Australians at War Film Archive

Thank you.

I was born in Toowoomba on the 13th of July 1921, which

makes me 83 today.

And we shifted out of Toowoomba when I was about three, I think, when we came down to Brisbane. My father was an electrician and he got a posting, or a job at the PMG [Post Master General] Department and we shifted down to Brisbane, and apart from my war service, I

was in Brisbane there until I shifted down to the coast here in 1974. I was pretty keen on fishing, so I took the opportunity when I saw a place I rather liked. I went to Taringa school initially, a little school in the western districts, and then we shifted out to Graceville where I did the scholarship examination from and

went to the Brisbane Grammar School on Gregory Terrace and went as far as Intermediate, which was a fair distance in those days, the middle to late ‘30s. I joined the air force in 19…I signed up in 1940 but got called up in 1941. and I was 20 years of age. Joined the Empire Training Scheme.

My intention or my hope was that I would be made a pilot and I would go to England. Well. I didn’t achieve either of those. I was a navigator and I spent the whole of my service life on flying boats in Australia, and the islands of course. I stayed in the air, actually, I

got, went into training about a month before the Japanese came in, and I stayed in the air force until 1948. We were doing a lot of bringing POWs [Prisoners of War] back and time-expired people back from the islands at that stage, air sea rescue cover for the land-based planes and that

sort of thing. I did miss a part, I guess. I followed my father into the PMG Department just prior to joining the air force and I returned to the PMG Department in 1948 where I stayed, PMG and Telecom when they split in 1975. I went to Telecom where I stayed until I

retired in 1984. I guess that’s a quick summary of my time. I could fill in some more details as we go through, but that’s it. I retired. I retired down here and I’ve

always been interested, I was interested in sport, in football. I was a hopeless cricketer but was interested in football. Played football, captained the local AFL [Australian Football League] side, well, it wasn’t AFL, it was QAFL [Queensland Australian Football League] up here, as a schoolboy to a premiership. When I went to Grammar, you played rugby union in Queensland, or you

didn’t play, so I switched to rugby union and played for the school and played both Australian Rules and rugby league in the air force when we had a team. And by the time I came back from the service I was beyond the playing stage and

got into the administration side of it. I was interested in swimming, and I was the first life member of the Dunlop Park Swimming Club, a local club, who had one Olympian, Joanne Barnes, the little 15-years breaststroker who went to Mexico.

And I was chairman of committees there and the first life member, and then I got into the administration of the local Australian Rules and I was vice-president and chairman of selectors for a number of years. I guess the interest in the football came from my father, who was a Victorian, and he was a Queensland selector for

the big boys for about eight years, during the ‘30s, and so we had a incentive to be there doing that. My brother, my younger brother, younger than me, the second one, I was the eldest, the second one, went the other way. He was a very good lifesaver. He was a club champion

and that sort of thing, and he got lost over in France. So in 1974 I shifted down to the coast, and as I say, I travelled to work from here to Brisbane each day by bus, which was quite good because the job I had required a lot of reading of reports and

that sort of thing, so three hours, 90 minutes each way, I was using the bus as an office to read reports that came my way. And we’re still here. I got married, I should have said this on the way through, I got married in 1945. I had just done

a couple of trips to America, bringing out new aircraft and I made the supreme sacrifice, knocked back a third trip to get married.

Dad was a

country, Bendigo, Ballarat area of Victoria. He was an electrician. He was on the crew, I’m not sure whether he was the gun layer or whether he was one of the small crew of the first 18 pounder that landed on Gallipoli. That’s in the war book that I have of his that shows the details.

He was injured a couple of times there and invalided back to Egypt but kept going back to Gallipoli. After Gallipoli folded, he went to the Somme and he was commissioned in the field and he ended up a lieutenant when he was discharged.

Came back from there and met my mother in Sydney, married and started the electrician’s business in Toowoomba, an unsuccessful one, during the Depression, and he contested the exam for permanency in the PMG Department and spent the rest of his life working in the PMG, except for during

the Second World War. He took up his commission again and was adjutant of various camps, and also CO [Commanding Officer] of the anti-tank training regiment at Tenterfield, so he spent most of the time back in uniform during the war, but obviously not in an overseas

position, training. He died of a heart attack not long after he retired, so he was about 66, I think, 66, 67 when he died. My mother, on the other hand, outlived him by a long way, and she was 99 and seven months when she

died not so long ago, and in complete command of her faculties, except that she lost her sight, but she had a mind like a trap. Had a great interest in cricket, knew all the averages of the bowlers and the cricketers right up to very late years. We had,

I was the eldest. My brother, Billy, he was, he came into the air force probably about seven or eight months after me because I was still in training at Parkes when he, I was finishing my training at Parkes when he arrived there, so it was a nine-month course that we did.

He came in and he went as a wireless operator, air gunner and he was shot down in a Halifax on his first operation on the 7th of June 1944 as part of the D Day Invasion, or the day after. And they, the whole crew is buried in a little church, in the grave of a little

church not far out of Paris. One of my nephews went there and we’ve got photographs and that sort of thing. The third one, the third of the family died of meningitis about 18, or a couple of years

old, and then Peter, he’s about 10 years younger than me, he’s, we all did something different. Billy was a very good swimmer, the one who got lost over France. I wasn’t a bad footballer. Peter was a good amateur golfer.

He played of a handicap of one, so that’s fairly good golf, and then my sister, Geraldine, she’s about 20 years younger than me, she was more of a studious type and they are all still living around the Brisbane area.

Not a great lot. I guess one of the things I’ve always claimed is one of the reasons I went into the air force was that I’d seen so many people of his vintage that were physical wrecks that were the effect of gas that they had during that time, and I always said if anything happened, I’d want to either come

back in one piece or not at all, and Billy and I both said this, and of course I came back in one piece and he didn’t make it. But it was, but no, no, he didn’t talk a lot about it, no. He had other interests of course. He got himself very involved in the football and he was also a scout master, so he was interested

in the youth. He was training young school teams in football as well, as well as being the selector for the seniors.

Not that I recall, no,

no. I think he certainly accepted that that was the thing to do, but as far as passing on any advice, I think he was realistic enough to realise that it was a very different sort of a situation that we were going into, too. Aeroplanes, they hardly, they did have

them. In fact, shortly before the war finished he’d just been accepted for the Australian Flying Corps. He was a lieutenant in the artillery and he’d just been accepted but he never got there. The war finished and he came home, but he understood that we would want to be involved. He understood we would want to be looking for something different.

I’d seen enough and heard enough stories about trench warfare and it didn’t appeal to me.

I don’t know, but I would suggest that he met her at a dance in Sydney, because Mum was a social

lady. She would have been young when they married, and when my Dad came back from the war, before he was my father, he went to Ocean Island, which is not far from Noumea, and he was running the phosphate crushing plant there, the electricity part of it, and he went, he would have gone

to Sydney on leave and they met. And well, it wasn’t all that long because I was born in 1921. I know, I think he only went back to Victoria once when his father died. We knew, he was the youngest of quite a number of his family but we never ever knew any of his side of the family.

There was never any contact except for his one trip back, so whether there was any skeleton there in the closet, I don’t know. He never opened up on it.

Mmh?

Oh, I doubt it.

Oh, she liked dancing,

and she was, when Dad was in the PMG between the wars, he was very involved in the Post Office Ball that they ran every year, and Mum was a hostess at that and she was a good dancer, so I just assumed that they met at a dance, because there was no friends or,

that you could put them together. It would have to be something like that.

The Post Master General’s Department, Australia Post now. It was one wing of it, but in those days the PMG was combined, it had the telephone side and the letter side.

He was an electrician, but

later on he was what they called a field officer with the Buildings Branch, but he was concerned with having the right sort of electrical equipment in the buildings that were being built and that sort of thing. He was an inspector of the electrical side.

Well, we were

lucky, because as I say, about in 1924, it would have been we came down to Brisbane, and Dad was always employed. It wasn’t great money but we always had food. We were the lucky group. I can’t remember a year that we didn’t, when

his few weeks holidays came along that we didn’t go away. We used to, we always went on a three-week holiday. We didn’t have a car but we went on a holiday down the coast. We knew the coast backwards. We’d start off on the bay side, round Clontarf and those sort of places, but Palm Beach and Tugun and those sort of places. Every year we

went on our holiday and we were probably, in a small way, we were givers I guess, because I remember distinctly there was a sign writer. I don’t know how good he was, but there was a sign writer used to come to our place every six months and he used to, we were in a rented place, but he always did the sign.

The house was Aldor, A-L-D-O-R, and he always came, and that was these people during those days, a lot of people were moving all the time, trying to pick up a pound here or a pound there. It was pretty tough, but if you were in full time employment you wouldn’t become rich, but you were at least comfortable.

And they made some sacrifices. Dad cashed his life insurance policy to put both my brother and myself up to the Brisbane Grammar, which was one of the GPS [Great Public Schools] schools. Having passed a scholarship we got a subsidy, but it still cost money, and he had to, he did that for us to make sure we got at least a little bit further

education because the majority were finishing at scholarship.

Do I?

He did, oh yes.

Oh, it was

good. I wasn’t a terribly good student, I must admit. I was sort of middle of the road. Probably a bit more interested in the football, and back then I was more interested in the football side of it. Probably one of the lasting effects,

lasting memories of our early schooling was we had I think it was the first major outbreak of infantile paralysis. What do they call it now? I don’t know. I should, polio, and the schools were all closed, and

we used to have our lessons came out in the paper everyday. It was about six weeks, as I recall, that we never went to school. We had these lessons come out and we’d do the lessons out of the newspaper. It was a very big epidemic. Yeah, schools were, I guess they were very much the same. When I went to Graceville,

we still spent a bit more time on the football field than we probably should have.

Grammar?

It was tough. It was a rude shock because at our state school, our primary school we just had the

English, Arithmetic, History and Geography in a small way but when you got to Grammar you got into your Chemistry, Physiology, French, which I hated, and you were coping with 10 subjects, which was quite a big change. And of course you changed, you went,

the whole class moved to the teacher and different teachers for the different subjects. It was quite a big school, Brisbane Grammar is quite a big school. We used to have to travel in about eight or 10 miles and then walk for about a mile with our ports full of books, but

it was a good school. Had been there a long time and had a proud record, and again had the sporting side, of course, pretty important.

Yes, well Brisbane, the western suburbs where we lived, we lived

at Taringa and then Graceville, Chelmer and then Graceville, that was out on the western line, towards Ipswich, that area there, all the schools played Australian Rules, and over on the northern side, out Windsor and Eagle Junction and schools out there, they played Australian Rules. The rest of Brisbane played rugby league.

It had quite a good, there was quite a number of teams. It was quite a good standard. We played 14 a side. We had no pockets, no forward or back pockets, so it reduced us to 14 a side, and it wasn’t bad football.

I don’t know, I don’t know. I think a lot depended on, well it couldn’t really depend on the teachers. They had it zoned, it was really zoned. I guess they gave it to two codes. Soccer weren’t in it at all. They are now, I think, but they weren’t in it then, but yeah, we had quite a strong area of Australian Rules.

I used to play what they called, what they now call ruck rover. I was about the same, I stopped growing. When I hit five foot six I stopped growing and stopped like that, but I was on the average to a little on the bigger side when I was playing

that football and then I ended up playing rover.

In the first year I played full back because ball handling and the kicking and you just automatically

gravitated to there, and in the second year I played outside centre, so I kept away from those scrums.

Oh it was quite strong, because they had the prefects, they still have the prefect system, and

those senior guys, they get you in line. Oh yes, it was good. I think it was good. I think the discipline was necessary because you just go in there at that age, and you could easy be rebellious if you were that way inclined, and if you weren’t been watched. Yes, the prefect system,

I thought, was very good even though on a couple of times I was on the receiving end of it.

Well, we had an adjoining school. The Girls’ Grammar, there was just a fence between us, so we knew they existed, but I think at that age we tended to be more interested

in the swimming or football. Well, I was anyway.

Well then I went into the PMG. I started as a temporary because Dad was able to exert a bit of influence, I guess, and I went in as temporary and then I

did what they called the lineman in training examination, which was a scheme which they’d bought in, and they had about 12 a year were bought in and the intention was to try to get a group of people that were capable of going on and taking on

the management sort of roles, the foreman, the line inspectors, the estimators, that sort of thing. But I didn’t stay in that area. I really didn’t intend to. I intended to, I was doing my extra study to switch over to the clerical side, which I did when I came back from the war.

Yes, oh yes. Yes, we’d just come through and seen a lot of people in trouble in the Depression and having a secure job was very important at that stage. It’s a totally different scene now, of course but yes, I had, about three or four of us that went in out of our group of about 12

that were studying to move on to get over to the over side where there was more advancement. And I might add it was the best move that I ever made because I ended up, I went in the personnel branch as a clerk, and in 1971 I become the superintendent of the branch

and in 1975, when Telecom was formed I was made chief manager of human resources and it was quite a big staff and that put me on the one of the six men on the Telecom state board, and

yeah, in fact, I’m the only one that went through the lineman training course to have gone through and gone onto executive level of the business. So I was there from 1971 to 1984, when I retired as head of the personnel and human resources, which is the same thing with a different name

of course.

Oh yes, oh yes. In fact I can remember distinctly, we used

to have no TV [television] in those days of course and radio played the Lux theatre of the air and it used to be on every Sunday, and it was interrupted one Sunday when England declared war on Germany. I remember listening to it, and I was probably about 16 then, 17, because I

was 20 in 1941 when I went in and 17. We were very conscious of what was happening, yes. I don’t think too many were conscious of the fact that Japan was going to come in, and the Americans didn’t seem

conscious, either, the way they were caught napping in Pearl Harbour [American Naval base that was bombed by the Japanese].

Oh, I’d say so, yes, yes.

No, no, didn’t really because well the only experience that we’d had of a major conflict was the First World War,

which went for five years, so it was not the sort of thing that you’d expect to be over in a hurry.

Yes, yes.

No, very quiet. I remember that distinctly because they had both been through the other one, yeah.

No, I don’t know that I was excited, but I certainly wasn’t going to dodge it.

No, I can’t remember excitement, but I knew that if it continued on, that I would be there.

Oh, I guess it was something, there was a bigger bond between Australia and England in those days of course, and

you, at least I think it was bigger then than it is now, and I think there was a certain amount of adventure in it, but it was adventure, but knowing that you probably had

a 50-50 chance, depending what service you were in, and coming back in one piece.

Oh yes, oh yes.

Oh yes, oh yes,

I guess Dad having being in the First World War and my mother’s brother, he was a colonel in charge of the garrison of operations from the Second World War and he was killed on Moreton Island. They got bogged in their car, or their jeep or whatever it was and he was helping to push them out and it went

forward and then back and hit him right in the head and he was dead when he hit the ground, so both sides were from a military side. And her cousin was 16 in Gallipoli, so there was I guess a bit in my blood, respecting it.

Yes, but I had to earn it. He had a vegetable garden that would have been 10 feet by 10 feet square and on Saturday he’d come out and have a look at it, and if there was one weed in it

I didn’t get the money to go to the matinee.

About sixpence, I think.

Oh the movies, we never had pocket money as such, but we were provided with money for things like that, not to spend stupidly.

No, no.

No, back in Taringa.

No, I don’t, but what I do know is the matinee always had a serial and they used to run over about 12 weeks and it was

very important you didn’t miss it, because every time that day’s show finished, that part of the serial finished, the heroine was invariably tied to a train line and the train was rushing towards and the goodie was trying to outrun the train to get there. And that sort of thing happened every time, and it was terribly important for us to get there to know that she was saved.

They would have been yes, oh yes, yes. Well I think I remember the first talkie I saw was only a portion of it, half of it was silent and half was a talkie.

