Australians at War Film Archive

Well I was born Robert Keith Johnstone

in Haberfield in Sydney. My father had just come back from World War I and he brought an English bride back on a warship with all the brides. And after six months we moved to Concord where I spent all my life until the time I was married. I went to Concord Public School. I was a kid living through the Depression years and then I went to high school at Ashfield for two years

and then another final year in the Sydney Technical College. I then was fortunate enough in the Depression to gain an apprenticeship in the NSW [New South Wales] Government Railways. It was like winning the lottery in those days to get a job, so I spent almost five years in the Eveleigh locomotive workshops working on steam locomotives.

It was the biggest industrial undertaking in the southern hemisphere. It employed 4,000 people and 30 acres of shops, workshops, and when I got to my final year I decided what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a designer and as such I was attending lectures at night at the Sydney Technical College to gain a diploma in mechanical engineering. So in the middle of my last year the war had started.

I had been called up and I went to a drill hall at Homebush and I went in a queue. And at the end of it after medical examinations and everything we had to go on a queue and a man in civilian clothes sat at a table and he took the card of everyone and read it and he would tell them where to report to army duty. My turn came and I gave him my card, he read it and he stamped the word ‘exempt’ across it –

the railways was a protected undertaking. So there I was back in the workshops again. Now in my final year they allowed apprentices who were doing a diploma course to do three months in the design office. I was in a small design office there and one morning a well-dressed gentleman came in and he opened the door and went across to the designs engineer who directed him over to me, and the man introduced himself as the Chief Designs Engineer

from the electrical branch railway housing Wynyard. He asked me a lot of quiz questions and then he left. A couple of days later I received a letter from him to start work as a mechanical engineer in the electrical branch of the railway in Railway House in Wynyard. The first day I started was 1st December 1941 and I found they told me I would be working in the radar section

and I had no idea what that meant. The young engineer that I had to work with explained to me. He said, “We are working in cooperation with the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. These physicists reckon they can send a high-powered beam out into the atmosphere and if that hit an aeroplane that would be reflected back to the point of emission.

If this happened they could determine how far away the aeroplane was, in what direction it was flying, at what speed it was flying and at what height it was flying. If this turns out to be true it’s going to give us a hell of an advantage in a wartime situation.” So then I found myself involved in the design of Australia’s first experimental radar set. They put it to a test at an army site at Dover Heights

manned by army personnel and in it’s first two minutes of operation it picked up a plane 62 miles away. Well we thought this was wonderful. This was a real breakthrough. And from then on I worked on radar right through the war years. We developed mobile radar units for all the forces including the Allies, the Americans and the New Zealanders as well. Following that I stayed in the railways for a number of years and then I

was living out on the Cronulla line and I was working, I got a job at Balmain for a place called Lever Brothers. I worked there for 2½ years and then I saw they wanted engineers for a refinery that was to be built out at Kernel so I applied and got the job, but the big hitch of it was I had to go to Bahrain for a training program for 18 months in the Middle East

with 29 other Australians, all who would be prepared to come back and start on this new refinery which was to be built at Kernel. So I stayed with Caltex for 31 years. It was a wonderful career. My wife and I spent 1973 in New York and most of the time was spent at the refinery. The last two years on a Caltex assignment on the east coast of Malaysia. Then I retired 20 years last week.

Will that do?

He was in the transport group. He was a sergeant. He went from Sydney in 1915 to Egypt where most of them did. That’s where they all got tanned up and got a good name as good tanned Aussies.

Then he was over in France for most of the war and then of course back in England where he met the eldest daughter of a Brixton butcher and they married and came back on the troopship. Now well I guess during the school days at Concord the Depression started to bite in the 1930s and I can remember clearly kids at school with no shoes on during the winter. A little kid around the corner from us

went to the Narrabeen Home for Children. He was suffering from malnutrition. The people were on the dole and the dole was just good coupons in those days. And they were pretty tough years but it’s amazing how society adjusted to it. The times were rough but I talk to people back then and they all say, “But we were all happy. We knew things were tough.” So it was quite an experience to go through that. And of course this kept up until the war started. We had no money before that

but we had all the money to fight a war. Everyone got jobs that were left but a majority of fellows of course went into the armed services. I went right through the war in radar and they had given me specific instructions in radar not to take any drawings out of the office. I was not to talk to anyone about radar and if anyone asked me what work I was doing I was to say, “I work in the electrical branch of the railways

responsible for the generation and distribution of electricity for the railways’ four power stations.” Which was White Bay, Ultimo, Newcastle and Lithgow. The guy who was telling us said that everyone was working that and I was the seventh member of the radar group. We had 15 at the end. I can remember clearly during those war years if you went anywhere at night every second street light was out.

The ones that were left were very dim. Cars – and there wasn’t too many on the roads then – had blacked out headlights with a strip across where light could go out. The houses were blacked out at every window so it was a pretty gloomy atmosphere. But I remember clearly the night the subs [submarines] came into Sydney Harbour. The subs of the Japanese. I remember the shell landing at Newcastle, Bondi and Port Kembla, and the whole community were convinced

about 1942 that the Japanese were going to invade Australia so I can remember helping build an air-raid shelter in our backyard with people next door. We pulled the fence down so both families could get in there if any air raid. This is how people thought at this time, so.

He told me, he used to say to me, “Son if there is ever a war, don’t go to it.” He abhorred it but he talked about it a lot. The things they used to do in France. He had a lot of photographs. Horrible looking things. Horses with their heads blown off and this sort of stuff, so then he reckoned that the water that they drank was putrid and he blamed that for losing all his teeth early in life.

They couldn’t wash their teeth. But he picked up a bit of the French language so he used to talk about it a lot but he said, “Never go to war, son. It’s terrible.” But of course he met my mother and got married and didn’t get back here until 1919.

Well I guess as much as it affected all the

World War I people. A lot of them suffered with gas attacks and the Concord Hospital was built mainly for repatriation people with all the ailments that they got in World War I. Fortunately my father lived through it all without any sickness until the end and then he got Parkinson’s Disease. Whether that was related to the war years I don’t know. But he died in the Concord Hospital

actually.

Well she was ten years younger than my father and she was only 19 years older than I was and she had a real zest for life. She adapted to the Australian conditions very well. She loved the bush and she loved the beaches and she loved the sunshine, which we got almost every day, so she adapted very well but never did she forget England.

I mean she had pictures of different parts of London all through the house and I guess where you were a kid was the most important part of the world. She never forgot it and she went home in 1923 and took her young Aussie son with her to show off to her friends and parents and everything. I don’t remember going over but my first recollections in life are being in London on top of a double-decker bus which didn’t have a roof

on it. I can remember going to a park where there was a big pond and sailing little boats across it. She told me later that was Kensington Gardens where I did that. Another thing I can remember is my mother and her mother making a double bed in the bedroom and they gave me a penny to open the window and there was an organ grinder out there and I was able to throw the penny out to him. Those are my first recollections in my mind.

She verified them as being true many, many years later.

No. She used to tell me as a little kid that if anyone was to ask you what you are you are to say you are a Pommy Aussie, but I was Australian through and through. I didn’t have any, although I have been to London ten times and I love it. I think it is a charming place but no, I was Australian all the way along.

Well we had a War Service home it was called. They bought it through the War Service. It was a brick home in Concord and that was on the outer suburbs in those days. They told me when they first moved in there were all these paddocks across to Parramatta Road. They could see horsedrawn vehicles

and a bus going along in those days, and of course we saw Concord develop and all those paddocks were filled up with houses as time went on. And my father then worked on the Concord Council in a clerical position. I remember him telling me one of the first jobs they gave him was on the electoral roll for Concord Council. He had to travel to every house in Concord – well him and a couple of others – and get all

the particulars to make up an electoral roll. I remember him telling me one day he had to call into the home of Dame Edith Walker, one of the few millionaires at the time, and he was there about midday and she asked him to stay for lunch. This was a big highlight having lunch with Dame Edith Walker. She of course donated the land to the Concord Repatriation Hospital and her home is still on the Parramatta River there and it’s a convalescent home. So Concord

they imagined pretty well in those days, the councils there. It’s got more parks than any other council I think in Sydney. And of course as kids I had a group of friends, obviously. There were 11 kids in the family and that was like a magnet. And we all met there and summer time we all went down and swam in the Parramatta River. You’d walk about two miles and come home dead beat, but you would back up and go down again the next. So and we were in the

scouts together all of us. The scout hall was just next door or near to us, so life as a kid we thought was terrific even though things were tough.

I have one sister. She is six years younger than me. I had no brothers but I had all the brothers in the world across the road at the Morgans where there was 11 of them.

Yes. My first friend was a fellow named David Bean who used to live around the corner, and his father came back from war married. And the mothers, his mother and my mother, became friends. The house was identical to ours, but around the corner in the next street. David Bean became my first friend that I can remember in life. So we went through school together.

But the home was very modest. It had two bedrooms and what would now be called a lounge room. That was a room we could never go in because it was highly polished linoleum and had tables and nice looking chairs. And in one corner there was a thing called a gramophone. I wasn’t allowed to touch it but they would play it for me sometimes. They would get this little needle out and put it

the record on and put it on and play music. My father was pretty keen on classical music and I think that’s how I got keen on classical music from those early days. It was lino [linoleum] right through the house and in the kitchen there was a fire-lit copper bricked in, and every Monday morning every woman in Australia religiously did the family washing and

you would boil this copper up. They would soak the clothes overnight and there was a thing called a copper stick. It was a bleached pole. And they would put it into the washing and lift it over into the hot water and boil it for a while and then put it back in the tubs. And first of all you hand wring it, but later on you got a wringer that fitted on the top of the copper and you could wind it and get most of the water out. Mum would then lump the whole basket full of washing out to the line and it was spread across the yard at the back and pivoted on

two poles. And no, during the Depression years there were people going along the streets calling out, “Clothes props!” Or another one would call out, “Rabbit-oh!” And what this was people would go out into the bush just out of Sydney and cut these saplings with a fork on the end and they would be used to prop under your clothesline to stop the clothes from touching the ground. So a rabbit-oh was a guy that went around and he had someone in the family

trapping rabbits and he would clean them and would go around selling them. I think everyone in Sydney would have rabbit pie once a week in those days. Of course these guys were trying to keep down a living and not being able to get work. I saw families ejected from homes because they couldn’t pay the rent and sometimes the bailiff would put all their furniture on the footpath because there was nowhere else for them to go. And then others would do a moonlight flit. They knew they owed

money and knew they couldn’t pay it so about midnight they would get someone they knew who had a horse and cart and load it up and take the stuff away. That was quite common in the Depression years.

Yes. One of the chores was to go to the shop every day. You see in those days we didn’t have… Refrigerators hadn’t been invented so of course meat didn’t keep long and you had to go to the butcher every day. And the guy

who you got the milk off would call around in a cart every day and it was a certain type of cart with two taps sticking out the back. He would… You would leave your billy can out the front, he would fill it up for a pint, a quart or whatever it was you got, and pour it in the billy can and you put this in what you called your ice chest. Your ice chest was a wooden cabinet with a lid on the top with galvanised corrugated iron

sides, and a man would come around every second day with a block of ice into your house and put it in the top there and you would put all your milk, butter and things in there because it would keep it cool in the ice chest. Now there was a drain at the back of that that drained as the ice melted; it drained it into a dish underneath. God help you if you ever forgot to empty the dish. It would overflow. And that was pretty common in all houses. The baker delivered every day and he

came on a special sort of a cart. It was all horsedrawn vehicles. The baker would come every day and deliver the bread. The grocer would come on Thursdays and get the order, come back on Fridays with his horse and cart and deliver all the groceries in a box. Always in the corner somewhere of that box would be some boiled lollies. That would be the biggest thrill of the week. They were the only sweets that we got. So kids like me had to go to the shop every day for Mum.

The shops were about 10 minutes’ walk away. I had a young granddaughter here the other day and she said, “Granddad, when you didn’t have cars how did you get to Woolworths?” and I said, “There wasn’t any Woolworths in those days.”

Well

I guess the greatest worry. Well my father luckily kept his job. He worked for the Shell Oil Company as a purchasing officer. Although the wages would have been very low we survived a lot better than many others. Now across the road there was the Morgan family and Brother Morgan we used to call him, the father, he drove a horse and wagon, well four horses and a big wagon, and he worked for the Concord Carrying Company. He would go down to the gas works at Mortlake

and he would load it up sky high with corn bags full of coke, and then when it was full he would go, take the horses right across. They knew the track, the horses, all the way to Arnott’s Biscuit Factory. The ovens there for the biscuits were coke fired and he would go there and sometimes at Christmas and holidays and that two of the Morgan kids and myself would go with him and sit up on this car. We would go right into the gasworks.

Kids in this industrial situation and they weren’t worried. They would pile this up and we took them up there, but when you emptied the bags they would pile them up and you took them back you see, but they would leave a space and when no-one was looking they would put a full bag in and cover it in with the bags, and as we went back past Brother Morgan’s place he had a big bin in the back and the three or four bags would be tipped in. The reason they did this was they had the gas cut off because they couldn’t pay the gas bill.

The same with the people next door and the people behind him. Now they all built lean-tos at the back of the house in the backyard and they covered it in and they had a steel hot plate with a coke fire going over it, and I can still see Mrs Morgan with a spoon there stirring different pots and things and cooking their evening meal. Large kerosene tins full of boiling water for Brother Morgan’s bath when he came home

at night. And this went on for quite a number of years but it was all cut in the house. That I remember extremely well.

The gasworks were a tremendous undertaking right on the edge of the Parramatta River, but they used to chuck all the muck and everything you could think of in the world and it would all go into the river which later became with all the paint companies down there

as well the most polluted river in Sydney. I’ve been back recently and it was nice to see fish coming back up the river again.

A great proportion of them came. It started to expand by the time the war was over so a real lot of returned soldiers were living

in the area but of course, not all of them. At Concord School there were kids whose kids hadn’t been to the war and that sort of thing, but I think a great majority were returned soldiers from World War I.

No not a lot, no.

I know there was a Returned Servicemen’s Club in Concord West and we knew that a lot of people went to it, but I think that most people were that busy trying to get back into normal life that they didn’t talk about it a lot. The Anzac March was on every year but they didn’t get large volumes that went at first. This developed into a big thing a bit later on.

No, this was in the city. The

main one they go to.

Not at first, but later on in life he used to go in and with a couple of his mates he still did that were still alive. He would march, yeah. As a matter of fact he would get up on Christmas morning and put all his medals on his pyjamas.

I’m not too sure now. We all lost track what happened to them.

They all got medals for service and something for in France and that sort of thing so he had about four or five of them across here on his pyjamas. I can remember that clearly.

Well I can remember a dirt playground and kids playing marbles. They were a strong thing. Marbles had come in and everyone was playing marbles. Then tops would come in. The marbles would

would go out and everyone would be throwing tops on the ground and making them spin and then we got into cards. Picture cards of famous cricketers like Don Bradman and Kippax and all of those people. And I think a lot of these cards came in cigarette packets because most of the adults smoked and kids would get a hold of the cards and it would be a game. You would flick the cards against the wall and the one that got closest could pick up all the cards and throw

them against the wall and all those that came down picture side up he could keep, so that was a game sort of thing. Teachers. Teachers were pretty good you know, but I can still see the kids barefooted in school. They used to give you the cane in those days if you did anything wrong. And to explain what the cane was, if you got into trouble you would go out the front and put your hand straight out at shoulder level and ‘whack!’ down this cane would come on your hand.

If you were very bad you would go to the headmaster and get six of the best. Of course you would be in court today if they did that to kids but it was pretty well disciplined and everyone that looks back on it says that it didn’t do us any harm. It was a cruel sort of way to mete out punishment.

Only up to the 3rd class. In kindergarten and 1st class it was mixed and then it

was strictly boys in one part of the school and girls in the other part of the school. There was no co-ed [co-education] right through to high school. None at all.

I had to walk about 10 minutes through Concord Park. It was a park covered in big turpentine trees. There were that many there I don’t know if it was an original forest there. It must have been. So we would walk through this. All the kids would follow the track through the

park up to the school and we were that close that we would go home for lunch and go back again after lunch time, except on some occasions if Mum was going out she would give us some money to buy a pie or something. That was a big thing. To get out of the routine was a big thing. That’s my memories of school.

