Australians at War Film Archive

I enlisted on the 11th of the 11th, 1946…

My first posting was to Flinders Naval Depot for the initial training. My first ship was HMAS Warramunga, which was for two years.

1947.

I joined her in Cairns, then from Cairns we did a little bit of mine sweeping, then we went to Vila, Noumea, the Guadalcanal,

the Honiaras, then back to Sydney, replenished, then we sailed for Japan. I was in Japan for six to eight weeks the first time, I might be a bit vague, came back to Australia,

had a little bit of rest and recreation, then back to Japan again. That was what was called the Occupation Forces. When I left the Warramunga, I joined the cruiser HMAS Australia, and I was in that for about a year, I think.

Didn't do a great amount of sea time, mainly up around Papua New Guinea, Manus Island and various islands like that. Then I left the Australia, then I was posted to South Australia up to the

rocket range for detached duties for a while.

I was posted to the HMAS Tobruk, and I was on the Tobruk for two years, that was in Korea, Japan, all around up those islands.

Then I came off the Tobruk, then I was relieved back here in Australia. Then I joined the HMAS Vengeance, and went to England for a couple of years, stood by the Melbourne,

commissioned the Melbourne. And then came home on the Melbourne. I remember in 1956, the Olympic Games in Melbourne.

Then I was on a ship called the Macquarie, and on the Macquarie we let off the atomic bomb on the Montebello Islands, and that was only about four or five months that whole thing lasted.

Yes.

And then Malaya and Borneo, and….I was not up there a great deal of time, because I was just about due to come out then. I came out in 1959.

Yes.

I went farming, that was always a mad ambition to be a farmer, but it didn't work out, in a little town in Victoria called Dromana, which is on the Mornington Peninsula.

And then I more or less drifted from job to job after that, mainly rigging. Over in the Mornington Peninsula they put a couple of big refineries and a big steel mill and I worked around there after that. It was about 1970 that my marriage broke up and

I came over here to South Australia and I lived in South Australia ever since then.

Five children.

I was born in South Australia, in a town called Evanston. I grew up mainly in Kilburn and I went to school at Kilburn, and a little bit at Montacute and Brighton, but most of my schooling was done at Kilburn.

That is in the hills, it's a market gardening area. I know the market garden is still there. It's years since I've been there.

I can't tell you a lot about it now, because I haven't been back.

Kilburn.

There was just really nothing. They did build the British tube mills there, the factory, that was just being built, and that helped Kilburn to kick on.

There was the Etherton Railway, the workshop, which was fairly big. But Kilburn…It was 1939 when I moved to Kilburn. My mother was a widow and there were four of us, and we moved into a home at Kilburn and that is more or less when I grew up. I just did all the things that a normal teenager does.

After I left school I worked at a store called John Martin's, in the chemist there, pretty well until I joined the navy.

He died when I was three, and I can't tell you…I know precious little about him, so I don't know. He died of TB.

He worked in the railways up at Balaclava, but I can't tell you a lot about my father, because it is pretty vague. My sister is pretty good, she remembers a fair bit.

Never, no.

That's correct.

It was a pretty hard childhood, with the four of us. As I said, at Montacute and places like that, we were put out with relatives, the relatives were pretty good and took us in.

Monticoot. That's right. Not a lot of time up at Montacute, but I can remember my very early days there.

Then we moved down to…Seacliff, and I went to school for about a year at Brighton. Then from Brighton we came up to Kilburn.

My mother's sister and brother in law, and cousins, and I’m still

great friends with all of them to this day, and keep in contact.

Oh, wonderful. To raise four youngsters on her own was a real battle.

I suppose you could describe it as…There were four of us, the three boys and my sister, we all went into the Services when we were old enough, and that eased the burden a little bit. But the early years were a real struggle.

Anything. She was a nurse,

and there wasn't a great deal of call for nursing, and she was quite good on office work. She worked for Long Range Weapons out at Salisbury…I don't know the time, but until the war ended. She really struggled to raise us and she did a great job.

The train…I can remember one of our delights of a night-time was cutting through all the bushes down to Kilburn station to meet her.

I was the youngest boy, I had two eldest brothers who have since passed on, and a younger sister. She lives at Hillbank.

We all had to look after ourselves. We pretty well had to defend for ourselves.

It was much bigger than this, but on the same style as this…It was quite comfortable. I think our pride and joy was the wireless, and in those days a wireless was quite a luxury.

The average Saturday night, if you were good, you were allowed to go to the movies. And that was about all.

In Kilburn, in Hearn Street in Kilburn.

Yes, and so were the people

up at Montacute. They were very strict. We were always in bed at half past six and out at half past six in the morning, sort of thing. You had to work for your feed. You had to pull your weight…And I think one of the things I used to love, it used to be very, very cold in the morning,

but we used to take the produce down to the old East End Market early in the morning. Come down on a cold, frosty morning. And sometimes it would be in horse and cart, and sometimes it would be in the motor lorry. In those days, with the war being on, petrol was pretty hard to come by.

About an hour, early in the morning.

Fruit and veg. Sometimes butter and sometimes cream, because they had a house cow. We used to separate the milk and make the butter and the cream.

Naturally there were the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s for the eggs.

Oh, very much. I loved it.

The horses. I've always been a horse lover. I don't know why, or how these things come about. I suppose it's the same thing with people and cats and dogs.

But horses were always my love.

Only the farm horse. He was used for the ploughing. He performed many duties, taking stuff down to the market…many jobs.

Yes, yes.

Big. Chips was his name, I loved him. And to be rewarded, one of my best rewards was to be able to ride him from the stables down to the night paddock of a night-time. I used to love that.

Oh, you learned. I had my cousin to help me up, then slide down. He was a kind, gentle horse. He kind of knew. His paddock was very steep. I can remember it was a very steep paddock, and he used to climb up that. And instead of climbing up,

he used to go across and across and across, and he used to do it that way instead of straight up and down.

Yes.

A cow, which I was scared of. I can't remember if there were any cats and dogs. I can't remember that.

One of my duties was I used to shift it from A to B during the day, to make sure that it had plenty to eat. But instead of me shifting it, it used to drag me along and go where it wanted to go. And of course it would eat the wrong things, and that would taint the milk. I never, ever got belted, but I would get bawled [shouted] at a lot.

Certain types of grasses, or cabbages, things like that would taint the milk.

It was to me because I wasn't very big.

Yes. That was very…

No, not really. We never really wanted for food, but it was never really plentiful and luxuries were a real treat.

Anything. One job I had was cleaning out the fowl house for a local poultry farmer, and run messages,

just do messages. Every weekend I used to go rabbit trapping, out at St Kilda and that area, for a couple of years when we were youngsters.

Precious little. I think we used to get threepence a rabbit. Then we used to keep the skins, and get some pocket money out of the skins, but that was all shared around.

Anything up to twenty or thirty.

They were very plentiful up there. And we used to use ferrets, as well as the traps. Yep, that was it.

No, you set them. When I look back now…one of the pleasant things in life

was to see them banned, they were very cruel, the rabbit trap. It worked on the principles of the steel drawers, and the rabbit put his foot in. You dug a little hole and buried your trap and covered it with the sand and earth…Like all things in life, you learned the little things, like how rabbits were very fond of boxorn and things like that.

The traps were set on their warrens and set on their dung beds and other places like that. And also, afterwards, when we had finished trapping we would go on down to St Kilda and we would do crabbing and cockles. That helped, a change of diet and things like that.

They were the really fun weekends, when we'd get out and do that. Really great fun.

Horse and trap, horse and cart.

The boys that I grew up, they owned the horse and trap, and the traps. It was a horse and dray type thing.

I had a lot of fun, you had to make your own fun, but believe you me, it was fun times. We used to light the fire and cook them in the open fire, that way.

That was about it.

There wasn't much else to do.

Oh yes. I was one step ahead of the reform school, and I was able to get into the navy just after my seventeenth birthday. I left school when I was twelve, because my mother couldn't afford to send us onto high school.

I always regretted that, and it cost me dearly, not having that little bit of higher education. That really cost dearly. Because in the navy, I just didn't have the sufficient brain power to go on up through the ranks. I stayed as an AB [Able Seaman].

A lot by choice, but a lot through the fact that I lacked the ability to go on and learn. Morse code was my greatest drawback…

Pinching. Everything.

There was a ton of mischief to get up to, don't you worry about that.

He was at Dry Creek. It's all so much changed now. If you know the main North Road leading out to Salisbury, he was out there, where the abattoirs were. That is what else we used to do. We used to love to go out

to the abattoirs paddocks and have a look at the stock. And in the winter, it was very great for mushrooms. We used to hunt in there for hares. It was a great place for hares and foxes, and we used to have the dogs do that.

That passed the time away.

Very much so. When I go along Grand Junction Road now, and I look and think back…And another thing was to come to Port Adelaide fishing. That was very popular.

Mr Tucker and Mr Wellsby. Mr Tucker took us onto Grade Seven.

Mr Wellsby, he was the headmaster. Mr Tucker did all the main teaching. In those days, I don't think they do it now, at the side of the school was a big area set aside for gardening.

We used to have the garden plots and plant the vegetables. That's the sort of things that stick in your mind.

Yes. I've always been a very keen gardener, except for the last year or so since I've had that treatment for the cancer. That knocked me about. I haven't been able to get to it.

Oh, a jockey. Yes, that was to be my greatest ambition to be a jockey. But unfortunately I had the right build and the right weight, but my mother said no.

I can't remember that one.

You couldn’t get to the races when you were young. You just learnt to ride best where you could. The horse was very popular in those days, then.

You'd say that there were ten horses to one motor car, type thing. So there was never any shortage of horses to learn to ride. You had to teach yourself, or you learnt yourself.

Anyone's. Riding was a thing that came easy to me. I had no trouble with balance. I found it very easy. I could hop on a horse with no saddle and ride it as good as anybody.

We really didn't have a decent saddle. We used to have an old bag and get on that way.

I can remember…

We were living at Seacliff at the time, and one of my jobs was to nip across to the station and get the Advertiser first thing in the morning. I was old enough to read, because I can remember, 'Germany Invades Poland.' And I came back and said, "It's on,"

or words to that effect. That was it.

Not really. And then…

When the Americans soldiers came out, they were so generous, and they formed a part of your life. You could ask them for a cigarette and they would give you a cigarette, you could ask them for a sweet and they would give you a sweet. When I went to various places, I always used to look after the kids, too….

Yes.

They were away. The three of us, we didn't get home a great deal together. It was either they were home and I was away, things like that. Then they came out and got discharged and got along with their lives and I was serving my time.

Not that I can remember the effects until about….Sixteen and seventeen year olds started to realise then that…

No, I can't put into words what I mean there, the changes that came about then. But there were changes, many, many changes. I really couldn't…

You didn't realise that changes were taking place around you.

Not really, no.

We weren't allowed to have the lights on of a night,

and the blinds had to be drawn. But I don’t think that in South Australia we copped it very much.

Just. And that was when it was beginning to…

to realise what the changes were taking place. One thing I suppose was the lengths of the train that used to pass through Kilburn to go out to Dry Creek, then on up to the Northern Territory and places like that. That's one of the changes I can remember.

Longer. And more often. We used to along the railway line and forage for coal that would sometimes fall off the trucks. And that was another thing we used to have to do, collect firewood for the stoves, because there was no electrical heating then.

There were plenty of places to go around Kilburn, many, many places. And a little further out, there was no development there whatsoever then.

Very much.

Sugar, tea, butter, and meat, I think.

I can't really remember, but naturally I know that she must have, because she was a wonderful cook, she was really a great cook.

We were well fed. There may not have been a lot and there may not have been a lot of variety, but it was there, and she could do it. And bake….She was very good.

I really forget.

But I know on Sunday nights there was always fruit salad. And then she could knock up a batch of scones as quick as you and I could go to the shop to buy them these days. Butter was very much a luxury in those days, it was rationed.

It was a bit of a delicacy, so we used to get by with dripping. Usually for breakfast it would be toast and some dripping. Tea or coffee? I can't ever remember having those as a youngster. Milk was plentiful.

Not really. Sunday was pretty always the roast; that was traditional. Roast whatever it was. And then in the later years on the weekends, I wouldn't be home. I would be out rabbiting and I wouldn't get back

home until four on the Sunday afternoon.

Yes. But after catching them and trapping them, I wasn't keen on eating them.

I don’t know. But crabs and the cockles and things like that, yes, I used to eat those.

We used to cook them a lot out at St Kilda, bring them back home.

It was just fantastic. It's very good to look back at some old snapshots of the port and see the various ways they unloaded the ships

and loaded the ships, and just how far they have come this day and age with the things…The ships always fascinated me. That put my desire to get out and see the world, what went on with those ships. They really held a…

fascination is the word for it.

I think most crews were always Chinese. And not one more than the other. It was also cargo ships and various passenger ships came up to the port.

Except the ones that did the coastal trading, that used to trade over to Kangaroo Island and Port Lincoln…They didn't have much appeal to me, as much as the cargo ships or the freight ships.

No. None, that I can remember.

In the [Rundle] Mall….and it's only been gone about five or six years, maybe more. But it was a very, very big

department store down where Myers are today, and opposite the Hoyts Cinema. A seven storey department store it was, and I worked for the chemist. I was the messenger boy that ran all the messages, and went to the warehouse and picked up things

and took various scripts out to people. Little things like that.

On the ground floor, near the escalator. That doesn't tell you much…It was owned by Ron Warren, his name.

And the dispenser's name was Mr Kinowski.

Fascinating. Yes, it was lovely….Not today's stores,

pretty much…You could buy anything imaginable in them anyway. I think about the third floor was a big dining room, and the fifth, sixth and seventh floor were officers, for the running of the store.

I went to the warehouse and got the prescription drugs from the warehouse, and the chemist dispenser would just give them to the patients, or sometimes we had to take them out to the patients

at various places in Adelaide. We kept busy all the time. And you'd help with the stock, go up to the stockroom and bring down the stock to help the girls with the displays, and things like that.