The same with colour, the first colour one. The first colour one was Annabelle, I remember that.

Annabelle was the star, the lady. I don’t think I ever saw her again but Annabelle played the part. I don’t know what the story was.

As a kid? Oh yes, Tom Mix, wild west.

Yes, they’re nearly all American.

Tom Mix was the goody amongst the cowboys. He used to knock off all the Indians and the rustlers.

No.

No, I don’t think I wanted to take a girl when I was that age anyway.

Yeah, that was later.

Yeah, we were Church of England but not strict, or partly practising.

We got sent to Sunday School and we got sent to the nearest one. In fact, I went to the Baptist Sunday School and I was rather disappointed at the time because the Baptists had, which I think now was a great idea, but in those days I’m not sure that I did agree with them, because at Christmas time

we used to take a present to put on the tree and it was sent to the missions. We used to get a religious book, one of the stories for being good and attending most of the time, but we were actually Church of England, but as I say not a…I was married

in the Alma Street Methodist in Brisbane.

I don’t think so.

Scouts?

I was, yes. My Dad was a scout master, but yes, I was in the scouts and I was in the scouts at Indooroopilly and I was a group leader. I

forget what they call it now, but they decided to have a Sea Scout group amongst them and I’d done a bit of sailing. I had done a bit of sailing so I thought, “Oh that’s good, I’ll be in that,” and I was skipper. I was made skipper of the boat and we built our own boat and I was the skipper. We only had the one, and we had a mixed one. We had land scouts and

the one crew of Sea Scouts and we used to race competitively against four other boats that were down at Kangaroo Point and we used to race down to the Royal Queensland Yacht Club down at the Hamilton. Yeah, I won the Vigane Medal, which was the results for the year, and I won this medal and the

first time it was presented. Also I went to Sydney for a Jamboree and we took our boat down, it was sent down as deck cargo on the Canberra. We were showing the other Sea Scouts what Queensland had because the other Sea Scouts from other states were all using

army whalers, which were cumbersome things, and ours were beautiful little boats. They had big spinnakers, and do you know anything about sailing?

We raised money and built it ourselves. We only had the one boat.

Yes, from scratch. We had an instructor showing us. Every weekend and Friday night, the scout night, we used

to be there, down there making this boat. It was 15 foot six, a big Marconi rig and big spinnaker. We used to sail all over Moreton Bay and we had the five boats, four from Kangaroo Point and ours, and we had Doctor Croll. Doctor Gifford Croll had

a nice boat, and you’d call it a yacht I suppose. He’s not alive now, and it was about 25 feet long and it was the mother ship, and we used to go down, I don’t know if you know Brisbane at all, but we used to go down to Kangaroo Point and we’d sail down across to Moreton Island, to the sand hills and

to Amity when we were kids, 14 or 15.

Yes, he was one of the crew, so we sailed together, but yes, there wasn’t, there was only 15 months between us.

Yes, to a degree, but I was up north when he went and in the Catalinas, we lost 320 crewmen and I was conditioned to people being lost. In fact, one guy was my partner in bridge,

bridge partner, and I never played bridge again so those things can affect you, yes. But Billy and I followed quite different paths. He was quite a good swimmer.

Yes.

No, no. No, I am not terribly handy although I managed to saw a plank or something building the boat but I’m not terribly handy with tools. But no, I never did any modelling of any sort. I was more interested in

the more outdoor active things.

No, no. I don’t think we had any around our way anyway.

Taringa? I would have only been about

three or four.

Yes.

Oh no, Taringa was only six miles out of the city.

Yes, just at the foothills of Mount Cootha really.

So you do know Brisbane?

On the other side.

Oh, usually the lungs.

Yes, yes. And they were struggling. The ones that got a good dose of gas, they

were really struggling. A very good friend of mine, he was on Catalinas but I knew him at school, and his father was a bad gas case and they just had like asbestos is doing now.

I think so, yes.

Yes, see he ended up with a commission from the First World War and

you don’t sort of get discharged. You can take up your commission again if they want you and they did want him. He offered, he offered and he spent the time as in instructional camps. He was at Enoggera, he was at Grovely, all out your area and except

for when he went to Tenterfield as CO [Commanding Officer] of the anti-tank training unit. He was at Goondiwindi with an artillery unit and stayed on there as claims officer to tidy up things after the army moved out and he was camp staff officer at Grovely, which was one of the bigger places, out near Enoggera.

And yeah, he had no hesitation. It seemed to be the sensible thing to do. He knew what it was all about and they needed people of probably his vintage and his knowledge so they weren’t tying up able bodied people that could go wherever they were needed, New Guinea or

wherever.

Yes, they were alright about it and they were alright about me, too, but well, they never complained. I must admit thought that I was worried about being in a protected service that I, that when I got my call up I took leave and when

I went in and applied for leave from the PMG when I was in the air force and I sort of made it difficult for them to refuse. I suppose they could have but not too many of the people that I trained with, only one other got away. He went into the navy and only two of us got away. The others I think they put a clamp on because it was communications.

Oh yes, well, when you join the or applied for the Air Training Scheme, which is a special scheme that they had, and they were only preparing people to go into air crew.

They had it in England, in South Africa, Rhodesia, New Zealand I’m sure had it. I think they did, they would have. We had it as a special nine-month course and you went back to school while you were waiting for your call up and I actually went back to Brisbane Grammar.

Yes.

I went back there. I think it was only one night a week and it was only in maths. That’s all they were interested in because as it turned out it assisted me because as a navigator you had to have the higher maths and trigonometry and that sort of thing which you didn’t normally touch on until you got into about the senior classes.

It was what everyone had to do, yes.

Yes, yes, we had tests, and we had tests all the time actually, but I guess

as I said I wanted to be a pilot. Everyone who went into the Air Training Corps wanted to be pilot and my sight didn’t change from short to long or long to short quick enough, the vision, and I was out medically from being a pilot. It was only that

landing an aeroplane, you didn’t have this alteration from the long sight to your short sight, so I was out and I was very pleased then that I had done well in maths, because apart from the extra schooling, maths had been my favourite subject anyway, because I don’t know where I would have ended up if I hadn’t been selected as a navigator, which the top ones in maths were, because I’m a left-hander

and I had a lot of trouble during my course. We used to have to do Morse and I did it with my left hand at the initial training school and I got up to about 12 words a minute and then we went to Cootamundra and they wouldn’t let me use my left hand. I had to use my right hand

and I got back up to about 12 words a minute with my right hand and the rest of the group were on about 18 by now and then we went from there to Evans Head and they let me us my left hand again. So I got back up to 12 words a minute there and they’d advanced to about 24 so I was an absolute failure and then I got to our last school was Parkes

where we did the astronavigation and I went back to my right hand, had to go right hand and I could never understand it until they did tell me there and I saw later on that the area for the wireless operator that operated in was very congested in an aeroplane and to be able to sit

here and have your equipment here and your key over there, you couldn’t do it, impossible to do it. But why they didn’t make it a set rule is beyond me because it was wasted, the whole of my operating time learning was wasted, so I probably would have been made a guard or something if I hadn’t had good maths.

Oh, they had some sort of equipment.

No, no.

Oh no, that was when you signed up because they had a waiting list. You didn’t get straight in. It usually took about nine months from when you applied, and as soon as you applied and they accepted your application on what you had, what you were able to show them at that stage, and you had a certain academic level that you had to be at to be able to get into air crew.

And then they bolstered that and they kept you happy with something, but they sent you to school until your call up came and I got called up in November ‘41, just before the Japanese came in.

No, it would be in Brisbane. It would be the recruitment centre in Creek Street, I think. I think it was in Creek Street, but

I wouldn’t be sure on that.

Oh when I was called up? Yes, yes, oh yes.

I thought it was great.

At last, at last, been waiting nine months or more, yeah, no it was great.

Of course I still expected to be a pilot and go to England.

See Japan wasn’t in.

It was either there or the desert.

England sounded better, yeah.

Down at Sandgate, where Eventide is now. You know where Eventide is now? Just the Sandgate side of the Hornibrook Highway bridge. It’s a big, big old people’s place on the water, and that was built for the air force and

that’s where we reported, all in our civvies [civilian clothing] and got thrown in hats and socks and boots and shirts and trousers and then got introduced to the parade ground and this nasty corporal drill instructor tried to knock some sense into us.

On my own.

Oh look, you got to know them fairly quickly because you immediately got, I think there were about 200 went in when I went in, but that made, there were about 20 to a, you were broke up into flights and there were

about 20 in a flight, and that 20 you got to know fairly quickly, and a lot of the others you never ever got to know because you were always with that group for drill. And we covered about 10 different subjects there. They covered hygiene and air force law and basic navigation to test people out, and

at that stage, I think in about the first month, they went through all the medicals and they were getting ready, the first month or the first two months you were categorised, you knew where you were going to next. They wouldn’t wait until the end of the training period. They’d already discovered that you weren’t going to be a pilot and you were heading in the direction of

a navigator because your maths was okay.

Something like that, and a guy with a raucous voice told us that we’re now in the air force and things were going to be different.

Yes, yes we would have. We did it ourselves later on.

Yes, that’s right.

Yes, I was alright. I’d been in the scouts.

We didn’t do the same sort of marching but we were organised.

Yes.

Oh yes, yes.

414680.

Well the 41 is the year and the four was the state, so that’s

the 414 and the 680 was the number in that bracket so I can look at anyone’s number and at least know where they enlisted and what year they went in. See the next lot came in at 425 I think. I think my young brother’s was a 425.

Yes, you remember those. I use it for…

I’ll tell you afterwards when we’re not on air.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Yes, two or yeah.

Yes,

we were shown once.

Yeah, yeah, and they told us if we done it wrongly we would get extra duty, and they were always looking for someone to hose out the showers or something like that, so if your bed wasn’t up to scratch it would be your turn to go and do it.

Oh, I thought I was good. I was interested in making sure that I knew what it was all about because it was, once I was going to be a navigator a lot of people were going to depend on my ability and my skills. Because I had to get them to the target and get them back. The pilot had a hand in it too. He had

to drive us but I had to tell him where to go.

No, no.

Yes, yes.

Oh it was the usual PT [Physical Training] and this sort of stuff (demonstrates) and

running.

No, no.

No, We used to have a sports afternoon once a week when we had various sorts of things that you could go and do.

A few of us used to go over to the Clontarf to the Peninsula Golf Course, mainly because they had a bar there.

Oh yes.

Yes, 20.

Yeah.

No, I think it used to be Bulimba mainly, which isn’t, which doesn’t exist now. They had a Bulimba brewery as well as a XXXX brewery in Brisbane.

No, I didn’t because I lived at Indooroopilly by then and I had a motorbike and I used to get home and I had a girl in Indooroopilly.

She is my wife.

Shortly after.

Her brother, I was very friendly with her brother and she was the kid sister.

Once you went onto the next school, the navigation school?

A month or two, I’m not sure but we knew and then all the navigators then went from Cootamundra from up here and I don’t know where they went from down south. Petrie, might have been, anyway I went to Cootamundra.

Oh, it’s out

past, it’s in the wheat belt, out past Bathurst, out past Orange, out that way, out west, not far from Wagga, north of Wagga.

Very cold, I learnt about that. We learnt the best insulation you can get

cheaply is newspaper. We slept on palliasses, bags filled with straw and if you put the newspaper down first it stopped the cold from coming up.

Yes, you had a sort of wire mattress sort of thing and then you put your paper down and then the palliasse down. If you

don’t put paper down it’s degrees colder.

Yeah, it doesn’t let anything through. It’s light but it’s airtight. Very good.

Cootamundra, at Cootamundra we then learnt navigation, dead reckoning navigation and make that distinction because later on the last thing we did was to learn astronavigation with the stars, but we did dead reckoning navigation,

and that was how to get from point A to B, how to find them, how to swing your compass, how to make the corrections, all the things that were necessary so that you knew that you would get to where you were going, so we learnt that. That was the main subject, and the second most important subject was meteorology, because the navigator’s job

was to take note of the weather conditions and record them every half hour on a flight, the amount of cloud, the type of cloud, the direction of the wind to the speed of the wind, those sort of things, because when we got back that would be the basis of the forecasters for what’s going to happen tomorrow, sort of thing. That was a big subject. We also learnt

how to pack parachutes in case we needed them. We did the theory of, did we know hygiene, usual stuff like that, air force law, and went on again.

They were the main things, but basically the navigation was the obviously important thing.

No, no I think it’s only to distinguish it from astronavigation, which was

using the stars. It was using the, the basis of navigation is to get from Point A to Point B, and to get there you’ve got to allow for your speed and more importantly your wind directions and any compass deviations or variations. See

generally we had variations of our compasses because of the position we were in the world was about 10 degrees so you had to make that adjustment. Then you had a deviation which affected the compasses too, and that could be upset by someone putting their revolver near your compass. They were fairly sensitive,

so it was taking all those factors into account, and they were things that you had to be able to work out and you had a, they called it a computer. It was a hand held sort of a slide rule, a round thing, and we used to use that, once we’d got the drift around it, the way we were

drifting and applied that to the air and we’d turn 60 degrees and do another one so you’d get three lines crossing and that middle one was the position. The middle one then let you work out what the wind speed and direction was and you applied that to make sure that the

course you were flying would give you the track that you wanted to end up with.

Oh I think we had gas

and, oh the usual hygiene and air force law. They seemed to have those sort of subjects all the way through. They’re not big but just the occasional one.

Oh yes, yes, at Cootamundra we started, we were flying,

in Ansons. Three trainees would go up and two would work and the other one would be there to wind the wheels up I think and we did quite a number of trips. Could I refer to this?

It’s my log book.

We did about 60 hours of flying in Ansons.

It was only a short one, only a short one and familiarisation I think they put it down as. I don’t think we worked. I think we just gawked at everything and it was all very interesting. We were in the farming, sort of grazing country and it looks

all patchwork, as you see now days. Yeah, it was very interesting and it was a thrill to have at last flown because that was what it was all about. And then we did mainly fairly short courses. We went about as far as Toocumwul and those places, down to Bateman’s Bay, across

the Alps to Bateman’s Bay. That was our longest trip but, and it was I guess a lot of satisfaction. You got a lot of satisfaction because you’re actually, the plane was going where you directed it and to find that you’d got to Bateman’s Bay when you were expected to be there was a lot of satisfaction,

particularly when we were just learning, just starting.

Oh pretty good, yeah.

No, no, it’s fairly basic sort of a subject if you’ve had the right training.

Well it wasn’t so flash as far as I was concerned because I lost all my mates that I had because I got the mumps and I got put back a course, but apart from that it was cold. It was very cold out in that area and I was there

in probably about April, May, June, July, cold.

Oh yes, oh yes, yes there was a pub there that had a big fire going, that seemed to be overcrowded.

Oh yes, oh yes, that’s all you had.

Oh yes, well you know it was an air force town. The hospital there was staffed by

aides, nurses aides from the town and it was an air force town and there were three courses there. There were at least three courses there at the same time each month, so at the same time so there were a lot of people. So they

had to come down with the straw broom some mornings and brush the ice off the wings of the aeroplane, which for a Queenslander wasn’t so flash.

How did you catch them? No idea.

What, dropping back a course? I don’t know. I really don’t know because now the Japanese were in anyway so the chances of flying out here rather than going overseas. They were still going overseas,

but I think that’s, no, I don’t think that was significant.

I don’t remember. I guess that probably on parade or something like that, I guess. I know that we

were, we started to get some extra work to do because we had to built deep slit trenches all around the place.

I think it was seen as a real threat, a real threat because

they made an awful mess of Pearl Harbour and they sank a couple of Britain’s or England’s biggest battleships in Singapore and they went through Singapore and came down there in a hurry and it was all over very quickly. I think it was a real threat.