Every school had a little shop nearby where all the lunches could be bought. There were saveloys,

pies and cream buns and it was big time.

Even during the Depression there was always meat on the table every night. The usual lamb. Roast on Sunday. Every Sunday, every place, every house would have a roast dinner on a Sunday at midday and at night it would be cold meat

off the roast for tea time, and next day what was left would be minced up and make cottage pie or something like that for the next night’s tea. That seemed to be a ritual everywhere. A friend of mine worked at the gasworks later on as a young engineer, a chemical engineer, and one of his jobs was to find out the peak periods of gas usage and it was Monday morning with all the… By this time, later on they got gas coppers so it was gas copper time

when they all washed on Monday morning. The other one was midday Sunday when all the roast dinners were on. The roast dinners in those days should have killed us by today’s standards. They used to baste terrific amounts of butter over it as it cooked, but what we did we walked everywhere. We really exercised. You had no option. You just did it but boy, those meals would have killed us today.

Generally a sandwich or something like that Mum would make. I remember I used to have to bring my sister back in the last couple of years and I had a scooter. No one had bikes – they were too expensive. I had a scooter and between the two parks was a concrete footpath with a little slope on it and I would get my little sister on the front and we would whiz down and I used to say, “Don’t tell Mum or she won’t let me take the scooter any more.”

Well they are pretty much like today’s scooter with the wooden board on it and the handles, but not like these little ones that they have today. A bit more bulky. A little bit later when I had kids they had pump-up tyre scooters. That was an advancement.

Just hard rubber. Towards the end of this, when I say hard rubber I think of Brother Morgan on that

cart with those four Clydesdale horses and they used to use trucks. They called them lorries and the lorries had solid rubber tyres, not pump-up, and I used to see him going past in this and he would wave to us as he went past and he was driving and it just didn’t look the same. He should have been behind those horses.

Just a percentage of them. Not every kid but gradually as times started to pick up a little you would see more and more kids wearing shoes more often and they had scooters and that sort of thing.

Well we had a park nearby and we had no trouble getting a cricket team and football team with all the Morgans and all the other kids living

around. We marked out our own mini football field and we played test match footy matches or cricket matches. It was right next to where the Morgans lived so we had this big open space to play in. Cricket, football I guess were the main things. Yeah and Saturday afternoon if you could scrap up sixpence you could go to the movies.

That was really something. And the movies to attract kids they put on a ten week serial and every week there would be a bit more and of course the kids would go and see it and the hero at the end of it would go over the cliff in a coach and you had to back next week to see what happened, but the coach steadied up again and went on. This went on and you would see thousands of Indians rushing down hills attacking these white people, but somehow the white

people won every time. I’ll never forget them. So the pictures were a big attraction to kids on a Saturday afternoon.

Well the pictures. Let me go back to when I was about nine. My mother and father took my sister and I into the city – it was a holiday – to look at the first talking picture. It was The Jazz King

with Al Jolson in it. And all of a sudden this picture came on and the people were talking and it was a real step forward, and interval came and we were sitting there and the curtain caught fire in the picture show. There was a wild rush of everyone trying to get out of the pictures. I remember climbing over seats. I got my foot caught and finally I got it out and that was the first talking picture and it was at the Lyceum Theatre in Sydney.

That was in Pitt Street. I’m pretty sure it was.

Well they started off pretty plain but they got a bit garish after a while to try and make it look more attractive until finally pictures shows around Concord, Burwood and Strathfield. We ended up with an organ which would come up just after interval. A guy in a white tuxedo and

he would play the organ for about ten minutes. That was a big feature. Things were really progressing then.

It was sixpence for kids and a shilling for adults. A shilling was about 10 cents. They were that popular that people would book seats for every Saturday night. The big entertainment then was pictures Saturday nights or dances and that was the total

of amusement that there was for teenagers and grown ups.

I wanted to work in the railways as a fitter and machinist. Why? Because my mother’s brother came out from England when he was 15 and lived with us and he had come out because when my father was visiting them in London he

asked him what he wanted to do and he said, “I suppose I’ll be a butcher like my father.” And he won a, some sort of a thing with mechanical drawing. He was very good at it and my father said to him, “It’s a pity you weren’t in Australia. I could get you into the railways because my father is the machine shop foreman in the biggest machine shop in the southern hemisphere in Eveleigh Loco [Locomotive] workshops.” It must have dawned on his mind because he migrated.

His parents let him come out to stay with his sister, my mother, and he lived with us. He spent his time in the railways but he finished by the time I got there. I used to think that I want to do exactly what he did. He was my mentor. He ended up doing what I did, a mechanical engineering course at tech [technical college] and he became one of Australia’s most, what do you call them?

I just can’t think of the name. I’m sorry it’s lost me. I’ll think of it in a minute.

He was a prominent patent attorney and in Australia and that’s what he did. This prompted me to follow his path. I wanted

to get a diploma too and I got it, so.

He must have been about 14 years older than I was. Yeah.

He must have been because he was one of those guys he used to play with me when I was a baby. He told me once,

he used to say to me, “I used to pick you up with my mouth by the back of your clothes and I walk around the room on my hands and knees and you used to think that was great. One time though you let out a hell of a scream. I had some of your skin in my teeth. We didn’t play that any more.”

I went to Ashfield Technical School which meant I had to go to Strathfield and catch a train every day,

which was a novel experience, and of course this was a different type of school. They set subjects everyday. I had a thing inside the back of my thing telling me what books to take for what subject would take place that day, and although we did chemistry and that sort of thing we also did metalwork and woodwork at that school. So I did pretty well at secondary school.

You either do that or go to a, I forget what they call the other type of school but it was more for accountants and that type of thing. Now at Ashfield School I did the first year, they gave me bookkeeping to do and when I finished that I was dead certain I was never going to be an accountant.

Oh it was.

Yeah, it was yeah. The technical schools did the metalwork and woodwork.

Most of the western suburbs along that line. From Ashfield, Croydon, Strathfield, North Strathfield, Concord, all of that area went to that school.

Well after school that age we… I don’t know. We still went over in the park and kicked the football around and that sort of thing. I guess we did that until the war broke out and all my mates

started to join the forces. Most of the Morgans went into the navy and Mr Hitler finalised a lot of friendships at that time.

There was only one and that was Don Bradman. We used to sing a song at school:

\n[Verse follows]\n “Our Don Bradman\n I was asked if he was any good\n When he goes into bat\n He knocks every wicket flat\n There is nothing that he cannot do.”\n

Of course there was Kippax and Oldfield and all those old cricketers, and of course it was a big thing particularly when the Poms came out to play the test matches. My mother would barrack for England and the rest of the family would barrack for Australia. People were really, they couldn’t get home quick enough because radios were available in the homes then and they couldn’t get home quick enough to listen to the test match. It was, everyone was cricket mad. Not that I was ever any good at

cricket but I liked football. I played football a lot but everyone was interested in test matches.

Australia. He was an Australian.

They used to get a fair crowd and it was very cheap to go to a part they called ‘the hill’. It was the cheapest part. You sat on the grass

and the hill had personalities in it that went to every test match and they would be yelling out funny things and the whole crowd would roar. So the hill became a spectacular part. And I remember I went with my father in 1932 to watch England play Australia and they had a bowler there called Larwood who could throw a ball with tremendous force, hit the ground and then try and hit the cricketer. This was called ‘bodyline’ bowling. Well the newspapers had a field day.

It was really controversial. I can remember going there and sitting on the hill with my father and there were crowds of people all around so it was pretty popular to go to the cricket.

They would boo. All he was trying to do was injure the opponents and it wasn’t very popular. This fellow Larwood, who ended up coming back and living in Australia.

Yeah I’ll say. It was mainly these cigarette cards that were in the packets of cigarettes and they just had cricketers on them month after month. Well all the kids would save these of your favourite cricketers. This was a big thing.

Fortunately I had

been given a cricket bat for my birthday so that was the only cricket bat we had. Stumps were just sticks that we hammered into the ground and somehow we got a hold of a hard ball. I don’t know how but we did. And we had a pitch just near where the Morgans lived nearby and we used to play on that. Or sometimes it would be in the street. You would have a dirt tin there as the wicket and

sometimes bats were just sheered out of timber and just smacked around, but it was pretty crude. No-one could buy too much equipment in those days. I remember I had a cricket bat and it was stolen. Later I got a letter back from a fellow, and I’ve still got the letter, and it says, “Bob Johnstone. I stole your cricket bat many years ago,” and there was a 10 shilling note in the letter. No address or anything else, so someone had a

guilty conscience all that time. I’d forgotten about it.

That’s right. Yeah.

I can’t recall now but maybe I lent it to some of my mates while I wasn’t there or something, but someone just took it home with them and I didn’t see it again.

Very safe. No-one thought about paying too much attention to locking doors and that type of thing. Everyone was poor and it was pretty carefree. People walked out at night. Kids went to school through parks and no problem whatsoever.

I think this was one of the most wonderful things I experienced through the Depression years. My grandmother had built a holiday home at Katoomba and they would go up there every Easter for a weekend and the whole family would go with them. Kids hardly went on holiday in those days so I went year after year to the house in Katoomba,

to the house up there. I wasn’t crash hot on Katoomba because it was drizzly rain or windy, although down the hill from us my cousins and I would go down and there was a creek flowing and we could catch yabbies in the creek. We thought that was pretty good. That was the best part of Katoomba. Now at Christmas time my grandmother would get a house up Woy Woy way somewhere. I can remember the first time it was at Davistown and we went in this house, all the family. They used to have what

they called stretcher beds and you could fold them up and put them away. Well they all came out and there was family all around the verandahs and the bedrooms were all occupied and that sort of thing. There was no electricity in the house. You relied on a fuel stove to cook on and at night-time there was one kerosene lamp with a glass chimney on it. All the family would sit around it at night playing housie or talking about relatives and that sort of thing. That seemed to be the main

occupation of the house. But we thought those holidays were fantastic. Later on she used to get a house at Ettalong overlooking the water and that was the greatest. I thought Ettalong was the greatest place on earth. I learnt to fish there. You could buy a fishing line down at the little local store there for threepence and made in Japan because they were the… Nylon hadn’t been discovered by this time and the Japanese put out silk fishing lines.

For threepence you would buy this line on a cork and as soon as low tide came in all the sandbanks would appear out of the water and everyone would go down squirting for squirt worms in the sand. When you had enough bait you would go and through out into the channel and you would always catch fish, so I thought it was the greatest place on earth.

Bream and whiting and flathead. Yeah.

You could get four or five good fish as the tide went out. You fished off the sandbanks, which was pretty good in those days.

Take them home and the family would cook them, you know. Of course my cousins would be there and all, so when we all pooled together we had a good feed of fish for the family.

Well he had retired. He had been in the railways as a machine shop foreman at Eveleigh and they must have been on their pension by then, but somehow she scrapped up enough money. I can remember saying one year that this cottage cost 5 pound for the week – that’s $10 in today’s money – but she said,

“Don’t tell your father. I don’t want him to know I paid that much for it.” So that’s about what it cost for a week in one of these cottages there. And there was a rowing boat, too, so that was pretty good.

If you could get into the railways you had a job for life. That’s what it looked like and that’s what it was. People had been in there for years and years. I remember working in the workshops there and I saw a guy, I was working with a guy

on a lathe and he had been on that lathe for 40 years. I was determined I wasn’t going to be a fitter or a turner in the workshops and stay on the one machine for 40 years. That was one of the things that sort of made me want to go a little bit further up the line if I could. But the railways, to get… When I got into the railways during the Depression my parents must have heaved a sigh of relief. At least I had a job for life and most of my mates were out of work.

We just lived across the road; you spent most of your time swimming I think. I can remember Grandma and another aunty in costumes that came down their elbows and down their knees and they would go in the water and splash themselves and duck up and down. Of course we kids could swim anywhere. You could swim.

It was pretty safe with the sandbank out and the water there so we spent most of our time in the water, most of the time in our swimming togs, I think on the holiday.

I think my father gave me some instructions but we didn’t have lessons, we just acquired it. You see we used to go down to the Parramatta River with all the kids and we all taught ourselves to swim down there really. I remember you would learn to swim and you would swim a little bit and grab a hold of

the wire fence and then swim a little bit more and grab a hold of the fence until finally you could swim right out on your own. That river was full of sharks in those days. I saw a kid there throw a stick out and his dog went out after it and there was a big splash in the water and blood everywhere and that was the end of the dog. But the sharks used to be right up the Parramatta River then until all the pollution drove them out.

Oh yeah. It was fenced off,

a fenced area in two places there and they were quite popular swimming areas, yeah.

My mother did. She used to tell us all the stories about what she did as kids and we learned what the names of the big roads of the cities and the West End where the theatres were. So we must have accumulated a lot of knowledge from her

because she never lost her love for London. Not that she wanted to go back and stay but she still had quite an affinity for her home, London. She went back years later. They lived in Brixton where her father had a butcher shop and they lived in the top of it. And I never forget, when she went back she knocked on the door, her and her sister, and a fellow came down as black as charcoal and said, “Well what do you want?” sleep in his eyes. And

and she said, “Well we lived here as children. We were just wondering what the house was like.” And he took them through the house and they went through all the rooms again. It was quite an experience for them.

Listen. This was remarkable. My mother corresponded with my grandmother continuously. We would get a letter from them and she would send one back, but you’ve got

to remember that it takes six weeks for the letter to come and six weeks for the letter to get back. She had this remarkable thing of never forgetting to write to Mum and Dad back in England. And during the war of course they moved out of London to a place called Croydon and they wrote back and said that they had got this sort of a bomb shelter built under the stairs where they would…

…about the bombing raids in England, but you had to wait six weeks for a letter to come. The thing came they called food parcels. You could pack up a food parcel. Even though you were rationed with food you could buy special things and send them over there. Well the excitement they got in their letters from getting this food that they hadn’t been able to get for a long time really made a difference. So food parcels became a thing.

It was getting towards the end of the war at that time.

Well it took six weeks before you got anything from England and you would get the letter and reply so there was a 12 week relay between the two. There was no airmail in those days; it was all by ship.

Well we went by train from here

Central or Strathfield we used to get on to Woy Woy. This was a real feature. I remember my father used to put a handkerchief around his neck and he would be sweating. He would have to carry, you had to take linen, everything had to go, and carry it. So we had suitcases and we would get to Strathfield Station and we would help Dad get them all up on the luggage racks and then we thought it was a gigantic journey to get to Woy Woy. And what’s more you went through this great long

tunnel. As soon as you got into this tunnel, and you’ve got to remember that a steam engine is pulling this train, the smoke would start to come in the window and you would hear windows coming down like mad along the train and you would be breathing in this acrid smell, and finally daylight would appear and you would open all these windows and you were back to normal again. The kids at school reckon that Woy Woy tunnel was the longest tunnel in the world.

Well it was mostly across the Hawkesbury River and every now and again there would be a row of tents along the railway line. These were the fettlers that did the maintenance on the railway tracks. They would live there all the week and go back home on the weekends. And you went past, they would be yelling out, “Paper! Paper!” and they wanted the people to throw out the daily paper so they had something to read. You see there was no little radios

or anything like that in those days so they relied on getting papers from the people on the train to find out what the news of the day was.

Not really, not necessarily. You would have smart clothes and I suppose the clothes you took you wouldn’t wear up on holidays you see. They would be kept aside for going up and coming back. But I think my father used to wear a tie, too.

No. You got there in half a day. So you would get on the bus at Woy Woy and go out to Ettalong and have lunch when you got there.

I had a sister.

All my cousins in the family would get together. There were two boys, Lenny and

Mervyn. They were my father’s brother’s boys and they were about my age so we just had a ball every Christmas there. And the rest of them, my sister and a couple of others, two little girls and a boy, but they were younger than us. But the three of us were the same age so we didn’t have a minute to spare at Ettalong.

Everyone had a Christmas dinner. Now

the big thing was that you have a chicken on Christmas Day. This was out of this world to have a chicken, but of course as things got a bit tough you bought meat or a leg of pork or something that was a bit cheaper than the chicken so in the Depression years the chicken took a bit of a back step. Chicken was the chicken dinner for years and years, the Christmas Dinner.

Oh yeah. They weren’t as prominent like they are today. You would only buy it at Christmas time for sure. And of course you always had plum pudding. You would be cooking in the stinking hot weather but you had to have it. That was tradition.

No car, no.

