Australians at War Film Archive

How far do you want to go into living as a child during the Depression?

I was born in Bairnsdale in eastern Victoria. We lived at a little place, 20 miles out of Bairnsdale called Fernbank, which had a hall and a timber mill and a railway station. My father had a small farm which didn’t support us and I had a brother and two sisters and my mother had been a

city girl and he’d taken her there in 1913. As each of us were born he would take her into a private hospital in Bairnsdale and she’d stay there and then come home with us. During her time there she killed 16 snakes. The place was alive with them. I can remember as a small child of three or four being in that hall and watching the adults dance.

That was their main entertainment. My father took a job with the Bairnsdale Council to look after the stretch of road that came from the Prince’s Highway, they may not have called it the Prince’s Highway then, but into Fernbank, it’d be a little over a mile. He had a two-wheel cart and a horse and he would look after that section of road like for branches falling from trees or if a tree fell over he’d arrange to have it

removed. Then we used to go to the Edwardses every Sunday, they were neighbours and the men were supposed to look after the children. My father and Mr Ernie Edwards were talking and I got into the swamp. Mrs Ernie Edwards came out and saved my life. So I’m still here. Eventually it came starting the, they used to have meetings

about council things. My father would be very vocal at the meeting. I think it was something international, important, but they were minor things when you look back on them at these meetings. They got really excited, so my mother told me years later. When it was time to start school I was taken to school the first day by Mildred Pengise, who would have been a girl about eight. She took me by the hand and we went to this school and

it was in one classroom. There would have been around 20, or maybe a little less, pupils of various grades. I was given a slate and a piece of chalk. My brother was three years older than me. In that first or second week there was a tank with a small opening in the top laying on its side in the schoolyard. Some of the boys came on ponies that were tied along the fence

and many of them were barefooted. Eventually my brother and I, when we left home, we’d take our boots off and put them under a bush and go barefooted to school, cos we went there from our little farm. These bigger boys put my brother in this tank and I was so desperate, I thought he was going to be hurt, and I kept begging them to and crying to get out. They kept pushing me away. I raced into

the school to the male teacher, crying, and wanted him to come and save my brother. He just ignored me. From that moment on I never cooperated with teachers, but I didn’t realise that till later in life that must have sown that seed in me not to cooperate. Eventually we had droughts and bushfires.

I can remember going with some men, this there man was taking my father’s lunch to the back paddock that was on fire. I can remember the men sitting on a log while there were trees burning behind. Even at night I can remember seeing fires. At the age of between three and four we were on a picnic and my mother asked me to get up in the jinker to get the biscuit tin.

My feet caught in the reins and I fell on the road. My next memory is I’m at my grandmother’s place in Hawthorn with a cast on my arm. I had a broken elbow apparently. It was my right, and I still have one arm longer than the other. When I buy a suit they have to make adjustments to the suit. My grandmother was one of these Irish people.

Actually they were well to do, they were merchants in Dublin. She lost her first child and my grandfather was an only child and had a wine and spirit business. The doctor said she needs a sea voyage, she went into depression. So he loved her a lot and he sold up and he came to Australia with his next son and my mother as an eight month old baby. So I am half Irish.

I can remember one day her taking me down to the local shops and I saw a car hit a man in the street. He was bleeding from the temple. I was fascinated. They pulled him into a shop doorway and a man put his thumb where the blood was coming from and I wanted to stay there. My grandmother hurried me home. Eventually we had these droughts and bushfires and we came down to Melbourne

in 1927 to Grandma’s place. We lived there for a while. I went to St Joseph’s School in Hawthorn. I think I would have been in grade one. They were lay teachers, a Catholic school. Then I was transferred to Marist Brothers’ School, St John’s in Glenferrie Road. There were brothers and lay teachers there. One of my teachers

was a Mr Duffy from Kew. That day the brothers had canes and the nuns, if there were nuns teaching females, and it was straps. The same in the private and the state schools. The boys at West and Xavier and those places had it worse because they had to bend over and get flogged with a cane. So Mr Duffy one day was walking around and we sat two to a

desk. He looked over my shoulder and didn’t like what he saw and he just crashed the ruler down on my knuckles. I don’t hold any grudges about that because that was how it was at that time. Eventually we moved to Edgevale Road, Kew. My father took out a loan with the State Savings Bank. Then my father had no job and the Little Sisters of the Poor at Northcote that looked

after old people and didn’t take the pension and more or less depended on donations and my mother’s father had to go there because he lost his memory and was a danger to himself. Like wandering off or getting a tomahawk and might cut a finger off. So they came round and they visited. If you had anything you could spare to give them you’d give it to them, they’d go to Victoria Market and

all the Italian fruiterers as we called them, they weren’t greengrocers then, would say, “Here you are, Sister.” All mother had in her will was five shillings, which in today’s currency’s 50 cents. She gave them half of it. That day father came home with a job and it was with the State Electricity Commission in Victoria. All the telegraph poles were wooden and my father had the skill of being able to cut the tree or pole and know whether it was sound or rotten

inside. Something you can’t learn at university. He had a very straight eye, he didn’t need a spirit level. He’d only had four years schooling. He was a child of 13 and as a child he was out working on properties. When shearing happened and the weather turned cold he, as a child, would be up in the night moving the sheep, because if you don’t the fat freezes around their kidneys and they die.

His father had come here in 1848 from County Clare, Ireland, because of the famine. Eventually my grandfather’s two brothers in 1851 and his mother and the other five children in 1855 came down. My grandfather had married this woman, and Irish orphan from Darwin. She was only 20. She couldn’t read or write. She had 13 children and never lost a baby.

Never saw the doctor. Was always midwives. One time she’d had the baby and the midwives were late getting there and she was up sewing. So I never knew these people because I was born after they’d died. I went to Sacred Heart School, Kew. They were nuns. They had straps. I didn’t care much for that because they’d listen to tales from the girls.

Eventually my mother sent me back to St John’s. I didn’t like school. I didn’t mind the Brothers. It was the Depression and I remember boys coming to school with holes in their socks and their pants. My own pants, if they got a hole in, Mother would patch it, that’s how it was then. I didn’t realise we were poor, cos everybody seemed

to be the same to me. I thought this was the way you lived. I can remember the Brothers taking these boys that had no lunch up to their house and they probably gave them their lunch. So one of my teachers, Father John, happened to be in the Solomon Islands when the Japs invaded there. He stayed with the people and they killed him. So I have great respect for them all. They were in a system where you used the cane and the strap,

but they’d given up a lot to teach children. That was the way it was. It was strictly discipline. It wasn’t the loving teachers they have now that do things with the children and made friends with them. Eventually at age 15 I left school and my education was up to, I suppose you call it year eight now, merit standard. My parents could not

afford to give my brother or I a secondary school education, not that at that time I wanted it, but I realised towards the end of my schooling that I tried to work. I really worked hard and I realised that you needed an education. But my two sisters, my sister after me after primary school, she went to the Convent

of Good Shepherd in Abbotsford. The nuns down there taught girls, it didn’t matter whether you were Catholic or what, from around Collingwood and Fitzroy, shorthand and typing. That’s what my sister learned there. She worked at the Trades Hall and lots of those girls became secretaries in firms. So I left school and my brother was a typewriter mechanic at Sidney Pencombe

in Queen Street, Melbourne. I got a position there in the despatch department they called it. My job was just to deliver typewriters around the city or the suburbs. I’d carry them on my hip. You wouldn’t be allowed to do that today and I wasn’t a big child. Someone were 20ish. I travelled on the cable trams and things like that on the trams.

I did that for quite a while. I’ll go back to St John’s. St Patrick’s Day, it was a very Irish church here in Melbourne, they had this big procession on St Patrick’s Day on the nearest Saturday, up from Queen Street, up Bourke Street and all that. We had soldiers from World War I teaching us how to march. That’s why when I did join the armed forces I knew how to march.

After a couple of years of that, I was getting ten shillings a week and a monthly ticket on the train was six shillings and sixpence and I gave my mother something out of my wages and I bought a suit for three pounds and I bought a sports trousers for ten shillings. For three or four shillings you could get very good shirts.

On our school breaks we used to go to the royal show when we were ten or eleven or twelve. The State Savings Bank would hand out a free sample back and a little tin or Nestle, that milk they had. Also we used to go into the city and we’d go up Little Bourke Street, I think it’s the only Chinatown in the world still in its original place

where it started. Maybe it’s the second. San Francisco might be. Then again we went up Little Lonsdale Street that I know now was the Red Light District, but at the time I didn’t know. I knew there was something odd about Little Lonsdale Street. I remember we walked up there about eleven o’clock in the morning and all the girls were outside these little houses, they’re all gone now, talking and that. We looked at them and we didn’t know quite what they were, but we knew

they were different to our mothers. That’s all. I left the firm and then I went with my friend to Kaiser Stockings in Richmond. I helped the ladies make stockings on these machines. Then after that a friend of my fathers, who had a bit of wool from Fernbank, he used to send it to Australian Estates. I got a job at Australian Estates just

taking away baskets of wool that the wool sorters had sorted to various bins around the place. I did that for a couple of years. When the war was declared I wanted to join the navy. I kept asking my father all 1940 could he let me join, cos he had to sign the papers. He’d worked with a man who had been in the

navy and told him the navy wasn’t a good life. During the Depression, I’m sorry, I should have told you this, I remember getting free books at school and I remember being with my father down at the Kew Town Hall, they were town halls then, and all the unemployed were there and there was a soup kitchen and I got free boots and my father got a tunic from World War I dyed black. He was on sustenance, which we called the dole. He had

to go and work on the roads and things like that. I got very desperate early in 1941 and I wandered into the air force recruiting place, I think it was in Russell Street in a motor firm, or was it Exhibition Street? It was on the corner. Not sure. They gave me the form. I didn’t care what I did, I just wanted to

be part. So I came home and said to my father, who had only had four years’ schooling, if he let me join the air force I’d learn something that would be good for me after the war, and he was interested in education. He signed the paper. I was elated. Next morning at six o’clock he woke me up and asked me would I tear it up cos my mother must have been talking to him. But I didn’t and I went in there.

On June the 23rd 1941, before that a policeman came to check me out. In those days, if you joined the air force, you had to be A1 and you had to be a good character. He came to our home to make sure I was a good character. I remember that day, June the 23rd, I had a little case with a few things in it and walking up Edgevale Road, Kew and my parents standing at the gate

and looking back at them and I was feeling so excited that little did I know that it’d never be like that again. That 1940 Christmas would have been the last one we were together as a family. At the time, that didn’t worry me. I remember getting our uniform.

In my father’s home, when they were all there, lots of the girls would come to Melbourne and work in a factory or as domestics and send money home. At home my grandfather would sit in his chair and his sons would sit at the table and his wife, my grandmother, would wait on them and when they’d finished the girls would sit down. The

boys all had very hard jobs, cos they’d go out to properties as children. There was a mine in Clunes out at Ballarat. My grandfather, in the gold rush time, he arrived in 1848 and bought a cart and horses and he used to take the diggers to Ballarat to the gold fields and they’d all walk and camp on the way. He used to camp

near Elizabeth Street, which had a creek running down at the time. From very early age they had to go and bring the house cows in from the common, walk two miles before school. These would be primary school children that would take their turn and bring it back and then take them back, have breakfast and then go to school for the few

years that they did go to school. At the age of eleven my father’s eldest brother, Tom, bare backed, cut out a wild boy from a mob. He was eventually to manage a cattle station, fall in love with the owner’s daughter but never professes his love because he felt she was above him in life. So he never married. Uncle Arthur, they were all great horsemen, he rode against Bobby

Lewis in his first race. The Lewises lived in Clunes. Bobby Lewis was eventually to be James Scobie, a leading horse trainer in the 1920s and jockey. Bobby Lewis rode four Melbourne Cup winners. In 1929, when Phar Lap was a three year old, Lewis had his only ride on Phar Lap in the Melbourne Cup and my father and his brothers were there. When they came past the stand the first time

Lewis, his stirrups were always longer, he was leaning back, really pulling Phar Lap’s head back, and my uncle’s a better horseman than my father, and they knew that this was wrong. Lewis was holding him too tight. Phar Lap all the way around fought for his head and my uncles always said Lewis was too good a rider to not know what he was doing to Phar Lap. Phar Lap finished third, but he

should have won it. Lewis was a chap who had a reputation as liking money and he never got another ride on Phar Lap. She he didn’t ride a good race that day. My father worked on farms, shearing. He worked in timber mills where he lost a finger. That’s how he knew all about timber. He worked on the roads up round Fernbank.

That’s what he was. A stockman, drover, anything like that, horseman. He got thrown from a horse once and dragged, but the stirrup leather broke, so that saved him.

I was only a child. I remember we had sheep and we had some cows. I can remember taking

my father’s lunch down to the back paddock to him. He had a single furrow plough with one horse. The horse and him guided it like you see. He grew a crop of maize. Then I watched out the window and watched him kill a pig. He had a horse that had to be destroyed and he couldn’t afford a vet so he dug a big hole in a sloping bank and he stood the horse on the bank and he

blindfolded the horse and then he hit the horse between the eyes with a sharp axe. It killed the horse instantly and the horse’s body fell into the hole.

He was a Victorian type father. We never called him “Dad,” we called him “Father”. He was very strong

on discipline. If I misbehaved he would strike me. But he was a good man. Everything for his family. He really loved my mother. He was ten years older than her. He was 38 when he married her. She was 28. If she said at three o’clock in the morning, “I’d like an ice cream,” and there was a shop anywhere, there wouldn’t have been, but he’d get up and he would

have gone and got it for her. When she died in 1946 and I came back to the house I’ll never forget his despair. He cried out, “Mother,” he called her Mother. This pain was in him. I’ve got great respect for him. He only ever wrote me one letter. He was reared in a Catholic family. Looking back on it they were really bigoted, without being knowing they were

bigoted. Cos I was going with a non-Catholic girl and he wrote to me and said, “I’m sure there’s hundreds of Catholic girls who would be pleased to know you,” or something. He didn’t understand. Today you don’t think like that, but that’s how it was. It was great ill feelings between Irish Catholics and the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Even at school they used to chant at us different

things like, “Catholic dogs/ jump like frogs/ in and out of the water.” We’d sing back, “Protty dogs/ jump like frogs/ in and out of the water.” But without feeling any dislike towards them, because I mixed with them in the park, played football with them. That was just how it was.

The state would chant at us and we’d be at the Catholic school and chant back. It’s different now.

Looking back it’s all so ridiculous.

It started off in the early days of Australia. The British tried to turn the Irish into second-class citizens. They even sold some of them into slave labour. At the time of the famine in County Clare there was 500 marched to the English landlord’s place and asked for food and he refused. By the time

they got back there were 300 of them dead. There were women and children laying in the street. But it wasn’t the English people, it was the ruling class in England. Because my grandfather had two children at World War I and five at World War II who all took the oath of loyalty to His Majesty. So they came to Australia and they were looked on as second-class citizens. The English got all the land grants, but the Irish went and worked for them

on the farms. The Irish also got into the racing. Trainers and jockeys. There were lots of funny things went on there. They all contributed to the church, but they might have been rogues the rest of the week when it came to fixing races.

I was only six when I left Bairnsdale. At Fernbank, 20 miles out, he had a small farm, but it wouldn’t support us. That’s why he took the job on the roads. The Christian Brothers started to educate boys and pushed them into law and the public service. The Xavier’s College was started for the sons of the Italians originally. So that’s the way the Irish came up. They

didn’t get the land grants, but they came up in the public service, like the taxation office was full of them, and in law there was the famous Gavin Duffy family, that’s how they came up.

Yes. My wife’s

father was a World War I soldier, a bulk up near Swan Hill. When he farmed he used horses. It was all horses. Then tractors started to come in and many of the men who had horses wouldn’t get a tractor. After a while they realised how much they could get through and improved their land with a tractor. My father worked at the SEC [State Electricity Commission], but he must have lost that job and he

was on sustenance. Then during the war years he was a guard at a substation in Brunswick. He even had a revolver. He never fired anything in his life. But the climate of the time when the Japanese came in the war was you felt there were Japanese just around the corner. So they had this electric substation in Brunswick and they had three shifts, seven

till three, three till eleven, eleven till seven. My father did that. Then he got very old and he finished up going to McPherson’s in Burnley Street, Richmond, and there were al these old men there and McPherson’s must have been very good and they let them come there and they could sweep the floor and when they got tired they could sit down at benches and sort bolts. It’s

strange to think that my father had that life without education, yet my own children, some of them with three master degrees and all that, how different my father’s life could have been if he’d had a chance. Me too for that matter. If I had had secondary school education my life might have taken a different turn and I mightn’t have met my wife

and she’s the best thing that ever happened to me.

One brother three years older, a sister three years younger, and another sister three years younger than her. My father was 52 when my youngest sister was born. So when he was working on sustenance he must have been in his 50s, early 60s and pick and shovel work and all that. I really admire him. He had

great principles. In our home we weren’t allowed to say “damn” or “hell” or anything like that. That was swearing. My whole life was around our church, the boys’ club and that’s why when I got into the armed forces that was the first time I realised people lived together without being married. I didn’t know that before that. That’s how sheltered my life was.

The farms, they were only very small farms. There were no big properties. Somehow, cos remember I was just a child there, somehow they managed to get a living cutting stringy bark. They used that for something and people would go out and get this bark and it would be sold to somebody

I don’t know who. They had a timber mill there and a lot of the men would work there and grow some little crop like my father. Maize or something and sell that. Have a few sheep, buy a few ewes, have the land, sell the lambs; same with cattle. That’s how they lived. Very, very simple life.

There was no church there, there was just a hall. We used to have church once a month. The priest would come from Bairnsdale and he would usually stay at out place. As I was to find out later he had a drinking problem, cos I can remember him being there all bloodshot eyes. That was his weakness. He’d stay at our place.

Yes, they nearly all were Irish when I was growing up. The Archbishop in Melbourne came from Ireland. It was a very Irish church.

We had no car. We just had a buggy. We were 20 miles out of Bairnsdale. There’s no way, that’s how it was. It even happened at Swan Hill. My wife’s family were six miles

away from Nyah West and they had church about once every three weeks. That’s how it was. If you were in the town you could go every week.

Not in Fernbank, in Bairnsdale. That’s where the priest would have too many drinks and the publican would lock him in the back of the boot when he got a bit drunk.

They all liked, they’re human, I realise now. My father thought a priest or a nun could do no wrong. We know now that they had their weaknesses same as anyone else. Some of the tales now appal me, shocking.

No, I didn’t I don’t think my father did.

I just knew. They were like today’s horseraces. Bairnsdale Cup probably and all that. No different today.

No. When we lived in Kew my uncle, Mick Perugan, he was a friend of John Wren’s. He used to have ponies and there was a pony racecourse in Bridge Road, Richmond. He used to go there.

I’m sure they fixed the races quite often.

Pony. That was so many hands. No, as boys we listened to the Melbourne Cup and all that, but we weren’t into racing. When I got into the armed forces they allowed us into the races for free, so I went a few times. I went to the 1941 Melbourne Cup

on the lawn. That was exciting.