No, no, didn’t really. I guess if we had of thought about it we would have come to that conclusion, but then again, possibly quite

wrongly because I was within a day of going to England. When we finished the course we were given pre-embarkation leave and I was particularly friendly with two guys, one from Cairns and one from Townsville,

so I said, Dad was in the army, as I mentioned, and I don’t know where they were at the time but I’ll said, “I’ll put your address down and I’ll get an extra day’s leave and I’ll wait in Brisbane until you come back as I can’t go on ahead, seeing as how I’m supposed to be in Townsville,” and

we got down to Melbourne and the rest of our group had already gone on a boat, so it was in the Port Phillip Harbour, or Port Phillip Bay. And it was there for another two days and we pleaded with the administration that it wasn’t our fault that we lived a long way away and

we’d come as soon as we could and they wouldn’t move and there were five of us, five of us out of probably about 40 that didn’t go to England. The rest went to England.

Mmh.

And they had very high, practically all went across as navigators and went to bomber command and they had terrific casualties.

Oh very occasionally.

Evans Head, Evans Head was bombing and gunnery school. We had a month on each discipline and we were flying then in Fairy Battles. Fairy Battles that had been used in the Battle of Dunkirk and they’d been shifted out from England to

Australia and they were used as training aeroplanes. Very unreliable, finished their time nearly and they had a bombing range at Evans Head and also gunnery. I was above average at the gunnery there. I happened to know one of the

staff pilots fairly well and he put the drogue, when it was my turn he was pulling the drogue on another plane and he put it within, I could nearly touch it so I got a very high mark for that.

Well instead of having

them a hundred yards or more apart he bought his aeroplane in real close, it was much easier for me to hit this big drogue. We had coloured paint on the bullets and they left a mark as it went through and I got above average and probably would have got the same as everyone else. Most of the others got average, had I not known him…

Oh no.

Oh fairly rough, the flying was interesting because they were a Rolls Royce Merlin motor, a big inline motor. They were a fighter plane in effect but they

were rotten planes to do bombing out of because you had the glycol coming right through, down low where you were with your bomb sight and fumes were very, very, noxious, and also their serviceability was fairly ordinary.

You’d feel pretty sick, yeah. Fortunately they were only short trips.

Then we went to Parkes, and Parkes was only a 20-day course but it was the astronavigation and it was basically the only properly picked up. The met [meteorologist] was,

every time we went everywhere, meteorology, but the astro nav was only a very concentrated course. You left there not feeling terribly confident about astronavigation because you took sights, you learnt to

recognise the stars, which was the important thing, and there were 28 main ones that we used to operate on down in the southern hemisphere, but you’d shoot them with the sexton on the ground and occasionally you’d do some air shots but you never worked anything out in the air.

So you never applied, like your dead reckoning at Cootamundra, you applied what was happening and that sort of thing, you applied that in your navigation. But you only used it as a carriage just to take the shots and show how difficult it was in the turbulence to get the shots. And I think I’m right in saying we only had a one shot sextant

and it wasn’t until I was on Catalinas that we got an automatic one that ran for two minutes and that would average itself out, and that was a big difference for their reliability because you could get a fair way out with a bump here and that sort of thing. So you knew the fundamentals and you knew how to use all the tables and you knew how to use the trig that you’d

learnt earlier, you knew how to use that if for some reason or another you didn’t have a book that covered that period, but you were never confident, not there. It had to be some time later before I had any confidence in straight out and then I became quite confident in it.

Oh yes, the navigator’s got to have a fairly big table. In fact, I haven’t got it here, I didn’t bring it in

but the nav table is quite big because you’ve got charts that are that square (demonstrates), you’ve got your rules and your computer and hand-held, they call it a computer, but as I said before it is a slide-rule-type thing. You’ve got lighting which you can turn right down,

orange lighting, so it’s not seen from outside.

Oh I only think we went into Parkes once, a typical country town.

Yes he was there,

it was also a wireless operator school.

Once.

Oh I think we went into town. I met some of his group and of course I’m the old hand. I’m just on finish.

In fact, yeah, in fact we had our wing then, our half wing. We got that at Evans Head so I was real old hand. We went and had a couple of beers I guess.

Yes.

Oh no, I tried to get him to fly for flying boats because not then, but I went onto flying boats straight after that and I tried to get him while he was still on his course,

but I wouldn’t have either if I had a chance to go to England. I’d have gone to England which he did.

Oh yes.

Yes, we all got sent to Townsville,

basically straight off course. Generally speaking as soon as you go, your next move I should say is you go to an OUT [Operational Training Unit], an operational training unit and that’s where you get crewed up and you learn the intricacies of the aircraft you’re going to be flying on

at the OTU [Operational Training Unit], but we didn’t get an OTU. We were all sent to Townsville and we were sent to 41 Squadron, which was flying four engine flying boats. They were the civil version of the Sunderland and they were taken over from Qantas. They used

to run from Rose Bay across to England before the war and that only started about 1938, that trip, and we all got posted onto them. And we were flying from Townsville, based in Townsville and flying to Moresby with troops and supplies, Moresby and Moratai and

Fort Island.

Not too happy. Pleased in the long run.

Oh no, no, we pleaded to get on that boat.

Do you know Townsville?

Yeah, well we were on the Strand at St Pat’s College. It was a girls’ college that was taken over, down a little bit from the Queen’s Hotel which on the end of the Strand and the city. We had a, there were five buildings there and

41 Squadron had the two middle buildings and the building out the back with the mess and the two outside buildings were had WAAAFs [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force] from the wireless operators and that sort of people from the big base there at Townsville. Townsville was pretty much a garrison town, a lot of Americans, a lot of army.

Probably still unimpressed because we thought we’d be in London.

I don’t think it mattered. They had their job to do and we had ours. One

of the guys ended up marrying one of them. He was the old man of the group. He was the industrial chemist.

I’ve got a photo of it. I’ll show you later. It’s a very big

aeroplane. All the passengers and cargo was downstairs and we had a special flight deck, they were two-storey, four big motors. They were a big aeroplane and we were pretty pleased about that and the CO, the squadron leader, John Hampshire, he was permanent air force and

the Grey, Flight Lieutenant Grey, he was a Qantas pilot, and they were all, the skippers were all very experienced and they were a beautiful aeroplane. They were unarmed and we were going into an area that was pretty well under attack. We were there one night and

one night in Moresby we stayed over. If we went up and back in the one day if we got away in the morning but if we got away after lunch we’d stay over in Moresby and we had a house, half way up the hill in Moresby. Ack-ack Hill they used to call it because the ack-ack [anti-aircraft machine gun] was up on the top of it and this house was looked after by the fuzzy wuzzy [New Guinean] and his wife

and they were there all the time and any time that we were overnight in Moresby we stayed there and in early ‘40, I think it was early ‘43 or late ‘42, one or the other, I’m not sure which, we were there the night the Japs sent over their biggest air raid, supposedly 100 aeroplanes came over. We

spent most of the night in a slit trench because we reasoned that that ack-ack battery would be a target and we were just down below it. But they were lovely aeroplanes, beautiful aeroplanes, but they were unarmed.

”Oh whoa, this will be great.” Yeah, they changed our mind.

I don’t know, I don’t know.

Oh it looked huge, oh yeah, oh yeah.

They were big planes.

Well they had a load master that loaded the aircraft up. We just went on it and flew it. The only briefing we got

really was a meteorology briefing, because that’s what we knew. Port Moresby was a mark on the map and…

No, no.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, very much so and exciting because I reckon the skipper could have flown there without me. Those permanent guys and also the Qantas trained they all had navigation anyway because they didn’t have navigators in their days. The pilots did

that as something extra and their was a light, a passenger’s light outside Moresby which showed up and also there was half way out there was a reef, Osprey Reef, still remember the name. Osprey Reef

was practically right on course so we had a couple of things to help you but it was only about a four and a half hour trip.

It was like water.

Yeah, right at Port Moresby yeah.

No, no onto buoys, yeah, anchor up to buoys and unloaded by boats.

Food mainly.

Oh troops, yeah and bought them back. Some knocked around.

We never saw them really because when we got on you’d have to work your way through them

because they’re lying all around the place, no seats or anything and we’d go straight upstairs. We were two separate parts and when we landed well we’d get off because they may be an hour after us.

Well I think we certainly thought about it. In fact we were, mainly if we did back and up in the one day it was not a problem because they weren’t coming over during the day. They were leaving until night to

come over but we did go, we were going into Marauki, which was further over and near the Fly River and we, I think he picked it up on the radio as well but we saw a lot of smoke coming from there

and we turned around and we were about 40 mile off and we shot through for about half an hour or so until we got the clearance that they’d gone, because it was under attack so we were flying straight into it without weapons. The weapons that you would have would be no good to you anyway, the sort of weapons

that they would have had against a proper attacking machine they would have had no hope, so it wasn’t the smartest thing. I was pleased to get away from them for that reason.

You would have been had they been round but they weren’t active, only at night.

Very interesting to think back on. Yeah, you could just see these little crosses caught in the searchlights fairly high and they were only doing, actually they didn’t go near Ack-ack Hill. We were alright as it turned out but they had a go at some of the harbour installations and

also a couple of strips weren’t, they were about seven mile out over the hills and they were trying to knock them out.

Haven’t got a clue.

Oh very good, good, he could speak reasonably.

Some of the guys used to take their ironing up for his wife to do their ironing for them if they were going to stay overnight. Take a couple of shirts up and she’d iron them up for them.

Oh, give her something, yeah.

Oh just yes, as I recall it

had a compound, a fence around it and it was a typical from up there. They used a lot of wooden louvres, whole walls of wooden louvres. Yeah, it was quite comfortable.

I think it was just something

because you didn’t, you came with what you stood up in.

No, I don’t think so. I think they would have come after us because we weren’t fast. We didn’t see the planes.

You could see that about 50 mile away of course.

Yeah.

No, no.

Which period are you talking about?

On the Short Empire.

Oh well they got replaced by Dorniers and we went onto the Dorniers. They were a three engine flying boat, obviously but they were German built but the Dutch had them and the Dutch sold five of them to the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] and we ended up with them

because I think Qantas were interested in getting their planes back. And unfortunately they were badly maintained and they were pretty useless but I got away from them and applied for nats.

Is it?

Yeah, the Dorniers that we got we got five of them from the Dutch and we always jokingly said that they sold them to the RAAF after they had half a ton of concrete in them because if it popped a rivet they never replaced it, they just popped a handful of concrete in them.

And their maintenance was very, very poor, which was a pity because they been a beautiful aircraft, typical German engineering, but they were, the instruments were no good. In fact, they were that, to give you a typical example flying between Townsville and Moresby with the crowd of troops

on board we would have to gain height to about 6,000 feet, about three or four times during the trip because they had an unusual system. They had a stub wing on them which was also a petrol tank and they used to pump from petrol from there up to the main tanks in the wing but they went via the motor and what the motor didn’t take

spilled over into the main tank and then came back and was gravity fed back through the motor and what the motor didn’t take the second time ended back up in the stub wing and every hour you had to transfer the fuel from the stub wing. But unfortunately because of their equipment not being

effective, the only way that they knew when the pumping from the stub’s wings had been completed was when the motor coughed so with 20 or 30 or whatever number of troops on board and every, say, every hour we used to gain

about an extra three or four thousand feet to transfer the fuel and when the motor coughed and you started again you knew that you were right for the next hour and you’d go down to your 1,500 or 2,000 feet again. Nothing ever happened, nothing untoward happened, it always worked, but it was not a very sensible way to operate, so yeah, they were not very good.

They were replaced very quickly by Martin Mariner’s which were a far more serviceable aeroplane, an American aeroplane. I was glad to get off. In fact, I applied to get off, I applied for Catalina’s and that’s how I ended up at OTU [Operational Training Unit] at Rathmines.

No, I wanted to get off them

because I hadn’t joined the air force to cart legs of, sides of mutton or whatever it was, foodstuff and that sort of stuff around and it didn’t seem to be a sensible thing to do, although you have to eat don’t you? No, I’d run into so many of the Catalina people and what

they were doing seemed to me to be great, interesting and worthwhile.

Yes.

Well we used to drop into Cairns every now and then and they used to come into Townsville.

Yes, it was a shame

that they were in such condition really but they’d been used by the Dutch and they’d copped a bit of a thrashing and as I say the electrical equipment was not very effective.

Rathmines is

on Lake Macquarie, which is just south of Newcastle. It’s a fairly big lake. Actually it’s, I don’t know if this is completely accurate, but it was always said to be 365 miles in circumference and the number of days in a normal year, and I guess they may have fudged a little bit

to make that statement but it was a pretty big lake, right on the coast. Had an opening near Swansea and Belmont into the ocean and it was the major repair base and also the training, the OTU for training up, crewing up. It also had the squadron

of Sikorskys, the little single-engine flying boat, no, the flying boat, the Sikorsky that used to patrol up and down the coast. And later on it had 11 Squadron Catalinas. They came back from Cairns because, I’ll show you on that map later on, there was, no-one really, a lot of people don’t appreciate the amount of shipping that was

lost off the east coast of Australia and the 11 Squadron were bought back down to Rathmines to patrol that area.

Oh yes, a lot.

No, the OTU is familiarisation with the new

aircraft, the Catalina, getting crewed up into a crew. They had four crews at a time, each month, would be down there for I think three months, two or three months, I’m not sure. I could get it out of my log book. I was a bit lucky when I was down there, well

I was lucky. I was the only, must have been two months because there was two, there were eight navigators there at the time. One of the guys coming back from America went missing from between Suva and Rathmines, Peter Marsh, and they made up crews from the instructors to mount a search and there was

one navigator short and I was the only navigator on course that had PBS experience, with 41 Squadron, on the Short Empires and the Dorniers and I got crewed up with Flight Lieutenant Terry Dygan. He was an instructor, DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross]. Won a DFC from his work up round Rabaul

and those places and so I was, I got the job out of the eight and we searched, didn’t find him but we searched from Rathmines to Noumea and we landed in Noumea and refuelled and we searched from Noumea and back to Noumea and

the third day we searched from Noumea back to Rathmines and there was a fair bit of disappointment among other people because some were commissioned and I was an NCO [Non Commissioned Officer] and I got this trip but it was because I’d had the previous service obviously. But the interesting part of it was the second time out when we were going out from Noumea and back to Noumea just as

we were breaking off to come back late in the afternoon, we came across submarines sitting on the surface and the information that we had was that there was no allied submarines in area. So we were unarmed, because we were doing

a search and we didn’t have the depth charges on and Terry Dygan, who was quite a celebrity, and he flew right down quite low over it and got someone to throw a sea marker out just to show our disgust and they were still on the surface, charging their batteries obviously. Anyway he went back and he pleaded with the Americans to put depth charges on it and we’d go back out but they wouldn’t.

The Americans were running the show from Noumea and they wouldn’t do it and they sent out four of their own planes, Booster Buffalos, single engine, big radial motor on them, sent four of them out and I think I’m right in saying that three of them overstayed their time out there and ran out of petrol and ditched. They never found the

submarine and lost three aeroplanes in the process, all because they wouldn’t put our depth charges on us. We probably wouldn’t have found the submarine either, but at least we wouldn’t have ditched. I think they might have wanted the publicity. They were a bit that way sometimes. But yeah, so I got crewed up with a,

except for the second pilot who was a flying officer, all NCO crew and my skipper was an NCO and he’d already done a tour as a second pilot and he’d come back and was doing a skipper’s course. A wonderful pilot he was, wonderful. Later on he went over and flew, he was a senior route captain with KLM [Royal Dutch Airlines] on

flying the Atlantic. He was very good but we got crewed up there and we were sent up to Cairns to 11 Squadron. The OTU was the usual training stuff, a lot of navigation exercises but we also had a bombing range where

we did bombing and gunnery. We did gunnery exercises and had our usual weather, wet, but then we went up to Cairns into 11 Squadron and that was the start of my Catalina time.