Very few people had cars. It was not until after the war that cars became prominent. We had one aunty who had a car and occasionally I went up with them in the car. We squashed everything in and they had two running boards and they would be loaded up with cases and things and we would be all squashed in this car. It was a Morris Cowley, I can remember. Sometimes it would boil and you would have to stay and let it cool down a bit and then go again.

Very few cars on the road then.

You walked everywhere. Everywhere. We walked miles to go for a swim. We walked miles to go to the pictures or anything like that. There was no thought about it being a problem. Everyone had to walk, there was no other way and of course I guess it kept us pretty fit. There were never any people who were very fat in those

days. Everyone exercised well unbeknown they had to.

There was a little shopping centre on Parramatta Road at Concord, but the big shopping centre was in Burwood. Now Burwood was lines of shops right up the main street and that was Friday night, late shopping night. Everyone went to Burwood on the Friday night.

Crowds of people up and down and of course all the young people, the young fellows eyeing off the girls. That’s where they met so Friday night was a big shopping night. I remember McIlwraiths was a big grocery store where we would go and buy stuff. You went into there and it was all sawdust on the floor and the guy behind the counter would slice the bacon or the ham on a handheld thing and they would all wear big

aprons right down to the ground, and when you paid for it you gave them the money and they put a docket in with it and a thing came down and screw it off and pull a cord, and this thing would go to a little cubicle where a lady sat and she would take the money and put the change in the thing and send it back. I forget what they call those things but that was common in a lot of stores then. Shopping at Burwood was a big thing.

No, only groceries. And if you wanted biscuits then the grocer would come along with his ladder and he had all the Arnott’s biscuit tins up on shelves and, “How much do you want?” and he would weigh them out. There was no plastic packing in those days. He would put them in a brown paper bag and that’s how you bought them. But you could only buy groceries and biscuits and things like that in that shop. There weren’t multiple things like you have in today’s

shops.

Well if you had any money there would be lolly shops. Fruit shops would sell lollies as well and the big thing was to get a penny nestles. They were a little chocolate. They were called nestles then. Not nestles now but that’s what they called them. That’s what the shops were like. There was a furniture shop and a different

shop for clothing and materials and that sort of thing. In those days the big thing for women was to knit. During the war years everyone would be knitting furiously jumpers and scarves and particularly sending things off to the war to people overseas that needed jumpers.

Just about, yeah.

She had a sewing machine, a treadle machine that she treadled and she made most of the clothes, yeah.

Well she manufactured a lot of them herself. If my father had a pair

of trousers or something that were going to be cast aside she would get some of that, cut the material up and make a pair of trousers for me. Shirts she made and occasionally when things got a bit better you would buy them at a shop, a clothing shop.

Only my mother.

Not too many. A few Chinese but mainly they were in gardens. You would have Chinese gardens in different parts of the suburbs and they grew vegetables and kept to themselves. The only migrants that I can recall them were Italians and a lot of them had fruit shops everywhere. They seemed to get into fruit shops

and of course one of the big things as a kid with fruit shops you would go in there and ask them if they had any specks. Specks would be a bit of fruit that was deteriorating or damaged on one side and they would give it you. You might get half an apple that you could eat. This was a big thing in those days. And you would go into the grocer shop and ask them if they had any broken biscuits because handling in these tins and they would put those in a little paper bag and give you those free. That was

big with the kids everywhere. Giving them broken biscuits or the fruit that had been damaged. Specks they called them. Yeah.

They were pretty much the same. They displayed the fruit pretty much the same. I remember Joe the Italian where we used to go and of course he would speak with an accent. “Okay you want the specks. We give you the specks.”

They fitted in. No-one worried about them until later on and when I first started work I got a temporary job with an electrician. I was working in Campsie and across the road was an Australian fruit shop and, I remember this clearly, on the awning was painted, “Shop here before the day goes,” because the Italians were called dagos in those days. I can remember.

You couldn’t get away with that now but I thought, “What a terrible thing to put up. ‘Shop here before the day goes.’” You could read it either way but you knew what they meant. But the Italians. I can’t think of anyone else, any other nationalities that were prominent.

Well a lot of them were interned. I remember the young fellow Sam in Joe’s shop, he was there and somehow he just disappeared. You didn’t see him any more. But a lot of them were interned. I don’t know what basis they were interned so they suffered a bit. And I know Germans did the same but there weren’t

too many Germans in the community. I had my daughter lived down in South Australia and there were a lot there and a fellow was telling me his father had been gaoled when the war was on. He was held in a gaol.

There was a distrust. They were the enemy.

Could you rely on them or couldn’t you rely on them? Yet the older Italians kept on the business near us right through the war but the young fellow was taken away. I can remember too my grandfather lived in Haberfield and he lived on a street that went down to a canal, and then there was a railway line that came from Darling Harbour or to the city or wherever it went, and the Italians were being captured

in hundreds and they would bring them into Darling Harbour and put them on trains to take them to prisoner of war camps. I don’t know where they were. Greta was one and somewhere else. And they were in the Australian uniform but it was coloured maroon so you knew they were Italians. Well I’ve never seen people waving out of the train as they go past. They must have been tickled pink to be here in this country. Later on I got very friendly with one

who was on one of those trains and he loved Australia so much as soon as the war was over he sent for the whole family to come out here.

Overseas and brought here and put into prisoner of war camps.

My grandfather lived on a street. There’s a canal runs through, a big canal that runs through Haberfield

that empties into the bay at Parramatta River and then there was an embankment and the railway line next to it going along to Darling Harbour. Now they would bring the prisoners into Darling Harbour in ships and put them on these prisoner of war trains and take them out and take them to wherever the camps were. I remember that very clear. As a matter of fact the fellow that I became friendly

with later on in life, he was an Italian captured and they were put to work on farms too. They worked on farms near where they were encamped and the fellow he went to work for just took to him, and he had a wonderful life working for him so that’s why he sent for the rest of the family to come and migrate here.

They were beautiful. All lined out

and you would see the Chinamen. They had like handmade creeks between the beds of gardens and you would see them walk down these with two big water cans and they would dip them in the water and fill them up. They had a yoke and they would come up and they would water everything by hand as they went along. But the gardens were immaculate. Beautiful. But they really kept to themselves, the Chinese. They didn’t mix at all in the community.

Oh yeah. Matraville had a lot there and Kogarah had a lot. I don’t know where else but they were quite scattered throughout the community. That’s where most of the vegetables came for Sydney from those gardens.

They wore raggedy old clothes it always

looked like. An old shirt and trousers but they looked pretty well worn. And barefooted they would be and they lived in little huts on the gardens. Everyone said they smoked drugs in there, that’s why they wanted to be on their own. That was the common feeling throughout the community. Poor devils, they probably never had enough money to buy any drugs.

Not marijuana…

Yeah, opium. They were in there with the opium pipes everyone said, but no-one had any proof. That was the common feeling that went through the community.

No, there wasn’t. I don’t know where they went to school. But the Chinamen, you never saw any Chinese women. It seemed mostly men.

I can’t remember any Chinese women being around these gardens but there weren’t any Italians. Not in my class anyway.

Well you had Australian history and English history. Two separate histories. You had maths, English,

geography and the manual subjects as well and I forget what they call it but it was bookkeeping and that sort of thing. They gave you a couple of years of that but that settled me. I wasn’t going to do that sort of thing.

Yes. It was all about the explorers. The ones Burke and Wills and

that sort of thing. Old stories. And we had old history books with pictures. I can remember one of them with an Aborigine throwing a spear which had speared in the back of one of the explorers, so those dark people, they were just savages. There was no other doubt about that. No-one, they didn’t try and teach you anything about their culture and how they got where they were. Nothing. Just the heroes

with the explorers who crisscrossed Australia. And of course you learnt about the wheat fields and the sheep and where all that started to go because that was primarily what we needed for export.

I never had any contact. Oh yes! I tell you what, we were kids, we were about 12 or 13, and there had been a football match somewhere

with some Aborigines and they came into our park and these blokes stopped and they had boomerangs and they taught us how to throw them. They said, “Throw them quick,” and of course we were all throwing these boomerangs. They were the first Aborigines we had ever bumped into. Later on in life in the railways of course you got free passes to travel and railway people were the most travelled people because you got five passes a year within NSW

and one within Australia. We used to go to Nambucca. There were 15 apprentices and we used to hire three cottages off a Mrs Petergan. She would put the oldest crockery and everything else you could think of into these cottages but we thought it was wonderful. We had wonderful holidays and we got friendly with an old fellow, King Billy. His proper name was Billy Robertson and he was a black as the ace of spades and he would come around and say, “Here’s my Australian friends again.”

We would take him up, every year I would take him up a packet of tobacco, tobacco papers and give it him every year. “Oh,” he said, “you bring me some obnoxious weed again.” And that old guy was so friendly and he used a lot of English words which were hard to understand, you know, high, sophisticated words, and he loved it. Whenever we get him to talk he would expel these words.

So King Billy Robertson used to come and see us every year and that’s, there was a dwelling on Bellwood Creek of all the Aborigines. They were only living in huts then. If they went to the pictures they could only sit down the front and I just heard recently that the fellow Ridgeway [Senator Aidan Ridgeway] who is in politics say he came from Bellwood Creek Mission.

That was my association. I just loved Billy Robertson. I just thought he was a fantastic bloke. Yeah but no-one bothered about thinking about the way they developed in this country and that they understood the country and there was much we could have learnt from them in the early days. But the early arrivals here of course wanted everything done the English way

and these people came through centuries of doing it. The only way you can adapt to the country. We could have learnt a lot off them, but they didn’t.

He used to just wander around. When we had these cottages he used to just wander around and just come in and talk to us and he was a lovely old fellow. Really lovely. One of the times we got two of the young boys there, they took us out into the bush where there was a sanctuary for flying foxes.

Of course in those days we had rifles and some of the kids did, the young apprentices, and they would just hop up and shoot these things. There was thousands of them in this rookery and we would toss in and give the kid a couple of bob for taking us out there.

All the victories we had.

How good our fighting forces were. No too much about all the rotten things that took place in the war. Just the victories and where we had been heroic in certain parts of the war. Flanders in France and those sort of things.

Oh yeah but no-one went to Gallipoli to celebrate on Anzac Day but we all knew that Gallipoli was where it began and how heroic our forces were but they were placed in unbearable situations. We didn’t know that the English had made mistakes and sent us to the wrong places and this sort of thing. But I can remember

always seeing the pictures of Gallipoli with barbed wire strewn in the water and people getting shot as they got off the little boats to land on the shore and that. Oh yeah, Gallipoli was the big thing in the history books of World War I.

We were pretty patriotic

still then. We were very patriotic. Every Monday we would be marched around with the girls to the flagpole in the school ground and they would put the flag up, the Australian flag, no, the British flag, up and we would sing ‘God Save the King’. I remember, “I promise to salute my country,” or something. There was some little something you said to the flag. So when I was at primary school

we were still very British orientated. That sort of start to break away from… It didn’t come until much later.

I certainly was. I was in the cubs for three years and scouts for three years so six years in it. In the cubs I became senior sixer of the club and we would go on a church parade sometimes of a Sunday morning and we would go through the streets marching.

I used to carry the totem pole with the wolf’s head on the top and there were scouts there with flags and we would have drums playing and bugalists [buglers] and people would come out from their houses everywhere as we marched by, but the other kids would call us the broomstick warriors. Anyway I was only a little bloke carrying this pole and I was glad when we got to that church. But the camps we went on were the thing that thrilled me in the scouts.

We would go as a… The cubs, they would take us up to Cheltenham and we would walk about three miles out into the bush and have a wonderful day and cook out over an open fire our meal and play games by the campfire at night and then back home again. Those days and camps at Christmas time at Menangle for a week were the best part of my life that I can remember. So the scouts did a lot for me.

They did a lot for a lot of other kids, you know. It was something to belong to and to enjoy, I guess.

In a way, yes. During the Depression years there was a lot of talk about the progress Russia was making and there was so much talk about it

and everyone, well not everyone but some people seemed to think that they had the answer. You put what you can into the community and everyone gets the same back. Of course it didn’t work out like that and we understood that so when the rise of Nationalism in Germany everyone, the papers were full of it. You could see it was scary what was happening with this

Nazi regime and of course the Soviet Union were about to spread their tentacles to take over some of the countries. There was a lot of talk in the paper and people were thinking about Europe and what the situation was. You know, how many were joining with Hitler in their regime so yeah, there was a fair bit of thought about it all of a sudden.

Oh yes, yeah. Of course this was bringing this right to us in picture form. And the movies, I can remember going to the movies and the newsreel came on and it showed Neville Chamberlain. England had become scared and their prime minister had gone over to Germany to talk to Hitler.

And I can remember this vividly of seeing Chamberlain getting off the plane back in London and he stepped off the plane with a furled umbrella over one arm and waving a document in his hand and shouting, “Peace in our time!” and people all thought, “Boy, we have overcome the problem.” But it wasn’t too long after that when our family were having an evening meal and my father got up and turned on the

radio – and in those days it was called the wireless – one Sunday evening and the prime minister came on the air and in a solemn voice he said, “It is my melancholy duty to advise all Australians that Germany has invaded Poland and Britain has declared war on Germany, and as a consequence Australia is at war with Germany.” That was a real shock to the nation although not totally unexpected. We were immediately on a war footing then.

At the end of that year the 6th Division of the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] had left for Palestine and compulsory military training was introduced.

Correct.

They thought I would eventually go into one of the forces and I decided if I did go I would go into the navy following the engineer career I had in the railways.

As what they used to call an engine room artificer. So that’s what I thought I would do if I was forced into the forces. Of course the railways were later exempt, the technical parts of the railways were exempt from going into the forces. I’m jumping a head a little I guess now but in my last year of apprenticeship I was made a cadet engineer in the railways

and worked on this secret mission called radar.

That was in the early days before all the commotion came, but then everyone realised that we had to do something to stop Nazism taking over the world so people’s attitudes varied a little then. We knew it was a real problem

for society and it wasn’t all anti war in those days. To go to war to survive was a sort of thing they were used to. My father during the war was an air-raid warden. As soon as a blackout came they knew where to go and they have their pump for sentry fires and a hard hat and I can remember a gas mask on so he got involved in that during the

war, Second World War.

They had a local council somewhere. They had a local thing for training all these people in that area. They were pretty well organised. They knew where they had to go.

As soon as the sirens went. If a siren… They used to have mock air raids sometimes. You didn’t know. But if the sirens went and you jumped up and you put on all your

gear and went to a certain spot and took over from there whatever you have to go. And I can remember the night the Japanese subs came into the [Sydney] Harbour and I jumped up and got out of bed and turned on the light and he said, “Turn the light out,” because everything was supposed to be black and it was blacked out. So he took off then. But of course this was all contained within the Harbour itself. So, yeah he was an air-raid warden right through the war if

he was needed.

Okay. In 1935 I sat for what they called the Intermediate Certificate. The day after the exam was over I set about looking for a job. I was up early and I looked through the newspapers and there was only two jobs for boys

and both of these were in shops in the city. The first was in a furniture shop in Pitt Street named Simpson Lee and you had to present yourself at 9.00. Well I thought I would get there early and as I turned the corner of Anthony Hordern’s at 8.00, there coming down the steps to the entrance of Simpson Lee were a queue of boys. That queue went all along the footpath and up Pitt Street and around the corner up Goulburn Street. Well I finally

reached the table where they took particulars and they said they would let me know. I then raced around to George Street, Haymarket, where the second job had been advertised in a men’s clothing store. Once again I joined the queue and they said they would let me know. Two days later I got a letter telling me to start work in the men’s clothing store. I arrived bright and early and I was to serve behind the counter and run messages. The hours of work were 9.00 to 5.00 except for Friday which was a 12 hour day, 9.00 a.m.

to 9.00 p.m. and Saturday 9.00 to noon. For this I would receive the princely sum of 12 shillings and sixpence a week. Well I grabbed it for two reasons. Firstly, I was rather anxious to be able to contribute something to Mum’s weekly household budget and, secondly, it allowed me to put a plan that I had in the back of my mind into action. Now this plan was kindled by a teacher in the last year of high school where on several occasions he had said,

“What you boys want to do when you leave school is get an apprenticeship and learn a trade. If you do that you will be set for life.” Now you couldn’t become an apprentice until you became 16 so my immediate plan was to get any sort of job I could to get money, and this was all based on the supposition that further down the track I would somehow get an apprenticeship. So I started work in this men’s clothing store. Christmas and New Year went by and

at the end of January school resumed. I knew that I wasn’t going back to school but I didn’t want to give up on my education so I enrolled at night to do a Leaving Certificate course. Now after a few months in the men’s clothing store I thought I’d watch my pay, but maybe I can upgrade myself to a better paying dead-end job. I applied for a job in the local paper as an assistant to an electrician and I got the job. This was a vast improvement because

I didn’t have to travel into the city every day. This electrician lived within walking distance of my home. He taught me the tricks of the trade and I adapted to the work fairly well and after about six months we’d reached the stage where I would, he would drop me off at a new house being built and I would run all the black metal conduit they used in those days, pull all the wires through for the lighting circuits and of course, while I was doing that he was doing the same elsewhere. Well he was that pleased with this situation

that he gave me 5 shillings a week pay increase so I was now earning 22 and sixpence a week. Now while all this had been going on I applied to the NSW Government Railways and heard nothing for such a long time that I thought my plans had fallen apart and finally the magic letter came. I was to start work in the first week of May 1937 as an apprentice fitter and machinist in the mighty Eveleigh Locomotive Workshops. That’s how I started my career.