We all made our own fun. We’d make paper footballs out of newspaper and we’d play together. We could do wonderful things with them. Many footballers that played in the top football started off like that. Then if you were on your own you could play, use your

imagination and play a game with yourself. We had cap guns. We played war because we’d been reared on World War I stories. So we often played war. We played board games, drafts, card games, 500 and everything. We had trucks. We built billycarts they call them and we’d find a hill and we’d race and we’d

try to beat each other. Then I used to take my cart on Saturday mornings down the road to Bentley’s bakery. I’d get horse manure and I would sell it to houses. People bought it for their garden. I’d get threepence a load. I would save that up. We were always on the lookout for bottles, cos if you found a soft drink bottle you could go back and get the deposit on it. Cos every bottle had a deposit on it at,

they weren’t called “milk bars,” they were called “lolly shops,” no such thing as malted milks then. Then you looked around for beer bottles and you’d save them up. Around our streets would come the bottle-o calling out, “Bottle-o, bottle-o,” and you’d run out and sell them to him. Then there was the guys coming around selling the rabbits. The rabbits was what kept poor people alive in the Depression. It was the poor man’s “underground mutton” they

called it. It was the poor man’s food. Mother would buy some rabbits, so I had all kinds of fricasseed rabbit, stew, rabbit roast, I never want to see another rabbit again. Then you’d have the guys coming around calling, “Props.” The clothesline wasn’t like today. They would put a post at one end of the yard and a post at the other and had a cross bar on it and run wires. The washing would be hung on and

you’d have these props. They were long pieces of timber with a fork, which would hold the line up when the clothes were on it. Washing at our place was all day. We had a wash house, a copper, a copper stick and a piece of roofing iron, galvanised iron, just so when mother lifted the clothes out of the copper she put it on so the water drained back. Then she put it in the trough

and it was rinsed. If you had some money you had a wringer. If you didn’t you’d wring it by hand. And you might rinse it again and you’d blue it. Ricket Blue I think it was called, like shirts like this would be done. Rickett’s Blue. With my father, every man in those days had a shirt, but you had studs. A stud in the front and a stud at the back and you had collars. The collars

mother would send to the Chinese laundry and they would starch them. She’d also send the shirts and they’d starch this here. It always fascinated me the Chinese figures and they were all mysterious people and all that. So that was one thing. Then every Saturday morning I would take two billies and I would go to the Model Dairy in Cotham Road, Kew and there’d

be a line of unemployed people and they’d be filling your billy with skimmed milk. I’d get in the queue and take that home and mother would use that for cooking. But we did get milk delivered with the cream in it. Mother would leave out a billy of a night and Kennedy’s Dairy or some dairy would come along in the night and they’d ladle the milk into the billy. I often think, “What about the cats?” It must have been so

unhygienic. The other thing was I’d go down to Trinity Grammar in Wellington Street, Kew and knock on the cook’s door, this was Saturday morning, and I’d have a billy and she would give me some food that was left over from the boarders’ tea on Friday night. When it was meat I thought, “God, they eat meat on Friday? That’s terrible.” Mother was a tailoress. She’d been trained at Buckley and Nunn’s, in

1900 she started, which is now David Jones in Melbourne. I remember her telling me how she’d make frocks for the Melbourne Cup Day people. Once she took one on the cable tram out to Toorak, went to this home and the man stayed in the room while his wife tried it on. That embarrassed her. Then they sent her to the kitchen and she had a glass of lemonade and gave her a shilling. On the way back along St Kilda Road

they passed her in their carriage when they were driving to Flemington for the Cup. So she made all her own clothes. She taught me the proper way to sew on a button, you wouldn’t believe that, and she even taught my brother and I how to iron clothes and things like that. We had to wash up. My job was to chop the morning’s wood, which was the deal every morning and the one fire stove would be lit

and for breakfast we had porridge

To get that porridge we had a grocer’s. They didn’t have supermarkets then, they had grocer shops, fruit shop, fish shops and all that. They weren’t called “greengrocers” to my knowledge. Mother would send me to buy six pence of wheat, which would be quite a large bag. We had a little grinder and my job was to grind enough for the porridge in the morning. So that’s what we had. Then we had that

porridge and toast with dripping on it. My lunch to school was mainly jam sandwiches, that’s why I can’t stand them today. I used to always be desperate to swap my lunch with another child who might like jam sandwiches. We mainly had on Sunday it would be a leg of mutton. We never had lamb. The legs of lamb were too small.

The legs of mutton were large. There was six of us and we would have a roast dinner on Sunday with that. Sunday evening Mother would put her best cloth on the table and little butter dishes with butter knives in, bread and butter plates, serviettes and we’d have scones. She would have send me up the registry to buy three pence of cream.

We’d have scones, jam and cream. We’d have cold meat and salad. We also had the special jam dishes with special jam spoons. This was in case we ever dined at Government House we’d know how to do it. You had to take the butter knife, put the bit of butter on the side of your plate and then use your bread and butter knife. So it was Sunday night.

That’s what she did, I don’t know why.

All day Monday she washed the copper. If Father was home he’d bring up wood to her, if it was school holidays it’d be my brother or I. Monday night we would have the remainder of the cold meat with hot vegetables and hot gravy. So that was one leg of mutton. Other times we would have lambs fry and bacon and we ate sausages and

we had sweets like lemon pudding and Yorkshire pudding was a main thing that had meat in it. With us boys, I’d met my friend Jack McKenzie in grade two and he lived a couple of streets away and we were great friends. We saw a lot of each other. We all managed to buy a bike of about

a pound and we’d go on rides to Warrandyte out here. We might spend the night and sleep on the river bank, or up to Kinglake. You’d find a stream and it was no pollution, you could see right to the bottom and we’d dive into this ice-cold water. Other times we’d go down to Kew, this’d be when I was 16 or 17.

We’d go down to Kew and hire a boat from Caine’s, a rowboat and row up the Yarra. Some of us would dive off and the others would row away from us. We’d sometimes hire a tennis court for five shillings and we’d have a hit. I’m sorry about that. Is that?

As boys we’d spend hours just talking to one another. We’d play backyard cricket with a ball. It was all very simple. We belonged to the boys’ club at the church. We played football in winter and cricket in summer. It was a leisurely life. I thought everybody lived like this. I didn’t

realise. My uncle worked with St Vincent de Paul’s amongst poor people in Fitzroy and I felt sorry for them. I never realised we were poor. In Edgevale Road, Kew, which is a long road, I only ever remember one person with a motor vehicle. There weren’t many on the roads.

Yes. We had an eight-room house, a weatherboard place.

My parents had borrowed money from the State Savings Bank of the day. As it turned out, when my parents couldn’t make the repayments, the bank never took the house. It was after the war when my brother and I came back that we fixed up the bank with the finance. We were very grateful to that bank that they didn’t take our home. Any other banks did.

In the

1930s.

Yes. They’d take. Then there were people that rented. They would stay for say two months in a place and they’d be behind in the rent and they’d do what they called a “moonlight flit’. They’d just leave and go somewhere else. That’s how it was.

Well, I knew houses that suddenly there were To Let things and the

people had gone. We all knew about that, but the State Savings Bank were very good to my people.

He was on sustenance and I think he got 25 shillings a week to look after us with food and everything, which wasn’t enough, but it was something that bought the food. Cos food was very cheap. On Fridays, when I went to school Mother would say, “On the way home, buy a barracuda.” But if it was a

shilling I wouldn’t buy it. If it was nine pence I’d buy a whole barracouta, which was quite a lot. I’d get a haircut, it’d cost threepence. That’s less than five cents. I can remember as a boy being in Exhibition Street, Melbourne and seeing a notice on a café window, “Three Course Meal 9 Pence.” Everything was very, very cheap. The cost of living

was way down.

That was at Fernbank. After Mildred didn’t take me to school any more I went with my brother. We went over the hill near our home, but when I went back when I was an adult, it was only a slight rise, but as a child I thought it was a hill. We’d take our boots off and leave them under a bush on the side of the road and go to school barefooted. Cos most of the children went barefooted. So the

teacher didn’t mind. On the way home we put our boots back again. Mother was a city girl. She thought we should wear boots. Sometimes on a heavy frost in winter my brother and I would get out of bed and run across the paddock on the frost looking at our footmarks in the frost. I can remember we used to crawl under this hollow log and there’d be snake skins under there. I can remember Mother

calling out to my father to come up from the paddock. There was a snake in the wood box. I think they were mainly black snakes, not browns. They were still snakes.

16 while she was there, which wasn’t bad for a city girl. When my father took her there, she was a tailoress they call it today, in those days they called it a seamstress. I’ll show you a photo after. She made all her own

wedding frock and her sister’s wedding frock. When my father brought her to Fernbank in 1913 the women from miles around came to look at my mother’s clothes, cos she had the very latest fashion. I met a woman later that remembered her. My father took her to these friends, the Edwardses. I remember Mrs Edwards and her daughter saying my mother was wearing a

burgundy kind of costume and things like that.

No, came from farms miles around. Remember this woman was from the city and had the latest clothing, which she’d made herself. They came to look at it.

Yes.

No, that was when she was single. She made them all there. Later on when we were at Fernbank we weren’t very well off and I don’t think she was making much up there. She brought all this clothing that she’d made when she lived in Hawthorn before she was married.

No, to sew on a button properly and iron. As it turned out it was a blessing

in disguise. When I got into the air force we had to iron our own shirts. So I knew how to iron.

I didn’t have any.

Yeah, eighth grade.

I was at St John’s in Hawthorn then. I left Sacred Heart, Kew, the nuns’ school and went back to the Brothers at St John’s. I didn’t mind the Brothers so much because if you misbehaved and you got six on that hand and six on that. When you went out in the schoolyard that same Brother might come along and share the kick with you,

meaning he got it and next time he got it, he’d give it to you. If there was any trouble between boys in the schoolyard they’d bring out boxing gloves and make the boys have a fight. When they felt it was enough they’d make them shake hands. Of course the fights would continue in a paddock after school. One time at the school in grade six at St John’s I decided I would put the clock forward an hour.

It was so stupid when you think about it. I thought I’d get out of school an hour early. Of course it didn’t happen. When Brother found out, “What boy?” And there’d be 50 of us in the class and no one said a word. Then he threatened to keep the whole class in unless the boy confessed so I got to my feet. I just got kept in I think that day. I couldn’t let the whole class suffer.

We marched in. We lined up in our grades every day and they had kettle drums and we marched in row by row into school and it was all strictly discipline. When we came in after lunchtime we stood alongside our desk with our hands folded and we said a Catholic prayer called the Rosary. That was

part of it.

Yeah, the whole Rosary. We just accepted all that. That’s the way it was. The nuns used to tell us crazy stories about 303 bullets bouncing off metal in World War I. When I got to World War II and saw what a 303 bullet can do, I said to Kevin Cahill and I was on leave, “What do you think?”

They made up these stories. More or less to look after you.

Rebellious and not wanting to work till towards the end of my schooling when I suddenly realised I was being stupid, that I should work.

When I

started school, I went in crying to the teacher about by brother being in the tank and he didn’t do anything about it. I was only five and I adored my brother. I was so desperate. He was going to be hurt in this tank. “You must come and get him out.” So that must have put something in me, a dislike of teachers

I think, looking back on it.

It was only an opening. It was ridiculous, but I was only five. He wasn’t going to be hurt at all, but I thought he was. Another thing, when I went to school, I was in grade four and we never got much fruit cos we couldn’t afford it. My aunt, my mother’s sister,

Auntie Agnes, sent me an orange for my birthday. That was great. I took it to school and I put it in an open locker and some kid stole it. I still remember that. As I grew up we knew around Kew when the fruit trees would be ripe and the grapes. We would go and help ourselves to a bunch or a couple of apples or quinces.

We wouldn’t vandalise it. Everybody did it. We probably could have gone in and asked the family and they would have given it to us. But we took it.

No, he was rejected for some reason. Remember, he was 38, he’d be 39 when the war broke out. At that time he tried to join up, but they

rejected him. None of his brothers went because they were all older. Two of my father’s nephews went. One was wounded on the Western Front, one of my cousins, before I was even born, and one was in the Light Horse in Egypt.

No, but Mother’s sisters

would come up for holidays. Even my grandma came up. Once we went down to Kew, well they all lived around Melbourne, so we saw a lot of the family, but not of my father’s family. There were only two or three of my father’s sisters in Melbourne. We saw them, but the others lived in the country. Some of them died when I was growing up because my father’s first sister was born in

1859 and father was born in 1876. I was born in 1921.

It was Sidney Pencombes in Queen Street, city and it was delivering typewriters to business firms that needed them. They ranged from ten inch typewriters

to 20 inch. I carried them on the right hip. Everywhere I walked, quite often a few blocks, in the city. Then other times I’d take the cable tram and I’d sit on the front part of the cable tram, which they call the dunny, it was all open.

It was a job, I didn’t mind. I just accepted it as I had a job. I was

getting ten shillings a week. Then I would go to the church dance once a week and I might go to the pictures occasionally. Life was good.

They were all right. They were kind to me. My brother was a typewriter mechanic there. Mr Brady was the foreman. I remember standing with Mr Brady one very hot day when the temperature was about 110

in Melbourne, 111, while he talked to my mother. The heat from the footpath you felt as if the skin was peeling off your face. She was talking to him about me. It looked like I’d become a typewriter mechanic, but it didn’t happen. I left there and I went to Kaiser Stockings near Richmond Station with my friend and made stockings for a couple of years before going to Australian Estates to cart away wool. When I joined the air force I

went to Myer and I worked in Myer despatch in Carlton waiting for my call up to come. So I worked there for a few months. I learned how to lift heavy pieces of furniture and all that.

Making stockings on machines. Don’t ask me to explain it now, but I learned how to do it.

They were all very noisy. There were males and females doing this. But a job was a job.

No, before that. He must have got retrenched or something or they felt they didn’t need him any more and he was in sustenance, which today you call the dole. He never had another job after that. Round about

1931 or ’32 he got the job at SEC, but somewhere, it couldn’t have lasted that long because soon after that he was on sustenance. One time he had to go to Werribee to work. I don’t know whether he worked on The Boulevard in Kew. I think he did some pick and shovel work for the Kew Council. In the 1920s and that the soldiers from the First World War built the

Great Ocean Road that runs down Victoria to Geelong there.

I paid my monthly ticket, which was six and six on the train to the city, or Richmond, and that paid my way into a dance, which would have cost two shillings, and I gave my mother some for board and I bought my own clothes. You could buy

a Henry Buck shirt then for about eight and six, and they were the top. But there was no way I’d pay eight and six, I’d buy something for two and six or three shillings. I classed my childhood as very happy, because I didn’t realise we were poor and I always had a bed to sleep in. We had a fire stove and we had a gas stove

and we had an open fireplace in what we called the “dining room”. Then there was three rooms each side of the passageway with high ceilings. It had been an exclusive home back in the 1800s because it had levers on the wall to ring the bell to call on the maid from the back path, but it had deteriorated when we got it, that’s probably why Father bought it because he didn’t have to pay as much as if it was in good order. It would

have been out of our reach. I slept in a room on my own. Eventually Mother took in lodgers, a mother and a daughter and a Mrs Osmond and her son and she let them two rooms. There was a gas stove in one room she put in, and there was an open fireplace in the other. We had marble fireplaces, mantelpieces, and some of the fireplaces

were with coke grates.

I was at my friend Jack McKenzie’s place. It was a Sunday night. We’d been playing cards and we listened to the wireless, it wasn’t called a radio then, and we heard the announcement about war and it didn’t make, well, it interested us,

but I didn’t immediately think much about it. As it went on I wanted to be part of it. Of the boys there I went into the air force, Jack Arletti went into the infantry and went to the islands, and Ian Tollman, oh, Jack McKenzie, he came up the islands and we met at Milne Bay, but he was sent home

because he had a perforated eardrum, so he never really had any war service. Ian Tollman was killed in the war. My next-door neighbour, Billy George, was killed in the infantry. Frank Doyle, another mate, he was killed in New Guinea. Pat Henley disappeared; the Japs got him. The boys Scott got killed in England.

Then boys I went to school with, some of them just disappeared to the Japanese. Some of them had, Archie Davis bailed out and had bad legs when he came back, but he survived. All that. Most of us that were in the boys’ club all had some war service of various degrees.

Catholic Young Men’s Society. Before that it was a

Catholic Boys’ Legion, under 18. I was in that and then I joined the Catholic Young Men’s Society and we had indoor sports nights, quoits and deck tennis like they play on ships in the net. We had debating and things like that. We had a football team, two football teams, cricket and all that. We went on picnics in the church. We’d hire a furniture van and the

girls would come too. We’d go up to Ferntree Gully which was a big trip, which is only 20 miles up the track. It was OK. I didn’t think any of the girls were ever interested in me. Some years ago I went to someone’s funeral and I said to some of them, “You never took any notice of me.” They said, “We liked you.” I said, “Why didn’t you let me know?” I never had a girlfriend or anything like that. I couldn’t afford it.

Well, none of us had much money at all. After the war I had 1,000 pound. I’d never had so much in all my life.

No, we knew nothing about it. We’d heard of Hitler and we didn’t realise what he

was doing. I can remember I was at the Franciscans’ monastery in Sackville Street, Kew, and they were good to us. We could go up there in school holidays and use their billiard table and we could use their tennis court. I remember they had these Irish lay guys there. Looking back on it I know they were all alcoholics that the fathers had taken in. Brother Pascal had something about some

German brothers had come. I shouted out something I reckoned was German. He slapped my face and I got a terrible shock. But he knew the misery they’d been through. I just thought this was funny. We didn’t realise. I went home, he sent for me and apologised to me and explained to me that because of what had happened to these brothers in Germany it upset

him for a moment. So it was all right. We never realised what was happening over there. The war started to go on and you just wanted to be part of it. I didn’t get into anything until 1941.

No, he just wouldn’t

sign the papers. We were very obedient to our father. He was a Victorian type father. His father had been like that, strict discipline. I see my son with his seven children, his children are climbing all over him. We never did that. Or giving him a kiss, that never happened. Yet I know my father loved me, but he wasn’t reared to express it. It was only one time when

one of those rare occasions that Mother must have been out somewhere that he played with us in the passageway and rolled on the floor with us. That was the only time ever. That’s just the way he was, but he was a good man. Did his best.

Three years. I adored him. He and I were very close. Sometimes we slept

in the same bed. We might have our toast in there and he’d sweep the crumbs over my side. We were very close. When I was posted in 1942 in New Guinea and things weren’t too good up there, when he came home, he was in the army, and Mother told me he cried in case I might be hurt. Yet

I wasn’t in the infantry, but Megan, my sister, wrote to me when I was up there and said, “Things don’t look too good. You might have to swing home.”

Yes, he’d been called up. They called up everybody. I wasn’t called up because I volunteered. Eventually my brother then became a volunteer. A lot of those guys who were called up to join what we call the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] and I

was to meet my brother in Port Moresby when I came back from Milne Bay. He was there.

I was never called up. He was called up. They all were.

1940. He was sent to Western Australia. They thought the Japs might land there. He was a dispatch rider I think. It didn’t happen and eventually he came back to Victoria. Then he went to

Queensland and he was at a jungle training school. No, that was a mistake cos he wasn’t in the infantry. I’m not quite sure what he was. And he finished up in Port Moresby.

Because my brother’s friend, Malcolm Green, had joined the navy and I just wanted to be in the navy. It didn’t happen.

Yeah, some of then in the boys’ club. Archie Davis and John Gibby, he was on bombers in England. Arch Davis was on the fighters. Steve Murphy, he was an air gunner on raids over Europe. Some of the others like

Jack Murphy joined the army and he was a signaller up there. I was in signals in the air force.

No, I was one of the first that joined. Gradually they all joined. Signalling was a risky job for the army guys up there because if the Japanese found one of the signal wires they’d cut it and set up an ambush. Our

chaps would do the same. So when you went to repair one you never knew what was gonna happen. He survived.

No, I would have liked to be an aircrew, but I didn’t have the education. That was the trouble. That’s why I was sorry I wished I had. So much so that I wanted to be, my father messed me up with this, so I had to con him into signing

the papers of the air force, but I would have liked to have gone into something else. When I was in the air force, later on the army were forming a paratroopers unit at Richmond in New South Wales and I asked for a discharge in the air force to join them. But as it turned out it didn’t matter cos they never went into action. So it wouldn’t have mattered.

He just didn’t want me to go away. Tom had already been called up and he wanted me to be safe at home. But I said to him that this was a great opportunity that they could teach me something there that would be good for me after the war. It was an absolute lie. I was desperate.

Not really. He only ever wrote me one letter. I’ve got it in there somewhere.

Yeah, he came at six o’clock and woke me up. Cos he always got up early. He asked me would I tear it up and I said, “No, Father, I want to do this.” So he accepted it because my Mother must have been talking to him in the night

about it.

No. She just accepted it, but I don’t think she liked it. I have letters of hers in there about various things. She went and worked at the Red Cross making hospital pyjamas and hoping that I’d never have to wear them and all that.

Yeah, early 1941, Myer dispatch in Carlton. Still there, the building. I just loaded furniture and all that on trucks with the delivery. It was just waiting for the air force to call me, which they did on June the 23rd. I’d just turned

20 on May the 29th.