Oh we didn’t see them very often. I found them fairly good. The only time we actually came into contact with them I guess was at Exmouth Gulf

which was an American base at one stage and they were right there and we also used to operate off American sea plane tenders a little bit and they were right, but I’m only assuming that was the reason. It seemed to be obvious. It was a small job to put depth charges on a Catalina

that was ready to go and it was a bit foolish them staying out too long, a bit foolish.

Oh yes, yes.

Two.

It had

terrific endurance. Our average trip was eight hours. The longest trip I did, with no spare tanks or anything, was 22 hours but that was, we were searching for a boat that was missing so we didn’t have a bomb load on. We’d carry a 4,000-pound load of

mines to a target and be away an average of 18 hours and that was a big load, 4,000 pound. When we did the bombing, I only did one bombing run. We did mainly mine laying

but a bombing run, we’d carry 6,000 pound because we carried a lot of anti-personnel and incendiaries inside, little ones, about 25,000 and throw them out the blister, yeah throw them out the blister, and that was as big as the Flying Fortresses were carting because they had a lot of ammunition on board and that sort of thing. They were a different role

but it was good load.

No.

Qantas were running a

flight to, from Perth to, in ‘45, from Perth to Colombo. They used to call it the Double Sunrise Flight at the time, they had spare tanks and they were taking about 28 hours but they were, I don’t think it was a civil flight

as such. It was mainly for VIPs [Very Important Persons] and that sort of people that had to go.

About two months I think.

No, actually the Catalina was just about to go out of production when the war started and

they geared it up again and kept it going, but the first of the Catalinas arrived in Australia in 1940 or ‘41 or ‘39? Oh early.

And we got well over about, I think I’ll leave those details till after we break because I’ve got a book which gives the numbers, but it was just on 200 of them that we got out here.

Yeah, we were sent up to 11 Squadron in Cairns. 11 Squadron was the first of the Catalina squadrons and it started in Moresby and they lost about three on the water

from Japanese attack and that was a silly way to lose them so they bought them back to Bowen and Bowen did prove to be, the water wasn’t particularly friendly and so they shifted them back to Cairns then and 20 Squadron also was in Moresby and they shifted, they came into Cairns and two squadrons there together.

There in the river there at Cairns and the base was all the way along the waterfront, near where the hospital is, if you know that area, quite a big area. We went up there and for the first six weeks we did a bit more on-the-job training, I guess, swinging compasses

and that sort of thing, and a few convoys. We used to pick up the convoy early morning and look after it during the day and then go off it at night. We always reckoned, jokingly I guess, but I must say this little joke in that the first thing we did as a navigator, I

did as a navigator was to see what sort of naval escort the convoy had, because if it was an American escort I’d have to work hard all day, because when we left we’d get up on the alder’s lamp and talk to the naval people down there and if it was a British or Australian navy escort we’d ask them where they were and we’d set course from there.

If it was an American one they’d ask us where they were. It wasn’t quite that bad but they were, they never had the depth of training that we did. They really didn’t. I’ve read a couple of books of theirs and they were just sailors picked off and said, “You’re going flying,” sort of thing,

and it was a bit different. Our training was excellent, but then when we got, by the time we got to Cairns the work that had been done round Rabaul, and Kavieng and Gasmata and all of those places, Solomons, and that was winding down and that was mainly

bombing although there was a little bit of mine dropping. That was winding down and the war had basically shifted to over what is now Indonesia, over to the Dutch East Indies, and from Cairns we would go across to Darwin, down to a forward base in the ampisound

on the West Australian coast, and we’d go from there to Surabaya, Macassar, Balikpapan, all around that area, and then we didn’t have enough fuel to get back to Darwin.

We used to go back to a seaplane, an American seaplane tender on the West Australian coast, refuel there and then go back to Darwin. And then we’d do that, if we came over we’d probably do two or three of those trips before we went back to our home base in Cairns. We’d do a lot of flying in a fairly short time. The mines we were

dropping incidentally and they, I ought to mention this as a lot of people think of mines as being a round thing with spikes on it, well these were either about a 960 or a 1,960 pound mine that we dropped. We took four of the smaller ones or two of the bigger ones. They were almost looked like a torpedo.

They were a long cylinder and a lot of it was just explosives, and it also had a little drone on the back, a parachute type of thing to slow up it’s descent when you dropped them into the water, because we dropped them from about 150, 200 feet and they didn’t want them exploding on impact so they slowed them up a bit. They’d go down and settle on the bottom and they

were an acoustic mine, which also had a clockwork machinery in them, and you’d set it for anything up to 14, the clockwork. And if you set number seven for example, the first six ships that went over it would only tip the mechanism over and the seventh would blow it. And the reason for that was the Japs used to send out little boats crisscrossing,

and after they’d known we’d been in there, they’d try to explode our mines, because they knew why we were there, they knew we’d been there, and you’re in harbours and they’d see you because they’d be shooting at you half the time and we had to be very precise. We were expected to lay them within 10 metres of the given

point that they’d set out for us, and once you’d picked up your, you’d fly a course from a datum point and easily able to be seen on a dark night datum point. And you had to fly constant speed, direction and height, and anything up to about three minutes, maybe longer, five minutes perhaps, but we did nearly

five on one in Suma Bay. As I say five minutes, and the reason for that was, you tried your best to get it within that 10 metre distance because none of them, to the best of our intelligence, had ever been swept by the Japanese. They didn’t know what made them tick, and of course, once you know what makes things tick it’s easier to do something

about it, so it was very important that they be dropped where the navy set out the, Commander George, we had used to give us our targets and where he wanted the mines placed strategically because they had a double role. A lot of people just assumed that mines are there to blow up ships. Well, that is certainly one of their roles, but also strategically

what we were doing by mining the harbours, we were pushing the shipping out further, not coming into the harbours, not coming into the coast, and making them easy pickings for the American submarines. There was a Japanese general interrogated after the war and he’d been in charge of Balikpapan and Suva Bay and he

said he had something like 2,000-odd people tied up just on trying to combat the mining. It was only being done by Catalinas, the only one’s doing it, the mining, and in spite of that, 60 percent of shipping that went into those harbours was either damaged or destroyed by the mines, so it was a very effective operation,

but no-one knew it was going on. Certainly no-one in, it had a complete embargo on it the mining. There was no publicity or anything like that for it, and we used to be a little bit upset at times but it was for our own good. Some places, Macassar was one in particular that had little boats running all over the place when you went in, and

we lost two aircraft that I know of in Macassar. They were shot down by these things.

Well that our big problem. We never saw, I never saw, and I don’t know whether other crews ever saw them, but I never saw a night fighter,

never, but, even the Bofors, you know the Bofors size? Even the Bofors they had trouble, because at a 150 feet you go fairly quickly past a given place, even if you were slow, which we were but it was mainly the .5 machine gun fire that was our biggest problem, because one bullet in the tank or the engine and that’s

all you need, and that was the biggest problem, but I always reckoned the poor old Jap didn’t realise, didn’t believe that we could be so slow, because I, not often, but occasionally, certainly when we came under fire you could see the tracer coming up and it always seemed to be ahead of us. And you could see it a couple of hundred yards ahead

of you and never, fortunately we never got hit. Not in nine months did we get hit and others of course did. But that was the thing about the mining, and the mining was carried on right through to the end of the war. They mined Hong Kong, they mined the China coast and

our last operation was the mining of Manila Harbour. We had 20, usually we operated in about twos or threes or maybe fours even, but that’s about it, and independently. You never flew as a formation or anything like that, but you may have up to four on the one job, but the Manila Harbour, we had

25 aircraft, four squadrons, six from each squadron and one extra one. It was dropping what they called ‘glass’, but it was tin foil to foul up the radar. It was up dropping those, and we lost one and we think he hit a hill. But we land, the whole of the Japanese fleet or that part of it that operated in that area,

was in Manila Harbour and the Americans were making their second landing on Mindoro and our task was to block them in and the landing was unopposed. They never got out, but we would have dropped 80-odd mines because some of them had four and some of them had two, depending on the depth of water. You might get away with a smaller mine

in shallow water.

Oh we had very good charts. We had very good admiralty charts and most of them, a lot of them were drawn by Captain Cook.

And the coast line was excellent, and of course sand banks alter a bit, we know that, but generally speaking

they stay basically the same, but the coastline of Captain’s Cook’s were terrific. The hills inland weren’t so hot so you could some up to four or five thousand feet out and that’s a long way if you hit it, but we used two sets of maps, not to navigate, but the coastline. And I

always found the admiralty map was very good for when we got in reasonably close and you’re picking up the radar signal and it gave you a pretty good idea, much better than the ones that we used for the main navigation.

No, I think eventually they go, but towards the end when we weren’t sure and we didn’t know, and even the Yanks didn’t know where they were going to go next, we had a soluble washer in them and we’d only put them in for 24 days life, and then if they

weren’t exploded, well, the washer would jigger everything up inside.

Could be there.

But they wouldn’t be working.

No, but there were one or two cases of mines blowing up on impact and one guy got, they got pretty badly knocked around. They didn’t

crash or anything but they felt it because you were only low, 150 feet. We had a special instrument that they called a radio altimeter because the ordinary altimeter on an aeroplane operates on the pressure obviously and you set it, you’d set it at the pressure of your home base. Well by the time you got to Suva Bay and Macassar

that far away it could be showing that you’re on the ground, underwater, because of the difference in pressure, so we had a radio altimeter for our mine drops and we always knew exactly the height we were flying over the water at, because we usually as I say used to go in fairly low, 150, 200 feet.

Oh no, we were flying at the same time, but oh gee, the chances of that happening would be fairly remote, because as I say, they usually had only three or four at the outside at the same time. The first mine drop we did as a crew,

there were three on it and we lost our CO and he got shot down about 10 minutes before we hit the datum over at Suma Bay and never found him but when you do that you loose nine of course. We carried a crew of nine normally and 10 on a long trip. Eighteen

hours was a short trip and anything much above that you carried a third pilot but no, they, oh gee, you maybe operating off a different datum. You may be operating, there’d be a gap between you generally. You’d have, I never heard

of two Catalinas meeting.

No, it could be anything. I’m sure the one we were given in Suva Bay was a gun emplacement, but a datum is a feature on the coast that you could

be able to, maybe with a little bit of difficulty, but reasonably easily identify, and also on a fairly dark night because the worst of our targets, we used to do on moonless nights and we were painted black of course.

Well the ones that had the worst reports coming back from previous

trips about the amount of fire power against you.

Oh we took a Dornier down for routine maintenance and should have taken about three days and were there

for six weeks because as they fixed one thing up they found something else, and it was the last time I flew on Dorniers, as I left straight from Lake Boga to go to Rathmines because my transfer had come through. But it was, Lake Boga is quite a, probably not now because of the drought,

but it was quite a large lake. It’s about 20 miles, or Ks I suppose it would be, from Swan Hill. Initially, it was leased by Qantas from the government and then Qantas leased it back to the RAAF because when the Japanese

were fairly active off the coast at Sydney with their little submarines and the shelling of Newcastle, Rathmines was right on the coast and they were looking for a safer place so they built a fairly large, substantial it was really repair base at Lake Boga.

Not there now, there’s a museum there now but it was a, it was well away from the coast and that was the point of it, well away from the coast, and when we bought planes, when any plane arrived from America, and the first thing they did after landing at Rathmines to get customs clearance and that sort of jazz,

they then went onto Lake Boga where the RAAF converted them into what they wanted and that was a bigger payload. And they took out all the armour plating from around, from particularly around the pilots seats. Very heavy armour plating they had when we bought them out, and also they took out the self-sealing from the tanks because that also was fairly

weighty, and that helped us get the sort of payloads that we had.

Oh yes, yeah.

It’s right on the border, well, nearly on the border of New South Wales, inland near Swan Hill. You know Swan

Hill?

I can show you on the map later.

Everything. They fixed one thing and something else would fall off. No, they were, unfortunately the Dutch had let them run right down and they weren’t

maintained properly at all and they had an intricate sort of, for the time, electrical work, which of course electrical and all those sort of gadgets, they’re very good if they’re working, but if they’re not working they’re only a humbug, and they tried to get it back into proper condition but no, they…

I went orange picking. I’d spent about two weeks around town, and no-one wanted to know us because the local girls, they wanted people who stayed put, so no-one wanted to know us and we were just spending time in the pub, and it was getting to be a bit ridiculous so we did different things. I got a

job with an orange farm, live-in. Lived on the farm with the family. It was managed, I forget his name, but it was owned by Dedman, who was the minister for manpower in the government, but I was sort of almost an overseer. I didn’t do much picking,

but they had land army girls and a lot of people clearing. A big place it was, but it was the only way to keep out of the pubs, nothing else to do as it was that sort of town.

Well yes, it was an air force town. It was built for the air force. They even had the, the barracks were in the form of houses and they had the fence posts in, like,

it was fenced so from the air it looked like an ordinary township. They didn’t have any wire on the fence or anything, but it was more for anyone that was observing it to keep it quiet.

Yeah.

Oh yes, they were sort of active. Going back a bit to

Townsville, every now and then, I don’t know how many times, but occasionally anyway one of their big engine flying boats would come over Townsville and they dropped bombs on one occasion when I was there, out at the racecourse, which was miles away from anything. But we had instructions where we were on the Strand, and that was, all air crew that

anyone who had side arms in the event of the siren going, we had to strap our side, and we were there, we had to strap our side arms on and go straight out onto the waterfront. Because whether they had seen it happen or whether they were just trying to guard against it, but they were concerned that they were getting some signalling

from the ground, lights, torch lights and that type of thing. We had to do that, only a couple of times, but that was a standing instruction. As I say, they didn’t do any damage, but those big things had plenty of bombs and you’d rather they weren’t there.

Not really, no. We used to see them around town because we used to go up and get our supplies for our mess, the bar at the mess. We were allowed two bottles a week.

Everyone was allowed two bottles a week and I think we got an extra two bottles every flight we did, so the non-drinkers were very popular people.

I think, the Americans to me, individually they’re a very nice people but they have that, as a group, well you know, The Ugly American, the book? Well you could just about say ‘The Ugly Australian’ cause they’re in the same position when they get in another country or another place. Like the problems the poor old footballers are having at the moment. Get a group

together and it doesn’t take much for them to get off the rails. Well, the Americans were a bit like that. They were very well paid, very well looked after and popular with the girls which made them unpopular with the men.

Didn’t matter to me as I,

just after the end of my tour I got married. I was engaged when I was up there.

No, never noticed that I don’t think. We didn’t run into a lot of the blacks but there were a few, but no. I went to America after the

war. When I retired we both went over for about three months and went all around, and they are very different. We picked up an airline ticket, a 60-day one, which meant that you just sort of got on the plane and as long as you kept on going in the same direction, well, they use hubs over there, but you couldn’t backtrack and you just kept going

for 60 days and kept moving, and we did all around the coast. I wasn’t particularly interested in the Wild West but I was interested in going to Washington and certainly wanted to go to New York. Washington, I wanted to go to New Orleans, so we did that and during the time we did three coach

tours. Two out of New York and one out of Scottsdale and one of the ones we did out of New York, we went up to Boston, up around that area, and the guide spent 90 percent of the time pointing out some little black stump or a street corner where 20 Minute Men cleaned up 100

Redcoats, that’s from the War Of Independence. They’re going back that far and still talking about it, and we also found by the same token there was a lot of animosity between Americans, not between us, but between Americans from the north and the south. It’s still there, and it’s obvious because I guess the job I did

was personnel and I had an interest in watching peoples interaction, and it was so clear. If a Southerner said that today’s Friday, you could almost guarantee that a Northerner would say, “No it’s not, it’s Thursday.” And it was that bad.