Several, but as in this day and age today, there are so many and in the war some of them were a bit hard to get, or they wouldn't have them in stock, but the warehouse would. There were two warehouses. One was Spaldings and one was Pickfords.

Spaldings was in James Place and Pickfords was over in Perry Street. And being the lazy little tyke that I was, I used to prefer Spaldings because it was closer.

Just used to walk. But in the latter part of it, we managed

to convince the boss that a tandem bike was the answer, with the box on the front. He was a wonderful boss and he came to the party and got that.

Three.

I left school and I think I was just about twelve and a half to maybe thirteen and I left then. I had a couple of little jobs mucking around, and I started to get into mischief, and then I got into the navy. I left John Martin's to go to a trainer to be apprenticed as a jockey.

The trainer went broke and couldn't afford to keep the stables going, so I came back home before I really got a chance.

Victoria Park. I can't remember exactly where,

but it was that far from the racecourse, as I used to walk the horse there in the morning. And there was no place there for me to live, so I had to catch the train up there from Kilburn to get to the stables early in the morning, and then back home of a night-time. And that's really where things didn't work out. It was just a little too much involved there.

Other trainers showed an interest, but when you look back now they were just using you as cheap labour, cleaning up the yards and shining the harness, jobs that go with the racing.

I always wanted to go to see the world, and the opportunity came to join the navy, so I did. And I wasn't getting anywhere…The war had came to an end then, and things were getting back to normal.

There were no war-time activities, no great demand like there was. The country was very young then and still growing, and growing very fast. I'm not sure if it was last night or the night before I saw on TV about bringing

the migrants out from Europe and all over the place, and that brought back many memories. I thought, "That will help tomorrow, a bit."

The immigrants came, from all over Europe.

There was a big camp up the road here in Rosewater, and they came and they made our lives different then. They were normal people associated with in our childhood. And they brought many ways,

and they were hard workers and they brought many things with them. They developed all that land, all through Rosewater, which I suppose now they've done in so many states of Australia. We owe them a real lot.

They interested me, because they spoke differently, they dressed a little bit differently and I couldn't so much appreciate them. I didn't get to know enough to appreciate them.

We used to tease them like hell.

I suppose if you don't know what is being said, you get a little bit annoyed at the words. We more or less teased them, I dare say. I didn't have a great deal to do with the younger children, going to school and that..

No, that was after the schooling finished when they came along. When I look back now and think of the years and how they battled. And they really did battle. They battled hard.

Yes.

To see the world.

Just to go out and see the world; that was all there was to it. The motivation to see the world.

I think mainly picture books. Those geographical magazines and other magazines.

And of them that appealed to me very much was the cover of the telephone directory, with the bright lights of Sydney. And I always said to myself, "'I'm going to see that some day."' And so I did.

Just over the bridge, over there.

And it was pretty easy. All you had to do was pass the medical. Education didn't come into it. They were desperate for people then. And that is how I was able to get in, so easy, with the poor education. Education wasn't the worry…they were after the body.

Seventeen, and a couple of months.

I was seventeen.

Yes, I had to have my mother's consent.

She said, "They will either make you or break you." She said, "It will be up the road, you will be in the reform school."

And all I was doing was getting into mischief, things like that. There was never really anything what was considered bad. So that was it, in I went.

Just a very quick medical, very quick.

It was all over in about a minute; that was it.

The Flinders Naval Depot which is in Melbourne. And that is where we did our basic training.

Their purpose there was to instil the discipline in you, make you understand discipline.

Oh good, yes. I had to. I think the people who were in charge, they understood a bit.

There is a certain amount of home sickness and taking you from one life and putting you into another. A little bit of tolerance there. They were tolerant towards you.

Yes I was. You'd go to the post office and you would hope there would be a letter every day.

Yeah. There was so much to do. You didn't get bored. If you liked sport, there was all types of sport to play ,

and you had to be involved. That was one thing about the navy; they were great believers in sport.

I can't really remember any impressions…It was very cold in those days.

The food wasn't very good. The food was…If you were hungry, you ate it. And if you didn't toe the line, you were punished.

Extra work in the free time. And that was from early in the morning, before breakfast, and before everybody was out of bed,

until four o'clock in the afternoon type thing, when everybody was out relaxing, and if you hadn't done the right thing, you were doing extra duties.

We'll give that one a miss.

Not really, no.

No, I didn't do a lot of punishment.

Well, naturally you got your hammock, which I've still got to this day, and your blanket and your sea bag to stow all your gear in.

Your going ashore uniform, and then there was the dungaree type things that you used to wear for your ship's duties and your depot duties, things like that.

Only the clothes you walked in in,

and they were parcelled up and you got those to bring home when you got your first leave.

Yeah.

Seamanship, which was learning to splice and tie the knots, navigation, not a lot, just a little bit of navigation. The other things you learn when you went on board ship.

And when you had been on the ship for a certain amount of time, you came ashore and you did specialist courses, which were either in gunnery or torpedo or radar. And radar was just coming in then, that was quite a new thing.

Yes.

Oh, many of them. Some of them I saw last Saturday, the Warramunga had a barbecue. And there were mates, not that I joined up with but…

I can't remember anybody here now that I joined up with, in South Australia, I think that they're all gone, they've all passed on.

There wasn't an enemy then.

But there had always been and there was always a peacetime navy. I don't know why it was, but there had always been a peacetime navy. And there was when I went, a peacetime navy there. And that takes quite an active part in defence, just in case anything went wrong.

You were there, just in case anything went amiss. You were trained to go…

I joined her about…April, '47.

I joined her in Cairns, and that took five days to go on the train from Melbourne to Cairns, it took five days to get there. You can imagine, I was a kid, and it was the first time I was away from home. Gee, that was an ordeal.

You got to Melbourne about nine o' clock in the morning. The train didn't leave for Sydney until about two or three in the afternoon, and you weren't allowed to leave the station, you just had to hang around. They fed us, there were special rooms put aside where you got your meals.

And then, from Sydney to Brisbane, there was also a very long wait for the train then. And then from Brisbane up to Cairns there was also a very long wait, in-between trains, but you got by…

I think it was about four o' clock in the afternoon when I joined the Warramunga, and everybody else was going ashore and I was just going on board. I knew the front was the front and the back was the back and that was about all. But I was about to learn. We stopped in Cairns, and I think we were in Cairns about three or four days before we sailed.

That was good….

Wash the ship, paint, clean the ship, just clean everything up that goes to make the ship. And you being the very youngest and not being very well trained,

you work in the galley and clean all the spuds, you clean the toilets…Just jobs like that go to make a part of the ship. I think on the Warramunga…we didn't do a great deal of training. I was still learning the ropes.

And you had to go rowing early in the morning. Take the sea boat, the younger ones used to have to go out and go rowing, if we were at anchor…That was fantastic, I used to love that. There was so much going on up in the islands,

early in the morning that you would see, and you just wouldn't believe it. I remember those big manta rays used to come out of the water and come flat down on their bellies and make all that noise. We would row for about an hour, then come back on board and have breakfast.

We had to be hauled back on board, and most of those things had to be done by hand.

The Warramunga was always blessed with a good crew. It was what you called a good ship.

There is something about ships that are good and bad. The Warramunga was a good ship.

The crew, the crew made her a good ship. And also the Warramunga was a fairly lucky ship, in that she saw much action and she never got hit.

We were only talking about that on Sunday. She never got hit.

Oh yes. They do. They all do.

And the first thing that they instil upon you is that you must be clean. You were supposed to shower and wash your clothes every day. And how you did that, was just hard. There was no washing machines. You did it in an old tin bucket

that you got from the galley or somewhere like that, or someone was leaving the ship and they passed it on to you. You got by. You just did that. That was something that was very, very much instilled in you, that you must be clean. Because in the mess desk, there might be as many as thirty people living in a confined space, so you just had to be.

And if it wasn't, and if you weren't, they just sort of squeezed you out, or made life so unbearable that you just did it. I don't think there was any actual… went on about it, but it was there. If you didn't do it, you didn't get this

or you didn't get that, kind of thing. That is the principle that it worked, you were denied your privileges.

Yes, and you watched it, and as you went up…When you'd been through, or you learned along the lines…The smaller the ships,

the easier they disciplined, but the harder the life. The bigger ships, like the cruisers and aircraft carriers, life was a luxury on board them, compared to destroyers or frigates. It was pretty hard on the destroyers. As a matter of fact, it wasn't pretty, it was very hard.

A destroyer, a Tribal class destroyer.

A hundred and twenty, I think. I can remember the captain's name was Olden,

George Olden. The first lieutenant was named…Dusty Miller. Your first job when you were young and you were learning, you do four hours on and four hours off watch. And then in that four hours,

you might have to do an hour's lookout, an hour's lifeboat sentry, or an hour on the wheel. I think that was the three main things…and that was all through. That was a seaman's three main jobs.

Yes.

Not so very good, but I learnt.

I always had somebody there to teach you, until you got used to it. It is pretty well the same as driving a motor car, except…the reaction in a motor car is much quicker than

the ship does answer to the wheel.

There weren't many then, there weren't a great deal of us. I was what they called an ordinary seaman, and you remained an ordinary seaman

for about twelve months to two years, and you learned…I think most of all you learned discipline, and you learned discipline properly. To do what you're told and do what you're told properly. Your requirements such as to be on the lookout, to be on the helm, to be positions in the gunnery,

they were just second to what discipline was.

They were specialists, the boys that did radar. Radar specialists.

And the same as the torpedoes. They were a bit more special …We didn't have anything to do with radar, but with the torpedoes and with the gunnery, you had to have just a little bit to do with them. With the gunnery, I specialised with gunnery,

and it was mainly gun maintenance. Had to look after them, from the bigger ones to the smaller ones, from the rifles to the revolvers.

It varied from ship to ship.

I think I was for’ard guns' crew.

At the front of the ship. Warramunga had four heavy guns. One on the bottom deck,

one on the next deck up, below the bridge, and two aft. And most destroyers had the same. And the latest and more modern destroyers, they had the heavy guns up for’ard, and the Bofors and Oerlikon type guns, they were aft.

You rotated. You could be loader…Being a bit small, and being a bit light, I didn't get to load much but mainly to lay. And the layer was, as you brought the gun down to position, you got your position from the bridge. Or in the more modern ships you got it from the director.

And they had headphones and the captain of the gun would get his orders from the bridge and relay them to you.

Verbally.

Well, it depends what you were going to attack, if it was aircraft or if it was land or if it was opposing ships. Those three things come into it.

I can't actually remember. I should do, it will come back to me in a minute. And again, it related to what type of gun you were operating. There was the anti-aircraft gun, and the heavy…what we used to use mainly for bombarding or for…defensive action.

What actual orders came through is just hard to say.

I'm not sure if it was two trips or three trips to Japan…I think it might have been three, with the Occupation Forces.

Yes, it was very little. We were going out from Cairns, and from Cairns we sailed across to Vila, I think they now call it Vanuatu, Noumea,

I think we went up to Honiara, which was Guadalcanal, and you see, this was when I was very young. Just hitting eighteen. Those places fascinated me and impressed me very much. We didn't do a great deal, we were just more or less up there

more or less what they call "showing the flag", or seeing how people were getting on. I remember we got leave in Vila and we got leave in Noumea. And we only stayed in each of those ports for a few days. Up Guadalcanal, there was no leave, because there wasn't anything there then, any settlements.

Looked around. Noumea was very young then, very, very young. There was…not much there at all…

In regards to pubs and bars and things like that, they weren't there at all. What we did? I forget now…

They didn't leave a great deal of impression. I wasn't really able to appreciate them enough…

Even when I went back a few years back, Vanuatu or Noumea never impressed me very much.

Guadalcanal. There was a lot of jungles, steamy jungles, and not a great deal to do.

For recreation at Guadalcanal and places like that, we used to do a terrible lot of shark fishing…Just throw a baited line over, with a drum, with a bait attached and catch the shark. We used to catch some beauties up Guadalcanal, and bring them back on board the ship and skin them

and use them for cleaning the decks on board ship.

Because the shark skin is very rough, like a scrubbing brush, and it used to bring up the timber very white and clean. On a destroyer, there is not a great deal of woodwork to be cleaned.

We never skinned too many sharks, it was just a few. But the ones that were there were absolute monsters. They still stick in my mind.

As I said, the hook with the big bait…What was best was…Have you see the hook that they hang the meat on?

We used to use one of those, cut the end off one end and make it on the other end into a barb, drill a hole and put a wire trace and the wire trace used to go onto a normal four gallon drum, and the four gallon drum we would attach to a line and that used to go off the stern of the ship.

Just while we were waiting for them to take the bait, which might be hours, you never know, then all of a sudden, bang!. And there was always great excitement when you got them. We'd bring them back on board, and they would shoot them in the head, and then we use the ship's stave as a hoist to hoist them up out of the water,

and do whatever we wanted with them. I can't remember that we ever ate them. If we wanted fish, sometimes the old man [captain] would let us let a depth charge go and get some fish that way. But that wasn't very often.

And the time that we spent up around those islands wasn’t a great deal. That would have involved three weeks to a month at the very most. Then back to Sydney and back to Japan.

It used to take fourteen days to go up.

Possibly we would stop at Darwin for water and for food. And if it wasn't Darwin, we might go direct to Hong Kong…Sometimes it was enough to go…to Darwin, then from Darwin to Japan. We used to cruise at what they called seven knots,

which was the economical speed for fuel consumption. Then we would get to Japan, and the same thing. We would do what duties we had to do in Japan…We might have taken stores up for the army or things like that. I loved Japan. I used to remember …

she was just getting over a very, very bitter war. The black-market…you could get anything on there. The two things that they loved was soap and sugar, and they were prized on board. I didn't realise just how much they were.

Then we would spend time going out to visit the various ports. We might be on patrol. Then back home to Australia. Sometimes we would bring back a few troops, or take a few troops up. Not a lot, just whatever we had room for on board.

