse, how to ride a horse, how to jump a horse….some weekends, we had a hunt. They had this hunt course around the college, with all these jumps over all the various fences.

And it was quite a social event. We had the Governor General come out one day, who was a Brit. The Duke of Gloucester I think he was, and his staff, and of course we just had to ride along behind him. So riding horses was great fun. Riding motorbikes, we were taught to ride motorbikes, we were taught to drive trucks….We didn’t get much chance to drive tanks.

We certainly had some, but it wouldn’t have been more than a few hours driving the tank. So as far as the training was concerned…Light artillery training was great fun, because we got to fire each of these weapons. The twenty five pounders and the anti-tank guns. There was a two pounder anti-tank

and there was a six pounder…I think that was the biggest one. And of course it was part of our training to control them. You're forward observation officer, and you've got a telephone or a radio, and you've got a battery or a troop of guns or whatever you've got behind you, a few miles back, and

you were able to call in fire to put it down on a certain point. That was good fun. Then of course the whole infantry training, the control of a section. We had to graduate as lieutenants, and the idea was that any of us, irrespective of whether we went to infantry, armour or artillery, wherever we went, you could in fact operate as a platoon commander

of an infantry platoon…

It was incorporated because most of our instructors had just come back form the war. Like, for example,

the first company commander we had, he was also our tactics instructor, he was a New Zealander, a major, and he had served with the New Zealand Division in North Africa, and he had won himself a DSO [Distinguished Service Order] because his brigadier wasn't around at the time, and he had to make all the decisions. And he had done a bloody good job so they gave him a DSO. But other fellows that I remember,

like our infantry instructor, they were all experienced infantrymen. They knew their business….Like, for example, one chap, he was a big tall fellow, and I don't know what job it was I had, platoon commander or section commander, whatever the job I was doing, anyway, he would just walk along and to keep you alert, he would say,

"What will happen if a tank appears over the hill? What will you do about?" And he would do this all the time. Now this was the benefit of fellows who had already been there and done that, and training us to make sure we knew, to get as close as possible to the real thing, because there is no other thing

except when you do it, do it for real. And a number of our class actually went to infantry and at a later stage they did it.

There was a certain amount of hilarity. I think it was VP [Victory in the Pacific] Day and

a little bit of indiscipline crept into the place. I think we had the day off. The fire hoses were used for all sorts of non-fire purposes. And that was about it. We dressed up in any kit that we felt like, instead of having to do this or that at the appropriate time for this and that…

We relaxed a bit.

My own one was, I started to think, 'Well, if there is going to be no war to go to, am I going to stay in the army?' And bearing in mind, this was August, 1945,

and we still had a year and a bit of training to go before graduation. So anyway, so I stuck it out. I wanted to graduate; I didn't want to chuck it in, having put all that effort into it. But as time as went on, and then…There was this bait of actually going to the Occupation Force in Japan.

Now, I'd never been outside of Australia. I suppose I was like any young fellow, even these chaps in the First AIF, Second AIF, they had never been outside the country, and this was a big adventure. So that was what I did. One thing led to another, and I just stayed.

I'm not really sure exactly when, but I think by the time we graduated, which was December, 1946, that we would go to the Occupation Force. You see, now bearing in mind, by this time, we had all been allocated to our various corps.

Certain fellows went to the infantry, certain fellows went to the artillery, engineers, signals…we had one bloke go to the armoured corps, and I think we had two chaps go to ASC, Army Service Corps. So by the time we went on leave, we had instructions, in my case, I had been allocated to Engineers,

that I was to appear at the School of Military Engineering, I think it was the 2nd of January, we didn't get much leave, but just enough for the Christmas. And I know that the chief instructor of the school, we happened to meet him on the train, going out to the School of Military Engineering, and he was quite amazed that were going there, because the school was in recess.

And he sort of felt that they could have waited a few more days. But anyway, we did what was said, the thing said the 2nd, you got there on the 2nd. And we joined an officers’ training course, which had already started before Christmas, and we just went into that, and completed the latter part of that. That took us up to the…sometime in February, early February.

Then we got on a troopship and went to Japan.

Yes. When I arrived at the college

in February, 1944…bearing in mind that I had a Leaving Certificate and that I went to Melbourne Boys High School where I did Leaving honours, in Physics, Mathematics, which is basically Pure Mathematics, and Mathematics Three, which was more practical, calculus and all that stuff.

We had only been at the college…six weeks, and they sent this form around, with the corps choices. We only had three choices. So I put down infantry, armour and artillery. About a week or so later,

the professor of Mathematics, who was our teacher of Pure Math, called me aside and said, "What is this about you wanting to go to infantry?" I said, "That's what I want. My father was infantry in the First War, the Second War; I want to go to infantry." He said, "No way, no way. You've got honours in mathematics, and physics, and you're qualified in chemistry."

He said, "You're going to go to the Engineers." I said, "I don't want to go to the Engineers." I had had no thought of the Engineers; it just wasn't on my screen. Anyway, I heard what he said, and during the next three years, they would send this form around, just to see if we had any changes. So I just kept putting infantry, armour and artillery,

in that order. It came up to about the middle of November, 1946, nearly three years later, and they put up these things on the board, Allocation to Corps. Four or six blokes went to infantry, the next one was armour, only one bloke went to armour, another four went to artillery,

and my name doesn't appear. Then there it is, engineers. So, I lost.

Oh, I was a bit bolshie [rebellious] to start with, but I don't know, just the thought of going overseas, that was enough to

allay the problem. But the engineers were a good crowd to work with. I joined this unit in Japan, and of course I am the lowest of the low, wet behind the ears lieutenant, and I got into this unit…It was Workshop and Park Company.

They used to look after stores and plant and equipment, and they used to have workshops, we used to call them white workshops, sort of carpenter shops and blackwork shops, with all this equipment, lathes…It really wasn't my scene, I must admit, so they gave me administrative jobs. So that was all right.

But fortunately, we had a lot of sport to play. As a matter of fact, that was an interesting comment one day. I was going somewhere, to rugby, and this soldier said to me, he said, "Did they teach you anything else at Duntroon but to play sport?" When you're in a small unit, if they're going to have a tennis team, you get in the tennis team, if they're going to have a rugby team; you get in the rugby team…

I even played Australian Rules…Well, I was a Victorian anyway, but I could play Australian Rules. And they even had me play soccer, a useless bloody game, hopeless….Basketball…If there was a team at Duntroon you played all those things. I had a bit of luck because I had been there about six months, and the big chief engineer fellow,

came down to see us, and he asked me whether I was getting any engineering training, and I said, "No." "Oh, well. That's a pity." And that's about all he said. But a week later a signal came through for me to report to the 5 Airfield Construction Squadron at Iwakuni, and I was required to write a report

on…it was to do with the operation of plant, as 5 Airfield Construction were using it on the Iwakuni airstrip. That was great. First of all you went to the air force, and a lot of engineers…were very good to me, and knew what I was there for

and they taught me more about engineer plant in about three months than I had learnt in the last ten years. So that started to spark an interest, and I took it from there. And then, just as I was really happy about the unit and what I was learning and all the sport, and had made a lot of friends, of course, up there, the blighters said,

"University." The professor was right, sure enough, so I had to go to university.

Well, it all started in Australia. We had to go to a personnel depot at Marrickville.

That was just to sort of get us together before we actually embarked on a troopship, the Manoora, the HMAS Manoora, and it was at Pier 13…We got on the troopship, and of course we were new boys, we were just herded into some cabins.

We only had one stop on the way, it was in North New Guinea…And then we proceeded to Kure, and we were offloaded at Kure. I still remember, there was a brass band of one of the battalions there, playing all sorts of marching music when I got off. They knew who we were, and what we were doing,

and what units we were going to, so onto the back of a truck. And I went to this unit, 14 Workshop and Park Company, as it was called in those days. And they deposited me outside the orderly room, which was actually in a big three storey building. It was an old aircraft installation of some description,

old Japanese thing, it was quite a good building. So anyway, I just got off and reported to the orderly room, and…I've got a story there. I reported to the orderly room, and the OC [Officer Commanding] wasn't there, Major Asphar was somewhere else, but his 2IC [Second-in-Command] was there, Captain A.V. Giles.

They said, "You better go and see the 2IC." So I walked through the door, and gave the 2IC a twenty one gun salute. "Mr McDonagh reporting for duty, Sir." All very formal. And all he did was, he looked at me and he said, "Oh, another Duntroon bastard." Well, of course, Dinky was….

He had quite an effect on my life in many ways. He was 2IC of the unit, and he was really the power behind the throne. He'd come up from the ranks and he'd been through the system, and he was decorated in the Middle East, and he had been to the jungle. He knew everything about everybody. So if there was a spare bomb to be disposed of, he would show it to me. He wouldn't trust me to do it,

mark you, but he was a sort of a mentor. And I didn't really appreciate how good he was. I only had about twelve months there, then I came back to Australia. Then many years later I end up a full colonel, chief engineer of Eastern Command. Big deal.

And all of a sudden I'm aware of the fact that there is a Major A.V. Giles wanting to see me. This is our Dinky, you see. So Dinky came in and he said, "Are you a member of the RSL?" I'd never bothered to join the RSL, because moving around all the time, it was just another administrative thing around your neck.

You had to go and tell somebody that you had moved, and you probably hadn't paid your subs [subscription], or whatever. It was just an administrative nightmare. So I just didn’t bother to join it. My father was a bit annoyed with me about that, because he was a very strong RSL person. But anyway, he said, "Well, this job that you've got, part of the job is that you are the patron of the Engineers

Sub-Branch of the RSL. So you've got to be a member." I said, "Well, okay." He said, "I'll get the papers." So a couple of days later I got the papers, signed up, then a member of the engineers Sub-Branch of the RSL, and I've been a member of it ever since, you see, all because of my friend Dinky. To finish off Dinky…oh, it was after he died,

and it was only a few years ago, I was delving into family history, and I had written my father's history, and I thought I had finished, then my eldest son said I had to write my own. But anyway, I thought, 'Oh well, I'll write to the army and ask them to give me my records.' And I found amongst my records this confidential report

signed by Captain A.V. Giles. And I read it, and I thought, 'I never thought he thought so much of me.' It was very good, simple…Years later; they had a special confidential report on officers, runs about four or five pages long…But Dinky,

it was only about half a page. Why I remember it, he said in this that I was…they had a rugby competition in the brigade, it was rugby league, and he said in this thing that I was runner-up for the best and fairest rugby league footballer in 28th Brigade.

I'd never known that. Maybe it's not true. I don't know, but it's written there. But that was the sort of fellow he was.

Well, first of all, mess life. You're the junior bloke in the place, so guess who is going to be treasurer and secretary of the mess?

Me. So, he gave me lots of tips and things about that. He gave me a bit of advice about the question of…you see, at Duntroon, alcohol was forbidden. So here you are, you can drink what you bloody well liked. So just a few hints every now and again, there.

He assisted me in acquiring a jeep. Bugger knows where he got it from, but I didn't ask any questions. I had to have a jeep, or so he said, so I got a jeep. But it wasn't on the equipment table.

In a small unit like we had, we had maybe only two hundred and fifty people…it's only a company. It's about twice the size of an infantry company, commanded by a major. They didn't have a sergeant’s mess; they had an NCOs’ mess. Which meant the sergeants and the corporals had a mess, which was something that I had never even dreamt about.

And also how to handle those sort of things. That was about it. I had a bloody good sergeant…I can't think of his name now, but he ended up an officer, many years later. I suppose one of the things that Dinky did introduce me to was photography. He was a mad keen photographer.

He used to take photographs of us playing rugby. Most of the photographs I've got of Japan, not most, but a lot, are actually taken by him.

It was mainly an administrative role, assisting the administration of the company. A lot of the things that I had to do, like for example, I had to sometimes do investigations. Say for example, one of our trucks had an accident, and the OC said he wanted it to be investigated.

So you had to go and interview everybody, get statements, write a report and submit it to the OC. At one stage, part of my introduction to the unit, was that I had a bit of control over the transport. That is just normal unit administration.

Another matter I got involved with was…I didn't learn much, but we had a lot of Japanese labour working in the unit area, and ‘Old Muggins’, me, had to be the fellow who had to sign all the blooming passes to authorise these fellows to be able to come through the front gate. And the upshot of that was, when I came back to Sydney and I tried to sign a cheque at the bank,

they wouldn't accept it, because my signature had deteriorated so much. And then of course…we had another engineer unit in the area, 28th Field Company, and I had a friend of mine who had graduated

with me and who was with that company, and every now and again, like for example, he might be tasked to a road reconnaissance somewhere in the area, and he would give me a ring and say, "C'mon Mac, let's do this together." So he would include me, to give me the experience of a proper road reccie to satisfy his boss.

On arrival? It was cold, bloody cold. There was snow on the hills all around the harbour.

It was the first foreign country that I had been to, so consequently, seeing different types of buildings, structures, an awful lot of slitty-eyed fellows. That was different. I suppose they were the main things.

There didn't appear to be a lot of destruction, as such. Not like, for example, when I got that job in Iwakuni, I had to go through Hiroshima. And that was an eye opener, because that was just a shanty town. I mean the whole city had been devastated with an atomic bomb, and they really hadn't had any time to build any more permanent structures.

It was just a shanty town. That was a bit of a shock, but that wasn't until about six months after I got there.

It was certainly an eye opener concerning what one atomic bomb could do.

We drove in one part, and we just kept driving, and everywhere you saw, there was just shanties. It was just destroyed. Bearing in mind, that this was…That would have been about eighteen months after the bomb had actually been delivered.

We took the opportunity to drive around a bit and it just…everywhere there was just devastation. It didn't dawn on us at the time the question of whether there was any active radioactivity there, but I don’t think there could have been. That was all dissipated.

That was the nearest city, it was Kure. But our brigade was located out at a little village called Hiro, and that was about seven to ten miles out. So that is where the brigade was. There was a Japanese village of sorts there, and there were other little Japanese villages around the coastline.

So when we went to town, so to speak, it was to go to Kure. And at Kure, they had an officers club, I think there was a hospital…no, I think it was on Eta Jima. There was another island a mile or so away. But our engineer headquarters and other engineer units were in Kure.

Yes.

I don't know what the Japanese…It was just a naval depot and ships. And even our unit area, I think, was part of the naval structure.

Yes, I think that was about it.

Yes. There was a very large building, taken over from the Japanese. It had about…it was a three storey building, and it was big enough to have the headquarters, like the OC's office, and the adjutant, the 2IC's office,

the orderly room, there was an RAP [Regimental Aid Post] there. Those sort of things that go with the normal headquarters function of an engineering company. But in the same building, also the soldiers had their own other ranks mess; they had their other ranks accommodation.

It would also contain the sergeants’ mess, or the NCO’s mess, and of course all their accommodation. There was also in that same building a very large laundry, we had a unit laundry. So it was no problem getting anything washed. As far as the officers were concerned, of course in our unit we would only have nine or ten officers.

And there was this structure, a single storey building, down on the sea front. Bearing in mind the sea front wasn't a beach, it was a sort of walled area. And above that they had this officer’s mess, which had our dining room, a big open anteroom type thing,

it had a bar, the usual toilets, the showers, and up that end was our bedrooms. It was all pretty basic. I shared with another lieutenant in one room. There was another…Ray Bishop, and another fellow, they shared a room.

The OC had his own room and the 2IC had his own room. We had a couple of captains…they probably had their own room. That was basically the officer’s layout. We had a little pontoon that went down the front. The unit had some little

recreational type boats, and that is where I learned to water ski. I came to grief on a few occasions. But it was very pleasant, especially in the summer.

The soldiery? The total unit strength, I would say, was about two hundred and fifty. I've only told you about the big unit, which was where they lived and where they worked.

Then back further, there were other working buildings. For example, all the transport was in one big…I'd call them hangars. They may well have been hangars. And there were other hangars, like there was the big workshop for carpentry type operations. They called it the White Workshop and the Black Workshop, where they had metal turning and all that sort of thing.

We had a so-called parade ground. We used to play rugby on this, there was no grass on it, so it was all very basic. Your knees were somewhat damaged. My Japanese driver used to look at me and say, "Bakusan," which meant, "You're mad."

What else? Oh yes, there was another part, but it wasn't in the same area. Approximately half a mile away, we had an engineers’ store depot, where all the engineering type stores were held for what you might call the Australian base area. So anything that was required

by say the battalions or the artillery or anybody else, and they had a need for it, they had it there.

They may be required to, in some cases, make furniture. In other cases, they might be required to make special things for buildings. Just ordinary buildings that were being constructed.

The Black Workshops…they might have to produce spare parts for vehicles or special items for certain training devices. Anything that required the use of a lathe or milling machine type thing.

Well, from the point of view of, if there was any labouring tasks to be done, like moving stores, or cleanliness, keep drains clear, all those maintenance tasks of a base, they would do all that.

We had a number of staff, like for example, our cooks were Japanese. We had another lad who more or less looked after the bar. We had those sort of people. And they would also be replicated with the sergeants, NCOs’ mess, and the other ranks’ mess. We had a number of Japanese drivers…

House girls. I don't know how many house girls we had. This chap and I, we had a house girl who looked after our clothes and anything we needed, like washing. So there were maybe five or six house girls, and there would be similar sorts of things down in the other ranks, and with the sergeants…

So there were quite a few.