No, no, no.

No, not that I found ,

because we only saw them briefly. We might get back to one of their seaplane tenders, say, at about midday, and we would ready for the cot. We’d been flying for 18 hours and we’d be ready for the cot, and the following morning we’d be off.

So we didn’t really, and their ships were all dry of course. They didn’t have any liquor at all on their ships and you’d see an odd one that had been drinking torpedo juice, we were told. It was high alcohol, but they had a system of landing them on a deserted island with a carton full of cans. It was the first time I’d ever seen, a

can was there, a carton full of cans, and they’d be landed there for the day on the island and not allowed any onboard.

The normal crew is you’ve got two pilots, the skipper and the second pilot and a navigator. You’ve got, this is working from the

front, the navigator is right behind the pilot, the navigator’s area. Then you’ve got two wireless operators, only one working at a time, but they also shared a gunnery role. The one that wasn’t operating would be manning the front gunnery. We had a gun up just where my bomb sight was in the front and then we had two engineers and the one

that wasn’t working, he had one of the blister guns, so they were both qualified as gunners, and if you were lucky at least one of them would be a reasonable cook, because we had a little hotplate on board and the engineer was usually the cook and he’d cook us some stuff.

We’d get a bit of steak occasionally and then we had a rigger. A rigger was the airframe guy who works on the airframe, and his role was to be there, and he also had a gunnery position, but he also, if you sprung a rivet or anything, there was a lot of rivets in the hull, and if you sprung a rivet

it was his job to get it patched up fairly quickly, which he did. And the ninth one was the armour who’s main role was to watch the dropping of the mines and to see that there were no hang-ups and that sort of thing, but he had a gun position also and that was the normal crew. Now when you had a longer trip, longer than normal,

they often carried a third pilot. Not because they needed it, but because you had pilots that hadn’t been crewed up and were floating around and trying to get some experience. Well, we had a wing commander who in rank should

have been a CO and he was a third pilot with us because he was trying to get experience on Catalinas and come off a different sort of aircraft, and they did that, but the normal crew was nine.

Yeah, they all had a double up, all those were working, actually working head down

had two of them except the navigator, but you couldn’t hand over. You couldn’t hand over to someone 400 miles of out of sight of land and say, “Now here we are, and you believe me, because that’s where we are, now you take over.” I wouldn’t have like to have taken anyone else’s position over, but if we worked it well, we’d get our chance to have a spell

because we had four bunks onboard. And I used to always as soon as we turned for home, after we dropped our mines, I’d already given the pilot our course and I used to go back and onto one of the bunks, and I’d say to the engineer who was on duty to wake me at, say, about three o’clock with

a black coffee, and then that would give me time to take two or three star sights before they started to disappear with the sun coming up, and then I’d go and give the skipper a correction and a course for home. And then watch it from then on but for the first three or four hours I’d let him find his own way. Australia was a pretty big place and it would be hard to miss if

you were heading south.

Who?

No, we had compasses everywhere. They had two compasses there up the front and I had two compasses, and as soon as we got into any sort of weather I used to have my eyes glued on

the compass because if we got into the tropical storms that you get in that weather you might fly for a quarter of an hour through 20 or 30 degrees off course to go around the big lightning build-up, and that sort of thing. I used to keep a running check so I knew roughly where we were to be able to get back on course, because I mightn’t

see a star again if the weather was bad, so I’d get it. We’d all do that, and they were all little tricks that didn’t take us long to learn, like I used to go up to the bomb sight in the bow, up to that compartment because I had to get us over the datum point and I used to go up there 20 minutes

before we got there because it would take that long to get your eyes accustomed to the dark from the orange light that I was using with the maps. If you left it too late to go up there, you wouldn’t be able to see a thing. Little things that were never taught to us at school but it didn’t take long to learn it.

No, no, no. I had another thing.

There was a, on one of the first trips that I did the navigation officer came to check me out and we were going to Suva Bay and I put my ruler down and I drew a line from the base at Cockatoo Island straight through to the centre of Lombok Straits, and Lombok Straits where Bali is,

straight to the centre of it, and he said, “Where are you going?” And I said, “I’m going to Lombok Strait, we’re going to Suva Bay, that’s where going, that’s where I’m going, through there, and I’m going through at 300 feet or less because there’s a radar station down on the point there.” He said, “I know all that, but why are you going there?” I said, “Because we going into Lombok Strait.” He was having me on, of course. He said, “Look, I’ll tell you something, a little bit of advice.”

He said, “When you go in a north-easterly direction,” but we were going in a north-westerly direction this time, so I’ll make it north-westerly, he said, “When you’re going in a north-westerly direction, head about 20 ks,” or nautical miles we were using, “head about 20 nautical miles to the right of it, a shorter distance, but when you hit the coast you know which way to go.” He

said, “If you’re 10 nautical miles out and you’re heading for the centre of Lombok Strait and you hit land instead of that centre, and there’s a big chance that you will because you’re covering a big distance, you don’t know which way to go.” He said, “Always make sure that you know which way to go.” That was never taught to us, but, and yet it’s so fundamental, and I never

did another trip without taking his advice. It made it so easy because there was no guesswork. You had to be a long way out to be on the wrong side, to be completely, but doesn’t take much, and if your compass, and one degree is a mile and 60, but get 600 and you’ve lost 10, haven’t you?

Ten miles, so those sorts of things and he was also the guy who gave me confidence in astro. He saw me loading up, and we used to use a plane float or an aluminium sea marker in daylight or a plane float at night, and instead of using the bomb sight to get a drift, to calculate your wind, we had a tail

drift sight which we put out the back and we’d follow the plane float, and as it came up on the gradient, we used to calculate the amount of drift. And I did what everyone else seemed to be doing and I loaded up and loaded myself on board and he said, “What have you got all those for?” He said, “You can nearly follow someone else’s as there’ll be that many thrown out but better than that, use astro if you can.”

Because we learnt 26 different stars and you had a pretty fair chance, and as it was completely covered in, you’d have a chance of picking one up that you could recognise. He took me hand as I was there and I was willing to listen to him and he took me in hand and I finished, and by the time I was halfway through my tour,

I had complete confidence in my astro. I knew that if I got a sighting on a star and I said, “This is where we are.” I’d been within five or ten ks of that or nautical miles of that and five or 10 nautical miles at 2,000 feet is just like looking over the side, so it’s not a great distance. Not like the poor old people in their boats where they’re dodging reefs

by using astro. They’ve got all different equipment, of course. They’re not travelling as fast, but yeah, there are lots of things and that made it easy still. Once I had confidence in astro, I could have a leisurely trip. And the other way, you were taking drifts every quarter of an hour to make sure that the wind hadn’t change because it

changes fairly quickly.

Oh yes.

Well I had a record of it, I knew, I just kept a log of what course he was flying and when he changed from that course to another one and I would, when we got

through it and he was ready to pick up the threads, then I would give him, work out exactly where we were, where we should have been, without a flying wind of course, exactly the course we were travelling, not the track. The track is different. The track is the effect of the course and the wind but

you might find that you’re 40 miles off track, or you reckon you’re 40 miles off, and when you just come back and that’s when you need that little bit of latitude for when you start to see the coastline, because there might be quite different wind effects during that storm period also.

Oh night, always night.

Yes, yes, well we had radar to help us, that helped us to pick it up but to identify the datum, that’s why the datum had to be something reasonably significant so that you could see it on a dark night because some targets, Suma Bay, Macassar,

Balikpapan, they were all targets that you’d go on a moonless night, and some of the others when you were not in a harbour but just in a strait, you’d just be in the hope of pushing them out into the deeper water, the shipping, well that was a different proposition. You could do those on a moon

light night but generally speaking we stuck to the dark nights. It’s marvellous what you can see when you know what you’re looking for and I always had it imprinted what I, the 30 mile of coast that I expected to hit somewhere along there I knew

there was a creek or a bit of a headland or whatever.

It was good, yeah, it was good.

No.

Well, as

I say, I would go up about 20 minutes beforehand, and by this time I know that we’re heading towards the datum. The skipper knew when I went up there and I’d just nudge him when I went past. I went past between the two of them and then I’d settle down and as we got a bit closer we had a patter.

If I wanted him to turn left I’d say, “Left, left,” and if I wanted him to turn right I’d say, “Right.” That was because the intercom was pretty rough and ready at times and it was not what I was saying but at the speed at which I was speaking meant that, this was taught to us mind you. I didn’t work this out, it was taught to us that your “left

left” or your “right” and the intention was that I would bring him onto, he knew what course. He had the course given to him and I’d get him onto that course as far back from the datum as I could, and you didn’t want to be making last minute changes, and then I’d talk him up to it. Now in the meantime I’ve got the off-duty wireless operator

with the stopwatch and he’s been given, once I say, “Drop,” the second pilot pushes the button and the first one goes and the other guy is watching the stopwatch and he’s reading it off, “Forty, 45, 46, 47, 48, go,” because he knows the next one,

49, is to go. So you work as a team in actually getting rid of it, because my job basically finishes once I’ve got him on datum. The first job we did, the one that we lost the CO, I was a bit slow in picking up the datum and we swung onto it, not at the last minute but fairly late,

swung onto it and I aborted the run. I wasn’t very popular because 10 minutes before the CO had been hit and here was me sending us around for a second run, but right at the back of my mind I could hear Commander George saying how important it was to drop it where he wanted it. So I aborted it and got a few caustic comments

from others that didn’t have the responsibility on board. I only did it once because it had to be a team effort and there was no good if you half did the job. You’d taken the whopping big thing a long way to drop it in the wrong place. That was the routine and different ones operated differently, but we

had it worked out very well, that one guy on the stopwatch. No good me watching the datum and having the stopwatch as well and trying to be a one-man band. He could do it much more comfortably, and no good the guy with the stopwatch reaching for the toggle, the button to drop it. Far better for him to just say, “Now,” and the second pilot sitting

there and it’s gone.

That was the worst. Can I just grab a bit of paper here?

I did write this out.

It is better with them.

I wrote this out because I felt it was important enough but I’ve just got general comments. “As a navigator I experienced several emotions on the average mine drop, generally on a moonless night. Satisfaction on nearing the datum point.” I’ve told you what that is, “But that’s a point where the aircraft had to fly a constant speed, direction and height, between 150 and 400 feet

for about five minutes up to when the last mine was dropped. Anxiety from the datum point to the release of the last mine, the critical time for enemy action. Elation when the last mine dropped and the pilot turned homeward on a course I had given him some 30 minutes earlier and relief when we cleared the target area and satisfaction on landing at home base after travelling some 18 or so hours, often through tropical

storms, to lay mines expectedly within 10 yards of the target.” And that all occurred within a matter of, well, most of them occurred when you were at the target area, and the last one of course when you hit home, which was when you had a cold beer waiting for you. But yeah, it was, there was always

anxiety because you’ve got nine people, you’ve got nine people and a job to do and no-one can accept that responsibility for you.

Probably about 30 seconds before you pass over the datum.

Once you pass over the datum, well, everything then is fixed. Your height is fixed, your speed is fixed, your direction is fixed until you drop your last mine. You can’t take evasive action. You just keep your fingers crossed and hope that if they are firing anything at you that their aims not too good at that stage because that is the dangerous part, or was.

We never got hit, not a hit, never got hit.

Yeah, we were on the same jobs when others got hit but we never got hit. Maybe someone was looking after us because there was nothing you could do. As I said before, I’m sure they thought we were faster

than we were because everything, we could see them coming up ahead of us and they used to have tracer in amongst their stuff.

Not very good, no, no, because you just wonder if he’s going to straighten it up a bit. I guess you feel

a little perturbed.

I suppose so, yeah. Yeah, I think there’d be something wrong with you if you didn’t because the record showed that there were people buying it all the time, so as I said before, I think 320 were the number of crew that were lost.

With nine members in an aircraft it doesn’t take long to add up, but it was a fairly high attrition rate all the same, 320.

No, no, never saw one. Saw one, in fact at Suva Bay we used to get in and out sometimes, without them even knowing we’d been there of course, and

Suva Bay, the second time we went over there, they were doing night flying practise, circuits and bumps, and they practically in the same area as we were, all lit up. Must have thought we were going to come in for a landing.

Yes, it was Wing Commander Geoff Haviett. He had come back to one of the nucleus of the Catalina group because he’d come back from 10 Squadron. He’d been flying Sunderlands over in the Bay of Biscay, out of England and he

was the CO back here, wing commander. It was our very first job so I sort of remember very well. We were about 10 minutes away from the datum when he came over the air to say that he’d been hit and that he was heading for Escape Point A.

See, part of our briefing before we went on a trip that the skipper and the navigator went on, the briefing, and we were given the escape points and they were either one reasonably close and one a bit further away. If possible with friendly natives in the area, and all those sort of things were taken into account, and so he said he was going

to Escape Point A, and so after we had dropped our mines we went to Escape Point A, which was some 100 nautical miles down on the way home. And there was a fair bit of sea running and we couldn’t see any sign of him,

and then we were joined by the other one. Ian Wood, he was the third plane on the job and he came down to the escape point and we saw him alright because we were looking for him because we knew he probably would come down and we were both milling around there on a dark night. And rather than get in each other’s way we thought, “Well he could cover this,” so

we went down to Escape Point B on the off-chance that he had found he could stay in the air longer than he had hoped and was trying to put more distance between Suva Bay and the escape points, so we went down to Escape Point B and we stayed there for about 20 minutes or so. Certainly long enough for him to be well and truly there if that’s where he went

and there was no sign of him. In the meantime, Ian Wood stayed at the other escape point A and thoroughly covered it and that was it. It was never mentioned, and never mentioned again in any of the reports that you get after the war. We picked up a lot of information about different ones and he was never mentioned, so

he obviously crashed at sea. Now that same trip we went back within the following night, back to Suva Bay area again, and I don’t know if I mentioned this before but this time when we arrived back at the sea plane tender, it wasn’t

there. This is the American sea plane tender down off the West Australian coast and there were three aircraft on this job, too, and we were all running around trying to find this sea plane tender, all getting short of petrol by then and two of them decided to go into Broome. Well we thought that will overtax them so we looked at the chart and there was a town shown on it in very big

printing ‘Cossack’ and we said, “Good, we’ll go there, this will be a change from going into Broome.” So we went into Cossack, flew over it and there was a lovely set out area with nice stone buildings and everything and we thought, “This is good,” but a bit strange, no-one out to wave to us and we thought that was a bit strange. Anyway, we didn’t have enough fuel to worry about it and we got down onto the water

and about half an hour later, after our life raft had blown up, did I mention this?