I’ve often thought of that. I think we went to Royal Park in Flemington Road and got our uniforms. Royal Park at times was an American base, an army one, I got discharged there, but I’ve got an idea that’s where we went, but I’m not quite sure. Cos I remember

one of the chaps, when we got our uniforms, he looked at the label on his greatcoat and said, “My uncle makes these.” He was the only Jewish boy I ever met in the armed forces. His name’s down there on our honour roll at Elwood. Then we went to Ballarat to do our rookies. That’s you train the marching, the slow march, all the drill, all the different salutes,

all the torture they put us through in wintertime. I’ve never been so cold in all my life. Cos the 303 has a piece of metal on the bottom and you can imagine on a winter morning when it’s under 30 degrees and you have to present arms and slap this hand on the butt, it’s like getting the cuts. That’s when I had my first experience of drill sergeants. They had this flow of language and things about your

ancestry, that your grandmothers and your mothers, God, I never struck anything like it. I got a bit angry. But looking back on it, it was all good. It was to teach you discipline.

All kinds of things.

I don’t know, their parents must have been stupid to have you cos how could you, all this.

I can’t quite remember. I soon learned to never volunteer for anything. That’s when they first tried that thing up there to joke or no, it really happened. They said, “Anybody know anything about music?” “Yes, sergeant.” He had to go and they wanted a piano movement in the mess and I went up and said something stupid about cooking and I finished up in the cook house cleaning these great

trays after breakfast that had contained sausages or something. They really made it tough for it, but it was really good. It hardened you. You could take it. Yes, it was, but, oh it was so cold. I’ve never been so cold. I wore all my clothes and as many blankets as I could.

Just unlined hut with wire frame beds in them and I think a palliasse full of straw, not a proper mattress. I think it was a “palliasse” they called them. They filled this hessian thing with this straw. I think it was that, I’m not certain about that.

And we had to keep our uniform pressed and we soon realised that instead of ironing the creases in your trousers you got two pieces of cardboard you could put your trousers between and left them under this palliasse so that kept them right. Then you had to learn how to make your bed properly. Not like you make a bed now. Everything would be folded up at the top and they had all these inspections.

If you had anything wrong they’d punish you somehow.

No worries, cos I’d learned it from the World War I soldiers at school for the St Patrick’s Day. But the slow march was different. That’s for funerals and ceremonial occasions. No, I could march. Any ex-serviceman today too, if you play a marching tune he can automatically

march and fall into step. It’s just something. It’s like you never forget that and you never forget your service number. That’s two things you never forget.

Yeah.

I’ve got an idea it was six weeks. We not only learned all that, but we had bayonet drill and all that, pushing bayonets

in, because when you’re on active service, if the enemy, say, drops paratroopers it doesn’t matter who you are, everybody's gotta pick up their rifle and somehow fight. So you wouldn’t be trained like the infantry, but you had to know. We also had to learn how to shoot the 303s and things like that. We did that as well. We were all very fit.

No. I’d never fired one. That was my first experience of everything like that.

Well, it was because of my father. He didn’t want to send me into the armed forces and he worked with a man who'd been in the navy way back and he told my father what a terrible life it was in the navy and all that.

So my father just said no.

I think my mother kissed me and I think my father might have kissed me too I think, which was unusual. I was very excited. I could hardly wait. I kept walking up the street looking back at them standing at the gate and giving them a wave.

It was all very exciting.

I had no idea. I was just going to be part of this war. Just part of it. I just wanted to be part of it.

No, nothing like that. Though we always had the national anthem, “God Save The King,” played. You went to the movies

theatre and they always played that and we all stood up. One of my friends who never joined up was at the pictures during the war and the chap next to him didn’t stand up and he turned around and clocked him. I wouldn’t have been as patriotic as that. It was

just a sense of adventure, that was all. I had two uncles that had been to World War I and they’d been in something, so I wanted to be in something. But I would have liked to have been in a more active role in something, but that’s the best I could do with my father. The only thing I could get him to sign.

No, we knew that our government was still paying for the guns that our soldiers had used in World War I. We knew that in the Depression, England had sent out Otto Niemeyer I think his name was from the Bank Of England and they wouldn’t give our government any money.

So we weren’t without, I didn’t have a dislike towards anyone, but we felt that wasn’t fair. This was all different. It didn’t matter.

No, I never had any resentment. It was only years later, when my grandfather, the circumstances of his birth in County Clare in 1823

the English had put his parents off the farm, they were tenant farmers. It was probably December the 6th 1823 in the middle of winter on the west coast, the icy winter of the Atlantic, and she was very heavily pregnant. On the way to wherever they were going, to some other cottage or something, she went into labour and my grandfather was born in a ditch. When he was born

there was a terrible storm broke out over County Clare, that area, and it was written up in the parish records. My grandfather never forgave the English for that and said he’d never work for an Englishman again. That’s why when he came to Australia he got the cart and horses and my father, he instilled into his children “Home Rule For Ireland” and all this business. My father used to sing, “Of the colours we must wear the England’s

cruel red/ but it reminds us of the blood that Ireland shed.” I think it’s something, but it didn’t mean anything to me. Two of my grandfathers’ grandsons were old enough, they went to World War I and there was five or six of us went to World War II. But you can’t blame him for having that resentment. But I hold no grudges. It was the ruling class. When the Famine was on the English had soup kitchens,

but the Irish had to pay and they didn’t have the money. When an Irish tenant farmer couldn’t pay often their cottage was pulled down and they were turned down. The first people who came across the … helped the Irish were the English Quakers, the Society of Friends. It was terrible times. But you’re not here for all

that history.

Threes. They told us to hold it up close. If you held it out there, the recoil. I turned out I was a pretty good shot. I was a good eye for it. Later on in life,

at 22, I was a good shot. I could shoot a rabbit or a crow or something.

Yes, did all that. They had these figures filled with straw and all that and there was something about getting the bayonet out. I can’t remember it all now. But it was all basic training so that

you knew what was going on. Say there was some emergency. You were trained, even though you weren’t trained like the infantry you knew what was expected if you follow what I mean.

They were all right. They were unlined huts, very cold. Meals were all right, OK. I’d never worn an overcoat in my life, but in Ballarat I had to wear my greatcoat

it was so cold. At one stage I got a bad cold and they put me in what they called the sickbay which was another unlined hut. It was just as cold as my own. I got over that. I was very fit.

No. We were all young. To join the air force you had to be A

1.

The army had B class or A2 and all that. Not in the air force, they were all A1. Had to have 20/20 vision and everything, not be colour blind, good hearing and everything. No, I don’t remember anyone dropping out. It wasn’t that rigorous. Not like the infantry, the commandos were training, not like that.

No, I knew I couldn’t because I didn’t have the education. I would have had to go away and studied, but I thought I’d never be able to make it. How long might the war last? How would I get on with maths when I’d missed the early years of math training? So I didn’t do that. I

just wanted to be part of it somehow. I would have liked a more active role, that’s why I tried to join those paratroopers, but it turned out they never went into action.

I just accepted it. That was the way it was. I just didn’t have that education.

My friend down the road who flew Catalinas, he went and studied, and he got into aircrew. He was at Ballarat too. He was a wireless operator.

No. It was what you called

“doing your rookies”. Learning how to salute. Certain officers, there’s different salutes for higher ranks. There’s a present arms and there’s a butt salute, and then you had to learn how to salute like the Yanks salute like that, we went down. All those things. Where you had your fingers, the slow march, like all the things. So wherever you are you can automatically just

wouldn’t matter if you’d never seen the guys before you’d all automatically do the same thing.

Yes. With the rifle. If you’ve got your rifle on your shoulder. It’s present arms. There’s a butt salute, but I can’t remember. The present arms would be for the higher ranks, but which rank I’m not sure now.

I was posted. I was posted

to be in the advance party to 7 Service Flying Training School Deniliquin in the Riverina in New South Wales about 20 miles across the border from Echuca. We were going to set it up as it turned out. There were no planes there, so I travelled up there. I don’t know really what we did there because there were no planes. But we were the advance party

so we must have been fixing up things. The hangars and all the equipment and the first plane to land there was a Wirraway, a Wirraway store it was gonna be, flown by Squadron Leader Scott, who was to be the chief flying instructor. The trainees used to call him “Scrubbo” Scott, because before a guy could get his wings he’d take them up for a test and often he’d say no and that meant the chap had to go to another section

air force aircrew, like wireless operator, air gunner, or all that. Eventually the planes arrived and everything got going. My job there was all up where the flying was about recording all the flights. So I was mixed up with all the flying instructors and the trainees. Occasionally they took me up on flights. I enjoyed that.

Then there were a few crashes. One day there was a plane crashed in the channel. The clock was missing. The clock from the Wirraway. The CO [Commanding Officer] of the station, oh, I met Bernie Hansford, a friend of mine there, in this advance party. I think he was a fitter 2E [Second Engineer]. He was eventually to study and re-muster and get into aircrew and come back to Deniliquin, do his training

and then go to England and fly Spitfires. I was very envious of him. He and I on Sundays used to walk into church in Deniliquin. Sometimes we’d get a lift. This clock disappeared. Wing Commander Campbell announced that there’d be no more leave for any of us. The NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers] and the officers were exempt from that. No more leave, and we resented that. Incidentally,

when we got there we were what you call AC1s [aircraftsmen], that’s the lowest rank. The NCOs we had were all permanent air force. We had blue overalls we’d been issued with, and a blue beret. Their berets were different to ours. They’d been tailor made. They were permanent air force. They were all right. It was decided in a meeting, this is mutinous, that we would all march out the gate into Deniliquin a

couple of miles away. At the last minute it was decided to march to the officers’ mess and put our point of view. We got there and the officers told us that Wing Commander Campbell was not there. Suddenly, from our own ranks, came this guy in overalls, it was Wing Commander Campbell, who had marched with us. Our spokesman put our point of view that, were we looked on as criminals? If you’re

and NCO you weren’t a criminal? You wouldn’t steal anything? Or an officer? He saw that and I think he included the others in it for a while, but then eventually it stopped. A long time later somewhere a censor picked up something in an airman’s letter talking about the clock and eventually they got the guy. Whether they ever got the clock I don’t know. During that time the local

church asked for some airmen to come in to be in a debutant set for local girls. So Bernie and I went in. We were mainly Catholics, but you could have been a non-Catholic boy, cos the Catholic church had a CUSA [Catholic United Service Association] hut, where we could go and if you wanted a button sewn on or if you wanted something mended you’d get a cup of tea. Actually some of the girls helping there

were my future wife’s cousins. I didn’t know that. Also, my future wife’s aunt was there, but I didn’t know that at the time. We went into this deb set and we did our job there. Then my partner was Joan Kerwin and his partner was her sister Pat Kerwin. They invited us out to their father’s property. So we had happy times out at a property called Hockley. They were a great family.

I must have gone out there for about seven months off and on. I bought a little Country Eagle two-stroke motorbike. Life was very good. And there was no romance, it was all purely the time. They had a Shetland pony which I’d ride the hell out of. They had a bit of an earth tennis court. They were a great family. I caught up with one of the Kerwins this year.

Pat it was, she’s 80 now. I said, “All that time I went out there, Pat, to your home, I never thought of taking anything out, a box of chocolates or anything. Nothing.” They fed us. I remember the first day we went out there Joan was showing me their records, the semi-classical ones, and they had a gramophone. In our home we were too poor and I had no knowledge of all that music and I felt inadequate.

All of a sudden came Pearl Harbor. That changed everything. The climate in Australia at the time was the Japs could be anywhere. As a matter of fact, during the war a Japanese plane flew over Williamstown down there, Footscray way, it was from a submarine out there. Our Australian gunners knew it was that and didn’t have permission to fire, so they never fired

on it. Crazy isn’t it?

Yes, that’s true. He felt how could he fire? He had to get OK.

Sometime during the war, I don’t know what year it was, we all heard about it. When they came into the war they kept grabbing lots of us to put a guard on the tarmac, which was really crazy. If the Japs were going to come, one

guard walking along the tarmac. I got picked this dark night and they gave me a .38 revolver and I’d never even seen one in my life. In Australia we never had any rifles or anything like that because our army often were training with broomsticks they were so short. But in the guardhouse there were rifles and .38 revolvers like the police have today. So there I am on the tarmac and they said, “There’s one

bullet. The chamber’s not set on fire the first shot.” I thought, “It’s pitch black, what if I have to challenge someone and they’re something to do with the Japanese?” It seems ridiculous now, but this is the way we thought. So I opened the cylinder and I looked where the bullet was and I pushed the cylinder home so it’d fire first shot and it went off and I never touched the trigger.

To this day I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles. Well, they came along, I was arrested and put in a cell at the guardhouse. I was taken out, charged next day and I won’t say the chap’s name in case any of his family ever see this, but the warrant officer at the time said that I had instructions on the range how to use a .38 and I never had any in my life. I got sentenced

to seven days’ detention in the guardhouse cell. They took me there and took my laces and my belt and marched me up for meals and had me doing hard labour around the place. There was a Royal Air Force armourer there and he checked all the revolvers and found a faulty one. So that could have been the one I had.

Yes, that was really

mutiny. Wing Commander Campbell was such a good bloke nothing was every said about it. No report went to air board. Goodness knows what they could have done to the lot of us, I don’t know. Mutiny is a very serious thing. The guys still did their duty of a day, but this was more or less about protesting about no leave. So the next thing is the army sappers [engineers] arrived from

Echuca. They picked out a number of us to learn demolition scorched earth policy. We were told that this would be in case the Japs landed in Queensland, we would go there and if necessary we would have to destroy things. At the same time they brought up all these air gunners and they put guns on the back of the Wirraways. I still remember the number, 61 and 62

Reserve Squadrons, with Wirraways that would be taken to Queensland to try to compete with the Japanese Zeros, which they had no hope. Later on I think those two squadrons went to Canberra. I’m not certain about that. We did this demolition course. I learned how to blow up bridges, make Bangalore torpedos which they used in World War I. They were a pipe packed with explosives, which you rolled under the barbed wire

and there was a detonator there and it’d blow the barbed wire. Underground petrol tanks. Everything. One day when they let a Bangalore torpedo off I walked up and picked up a bit of shrapnel. It was the first time I realised how hot it was. I burnt my hand. I thought of my cousin in World War I. Shrapnel went into his back and came out his chest, how it must have been burning his flesh at the

same time. The highlight of the course was to be the explosion of a hand grenade, believe it or not. Later on in the war we could play with them, you could do anything you liked towards the end of the war. Everything was in such short supply. So we finished the course and they threw the hand grenade and it didn’t go off. We were all crouched down on the ground. The officer went up and put another detonator on it

and that was it. Well, it never happened. The Japs never landed in Queensland. But those guys in the Wirraways would have been sacrificed and I would have probably not been here now if I’d been up there. Later on he used to come and I saw the look of some of the country. Gee. Any rate, time went on in Deniliquin and eventually I was posted to New Guinea.

I left Deniliquin and gave my motorbike to the Kerwins. They had a young son, Teddy, and they had a son in the armed forces, Des. These girls were both nurses and apparently eventually they did their nurses training and Pat became matron of the hospital. Joan was to join the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force]. This’d

be after the war probably. For the first time they had nurses with the same ranks as the male. She was to rise up to be group captain and fly wounded out of Vietnam and things like that. She just died last year. I think she was having a nursing association in Victoria. I went from there down to Melbourne and then I went to Bankstown Embarkation Depot in Sydney and I didn’t really know anybody, but I

chummed up with some guys there and I found myself in Sydney. I found myself in Kings Cross and these places. I couldn’t believe it and I heard all about Kate Lee who ran the gambling and Tilly Divine ran the prostitution in Sydney. I couldn’t believe all this went on. Tilly Divine was a good type of person towards those girls, because she looked after them. Nobody thumped them or anything like that.

They were well looked after. She was in an out of gaol the same as Kate Lee. This was entirely a new world to me. Then I had an older cousin in Sydney at Lane Cove. I went out there, they invited me out, and I managed to get out on a Friday night and they were having chops for tea. I thought, “They’re Catholic like me. How can they eat meat on Friday?” Not knowing that Cardinal Gilroy had said, “Because of the shortage of fish Catholics can eat meat on

Friday.” I ate it with a worried mind. See, you’re brainwashed into a system. I met blokes and I’d say something and they couldn’t’ stop laughing. I realised, I sorted it all out in the finish.

You know, I started talking about Adam and Eve and all these things. I had blind faith in what they told me and now

I’m a believer, but I know a lot of it, I know that the Christian Crusaders were a pack of murderers, there were corrupt popes. I won’t get into all that. And we’ve got all these paedophiles now. The Vatican should be taking their licence from them and kicking them out. Instead of that Cardinal Bernhard Law 40 years he sat on it. Letter from parents. He's got a top job in Rome, charge of Basilica. Disgusts me.

And many others. Anyway, Bankstown. During World War I my uncle had gone AWL [Absent Without Leave] from Sydney to come home to see his parents. So I had leave passes and I forged signatures. I came home to see my folks. I did it twice. But the second time, when I got back fortunately they hadn’t put the guys on a ship otherwise I would have been classed as a deserter, they’d only been sent onto Sandgate Embarkation

Depot in Brisbane. So I was caught. I went up before the CO and he really told me off. So I caught the civilian train up to Brisbane. I went to Sandgate and we were all different ranks and different jobs, but we just had to wait to go. They put a monument at Sandgate to all those who passed through and I saw it a couple of years ago. It was right on

the seafront, this embarkation depot. I just arrived and I got picked out to go on guard. I had to guard a patch of sea. There was all this scrub and a low brick wall and the sea. They gave me a 303 and some bullets, more than one. I think it was part of the day, part of the night, part of the next day, part of the next night. When it got to two or half past in the morning

on the second night, I’d had this. I hadn’t challenged anybody or seen anybody, so I put a 303 in it and I fired a shot out to sea for the heck of it. God, I smelled the cordite and I got some wet grass and rubbed the bridge. The next minute they’re there. “Did you hear a shot?” I said, “It seemed to come from over there.” They put me in this motorbike sidecar and I’m riding around. They only had to

smell my rifle and I was a goner. So somewhere in air board in Melbourne is a report about this shot that was heard at Sandgate. That was me. They let me into Brisbane. I’d never been to Brisbane and I didn’t know anybody. The other guys had gone on or something. I knew nobody. I went in there and I felt so lonely. I thought, “I’ll go to church. It’s Sunday night.” I went to church, cos in Kew we used to go

as boys and we’d stand outside and talk. All the time the girls would be talking over there. I stood outside and no one spoke to me. So I’m wandering along the street and at last I came across a servicemen’s rest hut. It actually was a Catholic one. It was Catholic United Service Association. I went in there and it was nice. People to talk to. There were women and girls and guys. They gave me a serviceman’s prayer book.

The next night, I went into Brisbane and I saw a procession. I said to a girl, “What’s on?” She said, “We’re going to Bobby Burn’s statue and then we’re going back to the hall for supper.” So I immediately joined the procession cos I was very interested in food. Brisbane was all thousands of servicemen and

they had a big brothel there, which I never went to. Edward Street Brothel. Australians would line up there and Americans would come along and pay them for their place. That actual madam I read years later died broke in Sydney. It’s a wonder. She must have made a fortune. They had these blue light places around Brisbane for servicemen who had been with a

woman to go and get some medical attention. That’s just how it was. You read back in history, Hannibal’s army and all that, they always had these things. Eventually we were put on a train to go to Brisbane. It was a slow train. I think it took about two days and a night or something. All day today and the night, all day tomorrow and get there about

six o’clock in the evening. The men were unshaven and dirty and they get into Townsville. Three of us went outside into Flinders Street, which is the main street, and we just sat on the footpath with our feet in the gutter, cos we knew we’d be picked up by an air force truck. We had our gear. One of the guys went across the road to a café and it turned out to be a sly grog place. He got a cold bottle of beer. I

wasn’t a drinking person, but we drank it because it was something cold. Then the truck came and we were taken out in the dark and to the bush somewhere, ten miles. I can remember pools of water when we got out. It must have been raining. We were met by an officer. He didn’t have his shirt on, but we knew he was an officer. He told us we would have to pitch out tent and he didn’t know, there’d be some food tomorrow or

something like that, we’d had no food. And it was there that I did the toughening up training. Marching, marching, marching. Not allowed to have a drink out of your water bottle. At first I’d have a real swig and after a while I realised you should only have a couple of sips and then the same. I’ve never been so fit in my life as I was there.