Kure. Kure was a Commonwealth base. We went to a place…It's in the South Islands of Japan,

called Iwakuni. We went down there, and Iwakuni was famous for the training of the kamikaze pilots. We went down there for more or less a look see. A lot of places, that's what we were doing, we were doing what they called showing the flag.

It could be anything, from on the helm, to the lookout, to what we called the 'seaboats crew.' Just those type of duties. In your time off, you looked after your gun, maintained the gun.

If you can appreciate that salt water is such a destructive agent, that they had to operate them and move pretty well every day. Just various things to make sure the salt didn't get in there and cause rust and damage.

We pulled various parts down and cleaned them and oiled them and put them back together again. Occasionally we would have a bit of target practice, to see how they were functioning or to give the guns' crew experience. But the main purpose was up to Japan and back from Japan

pretty well as quickly as possible. We would pull into Hong Kong on the way back for supplies, and rest and relaxation.

No. That didn't happen going across that way. You had to go out and go across…going to the UK. Going up to Japan and that, there was no crossing of the line.

That run was very, very tedious, up to Japan.

No, no. The whole life was initiation.

You learned something well pretty new every day. You learnt to appreciate things. Just little luxuries and things like that. You appreciated them much more.

At Kure, alongside the wharf. There might be things that have to be done with the ship that couldn't be done at sea. Something to do with the engines,

or for the evaporators, that turned the salt water into fresh water. Little things like that. But most of that was done in Hong Kong, because Hong Kong had two very big dockyards, and a lot of the British Fleet and the United Fleet were in Hong Kong.

It fascinated me. I think in all of my naval career I went there forty eight times. I loved Hong Kong, I just did. The way of life…I just really loved it. I went to the races quite often in Hong Kong,

even from a very, very early age. They didn't race there very much then. I think they raced once a month on a Wednesday. And a Wednesday afternoon on board the ship is what we called 'Make and Mend Day,' it was half holiday. So a couple of times I got to go to the races in Hong Kong.

Not necessarily on the Warramunga trip, but on other trips.

We worked with the other nations. I get a little bit mixed up between the Warramunga and the Tobruk, but sometimes we would work with other fleets, which might be the British, the Americans or the Canadians or the Indians. All the various fleets would get together and have exercises,

which might not necessarily be to do with gunnery, but to do with the officers learning tactical movements, things like that.

Yes. Devastated, and Nagasaki, too…To me Nagasaki, I could best describe it as, when we were younger we used to play cards, and build things with the cards,

and all of a sudden it would collapse. And that was what I thought happened at Nagasaki, but being such of a young mind then, I couldn't realise the devastation that the atomic bomb had done at Nagasaki. Kure, I didn't see a great deal of the damage at Kure.

We played a lot of sport. In Japan there was a wonderful club called the BCOF Club.

You could go up there and play billiards, play table tennis, play cards. I think there was a card game called West. Japan, in those days then, particularly in Kure was wonderful for shopping. …Over there you could buy

so many things, in Japan…This would have been around '47 to '50, and you could buy so many things…Cameras, binoculars…I don't think transistor wirelesses had been invented then, they came later. But cameras and binoculars and things like that, you could get them ever so cheap.

Everything…Mainly trinkets and little things like that. Being only an underling I never had a lot of money. I never smoked…we were allowed a ration

of free cigarettes, and we used to flog them on the black market.

Two hundred yen. To give you some idea, a bottle of beer was worth around ten yen.

That was three things they were very keen on, cigarettes, sugar, aspirin and soap. You could fetch them on board without really doing any harm and get by.

Yeah.

That was high in demand, that was as high as anything. That was the one thing, for some reason or another, they were after soap.

To get to Kure you had to go through the Inland Sea, and that was beautiful. With the mountains in the background, and then to see all…the way that they've got their mountains terraced, and you would sail up into Kure, it was fascinating. I loved the Inland Sea, too, naturally it was calm.

A hundred yen.

It depends. It depends how much sugar. I was never a great trader in the sugar, I just used to belong to the party on that one.

I never actually saw much that went on with the negotiations. But naturally there was never a lot of it, only what we could get it ashore without being detected taking it ashore.

With the Japs.

No, they would pester you in the street.

And when I say pester, I mean it. They were very, very keen. You had to be awfully careful, because the Red Caps, who were the British [military] police, they policed it very much, they were very active. They had a soft spot for sailors because they knew we were flogging stuff.

No. I got caught in the brothels one night, but that was a different story.

In Japan…

We were only talking about it on Sunday. The brothels were on a place called Kure Hill, which was out of bit. And on either side of Kure Hill there were paddy fields. We were in this particular brothel that night, and somebody said, "The Red Caps are coming! Quick! Get out!”

I baled out, and I baled out one of the windows into the paddy fields, which were filled with human manure. So I went back to the Warramunga, and they would let me back on board until I got hosed down. I stunk. But that was all right, I got away with that.

I got cleaned up and clothes cleaned.

No. They were pretty rough, the Red Caps. They were pretty severe.

Yeah, yeah. I went the wrong way…

It might have been the old Mama San that was in charge of the brothel…It was pretty well organised, and you knew when to go up and when not to go up, or where the Red Caps were or where the Red Caps weren't.

As cunning as we were, sometimes they were more cunning still.

Yeah. You know what it's like when you're young and stupid.

They used to read the riot every time we went ashore. You're young and you're fit and you're seventeen and eighteen years of age, and maybe a little bit older, and it's there for the wanting and it's hard to keep away from them. But still, never mind that,

that was a part of growing up.

Noumea was that, somehow or the other that came about. There were no brothels in Noumea; that was just one of those things.

Yes, because the venereal rate was very high, extremely high.

All ships that I was on, all through my career, they were always freely available.

No.

Yep. And you were encouraged…You weren't encouraged to go to the brothels, that was the last thing in the world that you would be encouraged to do. But the authorities knew we wouldn't keep away, so that was why they were there.

Not so much in Japan, later trips and journeys…

No, I was pretty lucky. I escaped. Don't ask me how,

it was more luck than good judgement. And if you did fall foul of it, your leave was stopped for a month.

Yeah, yeah.

Towards the finish…In Japan, they got on top of a lot through penicillin; that helped dampen out quite a lot.

Yes, you would get isolated.

You are not allowed in the common area, there was what they called a contagious disease area. It could be various rashes, or crabs. You weren't allowed in the general area of the ship,

you were in the contagious diseases mess, was what it was called.

No, no. I think it was just too common.

No, I can't answer that question. In Japan…I don't think it is fair to say she took a long while to get back, but in the '47 to '49 era, she was very poor. And then afterwards,

around about when the American aid assisted her, she got back on her feet and she was very different.

Human nature, I suppose. It wasn't so much the…There was a terrible lot of the girls worked out of the bars.

Yeah, it worked that way, and they had special places to go.

Not in Kure. The American base was a place called Sasebo. That was around on the South Island, and that was the place to go, to Sasebo.

I can't ever recollect going to Sasebo on the Warramunga. That came later…

Very good.

I struck one very bad typhoon off Hong Kong, in a place Subic Bay. We rode one out there for five days, and that was hell. We thought that was nearly going to be the end of the world, particularly when you are very young. When that happens,

you batten everything down and you only move from A to B in extreme necessity. It's all organised. When you know that you are going into one. You don't go to the outskirts, you go into the eye of it, and try and get through it that way.

That was no fun at all. I can remember that I really didn't eat or move or do anything for the whole five days.

Yes.

It was what was called the tiller flat.

And the tiller flat was as right aft as you can go, and that's where they used to stow a lot of the tarpaulins and various covers for the ships. And it's also where the steering apparatus is, where the wheel works from. It's hard to explain…

And the tiller flats used to serve as the cells. When anybody was bad or stupid, that was where they were sent to.

Yeah, yeah, I was. I was scared.

Oh, shocking. It wasn't very quick rolls, but sometimes you wouldn't think she was going to come back, but she came back. And it was pretty hard to steer, too, when it was like that. You've got to watch your steering, and very much

keep the head up into the waves. Just things you learn and you get to know.

No. After five days I was so hungry, and it's always stuck in my mind, there was baked beans on for breakfast, and it's always been my favourite breakfast since.

I was so hungry. And besides, it was good to fill…it was still there a little bit, the rocking and rolling of the ship, but not so much.

Oh, yeah. When I was young, I did.

As time went by, I got used to it.

Yes. That was what had us down. But then most of the crew was down with it, too.

Anywhere. And you didn't have a great deal of time…It was mainly dry wretch.

Yeah, when it stopped. That was the longest one I can remember. There were many other storms, some of them used to only last two or three days. You got used to them.

Yeah, many. As I said, those two rugs, I got those in Hong Kong, I think, in 1948, and they've stayed with me ever since.

There was a camphor wood chest that I brought back for my sister…

Just a good crew, a great bunch of blokes on board. As I said, we had a barbecue on Sunday,

We have a barbecue or a get together every couple of months. Whether it was the fact that I learned so much on board her, as regards to life, and what goes on, and got through that initial growing up period into

the other periods…

Not really.

No, the lowest of the low.

Until you turned twenty, you always had to be back on board by eleven o' clock, or if you wanted to stay longer, you had to get special permission. Once you become eighteen, you could get all night…

That would be classed as AWL [Absent Without Leave], and that would be leave and pay. That was something that they were very strict on. There were two things the navy was very strict on…Punch out [register departure] and to be back on board on time.

Yes, yes. We all sort of looked after one another, there was no-one that didn't.

Yes.

Side by side. In a space like in this room and I would say there would have been at least twelve hammocks, side to side. There wasn't a great deal of room between them.

No, you always slung your own and you lashed your own and you were responsible for your own…Say, for instance, coming home from Japan, and places like that, when we were coming down through the tropics, we would always take them up on deck and air them, air the bedding.

And once a fortnight, or even more often, you had to scrub them. Scrub your mattress cover and your hammock. They were all inspected, and if they weren't up to scratch your leave was stopped until they did. Just of interest, that was the greatest punishment of all.

Stoppage of pay was one thing, but stoppage of leave was the worst one. If you'd been on board ship for, say, fourteen days coming down from Japan and you were coming into Sydney and you had to do stoppage of leave, well, that was heart-breaking. If you had a pretty decent skipper, they used to waive it a lot.

If it was just late back on board and real serious ones, they didn't waive them. But there was never any really too bad ones.

There isn't any privacy. No.

No, that was part and parcel of the job. You just got by, you just learnt.

On the mess decks, you could read and write your letters. In those days, one of the most best things was every couple of days we'd get Radio Australia. And we'd get that at certain times of the day, just get the news from home,

what was happening and that helped relieve the monotony a lot.

Many. Most of them. Particularly the senior ranks, like the petty officers and leading seamen and chief petty officers,

they were pretty all well senior Servicemen. Promotion was pretty slow. It didn't so much go on ability; it went on service and experience.

Yes, yes. Put it this way …Say there would be twelve or fifteen in a mess deck, and of that twelve or fifteen, at least twelve of them would be senior sailors who had been through the war, and weren't reluctant to talk about it

or what the Warramunga had done. There was one, he was the butcher, and he more or less took me under his wing and looked after me. The one thing he would never let me do and I never ever did was get tattooed. I was all set to one night in Hong Kong

and he dragged me away, and said, "No. Your tattoo is your mark for life."

They say you don't regret it. Tattoos are a funny old thing, once you've got one you need another one to even them up.

Yes, that was what he was. Just more or less…At the end of my career, I was the same to the other young fellows who come on board.

Yes. But unfortunately you've just got to accept it.

They would bully you. It was either you'd do it, as it goes with bullying…

Or you cop it, you cop a belting. You just did it, you just went on and did it, no matter what it might be.

I think it's just human nature. I genuinely believe it is human nature.

Whether it's just part of the Anglo Saxon human nature, or the whole human nature throughout the world. Whether that is just something that goes on that makes it our way of life. I often wonder about that a lot.

Not really.

And it didn't matter who you were. How it was, it could be the officers, or not necessarily other crew members…It could be officers that might have copped a walloping off the old man and come down to look for somebody else to have a pay back on.

That went on a fair bit. As regards to bullying, well, that is one of the things that we have just got to live with. It's a shocking thing, but I can't see an answer to it.

Very little. A shortage of temper…

A lot of abuse to one another, but that's it. And it always on board, it was too close together to let anything like that go on.

No.

What the words to describe it? Would bullying come down in class distinction? Yes, that had a lot to do with it.

Yes, yes.

Your own common sense tells you that. You just learn that.

Yeah, yeah. And I think the big thing was, you were kept busy. There was very little boredom…I think a lot of problems exist through boredom.

No, not really.

They got to be very much sought after in the finish, to get a trip up there was pretty much sought after. There weren't a lot of ships, of the smaller ships, going up. There were the troop ships, the Munoora and the Kanimbla…

that were taking the BCOF troops up there and bringing them back for R & R [Rest and Recreation].

Not a lot of stores. On a destroyer there is not a lot of room. Our main thing up there was just to show support for the other Forces

The Australia, and she was cruiser.

It was like going from a hovel to a palace, and I just didn't know myself on board. You didn't have to do the laundry; you had the laundry on board. If you wanted to, you did your smaller clothes and things like that, but the main clothes all went to the laundry.

On the bigger ships, life is so much different than what it is on the smaller ships.

No, I passed. I done the exams, to go from ordinary seaman to able seaman. But you have to wait until you are twenty years of age. And the day that I went

from the Warramunga to the Australia, I became twenty, and I went before the old man. And the first lieutenant said, "I don't know if this man is ready to be an able seaman yet. He's just still a bit young and a bit inexperienced." "Oh no," he said, "It's his birthday. We'll give him a birthday present and make him up." So I got made up.

It's not a huge step, but it is a bit of a bigger step. It is a step in the right direction. You are not down-trodden and you can do a bit of down-treading.