Yes I can. First of all I got on the train and I had to be at work at 7.30 at Eveleigh and there were swarms of people going up steps and across the overhead bridge and down steps into the workshops. It was like a fluid flow of people and I found out, I asked a fellow where to go for the machine shop where I had to report

and he showed me the door down there. And I went inside and as far as I could see there was machinery and belts but nothing was working then. All of sudden, I waited outside the machine foreman’s office and all of sudden a whistle blew. The noise of belts screaming and twisting as the whole assembly started operating and then a clerk came out of the office and

called me in and took my details and gave me a brass disc with a number on it and that was my number for the rest of my life as far as I was concerned. That day in 1935 there was another apprentice and in these vast workshops. It was unbelievable.

Well it’s still there today across right along the railway line at Redfern.

Well constructed brick workshops with arched windows all the way along. It covered 35 acres, the workshops and different sections, and there were boilermakers, there were blacksmiths. There was the fitters’ shop and the machine shop was a tremendous shop. Very big. And then you would as an apprentice then get

moved about from time to time to different locations. So and they also had workshops up at Enfield in Sydney, which was the marshalling yard for all the goods engines, and I was sent up there for a year and then back to Eveleigh workshops again. You couldn’t have got a better place to learn a trade. It was fantastic.

Well they taught you to use machinery

and lathes for turning metal and milling machines and other types of machines. That was the first six months and then the second six months I was located in what they called the new locomotive shop. That was another shop at the Eveleigh workshops. Here they had 36 new locomotives. Now locomotives would have to come in for an overhaul and

they were shunted into the workshop which had a rail right up the middle of it and then a fitter, an apprentice and a labourer would start stripping this engine down. You would start pulling all the connective rods off the engine, you’d loosen off all the axle boxes and then two gigantic cranes would get the front of the engine and the back of the engine and lift it up off the wheels and move it over to one side of the workshop over a pit

and that was then stood on forks of timber. Now the fitter and the apprentice and the labourer would strip all the parts off and then send them down to the machine shop to be renewed and refitted and the cylinders to see if they needed relining and things. Then as the parts came back you would assemble them all again and the locomotives would then be ready to go out on the road again.

Now this was the greatest moment of the apprentice’s life because when it was completed a driver and a fireman would take this locomotive right around Campsie and around Sydney and back to Redfern and the apprentice went with it. Now there were two seats up in the engine, one for the driver and one for the fireman, so the apprentice held onto the foot brake and just shook like hell as it went around. I remember the fireman

telling me I could have a go at shovelling the coal in, which was a pretty tricky thing to do as it was going along, and we’d stop the engine and feel the bearings and check to see if they were hot or not and go right around and complete. In half a day it would take and I was pretty proud to think that I had played a part in getting this monster back in service again. It was just great.

You could get pretty dirty in it. For instance when the trains came in and had come from the country in the front of the engine between the cylinders it stunk like hell because as they went along there would dead birds in there and locusts and things like this in this thing, but the labourers would get along and clean all that out first. Everything was pretty greasy so you got pretty grimy, I can tell you. But

the conditions in the workshop in those days were pretty good. They would give you a lump of soft soap every week and they would give you a sweat rag, a clean sweat rag and then you would get a kerosene tin cut in half and put a handle on it and every night, every afternoon, you would go and fill it up with water and that was your washing facilities in this tin. So at lunch time you would turn the tin upside down and sit on it and have your lunch where you worked. There were no

canteens or anything like that then. It was pretty primitive.

Oh yes. This brass disc. Now when you went out at night you would hang it on the board and after you hung it up this bloke would put a glass screen over it and in the morning he would lower it and you take the disc out. If there were any left there they hadn’t arrived at work that day. But people were pretty… It was right in the Depression and no-one stayed at home and took sickies if they didn’t really have to.

It couldn’t have been better. These fellows passed on their skills to the apprentices. Everything they knew. It was really a wonderful teaching thing. They really wanted to pass on their skills to the apprentice and work with them. I made some wonderful friendships with the fellows I worked with who were much older than me.

Yeah it was a wonderful learning experience in those workshops. You would learn to be a fitter but you learned to understand the nature of people working in such an environment.

Well the first day I was there I remember a fellow came up to me and said, “What’s your name?” “Bob.” “Congratulations on being an apprentice.” And he shook hand with me and his hand was full of black grease.

Well come in sucker. On the machine they had what they called a lubricant which was like a milky substance that would drip on to the part being machined all the time to give it a smooth surface. Well the kids would get this substance and someone would be talking and someone else would be filling up your back pocket with the milky looking solution. They were some of the things. Another thing was they had this gigantic press up in one end of the workshop where the blacksmith worked. Tremendous tonnage and

it could press metal out, but at school the press was the thing in the corner where you kept all the books and papers and things. So the first day they would say, “I want you to go up the end and ask the fellow for the key to the Davey press.” All the kids would go up there and of course all the people were up there waiting for it and they would say, “Well, here is the Davey press.” It was a great big press. They were the sorts of things they would get up to. Everyone on Monday morning came in with a clean hat made out of newspaper. I used to get the

Sunday paper that had Ginger Megs and I could fold it in such a manner that it had ‘Us Fellows’ along the side. You put this on your head to keep the grime out of your hair all week. There was no such thing as hard helmets in those days.

There was a special way to do it. It took you a while to learn it but you soon found it and you could make them perfectly after a while and everyone had paper hats on.

Peaked sort of army hats with a peak thing here.

It would keep the grime out of your hair. That was the main thing.

Yeah, everyone.

Overalls. Overalls at first and then you would have to wash them every weekend. They were full of grease and everything. I used to give my sister sixpence to do mine. Later on when you got up into a better paid year of your

apprenticeship you could afford to join the overall club and they provided a coat and trousers dungaree which was laundered every week and you paid for that. I forget how much a week but it was an easier way to do it.

Well it was run in the railways itself, but they had a laundry that would launder them all and you had a new set every Monday.

Safety first was placards everywhere and they took a lot of precautions to ensure that you did everything as a safe as possible to avoid accidents. At the same time they ran first aid classes. Everyone attended the first aid classes and you would have to go through the first aid class and have an exam

at the end, and if you got it you got a little medal for first year, second year and third year which taught you how to resuscitate people and how to treat cuts, broken limbs, put splints on and all that sort of thing. Thank God I learned it because when we first moved to Miranda with our little girl she fell in the creek at the back and when I pulled her out of the water she was going blue, and I applied the old artificial respiration they used in those days and saved her life. So they paid

off, those first aid classes.

Fairly few major accidents. There was a first aid room and they always had people over. I used to get little bits of steel in my eye. I frequently got that. Other people would damage fingers and that sort of thing but I can’t, I never saw any major accidents take place in the railway workshops.

Well when you are hammering steel lots of little chips of steel would fly up and particularly if it was case hardened, which is a way that they harden the surface, and that can be very dangerous because that would shoot off. And I know on a number of occasions I went over. If they couldn’t dig it out they would send you to the Eye Hospital in Sydney to have it extracted.

Mainly be magnet. They would put it in and see if it jumped out at the magnet.

No. No.

No glasses given to you. No safety glasses given to you in those days. No, people would be grinding away and sparks going everywhere. I’m surprised they didn’t get hurt more than they did.

Well

you got into more sophisticated work. You got into the tool room where all the fine precision work was done and I think all the marking off table where you would have to white wash the whole casting and mark it off and mark where the holes had to be drilled and everything through it, so this was getting into more of the engineering and design stuff. You spent quite a time on

that and that was quite good, but it became more sophisticated as you got into your later years.

Well I guess you knew how to get foreign orders done. Now foreign orders were a job you got done that you shouldn’t have got done, like one place was making salad servers. You would get some brass plate and file it out into a certain shape. You would take it up to a fellow in

the spring shop and he had a business going on his own at home and you would give it to him. He would dish these into a spoon and fork and engrave it all and he would solder on a brass rod and then there was, the first plastic I ever seen was called aeronoid. Everyone knew where to buy that down town and this aeronoid was coloured and it was

plastic and you would screw that on and file it in shape and then you would give it to this fellow down in the spring shop and he would take it away and get it chrome plated. Everyone in the workshop had a set of salad servers and the other one was making shoe horns. The shoe horns would be shaped out of brass just the same and then you would give it this fellow and he would shape it. You’d put your girlfriend’s name that you wanted to give it to on it and he would chrome plate it, so shoe horns

were a big thing too. Those were some of the lurks that went on in the workshops in the later years.

Yes, that was the first time I was confronted with the union movement. People would come around and say, “You are a new apprentice. You should be in the union and the union is working for you.” So I became a member of the Amalgamated Motor Engineering Union. I think it was about

sixpence a month for apprentices and there’d be union meetings at lunchtime and the crowd would all get around, but there was never any stoppages or anything when I was there because mainly the war was on and the war effort meant everything. But unions were there and well known and respected by management.

You didn’t have to, but not too many people didn’t and the reason for this. A mate of mine who was working as an apprentice said, “I’m working with a fellow and he’s so friendly and talking to me all the time.” And we found out that he had been a scab in the 1917 strike and no-one had spoken to him for all the years he was there. He was ostracised for working through the strike in 1917.

So it didn’t pay you not to be in the union.

It was a railway strike, evidently. This was before I was born but there was a big railway strike state wide. I guess it was over money, I’m not sure, or shorter working hours, I’m not sure, but it was renowned. The whole of the railways shut down and a few of them did work right through it.

They were really ostracised for years and years after. ‘Sent to Coventry’ was the name they called them.

Often yeah. I remember a fellow I worked with said, “We were all on strike and we had a meeting and they said, ‘We would like to announce that they are all down at the Rock,’ and everyone was cheering. There was only a night porter worked there.” Oh yeah, they talked about the strike

a number of times.

I can’t tell you but it must have been for quite a few weeks. It was pretty severe because they didn’t stop talking about it.

Well I was working up at Enfield marshalling yards at the time and on the Sunday

night Menzies had made the announcement that Australia was at war and when we got to work the next morning some of the labourers were missing and we found out that the railway had contacted them at home that night and sent them with pick handles to stand guard around things like water towers and things like that which they suspected could be sabotaged quickly. They must have thought about it early because it was all put in place and

I remember the labourers came in the next day and they said, “Yeah, we were up there but no-one came.” And then I don’t know, the whole country was a different world all of a sudden. We were at war and started thinking about all the young blokes going off and this type of thing.

Well I thought, as I said before, I thought if I had to go I want to go in the navy and work as an engineer and work in the engine room

of the ship. That was the aim. I would go if I would be sent into it. I didn’t want to go into the army. I would try and get out of that if I could. But I thought if I could get into the navy I could use the skills I learnt anyway.

Well I didn’t try to enlist because I wasn’t quite old enough starting to,

but when I was called up to report to this drill hall at Homebush there were dozens of other guys my age there and they were all put into the army, I think. And at that time the technical people of the railways were exempt because it was a protected industry, so I went in there for a day or part of the morning and back in the workshops again. When I got back in the workshops thing were

happening. The machine shops were machining 4-inch guns for the navy and 3.7 anti-aircraft guns. Nearby a large workshop was cleared out and new machines installed and before long they were turning out 18 and 25-pound shells and 250 aerial bomb. Now once they became established they decided to increase production and worked the machine around the clock on a three shift basis. Of course in order to do this they needed

additional staff and then it happened. For the first time in the history of mankind females entered the hallowed corridors of the Eveleigh workshops. It was the greatest joke of all time having ladies operating machines. They must be out of their mind. Well about six weeks went past and production increased and the work by the ladies was the equivalent of their male counterparts and at the end the biggest cynics were saying they knew it would work

out all right in the end.

From what I can remember they all had scarves around their hair and they had overalls on and wearing boots most of them, and of course they were being trained then to operate these machines.

They thought it was a big joke at first. What, crazy? Who thought up this stupid idea? But it worked out very well.

I can’t remember. They just seemed to adapt very well and then the ladies had to go on shifts and I don’t know. They just slotted in very well. When they started producing all these shells and aerial bombs everyone thought it was a very important part of the war

effort.

Yeah, they worked alongside men.

I can’t tell you now. There would be 60 or 70 I would say. But that was the start of women coming into the workforce really.

I wasn’t working in that section at the time but we could see them working there and it didn’t mean that much to me. They were producing these shells and it had to be done and there was a manpower shortage.

I think she thought it was great, and she could remember back to World War I British women were working on munitions and that over there at that time

so she assumed it would be part of the process here.

I don’t remember a thing in the papers. Of course a lot of this stuff was kept secret. They didn’t want people to know where these things were being made. The railways were pretty involved. They were making parts for Beaufort bombers up at Chullora workshop. They were making parts of tanks at another workshop and

there were some of the war efforts that the railway was doing apart from railway work.

Well I can’t recall. You just went into the army. Yeah it would have been. You went in on a permanent basis into the army and of course later on they gave you the choice to go into the AIF and go up to New Guinea or wherever they were sending them.

Okay. I got a call-up notice to report to an army drill hall at Homebush with dozens of other fellows my age and we were given a card with all our particulars on it. Went through a medical examination and finally ended up in a queue where a man in civilian clothes sat at a desk. He would take the card off each person, stamp something on it, and tell him

where he had to report for army duty. When my turn came I gave him the card and he read it and he stamped ‘exempt’ across it as the railways were a protected undertaking. So I went back into the workshops again.

I wasn’t surprised because so many of my colleagues had been through the same exercise, you know. I sort of anticipated that this was what

would happen.

What I was in, you see it was imperative that the railways supply locomotives at a rate they had never supplied them before because the first priority were the troop trains, and they were moving people in the armed services, just mainly army people or air force people,

all around the state so the troop trains came first. Then there was a demand for locomotives to pull trains to collect scrap steel all over NSW and deliver it to Newcastle and Port Kembla steelworks. They were required to bring grain and other foodstuffs from country areas to Darling Harbour to load shops bound for Great Britain. So the demand for trains was that great that people were discouraged from travelling and notices were displayed at railway stations

saying, “Is your journey necessary?” So that was imperative that we kept working on locomotives to get them out serviceable to move the troops.

Yes it did, yeah. We still worked the same hours. I think it was a 40 hour week then or 44, I can’t remember which, but yeah there was a pressure on to get locomotives

through quicker than we were getting them before.

Well there seemed to be big troop movements to various camps in NSW and these trains would be full of soldiers or airmen. Mainly airmen and soldiers because

navy troops were mostly on the sea somewhere and it was dramatic effort. I was reading a book that the railways gave us when the war finished, and the railway refreshment, which used to be on every country station to provide cups of tea and sandwiches or a meal, well those people delivered over a million meals to all the stations that get off at

a certain station. They would have to feed them all. This was one of the aspects of helping the war effort.

No, no. Not a thing. I wasn’t told a thing. I didn’t realise that the secret part until I was put into the designs office as a cadet engineer and then I got onto a secret project there.

All the people that worked there knew. It was quite open. But the word didn’t seem to spread outside anywhere. It was just a matter of getting the war job done.