We put the life raft out and the rigger, Bill Cumming, no, the armourer, the armourer Bill Cumming, he jumped into it to go ashore to make some inquiries

and it blew up. And we’re still not sure whether, and he’s still not sure whether it was a shark hanging around, whether the shark had got it or whether it was just perished. But he came up as white as a ghost. I saw him in May when we were down at reunion in Glenelg and talked about it and he’s still

not sure whether it was a shark or not, but he came up as white as a ghost. He was covered in French chalk. I don’t know whether he panicked but whether it was the French chalk, but it was French chalk, and it blew everywhere. But it taught us one thing, that if it was perished you didn’t trust that sort of equipment without checking on it every now and then and they’re rolled up, they’re creased, and a bit of water gets in them and you can imagine and then the pressure of the

air going into them, it probably blew up. I think it did blow up. Anyway, a guy came around in a rowboat and said to us, “Hey, I wouldn’t stay here too long.” He said, “There’s a 60 foot rise and fall and you’re going to be high and dry in about half an hour,” and he’d come from a big mile and a half long jetty. There were two houses that maintained the jetty, and it was a jetty

for the asbestos from the mines in the northern part of Western Australia there. I wish they’d never found it. Well, a lot of people do anyway. And so we went around and we slept on the beach there. We got up to the house and singing around the piano and people had

never seen anyone for a long time, year anyway. Just these two families lived there, absolutely isolated, and we were there for a couple of days and they sent an aircraft down and we took enough fuel on, using a kerosene tin and rowing it across. One kerosene tin we had, and they didn’t have the facilities to transfer fuel and we took enough on to get us down to Exmouth Gulf where the Yanks were. We went down there and got refuelled

and the following morning, stayed overnight and the following morning we were woken by this American voice saying, “Reveille, reveille, ham and eggs for breakfast.” So we thought, “We’ll be in that before we leave.” We went back to Darwin and the following night we were bombing Ambon.

It’s a powder chalk. Chalk in a powder form that they used to use to stop rubber things perishing.

No, no, it was white. That’s the first one.

Well,

they wanted to talk, to talk about anything, about what was happening back in the real world, and they had this old piano and wanted to sing all the old songs and it was good, they had a list.

Australian.

They were maintenance for the jetty. Two families and the husbands were the maintenance people. Big, long

jetty, huge thing, but I don’t know often they used to get a ship in. I forget. They did tell us I’m sure but they maintained this jetty so they could load the asbestos onto the ships, little cargo boats that came from Perth, I imagine, or from Fremantle.

Oh very, it was as bad as being a lighthouse keeper.

Yeah, and we just got back from that and went to Ambon to do our bombing run because we were practically committed to mining by then, and we did our only bombing run and when we got to aerodrome there that we were to bomb and cloud was very thick and we couldn’t find a way through it so we bombed the harbour installations. Which was always,

for bombing you were always given a secondary target so if you couldn’t make the first one for some reason or other, you’d go to the second one, and so we started a few little fires. And that was where the rigger, he was the youngest guy, Cyril, he’s dead now but Cyril was the youngest of the group and I’m guiding the skipper up and we’re going to drop a stick of

four and then some incendiaries and then anti-personnel ones thrown out the blister at the same time and I’m guiding him up, “Left, left, right, left, left,” bringing him up to get and I’ve got the target coming down the B on the wires on the bomb sight. When it gets down to a certain spot that’s when I hit the thing and drop them. Cyril is down the back, “Jack, Jack, Jack, can I throw

the bottles out now?” And fortunately the skipper told him to get off the air and saved me the trouble because he’d been talking to old hands and when they used to do housing raids over Rabaul and the Solomons and Gasmata they used to put razor blades in the neck of their empty beer bottles, and the theory was and I understand it’s right, but I

never heard it, was when they got thrown out they made a whistling sound and they were quite a frightening sound and he was more interested in getting rid of his beer bottles and I had 2,000 pound of incendiaries and anti-personnel on the bunk and anyone of them hit with

a stray bullet would have sent us all up. And the quickest thing with those is to get them out, out on the ground, and he’s worrying about bottles, but you know, but he was a lovely little guy but he didn’t have priorities too right. I think he was about 18.

Yeah.

That was in the Celebes. We did a mine drop there. I don’t know what they call the Celebes now. It’s Sawawi [Sulawesi] or some name like that, like Macassar is on the Celebes. When I say mined Macassar, it’s a funny

looking one, north of Suva Bay and I think there were three or four aircraft on that job. I’m not absolutely certain on that and it’s the first and only time that we saw a balloon barrage. They didn’t worry us because I think it was there to protect

the wharf structure. See Pomolar was the only place that the Japanese had control of for their supply of nickel, and nickel was a very important mineral for armaments so it was pretty important to them, and I guess that’s why they had this, only had two or three up, with drones, and they had the wire up and

if anyone runs into the wire of course that’s ta-ta to them. We didn’t even go within a couple of miles because we were out bottling, there was a cargo ship and I missed that. There was a cargo ship in, about 8,000 ton of our estimation, it was in and we strung our mines out at the entrance of the harbour to stop it being able to get away

comfortably anyway. And so the balloon barrage I imagine was there to protect the wharf installations and it didn’t affect us but it was worrisome to see it but it was the only one we ever saw.

Oh the cable just usually slices a chunk off the wing and you just go in.

But strangely enough I never saw this in print, and it could be quite wrong, because when we went through amongst the crews that were involved in it the following day when General Kenny, the American Air Force general for that area, when he was told the result of our trip to Pomolar, that there was a cargo ship in

there, he sent out half a dozen B25s, bombers, and they managed to blow up sufficient of our mines for the ship to sail out, they missed it. It may be right, it may be wrong. It may be just someone having a go at the Yanks because

that was always likely to be on.

It would have been there to get nickel. That was it’s only reason to be there for their war effort.

No, it was just variety. They probably felt it was time they went, see, Ambon was fairly close, we were to do the airport, the strip, rather than do the other thing, but we only did the secondary target and it was reasonably close to Darwin

and I don’t think they wanted them to feel to secure there. You don’t really know the reason why but I imagine that would be the reason, that they would be building any sort of a force there, an air force, that they wanted to let them know that we knew what they were up too, because Ambon was a place that reasonably

regularly got bombed.

You see the fires. You don’t see them explode because we were doing that at about 8,000 feet but you see the fires.

Oh just their

wharf installations.

On which island?

No.

I may not have because it’s just automatic that, most of those places, the Suva Bays, the Balikpapans, the Macassars, all of that area there was just out of

reach of Darwin for us to get there and back with any measure of safety, so we had this Cockatoo Island. It was an island of iron actually, and our compasses used to go crazy when they got close to it and that was a forward base for refuelling. We’d line up in Darwin and then we would

go down there and we would refuel and spend the day down there and take off about four o’clock, round about four o’clock in the afternoon, and that was actually to be able to get to our target and back. It was a base that was there and it was used for a long time. Later on when I’d left the Catalinas, after I’d left operating up there they were using West Bay, which is in a little closer,

but we used to go from the ampisound and we would go to Suva Bay or Macassar or Polomar or that area and we would come back to this sea plane tender. Sea plane tenders were, at one stage, I can’t ask you whether you remember but

America gave Britain about 50 of the four-stacker destroyers at one stage and it was one of these things that they’d converted into a big fuel barge and that was it’s sole purpose was to be able to provide fuel. And of course we thought it was mainly it was for us, but what we didn’t realise was that it might just tootle off like it did when we went to Cossack and

refuelled one of their own submarines, which I thought was pretty sensible of them.

That’s right, that’s right.

Yes, we were engaged.

Oh yes, oh yes.

Oh yes, yes because what we used to do,

you got your hours fairly quickly in the Catalina, as you can imagine, and the 240 hour inspection was not done in the squadron, small work was done in the squadron and you had your own maintenance staff in Darwin, say for example. But the 240 inspection, which was the whole change of spark plugs and change a lot of engine components

and we used to go to Bowen for that.

To Bowen.

Just south of Townsville.

They had a base there where they did that and we used to go there and it was usually about a three or four day job, and my earlier connections with 41 Squadron meant that I knew what they were doing and they were on the move and quite often there were aircraft coming

through Bowen and heading to Brisbane and going to be down there for about two days, so that anytime that I was in Bowen with the 240, I’d get myself a ride down to Brisbane with them and then back. I suppose during the nine month time in Darwin I would have been in Bowen about four times and I went to Brisbane a couple of times. Then

Joyce, when she turned 21, she wasn’t, her father wouldn’t allow her beforehand, she joined the WAAAF and she went down, she was in Melbourne towards the later part of my tour and she was doing a course down there in

aircraft maintenance. She was a typist but she wanted to do something different and she went down there but she got out in July ‘45 because after I finished my tour, I did two trips to America bringing out new aircraft and I was scheduled for a third one and we’d already

had the date set for our wedding and they let her be discharged.

Yes, her sister was in it too. Her brother was in the army in Syria and the islands. Oh, nearly everyone was in something in those days.

So I got down when I could, but then towards the end there was no point because she was in Melbourne and I couldn’t get down that far and I got down there after my first trip to America before we went back again and the second trip I’d already been to the RAAF and we’d worked it out and they gave her a discharge. It’s a funny thing, I’ve got a photo

of the wedding group there, and I thought I’d mention it at the time of the photo but my skipper was to be the best man and our first engineer, Frank Turner, was to be the groomsman, and they, on the Friday night before the wedding, we were being married on the Saturday, on the Friday they left for America on the third trip.

So there I was and the Alma Street Methodist minister is rubbing his hands and he’s going to get a couple of dollars, a couple of pounds and things are looking very ordinary, so I went into Brisbane. I went into the Grand Central Hotel, would you know of the Grand Central Hotel?

Yeah, well the Grand Central Hotel was a sort of meeting place and I ran into Terry O’Brien

and he was another navigator and I said, “How are you Terry? What are you doing this afternoon?” He said, “I’ll probably still be here.” I said, “No you won’t, you’re standing as my best man. The wedding’s at two o’clock.” He said, “Crikes, I’ll have to go and get a dispensation,” because with a name like Terry O’Brien he had to go and get a dispensation.

Because he was a good Catholic.

Permission from the Catholic Church to be able to stand and be part of a Methodist wedding, so Terry got that and then Don Piddington, another guy that I knew, I struck him and I did the same to Don, so I picked up two out of the pub.

They’re both dead I think now. Terry was a nice guy. He was a school teacher but he was a navigator on the same course as I was, same OTU, and the same squadron, so we knew each other pretty well. So and then we just went, up until the Manila job,

which I mentioned before, which was our last one. In the meantime we had been going back to Suva Bay or Macassar and the Halmaheras and all around that area doing our mine laying. I got down to embarkation depot and I was posted to

Bairnsdale as an instructor and I wasn’t at all happy about that. I didn’t like the idea. They were Beauforts and they were land planes and I didn’t want to be on land planes. It took me about four hours to book into onto the station, which it does. You’ve got to the barracks and the orderly room and the doctor and the dentist and you’ve got to go to everyone and let them have a look at you and then I was sent down to the ship recognition hut,

and I went down there and reported to the officer in charge, who I knew. He was Tony English. He just died recently too. He was CO of the Committee of the Direction of Fruit Marketing after the war, but he was a Catalina navigator and I was looking for

sympathy from him and he said, “I’m in the same boat. I don’t want to be here.” And I’d been there about a quarter of an hour when word came through from the orderly room that I’d been posted to Ferry Flight and I was on my way to America and there was a plane leaving in half an hour for Richmond and I was on it. And that was the closest I got to serving on a land plane, although I did do one trip on a DC3. They were short of a navigator

and I did a trip from Townsville to Moresby. At one stage they called on someone to give them a hand out.

Oh it was after the war.

Oh yes, oh yes.

Yes, yes.

See I bought back a fair bit of it, I didn’t back a wedding dress but I bought back a fair bit of other stuff

from America, two trips to America, and I bought back quite a lot of Catalina bathing costumes, and Catalina Island was just off San Francisco and I bought quite a lot of stuff back, so she didn’t need them for that. Yeah, she had the full box and dice and her sister, who was a WAAAF, was the chief bridesmaid,

and she had her cousin, one of her cousin’s from England, the other one she was Joan. She was about 16 at the time and they came out and she had two cousins who came out in that refugee, they used to bring refugees out if you could nominate them and her family nominated these two to come out. Jean, the elder one, went to teachers training college while she was here and Joan

was our bridesmaid. Jean is dead but Joan, our bridesmaid, she lives, she now lives or has for some years lived in New Jersey but she could see the Twin Towers from her front balcony. New Jersey is right adjacent to New York, just across the water and she could see them. But she was out, she was out recently.

She came out for my granddaughter’s wedding in Christchurch. She came out for the wedding but she was one of the bridesmaids. They bought a lot of them out, a lot of evacuees out on some special scheme. In fact one lot were going to Canada and they were torpedoed and they lost them all. I read a book about it.

Yes, we went to Heaven Island, because we reckoned there was no way they’d get us off.

Yes, they could too. They might rip the bottom out of it with coral.

No, no.

Well, not air crew.

I learnt the same as everyone else did how to use the machine guns. See, we had one machine gun up in the bow, one down underneath in the tunnel, and there was a little hatch that opened up and in the blisters there were

two big .5 and they were fairly big machine guns. Now we learnt that. We learnt, for some reason or other, I think it was just to improve our reflexes really we did

No, what do you call those? Shot gun.

Yeah, clay pigeons, throwing these clay pigeons up and shooting and that was all part of the course, but no, and we weren’t even given any instruction on how to use our 38 which we were all issued with, a little side arm.

Oh yes. You usually knew someone. In Townsville there was this sergeant, Brian Ward, Brian Ward. He used to load the aircraft and he knew what was happening. He used to load the Short Empires and also the Dorniers because

it was fairly critical that you had your load evenly balance, reasonably evenly balanced anyway because it doesn’t take a lot of change, if someone moves from the front, or from the back to the front for the nose to go down. You’ve got to be adjusting the automatic pilot and that sort of thing all the time, so it was important for him, particularly if there was heavy cargo, it was

important for him to know exactly where it should go and he knew everything that was going on. He knew every aircraft that was going and where it was going and I knew him pretty well.

Oh no, no, they were all air force flights though.

Well not really, not really, but I didn’t not go. In fact when Joyce back up to Cairns with me later on they were the only people met, were the barmaids.

Well yes, we used to wander around a bit.

No, I had a job to go to.

No, it was a small place. I had my sights set on a managerial job

at the headquarters. That’s where the money is, and I don’t know that I would have liked to have stayed in Cairns anyway. It’s got it’s good points but have you been up there lately?

Did you?

Very hot and rough.

We were up there for a reunion about three years ago now I suppose and we stayed at Hyde’s Hotel and Hyde’s of course is almost a backpackers but the motel part is alright. We stayed there for old times’ sake, because that

was the pub when we were there in the ‘40s, but the rowdy bar they have there and it’s not the only one. A lot of them are terribly noisy. You won’t know this, but when you hit 80 you start to worry about all that noise.

No, I did not. Can I grab a book?

I flew on two different Short Empires, two different Dorniers, two different Mariners, which I haven’t

mentioned because I was only playing around on them. They were another flying boat that replaced the Dornier. Forty five Catalinas and one DC3.

Oh we

did quite a lot, during the actual war time operations I spent most of my time on two of them, 35 I think it was and 77 was the second one anyway. And yes, most of the time there, but I spent a lot of time later on you see on the air sea rescue and

there were different planes and different skippers. I also flew with, that was the planes. I pulled these out. I flew with five different skippers on the Short Empires, two on the Dorniers, two on the Mariners, 24 on Catalinas but only one on operations. The rest were air sea rescue and the period in the interim air force because

from August 1945 until August 1948, three years, I was flying on amphibs [amphibious aircraft] doing air sea rescue work, but during that period we were bringing back POWs, we were bringing back troops, we were

running the consular mail and would you believe in 1945 we went from Baliance, spent about six weeks in Balikpapan, in Borneo, we went across to Macassar in the Celebes, a place which was one of our hottest targets. Lovely little place it was, and we went across there and we had probably one of the most important missions of the three years,

we took the 1945 Melbourne Cup film over for the troops. That was the sole purpose of the trip. Things sort of got a little bit easy and so I was shifting around a far bit in those days and that’s when I flew with so many different skippers and

so many different aircraft.