Yes, more like batmen. To make sure of the washing of your clothes, mend your clothes, they made the beds…Not like me, I've got to make a bed, even now. That was basically their tasks for a while.

We had a thing called a Non-Fraternisation Policy. And any thought of me going to the homes of Japanese, just wasn't possible. So that was it. The only people we met were these civilians.

In our case, the nearest contact I had was with the mess staff. There were house girls, about five or six, the fellows in the kitchen, the fellow in the bar, my driver…

Very little. The only person that I would really talk to, more or less on a daily basis, was this house girl looking after our room. And of course the other girls who were in the same…That would be it. But you never got any…I know

that our house girl came from some village, not far away, but where she went to school, or…? You see, there was the language barrier to start with. There was a house girl there that looked after Ray Bishop and Mick Rappaport; she could speak pretty good English.

But our house girl? She didn't have a clue, and the same with most of the staff. But I didn't really have much to do with them.

I got the impression that the Japanese were quite happy to just sort of get on with life.

I can't think of any incident where they showed animosity to us, and I can't think of any incident where we showed animosity to them. We just on with our separate lives, I suppose. I think…I've got a vague impression that there was an incident somewhere

in the brigade area, of a chap who had been a prisoner of war. Now what he was doing back in Japan, I just don't know. It would be the most stupid thing to have an old POW, of the Japanese, back in Japan. I may not even be accurate there, but whoever the fellow was, he had some sort of thing against the Japanese. But this was purely a one off,

from what I could gather. You see, we didn't play sport against them, in any shape or form. We didn't socialise with them. It was just them and us. And after all, I was only there for about a year. There wasn't much opportunity.

It was quite strange. You would see these people and they just looked quite docile. They were never…I can't even remember ever seeing a drunk Japanese. After all, they drank a lot of sake. So they must have imbibed a bit. We just didn't come into contact with them.

There were Japanese classes that we could go to, to learn the Japanese language. I didn't get the chance to do this. First of all, I'm not very good at languages, and I was probably lazy. But because we knew that we were going to be going back to university, the School of Military Engineering here in Sydney

was sending assignments up, for about four of us, that had to go back to university. And we had to do these assignments, just to keep our hands in with mathematics and physics. So that kept us a bit occupied, getting those things done. And then plus all the ordinary social occasions in the mess, and we played a lot of sport.

Good question. We didn't really have much time to ourselves. But I must admit that I did score a leave in Tokyo. I think I was just lucky to get it…The fellow who shared my room; he was a fair bit older than me.

He had served with the 9th Division, in the Pacific area. We scored about a week, or ten days leave, in Tokyo. So we got on a train, went to Tokyo on leave. They had this Miramichi Hotel, which was just a sort of a big leave area. And at the leave centre you would meet all sorts of people, air force, army, navy.

And I know that we went to various functions, concerts, that type of thing, in Tokyo. We did a tour of…We couldn't get into the Emperor's Palaces, or anything like that, but just around the perimeter they had these bloody great moats and what not. We could have a squint and see where the big General MacArthur used to work.

Supreme Headquarters, or whatever he called it. And bearing in mind that it was out of bounds to go to a sort of Japanese restaurant or any of those sorts of things.

I didn't have that much experience with that,

but they seemed to get on all right, and certainly amongst the services. For example, when I went on that leave, I met a couple of Royal Air Force fellows, and I know that we were a party of about four or five, and I think it was the Mikado, or one of those Japanese shows, live,

but run in an Allied Force theatre. You said, "Where do you come from?" There were a couple of New Zealanders we chummed up with.

I can't think of any Australian Navy fellows. In those days, first of all there was plenty see and do; it was all just a mystery to me, these places. Especially around Tokyo though, there was a golf course.

And the reason that we got it, one of the American generals and the Australian generals decided to have a golf match and whoever won the golf match got the golf course. It was something silly like that. It wouldn't have mattered, everybody was welcome there.

Yes, it was one of those, but more specialised. We were in a hotel in the city.

Just a simple thing like going down and getting on the train was an experience with us. Getting on the train and go with the Japanese around the circuit. Or even walk down the street there…Ginza.

I suppose we could have looked into the cultural aspects, but when you're twenty years of age, you're not looking for culture.

It was a simple, technical thing. Just to work out the condition of the road. What maintenance would it require? Would it stand up to the traffic of tanks? Not that we had any tanks there, but we had an armoured car squadron. Things like heavy traffic. Was it a one way road or a two way road? It was more or less a descriptive thing of what it was

between Point A and Point B, which was about ten or fifteen miles, and what condition is it in? What is the drainage like? Is it liable to be flooded? All practical things.

5 Airfield Construction Squadron was in business to look after the airfield at Iwakuni, and also to construct houses. For example, near the end of the year of the time when I was there, they were just getting to the stage of where families would be able to come up to Japan. The air force families.

So they were busy building some form of a little village, just like a little village in Australia, with houses for the families to occupy. The main thing that I was on, they were doing an extension of the airfield. And it was a question of all the engineering plant that they were using for that.

The other thing to was they had a big gravel pit, and just the operation of the gravel pit, and how they won the material, and how they got the quality of the material they needed for the airfield, and then got it into trucks and transported it to the airfield, how they spread it and made sure it was a proper engineering project and not just throwing stuff at it and hoping for the best.

So there were a lot of technical things they tried to teach me. The OC of the plant workshops, his name was McGregor I think, an older man, and he was very good to me. He sort of took me under his wing and said, "Well look, this is the sort of bulldozer we're using; this is the sort of maintenance they're going to require.

These are the sort of repairs if they get into trouble, we take them in and that is an example of it over there." I had never been subjected to any of this, so it was all new, it was just a part of my basic engineering training. So that hopefully later on, when I was in other engineering units in the army, I would have some of knowledge

what I am on about. How to handle engineering plant, because you can use it and you can misuse it.

From what I remember of it, it was a typical airfield. It had the sub-base, which is some sort of solid material,

it could be rock, whatever it was, and then they built up layers of heavy, it could be boulders. Then you get to the stage where it is smaller gravel, then you finally get to a pavement. I think in the case of Iwakuni, it was a bituminous pavement.

As I say they were just extending it, actually partially into the sea. So what they have to do is, they got all these rocks and boulders, fill, to get the basic structure there and then finally compact it, and make sure it is strong enough to take the weight of aircraft and of course the weather conditions. It was a bit aggravated

by the coastal conditions. But I wasn't really in what you might call the design team that worked all this thing out. My job was just to write this report about plant, which was great fun, and the boys there really helped me.

Yes, you see it was an air force base. And unlike the army, normally when you are on an air force base, if you are on the flying side of it, you live there in accommodation and you use the mess. Now, 5 Airfield Construction, their officers were in the same place, and they occupied the same mess and it was much bigger than the army.

In many ways, it is much more efficient. You've just got one big set of kitchen, one big set of accommodation, one big mess and so on. So you can afford to have pretty good facilities. Not like the mess where I came from, where there were nine of us. There would be, I'm guessing, up to a hundred officers in this mess. And of course, the air force

looked after themselves. I can remember Christmas was coming up and we had a Christmas party somewhere about the middle of December, and we enjoyed fresh oysters, Sydney oysters, because they flew them up with one of the aircraft from Australia. Also, it was the first time that I ever came across, you call them a poker machine, over there we used to call them

'one armed bandits' or 'fruit machines.' We were on funny money up there, we were on BAFs, British Armed Forces vouchers, but they equate to sort of the pound, shillings and pence business. You could buy a few tokens and lose them into this machine.

Well, they're different. I fell under the spell of a bloke…He was a terrific fellow; he was a Catalina pilot during the war. He used to tell us a few tales

about flying the Catalinas during the war. I think at that time, he was flying Kittyhawks. I can't remember the numbers of the squadrons, but the Australian Air Force had these two or three squadrons on that base, and I think the Brits may have had some air force squadrons on the base.

But the people that I more or less associated with mostly was the Airfield Construction Squadron officers, and the OC of the 5 ASC was a pretty strict sort of engineer. And I learnt pretty fast…I remember going out on a job one day to observe plant or something….

I sat down and I had a look, and he came along and he berated me. He said, "Nobody sits down on my jobs. Stay on your bloody feet." Right? Just a simple little lesson.

He was trying to get the message through that this was a work site, and if people were wanting to rest, take them away and let them have a little smoko and a rest. But you couldn't have these odd bods around like I was, hanging around, sitting on their bums when they felt like it…

Not really. Everything was…Like for example,

going over to Eta Jima, this island, which I think there was a major headquarters on, army, navy and air force, and some A officers mess, and B mess and C mess, all these high falutin things. And of course, I was in the rugby team, and one little tale was that we had to over there to play rugby.

And the idea was that we got into our trucks, and we went down to Kure, and at Kure there was supposed to be an army boat to take us over to Eta Jima, the whole rugby team. But it wasn't there. And I was the senior bloke…

We had to get over there because it was vital that we won the match. So a Japanese ferry came in and I commandeered the bloody thing. And just said to the bloke, I got the boys on, "Eta Jima, hubba hubba." So off we went and we got to the other end

and there was a provo [provost], standing there. "Sir, were you the….who took the vessel?" "Yes." "Can I have your number, rank and name, please?" So I had to give him my number, rank and name. Anyway, we got to the footy, we won the footy, and we got home under normal conditions. And that was the Saturday, and on the Monday morning

I was asked to report to my Officer Commanding (OC) Major Charlie Asphar.. He said, "John, what is this I hear about you commandeering a vessel?" I said, "Sir, we were let down at Kure and it was the only way we could get over and play the match. We didn't want to forfeit." He said, "Oh, well don't do it again." So he let me off.

Well, yes. To be quite honest, I had no right to go and re-acquisition a Japanese vessel and take it, but bugger it, we had to get to the footy.

And I got away with it.

I sort of felt that, let's face it, I was enjoying myself in Japan. We had a good unit. Officers and NCOs and sappers,

we were all a team. I must admit it was the sporting part of it that I liked. I had one of our corporals who was lucky to go to work during the week. He worked out, there was one week when he played basketball, went sailing, he played rugby and hockey.

You could do that. Although most of the sporting activities were held on a Saturday or a Wednesday afternoon, which was the traditional sort of thing. So from the sporting point of view, it was great. I mean, the fellows in the mess were an amicable lot.

Everybody knew each other, there was only about nine or ten of us, and I was at the bottom of the pile and there was a major at the top of the pile. There were fellows with all sorts of experience. There was that Dinky Giles I was telling you about. There was another captain there, he had been in the Middle East and in the jungle…you could always learn information from people,

they'd all got different experiences. And I didn't appear to have been there all that long, and I was hoping, I must admit, that this university business would go away. But it didn't…

Well, to start with, there was a certain…

I didn’t realise at the time, there was a certain prestige value. You see, when I graduated, all my class, we all went to the Second AIF. My father was in the Second AIF, and thought, 'Well, at least I got into something that my father was in." His number was VX55292. My number was VX150772.

It's like a cricket score, you see. And the Second AIF was closed down while actually we were in Japan, the 30th of June, 1947. And then they created a thing called ‘the interim army’. They took away our VX numbers and gave us regular army type numbers. So there was that sort of prestige value.

And in fact I thought, 'Well, at least I can go home and tell the old man that I had been somewhere.' Because by that time, he was back in Wangaratta, he had had some troubles with his service in the war, malaria and that sort of thing.

He had almost forgiven me for going to the engineers, that's a story in itself…Because he turned up at my graduation, you see…In a nutshell, he got back from the Middle East, he then got into training establishments…

I didn't tell you, the day that I arrived at Duntroon, I got a message at about ten o’clock in the morning, I'd only got there at about eight o'clock in the morning…I think it was in the morning. I got this message to report to the officers’ mess, and who was there? My father. And I was horrified, I thought, 'Christ, he's come to check on me.' And that was the last thing I wanted, I wanted to do this by myself. Anyway, we had the usual friendly talk and chat…

He was a bit surprised that I was going to engineers. I think he always knew that if I had my choice, I would have gone to the infantry, purely and simply because he had seen it, been there, done it. He'd been a private soldier in the First War; I think he got to the exalted rank of corporal by the end of the war,

having been away and come back, and of course he joined this militia infantry battalion, and that was his business, he knew all about the infantry. Of course, when you are a Duntroon cadet, you are subjected to all the various arms of the service, and hopefully you get a choice. Some of us got our choices and some of us didn't, you see.

And I think…I must admit, I had always considered the acme of being an army officer was to lead a platoon in action. We had been brought up that way, anyway, really as cadets. All the training films we saw, the basic business was the infantry,

and they do it tough. So yes, I had to just accept the fact that I was going to go to the engineers. In hindsight, for me, I think it was probably the best.

I felt a bit disappointed, but you can't get too serious

about these things. In many ways, I had been outside the clutches of my father, by that time, for about six years. Because he went off into the army sort of full-time at the end of 1939, or '40. Then I didn't really see him, except when he was on the odd period of leave, I might run into him somewhere.

I know I visited him once, when he was at Heidelberg. I won't say we lost touch, but when I was a boy, I woke up and there was my father, I went to school, I came home for lunch, there was my father and my Mum, I went back to school, came home for afternoon dinner and what not,

there was Mum and Dad. So it was a sort of full time contact. Then it was just spasmodic. I could go a year without seeing my father during the war.

I think he realised that there is a place for everybody, but he wasn't that pig-headed.

He used to have a saying with me, when I was a boy. He said, "If a job is worth doing, do it properly." So that was the principle that I just had to use. I reckoned that being an engineer was worth doing, so I had to do it properly.

When I got there, the university was half full of ex-servicemen. So in many ways, you had a sort of slightly superior standing of being an ex…You see, they had an ex-service system, the name escapes me at the moment…I was slightly different to it, but I was included in it, let's put it that way.

In other words, I went back to university and I went into first year Engineering, and it didn't matter where I went, about fifty percent of them were ex-servicemen, army, navy and air force. And of course, I knew some of them. Like, for example, a very good friend of mine, Trevor Barker, he was the bright boy of our class,

in every sense. He was brilliant academically and as a sportsman, tremendous. He didn't just play it, he played it bloody well. So Trevor and I were detailed off to go to Melbourne University. Whereas the other two fellows in the class were sent to Sydney, and it was based on your home state.

There was tremendous camaraderie at the university in many ways. And college life was quite good, I was in Trinity College. I would say, at least half of us were ex-service.

I still remember that…Apparently Trinity College used to have initiation ceremonies. In the old days, you went straight from school, and you went to a university college, if you went to a university college, not everybody did. Apparently our predecessors, the first ex-servicemen that came and somebody talked about initiations, and

they said, "We're not going to give initiations. We're not going to be in that. We've already been initiated, mate." Went to the war and all that. For example, when I got there, there was a bloke there called George, and George had been a Lancaster pilot in England. He graduated in Chemistry, just when the war started, and got himself into the air force, got himself over to England flying Lancasters, then of course he came back…

By this time, George would have been about thirty, that sort of age, and he was doing Medicine, and he graduated as a doctor.

First year.

At Duntroon, we had done military engineering.

Part of our course, for example, we went down to the School of Military Engineering to do bridging and we built bridges. We built Bailey bridges, and folding boat equipment bridges, all those sorts of things. At the college, we were introduced to mine warfare, the basics of water supply…What you might call the simple field engineering.

Going to university was more specialised than civil engineering. The thing where I had, what I would call, a running start was the fact that that final year of schooling, when I did two honours Maths courses, and the Physics, when it came to those subjects at university, I had done half of that stuff at school.

There were lots of other things that came along that I had to contend with.

It was in my first year at Trinity. This mate of mine, Trevor and I,

we shared a study, and we had separate bedrooms. It was the way the building was laid out, it was in lower bishops[?]. Anyway, there were two fellows in the next door study; these were boys that had come straight from school, George and his mate. They stuck their heads around the corner one day and they said

"Oh listen, we've got some girls coming over for afternoon tea, this afternoon. Would you like to drop in for a cuppa [a cup of tea]?" We said, "Oh yes, thank you very much." So I dropped in for a cuppa, and there was about three or four girls, and one of them was this gorgeous blonde. By that time, I was a smoker, and she sort of looked at me as if…I was rolling my own, you see.

She said, "Could I try that?" Well, she buggered it all up, completely wrecked it. And one way or another, we met. So that was okay. From there on, it just sort of developed. The next thing I had got in touch with her. She'd come from Queensland, she had done most of her schooling in Queensland. Her father was in the bank and was sent to Melbourne.

She did her final two years of school in Melbourne, and then started university. And so, then she….I played rugby for Melbourne University, and she was then friends with certain other girls who were also going to the rugby, so this was more or less how we started to meet. So the next time she was coming for afternoon tea at Trinity College, it was into my study.

So it just developed from there. When I was in…third year, we had got to the stage where we became engaged. Helen, she graduated by then, she did a three year Arts course,

and she majored in Math and Economics. This is another story, we spent time together in our early days, this was before we had ideas of marriage or anything like that….Pure Two was a certain lecture that was very good, for the engineers.