I was twelve stone and we’d been sleeping on the ground and my hair was like wire with the dust in it and I was wearing boots without socks. Really. We had a few false alarms before we were to. I had a cousin in Townsville, that’s right. I went to see her. She was an older cousin.

In Townsville at night you never saw any females in the street. There were thousands and thousands of troops, American Negroes as they were called, white Americans, and some British, not too many, and all of us, and the army. There were lots of fights and troubles and things like that. I remember going with three of my mates. We went into Townsville and

one of them managed to buy a couple of bottles of beer at a sly grog place. We had to go back to camp. I think we went down to South Townsville. Under the bridge we hid the beer in the rocks under the bridge and next time we came in there was an Aboriginal family under the bridge. When they saw my friend pull out the two bottles of beer they lamented.

Is there any questions?

1942. What month? That’s the tricky part. It could have been September or October. I’m not certain. And I’m not certain now,

we were a fair while in Townsville.

Yes, Kokoda by this time. Yes.

Yes. From July until, God, when would it be? It must have been into 1942.

I reckon I must have been there about twelve months, or maybe ten or twelve months anyway. I’m uncertain. I never kept a diary you see.

Yes. The flying school.

I’m really a cipher system.

That’s codes. But I wasn’t doing codes at Deniliquin. I was just reporting the flights. I didn’t do codes till I got to the Islands.

No. That’s right. I don’t think so. Some things are very clear and others are a bit vague.

Yes, but there’s other things. I had to ask Jerry Fitzgerald, he’s the brother of Paul Fitzgerald the artist, I was in the tent with him at Oonoonba for a while and I asked him how we washed, I wouldn’t remember how we washed there. That kind of business.

There’d be a board with all the flights for the day and there’d be Flying Officer McPherson, Pilot Officer Woodshaft, Warrant Officer Barker, Flight Lieutenant Cooper Royal air force, he was kind of in charge. Then there’d be trainees’ names. I had to record all that. I think. I’m sure I did.

I must have, to keep a record. I would have. I must have kept the records of the flights.

Yeah. Like, I don’t know what we’d call it, it was just a board.

Yes. On New Year’s Day 1942 Flying Officer McPherson said to me, “Lynch, would you like to come up

and blow away the cobwebs?” We went out to the bombing range and he was practising high dive bombing. We had six dives from 6,000 feet to 2,000 feet and just practising for him. I liked when they took me up and went low flying. It was exciting going across and just over trees and over fences and that. But I wasn’t destined

to fly. Only on a biscuit bomber up in the Islands and on C47s travelling around.

Exciting. Great. One of my ambitions is I’d love to have a ride in a jet fighter before I die, but it won’t happen I suppose.

First of all there's the great paddock. No runways. So the planes took off on the grass. It’d be muddy in winter and dusty in summer. Then there was a strip of asphalt. That was the tarmac. Then there were the hangars.

In between the hangars I think there were the buildings where say I worked and the flying instructors worked, where the parachutes were. Then behind that again were all the huts where we lived in, the ablution huts. The big parade ground and then down beyond that, right at the very end, was the hospital. Then there was the officers’ mess and the sergeants’ mess.

That was to my memory. Then the road ran out towards there and there was the guardhouse at the gate of the drome. Anybody could have got into the drome. They could just get through the fence no trouble.

They were just the iron bed, that metal thing. I still can’t remember whether it was palliasses or a mattress, I’m sorry. I

must ask one of my friends. I think we just hung our uniform on a hook. I don’t remember any kind of a wardrobe. We had a kitbag, which I probably kept under the bed. There was about 25 to a hut down each side. Quite often we’d have hut inspection.

The sergeant would call out, “Orderly officer,” and we’d spring to attention and there’d be an inspection. That’s about all I can tell you. We had to make our beds a certain way every morning and fold your blankets and put them at the head and a pillow on that. But what we did with our clothes I’m not quite certain.

We wore blue uniforms and

there was a summer uniform that was a khaki type of thing. I did have one for a while, but not many of them had, mainly the blue. When we were on the station we wore blue overalls and a blue beret. We never wore our uniform during the day. That’s what everybody wore, the same. That was more or less for going out, your dress uniform.

Yes, quite a few. There was two trainees disappeared once. It was very open country, plenty of paddocks, not much vegetation, and they searched for over two weeks, every plane, trainees and everyone, and couldn’t locate them.

After a period of time a farmer went down to the back paddock and there was a patch of timber down there. They must have been fooling around low flying and instead of lifting they’d gone straight in under the trees. That’s why flying over you’d never seen anything. The plane never caught fire so there was no evidence from the air. Squadron Leader

Scott, the chief flying instructor, was very angry about that. He got them all up on the tarmac, the trainees and dressed them down and told them that that’s what happens. It’s like the time that I fired that shot on the tarmac. I forgot to mention that what was said at my trial or whatever you like to call it,

was that the bullet could have hit the ground, it was pitch black light remember, ricocheted, gone up in the air and hit one of His Majesty’s aircraft therefore causing so many thousands of pounds loss. No one would have been up there in the pitch black night. Nothing about the crew, didn’t matter about them, just the cost to the aircraft. So they were tempted.

They’d go out and be supposed to be practising instrument flying and they’d see a farmhouse and they’d dive at it for fun. What a lot of the trainees forgot, when you pull a plane out of a dive there’s a little squash first before she comes up. That’s where a lot of accidents must have happened. There were some planes lost on instrument flying at night because they thought

they were turning to port and instead of that they were turning down to the ground. Things like that.

It saddens you. Pilot Officer Wishart got killed on that bombing range I talked about. You just feel sorry. It’s an attitude you get. It was no one else. The others

would say, “We’re still here.” It’s like in the Islands, if anything happened in a bombing raid, if you didn’t get hurt your number wasn’t up. It was an acceptance that somebody would get hurt I suppose, that attitude. You’re all confident it won’t be you.

No, it didn’t affect me

much. I just thought that on the law of average things have to happen. Things never run right. I was sorry, cos Pilot Officer Wishart, I knew him very well. And Warrant Officer Barky was eventually to disappear in the sea off Point Cook. It’s not a nice feeling on the station when it happens. It’s

upsetting because these are the people that have been there with you. But you soon get over it and life goes on.

Buried in Deniliquin most of them I think. It’s like Sale. There were lots of crashes. There was something wrong with the tailplane of one of our lots of planes and a hell of a lot of crashes where they’re buried at Sale. I think they’re buried at Deniliquin most of them

that died up there.

Like airmen?

Bernie Hansford and a guy named Diamond, I can’t think of his first name now. I can see their faces, but I can’t

bring up the names. The Kerwin family were very much part of my life at weekends.

I was involved with them. I was in the same little building on the tarmac. They used to play shove halfpenny. That’s a game that apparently originated in England.

Flight Lieutenant Cooper Royal Air Force brought it to Deniliquin with him. It’s played on a board and you have a halfpenny and you hit it. I can’t remember how you scored and all that. I remember Flying Officer Mills. He was the adjutant. He decided that life might have been pretty boring for us. We had community singing. Cos in Melbourne in the 1930s Melbourne Town Hall, Prahran Town Hall, people just went along and

music played and they just sang the popular songs of the day. We didn’t have all the radios and everything you’ve got now. If anyone had anything in their home it’d be a gramophone which you wound up. I’ll never forgot the first song he got us to sing was “You Are My Sunshine,” which I still can remember the words of. I won’t sing it for you.

All of us. Just go along. We talked a lot. There’s nothing else to do. You talked about your lives and football and just things in general. You just went along with them and complained about the food. We used to have the orderly officer of the

day come into the mess and the sergeant would call out, “Orderly Officer, sit to attention.” We’d all sit there and he’d say, “Any complaints?” A guy would speak up and say, this happened too, there were maggots when the meat had been blown. Cos we didn’t have all the, the cooks could have been a bit careless. Lots of the guys just scraped them off and ate it. The

officer would say, “Make a note of that, Sergeant.” My friend, Kevin Hoine, when he was a sergeant he was with the orderly officer one day and, “Any complaints?” The guy said, “No condiments.” “Write that down, sergeant.” When they got outside the officer said to Kevin, “What are condiments?” Kevin said, “I don’t know,

Sir. I’ll find out for you.” Cos we never used a word like that. It was salt and pepper shakers.

If you’re hungry, later on as I’ll tell you, I risked my life twice for the course of food. I’ll tell you that later. You’re sore about it. I wouldn’t have done that, no.

Some guys don’t care.

They arrived before I left for the Islands. They arrived some time in 1942 and they had special section, their barracks.

Some of the guys became friendly, had a girlfriend amongst them and we must have had some

kind of a building that they must have occasionally shown a movie, cos I’m sure I can remember some of the guys sitting there with some of the WAAAFs, but I never got to know any of them. I was very shy and I’d had a partner down at a ball, but she wasn’t my girlfriend. I was a deb partner for someone else, but it was nothing in it. And Joan, the Kerwin

girls, they, it was purely platonic. I knew other girls. I knew a girl who used to write to me. She sent me a few parcels and all that. It was purely platonic.

Yeah, from Melbourne. Pat McGrath. I often wonder what happened to her. I don’t know.

No WAAAFs up there. I think the WAAAFs were mainly in the cookhouse and things like that at that time. Later on they branched out into wireless operators and things like that. Deniliquin I don’t remember them.

Yes. They probably gradually took that over. Things like that.

We worked every day. I don’t think they flew at the weekend, but some

of us would be allowed to go into Deniliquin on leave. Once a month they had a train to Melbourne. That was leave. I had a sergeant over me, and I won’t say his name, and he was married to a Catholic girl and he wanted a divorce and she wouldn’t give him one, didn’t believe in it.

Because I was a Catholic he seemed to take it out on me a bit, victimised me, which was hurtful to me because I would never have done that to anybody. I know there were times when the leave train went to Melbourne that once a month and I wasn’t on it. I was the one that was on duty. I just accepted

that. What was the use of stewing over or hating him? He had the problem, not me.

You could tell by his attitude. He was right onto me, if I had a button undone and all that. They were very strict in Australia. Once we got to the Islands we

half the time didn’t wear badges of rank. Didn’t matter whether you had anything on your head or not. Down here everything had to be spot on. They even had one of those drill sergeants. They had one of those up there. I can remember once there was the parade ground and none of us were allowed to walk on the parade ground except when there was a parade on. No taking short

cuts. I just took about a yard inside on one corner and I heard this voice call out from the other side, “That man.” And I had to run to him and get told off. So they were, but I thought it was good, the discipline. I feel if most young people today have a year’s training in the services they might be better people in

civilian life. Cos you can’t always think of yourself and you have to learn to live with people and everything like that.

About 25 I think. I’ve got an idea there was 24 and that one extra bed was that guy would be in charge of the hut. I’m dragging this out of my memory.

I’m pretty sure it was like that, but I’ll stand to be corrected on that. Cos the cameras we had, you couldn’t take photos indoors really. Cameras today you can take inside.

No, I didn’t mind

in the least. I accepted it all. That was OK. We used to go into Deniliquin and we’d go to the dances there. There was the Red Cross Club and I can still remember some of the songs. “Abbie, Abbie, my boy. What are we waiting for now? You promised to marry me one day in June.”

I loved dancing. I loved music. When I was in the Islands I used to think, “When I get home I’m going to Earl’s Court in St Kilda and I’m just going in front of Mickey Walker’s Band and I’m just going to listen. That’s what I missed when I got to the Islands, the dancing. I didn’t drink much. Sometimes I’d go to a hotel, but I wasn’t a drinking person.

I noticed that the boys that had very severe discipline at home, I was disciplined and at the age of ten or eleven I was allowed to go to the Royal Show on my own and go off riding when I was 14 up to Warrandyte. Other boys that had been kept right under the thumb, when they got lose up there they were like a dog off a chain. They drank

too much. They couldn’t handle it. They went too far.

Yes, if I was on leave, definitely. Didn’t worry much about “pictures” as we called them, or movies. It was the dancing. Other times if I could get into Deniliquin I’d go to one of the rest huts.

You had nice surroundings and you had women, as old as our mothers there to talk to and their daughters would be there. You weren’t allowed to ask any of those girls out or anything like that. That was just the rules.

The foxtrot.

When I used to be a young bloke in Hawthorn. Summer dance they’d play the “Bugle Call Rag” and I’d get Marg Softly and we’d be first on the floor and I’d pivot halfway around the dance floor, it was a beautiful floor. They finished up covering it up and making a library there. Then I’d take her to supper. That was another platonic friendship. When I was coming home from work in the wool store I met Marge Softly at Flinders Street,

I would travel to Hawthorn Station talking to her, then walk to her place and then walk on to Kew. A couple of miles altogether. Sometimes I walked her home from the dance, but there was no romance. Seems strange now, doesn’t it? We were just good friends.

No, I was always

taught to respect women. My father, if a woman came, we had to get to our feet and things like that. Father, when we trotted along with him to church, if he met someone he lifted his hat, “Good morning, Mrs ______, Good morning.” I tried to teach that to my own kids. I said, “If you’ve been sitting down and a lady comes in, when you get up straight away you don’t offer the seat straight away cos it’s warm.

So you engage them in conversation.” And I’d hear them practising. They’d say, “Come in, Mrs Jones.” Bernhard would be fanning the seat with the newspaper. No, my father always said that a man should marry. He only lived half a life if he hadn’t married. I always had that in my mind. One day I wanted to be married, but not married for the sake of being married.

That Kerwin girl was a pretty girl and all that, but I just didn’t feel that way towards her. I did meet girls after the war that I went with for a while and at times I thought, “This is the one,” but it wasn’t and so on. We’re still in Deniliquin. At times the air school, when it rained, it was all muddy.

Other times it was very dusty and very hot. We even had dust storms cos they were having droughts in the Mallee which wasn’t that far away, over the Riverina. I can remember the dust being so thick you couldn’t see your hand out there. We’d come into our home and the dust would cover everything. They couldn’t fly on those days.

Marge Softly, yeah.

No, I didn’t actually. No, I just joined up. Years later, four years ago, a girl living here in Ballina that was about at that time said, “I met Marge Softly, she’s not Marge Softly now, she’s Mrs So-on, down Frankston.”

She said to me, “Did you ever know what happened to Frank Lynch?” This girl said, “He’s a pillar of our church now.’” Not really. I go there. I did ring up one of those girls I’d known. Edith, Edith, anyway. I saw a death notice in the paper

and I rang up and got one of these girls I’d known way back and had a talk to her.

Yes. Only he was a doctor.

He said about VD [venereal diseases], “First of all don’t do it. Of course it’s useless saying that to you all.” I’d never had a woman, and didn’t look for one. He told us to take precautions. That’s why they had those blue light places. Every so often they had a VD parade and we’d have to line up

and we had to open our trousers and squeeze. If there was anything came out that meant you had VD. If nothing came out you were OK. That’s what it was.

I don’t know. It could have been once a month or once every two months. They were very aware

of that. I never met anyone that had VD. I don’t remember any guy getting it.

This is Deniliquin, yeah. I don’t remember them doing that to us at Ballarat, but they did it in Deniliquin. And they did it further north too in Brisbane and Townsville. They didn’t get worried about it in the Islands, cos there were no women.

There were some nurses, but.

I don’t ever remember any “ladies of the night” as my father calls them in Deniliquin. I guess lots of girls did have relationships with guys. You never know, they might have had it with a guy that came from Melbourne and he

might have given them gonorrhoea or something. So they had to watch it. They had brothels in Brisbane and a brothel in Townsville too. Cos there were Americans there. Wherever there were Americans there’s gotta be a brothel. It’s true.

Well, they had them here in Melbourne too. That wasn’t part of my life. I just knew they were there.

We had guys down where would have had VD parades.

Yeah. Bernie Hansford and I would walk in or might get a ride in on Sunday and go to church. He was Catholic like me. He’d come from Ararat

direction. It was traditional, we’d been reared you had to go to church on Sundays. It was a manmade law really. Lord said to keep the Sabbath day holy, but our church said you had to go, so we just went. Just took it for granted. I wasn’t a pious person. I wasn’t over the top about it or anything, but I believed everything they’d told me.

Can we stop it and I’ll get the dogs moved?

I spent a lot of evenings at the rest hut there. That was nothing to do with religion, that was just run by volunteers from the church and all that. Every serviceman has the right to go to his place of worship on a

Sunday, so that’s in the King’s regulations. We didn’t ask to be taken on Sundays, Bernie and I’d just walk in there. If a truck came along we’d get a ride. And we might walk back, we might get a ride. There was a monsignor in charge there. He went back to Ireland and he’s buried in Ireland. He died

where he came from.

Yes, I knew there were times when I should have been on the train and I wasn’t on the train. I’d miss a turn. But I might be on it next month. But I didn’t complain about that. I just accepted it. I felt sorry for Sergeant Hartlet.

She should have given him a divorce if it wasn’t working anyway. She dug her toes in and he had no grounds. Now you could separate for two years I think and you get automatically get it, don’t you? Something like that. The laws were a bit different then. Very difficult. I think he had another woman. She had the opportunity, but of course it was a no-no

because of the church.

No, that one wasn’t.

Nothing much at Deniliquin. When I was in Sydney, going AWL twice,

but I didn’t get away with it a second time. But I really did cos he only gave me a talking to. Then later on I’ll tell you about how I got away with things in my first leave. I always had a number of leave passes. You seize the opportunity. If you were down the orderly room and they turned their back, if you grabbed a few leave passes. You can sign things. My favourite

make-believe officer was Flying Officer Green.

People were very fearful. We didn’t, at that time they didn’t have the knowledge we’ve got now.

We heard through the grapevine there were ships being sunk outside the heads here in Melbourne and all things like that. I didn’t care much about civilians. I liked being with my own servicemen. When I came on leave it was nice to see the family, but

it’d only be the weekend. That was all right. But if I came on a longer leave I’d get very restless and I’d go into the city and I’d go to, they had a rest hut at St Paul’s, they had chocos [chocolate soldiers – militia] down Collins Street. The one I liked the best was run by Myer, the store in the city. It was where the Capital Theatre is, down in the basement. It was called the Dug Out.

In my mind I can still hear and see Pam Corrigan singing “Put Your Arms Around Me Honey” whilst these army blokes dances with some of the Myer staff there in their army boots. It was a great place. You could get meals, you could get ironing done for you. It was great just to be there with your own kind. You felt really at home. I enjoyed being there.

That was my favourite place.

Yes. The civilians would say, “There’s a shortage of this, there’s a shortage of that,” but really I couldn’t care less. When we came on leave they’d give us some food coupons and clothing coupons to take home. You’d give them to your mother, because you do have to eat.

They always seemed to have plenty of food at the Dug Out. That Sydney Myer who started the Myer stores, he was a great bloke. He did that. Built the Myer Music Bowl in 1964. He hired the Exhibition and hired the unemployed of Melbourne to come. They expected 10,000, but got over 11,000. He had his staff waiting on them. Emptied his store of toys. Yet they wouldn’t let him into the Melbourne Club cos he was a Jew.

He married one of the Baillieus, but they had to go to America for that. The Baillieus couldn’t hack it.

Yes, it was.

Yes, bands. I’ve got a list over there of all the places in Melbourne. I enjoyed that. Then sometimes if you wanted to stay in the city overnight you could sleep at Blamey House, which was down

the corner of King and Collins, very cheaply, or you could sleep across Princes Bridge at the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association]. That’s all been pulled down now though. When I did come on my first leave and I had to go to Point Cook for a while, I’d come home and then I’d go and sleep in the city near Spencer Street Station so

I could get the train in the morning. It was the train, I think. Or did we get a bus or something? I’m not sure. No, Deniliquin, I enjoyed life at Deniliquin, but I wanted to go away and I was glad when I was posted. It was an exciting day. I was the only one at that time posted. Just me. I think the people close to me, the officers,

sensed that I was restless and a bit unhappy. I think they must have fixed it up that I could go.