It was mainly…More or less, it was so much more comfortable. And the fact is, on the Australia, the first job I got was called

'half deck sentry' or 'keyboard sentry.' And he looked after all the keys on board the ship. Now I kept that job the whole time while I was on the Australia. Somebody made a bad mistake. He done four hours on, four hours off,

into a twenty four day. If you're in port, you've got twenty fours leave. Then on the weekend, you've got Thursday and Friday on, and you got Saturday and Sunday. That makes sense to you. But in the meantime you were doing four on, four off. And I think that is what mucked my life up, in regards to sleeping. I went through twelve months of that.

And the day that I left the Australia to come ashore, she was sailing for New Zealand, and New Zealand was about the only place in the world that I never got to that I wanted to get to. So fate can play a part in some things, can't it?

Not very, very much…Only up around New Guinea and then it was all Australian ports. We went to Tasmania, Melbourne for the [Melbourne] Cup. That was traditional, Hobart for the Regatta,

that was traditional, then Brisbane….It was what they called showing the flag. Up to New Guinea and the Whitsunday Passage. Nothing very exciting. A lot of time in Sydney, and that was quite good fun.

It just was. I used to like Sydney very much. I don't these days, I did then.

Usually the number one buoy, and if it wasn't, then number two buoy, and then not very often alongside.

Sometimes we used to come alongside, and if it was it would be Garden Island. I can't ever recollect, no, I know she didn't get into the dry dock. I think she was too big for the dry dock. The other ships, the Warramunga, the Tobruk, yes, we used to go into dry dock often. On the old Australia, swinging around the buoy.

The rocket range in South Australia. I forget how long we were there.

At the end of twelve years, you had to do two years in a remote area. And I was lucky enough to get up there. Some of the boys had to, what we called, caravan up to New Guinea and up in Darwin, which weren't very good.

Posted. Never given any options. You could request, they might call for various places to go and things like that, that you could request, but it was not very often that they were granted.

I was happy to go with the flow. I would have liked to have gone to Korea much more before I did, but that wasn't to be.

It had just been built, and we were in quite good quarters. Once again, you didn't know yourself; we were a lot to do with the army and air force,

and virtually no discipline and no routine. It was quite good.

Not really, because all three services had to share the responsibilities up there. Admittedly there wasn't a great deal to do for the seamen.

But other branch Services, there was quite a lot to do. I used to work with the sailmaker and we used to make canvas awnings for various parts up there, to protect things from the weather, and various materials from the weather. I enjoyed my time up the rocket range,

because there was quite a lot to do.

It was more or less still being built. The roads into it, the water that comes from Whyalla that comes into it, the airstrips.

The various rocket ranges where they launched the rockets from, the beddages where people lived. There were about four areas. The one that we were in was called The Village, and there was one called

Kuli Mookle, which was about thirty miles away. There was Woomera West, that was works and housing, that was the private contractors.

Up there? Just tin sheds. We had a special name for them…

I forget the name of it, but it was in the very, very early stages. It was just more or less being built.

I was assistant to the sailmaker and I was the rocket storeman. I was in charge of spare parts for the various rocket

components. I did three months down Salisbury, which is what we called WRE [Weapons Research Establishment], and learned all the storeman stuff there.

Yes.

We were very much under security. We were allowed leave once a month,

and six weeks every year. But it was very much under security. It was still very much in its infancy, everything was still being built.

We were setting it up…When I say we, we worked as a team, with some RAAF and some army. We would order the stores up from Salisbury. We were out on Range G, which is where they launched the rockets from, and our job was to set up that store there and get all the components up from Salisbury.

Oh yes. They launched about two or three a week. And the big important ones, it might only be once or twice a month. But they used to do a terrible lot of testing, with the smaller rockets, to train the operators,

who were mostly men and woman, and to help set up their data.

Oh, back.

When I say stand …From here to the railway line that runs along there, about that far away. There was nothing very spectacular about the ones that I saw go off. And then at that time, too, they had another plant that I didn't see a lot of, but I did see it, it was that aircraft called the Jindavik.

She was very up there, up there at the rocket range in my time, and it was a pilot-less aircraft, I think you would understand it, I think they described it as.

I can only just remember slightly in the back of my mind.

Not very big, but like a glider, it would be an over-rated glider. Just after the same lines of a glider, just like that. What it was designed for, I believe it was highly successful. And I've got an idea that Britain didn't have a great deal…

that went into it, it might have been a Swedish company. But most of the rockets up there, that was all British, in my time anyway. And the scientists were all British, too. There were a few Australians, but most of them were British.

Yes, just normal Australian summer weather. Hot in summer and cold and wet in winter. When I say wet, a couple of times there we couldn't get out. We were just rained in, and stopped in your quarters.

No.

There was forty of us when I was there, I think forty two. That was including officers and technical personnel.

No, we didn't have to wear our uniform up there. Put it this way, part uniform.

There was no stretch uniform. We wore dungaree type things. And when we were going on leave, we were encouraged to wear civilian clothes.

Compared to life on board ship, it was.

Plane. They used to fly us up and fly us back. But we had to take our turn with the scientists and the crew from Salisbury and things like that. It was always fly up and fly back.

They were called Dakotas, terrible, they were terrible planes. But you knew you were going on leave, so you didn't mind too much. You used to sit side by side; they weren't very flash at all. The RAAF…were responsible for us, for that.

I think so. If you were weren't, you could apply for a posting out,

but no, I would say…Yes, everybody was happy there, yes, because we used to get five and six pence a day extra, and that was a lot of money.

Remote area. And it was also tax free. So yes, that was the choice; that was quite a good posting there.

To protect the machinery, or whatever it might be, from the elements and the weather. They weren't actually sails; it was just anything to do with canvas.

Yes, and canopies.

We used to make a terrible lot.

A little bit. But there wasn't a great deal in them. The actual sewing wasn't so hard; it was to be able to measure up

and design and make things like that. I think it was the same as making your clothes, designing…

No. That was all done by the security police. And they were, more or less,

a little bit under the same pattern as the Red Caps. But they were civilian and not so aggressive as the Red Caps. But just as strict. There were certain limited areas that we weren't allowed to go into, and same as other people weren't allowed to come into our areas. It was just pretty strict.

You knew because your time was up, and the urge to get back to sea was there.

I was busting keen to get to Korea, get back to sea, but you had to do your two years. Unless you did something wrong and you went out on your ear, you had to do your two years.

I can't really remember a lot there, but just on board ship you were asked a lot of questions. Where you were born…and then I realised that they were checking you out.

To make sure you didn't have any Communist ideas. The Communist idea was fairly active then. I think it was just a general purpose security check. Everybody had to do it, who went, no matter who you were or what you were.

They run a security check.

To the best of my knowledge, no.

Sydney.

It was a bit hard, after living a life of luxury more or less for two years, to go back on board a destroyer, was just a little bit difficult, but I settled in.

Within a couple of days of joining her, we sailed. And I'm not exactly sure if it was to Korea, or we left for Korea, and we got…diverted to open up the war graves on Labuan Island.

I might be getting a bit mixed up there, I'm not too sure. Or whether we did that on the way home from Korea. I just get a bit mixed up there…

I was on a ship…The Tobruk was there, but I was posted to another ship called the Macquarie, and our role…The Macqaurie didn't have enough crew, or able seamen. I think there might have been twelve or fourteen went to make up the crew of the Macquarie

and our job out there was…I hated that, because we just had twenty one days of patrolling, up and down, up and down, to keep any ships out of the area of the Montebello Islands, while they waited for favourable weather to detonate the bomb. They had to wait…

Up and down and…I don't think we saw anything.

I think it was planned all along. There were several delays for inclement weather.

It wasn't a surface bomb, it was an undersea bomb. It was detonated under the water. And it was done at a little atoll called Bikini Atoll. The rest of the fleet were away, and on the Macquarie we were quite in close.

I think we were about eleven miles from where she went off, maybe even a little bit closer. But there was some real shonky [underhand] business went on there, because they tried to tell us we weren't there, but you know in your own mind when you are somewhere. But the British government wanted it covered up, for some reason or another; there was a very big cover-up.

Well, there's my ship's and there's my papers there, with my name written on the ship and it says "on the Montebello test". Canberra says, "No." But there it is there, on the ship's papers. And so why I never ever went on with it. I said, "I know I was there.

I saw that bomb go off, and I will never forget until the day they put me in a box and put me in the ground."

Days, days.

There wasn't a great deal of ships that used that route, but that was just as a precautionary measure. It was day after day, flat calm seas, the sea was like glass, just up and down, up and down. Normal ship's duties, just look out…

And then we went somewhere…we refuelled, and we refuelled off the Sydney and got some provisions from here, as we were getting very low on provisions and very, very low on fresh water, although she can make a certain amount of fresh water on board, the Macquarie was not in very good nick [condition].

Even though she was not a very old ship, she had been laid up for several years.

I never saw any that I could remember. There may have been one or two merchant ships that we just advised to steer to latitude and longitude, so and so.

Latitude forty one and longitude twenty one, type thing, to stay out of that area. And they kept it a little bit hush-hush what actually was going on.

Yeah, yeah. They would say, "It might be tomorrow. If the weather's fine, it might be tomorrow."

And this went on for days and days and days, just waiting for that favourable weather to go.

If you could see the damage that an atomic bomb can do, then you would understand why.

I don't know, I wouldn't have a clue on that.

I won't swear to this word perfect, but I think it was half past eight and it was on a Sunday and I had just come off watch. I had done from four until eight, I had been on watch. I went down and had breakfast and come back up on board,

and the old man came through and said, "They're going to let her go. You can come on deck and watch her…" And all of a sudden she did, she went. Before you saw the actual event of it, going up in the air

like a mushroom, as they do. Then the next thing was a very hot blast hit me in the face, I remember that as plain as day. And the ship…the only words to describe it, it shivered. And it shivered like when a dog or a horse is wet, and it shakes its fur to get dry again? Well, that's what that ship was like. And the halyards and mast

and everything like that were rattling. And we were on course, and I think it was blown something like eleven degrees off course, and we were only steaming at about three or four knots, just making way, waiting for it to go. I could talk to you and you would never really see the devastation that these atomic bombs can do.

And I sincerely hope that it is never used in warfare. I backed George W Bush for going in Iraq to look for weapons of mass destruction, having seen what an atomic bomb can do, and that was fifty years on.

To disappear into the horizon,

and then she went. The ship settled down after, as I said to you, being blown off course and the shivering and everything like that, and everybody…we were all absolutely dumbfounded. So the old man came on board

and said, "That's it, we'll get the hell out of it." He said, "We're going into Onslow to get the mail and get some fresh water…" And that's what we did, and then we went down to a place called Shark Bay. In Shark Bay, we arrived there about…not very long; it didn't take very long to get there. It wasn't a day's steaming, it wasn't a night's steaming. And we went in there and stopped in there and cleaned the ship down.

We washed her down and cleaned her down; we were there for five days. There were many things happening…There were several things happening in that five days …We could see the shore, but we couldn't sort of get ashore, because there wasn't facilities for the boats to land.

A stockman came along with a flock of sheep, and I know we managed to get one sheep off him for fresh meat, and we slaughtered that and put her on board. The fish absolutely abounded…We were encouraged to do as much fishing as we wanted, because we were getting fairly light on supplies.

And after that…I don't know whether that five days was a period of decontamination or what, and then we went down to Perth. I think the whole ship's company was given ten days leave in Perth.

We hosed her down, washed her down, from top to bottom. I think they were worried about decontamination…Well, that's what we were doing, we decontaminated. When we got into port, when we got into Perth…First, we didn't get any leave at Onslow,

we just got the mail and the fresh supplies. We weren't allowed to talk. And even when we got into Perth, we were forbidden to talk to press. We just said where we had been, and the rest of the fleet joined us.

Yes.

The press in Onslow …Onslow was the nearest port. There was press from all over the world, from every country in the world …Because apparently these atomic tests were very important.

I would say nine to eleven miles. Canberra say we were sixty. In your own mind, you know the difference between nine and sixty. And I think, we could see it, and it's generally considered that from the deck of a ship to the horizon, it is about twelve miles.

We were well within it.

I can't verify that, that is on the Bikini Atoll itself.

And what goes up must come down, mustn't it? Unless it is in the atmosphere. From what I was always led to believe…What horrifies me was that it wasn't considered a very big bomb. It was only supposed to be of a smaller nature. But the power of it…You won't believe me,

but it was really just mind-boggling.

I can understand what you're trying to say. The one at Montebello was so unbelievable, that I just couldn't compare it…At Montebello there was nothing there, more or less, to be destroyed. As a matter of fact,

I can only recollect, not a very great or very big tidal of water coming up from the actual explosion. I can't actually recommend there being much there of at all. Whereas in Nagasaki, you just realise there was mile after mile of ruins. And Hiroshima, I couldn't see enough

of Hiroshima to appreciate it. I've got a lot of photos of Hiroshima, not a lot, but some…

No. As I said, we were allowed on deck to watch it. Therefore they couldn't have made much of a worry about it…

No, no. Not that I can…No. But it still just had to be done. I don't know whether to make the press happy or what…

I think we went to Korea, didn't we?

All right. That was okay. To tell you the truth…

To go back to the Macquarie for a little bit. We got leave in Perth; that was all right for the people that lived in Perth. Then we came here to Adelaide, even though I had gone back to the Tobruk again, I got sent back to the Macquarie

to come to Adelaide for leave. I will never forget that. We pulled up at the wharf just down the road here. Once again, he said, "You've got seven days leave, you say nothing about where you've been. You've just been out there in the Indian Ocean. Nothing about any atomic bombs or anything like that." And that was that.

Naturally it is. When such a thing is…It really stands out to have been…Of all the things that happened in my career in the navy, and I saw plenty, many things. That was the one that stood out head and shoulders above anything else.

Unbelievable, that was the words, we couldn't believe it. "You know it knocked us eleven degrees off course?" The quarter master was saying when he came in for lunch. "I can't believe it," he said. "Eleven degrees off course."

I think we were all pretty well dumbstruck, and I'm really amazed at the velocity of it. We were pleased to be out of that, after patrolling, I can tell you.

Went to Melbourne. Sailed the Macquarie around to Melbourne, then rejoined the Tobruk and up north.