But Pure Two for the Arts people, apparently it was a bit of a wash-out. And apparently the word got out to Helen that this lecture in Pure Two for the engineers was good stuff. I don’t know whether she turned up with a mate of hers, but anyway, she turned up at Pure Two Engineering Lectures. Of course, in those days, all the Engineering students are men.

So she came in…I had met her before, so she came in and sat beside me. Anyway, the opening gambit from the lecturer was, "Oh, I see we've got female company today." She didn't realise she was having the honour of being chosen. But anyway, so she did Pure Two roughly with me that year, so that was great.

One of the conditions of all this marriage business was, her father said, "Make sure you are both going to have your degrees before you get married." She must have finished her degree at the end of that year we got engaged. So that was okay, she's got her degree, but I've still got time to go, you see.

She got a job with the National Bank in the economics department. That was another thing, too. We got this diamond ring, but she didn't dare wear it at work. It was her first year, and in those days, women are going to get married, so get rid of her and get someone else. So we used to go to lunch and she would have the engagement ring on, you see, then take it off before she went back to work.

Oh yes, unfortunately.

Well, they expected me to get a degree, and I did, but I took an extra year. I told you about Trevor, my mate.

Trevor got an honours degree, I got a pass degree. He was a bloody good student. I'm not a good student. But I said I was born lucky. You see, there I go, they bugger up the thing, they don't want me to go to the infantry, they send me to the university…but I got a wife, she's still here, and we had a wow of a time.

But you know, things go on…While I say that, my poor old friend is in a wheelchair over there.

He graduated the year before me.

No, they seemed to put up with it. You see, one of the unfortunate things was, too, we started our Engineering course, and in the year 1950, the Korean War started. Now, only three of my group got their Engineering degrees, but we didn't get to Korea.

But when the Korean War started, we thought, 'Well, this is why we joined the army. To go to a bloody war.' So Trevor and I went down to the army headquarters in Melbourne, and said, "We would like to defer our course and go to Korea, then come back and finish it." They wouldn't listen to us. They said, "Piss off." So, that was a bit of a disappointment.

We missed out. We joined the army to do army operational service, and we missed out. But that was tough; there was nothing we could do about it.

Our contemporaries were there, and some of them came back and some of them didn't.

We felt an affinity for them and what they were doing. For example, a couple of chaps who graduated Duntroon after me, they ended up at Melbourne University but they had gone to Korea first, and then they went to the university.

Oh yes. We were required to join and be part of the Melbourne University Regiment. Melbourne University Regiment had an assault pioneer platoon, mainly made up of engineering students.

So we used to go to the odd parades at the Melbourne University Regiment, which was on site, on the Melbourne University site. And I seem to remember at least two camps…during the university vacation,

over the Christmas period. They were normally held at Seymour. There was one at Seymour and I think there was one at…not Mount Martha, but somewhere in that area. So yes, we were associated with them, and it was nice to keep your hand in. Our CO was Lieutenant Colonel Phil Rhoden,

he just died in the last few months. He was a tremendous bloke. He commanded the 2/14th Battalion in New Guinea, when they were doing it tough.

There were quite interesting things, because most of the things we did were sort of engineering oriented. Now I think it was the first camp that I went to…I can't exactly remember the exact site of it, but I think it was down the coast somewhere, and we were building bridges.

And we were a bit short of numbers and what we had were immigrants. People who had migrated to Australia, and they had to do some sort of service for the government. So any tick of the clock, I could have, say, ten or twenty of these fellows to do the hackwork. We did all the design work, and we told them what to do and they did it.

You didn't know whether you were talking to a doctor or an engineer or a schoolteacher, but they were very helpful. So that was a very interesting experience…

I think it was the start of it, yes. Because my boyhood, in a country town,

the only people that weren't what you might call fair-dinkum [real] Aussies, there was a few Chinese fellows that used to have a market garden and would come around the house with a basket, and you'd say, "Oh, I'll have two pounds of those tomatoes." Or Mum did. And one or two of the cafes were Greek.

I think Russo, that was a fruit shop, I think he was Italian. And as far as school was concerned, the only new Australian that I can remember, he was a big solid Italian. It was in the third year, and he came on a bus, they had buses coming from the local district to our high school, and he come off one of the farms,

and all I can remember about him was that he was not very bright. We had so little contact with what you might call non-Anglo Saxons.

The function of the School of Military Engineering was to train all levels of members of the corps of the Royal Australian Engineers. In that two years I was there, we were teaching second lieutenants coming out of the Officer Cadet School at Portsea, who had come into the Engineer Corps, and we had to teach them the basics of

what you might call Field Engineering. We'd give them a little bit of bridging, how to build field defences, the business of the provision of water supplies, mines and booby-traps…All those sort of things that you do on operational service. Over and above that, you've got the sergeants and the corporals, and they had to have promotion exams, to go through the levels.

To get from sapper up to corporal, to get to a sergeant, to get to a warrant officer. And there were these courses at the school that they were required to pass to further their promotion prospects. The School of Military Engineering wasn’t designed like a university. But…a lot of us had engineering training at university….

For example, when I joined…Actually I went to the School of Military Engineering to do a course. They called it a Tack Three Course, because I had not had an opportunity to do it when I was at university. And when I was at university, they promoted me to captain, purely on a time basis. I had spent four years as lieutenant, so now I was a captain. But you were required to do those courses

to qualify. I had that outstanding. So I went there, and it just so happened that one of the members of the staff went sick, and they said, "Okay, you are now an instructor." At that time, I was posted to another unit; I wasn't assigned to go to the School of Military Engineering. Anyway, the chief instructor of the day said, "I want him." So the system wangled it so that I came as an instructor to the School of Military Engineering.

And I quite enjoyed it, because the job they actually gave me was external studies troop. And this was dealing with people outside of the school, who were required to do promotion exams. And myself and a warrant officer, we used to prepare all the assignments that had to go out and we had to correct them, and so on.

But in-between times, we would work as ordinary instructors at the school. That was the first year. Then in the second year, I became the senior instructor. They promoted me to major in the meantime. So they made me the senior instructor, so I had a year of that. I was getting experience of the full gamut…not just the external studies troop, but there was a Field Engineering troop,

and there was….what do you call it? It deals with all the plant and equipment. There was about three or four of these things. I didn't understand them all.

You were taught to do that at Duntroon. You were taught, really, to be an instructor. They pick you up on your bad points, and tell you where you can make improvements. One thing about the army is that you are always doing something that you can learn.

For example, this business of being an instructor at the School of Military Engineering…Don't ask me how I got involved, I don't know. But I was required to teach subjects concerning the construction of roads. And one part of that was the whole business of pavements, like bitumen. I knew bugger all about bitumen.

But the school said, "Don’t worry. There is a place a couple of miles down the road there. It's a big bituminous plant; we'll send you down there for a couple of weeks to learn." So down I went, and they told me what the ingredients were, how they were all mixed, how they were put into special types of vehicles,

how they were then transported, how they applied to the surface, rolled and all this thing. Having all that background, when it came to that part of the course, I had sufficient knowledge to be able to tell them what it was all about. I think it was in those days, I know I used some of these books later, but the British Army put out

certain engineering text books. And I know that here was one actually on bituminous work. But when I was on the Snowy [Mountains Scheme], I got caught in a situation where I was suddenly required to have all this plant for the road construction, and it was a question of how best to use it. And all I did was read the British Army book on it, and when you're using scrapers and graders and so on,

and how shifts you have, and how you run them in certain systems, tandem or whatever, and make the maximum use of it. And it was just as well, too, because my boss on the Snowy had a terrible habit of flying over in an aircraft, and if he flew over my job and he saw a piece of plant that wasn't working, he got on the blower [telephone] pretty smartly, wanting to know why, you see.

So it all came in very handy.

You've used the term 'education officer.' Now in the army, we have an Education Corps. There are a lot of teachers who…And I'm not really sure of the detail function of the Education Corps, but they teach people at a later stage that may not have been taught at school. For example, I went through the whole system of school,

but lots of fellows who joined the army, the private soldiers, and they need maybe to get an intermediate certificate, or a leaving certificate. Now these Education Corps officers, they do a lot to enhance the education of soldiers, to assist them for their advancement. I hope I get this right, because my daughter in law

was one of these, and she had specialised training and she was an instructor at Duntroon. But from what I can make out, she had overall control of all the syllabus, and she only did lectures on a few occasions on things like reports and report writing and certain administrative type things.

But in the main, she was responsible for the curriculum, what they were taught, who was going to teach them, she was very good at it. But you're getting back to teaching…

Well, in my day anyway, it was very important.

Especially when you were dealing with cadets at the Royal Military College. My speciality at the Royal Military College, in my first year there as an instructor, was in military engineering. I went through that business where we had to teach them bridging, and we had to teach them a bit about mine warfare, and water supply, and all these sort of things. All terribly basic stuff. And basic stuff that every officer in the army

really needs to know. Or at least have a working knowledge of it, so that when he goes to his unit, he realises that such things exist, and if he needs help and he is not an engineer, then he knows where to get help. So that is on the engineering side, and of course, the artillery, the signals, they all do that. There was a signals instructor, and I was the engineer instructor. There was an infantry instructor,

a tactics instructor and so forth…So in many ways, your life in the army, there is really a lot of teaching involved.

Yes, the Malaya Emergency. I went to Staff College in the year of 1956.

This was after I left the School of Military Engineering, and that is a course that you've got to do pre-entry exams for. In my case, I went to the Australian Army Staff College. Some people are selected to go to overseas staff colleges. Because when you go to these colleges, you are all at the rank of, about, major,

some of them are captains. And it is to teach you how the staff work is required on a headquarters, to organise whatever needs to be organised within the army. In my case, I was sent to…it was the headquarters of the Australian Army staff,

which was part of the HQ FARELF [Far East Land Forces] in Singapore. It was mainly British run and we were the little Australian element of it, and the New Zealanders had a similar thing, because they had a battalion in the brigade, and of course we had a battalion in the brigade, we had a battery, a troop of engineers, a smaller representation.

My job, they called me a DAQMG, Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General, a hell of a mouthful. Basically it was the logistics of the Australian Force in Malaya. In other words, everything, whether it was a question of their rations, a question of their ammunition, a question of their uniforms…all those material things

that they've really got to have to make sure that they exist. That was my part of it. For example, on that headquarters, there was another person; I'll call him the personnel officer. He worried about how many soldiers there were, how many officers there were, making sure that they got the right people; that they were properly looked after and so on.

As I say, that is just part of your training as an officer. It was a follow on from being trained to do staff work, then I went to a headquarters where I had to do the staff work. A bit of a shiny bum [a person working from a chair], really. Of course, you've got to go up and visit the troops in Malaya, obviously, just to make bloody sure they are getting what they need.

It had mainly been organised…There was certain things that the British Army supplied. Don't hold me to

the exact facts of these, but I seem to remember that the artillery battery that we had up there, was using twenty five pounder guns. Now those twenty five pounder guns I'm almost sure were supplied by the British Army. And we had to make sure that they also got their ammunition,

and that arrangements were in train to make sure that if they needed maintenance and those sorts of things…That the system completely worked. And in the main, it did. One of the…I won't say it was a big question, but the question of the married quarters. In Malaya, they allowed the families to come up and there was a big cantonment of families,

up on Penang Island, and there were other smaller ones around, but that was the main big one. And once again, when you're dealing with families…You see, the army provides everything. Whether it’s a question of refrigerators…the whole caboodle. So you've got to make sure that that system is working. They've got people up there making sure that it is working…For example, somebody up in the battalion

or the brigade or whatever level it is, has got a problem and they can't solve it, well, we have to solve it for them. It may mean getting stuff from Australia, or anywhere. Sometimes you would just buy it off the market in Singapore. I seem to remember at one stage there, we were short of refrigerators. So I more or less did a bit of tick-tack work [research] downtown, trying to get the best price that I could for some refrigerators to send up the country.

It's a very broad area, and it certainly keeps you busy because there is always something going wrong.

Not really. It was just…you had to make sure that the equipment that the boys got, whether they got it from Australia, or whether they got it from the Brits, was a feasible thing to do. In other words, you make sure that if it is a gun, that you've got the right ammunition for it. If it goes bung, that the correct maintenance facilities are available to make sure that it can be repaired.

Sometimes when you are working with these joint forces, you've got Australians and New Zealanders and British people all mixed up, they can have a conglomerate of staffers and sometimes it can cause problems. We've just got to make sure that we don't get those problems. It's a rough generalisation, I know…

There were a number of things to see. The main place that I went to was the battalion base, and it was just a typical military contingent, and depending on what was on at the time determined how much of the battalion was in fact there, because they might have been out on operations in the jungle.

So it was nothing abnormal in terms of a military base.

I honestly couldn't, it's a long time ago.

The thing was to go and pay a visit, to see the staff of the battalion,

just to make sure that the service we were providing was adequate, and to make sure that they didn't have any problems that we might be able to solve. It was a typical thing of staff officers on any headquarters. They get out in the field to see what is going on, just to make sure that a) they know what is going on, and b) if they can be of help and solve the odd problem.

Not to my knowledge, no. It's pretty true and tried systems that they have. There is always the possibility of when you're on operations and there is an enemy involved that as part of the operations

that something could go wrong. But there is not much you can do about that from Singapore. That is a problem for those on the site.

Oh, a visit to Malaya might only take a couple of days, then back to Singapore. I can't remember how many visits I had up to places in Malaya.

But they were varied places. I visited the battalion obviously, I visited the brigade headquarters, I visited the married headquarters over on Penang Island, just to see that everything was all right there. I think I was in Kuala Lumpur…I can't remember what I was doing in Kuala Lumpur, and various other things.

For example, just over the straits from Singapore into Malaya, Kota Tinggi, places like that, there was a training place that we went over to have a look at on occasions. But I think that was about it. Pretty routine sort of things. I can't ever remember there being a visit in reaction to a big problem, let's put it that way.

Not really. No. On one occasion, we took a little bit of leave.

We had little Jock with us at the time, living in Singapore, and we went over to the East Coast, to one of the British Army leave places. And you travel along roads, which are normally cleared. I didn’t feel any great threat in moving around on Malaya. It was a bit different in Vietnam, but not in Malaya.

No, most of what you would say were outward and visible signs had gone. I remember,

for example, at Changi. Now Changi, in my day, it was the site of the airport, and the RAF, the Royal Air Force, also had part of that airfield, as I remember. Because I did a parachute course in Singapore, and I think all our take-offs were from Changi Airport.

Yes.

Well, there's a bit of a history to this. When I was in Australia, I'd always wanted to do a parachute course. And every time I got into a situation where I reckoned that I could do it,

something cropped up and I couldn't do it. And it just so happened that when I was in Singapore, in the second year I was there, the commander changed over. And the fellow who was the new commander had once been in charge of the Parachute School, down here in Australia. So I made a few discreet enquiries at the British headquarters, got some papers

and put the hard word on the boss, and said, "I'm wondering you would agree for me to do a parachute course?" He said, "Why not?" And I did it, it was great.

Oh, I think that was okay. It was good fun; I was the only Australian on the course. It was a standard British SAS [Special Air Service] Regiment parachute training course,

and so I was the only, what you might say, outsider on it. The rest were SAS people. But I was a bit older, by about ten years; I was thirty two at the time. It was quite interesting.

Once again, I've got to harp back to a certain amount of sport. I ended up as the captain of the Headquarters FARELF rugby team, and we played a lot of good games against all sorts of people. And of course, our team consisted of

Brits, Australians and the odd New Zealanders. The only reason that I was the captain was that I was the senior rank. I had to keep the peace, you see. So if we were selecting a team, and somebody said, "Why can't I have him? Or, "Why can't I have…" I would say, "This is the way it's going to be and that's it.” Very simple.

I don’t know. They who make such decisions at army headquarters decided it was time that I went back and did my time as an instructor at the Royal Military College. Yeah, I don’t think there was anything odd about it.

I got a letter when I was in Singapore, near the end of my tour there, from the Engineer-in-Chief’s office saying that this was a distinct possibility and that at the end of my Singapore tour I would be posted to the Royal Military College. And I didn't have any disagreement with that. I thought it would be nice to get back there and be on the other side of the coin.

Yes, yes. You see, I was on a wartime course, and during wartime the courses got down to a two year course, when normally it was a four year course. I was a bit of a transition job, I was on a three year course, of which I think about three of them, mine, and I think the next two courses after us were three years,

and then they reverted back to the four year course. The other part of the culture was, too, by that time, there was a…the academic staff was much larger, and the course had got out to four years, and so what you might call the standard of the academic teaching

had been raised. Because I think at that time, if you were going to be an engineer, you left Duntroon with one or two years of credits to a university, and then you just finished off at a university of which state you came from. Queensland, Victoria, New South Wales and so on.

And they had also started to send some of them who had not reached as high a standard as, say, the university required, and they went to things like institutes of technology. Some of them went to the South Australian Institute of Technology…and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. So that was a bit different.

And I had a bite at both of these, accidentally, there is always an accident somewhere. But one of the engineering instructors at Duntroon, on the civil staff, was required to go back to Melbourne University and do some advanced training. I don't know exactly what it was, but he was going to have to take a year off to do this.