Well, my attitude I suppose, frustration at times, and I talked about it a bit, so one of them must have said something to the adjutant and he recommended a posting for me to

go north.

No. We were all at the embarkation depot and when it comes up there’s transport available you’re supposed to be there. But like in the First World War at all embarkation depots, the chaps would often whip off

and go home and get their mates to cover for them. They had a parade, so you’d get your mate to answer to your name. The trick was that if you weren’t there when they would go they couldn’t answer for you. That’s what happened the second time, but I was lucky they were put on a troop train to Brisbane. Whereas if it had been on a ship to New Guinea, I would have been classed as a deserter and probably gone into that awful gaol at Bendigo.

They talk about ill treatment of the Iraqis. What the guard did at that Bendigo Gaol went all through the armed forces. It was inhuman the way chaps were treated there. Their own countrymen mind you. Guys that went, deserted or went long period AWL or hit an NCO or hit an officer.

Making them

run for hours with full equipment on and getting them up in the night and all kinds of things and lashings. But nothing’s ever been said about that. But we all knew about Bendigo. You know what they call the “grapevine”? It’s true. So I may not have finished up there, I might have been sent somewhere else. Anyway, it didn’t happen. I might have been sent to somewhere in New South Wales since I was in Sydney. I

probably wouldn’t have gone to Bendigo. But that would have probably been just as bad. So I was able to get on a civilian train with civilians and go to Brisbane and catch up with the others. Not that I knew the others, but I did make friends of a couple of them later on, on our way when we left Brisbane to go to Townsville. There were three of them. Wack Smith, Doran and

Calvin. We called Calvin “Darkie” cos he had dark features. He wasn’t Aboriginal, but that was what he... And Brian Doran came from Camberwell. Wack Smith, I don’t know his first name, but he used to work on ships round the coast. We became inseparable.

You’d get on the train and the veterans that had been before, everybody’d try to have a drink over in the local pubs in Spencer Street. There’d be silence, there’d be no joy, cos it was this grinding journey all the way up. But me, it was all right, cos it’s my first time. The second time I was like the others. You get out at Seymour and I think

you had something to eat at Seymour. Then you’d get to Albury and you’d have to change trains because the gauge in New South Wales was different gauge. When you got out at Albury, if there were any naval guys onboard they’d go into the civilian dining room and sit down at the tables and the rest of us, the army and air force, would stand at trestle tables and we’d have our tin plates and our knife and

fork, or a dixie, whatever, and usually it was, and I loved it, sausages, mashed potato and some green peas and a cup of tea. That was good. Then we’d board the train for Sydney. I can’t remember whether we stopped any time between Albury and Sydney. We must have probably. Probably at Goulburn, but I’m not too sure.

We were jealous of them.

Sometimes on a troop train, we always jammed up, and they had a sleeper. One carriage. No idea. I’d be laying on the floor with my head on that respirator I’ve got there, that was a good pillow, and that’s how we slept. Some guys slept in the luggage rack and all that. But you accepted all that, that was no big deal.

They are, they’re senior service. Then the army and then the air force, the junior service. Same as going on the troopships. The navy go on first, the army second and the air force third.

No. But we were a bit jealous of them, but we understood the system. There was no way we could all go into this civilian dining room because

there’d hardly be any navy personnel on a troop train. Only just 20 of them or less. We were in big numbers. They had a pretty good life, cos they’d often touch base and they could get proper food and things like that. But it wouldn’t have been nice if you were a stoker in the navy, cos when there’s an action

they close all the hatches and you’re locked in. That wouldn’t be very nice. I was hoping if I got into the navy that I would have been a gunner on something, either anti-aircraft or the big gun. At least you were up there on deck, part of it. Anyway, it didn’t happen.

My first sighting of an American was when I was on leave from

Deniliquin in 1942. I was having a meal in a restaurant in Swanston Street and there were these two white Americans there and I think there was a black man in the restaurant, but he wasn’t an American Negro. They must have been near me and one of them leant over and said, “Excuse me, Bud, will they serve him in here?” I said, “Yes.” I really didn’t know much about what

went on in the south of America. So that was my first meeting. But I did see two Americans arriving early ’42 after the Japs came in the war. They landed at Deniliquin in two Aero Cobras. We’d never seen modern fighting planes. But actually the Aero Cobra wasn’t as good as the Kittyhawk or that. I’ve got

photos in that book of the Aero Cobras. They stayed overnight and the whole station was on the tarmac the next morning to see them take off. All the flying instructors was jealous as blazes cos they all wanted to get into the action, not be instructors. So I had nothing, there were Americans in Melbourne, but I really had nothing to do with them. Didn’t kind of

see them. I did once. I think it was 1942. I’d been out. I struck an American walking along the street and I think in Cotham Road, Kew. I knew there was no more transport. I said, “Come home with me.” He slept at our place overnight. Then he went and got the tram next morning and went back to his unit. That’s

right. I’d forgotten about that.

It was 1942. The Americans were allowed in the Australian canteen where they did serve alcohol, mainly beer, but the Australians weren’t allowed into the American canteen. Some of our army people resented that. They decided to gate crash into the American canteen. They came along and the American MPs [Military Police] were lined up in the doorway.

As our chaps tried to come in one of the American military policemen lost it, pulled his revolver and fired a number of shots and some Australians died there in Brisbane. After that, the army guys had webbing belts with a thick buckle, they went around and used the buckle to hit Americans. Not kill them, but to physically harm them. It got so bad, the

authorities of the day, I stand to be corrected here, I think they had a blackout every night, if they did they lifted that and made it a brownout. Or whether they had a brownout and put the lights on, I’m not sure. But they had to have more lighting to stop all this darkness over the city. Eventually that petered out. I wasn’t there for that, I arrived just after that, but we knew all about it.

Everyone was talking about it. Everything goes through the armed forces. You hear everything. It’s like when the Australian 7th Division were up on the Atherton Tablelands. They all knew where they were going. That was the difference. Half the Japanese didn’t know where they were. Some of them in New Guinea thought they were in Australia. Anyway, we’re in Brisbane. Well, Brisbane as I told you about the episode

with the guard and firing the shot, and looking for a bit of company and I did feel lonely in Brisbane, but I still wanted to go on. Then I think I talked about getting on the train and I think it was all day one night and all next day. Whether it was that trip or the next one I took, one time there were floodwaters and the train had to be diverted inland.

When the people through some little town heard the troop train was coming through at something like two or three in the morning they organised food and they tried to find as many girls as they could and got some music. The train stopped there and we had supper, a bit of a dance, some of us anyway, cos it was a highlight for them. Though there weren’t young girls in Queensland. Lots of

families had fled and the others that stayed were pretty brave cos everyone expected the Japanese would land in Queensland. It was a foregone conclusion. As we know, they didn’t. I think I mentioned how we just slept on the floor of the train or in the luggage rack. I slept on the floor with my respirator as my

pillow. I could sleep anywhere in my time. I was able to sleep on park benches, didn’t matter, on the ground. I was a good sleeper. Then we got to Townsville and sat with our feet in the gutter. I think I told you this before. One of the chaps went over to a café there across the road, which turned out to be a sly grog place and brought back a bottle of beer. I wasn’t a beer drinker or drinker, but

it was lovely to have something cold. Went out into the country in the dark and pitched a tent. I can’t remember what kind of food we got next morning, we must have got something. For a period of time we did training, mainly marching. A heck of a lot of marching. I think they had us digging in the hard ground, trenches, for no reason at all. Our

letters from there were censored and I’d go into Townsville and you’d see a few girls on the street of a daytime and a few older women, but when it was night you never saw a female on the street, cos of the thousands of troops. We heard that at Garbutt Aerodrome that the RAAF guys stationed there had a dance. They sent trucks around to the homes where there were young girls and

picked them up. Cos no girl could travel. Nobody had any cars or anything. I loved dancing. So I heard about this so somehow I hitchhiked out there. Course they wouldn’t let me in. But I went around and there was this window in the toilet and I climbed into the window and I got into the dance. I met a girl called Valerie West. Still no romance, but she invited me to visit

their home. When I went there I found that she, she was about 18 or 19, and then there was her younger sister and her mother. They’d owned a property and their father was somewhere in New Guinea. They were near an American Negro camp. They’d hear these, not because they’re Negroes, it would have happened if they were whites too, they’d hear these guys come up to the doors and try the doors at night. So they chained their doors

up. I visited them occasionally. I've got a photo of her there and wrote to her a few times in the Islands. There was no romance. Then on Sunday I said to a few of the other Catholic guys, “The King’s Regulations is we’re entitled to go to church.” So they had to supply a vehicle to take us to church. Maybe

one of our guys drove. Lots of the other chaps wanted to go in, but they looked at your identity discs and you had to have recognisance on it. If you were no religion when you joined up they just put C of E, Church of England as it was. So none of the others could get in. When we went in there some of the boys somehow found this sly grog place and went and got a few drinks and all that, so the chaps back at the camp were very jealous.

Then my friends Wack Smith and Doran one day, they went out to guard the aerodrome and said to a Yank, “How about a ride?” He was going to Brisbane in a bomber. So they hopped on and they were AWL. But they were picked up in Brisbane and sent back, charged and they were sentenced to seven days’ detention, but they didn’t do it in a cell like I done at Deniliquin, they did it in a tent. So while the rest of us were doing the marching and digging in hard grounds they were

laying in this tent reading magazines. A wonderful relaxing week. It was a reward. Then we met this Yank in Townsville. His name was O’Leary. He’d come down on a bomber. They’d come down to get some food or ice cream, I don’t know, Americans could do those things. He said he wanted a woman, where were the

brothels. We said, “They’re across the causeway, but they’re out of bounds because they found VD in them.” So they had American military police on the causeway to stop the Americans going across. So to this day I don’t know how O’Leary said that wasn’t gonna stop him, I don’t know what really happened. I’m not shocking you? This is reality. It was like

Brisbane.

This Brisbane, this line of guys. Actually I did go into it once with a mate, but I didn’t go in for the girls. I waited for him. I always imagined brothels were untidy, terrible, but they’re not like that at all. It’s a beautiful carpet and soft lighting. The girls seemed to be all called Amber or Candy or some names like that. But the Australians used to

sell their places to the Americans. I told you that before. I remember one night being in Townsville and they had betting shops up there. You could go and have a bet. Down here in Victoria, it was all New South Wales, it was all illegal. The starting price bookmakers behind hotels in lanes. Up there I’m sure they had a betting shop. There were still meals, there were cafes and

I’d often go in and have sausages and eggs. I loved the food. This night we didn’t know when we were going across and I remember walking along this street and I heard someone playing a piano. I went in and it was three air force chaps. They were playing songs and one of the songs was the “Maori Farewell: Now is the hour that we must say goodbye. Soon you’ll be sailing far across the sea.” Little did I know that next day

was going to be my day for boarding a ship. Though we’d had a few false alarms. That’s what happens. You might pull down your tent, but you’ve gotta put it back up again. This day they took us to the Townsville wharf and

I hadn’t done any. I didn’t do that

till I got to Port Moresby. This was the crazy part. But I had to learn it. Are you OK? Anyway, we went to the wharf and we were…

It was just physical. Toughen you up, because they sent us over there in shorts and short-sleeved shirts.

Port Moresby was all right. That was the dry heat. But Milne Bay was 100 per cent malaria rate. Even the troops that went over on Kokoda, quite a number of them had shorts or short-sleeved shirts. You can get all kinds of things. Dengue fever. But malaria was the big thing. We didn’t know all that. I didn’t care really. So,

where are we up to? Are we on the wharf?

No, it was just absolute physical training.

That’s what I can’t remember.

Weeks. At least six weeks or two months. A lot of it depended on when a ship would be available to take us. We only had two bases in New Guinea and the army guys had to go and all supplies and equipment. So everybody, it had to be

worked out. This day it was our turn to go. We went down to the Townsville wharf and the army went onboard first and they took up all the best positions on the upper decks and all that, and we went on last. My embarkation number written on that was number 52. So I was the 52nd RAAF person onboard,

but it still meant I was down in the hold of the ship. The hold was gigantic. It must have been where they kept cargo, because it was a passenger ship in peacetime around the coast, but it must have carried cargo because it wouldn’t just be cases and all that. There were these two ladders coming down. There’d be 25 or 30 rungs in the ladder. We were just down

there and just sleeping on the floor of the ship, the bottom. There was nothing to do. I had a pack of cards and I knew nobody. I hadn’t caught up with Wack Smith and Doran by this time. Yeah, they must have been onboard. They were onboard that ship. But I spent hours just playing patience with myself. It’s a game you can play. Other times I went up on deck and

the army boys had a two-up school going. Some of them had shaved their heads and just left a tuft of hair up here. So this was way back in 1942.

I don’t know. That’s what they’d done for some reason some of them. That’s the first time I saw anybody with a haircut that wasn’t short back and sides. You couldn’t do that on the mainland, but once you were overseas it

didn’t matter. Or going overseas. I didn’t have any tobacco. I only had five shillings in money. I needed some money. I waited till someone had spun three heads. Then I backed a tail and it came up heads again. So I lost that. I begged some tobacco somewhere.

At one stage I was on submarine watch. When you’re on submarine watch every ripple looks like a periscope, you can’t really tell. I suppose if it was a real periscope you could. At night, when you looked over the side, it was like a ribbon of light down there. It was the phosphorous in the water. We were in a convoy. We could only do under five knots. Very slow. The convoy can only go

as fast as the slowest ship. I think we had two destroyers, or one, I can’t remember, sweeping around outside us all the time. Then when we were down in the hold one day I think the sub must have been about, there was a submarine alert and the destroyers dropped depth charges. I’d never heard any depth charge go off before

and being down in the hold of the ship it was like as if the noise was someone hit the side of the ship with giant hammers. Noise.

Yes, and none of us went up on deck. That’s how confident we were that nothing could happen to us. Felt indestructible. I wasn’t frightened at all. I just couldn’t believe anything could happen to me. That’s why these young men today drive

their cars so fast. They think they’re indestructible. That’s the way youth are. You have to be like that when you’re young. The meals, and it was number two deck when I went down one time I saw in the other line a guy become ill. Straight away it hit me, seasickness.

I’ve never felt so terrible in all my life. There was nothing to take for it. No medical thing. I just lay on deck most of the time and watched the sea come up and down and wish it’d stop moving the ship. Also we had community showers onboard, but we had no soap. It didn’t work with seawater. They were seawater. The soap we had wouldn’t lather, but it didn’t matter.

So I wasn’t too good for part of that voyage.

They must have been all right. It was a peacetime liner. There were no toilets down the hold, but they must have been up top somewhere.

No. It must have been the peacetime toilets. I don’t remember going to the toilet. Isn’t that strange? They must have been, I would have remembered that. What we did,

that thing in Townsville, we dug a latrine pit. They were called latrine pits. You dug and dug and just put a board across, raised up. You left a mound of earth there, a mound of earth there, then a board and then a shovel. Every time someone went to the toilet they used the shovel. In some of the camps they had boxes in a long line, but still a pit underneath. The ship

must have been the peacetime toilets. Is your friend all right? Eventually we got near Port Moresby and I’m not sure what deck I was on, but I was a fair down in the ship. We had to get all our gear and our full equipment and we had to line up on this deck.

But we weren’t up on the top deck. Underneath with all that on us, the respirator and everything, though we didn’t have rifles. They hadn’t given us rifles at that stage. It was hot. The perspiration just poured off us. It seemed like hours that we stood there, but we must have entered Port Moresby Harbour. Eventually the door on the side of the ship slid back and the air came in. It was hot. We marched out

onto the end of the wharf, the jetty. We were right at the end and I looked up and I had my first sight of Port Moresby. The first thing I saw were two bombed out buildings and one of them had Burns Philps written on it. We marched along the wharf and they had American trucks backed in. We all climbed into the trucks and when one was full it took off to the left and it went

around the road along the beach and it was a cliff on our right. The truck in front just sent clouds of dust back, so I couldn’t see anything, but I knew the harbour was on our left. We got round into a native village called Hanabada I think it was called. It was built over the sea on stilts. In front of it was the peacetime golf course for

the permanent air force. Up above there was this great hill and below the hill were all these lovely buildings. They were the peacetime accommodation. That wasn’t for us. We were to pitch tents. As I’m pitching the tent I’m looking around at all the bomb craters I can see on the golf course. Just looking at them. Then I was told by one of the veterans there

that this was called Ack-Ack Hill. The Japs often tried to bomb it and they had shot down a lot of Japanese planes when it tried to bomb the shipping in the harbour. Actually I think finally, or up to then, 95 planes had been shot down by the guns up there. So that was intriguing. I was a bit exhausted because of the seasickness and no food

and pitching the tent. I remember, I think we had, whether we slept on the ground, I’ve got an idea we had a type of American stretcher. Little kind of stretchers. I went there and I fell into a sound sleep. I remember suddenly a voice saying to me, “It’s on, mate.”

I took no notice. Then all of a sudden I was jolted awake by this terrible noise. It was guns going off. I knew it was an air raid. I had never heard so much noise in all my life. I got up in the

tent and I was disorientated a bit. I blundered around the tent and at last I fell against the fly of the tent. I didn’t even have my helmet. I couldn’t find that. And I fell outside into the moonlight. I looked around and all around the hills these guns were firing up and there were searchlights and I could hear planes. I remembered where the slit trench was and in

the flashes that lit up the way I ran. I jumped into the slit trench and I was trembling. I didn’t have any helmet and there was stuff hitting the ground. Little bits of metal probably, and I could hear it. I was trembling. Suddenly the chap behind me put his hand on my back and said, “You’ll be all right, mate.

Don’t look up.” For that moment I was OK, but I did put my arms above my head and kept my head and just looked up like that. I didn’t want to get any of that in my eye or hitting me on the head. That was my first experience of an air raid. At the start when you hear all that noise you think, “God, it’s the end of the world.” But it’d be nothing to the noise in other parts of

the world. The barrage at El Alamein.

No, I’m on the peacetime golf course on the shores of Port Moresby Harbour. The air strips are further in. It’s a mile or two miles round from Port Moresby township, and there was this RAAF barrack, Ack-Ack Hill, the golf course

and then ANGAU [Australia New Guinea Administrative Unit], like all the headquarters, all the buildings. Administration and all the rest of it, and the signals. This is where I was to start my signal career. So anyway

Well, first experience of enemy action, yes. They didn’t strafe us or anything that night, which was good.

I realised after a while you have to be unlucky to be hit by a bomb, but if you were out in the open they had what they call “daisy cutters” full of bolts and razorblades. Then there was their phosphorous bombs, burning. If you were in a thing you’re pretty safe. You’d be very unlucky. It’d have to be a direct hit on your trench. Strafing is not so good, cos

they go around all boards. Any rate, I was so exhausted with my seasickness and I didn’t know the chaps in the tent. I just slept on and I missed parade. So there was another black mark. I got reprimanded for that. Eventually we moved camp up nearer the headquarters and we were told they had guards and we had to have passwords, things

the Japs couldn’t pronounce like Woolloomooloo, Liberty Lane was another one, I can’t think of the others. There were lots of carpet snakes there. You weren’t allowed to kill them because they ate the rats and they didn’t worry us cos they had plenty of food. That’s when I started my coding thing, there in Port Moresby. Time went on and I went looking for a padre and I

found a Catholic padre. I used to go to this recreation hut. It was built on the side of Ack-Ack Hill. The back of it was resting on the ground and the front there were foundations and then steps going down. It was a recreation hut and I spent a lot of time there.

Actually I didn’t. I just went to the rec hut and the padre happened to be at one end. Padre

Tracy was his name. He was of my faith, but I didn’t particularly. Cos Port Moresby had a peacetime church and all the windows were bombed out in it. I went to church there. I can remember there was an organisation, they had a boxing tournament in Port Moresby. I remember some of the concerts that the army concerts. They were all pretty rude, the sketches.