After that, I think….The atomic test was in '52, wasn't it? I went to Korea in '51. I must have went to Korea first.

At a place called Sasebo, which is on the South Island. That is an American base, a very, very big American base.

You get your fuel, fresh water and supplies. The whole United Nations fleet all used Sasebo. Then we would do a month up in Korea, and a month back down in Sasebo. If it wasn't Sasebo, it would be down to Hong Kong…But Sasebo was the big American base.

Again, part of the United Nations and we were, again, patrol and training bombarding, spotter for the big American cruisers.

They'd bomb from, say, ten or twelve mile out and we'd get in and spot where they were all landing. We also had a job…The second last job we done in Korea; we went to blow up some land mines…No, that must have been the last job that we done.

Because I remember I was on the motor cutter that took the demolition party ashore. And when she was there, something went wrong, and the PO [Petty Officer] had the stuff wrapped around his hand and was walking back to connect it to the thingamajig, and she went off and cut his hand off.

And we rushed him down to Hong Kong, straight to Hong Kong.

All across we were patrolling…

Near the 38th Parallel, and in that area. And in the second to last job that we done, just when the Armistice was coming to an end, we went right up into Russia, past Vladivostok. The Russians had shot down an American Flying Fortress, and we went in there to try and get the crew out.

Now I can't tell you a lot about that, because I was closed up as guns' crew, and I was in the turret and I couldn't see what was going on. All I know is that the Russians got there first, a Russian submarine got there first, got the crew of the bomber out, and we were ordered back down.

We didn't go into Vladivostok; we went past Vladivostok and back down into Sasebo again.

Only by what was coming through the ship's radio. Like the captain telling the various positions on board ship what they were to do, and what was going. The same as when we were in an action,

things like that.

Just your normal clothes. But your anti-flash gear. You may have seen it, it's a white hood that fits over your head and…you always used that when you were using gunnery.

Cordite flash back. The cordite gives off a fairly good flash.

I wasn't captain of the turret….The captain of the turret, he sits up, I was the layer,

and my position was to lay under the turret…Not the bridge but the director, and the director is like the old crow's nest type thing, and the director sends me down the directions and I lay the gun onto where they said…That bloke in the directory, he's a South Australian, he lives at Unley.

I haven't seen him for a few years, but we often talked about that, what went on. So we know we got our facts right there.

Like the handles on a motor scooter? Your handles were just like that. And you went left or right, up or down. And just on the right hand side one, if the director didn't fire, we did. You just pulled that. We could never open fire on our own accord; it always had to be directed by the bridge.

And I can remember one day we were in Korea, it was a Sunday afternoon. We were patrolling, and I spotted a tank, just rumbling along the shore. And I sent word to engage, but the bridge wouldn't give permission to engage it. And the next day they signed the treaty.

It was over, thank goodness, but we weren't to come home for a long time after that, even though they signed the treaty. A few times I went ashore in Korea, to a few of the various little islands there and met the people and talked to the people, in sign language.

What were they? Not very good. I knew that we were there for the United Nations. I knew that North Korea was hell bent on invading South Korea and we were there as part of that to send them back, to hold them back.

For South Korea to get a borderline back. And Russia had always had a very keen interest in Korea, because they were so close together.

Atrocious, really shocking. But then as well as in some months, when it was so freezing cold…The ship could be going through the water, create a bow wave and the bow wave would land on the deck and turn straight to ice. There were some glorious sunny afternoons

when we were down further. As I said, we would go onto these little islands, a stretch your legs type thing.I think it was just for a break from the routine.

The string vest, with the string and a lot of things like that. You ate and slept in them. The long johns, boot type things, and when we you up on watch, or on your gun duty,

you had to do all these exercises to keep your fingers working, and knock your feet together to keep the circulation going in your feet. And various boys that I know today still suffer from the frost bite.

Yeah, oh yeah.

Not really, because you get used to it. And if you were a layer, and I was a layer, I don't think we did wear gloves. We may have…I think we did. Yes, I'm pretty certain we did.

And the hood to go over your head and your face, that was all for flash back.

Nothing, really.

Naturally in your mess decks, your mess decks were all insulated with asbestos. You couldn't touch it, it would burn.

if I had the photographs, I could show you so easy.

I was in what they called the canteen mess deck, which was on the main deck, just below the bridge, and just one step short of the foc'sle. Just below the bridge.

Thirty I think. That was two sides. Imagine the ship cut down the middle, there was a port side and a starboard side. About fifteen on each side…

Once again, gun maintenance, every day. You were responsible for keeping the mess deck clean where you lived. We all took a daily turn, except if you were leading hand you didn't have to do it. But the ABs and the ordinary seamen, yes, you had to clean your mess deck every rotating. The heads, the toilets and the bathrooms,

we had to do our turns on those, keep those clean. And as well as the gun duties, there were other ship's duties, like painting. There was always a stack of painting to do on board ship…

You didn't, you didn't. You just didn't do nothing in freezing cold conditions. You kept out of those freezing cold conditions as much as you could, because they just weren't liveable. I don't think I can even recollect doing one thing out of the ordinary in the freezing cold…

Such as refuelling ship, replenishing ship, we always came down to do it. You couldn't handle things.

It wasn't very good at all. And if you weren't closed up, you were in your hammocks asleep. Or, as I said, doing your normal mess deck duties. Because when you're out there, it's twenty four hours a day,

day and night, so therefore you do spend a bit of time sleeping, bit of time washing, cleaning yourself, keeping your clothing and your mess decks clean, they had to be kept clean, and that's it. They didn't let you get away with any twiddling your thumbs [doing nothing].

Mainly patrol work. Yes, mainly patrol. And as I said,

knocking out trains where we could, and destroying the land mines and then as I said before we tried to rescue that crew of the Flying Fortress that went down.

The Russians and I think it was the Chinese…had very, very strict rules about US planes across the 38th Parallel, and that one accidentally or put it this way, was across the 38th Parallel,

so the MiGs brought her down. It was in-between Korea and Russia, where a big stretch of water was, where she went in. Up past Vladivosktok and way up into that area, and that's where we went. But as I said,

the Russian sub wouldn't give the crew up, and we were told to get the hell out of it, and the word came back from command headquarters, "Get out of it." So naturally we came back out. About two or three years ago, in our Advertiser, which is our local paper, there was a story on that.

The crew of that bomber were never liberated; the Russians never liberated them for some reason or another; that was just on the side.

Trains, we tried to get the trains, but Korea was a very mountainous area where we were patrolling.

And we used to try and get them from one tunnel to another, but they were a bit cagey. And then we finished up, too, we bombarded around the mouth of the Yangtze, and I think we were working with the Yanks then, with the battleship Missouri. And she would bombard

and we would send back the message whether she was too low or too high, and various little duties like that. We were what they called 'spotting' for her.

At the guns crew, at the four inch, and sometimes I might be up as layer or I might be down below feeding ammunition from the magazine into the turret.

About twelve, I think. That's from the magazine to getting it into the actual breech. I can't swear to that…

There were five of us in the actual turret itself, as the gun's crew. That's the layer, the captain of the gun crew, one each side loading, and…I forget what the second was called, and the director. But the director used to send down

the instructions to the captain of the turret, and I think sometimes the director would do his own spotting, but ninety percent of the time the orders came from the bridge to the director, or vice-versa, down from the director to the bridge and to us. But it was all very quick.

It wasn't a long process; it was a matter of seconds.

Oh yes. But if they were going off all the time, you didn't notice it near so much. But the first initial one you did. But once you engaged and got really into it, no, you didn't take any notice of it, you were too busy.

A fair bit, a fair bit. A couple of times a week, and then maybe more. It all depends on what we were sent to do.

It depends what the target was and what you were after. But there were never a great deal of times that run to ours…It mightn't be continuous, it might stop for a while, and just have a little bit of a break, to see…what was going on. That's about all that was important there.

It didn't matter where you were, the barrels got tremendously hot, sending those through, you had to be a little bit careful there. It was a different story on the Oerlikons and the Bofors and the Stags, which were

combined guns, groups of four, which were mainly used for anti-aircraft.

Yeah.

Layer.

With the Bofors,

you were out in the open, in the turret you were closed in. As I said, in the turrets, you had very little to see what you were doing. You had to rely upon the bridge and the activities around you.

That depends on what type of ship. On the Melbourne they were inside of the flight deck.

On the destroyers they were usually aft, or there could be one side of the bridge. But if they were, they were not very big Bofors, they were only single Bofors.

Yeah.

And it was mainly for anti-aircraft.

You've got a round circle, like cobweb, and in that round circle you line up whatever is coming towards you, a plane, or whatever it is you are approaching

and you just worked your layout from them. I'm not be explaining it to you very good, but it was an open site, and you just learned to use them. You are taught how to use them, in the gunnery school at Flinders. They weren't hard.

Not a lot. Only just some. The one higher up than me did. We never had a great deal…never had much trouble with aircraft in Korea. The MiGs a little bit, but not a lot.

It worked on the hydraulics. You move it that way; you go that, this way, you go this way. Same as the gun turret, it worked the same way. And up for up, down for down.

Three sixty.

No, not three sixty. No, because she would knock the bridge out, you see. You had to be a little bit careful there, but if you were up in the air, it could be thirty fifty. The same as the Stags. The Stags were multiple Bofors, which is a group of four, and they were very effective.

We used those a lot.

The Tobruk.

They were a group, they were four, four barrels. And they were designed by an Australian.

No, they all went together.

More of less simultaneously, they all went together. They were just in a group of four, there were no singles, when one went off the four went off.

They were loaded automatically. Their firepower was something short of fantastic.

They had a very, very rapid firepower.

Yeah, yeah.

Not very often. But we had to do a lot of practice. If you weren't actually in combat, you might lay off and go somewhere and do it, on ranges, and work with other ships. And possibly you've seen it, the aircraft carrying a drogue, sometimes they have them carrying the advertising signs on them.

Well, we learnt a lot through the towing of the drogues and everything like that. And boy, if you ever shot down a drogue, you got in the bother. They weren't meant to be shot down; it was sort of…near misses.

I forget now. I don't think they were done manually. But then again, that was the only way they could have been done. I just forget how we fed the ammunition into the Stags. They only needed to be gingered up…Someone would say, "Oh, don't you remember we did this?"

The Bofors, the ammunition was in ranks besides. The racks were always kept full naturally, and you would have to break the engagement off and re-top them up. There was never anybody standing there taking ammunition out of the ammunition cases and feeding them. You would have to stop and top up.

That used to come from the magazine. It all depends on what type…There was the four fives, which was on the Tobruk, and the four sevens which was Warramunga. One was handled by the hydraulic system

and the four sevens was done by manual, which the crew threw them in the breech. Whereas on the Tobruk, the ammunition went around a ring, and when it came to the loader at the breach, there was a break in the ring where he would grab his ammunition and drop it straight in the breech. It might sound a little bit complicated but it isn't,

it's quite simple. It's very simple.

I could be either be laying, or aiming, or I could be sending it up and down the magazine. They used to come from the magazine down to the turret. You can imagine there was

a trunk that went through the centre and they went that way. There wasn’t a great deal of manual handling of it. The manual handling came in the last little bit of it when the breech loader had to throw them in the bridge. But in regards to the hydraulic system, carting them up to the breech loader…It's all coming back now as I talk to you.

They used to come one after another, and there would be a little…platform to take them up, and when they got to the ring they would go into the ring. Or if of a night-time, we would have to do a terrible lot of 'starshells.' And the starshell had to be set

so that when it got in the air it exploded, and your light came out like a Very light. Am I getting the message across there? That's what we were doing on the Yangtze River. We did a terrible lot of that…

Yep.

I should say of all the ammunition that we used in Korea, apart from the Bofors, we used the starshell, most of all.

We might be eliminating targets for the US battleships, things like that.

On the mouth of the Yangtze, that was to help with the blockade. There wasn't a great deal in that, there was about a week, I think.

There was a reason why we laid off a fair bit from the shore, because Korea was notorious for reefs.

I remember one of the duties I had, that we had, when we were first in, a Canadian ship went aground on the reef and we went up and towed her off…I think the name of it was the Centaur, in fact I'm certain it is. At the races there was a horse named Centaur, at very big odds…

Stack the starshells…There was a little thing beside you and you would just set it. The instructions would come from the director

to the bridge to set one minute or two minutes or thirty seconds, that type of thing. And it was just the nose of the shell went in, whatever the setting was, that went in, and it took about a fifth of a second type thing, very fast. Then back on the shell and the shell went on its way. I can't remember if the starshell was set before it went into the ring,

or on the way up from the magazine. I'm not sure about that. It could have been done down below in the turret.

Yes. I can't tell you the exact weight…The shell was one part, and the cartridge was another part,

on the four fives, and on the four sevens they were complete. There were shells casings that you might have seen, fairly high…

The guns on the Warramunga were complete, whereas the guns on the Tobruk were cartridge and missile separate. Don't ask me the reason why. Whether it's to do with more effective power or just like that…I didn't get to learn that.

Also when we were talking before about the black market, the black market in Japan was very lucrative for empty shell cases. It was very hard to snitch [steal] them, very hard. Because Japan is devoid of metals,

and they would do anything for metals. They would pay any price for brass and things like that.

No.

Yeah. But at the finish, naturally the authorities woke up and they became accountable. On the Warramunga, it was quite…

if there was any great deal of movement from the ship, they could roll over the side.

Yeah, the cartridge. Not the actual shell, the cartridge. And you see when…the long projectile goes in, the cartridge gets ejected,

and the shell goes on its way, and that was why as for going up, the cartridge used to fall down the middle. When we were loading, we had to watch that and keep them aside.

Yeah.

If you're in the turret…

And they'd come down there. After they got to a certain degree, there was the lockers….locker doors, open them up and get them aside, but that was only after a heavy engagement. Normal engagements weren't very heavy, where we didn't to do that.

But on the star shell, and things like that, yes, when we were using a fair bit of ammunition that would happen.