So one Wednesday morning, I think it was, early in 1960, the director of military art, as he was called, called me in and said, "We have decided that because Leo is going off to do this course; that you will stand in this year, as an academic instructor, teaching academic subjects."

And I thought, "Gee, this is great. When do I start?" He said, "Friday morning." So I had forty eight hours notice to slip into gear, and turn up to a metallurgy lecture and tell them what was what. My subjects were Metallurgy, Strength of Materials, Engineering Design and another minor subject.

I think in those first few weeks, I was about three minutes in front of the cadets. So I had to change my whole business, I had been out of university for sixteen or seventeen years…but fortunately, this Leo Peterson, he was a Melbourne University graduate in Civil Engineering.

So his notes and the course were very much allied to the sort of work I had actually done as a student, but I had a bit of a refresher course to catch up on.

Oh, no more that a military instructor, I don't believe.

I think the military instructors were more involved in the general life of the cadet, mainly because we had been there and done that, as students. Whereas the academic staff, they could come from anywhere and maybe, on occasions, not even have any military experience anyway. But they were terribly good at their jobs, at teaching academic subjects.

And also being on the military staff, in my case, I was the coach of one of the rugby teams, the Colts, the young fellows. So you saw them at work and you saw them at play, and you had a fellow feeling for what they were on about.

When I was a cadet, in my first year, the people who were in the class senior to me, that was their last year, I think there was an incident where

a truck rolled over, turned over, and there was a cadet killed. And he was buried actually in Canberra. There was another training accident where I think…It had something to do with the Bangalore torpedo…You may not understand what that is, but if you've got a wire fence, which is used in obstacles, a great heap of wire and goodness knows what…

One way of getting through it is to get this great big long pipe, which is filled with explosives, feed it through under the fence, and then just detonate it, and of course everything blows up and you've got a path to get through. I'm led to believe that there was… an accident, when one of these things went off prematurely,

and one or two of the cadets, in fact, got shrapnel wounds as a result. I don't think it was anything serious enough to hospitalise them, but they were very lucky. So that was that time. When I was on the staff….no, no. But as an aside, the year before

I was there as an instructor, there was a situation where…Duntroon had a sailing club, and they had it shared with their all their boats, on the shores of Lake George. And this event was at the end of the sailing season. A group of cadets went down to clean everything up, tidy everything up,

and then they would come home. For whatever reason, they decided they were going to have a sail first, anyway. Anyway, apparently the weather blew up and it was terribly cold, and I think a couple of the cadets lost their lives as a result of that. Two of the other cadets who then went to great lengths to save those others,

and they probably saved a few other lives, they were awarded a George Medal. I can't remember their names, I can see their faces. It was interesting, you would see these cadets in front of you, and all of a sudden you're looking at a chap, and he was probably twenty if he was lucky, with a George Medal on his breast. It was a rather sad way to win it, but still…

Oh, no, I don't think so. You see, even when I was there all the instructors had a lot of experience. Especially people who were infantry instructors…I'm not just talking about the officers, I'm also talking about the warrant officers and some sergeants,

who had all basically served on some form of operational service, whether it was Korea or Malaya, that was about it in those days. They were all talented people to pass on this training.

West Australia. Perth.

Well, over there there is an army headquarters. A headquarters called Western Command. It was run by a brigadier, and they had a staff. And part of that staff was an engineer staff. The head of the engineer staff was called Command of Royal Engineers, CRE, and that was me. And I had a small staff

organise things on an engineering basis in Western Australia.

It was pretty broad type work. We had a construction squadron over there, and they would be involved in minor construction works for the army, whether they were building buildings, or they might do bits of road

or that type of engineering type task. We called it the CMF in those days, the Citizen Military Forces. I had an overview of their training, because we had a field squadron that was completely CMF [Citizens Military Forces]. We had water transport people, in small boats,

and part of it was regular army and part of it was CMF. I had an Engineer Stores Depot, where we had these engineer stores for all the places in command. Like you have an ordnance stores, we had engineers’ stores…Or we did have, we don’t' have it any more.

That was about it. We had the transportation people; we also had movement control staff, people who were involved in the movement of people and stores between places in Australia and overseas. As I said, we had the small craft, we had the engineers’ stores, the CMF, I've probably forgotten something which I'll regret later.

Well, the basic culture is the same. But in the CMF, he is part-time. If I remember rightly, they had a parade about once a month, I think it was. They had the parade and it was always in the evening, and that would go on right through the year.

And then once a year there would be a two week camp. Say it was 13 Field Squadron, they would all go into camp, in this case it was Northam, outside Perth. But of course, all of the CMF were part of an organisation of all CMF units. We had infantry battalions,

we had artillery regiments, signals squadrons, engineer squadrons and so on. So we had basically a brigade type structure over there, and the regular army helped them, because you would have a cadre of say a few regular army people to keep the thing moving right throughout the year and make sure the training was properly organised and keep touch

with all the fellows, who were doing their ordinary jobs, to make sure that they knew what was going on and when to turn up and this type of thing.

There is a story behind that. I arrived in Perth in about January, 1961. And I had to go alone because my wife

wanted to stay back in Sydney because her sister was getting married. But I went over and I stayed in the SAS officers’ mess, which was close to where our married quarters were going to be. And anyway, I took on my job, and then I went down to Karrakatta to check out these

CMF units. And I was acquainted with the fact that they were in camp. And one of the groups was in Rottnest. So I thought, 'Well, I'll go and see this lot,' because Rottnest was a holiday resort. So I went over there. There was a delightful bloke over there running the show, and I couldn’t resist sort of having a bit of a shot about coming over to a holiday resort when I thought they were going to be hard training in camps and things.

Anyway, this bloke had been in the infantry during the Second World War, and he had been in an infantry battalion in the Middle East, and he was a good operator. Of course, he had got older and he got into this movement control training business. I had only been there about six months, and he came to me and he was suggesting, "Wouldn't it be good if we could run an exercise,

where we could use as many engineers as we possibly could?" So I said, "Yeah, that's a good idea. But who is going to organise it?" He said, "I'll do it." So I said, "Go for it." So we ended up running an exercise…That's the people I forgot, we had a railway squadron over there; 44 Railway Squadron. And of course the OC of that was also an ex-World War II fellow.

And the Commissioner for Railways in Western Australia was an ex-engineer from the war. So we were on pretty fertile ground. So when I saw the outline exercise he was thinking of, he was going to base it on a length of railway line. So we went over to see the commissioner and we said, "We want a length of railway line to run this exercise," and what it was all about. So we ended up getting

Lake Grace to somewhere railway line, it was about twenty or thirty miles. It was only really used in the wheat season, so we had to do it outside the wheat season. We had permission to use rolling stock, and they were going to be operated by the railway squadron fellows, because they all came from the railways, you see.

So that was great. The signals system on the railways was a bit old. But to make it sort of a real exercise, we created a base in the Perth area, at one end of the railway, and at the other end of the railway we created another base. The idea then was that we would accumulate stores at this end,

send them up on the railway to the base up there, and then of course we would have to eventually send them back. So what it did was…First of all it, the movement control training people, that is their line of business, movements, and moving people and stores and all that sort of thing. 44 Railway Squadron, that is their business to run railways, so they were involved. I had the water transport people organised to

ferry certain stores over the sea, from around the Rottnest area and bring them into this base. I was able to arrange with the Royal Australian Air Force to drop certain stores from the air, and then we would pick them up from the airfield and run them into the base. To run them into the base, that meant I had to have transport, so I arranged for the RAASC, The Royal Australian Army Service Corps'

transport platoon, CMF to be in camp at that time to do this job. I had the SAS doing certain patrolling to keep the railway safe from insurgents. The engineer stores depot, of course, I had an engineer stores depot, and so my blokes

would send this stuff there. So we had this heap of stores, and they had to be loaded, properly loaded and they had to be moved. So over a period of two weeks, Exercise Pingarrin went. I give all full credit for it, it was his idea. And also the headquarters of Western Command were very good in permitting for these arrangements to be made,

because I couldn't do a thing without the brigadier's say-so, and he agreed. And then of course, a lot of interest was generated, because West Australia is another army, it's way over there. And I had the top railway bloke, I think he was the commander of the 8 Railway Group here in Sydney; he flew over to see what was going on.

Another fellow who was in the transportation business, he flew over to see what was going on. They had never seen this sort of thing…

No, no, it wasn't really…The only illusion to this was that the SAS did patrolling. But we didn't specifically create what you might say an enemy

to go in and blow up part of the railway. We wouldn't have been permitted to do that. But even to put obstacles on the railway or anything like that was not a practical proposition. You see, the aim of the exercise was to have it so that as many people as possible, who have these engineer type tasks, to practice them inside one another. So one was depending on the other. The stores fellow,

the movement control people who had to move the things. And so it went on…

No, it was amazingly smoothly done. And the credit goes to the troops themselves, they were trained well. Especially the railway squadron blokes, it was an everyday thing, but they were doing it in a military environment.

I think the main lesson that I learnt, that this idea of the structure of an army, we've got to make the maximum use of the resources that are out there in the community. I mean, you can have a regular army, but we were really on a cadre for, if we get into any trouble, we've got to expand quickly

and operate a lot of resources. Now when it comes to engineers, the whole infrastructure of the country is part of our bailiwick. The whole question of roads, airfields, ports, the railways of course, the movement control system that helps to get these things from one place to the other. In my day,

we had a thing called a Supplementary Reserve. We had a CMF, and they were what you might call the ordinary combat type troops, they formed into brigades and divisions and they were all around the countryside. But the Supplementary Reserve was based on government departments. For example, here in Sydney, the Department of Main Roads, as it was called in those days, would have

a construction squadron, and they were experts at building roads And they would go into camp only once a year. They didn't have as many parades…Because technically they knew all about roads; it was just to do it in a military environment. Like ports and harbours. We had a ports and harbours organisation, and so they would come into camp and do certain exercises.

And the same with the Electricity Authority. One example and this was Vietnam, when the Task Force first got to Phuoc Tuy Province and they occupied this Nui Dat base, they didn’t have a reliable electrical supply. Each unit has its own electrical generators, which of course are relatively small, they've got to fed all sorts of fuel

to produce electricity, and you've got this myriad of little things going bang, bang, bang all night. And this is, I was still on the Engineer-in-Chief's headquarters, and so the call came back from the Task Force, "Can we get a centralised electrical system for the whole of the Task Force Base?" Which contained anything up to two and a half thousand people. So what was the answer? The Engineer-in-Chief just got on the phone to

the State Electricity Commission in Victoria, now that is another government department. They had a supplementary reserve unit, who did all things electrical, and within a matter of the odd week or two, a major from that area went up and saw what the problem was, made a plan, solved the problem, just handed it in, and the people down in the engineers’ stores depots then

got all this stuff, put it on a ship, it went up to Vietnam and as soon as it got to Vietnam, the local construction squadron put it all together and bingo. And all of this was brought about because we had direct access to government departments who had military units, trained in the military philosophy.

Well, they worked in the government…Say it was the Department of Works, Public Works, in any state, and they would have, say, a construction squadron, and it was all filled with

people from the government department. And the government department ensured that the personnel that were in that unit were available at the planned times to go to camp so they would be effective. They only went to camp once a year, and the main aim of the exercise really was to get them into camp, not to really practice their technical requirements, they had all the expertise in the technical requirements, but in the more military environment in which they might have to work

You see, one of the most basic tenets of the Engineer Corps is that every member of that Engineer Corps, from the sapper upwards has got to be prepared to act as an infantryman. And a lot of these fellows have never dug a hole in their life. But in many cases, they were returned people from World War II.

It was just a question of making sure that their military skills were up to date. Their technical skills, we knew they were adequate, but they just had to be harnessed for the military need.

No.

No, they seemed to be…Of course, in many ways, the senior engineers in those government departments had served during World War II. So they knew what we were on about, and they made sure that the troops were available at the time, and they co-operated extremely. But then, turn the clock forward another

twenty or thirty years, the nature of a government department is just so different. In my day, a government department would have its own work forces to get things done, build roads and so on. Now, they just hand it all out to a contractor to do. So now you don't have a lot of that expertise in government departments

that take it from the time that it comes off the design list and handed off to their work force to build. They just don’t have it; they just go to a contractor. So it is a different scenario these days.

Well, when I was in my last few months in Perth, the Engineer-in-Chief of the day just happened to be coming over on a visit, and there is nothing like a visit from the Engineer-in-Chief for a young major. "G'day, g'day, where am I going next?" Or words to that effect. And anyway, the Engineer-in-Chief of the time said, "I've got a bit of a dilemma."

He said, "You're due for promotion to lieutenant colonel, but I think you would be better off going to the Snowy Mountains Authority to get a little bit more practical engineering." You see, I had been sitting on my bum in some of these staff jobs, and I needed to get a bit of dirt on my fingers. But he said, "If I send you there, I can't promote you." I said, "My choice?"

He said, "Oh yeah." I said, "I'd like to go to the Snowy." And that's how I got there.

Yeah, I had a reasonable idea about it, because when I was on the staff at Duntroon, and I don't know how it happened, but I know it was

before the birth of my second son, Richard. And somehow or another I organised myself, and I don't know what the motivation was, to do a tour of the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Now at that stage, I had no idea I was going to end up on the Snowy Mountains Scheme. So what we did was, we took a train to Cooma, and as part of some group, we then got on a bus and we went to the

headquarters of the Snowy Mountains Authority in Cooma, then we hit the road, and over the period of about…five days, we went to places like Cabramurra, Eucumbene Dam…I don't think we went to Island Bend…

But anyway, we went around and looked at these things, and it was fascinating. To see such a large project. For example, like T1 or T2, one of the big power stations, it was all underground, this huge cavern. Of course, the water goes tearing down these sluices, turns a few paddles over and in the meantime

produces all this electrical power, but it was all in power stations that were in these huge caverns in the mountains. And I presume they were designed that way for security purposes. Then there was the business of the road system, and the people who were building the dams and all the facilities to make all these things work.

We went around, and I thought it was great. That was when I was at Duntroon, and it was only about three years after that when this proposition came to go to the Snowy Mountains Authority to work. So I had a rough idea what the Snowy Mountains was about, because we had been briefed on it all, we had seen the facilities. One or two army officers had been there already, I wasn't the first, so I thought it would be rather exciting. And it was.

Well, one of the problems in a small army is that there aren't sufficient operations

or training exercises or situations in the army to carry out and get experience to army officers, and of course other people, too. So the Engineer-in-Chief had arranged, over a number of years, his office had arranged that officers of the corps who needed extra experience

could get that experience outside the army. Now for example, the public works department, this was the Commonwealth Public Works Department, they don't call it that these days, I don't know what they call it, but I know that one or two officers went to them, and there were big construction projects on of which they'd be a part. This other one…

They were associated with the building of certain facilities down at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. But a certain colonel who had served during the war, after the war had created this big company…

And he being an ex-engineer officer was delighted to think that…John Holland was his name. And he was always very co-operative in taking officers onto some of his projects for a year, two years, and let them get the experience of those sort of tasks. The Snowy Mountains was within that group. Obviously they had an arrangement with the Snowy Mountains Authority…

And I did check on some books many years ago, to work out how many of us actually went there, and it was in the order of fifteen or sixteen engineer officers, at different times over a period of about ten years, went to the Snowy Mountains Authority to get experience constructing facilities, whatever they were constructing them for.

Well, first of all the Eucumbene Dam had been constructed and much further up the Guthega Dam and the Guthega power station had been constructed.

I was to actually live at Island Bend, and the Island Bend dam was in this construction period, and certain tunnels which originated from island bend heading off again to…Certain tunnels were being constructed there. Then on the other side of the mountain,

there was certain other dams that had already been finished, Tentangala and one or two others. Bearing in mind that they started work there somewhere in the late '40s, and I didn't get there until 1963, so ten or fifteen years

had gone by and a substantial amount of work had been done. By the time I left, there was still a lot of work to be done. I was only concerned in a little bit of this. I think I've told you that I was born lucky. You see, when I went to the Snowy Mountains Authority,

I was sent to this Field Group A. It was the sort of field construction element. We were involved in field construction with the sort of people that built the roads away the Snowy, the ancillary things like the camps, to make sure that the water supplies worked and that the roads were opened. So that the big contractors that had gone into build a dam or build a power station,

well this was the framework against which all that was done. We had little airfields, so to make sure that they were fully operational. I got to Jindabyne, which was the place where these people were working, and I found the chap I was working for was an ex-Trinity College bloke. You see, I had been to Trinity College,

but I had left in 1952. This fellow, he wasn't even there then. So he was maybe about four or five years…so I found out he was a Trinity bloke, so we got on like a house on fire. So he put me in charge of Main Road 286, which was the road from Jindabyne up to Garden Gully.

It had already been started, so I just had to control it, that's all, the surveyors…It was being built by sort of our people. I had only been there about three months, and Ted came this morning and said, "I thought I better tell you, I've handed in my resignation."

I said, "Why is that?" He said…I think it had a lot to do with a girlfriend that was heading off to Canada, you see, and he was heading off to Canada and he could get a job in Canada, so I think that was what it was all about. But anyway, he was leaving. So I said, "Oh, who's taking your place?" He said, "You are." I said, "Me? Why me? I'm only a visitor here." He said, "That's your problem, mate."