Well when the war broke out it was obvious that the requirement

for locomotives was to meet the demand so everyone sort of put their head down and worked harder to get things done because the war effort was the thing. So it was, everyone worked knowing that what they were doing had to be done to survive this war.

Not a lot. Of course

we were on food rationing, we were on clothing rationing. All the windows of the house were blacked out. We dug this air-raid trench between our place and next door if an air raid came, which we anticipated would come from the Japanese… Everyone’s mind was on the war. The war effort was the big thing. Everyone just adapted to it.

Well there were three of us and with picks and shovels we dug six foot down into the ground and then we laid timber trusses across the top of this. We had a stairway coming down each end for the people next door and ours. And I remember the ladies came in and there were a little table they put in there and we had sort of a seat along each side which probably people would be able to sleep on.

And then we covered the beams across the top with galvanised iron and put all the earth back on top of that. That was the standard air-raid trench.

Well there were four in our place and the four next door, so the eight could crash in, I guess. You wouldn’t have much room to move but that was it. We didn’t ever have to use it.

Yeah.

Only the air-raid wardens had this provision because they were expected to go out. And incendiary bombs were falling in on London everywhere. They thought the same thing would happen here so they had to go out and put out incendiary fires with a hand pump and a little steel pipe. And if gas came they had the gas masks on, but the whole

community didn’t have gas masks.

There wasn’t too much at all except put a wet cloth across your face and this sort of thing, but there wasn’t the provision of any equipment to save the public. No.

Everyone did. We thought for sure

that the Japanese after bombing Darwin and the putting some shells at Newcastle, Bondi and Port Kembla we knew that was from submarines but we thought the Japanese would make some advance to land in Australia. Everyone thought it was quite possible.

Well a few people enlisted. Not a lot. A few people enlisted, particularly people who had never been able to get a job through the Depression. I remember a guy opposite us. He was dead keen on aeroplanes and he couldn’t get work, he couldn’t get jobs

and all of a sudden he went straight into the air force and thought that here was a chance to learn something about aeroplanes. And people like that, but not in large numbers at first until it became compulsory.

No, you could go to these… What do they call them?

These halls that the army had. They had been established for some time at different places and you would go to one of those if you wanted to enlist. That’s the way it worked then in those days. But I say of course National Service came in. You had to join that.

Of course a lot of them went in. The guys weren’t in the AIF. They were in the National Service and of course they got the name of Chockos. Chocolate soldiers. You know, that was quite quickly. And they would go across to camps for training and they would come back and the whole unit would decide to transfer to the AIF.

Well there had been a

musical play called The Chocolate Soldier many years ago. What it was about I can’t remember but it was just a nickname that they could fit onto these guys that didn’t volunteer but were forced to join and they weren’t like the AIF. They were just Chocko soldiers. That’s the way it derived, I think.

Yeah. Well my best mate was Mickey Morgan, and Mickey had been out of work at the time and he and I went down to somewhere in the harbour where a naval vessel was in dock. It was called the Waterhen and we thought how small it was. Mick was pretty keen. He thought he would join the navy and he did do that. he went into training and before long he

went overseas and in the Mediterranean he was sailing along on the Waterhen itself, this little ship, and they got hit with a bomb I think it was. And he said, “We all dived overboard and the ship didn’t sink so we all climbed back on board.” And he stayed then on different ships then right through the war. His younger brother joined the navy as well after he did and he was

a Chocko soldier. He got called up and he stayed in the military right through his career, so some of my other friends hadn’t joined up but they were forced into the National Service thing and they were in camp in Australia. I think at that time they didn’t have to go out of Australia. Just defend Australia. But a lot of them would say, “Well we want to be with the rest of them,” and the whole unit would join the AIF.

So when that happened with the Morgans and a couple of other guys in my street we just parted company for so many years. The end of a great friendship it was, really.

I guess they didn’t express it but I guess we must have been.

We all anticipated that all us young blokes would go into the army but it just didn’t happen.

No there weren’t because the people understood that it was necessary to

manufacture weapons and shells and wartime equipment and that we were limited with the number of skills we had in the country, so it was just accepted that we needed people in these industries to keep the war machine running.

No, people did get feathers. In remember a chap down our street, he was married and he got a white feather

in the mail. I could never understand why no-one ever asked me all the time that the war was on why I wasn’t in uniform. I was giving this talk that I give and a lady said, “Were you asked why you weren’t in uniform?” But I had been given this special answer from the railways about this secret mission on what to say if someone asked me what work I was doing. Do you want me to go through it? Okay. Well when I went into the railways the guy said to me, “Well

you are not to take any radar drawings outside the office.” Well they told me should anyone ask me what work I was doing I was to say I was working in the electrical branch of the railways and I was responsible for the distribution, generation and distribution of electrical from the railways’ four power stations, which were Ultimo, White Bay, Lithgow and Newcastle. The guy who was telling me this said, “Everyone in this office is working

on that. We are the radar group.” That was the answer that I was to give if anyone asked me. I was never asked for some reason or other. When I met Frances they must wonder why I wasn’t in uniform, but they knew that a lot of railway people were exempt so I assumed that they accepted that for the reason that I was not in uniform.

They were very limited for

sure. There was not the numbers that there used to be. I remember in, the end of 1942 one of the guys in our office. We had all been apprentices together, there was six of us, apprentice engineers and he was a scout leader or something and he trotted us up to all go to his scout dance on New Year’s Eve to bolster up the number of males that would be there. That’s where I met that.

Oh definitely. Well there was to a certain extent until the Yanks came and then things changed. They were in nice uniforms, plenty of money and they looked good and there was all the clashes between the Aussie forces and the American forces. A few punch ups. But before that there was quite a reduction in the male

population available for the girls.

He was a man with a couple of kids at the time. He owned a

motorcycle shop and they sold motorcycles and repaired them. And he was astounded when he got it because he thought he was a bit old to be given a white feather. But someone sent it to him in the mail. I heard of a few other cases but he was the one closest to home that I knew of. There wasn’t hundreds of these but some people wondered why they weren’t at war and sent them a feather.

They probably had some reason why they weren’t at the war.

One of the kids up the street from me went into the navy on the Perth and he was one of the first ships to be hit by a bomb from a

Japanese fighter pilot and he was killed, and the street was devastated that someone had gone, that one of the local boys had gone. Fortunately, a majority of them came back from the war.

Well we knew a telegram, they all feared a telegram being delivered to their door

saying that their son had been injured or killed and everyone was hoping and praying that no-one would come to the door, but it was pretty stark to hear it straight off. Someone delivering a telegram to the door. But there weren’t too many around our way that didn’t come back.

Well that wasn’t, we heard that because of the people who had been involved in it, but they wouldn’t name the ships in the news. You would just get a hint that a warship had been blown up somewhere and other people had been attacked on such and such an island or New Guinea up north, so the news on the radio was the big thing. That’s

where you got most of your information. And the daily newspaper, of course.

Yes. We had a pretty clear picture of the war in Europe because that’s mainly where it was in the first stage. And we heard about

the invasion of France by the Germans and all of a sudden we heard that about the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk and people just couldn’t believe. They thought that the next step was for the German armies to invade Great Britain. The world held its breath, I think, and then for some reason or other Germany decided to invade the Soviet Union instead

of Britain and they made rapid advances right up to the gates of the major cities. When the severe Russian winter of 1941 came in early that year and this slowed the war right down a halt and the severity of that winter swept over into 1942. Of course Russia entered into the war then and the people were then crying out. The Russians were then fighting the Germans

and we needed a second front. There was a lot of news in the paper, ‘When will we get the second front?’ This is the landing that was celebrated recently the Americans and the French. Of course the Americans didn’t come until Pearl Harbour was bombed in December of 1941.

We were shaken. We thought that Britain would be invaded by the Germans at any tick of the clock. You just prayed and hoped letters would get through to try and find out what they, what their situation was. But fortunately my grandparents survived it.

The Battle of Britain. They used to talk about the whiz bombs coming and things like that, but they had a pretty harsh couple of years in England at that time.

I was in the last year of my apprenticeship and I decided I wanted

to be a designs engineer and I attended lectures at Sydney Technical College to get a diploma in Mechanical Engineering, and there were about six of us in the workshops doing that. Now they must have had a shortage of skilled engineers in the railways’ designs office so finally I was in this designs office and this fellow came in well dressed and interviewed me an asked me a lot of questions and quiz questions and

some about elementary physics and some about metallurgy, and I answered most of them and at the end of it he said, “Thank you,” and left. And I looked at the designs engineer and he looked at me and I said, “What was that all about?” and he said, “I haven’t the faintest idea.” A couple of days later I was made a cadet engineer and two of us went into the electrical branch and the other six went into the mechanical branch working on a locomotive design. The two of us that went into the electrical

branch happened to come into this section of most secret work which was called radar. Out of the blue we came into this and we were involved, as I said, the first radar set was an experimental set working with the Council of Industrial and Scientific Research. Those physicists had found out how to send a radio beam out

into the atmosphere and if it hit a plane it would be reflected back. They did the theory and we did the practical design of this set and we completed it. But before we completed it we were getting near completion and we, Dick, the fellow, Dick, the engineer that

I was working with, said to me one day, “I want you to come with me. I’m going to see how the metal radar set is coming together.” We signed for a pass which gave us entry into Prince Alfred substation. It was a building just out of Central Station. We gained entry and there was this angle iron steel tower bolted to the concrete floor and on the floor was a large rectangular mesh antenna which the fitters were getting ready with an overhead crane to fix to the

top of this tower. I could climb up, I was supposed to design some brackets and I could climb up to where the brackets were. And so Dick and I did an inspection of the unit and talked to the foreman in charge and on the way back to Wynyard Dick said, “I reckon Wednesday of next week the unit will be ready for operation.” Well we were all keen to get this experimental unit finished and test out the theory of the physicists. Well

on that Friday we’d finished work and we were nearly completed when, damn it, we had to knock off for the weekend. We were all keen to get back to work on Monday morning to finish the radar unit off. But when we woke up on the Monday morning we had woken up to some news that was unbelievable. It changed the whole face of the war because while we had been asleep, over across our Pacific Ocean, up above

the equator, were the Hawaiian Islands and the United States had set their naval base at Pearl Harbour, and of course being the other side of the international date line the Sunday we had just finished was just commencing there and I think when dawn broke over the naval base that morning they thought it was a normal Sunday for a country that wasn’t at war. Early morning tennis players as the morning progressed occupied the courts. There was a 10 knot breeze blowing

and it was a cloudy day when at 7:55 a.m. countless number of Japanese bombers and fighter aircraft unloaded torpedoes, bombs and machine gun fire on Pearl Harbour and of course ships were like sitting ducks. Columns of smoke were bellowing from them and they blew up as their ammunition was hit, and in two hours

the United States had gone from peace to war. Well the questions we were asking that Monday morning was, “Where does Australia stand in all this?” Here was are with a huge land mass and a small population and a new enemy in our own backyard, the Japanese, and most of our fighting forces were fighting a different war on the other side of the world. So as we saw it the only bastion

between us and the Japanese was the British naval base at Singapore. Well finally it was back to work and by Wednesday of that week it was completed and it was pulled down and mounted on army trucks and taken to a secret location. So another weekend went past and on the Monday morning our boss was away at a meeting every Monday morning of what we called ‘the phantom committee’ and after lunch he got us together and he said that our

radar unit had been erected in an army base somewhere by army personnel and its first two minutes of operation it picked up a plane 62 miles away. We thought this was terrific. “Now,” he said, “we are to go into mass production as they want to place these radar units in strategic locations around the coastline of Australia. The railway industry will be taken over and their workshops will be devoted to the manufacture of parts for these radar unit. The Civil Construction

Corps will build us a large workshop on railway property just near Redfern Station and when completed this will be referred to as the Wilson Street Annexe. That with our own trades people and all the components made in the different workshops will be delivered there and our people will construct the radars, check them out and arrange for their despatch.” So, with that, preparations for mass production got into gear straight away.

Then you take a look at the war in the Pacific and evidently as they were bombing Pearl Harbour the 15, the 15th Japanese Army were at Kota Bharu on the north-east coast of Malaya and they landed at Kota Bharu against no opposition. Each soldier was in full battle dress and on landing

he was given an additional piece of equipment, and on that 7th day of December they started going down the only road that goes down the east coast of Malaya on the China Sea and their aim was to get to the state of Johor where a causeway crossed over into Singapore. Well three days later, on 10 December, we heard the devastating news that the Japanese had bombed and sunk two British ships off the east coast of Malaya. They were the

Prince of Wales and the Repulse. On 20th of August we heard that the Japanese had occupied two strategic islands in the Pacific, that was Guam and Wake Island. On 26 December we heard that the British garrison of Hong Kong had surrendered to the Japanese and so we entered the gloomiest new year of all time when 1942 commenced in Australia. In that first month of 1942 ‘the cycling army’ had reached Johor

and in the first two weeks of February they crossed the causeway and entered Singapore through the back door, and on 15th day of February the British surrendered Singapore to the Japanese. On that day over 15,000 Australians were taken prisoner of war but there was more. Four days later, on 19th February, the Japanese planes bombed Darwin. Everybody panicked. The real

extent of the damage was kept from the Australian public. The newspapers played up a big story about the post office being bombed and both civilians and service personnel had been killed but the real extent of the casualties was not told to the public. No mention was made of all the ships sunk in the harbour. The RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] base was frustrated not knowing when the next air raid was coming and they sent down to Sydney asking if we could send one of our

experimental radar units to Darwin. We did in a few days and we thought we knew that it had gone up there, some of the air force knew it had gone up there, but the rest of Australia didn’t know what radar was. So we felt sure we would get some feedback, but not a word. All we knew was that a few weeks after it had got up there that the air raids on Darwin had ceased entirely. So we were asking, “Was that because of our radar set? Was it worth sending up there?” We didn’t get an answer to those questions until 3½ years later.

By now…

Prior to that I was in a small design office where the designs engineer and two apprentices

did on-the-spot designs for the workshops, so it was getting experience in the design area of the workshops. They allowed a few apprentices to spend three months, I think it was, in the design office so I was about halfway through this when this fellow came in and interviewed me.

We were designing anything. I remember I was on the design for a thing for the foundry.

They were making what they call crucibles. They used to bring them in from overseas but they couldn’t get them so I was designing a machine that could make these crucibles. Things like that would come up in the workshops where they wanted it designed up.

Yes it’s like a large bucket made out of clay and other stuff in which they would pour red hot metal into it in the foundry

to pour castings and that. So that’s how I became involved in that design.

Well, mechanical engineering. We were covering mechanical design, heat engines, maths, physics and a few other things like that. It was like a university course

but it was the poor man’s course in those days at Sydney Technical College attended at night-time only.

Oh yes. First of all he asked me what I was doing in my studies. He asked me a few questions about the job I had on the drawing board at the time and he asked me if I was doing any studies and I told him. And this

was followed this barrage of quiz questions on maths, elementary physics and metallurgy. He just asked questions one after the other and it went on for a while and then he suddenly said, “Thank you,” and disappeared.

A verbal test, yeah. I guess he was looking to see what scope of stuff I knew about.

Yes he told me at the start that he was the Chief Designs Engineer for the electrical branch

of the railway office at Wynyard, so I knew who he was then. I didn’t even know they had a design office in the electrical branch at that stage.

About three days.

I thought it was wonderful. My aim had been to get as a cadet engineer in the railways and there it was; it came all of a sudden. I remember that 1st of December 1941 very well.

No, I got a letter. The letter said, “You are to start as a cadet engineer in the electrical branch the following Monday morning.”

I worked in Wynyard on the 7th floor for, well I was there for nine years altogether, but starting off right through the war years.

Oh boy, this was out of this world. They had airconditioning. That was never heard of. The whole building was, it hadn’t been built all that long and there were various departments on different floors all

occupied by the railway. Most of my mates went down to the mechanical branch on the second floor and I went up to this electrical branch on the 7th floor and then there was the ways and works engineering design office on another floor and it was mainly accounting and engineering in that building.

I can remember it clearly.