Not really keep out of the way. It was very well organised so that you didn't have to. But on the Warramunga, they could become a hazard…

You were too busy not to muck around with them, to get them out of the way. The guns crew did work as a team and get rid of them, so we didn't fall foul of those that landed, that we didn't trip on them and that sort of thing. And a lot of that came back, too, from when we used to practice. The guns would fire,

the cartridges would come back and hit a net, and the net would cause them to more or less drop straight to the deck, and then from the deck they were got rid of that way.

Yeah, to make sure they always had to be kept at a certain temperature. The temperature was never allowed to get too low or too high. And if they did, you took steps to remedy it. Because cordite is a bit of a funny thing…I'm not sure what the exact temperature was,

but it had to be kept at a certain temperature. And the magazines, being below the water, there wasn't a great deal of problems with that. But then on the Warramunga, we did have what we called ammunition lockers, and we had to do that. There was another ship that we haven't touched on,

when I was in Malaya, and Borneo…the ammunition lockers were on the upper deck. But we never used the four inch gun very much in Borneo or Malaya. It was mainly the lighter stuff.

Every day, without fail.

And there was a special man on board who did that. That was his job, and he was called the 'Gunner Yeoman,' and that was one of his jobs. Even in harbour, that was one of his jobs, to make sure those lockers ever got excessively hot or excessively cold.

No. On the last ship, just before I paid off in '58 or '59, I was pretty close to it. But no…They were teaching the younger ones…When I first joined, your life more or less

revolved around the older person. He got around with a halo on. But around '57 or '58, they changed all that, and they started doing it on ability. Not how long he had been in the Service, or what he could do, it was just on his ability.

Yes. But as I said, I think it must have been on the last patrol we done, when we went ashore to blow up those land mines, and the petty officer in charge lost his hand, yeah, up until then it was fairly good. And I showed you photographs of those women on the islands, the various islands,

the people there, they were pretty good.

No. The parts where we were in Korea, they were no good at all. I couldn't understand why they were fighting over them,

because it was so mountainous, and as I said, offshore there was those terrible reefs and you had to watch and you had to have lookouts on all the time, looking for these reefs as well as your enemy aircraft.

Sasebo.

Only Sasebo. And if anything needed to be done to the ship, down to Hong Kong. Because Hong Kong had quite the big dockyard…

That was by a lot of fluke. On all the various ships that I was on, I spent a lot of time in Hong Kong. Sometime in Singapore, but mainly in Hong Kong.

It was more or less like our picnic race meetings.

But the Chinese were mad, there were no bookmakers, it was all tote [Totalisator] And a lot of it, the jockeys were amateur jockeys…this is going back to the '50s, they were amateur jockeys and they could be from…Russia, and places like that.

No. The leave in Japan was pretty good, it was very good. Hong Kong was definitely better…

It was a Naval base and more or less…Naval traditions applied there a lot, where you felt more at home. Does that make sense? There was something about Hong Kong that fascinated. Going there from such an early age,

and life was awfully cheap in Hong Kong. It might have been in other parts, too, but I just saw it in Hong Kong. You'd just see children born on the streets, and terrible things like that. People dying and they'd stretch them out on the footpath and wait for the funeral cart. Things like that; that leaves an impression in your mind when you were young.

The British food and rations were not so good.

When we stopped off in Sasebo, we got fresh fruit and things like that, that were a luxury. I don't think I ever saw chicken or anything like those, they were real luxuries in those days. But fresh fruit was also a luxury. One of the things I'd always enjoy doing, was when we hit Darwin on the way home…

Or sometimes we'd call in at Penang, to top up for fuel and for fresh fruit, and to get fresh fruit on board was an absolute luxury. With the American ships, you would occasionally get the apples and the oranges. But in the islands, when you got to Penang and places like that,

you had the choice of pineapples and pawpaws…A mixed variety of food.

On the way to Korea. I'm fairly certain it did.

On the way up, we were diverted to that. I can't remember a great deal about Labuan, I can remember the…I think we did get leave there, and I think it was just a typical native place there, a few bars…But nothing really much in the way of entertainment.

The NAAFI Club; that was a better one. There was a NAAFI Club in Hong Kong, too, but the one in Singapore I feel was better.

It had an indoor swimming pool, and I used to enjoy the swimming there. It was a very good pool.

Not a bomb, a shell.

It was just one Sunday afternoon…Sunday afternoon, the same as a Wednesday

afternoon, you would get to relax and make and mend, and we were just lazing about and bang, off came one…It went straight through the captain's day cabin. Nobody was hurt, but a lot of people were frightened. That was it.

A shore battery. I can't tell you exactly where.

But I know that we moved out of there really fast, very fast.

It wrecked it. Enough to go to Hong Kong for repairs.

Not particularly.

I don't know…I think mainly conditions had a lot to do with it. And the fact is, when she got back to Sydney, after one tour up there, she was given very, very little respite and was sent back up again. And that caused a lot of discontentment with the crew.

We were diverted to the war crimes at Labuan and we thought she would come home, but no, she was sent back, she was up north again. That caused a lot of discontentment.

Yes.

Just the way they rebuilt. And you just had to see it to believe it. When I went back and saw Kure, and particularly

Nagasaki, I just couldn't believe it, and parts of Tokyo, I just couldn't believe…But they were really fantastic workers. And the way that it was rebuilt, to me it was like a miracle, when I had seen it so devastated by the bomb, to go back and see it rebuilt…

It just goes to show that possibly that things are…Well, we know it is possible because it was rebuilt so well. And I believe it was American money, the American lend lease that got her back on her feet.

I'm not sure when we came down from Korea for R & R, a month off, we said we would go and have a look at the various ports. I know we went to Yokohama, Kyoto, Iwakuni, and some way up north of Japan. And they had never seen

Americans, let alone Australians. They had never heard of Australia, to be quite honest. They were really over- awed by it all. Some could speak English, but the majority, no…

We carried an interpreter. The one that I can remember was an Australian army officer. Also when we were out patrolling in Japan, we carried an interpreter. The same as Malaya,

they were after the gun runners. It wasn't so much in Japan and Korea, they were after the gun runners….I got the impression that they still wanted to keep the Japanese repressed or cowered; that would make sense. But their attitude at sea, for the slightest infringement, we'd pull them up.

It is a rule of the sea that you dip your flag to a warship, and if they didn't, we would go aboard and sometimes there would be searches made…That was really interesting, that lot…

Nothing really. I know that in their dealings with the Japanese in all ways,

that they were scrupulously honest, and extremely polite. What that reason was for, whether that was part of their nature, or what, but everywhere, in the shops and everywhere else, I couldn't speak highly enough of their politeness. That impressed you.

They were out of bounds, they were high class. The geisha houses are not classed as a brothel…I don't know what we would class them as here in Australia,

what we would compare them as. They were very, very high entertainment places, and they weren't in the range of the ship's company.

I can't speak for the officers.

That was the ship that done it, that was the Tobruk. We went to Tokyo, we went to everywhere. It was something like seven ports that we visited.

Not for very long periods, sometimes it was only overnight, and we were on our way the next day. Yokohama, I liked very much, because Yokohama was American based. I saw some things go on in Yokohama that were just unbelievable.

The Americans were still, in that day then, they were tremendously hard on their coloured servicemen. I dare say it's all changed now. I was never very tall, so naturally I never used to get selected for a lot of patrol duties.

Once or twice I did. When we were ashore in these ports, it was up to the ship to nominate its own patrols, or to send its own patrols to see that we didn't misbehave, as well as working in with the British Red Caps.

Anywhere there was likely to be trouble, dance halls and things like that. You didn't interfere with anybody else. It was just the sailors. If the sailors were misbehaving, and there were brawls…There seemed to be a terrible lot of brawls.

The Australians and the Yanks did not get along at all well. Towards the finish they used to tolerate. They used to accuse us of being British, and there was a fair bit of resentment there, so there was quite a lot of fisticuffs. Particularly in Sasebo…

I can recollect a couple of very nasty incidents in Sasebo, until the captain went ashore and saw the commander of the base, and just said, "It's no good. My men are being assaulted for just minding their own business." So he said, "Right, we will fix that up." The funniest…The whole base had to stand retreats,

every night, for seven nights, and no more interfering with the United Nations service. It wasn't only the Australians they were picking on; it would be Canadians, British, New Zealanders, Indians…All the people that went to make up the United Nations in the various fleets.

I wondered if it was jealousy, or it might have been just a bit of bullying. We could never play a great deal of sport against the Americans, because it different. But as regards to other countries,

like New Zealand, England, it was always friendly rugby games, friendly soccer matches. Even in the islands I struck that a lot, in Labuan and New Guinea and Rabaul and places like that. It was pretty good for sport…And cricket matches. They loved their cricket.

Yes, yes.

No, thanks. I could run.

Grog. You know how grog makes you as brave as you could be, it makes your mind do the talking. I think it was the alcohol…Even in the ship's company,

they used to blue [fight] with each other, it was always alcohol related, mainly.

It was dry. I'm fairly certain it was on the way to Korea…I'm fairly certain is was around when Queen Elizabeth and Philip got married,

around about '52 or '53? Well, then we got what they called 'splice-the-mainbrace' and that was a bottle of beer. Whereas the British ships and the New Zealand ships, they had their rum, a daily issue of rum.

It was a good rum, the strong Jamaican rum, which was like golden syrup, according to your rank, that was how much water went in and they would mix it up that way.

Yep. Such as if you were an AB, you got the weakest of the lot. If you were a leading seaman you got a little bit stronger,

a PO quite strong and the Chief PO very strong. But that was traditional. That went right back to the old sailing days. That was handed down…

No.

I'm not sure.

I think we might have come home. I think we come home in '54, I'm pretty certain we did.

To the UK.

And stood by the Melbourne. Just while the Melbourne got fitted out for aircraft and the aircraft was tested….

Still gunnery. On the Bofors,

I had a Bofors to look after, or twin Bofors. And they were on the side of the flight deck. I used to like that job very much. You had a first class view of the planes taking off. It was never boring, it was always fascinating.

On board the Melbourne, there was always something to do. On the bigger ships there always was.

I think I left the Melbourne and just had a little time ashore and I got to Malaya.

Oh yeah. Lived on board….

Well, when we went across to Europe and places like that, on our leave, we didn't.

Yeah. The commissioning process was a fairly long process.

The catapults had to be tested, and all various things had to be tested. They did a lot in Scotland. Whereas before she was actually built in a place called Barrow Furness.

For a little while at Portsmouth. Just for a little bit of time, not for very long. Then down at Plymouth at what they called Plompy, but not for very long at all. We were pretty well kept on board ship all the time.

The squadrons joined up in Scotland, too, then the planes came on. To the best of my memory, naturally being a seaman it wasn't my post, but we never did a great deal of flying in England,

and parts like that. That was mainly done when we got back here to Australia. We used to up to Hervey Bay, up there in Queensland. And worked up there, worked off there, and worked up there, there was ideal flying conditions.

Yes.

That was held on board the ship; Prince Philip came down and done that. I think the kids grabbed the photos of that, of him shaking hands with us all.

There's a little thing in there of the commissioning ceremony. I think it was the British high commissioner, and well to do Australians, and all that.

Yeah. We got back for the Olympic Games.

We went straight to Melbourne and the Olympic Games were just about to begin, and they chose several of the crew for marshals at the Olympics, to show people to their seats and jobs like that. You could watch the competitions as well, and you didn't have to keep duty nights, so that was all right.

Yes. That was when Ron Delaney won the mile…And Roger Bannister was the first to break the four minute mile barrier, that didn't happen at the Olympic Games. It was Ron Delaney who won, when they were trying to get under the magic four minute mile.

A lot of pomp and ceremony, really quite good.

No, no, you could live ashore. You were welcome to live ashore.

While the Olympic Games were on, and those that worked at the Games weren't rostered for duties, whereas those that weren't had to stop on board. That might be the cooks or people to clean up the galleys or messes, the toilets.

The work that has to be done. On a normal ship, like on the Tobruk and the Warramunga, sometimes you would get one night in three off to go ashore. Well, then, in other things, when things were a little bit better, you would get one night in four.

Not necessarily, no. It all depends how far off it was parked from pay day and things like that. I was never a great lover of Melbourne, so I may have stayed on a fair bit.

Or people from the Games that we'd show to their seats, who would invite you home for a meal. Actually I do feel that people in the navy get a bit spoiled by people on shore…

They will make you welcome ashore, and take you to their homes and look after you well.

Yes.

I had a stint ashore down at Flinders Naval Depot. I had an easy time, six or seven months…I know I had done my twelve years, but because I had joined before I was seventeen…

You had to on until you're thirty. And I hated that.

Five months extra, and I spent that in Malaya and Borneo. And I had just been newly married, and my wife had come out from the UK, and I wasn't at all happy about that.

Yes.

In a place called Deal, which is Kent, down on the coast. Even though I've been divorced, I think about twenty-three or twenty-four years, we are still the best of friends.

I ring her up at least once or twice a week.

No, we married in Melbourne. I sponsored her out from the UK…That thing I was telling you was on the television last night, where they were really calling for migrants to come out.

In Pompy, which is Plymouth, at a dance at the NAAFI Club, a canteen in there, and it just went on from there.

Yes, and a very unhappy one.

She hated it. But I was my own worst enemy, because I made life extremely hard for myself by trying to buck the system, which is a bit stupid when you look back on it.

I just didn't think that I should have been sent. I could have got out of it…There was a clause that some smart legal eagle had found, which if your parents had signed your papers before you were eighteen, the papers weren't valid.

There was some section like that. When all things were boiled down, I really shouldn't have had to do that five months. Instead of getting out at twenty nine and seven months, I had to stop until I was thirty.

Yes. Twelve years and five months.

No. But it went very quick.

I was pretty fed up with being…But it went, and that was it.

We were mainly after gun runners. Or if they weren't gun runners,

they were running American cigarettes from Malaya into Borneo, or that area…I may be getting a bit mixed up. And our job was to try and catch them. With our radar set up, we'd try and catch them that way. But they were…

I don't think we ever caught more than about two or three, they were far too clever.