So I ended up engineer in charge of Field Group A, which gave me a bit more room to move, so I spent the rest of my time doing that. But I did take six weeks, I think it was six weeks; I made an arrangement to take six weeks off to work in the tunnels, to get experience of tunnelling.

So I did that.

No. Actually, what I said about going to the tunnelling was slightly accidental. Because one of the things that we civil engineers are interested in is concrete.

Reinforced concrete. Now Island Bend Dam was a great heap of reinforced concrete, and so I was intrigued to know where they got their materials from, how they used them, how they formed their concrete, how they tested the concrete…Because all of this is civil engineering stuff. You don't learn a lot of this stuff at university.

So all the arrangements were made. The day I turned up to do the sort of six weeks of training, including time in the laboratories where they tested all the concrete and so on, the coffer dam…they'd had a coffer dam there, holding back a heap of water, but it had failed and things were in a bit of a mess. This was the big American contractor was

doing all of this work. And the head of that organisation I reported to and no sooner had I had got to hi, than he said, "Look, I'm terribly sorry I can't give you the job on this concrete business as I thought." I said, "Well, what can I do?" And he said, "The only thing is, you can go down to the tunnels. You can get a job in the tunnels." And I said, "Well, okay."

This bloke was a German, and being Germanic I think he was very prim and proper and what not. By this time, I haven't told you, my promotion had come through, and he knew I was lieutenant colonel in the engineers. He said, "I can't give you a job for your status in the army, or even here…" I said, "Well, don't worry about it. If it's tunnels, I can't work out my

own experience in the tunnels." He said, "All right." So he put me in charge of the Jumbo, and the Jumbo was about a three storey thing, a big structure, which starts with the tunnels, and they have these jackhammers and they bore all these holes in the face. And then jackhammers come out, and you've got to fill them up with explosives, then you have to back off, fire them,

then all this stuff comes down, then you've got to clear it up, put it into little trucks and take it out through the…outside the mountain. It's a real system. For my sins, I was in charge of a Jumbo. They used to do three shifts a day, and I was on what was called the graveyard shift. You go on duty at about eight o'clock at night and you come off

at some ungodly hour of the morning. And in that time, you've got to fire that face twice, and God help you if you don't, because the next shift is not going to be terribly happy about it. Fortunately, it never happened to me, everything went tickety-boo [well]. We'd get in there and we'd fire…So I learnt a completely new thing.

Why it's valuable is you are still working with men, you've got a job to do and you've to make sure you do it properly, and it's the usual business of organisation and so on, people getting on together. And if you have a misfire…I don’t think I had one, thank God.

If one of the charges doesn't go off, you've got to know what to do about it. So it was a hell of an experience for me. Nothing to do with concrete, but I enjoyed it.

Everything has to stop. In our particular case, we were using that explosive that they talk about now. It's ammonium nitrate and you put about

twenty per cent fuel oil with ammonium nitrate, that turns it into explosive. It's what known as a slow explosive. A high explosive is like TNT or gelignite, you know it fires and there's a tremendous bang, and the velocity of the effect is very high.

With a slow explosive it is more of a heaving effect, and this is what you need when you start blowing a face in a tunnel. You put all these holes in a pattern, and you fill them up, and there's a core about down here, and it's roughly a horseshoe shape. You have them electrically timed. So the first ones to blow is this lot, and that blows outwards,

like so, and that means that the other charges, a hundredth of a second later, starts to go, it goes like that, and it just heaves the stuff out into a bloody great heap. That's the theory of it. It's usually about eighty or ninety percent okay, but you've still got to bar down ceilings and get lose bits of rock out of the way, so that people don't get killed and that sort of thing.

But if it goes wrong, the smartest thing to do is just hose the thing down, because water destroys the explosive ability of the ammonium nitrate. That doesn't work on those little detonators, but those detonators are just used to set off the explosive. So that's the main thing. You've got to clear

and you've got to allow time, just in case there is a delay. In our case, we were using all electrical detonators. It's a different kettle when you're using a fuse. You light it at one end and it burns nice and slowly. Well, with that, it's a different kettle of fish. If the thing doesn't go off when it should, you sit there for half an hour and you have a smoke. Well away.

And then after half an hour it is then safe to go forward and do something about removing it, and get that fuse out.

Yes, yes. Well, to start with, you always wore a helmet,

especially in tunnels, you've got to be very aware of the condition of the ceiling, because if something is going to fall, it's going to hurt somebody. There was a big accident that happened at the end of 1963. It wasn't my job; again it was on the contractor's job at the dam,

at Island Bend Dam. There was this very large hole in the ground, and it went down something like a hundred and fifty feet, and there were certain concrete structures being constructed, down there. And to get the concrete to it,

the trucks with the concrete would be up here and then using this big piping, it just went down. Now somewhere on its way down, this started to block. And I don’t think they realised that people were working on the base, and this concrete that was coming down suddenly burst these pipes and

I'm not really sure, but I think there were two or three fellows drowned in the concrete and a couple of other blokes were hurt by flying bits of metal and that sort of thing. I wasn't at Island Bend at the time, it was rather sad. I had a bit of Christmas leave and I was driving down to Sydney and I heard it on the radio. But fortunately, none of my blokes were involved, but it happened close to where we were working.

Yeah, we had all sorts of fellows. Italians, Yugoslavs, we had a few Greeks,

New Zealanders, mad Irishmen, we had them from all over the place. But they all seemed to get on quite well together. For example, when I was working on the road job, my main

people who were handling explosives were an Italian group, and they were damn good. Whereas other fellows, plant operators that I had, Yugoslavs, they could all speak English, so we had a communication. It was an interesting group of people.

I can't remember any. Even when they got pissed [drunk]…That's the time when most of the trouble starts, things can fester if there's anything there to fester. But I can't remember any…They certainly drank a lot these fellow. You see, pay day was on a Wednesday,

every second Wednesday, and we had to very particular about who turned up on Thursday morning, make sure they weren't pissed. There is nothing worse than somebody getting on a big piece of plant if he's pissed. It is just not an option; he has to be off the job.

I got there in January; I think I did this near the end of the winter, somewhere about August/September. That winter wasn't a particularly severe one.

I know they we’re all terribly worried that we wouldn’t get enough snow at Island Bend to go skiing. That was serious, you know. It's very iffy up there. You can have tremendous Easters, they've got a terrific one on now, but there are times when there is just snow…It's supposed to be there in June, it rarely is. That is the official opening of the ski season.

Of course, my two boys wanted to go skiing, didn't they?

In the winter, yeah. Take the boys skiing. My eldest one, he was a member of the…Scouts, and that was the only Scout troop in Australia that was on skis.

John Demagenic I think it was, I don’t know what nationality he was….Polish? He ran the Scout troop, and whenever of course it was snowing, they were all out there as a Scout troop, they did all their activities on skis. Richard was too young,

was only about four. He just had to stick with me, I was a mug [novice] skier, I learned to ski while I was up there. Jock became quite a good skier, and little Richard learn pretty early.

The role was to mainly construct the facilities

between all these construction jobs. Like Main Road 246, it was a job that we took over from the Department of Main Roads. Why they did, I don't know. It was just there when I got there. And it had to be built to Department of Main Roads standards.

That was basically it. We did it using contract labour and various things. So that was the road system we had to worry about. In the winter, we also had to worry about the clearing system, because there would be a lot of snow around, so you would have get the snow ploughs in to get rid of the snow to keep the roads open. Then of course there were the various facilities,

like the township of Island Bend, there was the little township of Guthega, and the Jindabyne camp. Not my responsibility, but there were people to look after them and make sure the houses were okay, the water supply was okay, ands all the camp roads were okay. Those sort of things.

There were a number of little airfields around the place that we had to keep operational. They weren't big ones…I forget the name of the aircraft that they use to fly, but it was nothing more than a small two engine type. The Cooma people used to visit around, just to check up on things. I think there were certain…

The question of water, the rainfall gauges and everything. Certain records and recordings they had there at those airfields that had to be looked after. The whole business of towns, the water supply…For example, one of the bigger jobs was the new town of Jindabyne.

We laid out the new town of Jindabyne, surveyed it all in and so on. About that time also we were trying to get a water supply in, to make sure there would be sufficient water for all the houses that were going to be built for X number of years. To do that we had to fiddle with a few of the water pumps and things.

They just weren't satisfactory for what the town would need, so all that had to be adjusted. We put the first house into Jindabyne, I think it was for the commission, Bill Hudson. He wanted a certain weekend

to celebrate the fact that Jindabyne was now going to be occupied, and he needed a house. Of course, the Snowy Mountains Authority was built on temporary houses; you moved your houses from Point A to Point B. My house in Island Bend had been brought from Khancoban, or somewhere over the hill. And it was the same with this first house.

So by a certain time, by a certain date, it had to be finished, and it was. And Bill came down and did his trick. Over the years…I think some of the blocks were sold out. Some of them were given…I know that the Snowy Mountains Authority people, if you wanted to get a block of land there,

you could get it reasonably cheaply, and I got a thing to say, "Did I want one?" And I said, "Yes." And then they woke up to the fact that I wasn't an employee of the Snowy Mountains Authority and it was withdrawn. Anyway, you win a few and you lose a few.

Yeah, well, first of all it was timber.

It was one of those houses where you could walk into a smallish room, probably only about a metre and a half square, so that you could pull the door behind you, before you opened up the other door into the house. So you didn't let this terrible cold air get into the house. They were all very well insulated,

in the ceilings and underneath. All the stoves were fuelled with coke, and especially in the wintertime, they were run twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, because your hot water service depended on that. The timber houses…

The layout? Working from the back, there was a sort of porch arrangement, it was certainly enclosed and it had glass so that you could see out. Then there was the kitchen. The next room was the dining room and that sort of drifted into a smallish lounge, and then…In our particular house,

we had three bedrooms. And under the normal course of events, there was one for Mum and I and the boys had one each. If we had visitors, the boys had to go and sleep in the one room and let the visitors sleep in the other. Electrical power? They subsidised our electrical power because…I forget what the rates were,

but they were all slashed if you lived above a certain elevation, and we lived above what they called the snow line. Our power bills were quite reasonable, because you use an awful lot of power in those places. The windows were all double glazed for insulation purposes.

One night, and I can vouch for this, those buildings are very flexible. There was a hell of a storm one night, and the wind was horrendous, and I went in to check up on Jock, in his bedroom, and the wall was moving like this. And I thought, 'Lord, what's going to happen?' I had a terrible vision that the roof would go, and I had to work out a plan if the roof goes, what do I do, and I've got to do it quick.

It didn’t happen, thank God, but it was frightening to see that wall going. I didn't tell Jock, because I thought it might worry him, but he slept through it.

I think they were on a top of concrete foundation.

But different to most houses, underneath they were also insulated. And of course the year we were there, the Queen of England had to visit, didn't she? And we had no sooner got into our house in…about January/February…I arrived there in the middle of January, the house became available just a few weeks afterward, and then the news came that the Queen was coming. But you see, my house,

along with a number of those in Island Bend, we were the first occupants, and nobody had laid out a garden or anything of that nature. The Snowy Mountains Authority was a very democratic place, so what they did was they came around and they just put the soil in front of your house. Hint, hint. Use it to landscape the gardens before the Queen comes. As I say, I was born lucky,

because I had a student up there for work experience, working with me on the Snowy, and his father was a landscape gardener, and he knew all about it, and he was dying to…I said, "How would you like to spend the weekend with me?" So I had this bloke, he laid it all out, and he helped me put the lawns down and the garden beds…I could never have done it without him.

Oh, she drove past and probably didn't even look at it. You see, we were on the route to the lookout over the Island Bend Dam. Every house that she was going to pass got one of these little piles of earth, if they hadn't already put in a garden…

It's like everything else, I think I learnt a bit about the organisation of jobs. I learnt a lot about man management. Bearing in mind that this wasn't a military organisation,

but my two works supervisors had both served in World War II, and they were characters, they really were.

Well, first of all they were very different. One was ex-air force and he was a technically sound…Bob was ex-army and he was as rough as guts. He used to worry me,

because on pay nights, he was always down the pub and he could fight, and he wasn’t a big bloke. I had to talk to him one day and I said, "Listen, you've got to stop this fighting business, because some of these young blokes are going to lay for you, and you're going to get done like a dinner." We used to call him Whopper.

And by this time, Bob had to have been in his forties, and Jim was the other supervisor, he was a similar age, but he wasn't as wild as Whopper. And they didn’t get on terribly well. I know that on occasions, like for example, Whopper would have that part of the job there and Jim had that part of the job.

And Whopper would order a truck load of pipes or something of that nature, and Jim would have somebody to waylay the pipes to go to his job, and not to Whopper’s. It all got solved because Whopper got crook, he got very sick. Which saved me…I didn't want to sack him; I don’t know whether I could have anyway, but it solved the problem. So I only had the one supervisor to work with.

Well, you need a bit of luck. I was just lucky. You see, they're different….I can remember when Jim….

Let me just put it this way. He found out, first of all that I was army, but somebody must have told him that I was a lieutenant colonel; this was after my promotion had come through. Somehow it leaked out. We both had our families living up at Island Bend, and my vehicle was being repaired for some reason…

I was selected to attend the British Joint Services Staff College. It was located

at a place called Latimer, which was about forty minutes in the train outside of London. And the Joint Services Staff College was a place where officers of the rank of, say, lieutenant colonel, or equivalent, you've got navy, army, air force and some civilians. This was where we got to know each others' ways and methods

and what the air force really did, and they took us to an air force base and we flew aircraft and that sort of thing. We did similar things with the navy and the army. We were lectured by all sorts of high-falutin people. It was a very interesting course.

I took away a much greater understanding

of the other two services, and also civilians who were involved in the services. I only had a sort of a passing knowledge of the air force and the navy. But you see there, we actually went to an RAF base, in this case

it was a base in Northern Ireland, and we actually flew out on these big four engine aircraft on reconnaissance of the North Sea. The main aim of the exercise was to find out what the bloody Russians were up to. But so, it was that sort of…It was a bit of hands-on, and flying very low over the water and those sorts of things that the air force like to inflict on their visitors.

And more or less get a feel for the philosophy of the air force. They were the big aircraft and then of course at various other places we would see fighters and training aircraft. As far as the navy was concerned, it was quite similar. You'd get into a ship…I had never been in a submarine before. And so we all clambered down into a submarine. We didn't actually go to sea in a submarine, which is a pity, I think.

It would have been interesting to get down under and just feel what it was like. And as far as the army was concerned, we went over to Germany and we visited a big exercise over in Germany. The interesting thing about that was, of course, they were looking at the big picture.

The Australian Army for many years had all been involved in tropical warfare. The use of tanks and things were peripheral as opposed to what was going on. But over there, in Germany, I can still remember this exercise we were on and we were in this particular area, with all the pits and so on, keep your head down.

And these bloody tanks, these huge tanks, came rolling over you. And it was quite frightening. I knew they weren't going to kill us, but the size of these things and the noise. It was amazing. So, those were the sort of things…Those little experiences. A much bigger army than the Australian Army. And of course they were doing a totally different task to what the Australian Army was doing.

And the use of their firepower, the actual power of some of this tank artillery was something to be seen. Because I hadn't seen many of this tank type things in the Australian Army. I think we had a few Centurions in those days and that was about it. Although we changed them at a later date, I think we went to a German one. The Leopard.

Oh yes, we were subjected to the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation] theory about what the Russians were on about, what they might do, the question of nuclear power. It was the first time

I had been involved in even thinking about the consequences of a nuclear strike on a particular place. And we did simple exercises, just sort of working through the things that might happen. So I found that interesting. And of course, while we were over there,

the British Government were thinking seriously of withdrawing from the Far East, and in fact they did withdraw from the Far East. We did a number of studies, by syndicates, as to how and when we would withdraw these forces. And also there was a certain amount of downgrading

to go on in naval forces in the general British area, and air force and also…army units. So it was all against a British background, but it was an interesting study. First of all you learned what they had and some of the problems and some of the solutions they thought they might have.

No. I remember it happening. That was John Kennedy's box of tricks, wasn't it? Yes, yes…

I'm not too sure…We got the overall….I don't know that we got the nitty-gritty. However it was one of those stand-offs where, "You hit me, I'll hit you."

First of all, I was in England and I was coming home, so they thought, 'Oh well, you might as well go to Israel.' To have a look at…what did they call in those days? There's a word for it…

Anyway, it was the whole business of calling out their troops if they had an emergency. The Israeli army of course has National Service for a couple of years. Everybody at a certain age has to do National Service. There were some of the people said to me…

I can't remember what the period was…"We're all in the services and we just have some time off to do a civilian job…" The word I'm looking for is mobilisation. And to mobilise their forces, should they be attacked, obviously by the Arabs or whoever.

So they took me through this system of how they do it. Basically they get the message out. Every person who is a reserve with an army unit has certain parts of his equipment at home. And once he gets this message, and it would just come over the radio, ordinary radio, like 2BL [Sydney radio station] or whatever,

and it would be normally be done about four o'clock in the afternoon, and they would just sort of say, "Report to your depots," something quite simple. And of course the word gets around in no time flat, and they immediately go and get this bit of kit, like their boots and their hat, and maybe their rifle, and they go straight to their depot. When they get to the depot, their kit is basically laid out there for them, basically to just pick it up and put it on…

First of all, there is the rest of the uniform, and then there is the pack and the haversack and the water bottle, and all the extraneous things that you have as a soldier, and the vehicles are there and within a matter of an hour or two, they get onto the vehicle and head off to an appointed spot on the frontier. And they've all got their appointed spots to go to.