I suppose the most polished skipper I ever flew with was a guy named Glen Grey, in Short Empires, but I only flew half a dozen times with him, but he was a Qantas skipper and he used to,

our plane would be loaded with the troops and the cargo and then the crew would go out because all boats to get there anchored on a buoy and then the crew would go out and then he would go out on his own. When he walked through he might bother to nod to you, he may not. He’d walk through and he’d pull on his silk gloves

ready for takeoff and when we got going he’d hand over to the second pilot to twiddle George, the automatic pilot, and he’d take off his silk gloves and they wouldn’t go on again until he came into landing. But we went into, we left late one day

and it was getting very dark by the time we hit Moresby and Moresby has this big hill on the side, Ack-ack Hill, I mentioned before, there’s this big hill and there was a southerly wind blowing, which meant that we had land into the wind and up there, it’s all north, and it’s even getting that way a bit in Cairns, but not quite like it.

But up there when the sun goes down, it goes down. It’s like pulling a blind down, it’s just darkness, and we were running very late and he went around the side of this hill and this great big and they were a big aeroplane and he slide slid down the side of the hill until he was almost down ready to land on the water that

far and just went straight down. By the time he’d touch down and finished his run they had to come out and tow us onto the buoy, as you couldn’t see. That’s how close it was to darkness, but I’ve never seen anyone side slip an aircraft of that size before and he did it as if it was an everyday occurrence.

Well, you’re still at your forward motion

but you’re just sliding, sliding like that, controlled slide, and it’s the quickest way to lose height. You lose height without having to go round and round in circles to do it. You didn’t have time to do that. He was probably the most polished, but my skipper was very good. He ended up,

he was a very fastidious pilot, very good and he’s also gone. He went to flying Catalinas after the war for the Dutch and then he went to KLM and he ended up a senior route captain on the Constellation and his family was growing up and

he had to sign up for about another three or four years or something to go onto the jets and he wanted his kids educated back here in Australia so he came back out here and he did a bit of flying out here. He was doing all sorts of running over to King Island for crayfish and that sort of thing. He didn’t have to do anything. He was nice and comfortable. He was a very good pilot.

Most of them were good. There’s only one or two that I wasn’t happy with. One I refused to fly with. I just went to the CO. It was later on in the interim air force and I went up with this guy, I was asked to go up with him and I was not impressed at all and I went to the boss. There were only two crews there then and I went to the CO and I said,

“I’m ready to go. I’m not here for the long haul,” and I said, “I’m not here to go the wrong way and I’m not flying with him again.” And about just after I’d taken a discharge anyway and got back to work, he killed a whole crew down in Java, somewhere out in the west. But he couldn’t be told, couldn’t be told.

What worried me about him was I said to him, he was only new, only arrived, I said, “You know,” see Catalina had no flaps, so they tended to float them in, they didn’t drive them in like they do with the ones with flaps, they’ve got far better control with aircraft with flaps.

The Catalina didn’t have flaps. I said to him, “You know that in the afternoon the Charters Towers road gets very hot and you get a lot of up currents, the heat rising from that can give you quite a bit of a start if you’re not ready for it.” He said to me, “I’m the pilot.”

I said, “Look, I’ve got over 2,000 hours on these things, so I do know a little bit about them, I’m just giving you that information.” And sure enough he came in over the Charters Towers road gliding, which gave you no control at all, instead of coming over with a bit of power on and we got thrown around a fair bit. We didn’t crash but we got thrown around a fair bit and we could have…

I thought, “Well, if he’s that sort of a person I don’t want to be stuck with him,” and sure enough he took a whole crew with him, which was bad luck for them but good luck for me not to be with him, but generally speaking they were well trained. It’s only when someone feels that they’ve got to make the point that they know all there is to

know, and it’s not good enough. I spent a lot of time, mine laying was sort of repetitive. You go in, you in at about 200 feet, you drop them and you come home and you go to different places and apart from the fact that we never got

hit and apart from the fact that Manila was a big and the final job, we followed a fairly slick routine which we’d gotten into. I went to America, do you want me to move onto there?

It was good for the team to operate as a team, but you still have to have someone in charge. The pilot is the skipper. Nowadays that is not necessarily so.

We went to Edinburgh while we were down in Adelaide. We had our dinner out there and the CO of Edinburgh was a navigator. And navigators are quite often skippers, that’s of the Orions, the coastal ones. The navigator is the, I don’t think necessarily the navigator should be, but I think he should be able to be, and

in our case probably there were times when he should have been able to be, but the skipper has always been, with the air force, up to now, war-time air force, the skipper was always the pilot. Not necessarily the best man, might be the best pilot techniques, but it takes more than

that to mould a team together. You’ve got to be able to handle people, and very different a lot of them too, young kids, and not so young kids and larrikins, and you’ve got to be able, a bit like a football coach, you’ve got to be able to get the best out of them.

I suppose they could be.

I suppose they could be, particularly the ones that have the full backing of the crew. Ours, as I say, was very good and he was only an NCO. He got commissioned. He got a DFC, a Distinguished Flying Cross,

and he was commissioned eventually but he did the whole term as an NCO, which I thought was wrong. I thought if they’re good enough to be the skipper of a big aeroplane like that they should be automatically given a commission because we had a second pilot who was commissioned, crazy.

Not us, not us. That’s fighter pilots, and the top button was left undone, too.

No, no. The occasional one had a mo [moustache] but not many.

No, he didn’t, no.

Yeah, we went over in Liberators as passengers and we landed at Sacramento, which I didn’t even know existed. I thought California was San Francisco and Los Angeles and probably San Diego, but actually I think Sacramento is still the capital of California.

But it was inland and we landed there. They looked after us fairly well. As I remember they gave us, I think we got 10 dollars a day extra to live. We had to do all our own arranging of accommodation but they gave us about four or five days in San Francisco to sort of let our hair down and look around. They then

shifted us down to Los Angeles where we had about another four or five days, very interesting. They were both interesting places, and then we went down to San Pedro, which was down on the coast, which was where the aircraft was waiting for us, to take delivery of us. San Pedro, the aircraft could have probably have come from Canada. It could

have come from up at, where there was a big base there, up north, nearly on the border? I should know it because I went there. Anyway, I can’t think of the name now. Picked up the aircraft and then we flew it down to San Diego for takeoff. San Diego was a very big, and still is a very big base. When I was over there in ’85,

I went out, I was with a guy who was a Catalina, an American Catalina guy and he took me out, took my wife and myself out over the base to have a look at it again and they were on a war footing then. They were flying, there was Russian submarines just off the coast watching everything they did and they were like a knife edge

and that’s less than 20 years ago. And that was our routine. We picked up the aircraft that we flew back. The first hop was the longest one. They were all amphibs that we were flying back, but the wheels were taken out and they were sent out by boat and they had spare tanks in the wheel bays and

San Diego to Honolulu was the…oh, we didn’t go to Honolulu. We went across the other side to Cantahoie, which was a very big air force base only about 10 miles across and we spent our time in Honolulu. Went to Honolulu and then we went to Christmas Island, Palmaria,

those sorts of places, Suva, Rathmines, Lake Boga. Then back to wait until the next call, which was probably about a week later, and when we got our call to go to Amberley and get on a plane to America with the Americans again.

I think that was a bonus, because there was no need. There was no need to go to San Francisco, there was no need probably to Los Angeles, as you say when you picked up the plane at San Pedro. To my way of thinking it was all organised. We were given the

time to move all the time and when to move on, I think it was a bonus and they gave us some extra allowance to pay for it.

I was coming home to get married. I was shopping.

Swimming costumes and dresses and all that sort of stuff.

We went out to the, the main studios were on strike for some reason or another and we went to a small independent one and the first set we went to and had a look at Frances Langford, who was a singer, used to tour with Bob Hope [comedian and actor], but she was quite good, but she was making a film and

we stayed there for about an hour and a half and she was trying to, it had already been taped, the song, and she was trying to open and shut her mouth at the right time and like the movement of this chair, shifting it six inches throws everything out of focus, she had a place where she had to mark, stand on the floor. After an hour and a half she was still trying to do it when we left and we

went over to another studio where they filming a murder mystery and the murderer had to walk into this room and there were about a half a dozen photos and he had to stand and look and move onto the next one and look and say about 10 words, and we were there for an hour and he either said the words to wrong photo or, anyway it wasn’t finished when we left either. So no

wonder they cost so much to make films, and we had a look at the place. We went to some of the night spots. Saw an old favourite of mine, Anne Miller, in the Brown Derby and, but went across down to Mexico, of course, down to Tijuana to have a look. We went down intending to go to

a bull fight and couldn’t afford it so we went to the races instead. Saw where Phar Lap’s [champion horse] big statue is there. And the second time, we liked Honolulu but they didn’t give us much time there, so the second time we picked up the aircraft at San Pedro and had a little leak. The front, where the navigators bomb aimer was had a glass panel and outside of that

was a roll down metal mesh thing to protect it when you were landing and there was a bit of a leak there and the skipper said to me, “What do you reckon about that?” I said, “If that leaks going to worry us, we’ve got real troubles, because it shouldn’t.”

If you land out in the middle of the northern Pacific I guess it might have, but we didn’t expect to be doing that and I said, “Why don’t we?” and we worked out between us and we’ll leave it and mark it in as unserviceable when we get to Honolulu and so we did that and spent 10 days there. And it was no good having it done at San Diego because it was not a very nice town. In fact, we were warned by the

local guys in the mess not to bother going into town because the only game that was being played was the nightly blue between the American and British sailors. They used to have a blue every night over there, according to them, so we kept out of the town which was a complete military town.

But yeah, we had a longer stay in Honolulu.

Oh they were good, they were good, yeah. See we had our patch, Australia, on our uniform and they never had more than about two crews in at the same time, so there were 12 throughout the whole city

and in San Francisco you never even saw the others. They were alright.

Yes, I was over there for, I was in America for Roosevelt’s [President] death and also for the first meeting of the United Nations,

which was held in San Francisco. Well, I came back from the second trip and instead of going on the third, as I mentioned, before I got married, and then I went up to Darwin on air sea rescue, because the war was just on finished.

I was in Sydney. What had happened, the war finished shortly after the atomic bomb, yeah. I was in Sydney. See it finished in August and I got married in July and I was still on leave.

Good, good.

Yes, yes I did. I got into a bit of trouble about then. I was staying at my auntie’s place, my wife and I were staying at my auntie’s place out at Carlton and Carlton, I don’t know if you know Sydney very well but Carlton is between Kogarah and Hurstville. And every train doesn’t

stop at Carlton. They stop at Hurstville and they stop at Kogarah and I had been out at Rose Bay to a, one of the guys that had been with me in Darwin was out there in the mess and he invited me out and I stayed far too long and I got back to the station and got on the train and it went to Hurstville and I got out

of there at Hurstville and got on another one going the other way and it went to Rochedale, Rochedale? Yeah, missed Carlton. Anyway it took about four trains until I managed to get onto one that was going to stop at Carlton and I wasn’t very popular when I got home. That was my first lesson that you don’t, you’ve

got to remember that other people are around.

No, yes I was still on the Catalinas and I liked flying and I enjoyed it. I knew that there was a fair bit to be done in bringing POWs back and the time-expired troops and that

sort of thing, and there’d be a reasonable amount of air sea rescue cover because of the amount of land traffic flying over water, and I was undecided at that stage on rejoining the PMG, so I applied for the interim air force and I immediately started studying for my civil navigation tickets,

which I didn’t continue with because within 12 months it was obvious to me that navigators were not going to be necessary in the long term. They had served their purpose. It was a short life during the war practically, so I thought, “Not much point doing that so I’ll just sit my time out here, enjoying what I’m doing, while I’m doing it

until the PMG decided to give me some sort of ultimatum about coming back to work or resigning,” and that’s what I did.

I went to Darwin. I had the chance of flying from Rathmines across to Darwin but I had never been through the centre of

Australia so I said, “No, I’ll go round and go up by the troop train.” So I went to Adelaide for the first time and went up in the troop train, which has been superseded now by the Ghan, but it was a very interesting trip, and I’d flown a lot of these places but you only see them from a height. But to get down to Alice Springs and Katherine and those sort of places, I found it part of learning.

I enjoyed it and I got to Darwin and then I we were doing a fair bit of bringing, as I say, POWs back and the troops from Morotai and Labuan and I didn’t get to Singapore. We were going to Singapore and we had an engine

problem and someone else went and we never got another opportunity, so I missed that. But spent about six weeks or so in Balikpapan and three months in Morotai and Labuan and I was about six weeks, Macassar, doing all those sorts of things. Interesting,

went to some places that I’d mined and getting back there and having a look at them was a bit different and then after being there for a fair while in Darwin, then I came down, I took leave.

Our daughter Lynne was born in ‘46 and I went up to Cairns and then my wife and Lynne, our daughter, they followed me up. She was about six weeks old and by the time she was three she had had a trip on a Catalina because it was fairly,

only two crews, two crews, two aircraft, the CO was a flight lieutenant and everyone got on very well together and he decided that if an aircraft needed a run, if it had some work on it and needed a run, it seemed to be a good idea that

the wives that sat at home and waited for you felt what it was like to go and get a flight, so Joyce and my daughter got to…she went up when she was six weeks, so I suppose she was would probably be nearly three months when she had her first flight and the only one on a Catalina. Yeah I think so.

Yes, no we had our main base there but we’d go and do a six week detachment. See once we finished the transporting role we were there as an air sea rescue cover and that’s the sort of thing where you hand around

and you hope nothing happens, so we went there. We bought a lot back from New Guinea too, from Madang and those places. They weren’t POWs, they were time expired people. We went into places; we took the consular mail over to Dili. Went into Koepang

and that was the first time, Koepang was the first time I think that I’d seen a Japanese because they had a POW camp there and most of the other places they didn’t have any and we didn’t see them. We knew they were there but we never saw them. They were up there.

They were coming over, mainly from Morotai and Labuan but they were coming in from Singapore. They’d be

coming over by some other means, probably might have been land-based planes, might have been ship and we were just taking them straight through to, we were picking them up there and flying straight through to, usually to Darwin and then onto Rose Bay.

Oh yes, and then back for another run.

Well, the time-expired people were alright. They were just lucky to be going home. Some of the POWs weren’t real flash but we never had the really bad ones. Had to be careful with them and make sure that

you didn’t give them too much to eat or something like that. We were under directions, but some of the ones we saw of course were absolutely pitiful. You’ve seen photos.

No, I don’t recall that we got any real briefing on that. I think it was probably left to our own common sense to realise what they’d gone through.

Very little. Most of them didn’t want to talk. They were still in a state of exhaustion, I think, as much as anything, but

they weren’t comfortable of course. We only had the four bunks so they weren’t getting any royal treatment, and to get amongst them you had to scramble over them, so it was not the sort of thing that you really did. The main thing was to get them on, try to fly at a height which gave them comfort because

we weren’t, we had no oxygen or anything like that, so you tried to fly at a height that gave them as much as comfort as possible and not to pester them.

Oh they were pitifully thin, pitifully thin, oh yes.

Temperature, basically the temperature, turbulence if you could dodge it, if you could get away from turbulence you would and still keep the temperature right.

Well, it just happens to be, did you see it here?

Yes, it’s ours, I guess. No, it’s just, I don’t understand it but I like it.

Yes, I like, I don’t like modern music but I used to like [Frank] Sinatra. I don’t like much of the modern stuff at all.

But that’s quite good isn’t it?

Yes, yes, like if you weren’t running into storms and some of them could be very severe, full of lightening in the clouds and reaching up to 20,000 feet, well beyond a height we could have flown up. It would be quite reasonably simple - you’d set your course and away you’d go,

but we often, once we ran into what we called the inter-tropic front, which created the problem with the storms and it moved a bit over the year, you might have to go 40 or 50 miles and round the storm. There were just some that you couldn’t go through, they were just too severe.