They weren't ships, they were the dugout canoes that they used . And if you can appreciate…They used to have the outriggers from the canoes, and they'd have the big Johnson outboard on each outrigger.

Even with the best of radar…We'd track them, but then to actually get them…We'd get a few, but not many.

In our boats, in our sea boats on board ship.

We'd actually get them that way. The actual destroyer was too big to go in after them. We'd use our own boats. And we'd work a fair bit with…We worked hand in hand with the Malaysian customs. That was very good, really good.

Yes.

I get a little bit mixed up. I'm not sure whether they were coming from Malaysia into Singapore and places in that area….I just get a little bit vague on that one…

Mainly he could speak English, which was okay for us, For the ones in the dugouts and the canoes, it would be one of the dialects. And they were mainly Sikhs, the big tall Sikhs, they seemed to specialise in that.

Yes.

Only that it had been worked into a very bigger campaign, for mainly the business of the rubber.

I think that it had a lot to do with rubber, and the disagreement that went on there between the British government and the Malaysian government. I don't think they were one then, I'm not too sure on that…Another one that amazed me a lot,

I don't know if you have ever been to Singapore…The Indonesians, or the Chinese or whatever it was, kicked the Dutch out of all those surrounding islands. And the amount of ships and boats

that used to trade in the copra, or the rubber, and bring it out into the straits, there must have been hundreds of them. And I realised how much they must have hurt Holland, to get the boot from Indonesia.

Participated in some of the gun running, to try and trap them. As I said, we were attached to the Customs then…Several of us would be picked out to go of a night-time and try and work out the radar traps for them,

but they were far too good for us.

Yes. But they were so clever; the ones that were actually…I think more than the guns, the American cigarettes were very attractive too,

and they were trying to beat the excise on them. There was a lot of smuggling that went on. That's who were after, smugglers. They were just too crafty for us.

I don't think there was any dope, but it was mainly guns and cigarettes.

Apparently not then, I don't know what the attractiveness was about it. But there wouldn't be one, there would be as many as twenty or thirty of a night-time. How they used to be so elusive, the radar plot would pick them up all right.

But also between the radar plots, there would be the fisherman. And that is where we used to have trouble…You'd think you'd grabbed one and what you were doing you were grabbing a poor old innocent fisherman. By the time we got things sorted out, the culprit was up and away, like you would see in a movie.

That was the Customs that grabbed them. That was then taken over by the Customs.

No, not really. That was all she was…And again, it was part of the United Nations patrol.

No, it was always Singapore. Singapore was the base.

It depended, very much.

Never more than four or five days.

A destroyer. She was quite a good ship; she was a happy enough ship.

She was involved in a lot of training of the younger seamen and the young blokes. I think she got sent to Singapore to make up the number for the United Nations.

A

No, I don't know. I just can't remember what class she was.

On the Vengeance? Yes.

I was posted.

Oh yes, to go to England, and to get the opportunity to go to Ireland…That made my day.

Just to see more, more of the world. That was still the ambition, and the motivation was there to travel and see the world. It was until the last little bit that I got fed up didn't want to travel any more, go away from Australia.

Simple, there was no difficulty whatsoever. When we got there, to England, the first thing that was done we were given fourteen days leave. I didn't go to Europe that time, I chose to go to Scotland and up through into

the Midlands of England. When you say, "How did you find your way?" There were people on board that helped us, that knew that. I have no regrets about going up through the Midlands into Scotland and that, but knowing that the Melbourne was going to be up there; well I wish that I had gone into Europe.

We got into Europe when I was on the Melbourne. A party of us went over for a tour then.

No, we stayed on board…As a matter of fact, I was one of the last to leave the Vengeance and go to the Melbourne, but that was by choice.

They just wanted somebody to stop back. We couldn't all go together. When the ship pays off and she's finished, the dockyard takes it over or we waited for the dockies [dock workers] to come on board and signed everything over to them and away we went. I was trying to remember how we went from Portsmouth up to Glasgow

…That is something that eludes my mind. I don't think we went by bus or train, or by ship. I joined her in Barrow Furness, which is only a matter of a few hours by train…

Not in dry dock, but she was in the dockyards, and she was in the dockyards for many, many weeks. They were having problems with the catapult, something to do with the steam in the catapults.

That is what catches the aircraft, and shoots along the deck and the aircraft goes off into the sky. I'm pretty sure you would have seen it many times and not realised it. The one on the Melbourne seemed to be jinxed right from the day it went into operation, because we lost a couple of planes in the Melbourne

through the faults of the catapults.

Yep. Both of them up in Hervey Bay.

Yeah.

The first one, it took off from the catapult

quite well. How I know is my gun turret and my gun was right opposite the runway where they shot along. Now they secured to the catapult, they secured them with a big steel halter and that comes away. Now the steel halter came away quite good from the plane, the plane banked and I think

the pilot banked too soon, too steeply. And the wing hit a wave and away she went, catapulted, and before we could anything the plane was gone. For the planes to take off from the catapult, the ship has to be doing a fair speed.

And naturally by the time that he backed the speed off the ship, and got the acceleration and got the sea boats away, the plane had gone down. I can remember it quite clearly; there was no attempt by the pilot or the co-pilot to get out. So whether they had been knocked unconscious by the impact, I don't know.

Yes, and the beauty of it was…We were up in Hervey Bay, we were meant to be up there for a month and we were ordered back down to Sydney to work on the catapult again, and both the Gannets, that was the planes that were used on the Melbourne, they were both grounded.

Gannet. What they called a 'Gannet' after the bird. The Venom was a fighter plane and the Gannet was a long range bomber. In other words, one was a lighter plane and the Gannet was a little bit heavier, or much heavier.

Yeah, and I've got an idea, if memory serves me correct, the Venom only had a crew of one where the Gannet had a crew of two. Yeah, I'm certain on that one.

There's a flight deck that runs along, and just in there, the gun turret was there, and they were Bofors, just a single Bofors.

Watching, because the Bofors are not closed in. The Bofors are multi-purpose guns.

You can use them for so many things.

Sheer shock and horror. Couldn't believe it. Brand new ship, brand new catapult…We were in Australian waters, we came to Sydney and they tried to sort the problem out.

They did sort it out and not long after that…I'd left the Melbourne, and that was when I went down to Flinders, and they lost a Venom, one of the Venoms went too. So there was…

Yeah, yeah. But the Gannet I did see go down. I saw that with my own eyes.

And I knew the pilot and the co-pilot, both. The co-pilot went on that trip to Europe with us, when we went into Austria. He was one of the party that made that.

You don't feel very good. His name was Keith Poulson and he was a West Australian.

You never feel good when you lose anybody at sea.

No, in Australia. Up Hervey Bay, which is off the Queensland Coast. That was very sad.

No, it went down pretty fast. Now I'm positive what happened was, for some reason or another, I wouldn't like to say it was a freak wave, but one wave, it was maybe eighteen inches higher than the others,

and that was enough to do the damage. The actual pilot had a reputation for being a bit of a lairiser [show-off]. And whether he was trying to impress the bridge …He just came unstuck that way. But that was it.

No. The flight deck would have been a good fifty or sixty metres wide, possibly more than that.

So you were quite a distance away from it. And the Bofors…I forget the name that we had there, fell a fair bit short of the actual flight deck, it didn't run to the end of the flight deck, it came back this way a little bit.

There was a bit of a cutaway.

Very noisy. And the catapult makes a fair bit of noise, too, but you get used to that. I suppose that

there wouldn't have been more than twenty planes had used the catapult before that accident happened, but this time, I'm of the firm belief that it wasn’t the fault of the catapult, it was the fault of the pilot. But they suspended all flying…And that's what they do, too. When the Venom went, they suspended all flying. They say, and I don't know if it is truthful,

but I know this is what happened…When the plane goes in the drink [sea], don’t give the pilots time to stop and think, get another one up and away. Get him going, as soon as possible. And I'm sure that was the case. But they couldn't, because they went back to where the actual plane had gone in.

But that's the talk we say on the mess deck. "If a plane does go into the drink from the catapult, the one that is coming behind him, you get him to go off straight away, too." But on this occasion we didn't. We stopped the ship and went back and launched the sea boats to see if

there was any sign of any wreckage or bodies. But there wasn't.

No. Possibly a helicopter. In those days, a helicopter always flew a little bit off port of the flight deck, so if there was a mishap

the helicopter could nip around…Yeah, that's how where we knew where she went in. The helicopter went straight across and dropped some flares on the spot where she went in. The turbulence was still coming up from the plane going down.

I should remember him quite well…Carrington was the captain of the Melbourne.

He was the one that said, "It's his twentieth birthday, we'll row him A to B for his birthday." He had just joined the Warramunga that morning I was going off, yeah.

Yes, he was captain of the Melbourne.

Yes, she was a very happy ship, the Melbourne. Even on the day, on her way to the wreckers up in Japan, she played up. She broke adrift from the tug taking her up, and the tow line parted and she was out there having a bonnie time in the ocean, then they got her back.

I don't know about this word jinxed. It's just whether circumstances go against, and things go wrong…

To come into port. As a matter of fact, I remember one, we fired them….We fired like a twenty one gun salute, for the service of the two pilots that went down, we fired for them. And to come into port, they would fire a salvo just as a gesture of good will.

That was done about an hour after it went down. And I don't know where they come from,

but there was also some wreaths on board and they were dropped into the sea, and we had a service, almost immediately. Even though everybody was in a bit of shock. You've got to get on with it and keep the ship moving and keep the ship going.

But we did have the service, I know we had the service, and there were wreaths laid in the water. I can still see that…in my mind quite clearly.

No, no.

Yes.

Yes, and the Melbourne, on the way back to Australia, we called at Le Havre, and there was forty eight hours leave given, and that was how we were to get up to Paris, on that second time.

And if I loved anything, I loved Paris. Not for the wildlife, but for the culture. I loved the galleries, the Louvre, and the ‘Mona Lisa’, I went and saw that. And when we were in there,

there was an Australian came along, and apparently he was what was called an academic, who studied art, and they made themselves known to us and they took us all around the Louvre, and showed us just how to appreciate all the beautiful paintings that were in there. That was just fantastic.

I wasn't very impressed with the Mona Lisa, and he assured us that many people aren't. That it is just one of those paintings that got the name, and took off. And it wasn't until only about two months ago, one of the ladies came down from Veterans Affairs to help me with some things, and we were talking about that,

and she said, "Did you know that there are two Mona Lisas?" And I said, "No, I didn't." She said, "Yes there is. There is the one in France and there is also one in…" I don’t know whether she said Portugal or Spain, in their museum there.

Yes, in Paris I did. But when we went across Europe, no. It was in civilian clothes.

I'm afraid it did. Yes it did. It would be free drinks; it would be lots of things. Lots of things. Perks.

Yes, there were.

I think it was around about 1955, I just can't give you the actual history of it, but it was something to do with the Communists, and the Communist Party. And it was brought in that we were allowed to wear civilian clothes,

to take civilian clothes on board and wear them ashore. That was normally…a privilege for the officers. But for some reason or another, and I'm fairly certain it was to do with something on the Communist front that we were allowed to wear civilian clothes on board the ship.

On board all ships at the finish. On board the Melbourne it was different; it was much easier to, because you had a bigger locker, whereas on the destroyers you had a much smaller space.

You stowed hammocks in the corner of your mess deck, and the old sea boat, they went up the back…

No, we had bunks on the Melbourne. We had hammocks on the Vengeance, and we had to take our hammocks across to the UK.

I'm certain we had hammocks on the Vengeance, because when I was on the Vengeance she had no planes. After Korea, they took the planes off the Vengeance.

Terrific, fantastic, because they folded up. We did keep our hammocks, because we had to have our mattresses which go with the hammocks. And you laid your hammock on top of your bunk. That's right we did.

There was no mattresses with the hammocks. The hammock went underneath your bunks. And to go on the mess deck,

where you were using your hammocks to sleep in, and in the mess, you also had your table to eat your meals, and you also had your locker on the seats, and some along the sides to store your clothes…You can appreciate how sardines feel, sometimes. Life was very congested.

Yeah, yes, the ventilation was very good. The biggest problem with destroyers was that there was never anywhere to dry your clothes, so therefore there was a lot of wet clothes in the mess decks, and that resulted in a

tremendous amount of tuberculosis in the Naval personnel. They sorted that one out very smart, after a time.

Never.

They never came on board. Never ever did I strike one. Never did I strike any of that on board. There was plenty of it that went on shore. That was just…hard to describe it.

I went to some terrific homosexual parties up in Sydney, at the Paddington Town Hall, and up in Kings Cross. It still is to this today.

Homosexual parties.

Put on by the homosexuals attended by the sailors.

Well, that all depends. There were many, many…That was back in the younger days….Say around '51, '52, the early '50s, when homosexuality was coming out up in Sydney.

I couldn't believe it. As I said, I was still pretty young at the time, and I…couldn't believe the things that I saw go on. I didn't think that they happened, but to see them, you know that they do.

Men hugging and kissing and all these various things, and men dressed as women. And they had the mock weddings and masquerades. Things you never saw as a kid, and never realised as a kid, and then to go up to Sydney and strike it, it sort of made you think. A lot.

It beats me, and I could never understand where they got their money from. But there were lashings of money that they would spend on these parties.

There may have been. That would be early days…

I'm not sure how I went…Oh yes, it would had to have been in uniform. I only had very simple, little civilian clothes. And another place that was notorious for those type of parties was Liverpool. I think that was worst than Sydney.

It was pretty much the drag business up there.

No, that's what surprises you. Definitely not. That's what used to knock me…I had to see it to believe it, there was nothing secret about it.

Yes, they were. And pretty wild parties. Not so much necessarily the sex side of things, but things that went on, you just couldn't believe it.

But seeing is believing, as the old saying goes.