That was the guts of it. There was a lot more detail that I can't really remember. I know I had to write a report on it at the time, but it was interesting, just to talk to these people.

I think they were interested in what the Israelis were doing, in that regard. It may well be that

the people at army headquarters were thinking that in the situation of us having to mobilise the CMF, now called the Army Reserve, we've got to have similar sort of things. But first of all, we have a big country, whereas Israel is only a small country.

And all the things that they do in Israel is concentrated in a very small space, probably on the size of Victoria, let alone the whole of Australia.

Up to this point, I didn't know much about what was going on.

When I was in Canberra in 1964, and the first half of '65, I was involved in what you might call the staff planning of the Australian Battalion Group, it was in those days, that was to go to Vietnam. It hadn't gone to Vietnam in that time.

I was interested in the engineer element of it, which was only relatively small, of course. The battalion group went in, I think…I started my course in June, '65, and I think it was about August or September that the first battalion group went into Bien Hoa and joined the

…it was an American airborne brigade, and they were a battalion group in that airborne brigade, and they were based out of Bien Hoa. So the Engineer-in-Chief thought it would be a good idea if I went home via Singapore, because there was an army headquarters there,

and they could give me all the necessary directions and what not, and send me off to Vietnam to have a look. It just so happened that the lieutenant colonel, who was the senior staff officer there was also an engineer. Did I tell you he also sent me to Thailand? You see, he had also been on the Snowy Mountains Authority

and the Snowy Mountains Authority were assisting the construction of some roads in…I think it was northwest Thailand…I might be getting mixed up here, there was two things going on in Thailand…No, that's right, it was the Snowy job,

and they were sort of responsible to make sure the design of the road was okay, and also to supervise the construction of it, to make sure it was to the proper standards of the highway to be built. But that was interesting. Some of the fellows that I had worked with on the Snowy were up there.

I know one of them gave me a bottle of whiskey that I had to take back to Bill Hudson, and it was one of those Mekong…it had a strange name, it was ghastly. I didn't drink it. But it got back to Sir William Hudson.

The basic overall philosophy was that it was this domino theory. That the Communists were just working their way down the map, and trying to take over all these countries. Then there was that split, after the French had been thrown out of Vietnam.

There was a North Vietnam and a South Vietnam, and the South Vietnamese were trying to set up a…I won't say a democratic society, but a sort of free society that they wanted as opposed to being Communist. And the Communists wanted to get down there and do it. And this was all just part of the business of trying to ensure that the South Vietnamese Government

was free to do what it wanted to do, as opposed to what the Communists wanted to do. There was a political gap in their philosophies.

On this trip? No. On the way back from this job in England, I was only sent there by the engineering chief to find out what the engineers were doing,

and to give him a first hand report, as to what the….We only had a troop, and a troop of engineers is only something like thirty odd fellows, run by a captain. So I was lucky to…It was an Operation Crimp, and it was about the middle of January. I remember it

because it was my wedding anniversary on the 14th of January, it was about that date. So I arrived in Saigon, and another engineer officer, whose name escapes me, was on the staff of the Australian headquarters in Saigon, so he accompanied me down to Bien Hoa in the helicopter. But of course the battalion wasn't at Bien Hoa,

it was out on this Operation Crimp. So we had to fly into Crimp. The CO of the unit was a friend of mine. All these fellows were contemporaries, you see. Alec was commanding the battalion…

They had run into a certain amount of trouble. They had run into this big tunnel system, where they found these underground facilities. And it was very interesting things for the sappers [engineers] to do, to get into these tunnels and find out what the heck they were. It was a very dangerous business. In fact, the first engineer of that troop

that was killed, he actually died in those tunnels.

I think he was asphyxiated. He was a big sort of fellow, and these Vietnamese were only little skinny blokes, and the tunnels were built accordingly, and he somehow got jammed into one of these and was asphyxiated.

Oh yeah, I got down into the tunnels.

The entry just looked like any piece of territory, it was quite well camouflaged, and some sort of a trapdoor came up…

Yeah, yeah. Well, the one that I went into was in an area where there was a fair amount of timber, but not heavy jungle.

At a later date, there were lots of tunnels. You could more or less walk straight up in some of them, they were large tunnels, walk in. But these, you sort of dropped down. They must have been communication type tunnels, and of course I'm only small, so I didn't have any great trouble, but bigger men would have much more trouble.

The bits of tunnel that I was permitted to go into…the battalion wasn't going to lose a strange lieutenant colonel doing stupid things. So, there was no enemy to contend with. But those sappers, they would go down with probably just a pistol and a torch, they didn't know what they were going to find.

They did some pretty wonderful things, and cleared them out. So I was kept under pretty good control. I was fresh from England, my greens were all brand new, and I looked like somebody who was a bit wet behind the ears.

Mainly it was just straight through the soil, but now and again at certain places, where obviously they thought they would have some trouble, there was obvious shoring up with timbers. But I didn't really see, on that very first trip to Vietnam, I was only in a small run of communication tunnel,

and it was nothing to really look at. In later years I got into other tunnels and they had whole headquarters underground with hospital facilities and plan rooms and communications. All sorts of things. And of course I have visited Vietnam since the war,

I think it was 1997, a group of us went up from the Civil Affairs Association, with our wives, and we went into the Cu Chi Tunnels. That wasn't in our area of operations, but it was a huge system, much bigger than anything I had ever seen.

Not really, not really. It was very early days. I had every confidence, all things being equal, that the Australian battalion could handle anything that the Viet Cong could throw against them.

The battalion had only been there a matter of six months when I got to them, and they had changed the CO in that time, because the first CO…I think he was sick. For medical reasons he had to be replaced.

But the other CO, who had been working on the headquarters in Saigon and being an infantryman, he knew how to command an infantry battalion, it was his business, so he just took over.

First of all I wanted to see the work they were doing. These tunnels were something new,

and of course, all the other things that combat engineers do, with mines, booby traps and they can turn their hands to just simple tracks, I won't say roads, but they can do minor construction work. They can man water supplies, sometimes they might have to worry about some electrical facilities, just to look after it.

The other thing is they do a lot of things with field defences, like wire defences. It was just to see what they were doing, and was the training they were getting in Australia relevant to preparing them for Vietnam.

No, they seemed to be pretty well up to date. In other words, what was happening was the fellows in Vietnam were reporting back, and it didn't need me to say a) it was wrong, or b) they should be doing something different or anything of that nature. Because they had set up, at the School of Military Engineering, a system, they even had tunnels and they had what you might call

mock Viet Cong facilities, and the boys were trained on it. Things like getting in underground, they weren't used to those sort of things. So I think in the main that their training was okay. There might have been some minor details…they can always improve training.

I think the first impression was the huge American influence. The airport was just full of military aircraft,

Tan Son Nhut, or Saigon airport, whatever they called it at the time, they changed the name after a while. And the American presence, if I can put it that way, because remember at this time, we only had a battalion there, at Bien Hoa, and that was a huge American base, with all sorts of facilities in it.

And of course, anything American, it's always done on a grand scale. They've got the resources to do such things. So that was my main impression.

No. I was on there the day,

actually in their operational position. And there was no, what you might say, big activities going on on that day. Of course every day has its things. In fact, I had to be careful I wasn't an embarrassment, getting in the way. I had this young fellow,

a captain, looking after me, and I think he was particularly worried about the cap. He wanted me to wear something else in case there was a sniper around. And that was fair enough. It was nice to have that sort of advice. And flying in and flying out, that was okay.

I know that it's an old habit, with the Viet Cong, when they've got these helicopters they send up signals that they think we will recognise, and if you're mug enough to go down they will do you like a dinner.

Interesting personalities…I knew a lot of the fellows in the battalion. I knew the CO and the 2IC and I think I'd met the OC of the headquarter company, and some of the young officers…In fact, the fellow looking after me, he had been a cadet at Duntroon

when I was on the staff there. I can't think of anything outstanding…

Well, my understanding of it was that at the political level, there was a suggestion that this civil affairs type unit could be used in Vietnam. That battalion group that I visited, they had already got involved with the American

civil affairs type operations in a minor way, in the way a unit of the American Amy might normally get involved. And it might be a simple thing like helping the local orphanage rebuild the front fence. They might be short of a medic to do something and they could send a young medical orderly over to assist, just on a temporary basis.

Another battalion, at some stage of the game, was heavily involved in getting a school organised, and in fact, I saw that same school when I visited in 1990. So there was this thought…and I'm thinking that the minister for the army at the time,

who was Malcolm Fraser, had some thought about this and that they should produce such a unit. And the army headquarters, bearing in mind that I was part of the egineering staff, they had started to plan what a Civil Affairs Unit should look like.

How many people should be in it, who they should be, what sort of equipment they would have, and that sort of thing. So the first inkling of this that I got was the usual thing, if a new unit is being raised it gets passed around the various directorates. It goes through the infantry people to say, "Is that okay?" It goes through the artillery people and the armoured corps. It has got to go through all these various people to make sure that

they are happy about contributing to such a thing, and if they're not happy, what they think they should be doing. So the first time I saw it was when I was senior staff officer at the Engineer-in-Chief’s branch, little knowing that I would have much to do with it. But anyway, somewhere along the line, I got called in and told, "You're it, buster."

By which time, the establishment, the list of people who were in it, was quite well suggested and so on. And also the equipment table for all the stuff that they should take with them. So they gave me this job about…April, 1967.

So having got this thing, I got on an aeroplane and flew to Vietnam…by which time there was a Task Force in Phuoc Tuy province. So I met an awful lot of people in Saigon, and I had to go down to the 11 Airborne, I think it was the old brigade

which our battalion had been a member of, and talked to them there. Then of course I got to the Task Force, Brigadier Graham was the Task Force commander, so I could see where the layout was and where we might be located within that layout. And in between times, I also had to go down to Vung Tau, I was going to have a detachment down in Vung Tau.

Certain facilities…because, we hadn't even formed the unit at this time. That was in April. I came back, I was there about a fortnight, so at least I had some inkling of where we were going to go, there were a few fellows up there who had been doing some civil affairs type work and they told me what it was, I got their advice.

Then about the 1st of May, we started to assemble at the Army Intelligence Centre. We all came in, they gave us accommodation, they fed us and then the personnel started to arrive. I got an adjutant, I got my 2IC, and so it went on. We ended up assembling about fifty fellows, and we had

an orientation course by people who had been in Vietnam, to tell us what the culture was, the religion, what the climate was like, and a few bits and pieces about Phuoc Tuy Province just as sort of an eye opener. It was all very quick, I might add. And then we took on a colloquial Vietnamese course, and that was quick. The whole trouble was being the commanding officer,

everybody wanted to talk to me, and I doubt that I ever went to more than half the lessons. So I didn't learn much Vietnamese. But what I was really delighted at was everybody was so helpful, to help me form the unit. Like the Engineer-in-Chief of the day was Brigadier Logan. He just said, "Use whatever facilities you want

from my branch to help you do what you've got to do." to put this equipment table together and so on. And it was the old story. The equipment table, I had to go and physically talk to all the people who had a say, and they were all very co-operative, rather than pass it around by the mail…It takes a hell of a long time to do these things, and I couldn't afford that time. So we got that organised.

And I had to go to Melbourne. I was having trouble getting a doctor, I needed a doctor, and so I had to go down and talk to the medical people down in Melbourne where the headquarters of the medical profession were in the army, and I ended up with Hobson's Choice [no choice], and it happened to be the doctor that I ended up with, who was quite an interesting character.

He had already been in Africa, doing medical type work. He had also had a brief run in Vietnam, down at Vung Tau. He was a very colourful man and I was debating whether I would take him. Anyhow, it turned out that he went to the same school that I went to and he was a parachutist, and I thought I would be able to control him.

So, I took him on. He did a great job.

I thought it made a lot of sense. I mean there was some pretty high falutin language used, but the thought of a foreign force going into a country, and trying to assist them, doing what they want to do,

you can get a lot of…not just kudos, but you can help the local people do what they are trying to do for their people. Take a simple thing like the medical business. In a province, there is a medical organisation and they have their problems, but of course when you get these situations of warfare

and all that sort of thing, things can break down. Now the military, we're terribly well organised, and there are times when you've got facilities that might be of use to the civilian population. So bearing in mind that they said the role of the Civil Affairs Unit

was to assist the government of Vietnam organisation, to help them control and help their people….And of course, there's a bit of a throwaway line that get a bit of kudos for Australia, too. That is a pretty rough as guts description of it, but that is the guts of it.

It's like a lot of these things…I thought it was a good idea, and I thought that the Australian Task Force, which was the sort of facility that I was going to work within, could have something to contribute. But it's like everything else, you don't want to be the first into the field, you see. We were the first people and we had to stick our foot in the water,

and test it all out, and we got a bit of criticism, I believe, from various people, who thought it was a lot of codswallop. There was the odd article in the newspapers, in the time that I was in Vietnam, which were not terribly complimentary, saying, "Do we really have to do this sort of thing? Is it losing sight of the main aim of the exercise with the military force?"

There were one or two people in the Task Force who were not terribly imbued with the thought of this, “civil affairs” business. “Let's get on with the soldiering bit. Give me more bloody ammunition, give me more guns. Let's get stuck into this."

Anyway, for good or evil, we were the first ones to try this out…Not the first, because remember that 1 Battalion group, there was a little bit of going on there, just what they could do.

Well, in the Task Force area, there were small jobs like,

for example, we were able to assist in the repair of the market place down at Hoa Long. Now the market place is a very important place for a village, and the Hoa Long village was just at our doorstep. So that made a little bit of sense there. I think there was a little bit of assistance given by the units

to make some repairs to the schools. So that was in the educational field. In the medical field, I don't know that there was all that much done, unless it was done within a unit. There was a fellow called John Donahue, he was with a little group of people, I doubt that he had more than half a dozen or so, mainly tradesmen,

who could go around and provide assistance to various people in various villages. I know that there was one scheme…They thought it was a good idea, there were lots of orphans, and taking them down to Vung Tau for the day, to the beach. Kids love playing in the sand and all this sort of thing, and it was an outing for the kids.

We didn't do much of that in my time. There were other things that we got involved in. But that chap, like me, he had no training for this. He was thrown in the deep end and he was quite a charismatic sort of fellow. He had a little flag made up

in the form of a triangle, and it was yellow over red, which were the colours of Vietnam, and it had WHAM on it, 'Winning Hearts And Minds.'

Yeah. It is a very broad generalisation,

but in essence, yes. If the activities of the Australian soldier in the province can be seen as to being helpful to the ordinary man in the street, I mean it can but good. But it's not as simple as that.

I know a lot of people criticised some of the things that we did, but I think civil affairs changed over the five years that we were in Vietnam. First of all, we were brand new, secondly the operational control of the Phuoc Tuy Province was still a bit dicey, here and there, whereas a couple of years later, I mean the Phuoc Tuy Province was as safe as the house.

The chap who is writing the history, Barry Smith, Barry used to wander around the villages and he wasn't even armed. My blokes, no way would we have been going anywhere without our rifle or a pistol, because the situation wasn't as good. But as time went on, and the Task Force

could devote more facilities to this sort of helping the government departments in Phuoc Tuy. Whether it was the medical people or whether it was the public works people, they also got into the agricultural field. Of course, the medical field is always a winner. So people who, like us, who did it the first time, we struck a few snags.

Go forward two or three years and they're building great big housing estates almost.

Well, I had heard the odd report, but…he had been taken out of the country, for some reason.

I think that was basically it, but I couldn’t entertain those thoughts because it was either him or nothing.

Well, apparently the medical people didn't have anybody else to offer. That was it. And he worked like a slave; there is no doubt about it. He did a great job.

I didn't get much really at all. They seemed to be doing slightly different things. I think they were a little bit involved in military government,

from what I could make out, which of course wasn't anything to do with us. I know that when we first got to Vietnam we were very quickly being the host of a platoon of an American Civil Affairs Unit. It was commanded by a captain, and we just gave them accommodation and fed them. They were doing…

Bearing in mind that Phuoc Tuy was shared between the Americans and ourselves. In the American area, these people were doing checks out on villages, and doing some sort of research work on numbers and what sort of activities were going on and that sort of thing. I suppose you would call them surveys of activities.

Something quite different to what we were really on about.

Oh yes. The Military Intelligence Centre at Mosman. They were nominated by Headquarters Eastern Command to be our host. In other words, they took us in, they gave us accommodation, they fed us while we were there, and they assisted us…

My adjutant was helped to get the records of all the soldiers and so on, and to get the unit formed. First of all to get them physically in one place and then to start this little training episode for a few weeks. All along the line…sometimes you can't get the fellow you want,

sometimes a person, for example, is posted to the unit but he doesn't turn up for some other reason and you need a replacement. All those things can be very quickly helped, or solved, especially at the headquarters Eastern Command level through the Military Intelligence Centre. They smoothed the rails for a lot of these things. They were very useful, very helpful.