It was this brightly lit design office where about 50 engineers were working at drawing boards. I was introduced to my new boss, a Scotsman, who showed me to my drawing board and told me I would be working in the radar section. I didn’t flinch but I thought, “What the hell is a radar section?” And then he brought over an engineer with whom I was to work. This fellow’s name was Dick Hugo and he told us that he had to leave to attend a meeting at Sydney University but he said, “Dick,

tell Bob what radar is all about, what we were are working on and how we are working and make sure he understands the security that goes with the job.” With that he left. And this fellow Dick was about 35 years of age and he pulled up a stool and with a smile on his face he said, “I bet you’ve never heard the word ‘radar’ before.” I said, “No, I haven’t.” He said, “Don’t worry. Until a few weeks ago neither had I. Let me start from the beginning. About six weeks ago

the Commissioner for Railways was approached by the government and asked if he would provide a group of engineers to work on radio direction finder equipment. This would involve the design of steel towers and aerial systems. Now he was also told that this was for extreme national importance. That this experimental work get under way as soon as possible, so the Commissioner agreed and so a radar section was formed.” Now Dick said, “You are the seventh member of the radar group.

Now we were working in close relationship with the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research who are located at Sydney University and they have come up with this theory that they can send out into the atmosphere a short wave high frequency radio beam that will travel on a straight line at the speed of light, and should that beam strike an object like an aeroplane it will be reflected back to the point of emission, so they say, with the right sort of aerial

system which they referred to as an ‘antenna’. They say that they will be able to pick up that returning beam, pass it through a special cable called a coaxial cable to a piece of equipment called a cathode-ray tube. Now that cathode-ray tube had a flat glass circular screen and they say that aeroplane will show up on the screen as a white blip. But not only that with some additional radio equipment they will be able to tell how far away that aeroplane is,

they will be able to tell in what direction the play is flying and they will be able to tell what speed the plane is flying and at what elevation it is flying. If that turns out to be true it will give us one hell of an advantage in a war situation.” So that was my introduction to radar and all that he said to me was, “The first job I want you to do is to design some brackets. These brackets have to be fitted to the steel tower to support

a protection shroud around the drive shaft; as the antenna has to rotate we have to drive it around. I’ll get you an assembly drawing from which you will able to get dimension to start making a layout of these brackets.” Well he went away and brought back these drawings which had been stapled together at one end and he put these on my reference table and he showed me the first drawing and the second drawing, and the third drawing was the one that I wanted to look at but what had caught my eye on the three drawings I had

seen were the bold purple letters stamped on top of each drawing which read ‘Secret’. It was then that Dick told me I should understand the security that goes with the job. I was not to take the drawings outside the office. Don’t talk to people about the job and he gave me the standard answer if anyone asked me what work I was doing.

It wasn’t a book, it was a multiple number of drawings stapled together at one end and he just flicked through the pages, the three drawings, one after the after

Well it was an assembly of what they were trying to build. They drew it up already and it had dimensions on it so I was able to figure out where my brackets went and get the dimensions so I could fit them in.

These are what they had produced already in the few weeks they had been in operation.

They were different parts of the unit. I wanted the part where the brackets came in so I had the assembly of the top part where the drive mechanism was so I could get the dimensions and start making the design for the brackets.

The way he described it was very plausible. If it worked he said that, “If we can get this experimental radar and put it out and test their theory to see if it operates it will be a marvellous step forward in the war effort. Just imagine that it does work and they have this experimental radar set up somewhere and

it’s going around and around sending out its radio beam and all of a sudden a bunch of white blips appear on the radar screen. They are enemy aircraft coming in and as soon as that happens three things are put into operation. We call up our air force to intercept the enemy aircraft before they get to the target area. Each of our pilots will know where he is going to met the enemy, which direction they are flying, at what speed and what elevation they are flying.

The second thing we do is call up our anti-aircraft guns and tell them to point their guns in such and such a direction and precisely so many minutes enemy aircraft will be within your range coming from such and such a direction at such and such a height. The third thing we do is sound sirens all over Sydney telling people that an air raid is imminent and giving everyone time to take the necessary shelter.” He said, “These are the great advantages that an early warning system

will give us.”

Yes. Well I found out in the weeks around that radar was first discovered in England in the early ’30s. They had worked on it and

towards the war they had gone to another… Heat sensing was another thing they were working on. They had sort of put radar aside. But when England started to get bombed they developed the radar units and fortunately about this time some people from different – Canada and Australia and that – they had sent a representative over to learn a bit about radar and only one man in Australia, Dr Pith I think his name was,

knew about it and he got the people in the CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation] to develop it. They worked on it and got the theory going and that’s how we got involved. They needed a design group to design the thing.

He had worked in the electrical branch of the railways as a senior engineer for a number of years but they picked him to head it up

in the railways.

There were seven to start with but we built up to about 15 engineers at the peak of the war so.

There were rows and rows of drawing boards. People leaning over them sitting on the stools. Most of it was for the electrical part of the railways, but this particular little group of us worked

in there with them but nothing to do with the railways. Working arm in arm with the CSIRO to develop the first radar experimental unit.

No, it was a week before Pearl Harbour, right, that’s when Japan entered.

Well of course we didn’t expect Japan to jump as it did. We didn’t

think they would be coming into the war. So we thought this would be used with our forces when it got there that were fighting in the Middle East and that were fighting in middle Europe. We thought this was where it would be although we put it up to protect Australia, but we didn’t think we were too far away to be invaded by anyone. That was the thought at the beginning until Pearl Harbour; everything changed dramatically.

Very little. I can remember as a kid going on a Japanese warship when they used to come and dock in Sydney Harbour for manoeuvres – not with us – but they used to come in and we would invite them in and you used to be able to go on the ship and that. But while they were there, obviously they were taking note of all the channels and everything else. They probably knew a lot about Sydney Harbour.

I was 21.

I was with my mother, a kid. I must have been about seven or eight. I can remember clearly the public were allowed to walk on these warships. We were talking to the someone in Japan who could speak English. I remember asking because someone had written their names down in Japanese and she said to this fellow, “What does this mean?” and he said, “That’s just somebody’s name.”

But they were free to come into the Harbour in those days.

Well I was given little design jobs to start with. First of all it was the brackets that I had to design and several other things until I got more used to it and then I got into more complicated design

things and it was all innovative work. There was nothing. We decided we would send these units up into the jungle and they had to put them up quickly or the enemy might be near so they had to pull them down quickly and move them, so it was just thinking about quick ways of pulling it all apart. Quick-release catches and that type of thing. So it was a new type of design completely and it wasn’t, it was a bit unorthodox but very fascinating.

It was about two months. Someone came, our boss called us together and he said that the committee, heightened by the success of our original radar unit, wanted us to research the possibility of

designing a small radar set, one that could be easily transported and manhandled through the jungle. Well we scratched our heads and talked to our each other and finally the thing that came through was light weight. Whatever we designed would have to be strong enough to do the job but weigh as little as possible because they would have to move the whole lot through the jungle. So we started off then and came up

with a design of a square hut made out of lightweight tubular steel. And this hut was square and someone suggested, “Well, it will be like when we were kid and had a Meccano set. You pulled all the bits out of a box and then put them back.” And someone said, “A box! We’ll transport all the pieces in boxes.” We would make plywood boxes with cradles in them

so we could fit all the parts in so they wouldn’t rattle about. And everything had to be chopped down so the heaviest box had to be able to be handled by two men over rough terrain. So we got stuck into this tubular steel design and then said, “Whenever they erect it in the jungle it’s got to be on level ground.” So a decision was made to start off with four tubular steel trestles about 1 metre high at each corner of the hut and we would build the hut on top of that.

What they had to do was excavate under each trestle to get it level, so we started off on these four trestles. We ran four tubular square beams in a square around and crisscrossed that with other beams and where they met in the middle we put a bearing housing. That could be the bottom bearing housing for the mast that had to go in. We put tubular steel sides about 6 feet around the side and then tapered over to a roof,

and where they met at the top there would be another bearing housing. So this supported the mast of the radar unit. Then on this base framework 1 metre up off the ground we put a circular steel flap around because on this we were going to build another floor which would rotate with castor wheels, rubber type castor wheels running on this track. When we got

this rotating framework we decked that out with waterproof plywood, so we had a wooden floor revolving with a mast and antenna on top. Now on half of that floor we put tubular steel racks with cathode-ray tube and all the other radio equipment. On the other half of the thing we put three tubular steel chairs. Now these faced the radio equipment.

On the two outer chairs we put a little desk in front so the guys looking at the instruments could make notes and put whatever they wanted down on paper. Now on the middle chair. Well with every unit we would send a portable petrol-driven generator. This would supply power to all the radio equipment and it would also supply power to a little gearbox

which rotated the assembly. Now after a while we thought, “The enemy could be in close proximity and the last thing you would want is the beat of a petrol engine,” so it was designed so that you could shut down the generator and rely on backup batteries for all the radio equipment. And then a guy would sit in the middle seat and in front of him was a hand wheel on its side with a handle on it and he would wind that manually with a bike chain

and sprocket down to the drive shaft and that rotated the unit. So once we got this framework up we covered the side with tarpaulin. One side of course had a doorway to get in and out of the thing and the operators were about three foot up off the ground and a little stepladder went down to the ground level. One of the ideas of having it 3 feet off the ground you could create a draught to come up off the thing and give it circulation, and the other thing

was you got away from all the creepy-crawlies that live on the floor of the jungle. So once we decked that out and we had the antenna on top on the top bearing housing there was a 4 foot square like a steel roof coming out, and from that we tethered camouflage canvas that went out in all directions with hooks on the end and these would be tethered to tubular steel pegs that were driven into the ground. When it was finished and stood back from it, it looked

like a tent surmounted by an aerial system. While we were trying to design all this the Civil Construction Corps did an unbelievable job for us. They finished the workshop for us, which we called the Wilson Street Annexe, and in record time working seven days a week, working around the clock three shifts, so as soon as we moved in we had fitters and carpenters working there making fit ups

of the design until we finally got to this design. Now all of us looked at it and we didn’t say anything to each other at first about how low the antenna is to the ground compared to the original set that we made. Would this be detrimental to its operation? So then we pulled it all apart, packed it in its proper boxes and took it to the University of NSW where the radiophysicists were and it was erected there in an isolated area that they had and they could play with it and see if they could get it to work.

Well bingo, it worked straight off and it did everything that the giant radar set had done. So we tapered off mass production of the giant set and went into mass production of this smaller set which we called LWAW Mach I – light weight air warning. Well we started to churn these out at the Wilson Street Annexe and the air force couldn’t get them quick enough. Not long after that the army was knocking on the door and they said, “We need them, as well as the air force.” So

we made it for them, too. Now the air force decided that our boss, Mr Wallage, should go to New Guinea for a week and see the units operate up there, and so we came into work one morning and there he was in a high ranking air force officer’s uniform and off he went to New Guinea. Came back after about three weeks and he said, “There is an urgent modification you need to make on the structure. Somehow you’ve got to incorporate an exhaust fan. It’s just impossible

to stay inside this in a jungle situation with all the humidity, etc.” So we designed an exhaust fan and it was fitted in and they tried it out and that was the answer. So it was then called the LWAW Mach II because this took over from the Mach I, and every one that was produced then had this exhaust fan in it. Well we were producing these out of the Annexe there as fast as we could make them.

Not long after that the navy came knocking on the door and they said, “Look, we need early warning system as much as the air force.” Well this was more complicated. You couldn’t build a hut on the deck of a ship so this problem was rather easy. All we did was design a rotating antenna situation which clamped to the mast of the ship, and of course the power leads came down below to the operators working below deck. So now the navy, the three services

all had early warning radar. We were making these at the Wilson Street Annexe. We used to double check them because everyone realised there was no way we could let a bunch of guys go up into the jungle, put it altogether and realise there was a bit missing, so this mobile system worked remarkably well. So there we were providing radar to the three services. Now there was a time where the radiophysicists had us working on a different

radar unit. It was an experiment. The next one we did had a big parabolic antenna, you know, banana shape, and we would put that out on a big outrigger platform with two A frames about 15 feet by 4 feet and with a parabolic antenna and that used to rotate but also oscillate at the same time. You could cover a greater area by doing this so we were producing these. Now I don’t think at any time through the war there wasn’t a time when we didn’t have

a new experimental one. In the end we had one which was a one-man operation that you could take up into the mountains. Just built like an Indian wigwam with a slot in the side and a little antenna that moved like this as it went around. We never did get into production of that because the war finished, but for some reason they called that the ‘Daisy May’. I don’t know how they came to that name but that’s the way we went through the different designs.

Well it was transportable, that was the first thing it could do. People could carry it through the jungle and set it up wherever they wanted to put a radar unit. It weighed of course a hell of a lot less and

well it was just a vast improvement on the big bloke. It could do everything the big bloke did but in a much smaller, compact fashion.

It was all made out of structural steel angled, and it went up to a pretty high tower and it had a rotating system on the top and drive mechanism on the bottom. Wherever you established that it had to be left there because you couldn’t pull it all down

and keep moving that. Now in England I know there were huge big radar units on the coast where all the air raids were coming from Germany and they were big cumbersome units but they did the job for England. But no-one in the world had thought of a portable radar unit. We were the first to do it and in the end the Allies also adopted it as the most efficient type of radar for a war in the

tropics so we supplied to America and New Zealand and our own forces.

The big…?

Oh yeah. They put them in different parts around the coastline but we hadn’t got too far doing that before we found out that the little ones we were designing could do the same job. So it was much easier to make the smaller one so we abandoned the big ones altogether

and mass produced the LWAW Mach II, which became the backbone of the air force’s radar.

No, I can’t tell you offhand but I know I’ve got a book somewhere of radar operators and all of the armed forces had schools going to train operators to run these sets.

And at the end of the war evidently all these radar people got together and they formulated books on radar yarns and stories. And I’ve got one there that showed every radar unit and where it was stationed both in Australia and in the islands up north. Looking at that we found that there is a place called Lilli Pilli near Caringbah and they had one erected there during the war, which would have been a good place to spend the war.

Well there were schools of training officers at first and then they went out and spread it and it went pretty smoothly everywhere before when the operators out of the navy, army or air force learned how to operate them. It didn’t take too long and they worked pretty efficiently.

No, not at all. The armed forces took this up and the air force commenced first.

No, University of Sydney.

NSW hadn’t been built then.

Well they were already stationed in the university, in part of the Sydney University, and this was the…

What do you call it? The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. They were, that’s where they kicked off with their headquarters at the University of Sydney so they, well they did all the theory and they needed people to do the practical design. That’s how the railway got involved.

They gave us particularly on the antennas was the first thing. They gave us all the specifics. We would need

to create an antenna so we were able to design those in accordance with their instructions, but the rest of the structure was whatever we could manoeuvre to build.

Well they, there is different ways of sending out the radio beams with dipoles and this sort of thing which was right in their field, so they gave an idea of how many of these things would have to be encompassed in a system and then we designed it to fit

them all in, so that’s how the antennas were designed.

It was a big square mesh on some of them. Pretty sizeable. I suppose about 8 feet wide and about 6 feet the other way. Rectangular. And then of course we got into the parabolic ones which oscillate.

But mostly they were rectangular in shape.

Still made out of steel, but wire mesh.

We didn’t know. They didn’t tell us at first. But the first test they ever did was at an army base at Dover Heights in Sydney. There

was an army base there and they experimented with it. After that the air force had places where we could erect them and test them out.

We wouldn’t test them. We would just design them and then they had a special group that would go out and test them. I suppose some of the radiophysicist fellows would be involved in that.

Annexe.

Well, it’s

in the Eveleigh workshops. One side of the Eveleigh workshops there’s a carriage site which houses all the carriages and that was all along Wilson Street, and there was a lump of land there and they built this workshop on it, and being Wilson Street they named it the Wilson Street Annexe. They didn’t want to talk about radar so it suggested it was just a workshop called ‘the Annexe’.

Well wide open spaces. And there would be fellows

erecting radar units and there would be parts where there was machinery machining pieces, but most of it was made outside and just assembled there. It was a pretty big floor area. No windows in the building so the spies couldn’t look in and see anything. I don’t know what people thought we did in there but there was no mention of radar at all.

Only once I think some people asked me what was I doing during the war and I said I was working in the railways electrical branch, that was all. They forgot about it and no more questions.

I don’t know. I don’t know what word got out to them or they knew it was a wartime thing. They knew it was a wartime project. You couldn’t say it was

radar because no-one knew what radar was. So it was kept pretty secret, I think, but just that they knew there was some sort of war project going on.

Mostly on the drawing board. You would go there and whatever you were designing you would keep going until you had completed it. And the engineer would tell you another bit that he wanted done and you would go ahead and do that because we were pretty junior engineers.