And there were picture shows. See, Port Moresby had been a peacetime base, and it was a dry heat. We even had a proper building to have our food it. It had been there in peacetime. I can remember sitting there, my elbow on the table, and there was a pool of perspiration at the table. Your shirt always stuck to your back. We were wearing shorts at the time I think, and we never wore

underwear. And you’d take your shirt off and dip it in water and let it fry and put it on again. I can remember it was Christmas and it was Christmas Eve and I decided to go to church. At that time they were fighting, they had passed Kokoda and were into Buna. They were

fighting in Buna on the far shore. There were some educated natives up to eights grade, say to merit standard. They worked in an organisation, I think it was called ANGAU or some name like that. I don’t know what it stands for. Something “New Guinea”. They were like clerks in there. I remember sitting with some of them along the stone wall outside the church and then some of the

“boongs” we called them, natives, we called them boongs, but it wasn’t like putting them down or anything, it was just their name, coming around wearing lap laps. This black New Guinean sitting next to me in his khaki shirt and shorts and boots said to me, “Look at the black bastards.” God. Give a person a bit of education. These are going to

church too. Then something happened. Wack Smith, Doran and I did something. I can’t remember what it was, but we went up before Squadron Leader Curtin. You can’t get any leave from there, you can’t get confined to barracks, you’ve still gotta work, so it had to be some punishment. So the punishment was that we were going to be sent to Milne Bay, which was a dreadful place. Malaria rate 100 per cent,

rain nearly every day, swamps and you name it. Anybody that had been down there had only stayed three months, but it finished up we stayed nine months. They left us there. I came back from there like a sewer rat, thin and a few grey hairs.

Yeah, but it might have been missing another parade or something. Or it might have been abusing

and NCO. It wasn’t anything, we were still doing our job.

We were a bit rebels. You know what I mean? Once we were on leave in Sydney and we used to have fun there, force house with the other bloke, pretend we were fighting and all that. That was later on. It wouldn’t have been anything, but when you’re in active

service you have to behave yourself. So Squadron Leader Curtin dressed us down and sentenced us to Milne Bay. We didn’t care. My sister had married a naval man that lived in our street. Sometime later the next year, she’d got a permit to go to Sydney from Melbourne on the train to see her husband.

This is like six months later. And in her compartment was a squadron leader. His name was Squadron Leader Curtin. She asked him if he’d been to New Guinea and he said yes. She asked if he knew me. This is when you came on leave they all used to ask you did you know so and so, and there was thousands of us up there. That was the man that sentenced me. He went down to Milne Bay and that was…

I think he did, but he never let on. We deserved it. We must have deserved it. Whatever we did, it was some stupid thing.

He was the commanding officer of our signals unit and his top rank was squadron leader, so they didn’t fly on planes. They all rank the same. The men I admired up there at Milne Bay and Port

Moresby and later on, were the older men. Men around 40 and all that. One was a Methodist minister from Kew. He joined up in the administration and it must have been very hard on them, that climate up there, and having families back here. But someone had to do all the administration work. I really admired them. But Squadron Leader Curtin wasn’t old, he was probably

late 20s or something.

Yes.

Yeah, in Port Moresby, he was my…

No, I only met him when I arrived. You don’t meet your commanding officer. They call you by your surname most of the time. Once you get any rank they call you “corporal,” “sergeant” or whatever.

I was in the 7 Service Flying Training School at Deniliquin. I did my rookies at Ballarat. Then I was with no other unit. I was just sent up through Townsville, then to Port Moresby, but I know it was the signals unit, but my pay book and everything got burnt, so I don’t know the name

of the unit, but it would have been Something Signals Unit. I know at the end of the war I was in the 1TAF [Technical Air Force]. RAAF, but even at Milne Bay I don’t know. I can’t remember cos you didn’t take any notice. They were letters, but they would have been something to do with signals.

Port Moresby.

They had WT [Wireless Transmission] aviators and they had machines and all these signals would come in and you had all these code books and things and you had to decipher them. Messages went out to go out, or messages coming in. Another thing about Port Moresby, every day at 12 o’clock a Jap reconnaissance plane came over and took photos. We’d look up and say, “Oh, there’s Joe again.”

He didn’t drop anything, it was a reconnaissance. We probably had planes over their bases too.

Yes.

You might have a set of five, I can’t remember. You might have a set of five numbers and each number

meant some kind of a letter. It all would have to be worked out. If you got a signal and you started to decode it and it said the first word was “tiger,” you had to call the intelligence officer straight away because that was from our representatives from behind Jap lines in enemy territory. So that was his prefix, tiger. He might say,

“30 Betties [Betty bombers],” they were Japanese bombers, “Escorted by 20 Zekes [Zero fighters].” “Leaving Rabaul 0900 hours to attack.” How he knew all this, I don’t know. But we called the intelligence officer and all that. So they were called Coastwatchers quite a number of them. The one in Rabaul, how he would get information like that, because the Japs would have

planned it in their operation room. So they must have had an English-speaking native or something in the vicinity who pretended he couldn’t speak, or Japanese I mean, who couldn’t speak. Because no way could a white man be so close to know that. Even we, in Port Moresby, even though we only had a couple of airstrips, we never knew what planes were going to attack when, even though we were right there on the spot. Not unless you

happened to go out the aerodrome and someone would say there, “They’re going off again to hit Lae.” So how those Coastwatchers knew used to always be a mystery to me.

It comes through these signals, but it comes through in a code. Then that’s passed to me and I decode the code into English. I

can’t remember. I know that’s what happened. You have to put a message in code to be sent. For instance, Port Moresby, before I got there, there was no planes that stopped the Japanese and they used to come over and strafe and everything. Then in April or May American P40s, flown by Australian pilots, came into Port Moresby.

Every time the Jap planes came over like that the chaps here would get out there with their rifles and just fire at them and ack-ack would fire. These, they fired on them and they landed and they realised they were proper fighting planes. After the war the intelligence officers told us all the stories behind the scenes. This is what happened that time in Port Moresby. They knew that the Jap reconnaissance

plane would come over at twelve o’clock, they knew he would see the P40s [Kittyhawks], the American fighter planes even though they were flown by Bluey Truscott, Peter Turnbull, and the Jackson brothers. And they would take photos and then not only that, if he was under attack he would radio back to Lae, the base, and tell the Japanese. So they looked up the regulations and found

before you can jam an enemy’s frequency you must have permission of air board. Everything was done according to regulations. So the senior officers of the area all met and decided they would jam the Jap’s frequency and they would send a signal to air board that they’d done this. They couldn’t wait for air board’s permission. Also they sent two Kittyhawks up to shoot him down. I think one of the

Jackson brothers was one of them. So it was a great day. As soon as the Japs saw the Kitties making for him he started to send and the radio operators jammed his frequency and he was shot down. So next day, with the blessing of all the troops in Port Moresby, away went the Kittyhawks and got over Lae or Madang or somewhere, or Wewak, and found all the Japanese planes out in the

open and hit the mark. So that was wonderful. That same squadron went to Milne Bay in August ’42 when the Japanese landed there. They were repulsed there and that’s where Peter Turnbull, one of our best pilots, was killed. They think he crashed and a Jap hit him with a rifle butt, cos his head was stoved in.

No, that was before I went there. I thought I’d tell you that as a matter of interest. They were the first proper fighting planes and everything. Courtesy of, see we were only getting 5 per cent of American aid. Even the shirt I wore was an American shirt. We were short of everything here.

Before we went to Milne Bay they needed volunteers to push supplies out of the C47s. They’re a Douglas aircraft which was used extensively up there, to the troops over Buna. I did that a few times. The things were in a kind of container and I think there’s a bit of a parachute on them. The door opens and

you just hang on and push them out.

I wanted it. I wanted to fly. It was nice to be over Buna. I was to meet the chaps that fought there later on and they told me all about it, what it was like, and it was pretty tough going cos the Japs just wanted to die. Not only that, it was Buna, Gona and Shaggy Ridge. Shaggy Ridge they had all those tunnels. They wouldn’t come out.

Our chaps would put cover fire on the tunnel while another one got up and blew them in, like rabbit warrens they were. They brought those guys back to Port Moresby for a rest. Some of them were back before I went to Milne Bay. For a rest they put them on the sides of the roads with shovels. The sergeant in charge said, “I don’t worry them. If they lean on them,

well and good.” These were the guys. Because you’ve gotta do something with them I suppose.

You depend on the guy in the plane to tell you when to push it out. The pilot knows, he’s got a navigator, when he’s over our lines and not over the Japanese lines. It must have been pretty difficult because there were lots of foliage down

there, coconut palms, and you can’t really see much through them. That had to happen, otherwise they would have had to try to carry supplies overland, right over through Kokoda and over all those terrible country. Cos we had no airstrip over Buna or anything then, so that’s how it was done. I finished up we went to Milne Bay.

We had two strips at Milne Bay. A fighter strip, that was called Gurney, then the bomber strip. Down at Milne Bay, cos there’d been the battle in August, there was lots of Japanese bones and things around. Guys used to play football with skulls and other guys used to make letter openers with their bones.

It sounds terrible now, but we had no respect for them or anything like that. I remember finding a body one day in the water and I got a stick and it all just dissolved. The flesh. Incidentally, we had air raids on Port Moresby. Quite a few. Sometimes some planes would be shot down and

I never saw any Japanese bail out. Any time some saw a crashed Zero or anything, there was never a parachute in it. I did get strafed at Port Moresby. I’d forgotten that. I was on my way to this recreation hut and the red alert went and suddenly they were there. I thought, “They’re bombing the airstrip, they’ll be a fair way from me.” I didn’t worry. I kept

on walking. All of a sudden, over the hill I saw a Betty, a Jap bomber coming. He dropped down, he was escaping out to sea. So I dived into the slit trench and I looked up and the gunners on it kept firing bullets. That was the only time I thought I might get hit. Because they seemed to be flying everywhere. I could just see them coming towards me.

My thought was about how sad my family would be and I wished I could say goodbye. I could visualise our dining room at home and the sofa, them sitting there. Then I thought of a guy I’d done something terrible to on the football field and I thought, “I wish I could say sorry to him.” That’s all I thought, and the bomber was gone out to sea. Here I am. There was no, “Lord, look after me,” or

“Take me into thy keeping,” or anything like that. They were the thoughts I had. It’s not nice to be strafed. It happened a few times. Cos you can only bury yourself in the earth and hope the bullets don’t hit you, whereas with the bomb you get into the slit trench. We didn’t have the shell fire up there that the guys in World War I had. That terrible shell fire. It wasn’t that type of country

for that, so we never had to experience that.

I don’t really know. I don’t think so. We had barbed wire entanglements on there and we’d been told by our commanders that if the Japs dropped paratroopers or came in we would all have to take up our rifle and fight. If they got a foothold we would just have to take to the hills and do the

best we could and hope that someone would come and kick the Japs out. But it didn’t happen. We’d only had one victory, in August, at Milne Bay. The troops had pushed the Japs back to Buna. So they were the only two pluses in the war. Everything else was the Japanese way.

Yes.

It was in the Markham Valley and all that at times. Later on in the war. No, that was 1944 I think, cos I was at Milne Bay in ’43. I think that was 1944.

No, they weren’t paratroopers. I remember, I was in Port Moresby when

that happened. They were artillerymen. They said to them, “Well, the only way we can get in you’ve gotta drop by parachute.” They dismantled the guns and put parachutes on them. They’d never jumped from a plane before. There was a terrible tragedy that day, an American Liberator crashed into a marshland area and a lot of our guys were killed. Eventually they did jump into the Markham Valley, but

there weren’t many Japs there, they’d pulled back. They were expecting a real ferocious battle there, but it didn’t happen.

But the Japs had it then. We were only at Buna and Gona. That was over through Kokoda to the other coast. The Markham Valley was further

up the coast. Even my cousin on a survey vessel back in sometime in 1943 they went up the coast and they went into Lae Harbour surveying. When they came back the skipper went ashore and when he came back he said, “The Australians have just occupied Lae.” So they were in enemy held territory, but a lot of the Japanese had pulled further back. Further north

for some reason.

There were Japs around the hills I presume, but we used to get raided a lot. We just did our job. At that time, early ’43, the Americans were pouring into Milne Bay and we were on short rations with General Krueger’s 6th Army. They were preparing for the assault on Japan.

That was to take, the first assault was at Cape Gloucester in New Britain, which was to take place in May or some time like that in ’43. I’ve got the date over there. The Americans suffered appalling casualties, cos that’s the Japs were in the tunnels, which the Americans didn’t know about. They had barges full of dead, but it was a victory. That time

in America they showed American dead in the Pacific for the first time on TV or whatever they had, or pictures in the paper. Immediately recruiting dropped off and war bond sales went up. I met some of the guys that came back from Cape Gloucester and one of them gave me a Japanese flag that he had taken from a dead Jap, which after the war when I had some Japanese here I sent back to Japan because it was

a Japanese unit and my son speaks Japanese could interpret it was good luck messages and named the unit. So I felt I should send it back there. It was after the war. In about April the Japanese made a 100 raid strike on Port Moresby. Then I think on one of our bases, Dobodura I think it was named, and then through signals

from the Coastwatchers we knew they were coming to Milne Bay on the Wednesday I think it was. Believe it or not it was a sunny day around twelve o’clock. The bay’s about 45 miles long, Milne Bay harbour. They came up the bay in formation the bombers and the Zekes on the outside. Then our Kittyhawks attacked them

and the anti-aircraft opened up and they started to fall down from the sky, be shot down or hit by the, and we were standing where I was on the slit trenches, outside them cheering our chaps on. Suddenly one of the Japanese twin-engine bombers is gliding and there’s smoke coming from his motor and he’s coming very slowly near our camp.

So I had my rifle, so I fired two clips into the plane, it wasn’t far up, as it went down to crash. I definitely hit it, I was a good shot, and probably hit anyone in there. I was a very emotional, I wasn’t a swearing person, but I was screaming at them, “Die, you bastards. Die.” That was the emotion

of the moment. I didn’t talk like that normally. Even though that’s minor word today, that’s how I was reared. For weeks after, none of them bailed out. They lost the lot. They lost all their planes. They got chased down the bay the whole lot of them, gone. It’s after that there were only spasmodic raids until we got further north. That must have been a

final go, those three days.

I was still in signals. The tent we had at Milne Bay, it rained every day, and it leaked though there were no holes in it. I think it must have been a World War I tent that probably my wife’s father slept in, a bit of a joke. So we thought, “This is no good. We’re

near a swamp.” So some of us went to an American camp and we stole an American tent and erected that and made a floor. I’ve got photos of it there. That was called “scrounging,” not “stealing”. If you needed something, if you needed a jeep, if you could get one it was called scrounging, as long as you didn’t get caught. Our officers immediately put it on the unit strength, one American tent, as if it belonged to us. It was a terrible place. If you left your

haversack on the tent pole and you had a shirt in it and didn’t look at it for a couple of days it’d be all mildewed. Like that. There was a swamp nearby and then there was the 5th Division camp. That’s where I first heard a lot about that Bendigo Gaol from the guys that had been in it and had come back there. There were boring times and

then we’d get sticks and we’d get all in a great big circle and into the grass and beat it and drive the rats out and kill the rats, thousands of rats. I’ve watched natives cook birds in ashes and eat all the insides. One of the natives invited us to his village. It was all coconut palms, but then you could leave that and you could get into jungle. He took us and he pointed to the entrance into the jungle, the trail we’d have to

follow. So three of us, Wack Smith, Doran and myself, went. On the way we passed native women at a stream doing something with grass skirts. They’d give you anything for dye, but they’d boil leaves to get the red colour. They all didn’t wear one skirt, they wore about ten skirts. They were very modest people, the natives at Milne Bay.

Well, we went into the jungle. It was like going into a dark corridor. Everything was growing over the top. When you think of the infantry having to fight in those conditions you really, they’re the tops. You’d push one foot in and the mud would go over your ankle and there’d be thousands of insects rising. Sometimes you’d fall in a hole and snakes would go away. You

come out in a clearing and see the sky, it was wonderful. Eventually we got out of the jungle and arrived at the village. They had banana trees and all kinds of vegetables. They were on the bank of a creek and all their buildings were built up with a platform on the front. The men, the top man sat right in the front and it went down the pecking order, and the women were right at the back. This man

showed us the Bible and they’d been converted to Christianity by Methodist missionaries. It was a Methodist Bible. Then he called one of his grandsons, and his grandson stood there and sang “God Save The King” for us. They gave us some fruit and all that and I think we must have given them some kind of gift, but it couldn’t have been the tobacco we got from the comforts fund because it was so awful the

natives wouldn’t accept it and we didn’t smoke it. But they also used to give us toothpaste, which we never used for our teeth, but we used it for cleaning our rifle barrels. Cos we used to have rifle barrel inspection every so often. Make sure there was no rust in the barrel. If anything happened you wouldn’t want rust there cos it’d throw the bullet off. This time we had rifles all the time, and bayonets. We’d get natives to climb the tree

and then you’d cut the coconut out the coconut tree, you’d cut the coconut open with your bayonet. For washing we might have a bit of a tin dish and you get a bit of water out of the tank and strip off and just tip it over yourself. You had to soap that and then you’d tip another bit over and that’s how you wash. We didn’t swim in the streams because you could get infections in the ear or in your eyes.

Any chance we got we’d go down to the wharf called Giligili and there was a sunken Chinese boat there, the Anchun, that the Japs when they came into the harbour some of their destroyers had sunk, and we used to swim around there. That’s where I met my cousin. He was on this survey vessel. So that was great. Got to March, April,

and the Japs must have decided to reinforce their troops in New Guinea up above Buna and Gona. There was 22 ships left Rabaul coming along the Bismarck Sea making for New Guinea. They were attacked by aircraft from Port Moresby and Milne Bay. The first ones to go in were the number 30 Squadron, Australian squadron of

Bristol Beaufighters. They were called “whispering death” because they could be coming at low level over the coconut palms and you wouldn’t hear the motor coming till they were right overhead. Black Jack Walker was the commander of 30 Squadron. I think he was a squadron leader. They went in at low level and strafed all the decks of the ships. And then the next lot in were Americans with their A20 Mitchells. Up above

were Kittyhawks and P38s, they’re flown by Americans, Lightnings. And of course there were Zeros up there too. All the ships were sunk. There were all these Japs that weren’t dead floating around in the Bismarck Sea on rafts and things like that. From Milne Bay our guys were told, and from Moresby, to go out and strafe the rafts

because they knew if the Japs got ashore they’d kill some of the Allies, that’s what they were like. A few did get ashore on Goodenough Island and we lost some men there. So I can remember one signal from one of the pilots, “Sighted rafts containing estimated 300 Japs, strafed same, killed estimated 300, sank rafts,

sharks sighted in water, broke off attack.” Because that had to be done because you couldn’t let them get ashore. So that was an appalling loss to the Japanese. Well, we got a few raids after that, but it was the climate. It rained and rained every day practically. It wasn’t healthy at all.

Yeah, that’s all.

I was off duty. I wasn’t in the signals. So that’s why I was out there in the open. We were just like spectators. It was up to the pilots and the anti-aircraft to do the job. Me firing those ten or twelve bullets into that plane was just something I did.

We knew they were coming. That was from the Coastwatcher. I met one of them once and he didn’t look very well cos he had to live under primitive conditions. But how they knew the exact number coming to this day I don’t know. I’ve never read any article by a Coastwatcher why explained how they had such good intelligence about what the enemy intended. If they were a white race

you could understand, you could infiltrate, but they were Japanese. Later on the natives didn’t like them. No prisoners were taken up there unless MacArthur’s headquarters wanted one. The natives

would always go like this because they ill treated the natives. They raped their women. One day somewhere, it must have been somewhere in the Markham Valley later on, I was with some chaps and we came across a hut and there were those Japanese clothing in it, the women’s wear. What do you call them? Kimonos or something? So they must have had, but they wouldn’t have been Japanese women

cos they only used foreign women as comfort women, mainly Koreans. The clothing looked Japanese to us, but probably the Korean women wore it the same. I was just going to say, one day at Milne Bay I started to get very sore, this pain back here. I didn’t know what it was. It was difficult to walk. So

I staggered more or less up to the field hospital and there were three officers there, they were doctors. I just said, “I’ve got a pain here in my backside.” They said, “Drop your trousers and climb up here on the table,” which I did. Then I could feel them interfering with me and I felt a bit of pain. Then they said, “All right. Pull up your trousers and

go back to your camp.” I could hardly walk. I eventually recovered, but I wondered what it was. After the war I got internal haemorrhoids and I went to Heidelberg Hospital in ’56. On my papers they had that I had an external haemorrhoid which had been removed at Milne Bay. At Heidelberg Hospital I got put in a lovely warm bed, I got put on a stretcher

wrapped in a warm blanket and all this, and lovely conditions. That’s how it was. Incidentally, I met my friend Jack McKenzie that I met in grade two up there. He loved dancing and he said, “There's a new number out in Melbourne. It’s called ‘Tangerine’.” I said, “Sing it to me.” He said, “It’s a slow foxtrot.” We danced together along the side of the road. As the guys went passed they called, “Troppo.” Then I

run into my cousin and then I met Jack Arletti and he was on Milne Bay defences, the gun pits. He had all these strings with tins on rigged up if someone was coming. So it was a great reunion to meet your old friends. Then an American concert party came to Milne Bay. They were all middle aged or more vaudeville artists. I went to it. And it was wonderful. They had

violinists and everything. Then suddenly one of them said, “There’s a new song out in America. I’ll sing it to you.” And it was “White Christmas,” which was to sell millions of records. Another night I was wandering along down near the wharf and I heard this music and I followed my hearing and I came across these American Negroes and they had all these musical instruments. One would just tap the drums and away they’d go. It was great. They

were so good. They just had music in them, those guys.