Well, first of all there was medical equipment that the medical people would need to have. On the engineering side of it,

there wouldn't have been much equipment, per se, but every unit sort of has the normal equipment they need, like cooking gear and all sorts of things. Whether it's vehicles, equipment…when I say, depending on what the thing is of the unit, it might be necessary for us to have had bulldozers,

but we didn't have bulldozers. So if we needed bulldozers, we got somebody else to do that. And of course, all of our, what you might call, we had certain storage requirements to store equipment, and we needed people to do that, not that we had much equipment there, we had to…either we were given storage sheds in our unit area or we had to build them when we got there.

That's a rather tough question; it's so long since I had anything to do with a unit equipment table. There are probably all sorts of basic day to day things that you need that just live as a unit. Like typewriters, how many typewriters would you need to have to run the orderly room?

And so it goes on…how many radios…

The basic number was in the order of fifty odd.

We had a little headquarters. I was on the headquarters, my 2IC, he was a major, he was there, I had an adjutant quartermaster, who looked after all the administrative things for the people and the equipment and how to feed us. I think I had a couple of liaison officers, and of course you had to have clerks

and those sort of things to run an orderly room. And I think I had people who could run storage facilities. Then under them, we had a medical detachment run the RMO [Regimental Medical Officer]. I had an engineering group run by an engineering captain, who was also a second lieutenant.

I think there was a couple of warrant officers, and a few tradesmen, like a plumber and a carpenter…Then we had an education section, again run by a captain from the Education Corps, and he had a small staff of people to assist him

with the education pursuits. So they were the basic three. Near the end of my time there, the question of agriculture came in. And I think it was just before I left, we were allocated a chap who was first in agricultural matters. In other words,

he could act as a bit of an advisor to the agriculture person at Phuoc Tuy Province, the Vietnamese province. Or at least be able to sit in, understand what they were on about, and if there was anyway we could help, start to work. I'm not terribly au fait with that because that hadn't really got off the ground before I left.

Well, I suppose the only goal that I had in mind was to be able to effectively do the work that was apparent to be done. But to call it a goal is a bit of an overstatement, because events just happen.

See, initially, most of the operations of the Task Force, I was able to have a small detachment of my people on the operations, just to see what went on. There were all sorts of things that you might be able to help with, just the control of the people, and they might have problems with the health of…there and then on the spot, and they might have casualties you might be able to help.

One thing we ran into was the question of rice. Our caches of rice, there were people who were obviously hoarding and doing all sorts of naughty things. And of course the Viet Cong, if we pinched rice from the Viet Cong we could hand it back to the people. There was a bit of that that went on.

It was a bit of suck-it-and-see for us, because we didn't have anybody to say, "This is what has happened in the past, and you just take it from here." We were starting from taws [the beginning]. For example, the medical section was hand in glove with the medical authorities of the province. Bearing in mind, there was another organisation,

the Americans, they had people assisting the province chief, sort of an advisor to the province chief, a military advisor, but they were also supported by an American organisation. It went beyond civil affairs, but it was a similar thing. And so we had to make sure that

the Americans and ourselves were in unison when we were talking to the Vietnamese Government authorities, whether it was the public works department of the engineers, or the education people and the medical people. And everything we did we always kept everybody informed. If they didn't want us to do it, not that that come up very often, if they had reservations, then of course we would say, "We won't do it."

On the other hand lots of things cropped up that were brand new. Like, for example, we had this refugee village thrust on us at short notice. I was called in by the brigadier one day, there was an operation on, these people up on Slope 30, I think they called it,

were a little bit exposed to being exploited by the Viet Cong, so they decided to move this group of people, down just outside the Task Force. To do that, first of all we had to have a piece of territory, which the brigadier told me what it was. The second thing was that we would have some sort of protection. We had that because he gave us a company, 7 RAR [Royal Australian Regiment]

to protect us while we were doing what we were going to be able to do. Then of course we had to design a village. But we couldn't just go up to the Vietnamese authorities and say, "Look, we're going to design this village. Can you help us?" Because the security situation was we didn't want the Viet Cong to know. And if we had done that, sure as God made little apples,

the whole thing would have got out and might have aborted the whole project. So, basically, to design it was a bit simple. There was a main road, and I thought this main road might connect up with somewhere else in the province at a future date, it was running along a ridgeline so that was good. I grabbed the head of the survey unit, and put him in a helicopter with me, and we flew over Vietnamese villages

and sketched what they looked like. Where were the province authorities? Where were the schools? Where were the medical things? Where were the religious things? How big were the plots of ground? All this sort of thing. And we were doing it blind, almost. Anyway, we laid it out and then we had to get it surveyed.

The survey people surveyed it all out, and got in all the pegs. Then of course the engineers had to hop in and construct the roads, the road systems, dig the wells, because they were going to have to have wells to get water. So it went on. And like everything else, in these sort of things they don't give you much time.

But the OC of the field squadron was an old friend of mine, and he gave me tremendous help. What we did was, we worked out there was going to be a plot of ground for a family, and all we could afford to do was basically put some sort of a shelter on that plot of ground and construct it, as a start point. It wouldn't be much bigger than this room, but it would be timber corners,

and I think it had a tin roof, and it was clad around the side with some sort of plastic or vinyl covering. But it would give you really the most basic cover. That had to be constructed by the engineers. Then the big day came when the refugees started to pour in. They had to be checked medically,

and of course once that started, we were able to tell the Vietnamese authorities what we had done. And of course they had to come in and…These people had to be handled as refugees and there was certain rules regarding the handling of refugees which the Vietnamese were already used to, under the American system, so we had to sort of obey those. It was pretty ghastly for the poor old Vietnamese, mum, dad and the kids.

I've never seen so many pumpkins in my life, pumpkins everywhere. And so they had to be allocated a house, because initially they lived under tentage and then after they were allocated out to housing.

It was quite detailed. It was a question of maybe roughly the size of the plot of ground. Secondly, did they have ownership? The question of what they were permitted to receive in terms of health treatment, because they were on the move.

There was also money handed out to them, to see them over, to get them going in this period of disruption. They weren't to know about it. They were suddenly picked up, taken to a new location and dropped down. And there was the question of as soon as possible the kids have got to go to school. In other words, government administration has got to be established.

This was a new hamlet as part of the village system in Vietnam. But I can't remember chapter and verse, what was in the documents…

Oh yes, yes.

The plot of ground was sufficient for them to start growing vegetables and food for that sort of thing. One of the big problems was just that whole business. I mean you take a person away from an area where, say, they produce charcoal. This new site, hopefully, you can find a place where they can produce charcoal.

On the other hand, they may be rice farmers and can we find a place for them to grow rice to make a living? That sort of thing, yes, that certainly cropped up. There was no sense that if we picked this lot up and put them in the mountains, they couldn't go fishing. That was certainly a consideration.

Not really. Bearing in mind it happened in September, and it might have been early October when the first villagers arrived. I think it was a big experiment.

A big event in their lives. We tried to alleviate it by dividing the village up into areas, and specific units of the Task Force would assist those particular houses. Now, see, there is a lot of rubbish and leftovers in the Task Force, or the unit. Take an infantry battalion. There might be timber, there might…

but it might be stuff that is of use to the Vietnamese, you see. And a lot of units, I think, helped a lot of people really get on their feet. Because one of the things we had to watch, it wasn't long before word got around Saigon that we had this refugee village and we were going to allocate them land. One of the rules had to be that they couldn’t sell it.

Because they had all these strange faces coming down from Saigon wanting to buy up their land, at bargain prices. So all those little problems…

That is a difficult one. We found that the type of people that we had in the various sections…Like the medical people, they were immediately able to be absorbed into the system, and I think they were effective…

You can always improve. At a later date, we also had dental facilities, which tacked onto the medical facilities. And again, with the education people, trying to find out what are the problems that the Vietnamese education system have got,

have they got sufficient schools, have they got sufficient books, or the where with all for the students to use, or whatever it was. And through their public works type system, we attempted to build schools. We learnt a few lessons there of course. If you attempted to get the Vietnamese to build them,

for the plans that the Vietnamese would normally use, and you would finance them to do this. We found very early in the piece, that if say a battalion or a field squadron went in and built a schoolroom for such and such a school, the Viet Cong was just as likely to come in and burn it. But if it is built by Vietnamese,

for Vietnamese, they didn't touch it.

I think we knew this when we started. We hadn't tested it, mark you, but that was it. Like, for example, during the Tet Offensive, there was a case there

where certain marquees and things were set up in an area for people who had had their houses burnt down, or had to flee out of the houses to get away from the Viet Cong, and I think one certain Vietnamese unit was supposed to provide protection, and for some reason they didn't.

So the Viet Cong just came in and burnt the whole lot down. So, that proves it. They were erected by probably our…soldiers, and so then the Viet Cong had no compunction in burning it down, but if they had been erected by the Vietnamese themselves…the Vietnamese people would get their nose very much out of joint. That wasn't cricket [fair].

We had an advance party. There was myself, a batman and a driver. There was an interpreter and…it might have been the chief clerk. There was only about five of us.

And we flew via Manila, as I remember. Don't ask me why. Qantas took us Manila, then we flew Air France to Saigon. Because I remember on the Air France flight, I think they served us champagne, and we had a menu. I couldn’t' resist sending it back to my father…

"Dear Dad, just on the way to Vietnam. What a hell of a way to go to war." I thought he might have appreciated it. But anyway…

Yes, so we went up as an advance party, just to make contact with the Task Force people and the area we were going to move into, and also down at Vung Tau. To make sure that when the ship arrived with all of our kit that it was received properly, that it would go somewhere,

where we knew where it was going, and similar reception arrangements for the Task Force. As it turned out, everything went smoothly.

They made up our minds for us. The deputy commander of the Task Force

said, "Look, you've got to get settled in." They allocated this area which was pretty scruffy sort of an area, so we had to get in and build latrines and showers and allocate accommodation to people. Some were in tents; some were in old structures that had been left behind.

I think he said, "Just take the first month to get settled in and get yourself properly accommodated and make the fellows comfortable in the area." We had to integrate ourselves, of course, with the normal defensive arrangements of the Task Force. We weren't on the perimeter, so we weren't terribly exposed. And that is basically what happened.

I think the unit arrived about mid-June. And the other bright idea, that's right, I think it was coming near the end of that month, and Operation Paddington was coming up, and the Task Force commander then suggested we join this operation, more or less as observers, so he attached us to the headquarter company of the Task Force,

so we got trundled off on an operation, down near…can't recall. It was a small village, and we were outside of it. We set up a Task Force base area there.

And the fun and games was, it was rather good, it taught us a lesson that I had always been trying to get through, that all engineers have got to be capable of doing an infantryman's job. You've got to be able to dig a hole in the ground, to be safe, to be able to use your weapon in a defensive manner and so on. Anyway, we found ourselves on the perimeter of this area,

in a defensive capacity. There were about thirteen of us. I had a pistol…That's right, the two or three officers had pistols, and all the fellows just had ordinary SLRs [Self Loading Rifles]. So I got in touch with the OC of the headquarter company and said, "Look, I'm a bit short of firepower here. You want me to defend this area here,

no problem, I can lay out all the pits and we can dig the pits. But I need more firepower.” This was like putting a request in for a bit of extra somewhere in the morning, by four o'clock in the afternoon, I've got myself seven tanks. Seven tanks from some United States Armoured Squadron. So we felt very safe…

Well, as I said, I got on the blower to the OC of headquarter company and said that I needed more firepower, and I thought he would send some machine guns, or some sub-machine guns, or something of that order, and all I heard later in the afternoon was this clanking coming up the road and it turned out to be seven tanks

from the United States Armoured Squadron. They clunked themselves out in a protective arc, right across my front. I think the D and E Platoon from Vung Tau was on the hill and on that flank, and I forget who was on the left flank. But you know there is always a good and a bad part to all this. The United States Armoured people

have a great habit of clearing ground by fire, all hours of the night. Now we were there for about nine or ten days, and I don't think I got a decent sleep the whole time I was there. Because somewhere in the middle of the night, any old time, there was no rhyme or reason to it, these buggers used to open up. And I think the philosophy was that if there was anybody out there,

it was going to be very uncomfortable. With a bit of HE [High Explosive] and the small arms business, I don’t know what calibre they were using, but it was pretty big calibre stuff, and it would be a pretty dangerous place to be. It certainly wasn't a place that I was going to put out any sort of listening posts or patrols. It all had to be behind those tanks. As it turned out, it was great,

and we got in contact with the American commander, and was a very helpful sort of bloke, so we felt quite safe to…During the day, we tried to do some civil affairs type work in the general area. But we had to be careful with that. We were just trying to cut our teeth as to what sort of work we might possibly do.

Because the area we were in was under the control of the Americans, and their civil affairs people, or whatever they called it, would be doing this sort of thing. So our medical people and our engineer bloke and our education bloke, they all got a bit of a feel for what might be needed. I think that area finally come under Australian control

at a later date, so it was good to have the information as to what was there and what had been done. That type of thing.

Oh, I think the reason that the

deputy Task Force commander…he wanted us to be exposed to what you might call a typical operation with the Task Force. I'm not sure that it was such a typical operation, because it was a pretty big operation, and it had a lot of American Forces with it. I think our Task Force contribution was far outweighed by the Americans.

The basic problem with Operation Paddington was that it was suspected that there was a major Viet Cong unit in the area. And the main aim of this exercise was to go in there and either disrupt him or destroy him or do what they could with him. It turned out, from our point of view,

to be a…well, it wasn't a problem for us, physically. And we were pretty free to move around the village and see what went on, and get some sort of feel for what it was. And if we had to go back there, we had a bit of information.

Well, it was quite an established system. To start with there was a province, Phuoc Tuy province, and in our day the capital of Phuoc Tuy province was Ba Ria. And in Ba Ria, you had a province chief. He was the boss.

The government departments who handled medical matters or public works matters or agricultural matters, because they were close to the coast, the fisheries, all those government departments were located in Ba Ria. Then outside Ba Ria you had what they called districts. So you would have

so many district that formed the province. Within that district you then had hamlets. I think they were called hamlets. And they were the basic element of the district. There was a district chief, there was a little district headquarters who looked after that….Now having said that, like for example, down at Hoa Long there was a village.

And down there was in fact a member of the training team, AATTV, the Australian Army Training Team in Vietnam. And their role was to assist units of the Vietnamese Forces, whether it was their regulars or some of their territorials to

train them with weapon training and all those sorts of things, and to assist them with their operational matters. And so, we had a warrant officer down at Hoa Long assisting the district chief in that regard. And that happened in some other villages, not every village or district throughout Phuoc Tuy Province. So you had that basic structure.

So when it came to, if anybody had a problem. First of all there was all that liaison business. You had to get to know the province people, and that was part of the…like the medical officer, part of his job was to work in cahoots with that Vietnamese medical group, and of course the Americans, the same way.

And the same with the public works department and the education. They were the three main ones at the beginning. Then out of that they might find problems, then they could go to the district level and again, have proper liaisons, in other words follow the established order of things. They were pretty well organised,

but it was just that they mucked around so much. There was a lot of help that we could give.

Oh yes, oh yes. They didn't mind all this stuff that we could give them. What we had to be very careful of was that we had to give them what they wanted, not what we thought they needed.

I mean there is no sense me going in there and saying, "Oh, I think you need in this place hot baths." where they don't have hot baths. You have got to ask them what they want, and work out a way or providing it, and providing it in a reasonable space of time.

And especially if there is any work involved, make sure the Vietnamese do the work, to assist, so that they can be helping themselves and also to stop the Viet Cong coming in to get rid of it.

Not really. We tried not to do that. But I do remember a case, it didn't come through us, I think it came through the Australian Embassy. There was a bituminous paver turned up

and the poor old public works chief in Ba Ria was faced with this machine. And I don’t think he knew how to use it or what to use it for, you see. And this is where we said, "If you want to have bitumen roads and what not, you can use it for that." But apparently it just came out of the blue somewhere. One of the things that you had to be very careful of, apart from the usage of it,

they are not great people for maintaining equipment. It's there, you can pour petrol in this end, it'll work, but as soon as it stops working, it's no bloody good, get rid of it. That was a minor thing…

John McDonagh. It's all my fault. I've heard a lot of people criticise…But I discussed it at great length with the public works chief down there,

in Ba Ria, and I said in Australia we can use these windmills. "The wind blows them, so you don't have to use fuel or anything like that. And there's a pump there and it pumps the water up there. It's a pretty hygienic way of doing it. People can then just turn on the tap, take the water they want,

as opposed to just chucking buckets down in a well and what not." And this fellow was quite receptive to it, because I think he had seen it before. This fellow had been trained in America, so he wasn't blinkered just by being a Vietnamese fellow in Vietnam. So he agreed. I said, "Where do you think we should have these?" So between himself and the engineer officer,

they then worked out certain villages where the windmills would probably be a good idea. First of all, there had to be water there to get. And like everything else, it is not a consistent thing. The water table in some areas is only ten feet down. In some other areas, you might have to go down sixty feet to get it.

And that's why we had to work our where they wanted it so we could investigate those sites. In this regard I was helped by a young National Serviceman, who was from Western Australia, and he had had a fair amount of experience with windmills, and what it was all about.