When I think of it now, I was probably the youngest in the section. Most of them have croaked [died] by now.

Well the thing is to get it so that we could pack it up and move it with men carrying it. What we did was design these waterproof plywood boxes and we would put the parts into it so they couldn’t move,

and then to every box we would fit an endless piece of strong 2½ inch arm strap and that would go on the underside of the box to one side, fitted carefully and up each side, loop up in the air again and down each side of the box. Now the ideas of the loops was once up in the jungle they push a bamboo pole through the loops, guy in front, guy behind and the bamboo pole on their shoulder, and that’s how they carry it through the jungle. The boxes were all shapes and sizes. Sometimes you would fit four boxes

on the one bamboo pole. So the intrigue, I think, was getting it so that you could pull it apart rapidly, not lose the parts. And all the holes and screws were connected with a chain and riveted to the thing so if you undid it quickly and let go of it, it was still there. The achievement was to make it light and to make it so they could erect it quickly and dissemble it quickly. That was their whole theory behind

having the mobile unit. They could move them from place to place.

I would say about 20 feet square. That would accommodate it quite easily.

No, no. We never had any related back to us. It worked quite well.

Exactly right. You sure did. Some of the electrical people in our group knew that if we didn’t thoroughly coat all of the electrical parts with some sort of goo the corrosion in the joints and the electrical parts would fall apart. This was on of the great assets of the Australian design, the

protection against corrosion of all the electrical joints and everything, which worked very well. We also decided that all steel work would be plated with… It wasn’t chrome but I just forget what it was. It was given a coating to protect it from the jungle. All aluminium was anodised to protect it against the corrosive environments.

So there were a lot of aspects like that to think of and what the conditions would be like where it was going to operate.

It didn’t, it worked pretty well I think. Once we had these four stools it didn’t take much to level it and get them right at the start, and then you could built the thing on top of it.

No, we didn’t have any problems with that. I guess the antennas would be pointed skywards and I suppose you wouldn’t erect them right next to a mountain or something like that. But no, there didn’t seem to be any difficulties with the antenna being able to pick up around the jungle.

Okay. What happened, as we started to advance into the islands up north the authorities came up to us and said that the boxes we were sending them in are no longer applicable. We’ve got to have boxes that are completely watertight and must be buoyant. That meant that every box fully loaded had to be able to float.

Now at that time this happened the boxes we were making had four cleats sitting over the top of the lid and hinged bolts on the outside with wing bolts would tighten them up. Now these four cleats were punched into the boxes in transit, so they said, “Well you’ve got to design a box that has no protrusions on it.” So the people making the plywood came up at that time with a new remarkable plywood called bakelite bonded plywood. It was three-sixteenths of an inch thick

and we were using 3/8, so it was much lighter material. And we made a box and of course firstly we built a wooden frame and put the plywood on all sides and it gave you a surface on the top about an inch wide of timber. We made a little, we had a little piece of equipment which would cut a perfect 3/8 diameter groove in the middle of the timber. In each corner we put a three-sided piece of timber so you would get a lovely little radius and the same in the lid,

and then we had moulded rubber O-rings which fitted in the lid perfectly, put the lid on. Now inside the top timber we put little brass lugs on it and it was fixed to the side of the timber in the box with a threaded hole in it. Above every one of these little lugs we cut a 2 inch hole in the lid and inserted what looked like an aluminium ashtray with a little hole in the middle. Now the bolts would only be about 2 inches long with a thread on the bottom, and on the

stem of the bolt we welded a disc about the size of a 20 cent piece and on top of that was a wing. What you would do is thread a rubber washer over the disc and it would snugly fit under the disc, push it through the hole of the little ashtray and pick up the threaded part, wind it down and that just finger tight would press the O-ring and it was perfect. It floated. And that was our answer to the boxes being damaged in transit. Now

the reason they wanted the boxed to float was this. As we started to advance into the islands they would put a full set of radar boxes along the edge of a naval vessel and they would tie a rope onto the loop of the first box and thread it through the loops and tie it onto the loop of the last box. The naval vessel would head towards a predetermined beach under cover of darkness and it would make a sweep towards the beach, shove all the boxes overboard into the sea, the landing party would paddle out

and tow them into shore, get the boxes into the jungle, put the bamboo poles in and carry it to wherever they wanted to erect the unit. Now inside the largest box was a very carefully prepared manual with explicit instructions on how to prepare the unit, so a path list, and this seemed to work extremely well. We didn’t have any problems at all with that. So that’s how they got them to shore towards the end and to wherever they wanted

to erect it.

Well there is a full description and…

Well a full description. There were diagrammatic sketches with numbers, like when you put something together that you buy at a local shop these days. Step by step how to get it all together. The parts and everything. There were little photographs of the parts in the parts list

and they got to know these very well after a while.

I wouldn’t like to think. I wouldn’t like to think because there were big parts and little parts, but I think they could erect it in about five hours.

Well you could get up to 40 boxes in a radar unit. All broken up and put into 40 boxes.

They weren’t all the same, you see. The LWAW Mach II, but then when you got other types of the radar units like the ones with the parabolic antenna and that, of course they were different sizes so the number of boxes would vary depending on the type of unit we were putting out.

Well the first part would be to get the four trestles and put them in exactly the same place and get them level, and then you had a beam which ran between each trestle. They were in boxes on their own. They were already fabricated.

Sometimes if they were too long they would cut them in half and put little flanges on them so they could be folded in half and put them in and all around and it worked extremely well. They had no problem in erecting the units. We had no problem whatsoever.

The walls would go up, the walls of the hut, then the rotating floor would be assembled with the mast down

and the two bearings. Then they would fit the antenna to the top of the mast and then sheet it out with all the walls and the camouflage fly going out with the steel pegs driven into the ground. I think they got so used, trained to doing it. You see these teams would train before they went in local places in Sydney.

I’ve got a picture there of American troops at Rosehill racecourse practising erecting a radar unit, so they got training on how to erect them before they went out to the jungle.

Oh yes. That was all in boxes broken down. It was a real jigsaw puzzle, I can tell you.

At the end of the war they said

that the American units weighed about 60 tons. The Australian portable units weighed about 2½ tons.

Well whenever you could use aluminium we could. We went to the lightweight tubing

of course. We had to have steel for the strength and brass was used quite a lot. All of that. You see brass was dull chrome plated so that it wouldn’t be attacked by corrosion. Aluminium was anodised so it wouldn’t attack it and I forget just what all the steel part was coated. I can’t quite remember what sort of coating it was but it was like chrome plating only

it wasn’t chrome, it was something else. So it was all the protection against corrosion was well thought out.

The first mobile unit. I guess it took about 2½ months. I know when we were first got stuck

into it the Annexe opened up and we could move faster. Our working week was increased by working three nights a week until 9.00. No overtime, mind you, but this was war effort time and that really moved things along quite a bit. So I think 2, 2½ months the first set was ready to move up to the university and the radiophysicists could try it out.

Never. I never met them. Our boss used to. He didn’t have an office, he had a table in the middle of the drawing boards somehow and when he was there often air force guys would come in and sometimes the radiophysicists, but we were too junior to be introduced to them, you know.

In the Annexe there were about 40 I think. There were about 40 people in

the Annexe and we were 15 strong in the design office.

We would send all the drawings to the people who just went around to the various workshops that had been taken over. The different places around Sydney. And they would give them things to make. “You make this part and you make that.” There were parts being made all around Sydney, all being delivered back to the Annexe so

the people in the Annexe were just assembling. That was their main job. To assemble them and make sure it all fitted together, make sure every part was there and pack it in the box and send it off.

I think at one stage there we were turning out a set a week, or at least a set a week, maybe more, because we supplied hundreds of them – it was unbelievable – to all the forces and

the Allies. But we had it down to a fine art because the war in about 1943, ’44, we were well into it.

This was one of the fears but I found out later that the Japanese had a lot of trouble in

understanding the technology, particularly in the radar parts and all that because that astounds you because they became the leaders later on in electronics but apparently that had difficulty in understanding what the theory was and figuring out the technical language and that. So as far as I know, Japan didn’t have a radar set right through the war.

Oh there were, sure. Yeah. Well I mean it’s just a simple part. If it’s not there you can’t erect the unit and they would have to wait for someone to fly one in from somewhere. I met a fellow later on and his job in the air force was to do maintenance on the units, and he didn’t know where they had been made or anything else

but he knew all the parts that were in it and he would try and hop a lift on some aeroplane that was going to where they were having trouble and get there and work for a week or so and taking parts with him that he knew that they wanted, so this was another thing that we knew nothing about at the time.

Yes. There were a few parts that were pretty critical and could break down. With them you would send a spare. If this was a dicey one that would wear quickly or something they had another part there to replace it with, so that went with the original unit. But there weren’t a big number of spares, only a few critical parts.

Mostly it was electrical equipment. I think that’s pretty much the electrical equipment that they would. You had valves and things like this that might fail. Valves were a pretty important part because we were making them Australia, like old wireless valves that they used to have in radio sets. Poor

old New Zealand was trying to go ahead with their radars but they couldn’t get valves and they couldn’t make them. Fortunately, we were making them right here. England couldn’t send you any. They were too busy trying to get their own lot ready with the radar over London and etc., so that’s why New Zealand took our sets.

It was given priority. There was shortage of material but we were given top priority for

any materials we needed. I don’t know how behind the scenes the commonwealth was distributing material, but certainly we got priority on everything we needed.

No, I don’t know. I guess tubular steel and that we would have got priority from BHP [Broken Hill Proprietary] steelworks. Radio equipment we got top priority on that. I know AWA [Amalgamated Wireless Australasia] was one crowd that made the valves, etc.

So we never had a shortage of products.

It was intensely interesting, but not exciting because we were that busy getting these designs done that you didn’t have time to think if it was exciting or not. And when the war was over I forgot all about it

because my life became pretty intense getting married and changing jobs. I left the railways and went to work at these Lever Brothers at Balmain and then the Kernel refinery. I was always forging ahead. I forgot all about it until I retired and at a progress club and I had given a couple of talks on various things and they said, “Would you give a talk on next month of something.” And I said, “Okay,” and then I thought, “What will I talk about?” And then I came across a lot of the old papers I had and I got that intensely

interested in it that I said to Frances, “Look, we are going down to Floriart [Festival] in Canberra, I want to go to the War Museum.” The kids were little. I remember taking them, too, and I remember showing them the LWAW Mach I radar unit. When I went down there it was missing and I happened to ask a fellow, one of the attendants, and I said, “I’m looking for a radar unit that was on display here.” He said, “You must have been here a long time ago. That hasn’t been here for years.” He said, “Why do you want it?”

and I said, “I helped design it and I want to give a talk about it.” He said, “Come with me up to the bookshop. There’s a new book come in last week. That might be what you are talking about.” So he took me up to the library and he pulled this book off the shelf and I opened it up and the first thing was this LWAW Mach II photograph from the Wallage collection. Wallage was my boss. It had parts in it and it showed you what part the railways played in this

whole affair. And that’s how I thought to revive it all and I got keenly interested in it in my retirement years and I realise now how exciting it was. But at time everyone was trying to do something exciting. Guys were going off and losing their lives. I didn’t really have time to think about it but we were doing an important job which I guess was the main thing.

Okay. Well this had started a few weeks before I arrived in the radar section. When I arrived

a fellow Dick Hugo said to me, “We have designed the structure and from the information they have given us we have designed the antenna. Now the, we have to keep our eyes on the sky all around us so the antenna has to rotate. We’ve designed a mechanism to make it rotate. Now the first job I want you to do is to design some brackets that will be attached to the

main structure which will support a protection shroud around the driving mechanism.” The whole structure was angle iron, which is pretty heavy steel that crisscrossed. And when I got to the… They built it in the substation near Central Station, Prince Alfred substation, and when I got there it was anchored to the floor with bolts into the concrete floor. The structure went up and I could see

the drive mechanism in the structure and on the floor was this large rectangular mesh antenna and the fitters put it up and fitted to the top of the mast. So it was a heavy structure. There was no thought about it being mobile and moving it from place to place. This hadn’t entered anyone’s mind at this stage. We just had to build this structure that would support itself and if it worked right through the war. It was pretty heavy in weight.

It was a pretty robust sort of thing so you know that test that took place on the 12th of December with this thing at Dover Heights. We had erected it there and it was a very solid complex structure. It certainly didn’t lend itself to be moved about.

Nothing. The thing worked and we couldn’t believe it when he told us that in the first two minutes of operation it picked up an aeroplane 62 miles away! And we all looked at each other and thought, “This is fantastic!” Now I would have made refinements on it from the physio, the radiophysicist. They probably smart tuned the antenna a bit and things like that. But

mainly we started to produce these, mass produce these, to put around the coastline and without any… So it was a big, heavy structure this one, for sure it was.

Well we were pretty good bunch of blokes, all worked together and

we were all keen to get this going, and everybody would help everybody else with ideas and this sort of thing. We all pitched in with ideas, particularly when we got into the mobile thing to get different ways of doing things. For instance, this guy, one of them created this quick-release catch where you could put two parts together and just snap a thing and it would be fastened together, the idea being that if they had to move quickly they could just click it together and move it. That

guy produced this quick-release catch. After that we made dozens of all different sizes and types to fasten it together, so everyone was helping everyone else. It was a pretty good cooperative team. I guess it was the excitement in the way that would it work? would it not work? and this sort of thing.

Not very often, but occasionally the whole electrical branch. There were some girls in that that were real keen fund raisers for the war effort and that nothing to do with radar, so they would hold a dance somewhere or something like this and we would all go along to this sure. But we would have a meeting at lunchtime altogether and working back three nights per week until 9.00 we were pretty much together most of the time.

That was in 19… That was just after the raids in Darwin when we really got stuck into it and the idea of this mobile radar unit was mentioned. We took onto it and we constructed it.

So halfway through 1942. And we started working the longer hours and it developed and it didn’t take long before it was out being produced, mass produced.

There was a set rate for engineers and I think that at time, it was in pounds, I was getting about 6 pound a week, 6 to 7 pound a week. I forget now.

That was for a junior engineer; that was the going rate. Funny thing, you never thought about pay. You just thought about getting the job done.

There wasn’t any security at all except the Wilson Street Annexe. They had a guard on duty all the time like

there, but as far as in the offices there we just mingled with all the people working there in Railway House. We weren’t noticed or anything else. We had our drawing boards amongst all the others. It didn’t make much difference. We just felt one of the mob.

Well there was real panic in a way because everyone felt sure that they were going to land somewhere in Australia. People were sending their kids out to friends in the country, you know. They thought that the cities would be attacked. It was a pretty strong feeling. We thought the Japanese would get into

Australia and capture it. I don’t think the Japanese ever intended to do that because they couldn’t afford to. They entered the war not having any oil and you couldn’t go to war without having any oil because all the machinery is run with oil, and of course the idea of knocking Pearl Harbour out of the water in two hours was to allow them to get into the Pacific, around into the East Indies and capture all the oil fields, which they did.

So all they wanted to do was to protect those oil fields so they could run the war machine in Japan. But they kept us alert and frightened, particularly with the submarines off the coast and the ones in Sydney Harbour, and of course the few shells that arrived on our shore. But everyone was convinced that they wanted Australia. It was a strong feeling amongst the whole community.

Well of course there were air-raid shelters in the Sydney. They thought with mass people Wynyard Station, for instance, in Sydney, was marked ‘air-raid shelter’. All the underground stations were so that it’s like in London I guess, if an air-raid alert went they would try and get down and into cellars under buildings were built. People were alerted on drill on how to get down

there quickly and not cause too much confusion. Every window in Railway House was blacked out. We didn’t see Wynyard Park for about three years through the window. So, you know, I guess that was the extent of the precautions that were being taken.

Yes, every person was allotted

so much, so many coupons for clothing and so many coupons for food. I can’t think of all the things but there was butter, bread and all the commodities that you needed. Meat was rationed and that, so if you had visitors coming you would have to save your coupons, and send a few coupons this way and that way if someone was getting married, which some of them did. This coupon thing went on after the war. For Frances to get her wedding dress she had to get coupons from all the family

because she had to have a coupon to get the material to make the dresses, you know. So clothing was pretty well… Well you couldn’t get it without coupons; it was impossible. Beer was in short supply and sometimes the word would get around that such and such a pub has had a delivery and there would be queues for bottles of beer. We knew a girl who worked in Woolworths at the chocolate counter. She would give us the good oil [inside information] with chocolate.