We didn’t see much of the Negroes. The Americans didn’t let them do the taking of the islands. They kept them out of combat. They came and after the white Americans had taken the island the Negroes came in as the garrison. They didn’t really get into the action

till in France, the final days. And later on in the war in probably the Philippines. But at the start because a lot of the Americans I met were southerners… Back at Port Moresby I had a bit to do with American Negroes there. They drove all the big trucks. We could always get a lift with them. I do remember they did all the unloading of the ships

and all that, and I do remember the story went around they had mustard gas in Port Moresby in case the Japanese dropped gas they could retaliate. No one’s got any proof of this, but we all kind of understood that the American Negroes had unloaded mustard gas in Port Moresby in case the Japanese used gas, but they didn’t. Never happened. So I can’t prove that

statement, but I think it’d be very correct. We found them nice people. They were fine looking guys. Friendly towards us, cos we were very friendly towards them.

Not really. After that 100 plane raid there were raids, but not to the extent of that raid. They’d probably lost so many planes. But there were always Japanese around in the hills. Every so often they’d pick them up. You never knew when one might get into your camp and just roll a grenade into your tent or something. You were always

aware that you were in a war zone and there could be Japanese, because they might decide, five or six of them, to do some damage to us and not mind dying. So you never knew.

No, not to my knowledge. I didn’t hear anything about it there.

I’m wondering if we had guards. We must have had guards. They were a special mustering, guards. But I don’t think we had, we had guards at Port Moresby and I don’t know whether. We were ten miles inland near a swamp under coconut palms, so I don’t think we had guards at Milne Bay, not at our thing, cos up the road from us was a radar unit tracking enemy planes. My friend was in that.

The fighter strip at Milne Bay was mesh because of the climate. When I went to the Canberra War Museum a few years ago there was a bit of the Milne Bay mesh, I asked the attendant could I get an axe and take a little bit as a souvenir. We used to spend a lot of time at the strip and you’d see the bombers come back. Sometimes

they’d have holes in the wings. And fighters would take off. Sometimes one in front and two abreast. There’d be all these C47s, which was a Douglas transport plane, they did a wonderful job. They were Beaufort Bombers from there.

We had a building next to an open, we had a bit of a

mess. It was a kind of floor made out of coconut palms and posts. There was a bit of a thatched thing up to your waist and then open and then a bit of thatched roof. The natives must have built it. We had a place next to there. We used to do shift. I can’t remember whether they were twelve hours on and twelve hours off, or probably twelve hours, and a nightshift. It always

had to be manned cos there was traffic coming backwards and forwards all the time. It was about everything going on. You’d get all the reports of, “An Australian patrol went out in such and such a place and came across some Japs and killed six and two Australians were wounded, or one died.” It all came through.

All that information would go to down south I suppose to General MacArthur’s headquarters and then they’d decide what was to be released to the civilian population. I did see General MacArthur’s plane one day before the Cape Gloucester, the first American landing on the way back to Tokyo. And he came up to see General Krueger. He was in a bomber and there were 30

fighters around the bomber coming out from Queensland. Though I never saw the man in person, just his plane.

Yes, there would have been other signals officers, Port Moresby, army ones, where there’d be a hell of a lot of traffic. There’d be all things about equipment and what was needed and you’d

get signals that somebody’s mother had died and this guy could come home on compassionate leave and you’d have to send it to the appropriate unit. Things like that. Everything. There was no such thing as picking up a phone and ringing back to Australia.

Yeah, from memory. For the

mainland and. I never thought of where they all came from, I just decoded them. I knew what one came from behind enemy lines, or in enemy territory, the tiger prefix “one”.

No, not too many. Every so often we’d get that tiger one. We got quite a few at Milne Bay because there was a lot of activity. Our planes went out every day and bombed New Britain, Gasmata

and Rabaul. That’s where the Japanese had their big base, Rabaul. So Milne Bay and all that was within easy reach. So we’d get a lot of information from him there. Not from other Coastwatchers. I don’t remember another one.

That was we’d know it was in enemy territory and we’d have to call the intelligence officer

straight away and he’d take the appropriate action with higher authority. See, if they knew a raid was coming, planes were coming, they would do something about it, take precautions.

I was corporal by this time. Later on I was a sergeant. Yes, and several others, we just did our job.

I didn’t do the radio bit. WT guys did that. I just did decoding. They passed their message to us with all this code and we had to work out what the message was. Or if we had a message to send we had to put it into code.

Appropriate

action would be taken. It was like I said about a chap whose mother had died and he could come home to look after the family, we’d have to send that to his unit so that he could be sent on leave. Anything.

We would have an officer on duty and

we’d refer them to him and he would probably send them out. We’d just pass them to him. I wouldn’t do it myself. The officer in charge of that shift would take the appropriate action with each signal. Just as well the Japs didn’t get me, they would have tortured me for the codes wouldn’t they? I never thought of that.

I don’t think so. It’s hard to remember.

Codes were foreign to me, I would have preferred to be doing something else. But that’s what I had to do at that time.

More active role in the war. I tried to get into that paratroop thing, which never went into action. But there I was. Later on in the war I did get into places where there were snipers and things like that

and got shot at a bit, but I wasn’t actually firing back. Eventually, after nine months, we were sent back to Port Moresby. I met my brother and he couldn’t believe I was pale and I had some grey hairs. We were very resentful to the guys in Port Moresby who

we thought had it easy while we had been left six months longer than we should have down in Milne Bay and been sick. So we weren’t very friendly towards them. One night we were at that same rec hut in Port Moresby and they had a red alert. All the other guys went down on the golf course into the

slit trenches and the three of us stayed and we went under the rec hut and it had concrete pillars going up to the floor. We leant against the pillars looking down at the golf course. That night the Japanese had a go at the gun above us. The bomb, one or two, I don’t know, hit behind the rec hut, but we were protected from the

shrapnel because of the concrete. The blast sent me to my knees and there’d been a guy standing on the steps of the rec hut playing a piano accordion, shot him off onto the ground, but he wasn’t injured. It was a great humiliation cos the bombers had gone then and we ran for the slit trenches and all the chaps in the slit trenches were cheering ironically

at us, the smart alecs. I flew over the barbed wire, long jump, and got in a trench. It was a great humiliation. Terrible. I lost minimal hearing in this ear from that. Only minimal. So it was just as well we weren’t around the corner. Just as well those concrete pillars protected us. May not have been a very heavy bomb, or

whether it was two I don’t know. But they were going for the gun. They had frequent attempts to get it.

We’re going to Townsville on a C47. When we left Milne bay to go back to Port Moresby, I forgot this little bit, the sergeant pilot got on the C47 and there were Americans and there was a big trunk. The sergeant kicked it and said, “How much does this weigh, Yank?” looking at the manifest. “It’s a lot heavier than this.” The Yank said, “Are you scared, Aussie? I’ll take her up.

If anyone wants to get off, get off.” Two guys did, but I didn’t. I knew Milne Bay strip very well. He revved her up and revved her up and we got her rolling, and we passed the control tower and I knew we should be airborne and we weren’t airborne. I was thinking of the coconut palms at the end of the strip. I thought, “Oh God.” Anyway, she was still on the deck and he finally gets her up and I’m looking down at the wing out of the,

and the trees just went under me. All the way to Port Moresby we travelled between the hills got she couldn’t get height, she was overloaded. When we got to Port Moresby he taxied the plane to the weighing thing and it was the heaviest load that had been carried in the southwest Pacific up to that time. He should never have taken off. He risked all our lives.

It was overloaded

It was too much gear. Everything had to be weighed when you got on a plane. I was say eleven stone and so much gear. A plane can only carry so many pound in weight. This was heavily overloaded. It was a C47 and eventually we got a plane and we took off at Townsville, this is coming home on leave. We ran into

an electrical storm and I was cold for the first time for 18 months or whatever. I was just watching out the porthole down at the sea and there was lightning and everything going, and teeming rain. All of a sudden a sheet of flame went past the portholes and I thought, “God, a Jap fighter.” The motor stopped and the plane started to fall down.

I wasn’t frightened. I was so cold I couldn’t have cared. All of a sudden the motors got going again. We got to Townsville and the pilot told us that the lightning had hit the nose of the plane and that was the light we saw, and it had stopped the motors. So I immediately fell down and kissed the earth. The guy in Rome did that 30 or 40 years later.

We went into Townsville and the first thing we made for was the café. Sausages and eggs. Three hours later, back to the café again, but our stomachs wouldn’t take it. It was so wonderful. We travelled all the way down on the troop train down to Brisbane, on another troop train to Sydney, and then all the way to Melbourne.

So it was pretty long. I got home and saw the family. My brother was still up in New Guinea. I got restless in my leave and I used to spend a lot of time at the Dug Out in Swanston Street that I talked about earlier. It was run by Myer and everything was paid for. Then the leave was over and they had

a big signal place in Camberwell at a mansion, Frognell or something. They sent me there for a little while and it was very secret. All these signals came back and forth. From there I was sent down to Point Cook. By this time I was a sergeant.

I was surprised to get it. They must have thought I had some ability of leadership. I must have

got it at Milne Bay. I never had any occasion to ever reprimand anybody, except once. This guy did the wrong thing and I can’t remember what it was, but he was letting us down. I really tore into him. Words poured out of my mouth that I’d never said in my life. I’d heard them all. The emotion of the moment. After that he was all right. I never had occasion, cos we all knew what we were doing.

OK, Point Cook. So I got down there and I went in the gate and you have a movement order. You’re supposed to report to the orderly room. I didn’t report to the orderly room, I just went and found a hut and a spare bed and just camped there. When the other guys went on parade in the morning I went up and had breakfast with them and then I came back, waited till they went on parade,

got into my uniform and then went to the back of Point Cook and got through a hole in the fence and walked a number of miles across the paddock to Geelong Road and came up to the city. I did that for about a week. Then eventually I turned up at the orderly room and handed in. They thought I’d just arrived. Then they put me in charge of number 4 Squad. So we used to have this parade every morning, and I’d shout out, “Number 4 Squad by the left, quick march.”

We’d go past the saluting base and I’d said, “Number 4 Squad, eyes right.” And I’d salute. Then, “Number 4 Squad, eyes front.” Then we went down where they were training them. It was a training school for wireless operators and codes and everything. It was right on the beachfront. I was there for a while and then eventually I was to go back to the islands. Once again Wack Smith and Doran were with me

and we got to Sydney and we used to fool around in Air Force House pretending we were fighting one another just for the heck of it. Then eventually, did I fly? No I think I must have gone on the troop train, because I had two trips on that Brisbane to Townsville one. We got up there and I can’t remember where we were in camp in Townsville,

but we must have been in a camp. This time they flew us over to Port Moresby. Then they flew up into the Markham Valley. I don’t know, I must have been in signals in the Markham Valley around Nadzab or something. I remember there was Americans there and we were told not to go into the kunai grass cos you could get scrub typhus, which could

sent people temporarily mental. It happened to one of my friends, Des Duffy from Kew. There’d been this American man, Peters was his name, or it might have been more than one, but Peters was one of them, who’d ran amuck with a machinegun. He'd gone mental. The Americans didn’t fool around. They court-martialled him and sentenced him to death by hanging. They hung him on the Nadzab strip in front of all the

units to watch it. It’s pretty gruesome, hanging. I’d much prefer it to be a firing squad.

Yeah, and then they buried him in the war cemetery, but right at the back, not at the graves of guys who had been killed. He was right up the back fence and I felt sorry for his family because it wasn’t his fault he’d gone mental probably. But the Americans didn’t fool around.

Representatives of each unit, yes, lined up on the strip. It was on that strip I think where the Japanese back in ’42 had beheaded Flight Lieutenant or Flight Sergeant Newton. He’d been flying Bostons, A20s, I think, and they’d gone over there and done the Japanese over and when they went over next day he crashed and they got him and they beheaded him there. But that was in their

culture, the beheading. It was repulsive to us. Anyway, we took off, I found a little bit of a writing pad there. We took off from there to go to a place called Aitape I think, and we had to turn back because of the weather and I came back to Nadzab I think. It was over the Markham Valley when I first arrived there, I’d had no breakfast at

Port Moresby. We’d come and landed and I ate my emergency rations. When you got over the Markham Valley the plane bucked like that and I was ill on the plane. Once you land you’re over it. From the Markham Valley I flew to Noemfoor Island, which is at the top of Dutch New Guinea, and that was a little coral island. The Yanks had landed paratroopers on it

and it was a coral island. The strip was white coral and it had been really blasted. I’m not quite sure whether they cleaned all the Japs out of there or not, it wasn’t that large. So that’s where I was there for a while, living in a tent. As I mentioned further back I asked Jerry Fitzgerald, the brother of Paul Fitzgerald, the artist that painted the Queen and Mr

Menzies, “How did we wash on Noemfoor Island?” He said, “Don’t you remember? We got tins and made holes in the bottom and we put water in it and pulled the string, soaped yourself and then pulled it again. You should remember, you fell in all the slots.” It was blinding the coral. We were always squinting into this bright white stuff coming back at you. There was Japanese

plane graveyard there. The planes that had been wiped off. But we never saw any parachutes. I think we had some raids there, but I’m not quite sure about that, but they didn’t do any damage I don’t think.

’44. I did forget something about Milne Bay. Can I just?

Right, we were short of food when General Krueger’s 6th Army came up and my cousin was on this survey vessel, a crew of twelve, and they had a little dinghy. The Americans had barges out in the harbour with boxes on. We though they were tinned food. But they had PT [Patrol Torpedo] boats and night running around with lights. I said to my cousin, “Can we row out there and I’ll break open a case and there might be

some food?” We never got caught, but when I broke open the case it was clothing. So I stuffed some of the clothing down my shirt and when I got back to the ship it was athletic singlets. But if the Yanks, it was stupid, because if the Yanks had caught us there they would have just shot us. That’s what they were like. Whereas us, we’d challenge first. The Yanks, they didn’t mess around as a rule. I think they shot many of their own men sometimes.

Noemfoor Island.

That was all over the island. Wherever you went there was open air. You just had a screen up and you took a box or a tin and you just sat there. That’s how we saw concert parties. Gracie Fields came from England to sing for us. But there were no such things as seats or anything

like that. Port Moresby might have been a bit more civilised.

No, I think it must have been Port Moresby. Could have been Milne Bay. Joey Brown went to Milne Bay. No, I think I must have seen her at Port Moresby. Hard to remember, but I remember seeing her because she was married to an Italian and all our guys called out when he came out they called him a “Dago” B. He just laughed. It was all kind of a joke.

“Get off, let your wife come on.” She met him in Italy. She sang. They also used to put the King up and play the national anthem, believe it or not. And the guys used to call out, “What about Joe?” One time they put up Joseph Stalin’s picture on it. We’re on Noemfoor Island and I must have gone to see someone and it’s at night. There was the coral strip and my guys’

camp must have been over past there and the road wound around there and I had to get over there. So when I left this camp it was pretty late. I thought, “There’s no vehicles. I’ll take a shortcut. I’ll go down the strip.” I wasn’t thinking straight. Incidentally I had no badges of rank, no nothing on me. I got two thirds of the way down the strip and there were all these bays with bombers. All of a sudden I looked back

and I could see a light. I thought, “There’s a truck.” I ran through the bay to get to the road and next minute I’ve got a flashlight on me and a gun barrel pointing at my tummy and a Yankee voice speaking to me. It’s a wonder he just didn’t shoot me. He took a bit of convincing. I had my hands in the air and as I said no identification. I told him and he told me how stupid I was and I said, “I realise that now.

I should have known better.” He let me go, so I was a little bit lucky there. I got back to camp. Eventually we were to move on. Morotai had been taken, the Halmahera Islands. It was a white Yankee unit that took it. They were southerners. They had these Liberty ships that came across the Pacific

loaded up with equipment. When they left the base they never took any equipment with them cos there was more coming from America. On Noemfoor Island they had acres and acres of good equipment that they just poured petrol on and burnt. That’s capitalistic nation can do that. I didn’t know how we were going into Noemfoor, but they decided to take us on and aircraft. So we went in on the

C47s again. We set up base there. Our camp wasn’t far from the Japanese perimeter. They’d landed, they had a couple of airstrips, another section of land, and then all the Japs were back there in the jungle. The Americans had foxholes everywhere so often. At night time they fired star shells to light up the area. My tent was the nearest to

this line. The Japs often used to come through to get at our food dumps, tinned stuff. We had tinned fish, bully beef and M&V, which is meat and vegetables. Sometimes they’d roll a grenade into a tent. As it turned out I was sleeping in this tent on my own for some reason. I don’t know why, the other chaps must have been posted away.

So I wasn’t frightened, but at the back of your mind you knew that something could happen to you. One night we were going down to an American camp to watch a picture show. All of a sudden there’s bullets flying passed us. It must have been a Jap sniping at us. So we just fell to earth and pulled ourselves along on our elbows until we felt we were in the clear. Cos you never

knew where they were. Snipers. I have seen a guy just drop. You wondered why and it was a sniper had got him somewhere. What else happened up there? I met another couple of my boyhood friends, one of whom was flying with 3 Squadron in the Middle East and Italy and the other had been in the army in signals

all through New Guinea. We were hungry. At this time things had improved. We got into 1944, we were approaching Christmas. I saw ‘Killer’ Caldwell shoot down his 29th victim over Morotai at night. 29th, down he came, a plane. We had a lot of air raids there. That’s where I got

strafed too. I got strafed there and that wasn’t too nice. It might have been back in Port Moresby with that bomber, but this was a Zero. You just go to earth and hope for the best. Nothing happened to me.

No, I didn’t. I never thought of that at all. Though my mother had given me a little thing with holy things in it. With the Port Moresby I just thought how sad my family would be and I wished I’d apologised to that bloke. No,

I didn’t have any thoughts like that. You’re just trying to survive I suppose. It’s not nice, strafing. That’s why I feel sorry for the refugees in Europe that the Stukas used to strafe along roads in Europe for civilians. Never been under fire or anything. If you ever hear a shot, just go to earth, that’s what you do.

I don’t think so. They just strafe you and they hope they

hit something or you. They didn’t pick me out, it’s just a general strafing hoping that they do some damage. It was almost Christmas 1944. I’d come off duty and I was sleeping. The other guys were on night shift.

In the night they’d got a signal that my mother had had a stroke and looked like dying. But they never woke me up till the morning. My sister in Melbourne had gone to air board here and asked could her two brothers come home on compassionate leave, cos they were managing at home with my father who wasn’t too well and there was another younger sister. So the leave was granted. But then of course I had to

get things signed to get a plane. So I did a bit of Flying Office Green, instead of finding that guy I signed it. Eventually I got on a Lockheed Loadstar. We flew out of Moresby and came down across, we landed at a place called Sausapor, near the top of Dutch New Guinea. It was an American base.