He was just attached to the engineer section to give them a hand. And so for each of the sites, we worked out what sort of windmill we'd need. Because if you've got to got to get the water from sixty feet down, it's going to need a different sort of a pump, and maybe the windmill will need to be slightly bigger as opposed to one where you get the water only ten feet down.

So we worked all that out, and we then put in our requisitions to our stores people down at Vung Tau, then they sent back to Australia to get them. I had left before any of these apparently turned up. We certainly didn't build any in my time. But somewhere along the line, the ordering system went haywire.

Instead of ordering the individual pump for the individual site, somewhere along the line…Say there were sixteen windmills to be purchased, they bought sixteen identical windmills. Bloody hopeless. So that had to be corrected

to make sure in the first place….and I think my successor, who wasn't an engineer, so he probably didn't thank me at all, it was in his time that most of the windmills were constructed and started to be used. But it's like everything else,

I think I've got to admit that, in the long term, the business failed. Because I went to Vietnam in 1990, and tried to retrace our steps as to where all these windmills were….say there were sixteen, I could only find about five or six to start with, and of those five or six, only one or two were still working.

And it was the old simple business on maintenance. A bit of grease here and there. It was 1990, and I was there in '67, so it was twenty odd years afterwards, and of course most of them were relatively close to the sea, and most of them would have corroded or something. It just didn’t work out.

I think I would have to admit that it didn't work. If there was somebody there, even if it was just bloke saying, "This has got to be fixed, that's got to be fixed." Even if it was done with Australian aid money, it would still be very useful. But obviously it wasn't a thing

that the Vietnamese would be prepared to handle in the long term for themselves.

It wasn't a patrol. No. We were in this fire support base,

and that was where all the logistics vehicles were, where all the artillery are and that sort of thing. And that perimeter has got to be protected from the Viet Cong getting into the place, if they got the bright idea that they wanted to get in.

To start with,

we had to build some showers, get in some latrines, the officers’ mess was just a tent, it was pretty basic. The soldiers had a canteen that was a nice…it was a sort of an aluminium type structure, and their mess was quite good.

We had to build a command post. If we happened to be submitted to fire, we had to have a series of slit trenches in the area. So they had to be built and built properly, and we had to have a command post,

whereby a place…with all the communications to my blokes and also to Task Force headquarters, if we came under a siege or whatever, just so that we could protect ourselves. So all that work had to be done, and the deputy Task Force commander came down and inspected it all when it was finished and he said it was okay. Away we went.

Well, it happened somewhere about the middle of February, and Viet Cong units got very active, especially around the Ba Ria area

and they started terrorising the community. I think they killed a few advisors down there in Ba Ria. They certainly made a mess of the hospital.

The exact nature of the forces they used, look, I can't really remember. But they did cause a lot of alarm and despondency amongst the people. And it just so happened that the 3rd Battalion, which had arrived in November or December, were just settling in and getting on with these sorts of operations.

I think it was a particular company of the 3rd Battalion got in and cleaned them up in Ba Ria. They did a fair amount of damage, but I think the thing is, it all happened so quickly…I won't say it caught us unawares…

Like I think it was the theatre…which was very badly damaged. A lot of people lost their homes, or were burned down. The local school in Ba Ria became a sort of marshalling point for the people to protect themselves.

A lot of people on the outskirts of the village came in to get away from the Viet Cong. We were required to build some very temporary…refugee areas, where we could at least give people accommodation, and also assist them with a bit of food and medical attention. Until such time as they could get back to their houses. As I remember the Americans

gave us an allocation of resources, mainly in the form of timber and roofing, to immediately start the repair of the Vietnamese houses that were destroyed. It all happened over a very quick period of time,

and I don’t know if that was the time when….Suoi Nghe was up and running, and it had a hamlet chief, there was a refugee office located in the area and there was a boss of that office, and there was another fellow, and I think the Viet Cong got in there and they massacred those three fellows. Don't hold me to this, my memory might be playing tricks with me,

whether that happened at another time or whether it was during the Tet Offensive…I've got a gut feeling it was during the Tet Offensive.

Yes, it certainly had a role to play, because bearing mind that that the ordinary

administrative system, whereby you have a province chief, and his organisation, we had an American advisor and some American people there, and of course we had the Task Force….It certainly, from a medical point of view, to get around it helped people, because the province authorities couldn't be everywhere all the time, especially under those conditions.

And it was the same with the education business. A lot of schools took a bit of a pounding. So there was assistance that they needed to get back on the job again. And of course a lot of that got reflected into the public works department, assisting them to get structures

repaired or replaced. But once again, the Americans came to the party again with a hell of a lot of construction type materials to be used. But I didn't see the full effect of what they did, because this happened in mid-February and my replacement came in March, I think it was.

Somewhere in March. It was only a matter of weeks afterwards. It was a bit of an introduction for my successor. I felt a bit poorly about it, walking out from the thing, but these things happen.

Not really. You can always see people who do things that you wouldn't want to do yourself.

I heard, and I don't know whether it was my correct…there was one of my NCOs who slept with a rifle every night. This was in the Task Force base, and he had it in his bed with him. I don't know whether that's a true story, but it certainly didn't affect what really happened. And sometimes,

you can't always judge…There was another situation when we had a problem down the coast, and we had a medcap being conducted, and we had to the medical team seeing patients and we had some Vietnamese medical people with us,

also, who were being partially instructed and who were helping. And what actually happened was, some Viet Cong rushed in and started shooting the place up. They killed a couple of Vietnamese, and one of my blokes was wounded. There was a sergeant in charge of this, and

I'd never had much time for the sergeant, quite honestly, he just seemed to be an innocuous sort of fellow, but he handled the job bloody well, under pressure.

First of all, he got on the blower and told people what was going on, and he was able to gather the people together and get them away from the problem. By this time, the people who were doing the shooting…It was just one of those things

where they rushed in and they rushed out. But anyway, this fellow handled the situation quite well.

Well, when you're a soldier that is the name of the game. I mean, I always had a weapon wherever you went. Every soldier always took a weapon.

The only misgivings that I would have had….Travelling around the province, they have a system of roads, colour coded. If it was red, no go. If it's green, okay.

Once or twice, I was tempted to go down a red road. On one occasion my driver didn’t want to go anyway, so I didn't go.

Yeah, Johnny Carnes.

I felt pretty safe with him. He was just one of those quiet, well trained soldiers. He accompanied me, and my driver, everywhere I went. And as I say, being SAS trained,

we didn't have occasion to use him, thank God. We never got to an event where he actually had to shoot at somebody. The situation didn't arise. You could always sometimes feel a bit…Sometimes going through villages, like for example,

two or three of my blokes were in a vehicle going through Hoa Long one day, and somebody took a potshot at them. Luckily they weren't hit, but that sort of thing could happen at any time. Somebody gets a bit discontented. But apart from that, I don't think that I felt in danger.

Well, because we were a new unit, we seemed to attract a lot of visitors.

We took a photograph when Mr Fraser came up, he was one. And I think it might have been before Mr Fraser came up, but Andrew Peacock, he was a Liberal backbencher in those days, at a future time he was to be the minister for the army. And it happened in the very early days that I was there,

because I got detailed off to go down to Vung Tau and look after him, and just sort of take him around some of the villages. And I know that he also accompanied one of the battalions, went out to one of their operations. We had visits from certain senior American people who were interested to know the work we were doing in civil affairs.

They came from everywhere…

I think this was more inspired

through the Task Force headquarters. Because you will notice that the brigadier is there. Looking at the box, it seems as though it might have been a distribution of toys and goodies to children in a village. There was some sort of a system in Australia where

people were collecting things that they thought might have been of use to the Vietnamese people, and sending them up for distribution. A lot of it was quite useful. For example, one thing that seemed to be quite popular, one of the motel chains used to collect all the used soap. You'd go into a motel, only use the soap a couple of times

and you've got all this stuff left over, but you can't use it behind for the next person. So they collected all these and the Vietnamese put those to some use. That was on the plus side. I heard of one situation where some person or persons collected a lot of female clothing, cocktail frocks and things like that.

Well, it wasn't the sort of thing that the Vietnamese ladies were wearing at the time, so that was pretty useless. The other thing with commodities distribution was to really determine who needs it and make sure they get it. But so often it's first in, best dressed, and sometimes it can be a really embarrassing melee, where people are fighting and scrounging

to get something and there is no control. So we attempted to keep those sorts of distributions down to a minimum. But I think that that was the sort of situation where, at the time, I think it was in Hoa Long, which was the village next to where we were camped at Nui Dat.

Well, Fraser especially, because it was a lot of his initiative that formed the unit, and I think he came up to see what we were doing. It was a very quick visit. It was all over in a couple of hours. And Peacock, he was interested

in what was going on up there. Some of the American fellows came down, and they were anxious to see what we were doing. Anything you do in that line, it is good to have a meeting of the minds. It encouraged you to do a little better, and maybe they learnt something from us.

Not that I can remember. But it is quite possible…You see, you take down at Ba Ria, there was

a Roman Catholic orphanage, and I do know that one of the battalions more or less adopted this place, to help them out with any little bits and pieces they might need. And maybe even to build a couple of swings for the kids,

so they could entertain themselves better. It might have been that the RMO went down, and being Catholics, we had Catholic padres…there is every possibility that they went down there. I know that in my time, I was invited down to that orphanage by the Mother Superior or whatever she was. And I had lunch with them.

There was the doctor, myself, it might have been my engineer, just a very simple luncheon, and a chat and a talk, and that was it.

No, I think the rules at the time were that there were a very limited number of berths to go back to Australia.

In our unit there would be, say, only ten berths available to go back on R & R. After all, I was the commanding officer, so there was no way I would want to compete with any of the fellows. If I got a berth, not right. It doesn't look right. Justice has got to appear to be done.

It didn't happen, so I went to Taipei, and I went with the CO of the artillery regiment, he was going at the same time, and one other fellow. But when I was over there, somewhere along the line I got my hands on, they have all these pirated books in Taipei. Somewhere along the line,

I got hold of some books that dealt with civil affairs-type matters in the United States services. A lot of it was geared to military government, as opposed to the type of civil affairs that we were doing in Vietnam. Of course, as I remember it, there was a civil affairs type unit

in New Guinea, just after World War II, mainly to control…I suppose it was military government in some form, but there was a lot to do with labour relations. That was the only reason I knew what civil affairs meant, because when we were at Duntroon,

the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit was actually based in Canberra, I think, just right at the end of the war. They were only there for about six or eight months, and they'd occupied space, which…there had been some sort of officer training for senior officers, something like pre-staff college type arrangement.

I'm not a hundred percent sure what it was, but they went out, up to Queensland I think, and this other group came in for a short time. But I never really came to terms with…That's all I remember, Australia New Guinea…ANGAU [Australia New Guinea Administrative Unit], and they were a sort of civil affairs type unit. But again, it was horses for courses, you see. Their problem was totally different to the Vietnamese problem.

Oh yes, yes. In the army we call it a hand-over period. He came up and I would have spent at least three days, travelling around, talking to him,

introducing him to people, that sort of thing. He was a chap I knew.

I doubt that I gave him any tips. I just told him what we were doing and the type of work that we were involved in. I was leaving a bit of a problem,

the leftovers of the Tet Offensive, because a lot of work would have had to have continued, and as I understand he did continue it, and away it went from there.

I suppose the biggest and quickest project

was the building of this Suoi Nghe, to house these refugees. From the point of view of getting the job done in time to receive these, that was quite an achievement. We did it. We got tremendous co-operation from all units of the Task Force.

I know that there were criticisms of what was done. Some of those criticisms, of course, was…the poor old Task Force commander was criticised. "Why do this?" I mean, I was just doing what he was telling me, it had to be done. There was no way in the world I could say, "Sorry, Mr Brigadier, I don't want to do that today." It just doesn't happen you see.

But it many ways…I went back in 1990 to see, with Barry Smith, and a doctor who had been up there, John Chamberlain, and I was able to go into Suoi Nghe and see it. And it is quite a nice looking Vietnamese village today.

It's got all the facilities that we had, they still continue, like the medical facility, the market place, the Vietnamese government facilities of course, are now in there, as a proper village of Vietnam. Whereas this was built, I suppose, about a kilometre off the main road, they've now built houses along, connected it to the main road.

But the nice thing is, it still exists. I mean the roads are there. Of course, all those temporary houses are gone, and they've built what they wanted to build, and it just seems to be a reasonable village like any other village in Phuoc Tuy Province.

I think one or two were criticising this refugee village. The basis of it, I'm not a hundred percent sure. But there was a particular correspondent who wrote silly things. They were just critical of what it was all about.

I find that hard to…because sometimes all I can say is that when the Tet Offensive came up, and I was cutting that tape to my wife,

and I've got a record of it, one of the first things that I said to her was, "Don't believe all that you read in the newspapers, because the situation here is not nearly as serious as it might well be in other parts of Vietnam." Obviously at the time I had that gut feeling that they might try and…You see, one of the problems with Vietnam, I know, in the Task Force area was we had these journalists

and they were just hanging around waiting for something to happen. And if it didn't happen it seemed to me that they dreamt up that it should have happened, and I was very suspicious of the whole. But that's only me. It was an unfortunate episode, I think. I felt sorry for the soldiers, because here they go to a war and back in Australia you've got all sorts of people

saying we shouldn't be there. Well, it's not the soldiers’ fault we're there. The government sent us there.

From what I saw in the Phuoc Tuy Province, I sort of felt that we were getting on top of the whole thing. And from what I read

of what happened in successive years, Phuoc Tuy Province was a pretty safe place to be. I mean, we'd got the Viet Cong under control. But I think we lost the war with some psychological operations that were conducted outside of Vietnam. We were just told that we couldn't win it, and suddenly we believed it.

Not knowing the higher echelons of the whole thing…I find that hard to understand.

Oh yes, I've got memories of all the people that we worked with. The province chief, I knew him…Well, we had two province chiefs, when I was there. And certain Vietnamese people that we worked with. The American province advisor, Tommy Austin,

I always had a high regard for Tom Austin. He was always terribly helpful with the things we were trying to do. There was an American civilian down there, his name escapes me, he was also…always supportive of the Australians and what we were trying to do.

I suppose in many ways, I suppose the lasting memory is that I felt the Vietnamese in general appreciated what we were trying to do for them, within the constraints of how they might have to live…Viet Cong may be in the village, and they might have relatives who may have joined the Viet Cong. It was the old Communist versus non-Communist philosophies.

No. Of course, my involvement with the RSL was purely being a member of the Engineer Sub-Branch of the RSL. We were all engineers or ex-engineers and of course we cover a far greater span than just the Vietnam War. I felt sorry for the poor old…

Especially the National Servicemen who got called up. They did a terrific job. I mean, those National Servicemen were…First of all, they were good material, they were well trained and with my limited knowledge of the National Service blokes that I had, I had no complaint at all. Typical with most Australian soldiers, they liked to help people,

even if they are in a war zone or what not. And I did feel sorry for them…How many years afterwards when they had a Welcome Back march? Being a regular person, Vietnam was just a segment of my life, and I had to just forget about it and just get on with the next job that I had to do.

Well, it means a lot to me. I was brought up by a father who served in the First World War, and I can remember as a small boy, fronting up to

the local memorial in Wangaratta and seeing my father up there delivering the oration or speech for Anzac Day. My brother and I…I think it was the day before Anzac Day, because Anzac Day was normally a holiday, but we were permitted to wear our father's medals to school.

Having two sons, I wore them in the morning and Keith wore them in the afternoon. We were brought up on the philosophy that these fellows had done a good job for the country, and they had suffered some horrendous things. I mean, nothing like that has ever happened to me, what happened to my father. So we had that respect for it.

And of course as years went on and you're in the army, and of course I always felt that you should turn up on Anzac Day to see the fellows.

I suppose the only thing I should add is that

I have great respect for the lady that I married in 1953, who put up with me for fifty one years and…you know, I used to dash off and do things, and she was the Rock of Gibraltar. She had the kids at school; they both had to go to boarding school for various reasons,

and she was always there with support, terrific, so I never could have done it without her. I was looking at some old diaries, it was when I was at army headquarters in the years between, say, 1974 and 1980, and I seemed to spend an awful lot of time out of Canberra. I had a job that demanded I had to go and do a lot of visits out of state.

I remember when I was in charge of Portsea, here am I training these young fellows to be officers in the army, and at Portsea, you had to have a minimum age of eighteen there, not like Duntroon where it was sixteen. The maximum age was about twenty three, but if you had a degree from university, like my son, he was permitted to go in when he was twenty five.

Now people in that age bracket get married, and when I got there I had all these fellows who were married, so I sort of encouraged them to bring their wives down to Portsea, and of course a lot of them had kids. I said to Helen, I said, "All right, it's my job to train the fellow. It's your job to train the girls."

Because some of these girls didn't know anything about the army to start with. Some of the girls were the wives of, say, privates in the army and here am I converting them to being officers, and the poor old wife is going to be left behind if she, if she suddenly gets thrown into an officers’ mess and doesn't know what the rules of the game are, and all that sort of thing.

So she did that for me, terrific.

Thank you.