Severe lightening and hail and to get into those sorts of situations, those really bad ones you’ve got an updraught going up at a fair speed and right alongside of it you could have a downdraught. Now with a plane with 110-foot wingspan, you could have one in each camp, which means you’re going like that,

so you didn’t really go into that sort of a situation, you went around it. Now the moment you veered off the course that you were given by the navigator, you caused him a problem, because he had to watch his compasses and keep a running record of how long you were flying on this particular course so he could then work out how to get back to where we were.

Or not necessarily back to where we were, but how you could get back to where you were going to, which is about four hours down ahead, because if you tried to get back onto the track you should be on, you’re only making it a longer trip, so you take the hypotenuse of the triangle don’t you rather than the base and the height. So yes,

the weather was a problem because we travelled quite large distances, so you were bound to run into at certain times of the year you’d certainly run into some very bad weather.

Something like that, yes.

Oh yes, you run into northern one then and that’s even a bit more troublesome because it’s not an area that you spent a lot of time in and you don’t know any of the stars to help you up there. They’ve got a different sort of set in the northern hemisphere.

Some of them are duplicated but not too many, and they don’t get the Southern Cross and we don’t get the North Star.

Oh yes, I thought you were going to ask me who won, and I don’t know.

Forty-five.

I don’t remember. I think we’d probably seen it in Balikpapan because we’d been there for a while. We’d probably saw it there before we took it over. See, the film was, in those it was the Movietone or

that sort of thing, Fox, there was a Fox one too wasn’t there? Movietone, that sort of thing, and it was just a film and it would have been shown as Balikpapan was a fairly active base. The army was there and there was a lot of work to be done at Balikpapan because all the oil storage had been badly bombed, not by

us, but by the liberators, generally speaking.

We knew something about it, yes. We used to very often listen into Tokyo Rose [Radio Tokyo propaganda host] while we were flying, and

Tokyo Rose was a pretty sort of a vicious a woman, but she used to give us a welcome, “Welcome, we know the weather’s right and you Catalina,” oh, I’ve got cramp.

“You Catalina’s will be flying tonight, and any of you that we catch, of course we’ll behead,” or something like that, which they did.

We had one chap, Charlie Williams, and his crew they were shot down at Macassar and they were kept for nearly six months before they were taken to Suva Bay for a ceremonial beheading.

Yes, they chopped a lot of individuals like that where there weren’t great groups.

Great groups they were very hard with. They worked them to death, like on the rail and that sort of thing, but smallish groups they just got rid of them. Gough Hensworth, he’s the pilot in on of those photos I’ve got in the office, which I’ll show you, he was shot down during the Coral Sea Battle. He was still radioing the disposition

of the ships when they finally got him. He was, we don’t know about the crew. We’ve heard different reports but none of them were substantiated but he was beheaded some time later in Rabaul. They took him all the way back to Rabaul. So they did it as, “We told you this was going to happen, now.” So we used to listen into her and

she played some good music as well in between times, but there was no Australian station to listen to.

Yeah, when we were flying to the target and she was telling us, “The weather is nice so you’ll be out there today. If we catch any of you, we’ll lop your heads off.”

It is.

I think practically all of the

crews would have listened into Tokyo Rose.

I think you knew it was inevitable. You knew it had happened but you also knew that the chance of you being taken alive was slight, more chance if you crash you were going to be killed anyway, which is probably the

better way to go.

Yeah, I don’t know what his name was either. My log book doesn’t show but we took him over to Jesselton, which is now Kinabalu, they renamed it. We just

took him over, I guess to have a look at the area. Jesselton wasn’t very far away and Vacy, I think Vacy was killed in Cairns – no, it was the officer commanding, or the general officer commanding the 9th Division. Yeah, we often carried a celebrity, I suppose, to

some of these places.

Well we took a scientific group at one stage, from Darwin to Champagne Islands, wherever they are, I forget. But we didn’t ourselves but a lot of them were involved with taking

people for the various surrender signings. They used Catalinas for transport but we never got one of those jobs.

I don’t know.

I never went to Thursday Island.

Oh yes, yes, I only put that in because that was the longest trip we ever did. That was 22 hours.

Yes.

A bit, I’m not sure. I’m not sure but we certainly would have had enough for another couple of hours, I would think. You see once you do that, once you go on a search, we were looking for a ship. Now once you go on

a search you’re cutting your power back, you’ve got no extra load, you’ve got no armament so everything is lightened down, and that gives you a better, so you’re going slower because there’s no great hurry if you’re searching and having no armament would give you considerably more fuel. Because when

we doing our 18-hour trips there was still fuel left, we were carting 4,000 pounds of mines to the target and we were carting, 99 times out of 100, we were carting ammunition both ways because we didn’t use it. There were some crews that used to go and

shoot up a bit of shipping and villages, and we didn’t think it was the sensible thing to do anyway because you might have needed those people, but there’s always some cowboys that write their own way of doing things.

But yeah, we didn’t find that boat either.

A coastal, one of the river boats that had been reported missing, and we covered a fair bit of the Gulf. Very hard to find. From Rathmines at one stage we spent I don’t know how long,

probably a full day, looking for the Ramji. The Ramji was an ocean racing yacht coming from New Zealand, and the area we were looking for it in was 100 miles away from where it made its landfall, that’s how inaccurate their description of where they were, or where they were heading was.

Yeah, some of the others were never rescues at all. See what we used to do during the war-time part, we did a few trips. We’d fly up and stand off Timor, 50 or 60 miles, while

the Liberators or Mitchells were bombing it, just to be available if they crashed, but nine times out of 10 they wouldn’t. The guy that’s my secretary, he’s 87, he’s the secretary of the Catalina Club, and I’m the president and he was in a rescue. He’s a pilot and he

was in a rescue of a Liberator or a Mitchell crew, might have been a Beaufort, one of those anyway, two-engine light bomber, and they were that close in that one of the crew men, Bill Hasty, was hit by a rifle shot. They were that close into the beach picking these guys up, so that was another role. We did that and

we also did that with Celebes. We had one guy, one guy was hit at Macassar, Cliff Hull, and he was, he lost both motors. He lost one and he was struggling on the other one and it went and he landed about 20 miles off the coast of Macassar and they worked, his engineers

worked all night trying to get one motor going because they were drifting into the coast and they were in a very short distance, I don’t know exactly what, when they managed to start it up and they went away again. They were picked up the following day by Armaneti, and he was a Swiss French

lady killer, lovely guy, lovely guy, but he went down right on the coast of Macassar in daylight and picked them up. Those were the sorts of things that you’d be on standby to do, but if you were lucky it never came up because you’d prefer not to be doing those sorts of landings in roughish water. It wasn’t very interesting, and Armaneti, after the

war, went back to Switzerland and he was flying with Swiss Air and he was the first, he was the skipper of the first aircraft blown out of the sky by a bomb, planted in the luggage. He’d been flying with them for about two and a half years and up he went

after going through a lot, which was rather miserable, wasn’t it?

Over water?

Oh yes, yes, certainly. I mean,

you’ve got probably an 80-percent chance, and you’ve no chance if you’re in a land plane, yes, certainly. But the rough water, you know what a stall is? You know when they stall, that’s the plane, and they come in at that angle, that’s a stall and they come in, and in rough water they land and this part hits first

and then everything gets thrown forward. Well, you knock a few rivets out and you may break a float off or something like that off if you’re unlucky but you get down. But you can’t normally under those circumstances because whilst you’ve still got flying speed, the next wave you get thrown up into the air and you’ve got no flying speed and you’re just a hopeless mess. It’s a rough landing, but it certainly can be done.

In fact, they’re trained in that, the pilot is trained in that. We used to, from OTU, we used to go to either Broken Bay or Port Stephens and they went there just to do that, to practise landing in rough water. In fact, one guy there,

Tubby Higgins, he went in and they were all killed at Port Stephens doing it, but that was part of our training as a crew, to be there while the skipper made an attempt to get down under bad conditions.

Yeah, they got killed, yeah.

Yeah.

Yes, what we did was, Keith Rundle was, they called him the a RAAF searcher party. He had all the documentation of all the planes that were missing in that New Guinea area and across as far as Ambon.

And he had all the engine numbers and they were identified and they had an identifying number on the air frame too, so if any wreckage was available he had a chance of at least saying, “This is such and such an aeroplane,” and he talked to the natives and that sort of thing and find out. We were the crew and we were away for three months. We went from Townsville. We went up to Biak.

Do you know Biak? Well Biak is a fairly big island on the north coast of what is now the Indonesian part of New Guinea, and we went up. We set up base at Biak and we did about 28 landings in all sorts of uncharted water. We would fly around and Keith Rundle would see a native village and he’d

say, “I’d like to talk to them.” So we’d land, after looking to see that there were no logs floating around because those places, normally you have your crash boat sweep the water and make sure that it’s alright, but you can’t when you’re away like that. And Keith had a Warrant Officer Cockling, who had a Queen Wilhelmina Medal, and he was a Indonesian and he would

have been an Indonesian now. The Queen Wilhelmina Medal was equivalent to the Victoria Cross, the Dutch one, and he was the interpreter and they’d go down and they’d talk to the natives and find out if they had any knowledge of any crashed aeroplanes or anything like that and then any information they got they would follow up and do it. They did a three-day walk at one stage and they found what the natives

had told them about. They were extra Japanese petrol tanks, wing tanks. Once they emptied them they used to throw them off, so their information wasn’t very good at times, but we did find the remains of different ones. We did about three or four

days on canoes, native canoes in crocodile country, and we were the passengers, the natives were rowing, and the tide was so strong it took them about two days to get about 30 miles, but we found the aeroplane that had been reported there but it was an American one as it turned out. We found the, he had a roving commission

for the war crimes also. He found the grave of a Beaufighter crew with the head of the two, the Beaufighters had two crew and both their heads were down at their feet. They’d been beheaded before they were buried and he dug that up, had the natives dig it up anyway. He didn’t clean up the ones that we were interested in because we had a couple of Catalinas,

in fact, Warren Rose used to be my bridge partner and he went at Manokwari and we really looked fairly hard for that. You never knew whether they actually got to the target or not of course because New Guinea was notoriously dangerous mountains, and clouds would come in and they’d just fill the valleys and

not a good place to be flying overland. Yes, we went to, they would only be names to you but they were Babu, Ambon, Sagan, Manokwari, Biak, all those places up around there that we had been operating in, and not only us but also Beaufighters and those sort of planes that were

missing in the area. He had notes on where they should be and he went to the natives and started talking to them in the hope that he could get something out of it but didn’t get a great lot, but we were away three months.

Yes, I suppose it was, but he was an amazing person and I think you’d have to be like him to be able to do it, and I think, I wonder at times whether they were showing the flag rather than expecting any great results,

because it’s already, it was 1947.

It’s already…lolly?

It was already a fair way. It was just trying to make a closure. They found one that he missed. We’d been up there looking for it and they found one only about two or three years

ago at Ambon. They had a big ceremony up there. He’d hit a hill at Ambon. Now we spent a fair amount of time at Ambon with him trying to find out what he could about that particular plane, but it was just found by someone walking through the jungle. You could walk past one that was the other side of the street up

there and you wouldn’t see it up there of course, and the jungle grows again so quickly after it was broken down.

Well we spent most of our, our main base was on Biak because we had an amphib and it had a big, Biak

had a nice big strip, a coral strip, and it was a sort of a Dutch, the Dutch still owned it then and the Dutch had an administration there. There was all the facilities at Biak and at Manokwari we spent about a week because we looked around that area for a couple that he suspected were in that area.

And Babu we were about a week, Hollandia we were about a week, but each time we’d go back to Biak because that’s where the, and there was a bit of assistance there too because we had to borrow a tyre from, the tyre, we busted one.

I never had very much to do with them, and I’d be wrong

to make too much of a statement. They didn’t have a very good, the colonial Dutch never had a very good name but nor did the Portuguese, and that’s why it was so easy for the Indonesians to take it over there, take over all of that area, because the Dutch didn’t have too many friends and the Portuguese didn’t have any, I don’t think. They weren’t good colonial people, but I don’t

think the British were in some parts either, were they? From, history tells us?

Yes.

Yes.

Well in PMG, this is before 1975, in 1971 I was appointed the superintendent of personnel in PMG and then in 1975 the PMG broke up into Telecom and Australia Post and I

chose to go with Telecom rather than Australia Post and I was appointed the chief manager of human resources, which was the same sort of functions as personnel except we took on quite a lot more because we no longer had

Public Service Board running interference on us. We were more masters of our own destiny, whereas previously we had the Public Service Board looking over our shoulder and in many cases exercising the approvals for things that we could only recommend. Well that all changed and we took on the complete role and it was a very interesting stage really.

Not now I couldn’t.

No, they came to Cairns but not to Darwin.

Oh look, I got back a fair bit. Things were easier to handle then. There was always traffic between Brisbane and the north and I could get

away. Yeah, it was alright, and then the other one was born, Wendy. Wendy was born then in 1950 and I only have the two daughters. Two daughters and Lynne’s in Adelaide, well, in the Hills, the Adelaide Hills, and she has three children and

I’ve got two great-grandchildren, that’s right, two great-grandchildren there. And Wendy lives in Christchurch with her daughter, and her daughter has got one child and another one pending.

Each club, each state I should say, each state has a club except Tasmania. Ours was formed in 1945, I was still in the air force then, obviously. Victoria was the first one and they also started in 1945, and we followed very closely afterwards. We had a

national committee and the national committee looked after things of general interest and particularly reunions, and I was one of the two Queensland delegates to the national reunions things during the ‘90s, and when Val Lucas, our president, died in ’99, I then moved on and

since then I’ve been the president of the Catalina Club. We have a reunion, or we have had up to date a reunion every two years all over the place. Been to Perth, Adelaide twice, Nelson Bay fairly frequently because it was handy to Rathmines, and we were able to call in there.

We’ve had two in Queensland on the coast here, Geelong, all over. We get an occasional visitor. We’ve often had visitors from America, particularly people who’ve been rescued by Catalinas that keep in touch and they come out. We didn’t have one

this year in Adelaide but the last one we had at Nelson Bay we had an American and his daughter and wife I think. I’m not sure. Gee, I should remember that. He’d been picked up in New Guinea. I think he was on the

dodge around the place for nearly nine months before they managed to recover him. A lot of memories those people. Another one was picked up with Terry Duigan, the guy that I went to Noumea with. He picked him up and he was an American fighter that got picked up out of the drink. We had a lot of people picked up out of the drink, different ones.

Not terribly. I’ve got a very good secretary considering he’s an old, he’s, as I say he’s 87. We work well together, and apart from organising the Anzac Day service that we go to, we had a member

who was at one stage the chairman of the BACT and he organised us to have a post-march function out at Doomben Racecourse, and he’s dead now, but he’s continued that and we go there every year after the march. I don’t march any longer because I’ve got

stents in the heart and got a bit of a problem there. A couple of times they’ve had to put stents in and the march is just a bit too much for me, but I go for the fellowship part. We also used to but I think it’s folded now, go to the air force one. They had a march to

the memorials right opposite the Treasury Casino there, and apart from that, usually I’ve been to every…but last year I missed the reunion at Lake Boga, of all places. I wanted to go but I was in hospital. But we don’t do all that much, and I send out two

or three newsletters a year. I get the information from all the other states and I let them know who’s left us, and there’s a column on that nowadays, unfortunately.

Well you expect it. Anyone that hasn’t

is really, I guess, fortunate because the situation has changed so much. Like, 20 years ago people weren’t living to their early 80s. Now I’m 83. My mother lasted until she was 99 and seven months, and maybe I have got her genes because my father died at 65, but yeah.