Yes, shocked. That's the word to describe it. More shocked than surprise. Still, not making excusing, but I was young and inexperienced

and didn't realise that these type of things went on. Now when we look back over the years, yeah, that was human nature. Mother Nature plays a pretty funny part when she puts the embryos together, doesn't she? That's the way that I look at it…

No. They just wouldn't have been tolerated on board. You couldn't hide it. It just didn't work out.

Oh yes, you do.

Just on board ship. You just do it, because you can see them struggling.

Like today, when you see a person struggling to cross a street. It's only natural that you walk up and give a hand. That, to me, is how it reads. It is something in your make up that you just do, you just help them with…Say, for instance, with ship's duties. "You don't do it that way, you do it this way." "You don't put your hand in there,"

or, "You don't put your foot in there." "You climb up a ladder this way." And for instance, the washing of the clothes and how to stow your clothes in the locker, to get the best out of your locker. Almost like passing father down to son, that idea.

Not really. No, not really. On the Quickmatch, yes. Someone I'm very pleased to say he went on and done very well for himself in the navy, rose up to be better than

what we called a warrant officer, which was very, very good. And then went out into civilian life and done very, very well in civilian life. That lady up there, it was just at a party that she happened to mentioned things. "Did you know Gordon Bailey?"

And he said, "I knew Gordon Bailey quite well."

No, I've forgotten now. But on the Quickmatch, he and I teamed up together.

He was a youngster and I was a bit older. We used to take him on the gun running patrols, and worked with the customs. The customs were in charge of us, but we were there to provide the firearms.

Yes, that was the ones that we were trying to trap. I've got an idea that there were three or four Customs officers and in that there would be the interpreter and then there would be three or four sailors.

Yes, just to teach him.

He would have had to have been eighteen, because they stopped the seventeen year olds. They stopped that around about '54, '55, I think, when that business about having your parents' consent…

Yes. And to see him do so well…

Now that varied. For the officers mess and for the ward room,

which is a pretty big part of the ship, they might play nightly. For the ship's company, once a week or every ten days. They used to do a lot of ceremonials ashore and the various ports that we went to.

With the navy, a bugle has always been a very important part, on the larger ships, not necessarily the smaller ships, but the Australia and things like that. And the Shropshire, there was always a bugler. And in the depots, if they had

any type of inspection, there was always a bugler who used to walk out in front and sound his bulge and he stood to attention and let the officers pass. The bugle has played a very important part in the navy.

Yes.

It didn't. It was always played manually, and certain bugle signified that you did certain things. For instance, in the old days when they had the drums, urging people on to go into action. The bugle in the navy has always played a very important part,

telling you what to do. Certain bugle calls meant that you went into certain places and did certain jobs.

Yes, very much.

Well, the blah was stand still, for whoever was coming past, whether it be officers or someone like that. The bugle went at six o' clock in the morning for wakey-wakey [wake up], and it also went at seven o' clock for hands to breakfast.

And for lunchtime, sometimes on the bigger ships it was the bugle. On the smaller ships it was what we called the Bosun's Pipe. But on the bigger ships it was the bugle. And there was one, 'Liberty Men Declared,' and ''Liberty Men Fall In.' Little things like that, the bugle played a very important part in. And on the smaller ships

it was, as I said, the bosun's call or the bosun's pipe.

I can't help you with that one.

Oh yes.

Oh yes. There was a few sea shanties.

No, I can't. That one will have to stir my memory up for what I can sing and what I can't…No.

I've dropped away from them a bit.

As I said, on Sunday, that would have been the first time that I had anything to with a group of naval personnel since Anzac Day. Then again, it was last Sunday I went to one, and this Sunday is Korea Day, so we'll have

a big turnout at Hindmarsh.

Yes, but I would have to sort them out.

Not wishing to side-track you at all, but do you ever get near Henley Beach?

We've got a good strong Korean club at the Henley Beach RSL. It's quite interesting in there….

The Customs had then. They weren't slouches, they were fairly powerful, but they were what were described as a work boat, type thing, that could carry a crew of four or five quite easy, and weapons if needed.

Then again, the blessed gun runners, if you fired upon them, they would fire back. And they would carry the old .303s, and they weren't frightened to have a go.

Just the Owen gun, and or a Bren gun. Nothing too bulky, something you could move around with fairly easy,

and look pretty threatening. And I believe they still do to this day. Like when the board the ships, like the Tampa, and this illegal fishing, I think they still carry the Bren, the boarding parties.

Quite a lot of times on the patrol in Japan and Korea, we boarded various junks and searched them, looking for weapons and things like that, and illegal immigrants.

Yeah.

They were the junks, the Chinese junks. Which I suppose would be one of the most versatile type ships that you could ever come across. They've been with us since time immemorial. They're very, very good in all types of weather, and they can crack up a fair speed.

There have been people who have been born on these junks who have never known what it is to set foot on land.

The outriggers.

Somebody would have alerted. It might have been the harbour master, a call came through from the harbour master, "Can you check on this? It's been acting suspiciously." And this is truthful facts. "It's left port under the cover of darkness." Or without a port clearance…

Little things like that went on, even in those early days. We always acted on complaints from somewhere or someone. You just don't board without a reason.

Just pull up alongside.

And send away the sea boat. There was a sea boat which was powered by oars, or you had the motor cutter which is powered by an engine. In those circumstances you would use the motor cutter. The motor cutter was quite a versatile thing. If we anchored out on the buoy at various ports, then the motor cutter used to take

the liberty men to and from shore. It had a lot of uses, many duties the motor cutter. The sea boat that I was talking about, the whaler, you could launch that much faster, say, if you lost a man overboard and things like that, it was always the whaler put in to try and rescue…

Yes. As I said, the times that I can remember it was an army officer, an Australian Army officer, too. I can remember him pretty well…

You'd leave that up…You'd give them a warning. You'd turn around…We'd either take them in tow and tow them back, or we'd threaten with gunfire, put the Bofors on, and order them back in. It never failed to work; it worked every time that it had to be used.

That was in the larger ships; that worked for them. But the smaller ones, no. They got away. If we apprehended them, and went alongside them and found nothing, we just used to let them go on their way.

The Malacca Straits. That's between Singapore and Borneo. It was notorious for the gun runners at that time, very notorious.

I would say about twenty feet long, not terribly wide, because they had outriggers on either side, and then they had the outboard motor on each helm…This was when they were getting really organised, and that's how they got it down to a fine art.

Up in Japan, the Inland Sea and places like that, I never saw them. It was only the junks. Or sometimes on the way to Hong Kong, or the way back from Hong Kong, we'd have trouble with the dows and pull them over, or the junks. But it was pretty tame, mostly.

The junks used to fascinate me, in the fact that they could travel so far from land and so far from home, and still be going along quite good. They were never really that overly big, but they must have been wonderfully seaworthy.

Not to do anything. I went aboard, and had a bit of a look over. They would take their own dogs and their own chickens…As a bloke that was with us, the interpreter said, "Well, they've been doing it since time immemorial."

Yeah.

Just in the…and the same with the cigarettes, they just had them covered up in bundles there.

No, it was pretty well always picked up on the radar. That would be from the radar on board, and then we would work in conjunction with the customs, that way. We were out there looking for them, using the radar, and the Customs would be with us, in the suspect areas and that's how we knew.

I can't think of his name now, but he was an ordinary seaman. Maybe been in the navy, and the Quickmatch was his first ship, and he was just learning the ropes.

No. Age doesn't come into it. No. I can remember, I was seeing action when I was eighteen years of age. Age doesn't come into it.

A lot of times it would be lookout, or I would be in charge of the gunnery side of things. But lookout mainly, and a fair bit to do with lookout.

On board all the various ships, we had to take our turns at lookout. I saw some fantastic things at sea. Made some fantastic rescues. Rescued just by having the lookouts posted.

It used to get awfully boring, particularly coming from Japan to Australia on that run. Occasionally we'd sight things. One of the most unusual things I found in my course as lookout…We were coming home from up north and there had been these terrible floods in Queensland.

I was lookout, and I looked and I couldn't believe it. There was an animal in the water and it looked to me like a cow. And I reported it to the bridge, and we went back and we rescued it and pulled it on board and brought it back into Sydney. That made headlines in the press.

Apparently she had washed out with the floods, washed out to sea. Goodness knows how many days were involved. That's one of the things that stick in your mind…

No.

Many, many, many. That was a lot of the purpose of being there, that we worked with the New Zealand navy

and the British navy and the American navy and all that. Yes, that was part of the being in there.

Mainly to assist the officers in manoeuvres, and the radar plot, and I wouldn't say a lot to do with the torpedo side of things…

In my whole time in the navy, I think I only saw torpedoes fired about two or three times, and that was off Sydney. A terrible lot of your time at sea is spent in Allied manoeuvres and you were engaging various

forms of gunnery with the other ships. Just having competitions there and things like that.

Yep. Yes, it happened to one of our ships, I'm not sure which one…yeah.

One of the New Zealand ships hit one of our ships. And the captain made the signal…That was off Singapore. "I've received a direct hit and I’m proceeding to Singapore, full steam ahead." And an admiral of the fleet said,

"Fall back into line. Get back into line." And he said, "No," and re-sent the signal. "Have received a direct hit, several casualties on board." That was one of the many, many muck-ups that happened at sea. Accidents, poor timing, inexperience.

I think the ship that caused it, was one of our ships, and it may have been the Tobruk…And if it wasn't the Tobruk, it might have been the Anzac.

You just say…"What's the casualties? Where did she get it?"

Sydney. At Garden Island at Sydney. There was a little bit of shemozzle that went on. I joined the navy here in Adelaide and I wanted to be discharged in Adelaide. But because my wife had come out from the UK and was living in Melbourne, I had to fight them a bit to do it.

It worked out that they wouldn't come to the party, and Melbourne was considered my home port. I got paid off in Sydney and they paid my fare down to Melbourne.

Your sea bag, just a waterproof bag, and you put all your belongings in that. It looks rather like a sausage bag, that type of thing. But you learned to fold your gear correctly, right from the word go, the same as you learned to do your hammock.

You'd do that in your basic training at Flinders.

Absolutely nothing. No, it was a pretty wild life, and a full life. I had a chip on my shoulder about being separated from my wife, her being in a strange country and not knowing too many people.

But they said, "You go," and that was it.

It took years, because like a fool, like an idiot, I was a heavy drinker from the naval days.

It took a long, long time to settle down and get into a routine, and that cost me my marriage at the finish.

Probably only about twelve years ago,

even when I was living over here. I started to settle down and get my life into a routine that wasn't naval orientated type of thing. Get the navy a bit out of your system.

Some of my friends that, as I say I will meet on Sunday, and that I was with last Sunday at this barbecue, they are still very, very navy orientated. They still eat and sleep it, even though we've been out twenty or thirty years.

That would definitely have to be the Warramunga. The ship mates that I served with on the Warramunga are still my friends to this day,

and one of them I would say is my best friend to this day. He lives just up the road.

Just as what they were, just a darn good group of blokes. Right from officers down…

Normally in the navy, these lower ratings hate the officers. But on the Warramunga, it wasn't too bad. They were a pretty decent sort of bunch of blokes. They're all gone now. There aren't any of the officers left alive.

Proudest moment or most memorable moment…which would you say?

The moment that stands out in my life, and will to the day I die, would be the atomic bomb, the detonation of that.

That would be by far the most…

Yes.

The impact, the way it shook that ship.

And just to realise it was just a small bomb, and the terrific power that these atomic weapons have got, and I hope that they are never used…That is my greatest wish, is that the world never goes to…They say now that the hydrogen bomb and the plutonium bomb is more powerful, but

any of that type of weapon I just hope that it is never used.

It is the forgotten. It definitely is the forgotten war.

How many people can tell you what actually went on in Korea? And what the United Nations were doing there and just what their purpose was. And how well the Australian soldiers fought in Korea, and how they distinguished themselves.

Just have the wreath laying ceremony up at the memorial and then we have lunch down at the club rooms at Hanley Beach. Nothing boisterous or anything like that. We used to have a march,

but the police just couldn't give permission for us any more, on account of so much traffic about on a Sunday. It just didn't work out.

No, not under any circumstances. Compared to Vietnam? No. And that isn't being biased,

that is the truth. Many people have attempted to get something going, up in Sydney and places like that, but it just doesn't seem to go so well. Whether we're not organised…or not united enough might the word for it.

No, no. There aren't too many South Australians who did serve in that campaign, to the best of my knowledge. I know that navy- wise there is not, and army- wise, I don't think there was a great deal either.

It means a lot to tell you the truth, it means very, very much. It means that at least I went out and defended my country when I was needed, and I always look back on it as a surprise…Even though we may not have done a great deal, we just went. We went as volunteers.

And we went prepared to lay our lives down on the line.

Now that one I…I just can't really. I don't really know now. Fifty years have gone by and it is starting to slip away. It's a bit hard to put a finger on what I would like to see done.

They are now, you might be aware of, they are doing a study on the health business. But there was much difference in what the soldiers did in Korea, what the army did in Korea to what the navy did in Korea. There is so much different type of service.

They distinguished themselves so much more than the navy ever did. If anybody gets the raw end of the stick, it is definitely the army boys.

Yes. Still to this day. Still a member to this day.

Because I believe in that old saying, and it is a very true saying, "United we stand, divided we fall." And also I'm not a strong member of the Naval Association, but I am a member of it. They have quite a good club down there on the port.

Yes.

Mainly the camaraderie. That is when that camaraderie really comes to the fore. Apart from the reminiscing and all the bulldust that flies by, it is the camaraderie that comes back.

I think in the last few recent years. I think it was about 1999, a little bit before or after; we had the unveiling of the Korean War Memorial in Canberra. I went up for that.

There was so many naval, old shipmates that you hadn't seen since the days of then. And you see how well they've done in civilian life…And how many have fallen by the wayside and passed on.

Always to be united. Always to be united, stick together.

Unity is the strength. They're the best words that I can give. And you will find that applies a lot to the naval personnel. They are a very united mob. Whether that bond of friendship comes about by living so close on board? I can only assume that's what it is…

Not yet, Louise [interviewer]. Not yet.