They were scarce, the foods, the luxuries like that.

Oh yeah, they were out of beer. You’ve heard about the pub with no beer. No, things were in really short supply. Of course they were trying to make distribution of foods to all the armed forces and all the people in the air force and they didn’t have the

manpower in all the farms and that so it was pretty closely monitored.

The electric trains were still running. I used to go to Strathfield Station and get a train straight into Wynyard so all the electric trains kept running throughout the war.

Well the workshops around Eveleigh there were

a lower ground type of living, so all these little houses had been constructed by the British when they first came and established itself like they were in England. All built up against one another, chimney tops across the tops of them, and it deteriorated into a place where the strugglers were living. Eveleigh, of course, there were no Aborigines there in those days living there, and Eveleigh was a…

You could walk around the streets without a problem and things like that. But you knew you were in one of the lower ground districts. It just had that feeling. I remember a guy I worked with, a fitter, and he lived in just one of the streets just outside Redfern Station. A lot of the railway people lived there. It was close to work and I suppose a lot of them were renting and it was low on rent.

Well there was a bit of it. I mean there were now and again someone would say, “So-and-so knows a bloke that’s got a lot of silk stockings.” I think this was when people started making their own grog. But the black market. Someone would come up, you know. I remember a fellow came into work and said, “I’m talking to a bloke. He’s got ladies’ face powder

and anyone want some?” Because it was hard to buy in the shops. Whether it was stolen we didn’t know.

A suit every day. You had to wear a collar and tie. I remember my old boss. He was an old Englishmen and he had a stiff collar up here with the peaks all around. This is going way back in the dark ages.

Well the design office was full of drawing boards. They don’t do it today. Engineers don’t sit at a board any longer. They have draftsmen to do that. You do all the calculations and things and they have a computer anyway, but every engineer had a drawing board and he had a table at the side, a reference table, and he would do all his calculations on the drawing board and then did the design,

so there were rows and rows of all these drawing boards up and down this huge office and different sections. There was the electrical section. There was the section working with the electric trains, section working on all the powerhouses of the railways, and we were sort of intermingled in the middle of all this, the radar group.

We did calculations using a slide rule, which was a logarithmic scale on a slide rule and you did all your calculations there. You measured, put it up there, moved the cursor and came up with the answer. We didn’t have what you call it today with all the…?

Calculators weren’t available. You did it all on the slide rule. I show the grandkids the slide rule

and, “How stupid were you to use things like that?”

I still kept going to tech three nights, two nights a week and Saturday morning and three night working back. It was a pretty heavy schedule because tech was three nights, 6.00 to 9.00 each night.

When I first went in there I thought that I wasn’t getting the exercise like I was getting in the workshop so I joined the Leichhardt Rowing Club to get exercise. I went down there and there was a guy sitting there and he said, “I’m the Captain.” I said, “I’d like to join,” and he said, “We’d love to have you,” because most of the guys had gone away. And I started rowing there with them in Leichhardt Park; it was there. We had, we still had regattas, eights and fours

rowing, and then in the middle of all this the Americans took over that park and made it a big store area and they pushed our rowing club right down the end of the park next to the mental home that was on the bay there. I forget the name of it now.

Callum Park. And so we moved down there and that’s the sort of exercise and the

weekend sport that I did. Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning we would practise rowing there.

Oh yeah. There was stuff stowed everywhere. All sorts of equipment and everything all over the place. They had several Americans there with a jeep just riding around keeping watch over it all. The jeep would come in from somewhere else with all the pannikins with their food

at lunchtime and they must have brought all their meals down. I don’t know where they cooked them all. But they took over the whole big area of the park there as a store yard. We got the rowing club moved and we got a lot of refinements done in the move. We done well out of it.

We would say, “We need that and need that.” They would do extra things and the Yanks were paying for it so we didn’t care.

We were right against it and from there up was storage areas of equipment.

There were people there on duty there all the time, Americans riding around in jeeps there all day long. No-one could get in and thieve anything, yeah.

Well I remember it well because I had an aunty who lived in Providence, Rhode Island, and my mother’s sister she had migrated there and they communicated pretty frequently. And a couple of neighbours had joined the army and she said to them, “If you ever get to Australia, look up this address.” So one night there was a knock on the front door and my father went out and there’s these

two Americans there and he told us he had our address from Aunty Ruby in America and we welcomed them in. And my father having been to the war, I remember him saying to them, “Now while you are in Sydney camp, make this your home. Come here any time you like,” because he had been isolated from home. So these fellows came pretty regularly. I remember it was Chuck Jones and Mickey Brusey. I’ll never forget their names. And there used to be a… My parents were involved

in a committee every Friday night in the local community hall to raise money for some war thing, I forget what it was now, and the Americans they invited, them up and they were the first Americans to do the real rock’n’roll stuff. And the two blokes would get out and do a thing and all the mob would be around clapping them. They introduced the new dance that caught on pretty quick here. That was my first impression. But then again there were a lot of

brawls they tell you about them in Brisbane and other places where the Yanks were getting the girls and the Australians weren’t, so there was a few punch-ups, I can tell you that. But their uniforms looked miles better than the Australian uniforms. The Australians were rough looking and the others had a tie which tucked into their jacket and a little peaked cap here and they looked tops. Mind you they had the money to do that; our blokes didn’t have.

Oh no, they were present everywhere in Sydney. If there were dances and functions on there would be Yanks there all the time because they had a couple of big camps. I know one was Rosehill Racecourse. I forget where the others were. But they were in places like that and it was a sort of stepping off. They would send them down to Australia, go through a training program, and from there they would go up north. At the end we saw Mickey Brusey

and Chuck Jones.

None. They were here just as raw recruits in the army and after the training they sent them up into New Guinea and that was their first war experience up there. I had a cousin out here now a couple of years ago now, about four years,

and I said, “Did she remember Chuck Jones and Mickey Brusey?” And she went home and made some enquiries and she found Mickey Brusey and he wrote us a letter. We related the times he was in our house.

Well we would talk about our relations over there and what they thought about the war and everything which was much akin to what we did, although

they came in a lot later than we did but of course we were all British. Whatever the British said to do we did it, and they came in a lot later. But we had some very pleasant discussions with them and they thought the stars and stripes told them to go war they went to war and it was a simple as that.

Oh they were very amused with it but they thought they were much further ahead than us. I remember Mickey Brusey and Chuck Jones said to me one night, “Hey buddy, come out with me one night and I’ll show you how an American guy spends his night.” I never got to do that. No, they felt and they were probably were further advanced than we were because we used to follow their techniques about three years or four years behind whatever happened in America, so they were a step ahead of us.

Well first of all the midget submarines. Well first thing the sirens went and every light had to be blacked out. It was about 2.00 in the morning as I remember

and no-one knew why the blackout was on, of course. And I remember my father going out to his post as an air-raid warden and the next morning in the paper they said, “Japs, miniature submarines had got into Sydney Harbour.” Now there was a big net in Sydney Harbour which could be opened to allow our ships to come in and close when they went out. Well the midget submarine had come in under the hull of big ships into the Harbour

and fired torpedoes and hit a ferry boat which houses a number of sailors on it. They were sleeping on it and they were all killed. I think it was called the Kuttabul. And it shocked Australia, particularly Sydney, to think that they could get into our harbour which we protected so well. All the submarines had been sunk with depth charges and of course later on one was hauled out of the water and it’s still in the museum down in Canberra.

So that meant that the Japanese were right in amongst us almost. That was the feeling that everyone had. I remember they started shelling from the mother submarines out at a sea and they hit Newcastle, Bondi and Port Kembla. The two were obviously for the steelworks to try and wreck them. They were the targets so everyone sort of felt that, “Boy, this was the start! They are going to

raid Sydney! They are going to land here!” We were expecting the worse but it didn’t ever… By the way the war changed it did never eventuate.

Well everyone… You didn’t know if it was an air raid or what it was so all we in the family went into the trench and waited there.

And I think what would happen – I can’t quite remember – but particularly with the mock air raids they would leave it on for a while and then they would sound sirens to say all clear, and whether it happened that night I don’t know. I’m not sure how long it took that they sunk all the midget submarines in the Harbour but it was pretty quick. They must have fired a lot of depth charges. You could hear the boom at Concord where were lived. We could hear these depth charges going off.

So it was part of the atmosphere of the Japanese were going to come and there was no doubt about in everyone’s mind.

I’ll tell you what, the foreshores of NSW were filled up with barbed wire around every rock headland. I’ve taken

photos down the front there where they’ve cut the steel spikes off and you can still see them in the rocks. There was barbed wire on every headland up and down the NSW coast. Some sort of local army watch camped on a lot of the beaches, particularly up north. I remember Nambucca, we were there and the guys in camp up there were watching out and we told them we were going off in our boat to fish off sea. We were going with a fishermen to fish off sea

and they said, “Okay,” and off we went. And when we came back in my mate said, “What are you really looking for?” And he said, “Blokes like you, where two go out in the boat and three come back.” They were all along. Right along the coastline there were defence forces right along the coastline. As I say, you can still see the remnants of the steel spikes in the rocks where they were cut off after the war.

I don’t think there was, was there? I don’t think there were any Japanese planes flying over Sydney. It was never reported. You see it was submarines that fired on Sydney down this far and it was just submarine attack really around Sydney was all that we got, but there were no planes overhead.

Well we worked on them flat out. I was there for four years doing this. At the end of the four years, as soon as peace was declared, this was, I’ll never forget it, in May

1945 Germany had capitulated. The war in Europe was over but the war in the Pacific showed no signs of abating and it was thought even though we were pushing the Japanese back we would have to push all the way back to Japan. Now how many years this would have taken and how many more lives this would cost didn’t bear thinking about. Then on the 6th of August 1945 the double doors in our office were flung open and fellow stood there holding a door in each hand

and yelled at the top of his voice, “They have split the atom!” We all turned around thinking someone had gone berserk. Soon newspapers appeared on the street to tell us that a lone American plane had flown high over Hiroshima and dropped some sort of an atomic device on a parachute and just above the city it was detonated, and that nuclear blast took the whole city down to ground level. When we come to terms with that, three days later they dropped a bomb

on Nagasaki. Both devastating results. On the 15th August the Emperor of Japan capitulated and the war was over. Now on the 15th day of August 1945, Sydneysiders plunged headlong and full favour into celebrations, but people screamed and shouted in the streets and sang and danced. Right on the streets themselves, everyone was dancing. They had gone berserk.

The war was finally over and how quickly the radar section began to disband. Within about six weeks I was the sole survivor getting rid of finished and half finished radar sets from the Wilson Street Annexe to an army base on Sydney Harbour at Middle Head. We took all the stuff there, but all the design drawings, and gave them to the Department of Defence. And after about four years of fine,

innovative work I found myself involved in the design of powerhouse boilers, coal and ash handling. And I stayed in the railways then for another four or five years, yeah, five years, yeah. Then I started to pull out of the railways. No-one said you should do that, it was a job for life, but I wasn’t really happy with the railways work. You had to… It was all on

seniority and what’s more they gave you a seniority book, so if some poor fellow fell sick and he was in hospital and they would pull out the seniority book and you were moved up one and who would get the job, and so I got a bit fed up with that so I quit the railways in 1950.

Because there was a big sigh of relief once they had blown most of Europe apart, or all over the place. By this time we were moving forward in the Pacific so we were moving pretty fast in the Pacific

by this time and so it was a feeling that we might end it all before too long. I think the whole world felt more secure with Germany out of the war, although Germany and Japan didn’t unite in any way with their fighting fronts. That was when they thought it might have been a hard slog – even though we were advancing we might have to push them right back to Japan itself. But of course the

atomic bomb made all the difference to that situation. I think there was a refreshing feel once Europe had come to a halt that we might get more aid from other countries and everything else, so somehow the Japanese wouldn’t be able to carry on. So that was May 1945

and of course the atomic bomb wound it all up in August 1945.

Well we knew very little about it. Absolutely almost nothing. Of course we learnt a little more after that that they had created this massive explosion using atomic energy and we knew that no-one had ever split the atom

before. And I think people were relieved that we won, but in the way we won we didn’t want to hear about the devastating effects it had on people. As time went on they lingered with cancer and everything else for years and years after. And I went through the museum in Peace Park some years ago in Hiroshima and, my God, it was terrible!

But we didn’t know. We didn’t understand the ramifications of what would be left behind after an atomic explosion. We were pretty ignorant of atomic energy at that time.

Well of course the newspapers then came out with these stories

of the horrible things that were happening to people. That this radioactivity could be with you for years and people could be walking in areas where they could still be affected by radiation. It was a bit of a whole mystery to the whole world. We just couldn’t comprehend it so over the years we learnt just how devastating it can be.

No, there was no transferring of any technology from one nation to another. Everything was kept to themselves. I mean that was why we were on our own with radar because Britain didn’t have time to tell anyone what it was all about. They were too busy themselves and the Americans had developed radar. Even the Germans had developed radar

but not the same as ours. They were all massive big installations along the coast of Britain and I guess the Germans, they had it in clusters. They didn’t have the revolving; they had the fixed antenna in different directions. I don’t know why they didn’t revolve it. It would have been a lot cheaper rather than make these four things. They were monsters, too. They had radar but on a big scale with big units.

So the only country that developed a mobile one was Australia.

I guess when we first, the first experimental radar unit was a success we felt we were onto something

big so we kept working hard at it. But when the war finished we just stopped. I didn’t think about it any more. Never did I ever envisage that every house would have an antenna on with a cathode-ray tube in their TV [television] set. Never did I ever think there would be a radar set small enough for a policeman to hold on the edge of the road and pick you up for speeding. The same principle of radar applied to ladies who were having babies – they would

put ultrasonic on them and a radio thing would be refracted back. The same principle in the refinery. We would check corrosion on the inside of a vessel by holding a probe in the vessel which sent a sound wave in down the inside of the vessel and would refract back and give you a complete measurement of the thickness of the steel so you knew if it was corroding inside or not. So ultrasonics and that really came to the fore after the war. But

except when the war was over we realised that it wasn’t too many years after that every ship, every aeroplane and fishing trawler had their own radar set to give them eyes to see in the night. But we didn’t realise the potential that it had further on down the line.

It wasn’t revealed except that the railways put out a book at the end of the war with all the wartime activities that they had been involved in. And there was a section of radar on that and that’s where I picked up most of it. And then I got the book from down at the War Memorial in Canberra and I read a lot of that. And I showed that the radiophysicists were working on it and they got the railway involved

in the electrical section. And we did the design work and it started to gel then just how important it all was. When the war finished, as I said, I was so busy doing other things that I thought, “Well, I did as best as I could in the war. I played an important role,” I felt but I didn’t worry about it any more. I didn’t read about it until I retired and I think it was a pretty important part of the war effort.

There were several newspaper articles printed about that time that revealed… The one that I have there was printed two days after peace. We found out how it saved Darwin and protected Sydney from raids. But other than that it was, there were magazines on radio and that and a lot of those

had stories on how it developed and that. A few stories in the paper, but that soon died out and I guess radar became a permanent thing and they realised the value of it for Australia and for aeroplanes and etc.

It was claimed to be the most important part of the victory in the Pacific because the Japanese weren’t getting early warnings and we were. We could tell

when they were taking off and when they would fly in. That article there tells you about when we sent this radar setup to Darwin that when it was travelled that was severely damaged, and it was the radio equipment. And two radiophysicists went up to Darwin and worked hard on it and put it on just in time to pick up the Japanese

all-out raid on Darwin. They were just 50 miles out of Darwin. They sent the air force out and knocked two out and damaged many others, and that was the end of the air raid by the Japanese on Darwin.

Well the whole world changed dramatically. There is no doubt about that. The hatred started to

die down for a while. I mean we went on holiday to Japan. Japanese tourists come here. The Germans, who no-one wanted to talk about, a lot of them assimilated here. A mixture in the migration policy and Australia’s outlook on life. And what’s more we had that many migrants from countries we had never heard of. We had Russians neighbours who came out

to escape the war or came out as migrants after the war. And then of course we had all the different restaurants with all sorts of different food from different countries. All of a sudden we blended in more with the world. We were not as isolated as we used to be and it was a radical change. Yeah.

It’s a pleasure.