It was the most eerie place I’ve ever seen. There were thousands of Japs in the hills and everywhere there and it was just these Yanks here on this base. I felt sorry for them. Isolated where they were. Then we took off from there and flew across Dutch New Guinea and landed at a place called Merauke, which would be on the west coast, and still Dutch New Guinea. From there

we took off and landed in Darwin. I know it was lunchtime, and we couldn’t get anything to eat or anything cool to drink and I didn’t leave the airstrip there. Then we flew down across central Australia. One of the aircrew came down and I was sleeping right down near the tail, near the escape hatch, there was a little door. He said, “We’re tail heavy. Could you move up?” He woke me up.

I moved up to near the front of the plane, it had a cabin, and a few minutes time the escape hatch door blew in and the point of it landed right near where my head had been. So I would have been a goner if I’d stayed there. But it wasn’t my time. Then we came across the Riverina above Swan Hill. They were having a dust storm all in

the Mallee and Swan Hill and the Riverina, and the dust was thick to 10,000 feet and we had to go to 12,000 feet and I could see blue on my fingernails, that means lack of oxygen. We were still copping bits of dust, but I was looking down feeling sorry for the people down there, little knowing my future wife was one of them. We got to

Essendon civilian airport, not Tullamarine now, the old airport. On the plane had been Flying Officer Butler, the Methodist minister from Ivy Avenue in Kew who knew me, but never spoke to me on the plane, but knew me as Lynch, even though I was a sergeant he didn’t call me “sergeant”. I got out there at Essendon and I was dirty, unshaven, I had no

Australian money, I only had Dutch guilders, we got paid in Dutch guilders. There I am at Essendon airport, what do I do? This Flying Officer Butler spoke to me. He said, “Lynch, are you going to Kew?” I said, “Yes, sir.” He said, “I have a taxi. You can share it.” He didn’t ask me to pay anything, I had no money to pay it. So we got to Ivy Avenue in Kew and he let me out. I had three quarters of a mile to walk home.

That’s how. We had no Christmas dinner. That was Christmas Eve 1944, and we had no Christmas dinner at home. I think my sisters were going somewhere. But I rang up, I think they had a phone, Brian Doran’s parents in Highfield Road, Camberwell, and they said, “Come here for Christmas dinner.” So I went there and had Brian’s photo

on the table and I was to talk about Brian. Not the wild things we did, just about their son. Then I went to see my mother at St Vincent’s Hospital and I got very restless, and so did my brother, Tom, he came home and we’d often go into the city to the Dug Out and all that. At last my sister dressed us down and said, “I didn’t get you both home to be running in there.” We couldn’t

get into the civilian life. I should have been doing things around home and all that. So eventually we had to go back. I think I went once again by troop train.

Well, she was stable. She wasn’t going to go then, but she was paralysed down one side. Then

on the troop train going out at Spencer Street everybody’s very silent. You’re leaving home, you’re going away. I got to, I think it was Townsville, it could have been Brisbane, no I think it was Townsville, and I was put on the United States Army troopship Seacap to go right back to Morotai. It was

great. Believe it or not, the Americans had Filipino stewards onboard. The accommodation, I don’t know what I slept on, but it wasn’t down in the hold. They also had the ceremony of crossing the equator line, which I experienced. I got friendly with one of the stewards and I said to him, “My friend’s back there and he’s pretty short of food.” So when we got near Morotai he gave me a brown onion and one fresh egg. We got to Morotai

and there was no jetty then. I saw something in the veterans’ paper about a jetty at Morotai. Well, I don’t even remember one. So we had to disembark down nets onto these swaying barges that didn’t have sides, that were swaying up and down and banging into the ship and up and down. When you’re getting down the net you’re hoping you don’t fall, that your foot doesn’t get caught in it. Actually, you’re hoping your foot does because

that means your life will be saved. If you fall down you’re a goner. You could fall between the barge and the ship and go into the water with equipment and just drown. The blokes up on deck were always making jokes about falling and when you’re up there you’re doing the same thing. So when I got down near the bottom I waited for the barge to come up and then I let my self go crab fashion. Then I got back to the camp and I

gave them the boiled egg and the onion and they boiled it and they cut up the onion and cut up the egg and chopped it all up and went and got some bread from the cookhouse and they all thinly spread they had it. Food becomes very important. At that time things had improved. They had us on a beer issue, I think two bottles a week or something like that. I didn’t care about drinking, so I’d sell mine to the Yanks for two pounds, a pound a bottle.

On this leave I took back some bottles of whisky and sold to the Yanks for ten dollars. But it was all trading. The Yanks were happy. They didn’t care ten dollars to them. At that time and then life went on and all of a sudden we had an American Negro 99/3rd Division next to our camp, a big division. It was about 18 or 19,000 men in that division. Down the other end of the island was the white division and they were southerners, and they’d taken

the island. Suddenly one day we were all on parade, which was unusual, and an order was read out from the commanding officer that they’d had a complaint from the commander of the white division about us picking up Negroes in our vehicles or getting rides with Negroes and they wanted us to desist from that. Well, that was like a red rag to a bull. If I was riding a jeep, which I did up there at times, and I saw a Negro I would say, “Would you like a lift?”

We deliberately. So they all went back to American considering Australians were white trash cos we were associated with Negroes. I got friendly with the Negroes. They were a happy race. Even went to church there and they sang all the way. I even went to what they call confession to a black priest. I’d never seen a black priest in my life. I’d never seen black people till I saw the Yanks. I’d never seen an Australian Aboriginal.

So that was one thing.

I don’t know. They were terrible trouble in America when the black officers came to the north. For the southern Yankees to salute a black officer, they had terrible trouble. They had to try and keep them apart. When they got to Europe into France, those last battles I think they were all mixed up, and in the Philippines and that. At times our living conditions improved a bit.

We’d get more fresh food. They’d send up boxes of blade bone steak I reckon it’d be to the army. They’d be flown up and the army would distribute so many boxes to each unit. This is only every so often. Sometimes it’d be boxes of eggs. When you knew there was fresh food there you’d go to breakfast, eat as quickly as you could the egg and go back, hoping the cooks would give you some more. They said to me this night, “There’s fresh meat.”

The cooks were cooking some. So three or four of us drew straws, and whoever got the shortest one was going to go and get some of the steak. I got the shortest one. So there were guards about. They could have thought I was a Jap after food. They had a bit of a cookhouse with bits of flywire with a bit of a door that squeaked, but it wouldn’t keep the flies out. So I

squeezed my way in and you could hear the rats running everywhere. I felt the top box and that was intact. There were two boxes. They’d opened one and they’d put the full unopened box on top of the one they’d opened. So I lifted that one off and lifted up the board and I took four pieces of meat and put inside my shirt and then put the board back and then lifted the box on and then we went way down the beach somewhere and built a fire and cooked it, and we ate it

before it was ready. Food is a very important thing. You dream about it. So that was twice I’d put my life down on the line for a bit of food. Eventually time went on at Morotai and the raids got less. One day I was in the tent off duty and I heard shots and I went out and I said, “What’s on?” He said, “The war is over.” I went

back and I felt a bit uneasy. I knew I had no training for anything and you’ve been looked after. What was it going to be like home again in civilian life? What was ahead of you? Eventually we had the big surrender on Morotai. The Japanese flew in from the Celebes in a patched up Betty bomber I think it was. They had all of us there and

they had the army guys, big guys, all lined up in rows that the Japs had to walk through. They had their ceremonial swords, and General Blamey as he was, later field marshal, made a speech and told them they weren’t a worthy enemy. When he said those words and it was interpreted to the Jap one of them started to cry, cos that wasn’t good, loss of face.

They signed the surrender for that area and then they were escorted back to their plane and they flew back I presume to Celebes. I think they handed over their swords, but I’m not certain about that. They probably did. Then of course the thing started to let the Japs know the war was over. So I have some leaflets there that were dropped, telling them. But many of them didn’t believe it and we were there for a long time

after the war and it was still a bit dangerous because even ten years after the war they found some Japs up in the jungle in the Philippines or something, still fighting for the emperor. I did see a cage full of Japanese prisoners at Milne Bay when they’d boarded a Jap hospital ship and they found arms onboard. They brought them ashore and put them in this with a big wire fence all around them. Every day at four o’clock they’d bow towards Tokyo and shout out,

“Banzai,” which I think means, may the Emperor live 10,000 years or 20,000 years or something. We had all these Jap prisoners. I went down and got one out of the compound. I must have been mad. It’s a wonder he didn’t turn on me. I brought him back. I don’t know whether I was armed. I indicated he had to do my washing. When he did it in a kerosene tin I’d

sit over him and light a cigarette and blow smoke in his face to humiliate him. It’s terrible, isn’t it? That’s how we felt towards them at the time. Cos we knew some of the things they’d done to people. I did that on a few occasions, but it was very foolish cos he could have decided he’d suddenly die for the Emperor and kill me. He probably would have been a trained infantryman. Then for amusement we’d go down to where the Sikhs were. They’d come from Borneo, they’d been

in prisons in Borneo. The Japanese had eaten some of them, so they had no love for the Japanese and they had a lot of the guards were Koreans and they were very cruel to them. So every day they went up to the prison compound and got their old guards out of the prison compound, they brought them back, they were fine looking men with a bit of nourishment, they’d put on weight, and they’d make them over near the fence, dig in the hard earth and

fill a kerosene tin that size with earth, put it on their shoulder and run right over the other side and empty it out. One day one of the Koreans turned on them and they just whacked him on the head with one of their baseball type bats and brought blood. But they weren’t allowed to kill them, which they would have liked to have done, but they didn’t mind knocking them around a bit. We all thought it was hilarious, this. Just great, because

for the first time in my life I saw children that the Japs had had, and they’d been in Java and they’d brought them over to us. How our government can keep any children in captivity in this year I don’t know. They all had beriberi, swollen tummies, the skin on their skulls was just skin, no flesh, and big eyes, and they didn’t laugh, they didn’t cry.

It was sad to see them and you wonder what kind of lives they had. A lot of them were Dutch children. But after a number of days with us they started to laugh again like children would. Then they started to bring our prisoners of war back, some of them came there. The Americans had a vehicle that was called the Duck. It could travel on land or travel in the sea. I’ll never forget, one was out on the

sea and I’m standing next to this ex prisoner of war, one of our blokes, and he just drives up on the beach and goes off on the road. He says to me, “An effing boat on wheels.” He couldn’t believe it, equipment, how it was. I met Sabu, an American actor. He was there. While there in Morotai I was attached to the American 6th Air Force for a few months and my living standard

went up. That was good. I did spend a lot of time at the Negro camp. I liked them, I liked their music.

Jazz, the hits of the day and all that. I can’t remember when I came home. I know it was along time after the war that I came home, because they couldn’t bring us all home at once. I remember being discharged on February

the 20th 1946 at Royal Park out along Flemington Road. That’s my daughter-in-law that’s come in the driveway. Well, it was settling back into civilian life. They gave me a new uniform. It’s on that photo up there. I haven’t got any ribbons up or my chevrons.

I don’t know why they’d give you a new uniform and then discharge you about a month later. Some years ago they gave us all a medal, a service medal, the ones that were up there a period after the war. Do I go on?

I was discharged and then I went and got a job

in the public service as a temporary clerk in the Department of Disposals, disposing wartime goods. By this time I’d met a girl I’d been writing to. I worked in Melbourne for a while in Little Collins Street and then she went to Sydney and I transferred over to Sydney. I lived in Sydney for about six months. My mother, suddenly I was called home

in June 1946 and my mother, it took her a week to die, but she died. That’s the way it was. Then I went back to Sydney. I was having trouble with this girl. I caught her out one night when she was supposed to be somewhere else and I even got engaged to her and she wasn’t wearing the ring. I’d had nothing much to do, I’d always been honest with people. So I realised, I came back to

Melbourne and she came back to Melbourne and I realised it wasn’t going to work and I broke with her. Then I applied to do wool classing at the Geelong Institute of Technology in Geelong. I went there and did three years’ work in two with other ex-servicemen. I had broken with the girl and I sat down with the chief instructor there, who had lost half a leg at Tobruk, and told him my troubles and he said to me,

“You’re starting afresh now.” We used to have jokes with him about bringing white ants in to throw down at his artificial wooden leg. It was a happy two years there with ex-servicemen. I went in the wool school’s sports and my mates all barracked for me and I had no training and I came third in the high jump. People used to invite us out for parties

and we’d go to their place. We’d got part time work on the wharf unloading ships and one of the boys’ father and uncles were wharfies. We used to call his father, “Father”. I used to go to their home and their way of life was to work on the wharf, have some drinks after, every Saturday night at someone’s place, get a nine gallon of beer, play cards, and the women sat in the top room and talked and made the supper. They were great people. Loyal. If you were loyal to them they’d shed

their blood for you. I worked at the

This must have been 1944. I must have been on my way back. I took off from Townsville and arrived later in the day in Nadzab. “October the 14th, left Nadzab, landed Taji. Then returned to Nadzab due to weather.

October the 16th, arrived Noemfoor Island. December the 9th, left Noemfoor for Morotai. Arrived at Morotai 0945 hours. December the 10th, in the early hours of the early morning the Nips paid us two visits. On the first visit they dropped bombs, but the second time they strafed

us.” Then we had a few more alerts. They were about, still December the 10th. “Another red. December the 11th, another red.” That means there was an enemy plane. “December the 11th another,” there must have been two reds that night. “December the 12th, another red. The 18th a red. 19th a red, 21st.”

That's all I’ve got there. Whether they raided us or not, I don’t know.

I must have just written it down up there in Morotai for some reason, I don’t know why.

I don’t know so, just rust. Back to Milne Bay. The malaria rate for Milne Bay was 100 per cent. On the Solomon Islands, Guadalcanal, the

American division there, there was 19,000 in it and 10,000 of them were sick with malaria. This has been released with the Freedom of Information in recent years. Now I know what happened. General MacArthur sent to Washington, what could they do? At that time in America they were experimenting with DDT [insecticide].

So they decided they would spray DDT on all these where they were going to land and so day after day they came across Milne Bay at one stage, two planes, spraying us. We saw this misty stuff coming down and we knew it was DDT, but we didn’t know it was one of the most dangerous things that could ever be. They also did that further on.

In 1992 I think, or ’93, my doctor discovered I had a prostate cancer. They put it down to that DDT that they sprayed back then. Cos it’s not in my family, no one else has got it. They give me a drug every 28 days that stops it feeding, it’s aggressive. I lead a normal life.

So I’m all these years on. But a few years ago I was down the local shops and one of my neighbours said, “How’s your health?” I said, “Mine’s all right. I do have a prostate cancer thing. I was sprayed with DDT during the war.” He said, “I was one of the ones that sprayed you.” He was in the unit and he had a child born with a birth defect and

lots of his unit has. Every time he goes to a reunion there’s more dead with cancer. He said, “We mixed it with kerosene. Every time we went back to our camp,” he told me what camp it was, they were stationed out of Milne Bay somewhere, “we’d go low over our tents and release the last bits on our own guys.” Nobody realised how dangerous it was. So I thought I’d just mention that.

No, but I’m sure there would be others. But I’m not in contact with any of them. There must be, cos you’ve only gotta look at his unit, how they’re riddled with it.

Any of us that get cancer the Department of Veterans’ Affairs pick up the tab. You can never actually prove it, though I know that’s it and so does my doctor, but you can’t actually prove it 100 per cent.

They look after me with treatment and all that. But it was a terrible shock to me cos I had no symptoms and I felt so well.

Yes. The boring

time. Nothing ever happened. We used to go on rat hunts, that was one of the ways we amused ourselves. Or we’d just go out and hitch a ride on a truck and go down the wharf and walk around. Look at anything. We never had any newspapers to read, no radios, or wireless sets as they were called then.

We’d write letters if we had the paper, which the officers would censor. I believe that’s where they got their inspiration from to write their own letters. They had a right to censor any of your mail. I became very friendly, I forgot this, with the, there was no Catholic padre at Milne Bay when I went there, so I went along to a Padre Powell, who used to preach at the Independent Church in Collins Street

and later on in Washington. He mixed with presidents and he’s written books, he lives up here in Doncaster, he’s in his 90s now, he was a married man. He had a tent at Milne Bay and I used to spend a bit of time there and he showed us slides of a trip to Russia. He showed us a slide of Loch Ness where he’d taken a photo and you’d swear there was something in the water. He was very friendly and very nice. They decided to have

a sports day. I went in the high jump and I came second, but the other chap had been at the Olympics and he jumped six inches higher than me. I had no training or anything. The King called for a day of prayer, I think it was in August 1942 throughout the whole British Empire. I think Padre Gordon Powell decided to hold

a service. And I didn’t go to it cos Catholics weren’t allowed to go to non-Catholic services. I was still in that frame of mind then. Not that I had anything against them, but I was just obeying the rules, which were stupid of course. Now I know. Apparently it was a great success and years later in civilian life, when I’d retired from

my wool classing and I went up to the local service station and worked on the console, in came a man one day with a tie with Holy Spirit on his tie and it was Padre Powell. I said, “Padre Powell.” He recognised me and I said, “You know that church service you had? I was a Catholic and I didn’t go, but if you had it now I’d go.” We used to talk and he tells me he’d say

to his wife, “I think I’ll go down the service station and see Frank, get a spiritual uplift.” This is the man who’s written books and you know. It was great. He was a great guy. I ring him up occasionally. That was a nice thing.

No, Catholics didn’t have Bibles. I had a little prayer book, but I can’t remember whether I read it. I didn’t know what day was Sunday. I don’t remember

whether I said any prayers or not. You didn’t know what day of the week it was most of the time. Just day after day. You wouldn’t have a clue about the day. You had no occasion to. I suppose it might have been on the signals, but you never took any notice of it. Later on we did get a Catholic padre there and he’d have a service just out in the open and you’d stand there or kneel on one

knee or something like that. That’s how it was done.

No. Not those pastors. Your family might send you a newspaper occasionally and all that. You’d get letters, but you didn’t really know much. As you know, after Pearl Harbor, seven months later

the Americans sent General Doolittle on the Hornet to bomb Tokyo. They practised in America on the ordinary ground. Takeoffs and a certain…Pilots didn’t know what it was for. It was not to do any damage to Tokyo, but to put allied planes over Tokyo to shock the Japanese people who had been told they were invincible and nothing could ever happen. They were steaming

and a fishing boat was there. So they had to take off before time in case the fishing boat had a radio. They got over Tokyo, it was only a nuisance raid. Some of them, the idea was then to fly onto China, some got to China, but many of them got shot down and captured. The Japs put them on trial and executed one of them. One of them said, when the Japs said to him, “Would you do this again?” he said, “Yes.”

That condemned him to losing his head. When I came back from Milne Bay to Port Moresby in late 1942 they had three Japanese prisoners on the Seven-mile Airstrip. Two of them were ordinary soldiers who just hung their head and the other one was a Japanese interpreter who would have questioned the prisoners. I think he’d been partly

educated in America, because he had an American accent. We kept asking him, “Were you in Tokyo?” Cos that was a big thing to us. It was nothing, it was a mosquito bite in the thing, but it was something to get over Tokyo. He wouldn’t answer, he’d just smile and say, “How are the Cardinals doing?” wanting to talk about baseball. Then all of a sudden one of the soldiers just urinated on the strip.

They had tunnels which they lived in, they toileted in, the insides were a disgrace. We’d dig latrine pits, but they didn’t do anything like that. I think a lot of the ordinary soldiers must have been peasant class or something. They didn’t have a clue. And their own officer used to belt them. That was part of their thing. That didn’t happen to us.

Where do you want me to go now? Back to civilian life?

Yeah, some of their barges. The never occupied Milne Bay. They came in there in August ’42. They were Japanese marines. They were six footers,

especially picked out. Lots of their warships came in and they shelled, just threw shells into the coconut palms. They couldn’t see anything they hit. They hit this Chinese ship at the wharf. Then they landed and they were met by Australian troops and the mud was terrible at the time, up nearly to your knees. Then our pilots from Port Moresby and the Kittyhawks, Bluey Truscott and Peter Turnbull and the Jackson brothers, they’d all brought that squadron down to Milne Bay.

So they did the air business. Most of the Japanese died. They were repulsed. I don’t know whether any of the troops got away. They buried them under the bomber strip with a bulldozer or something, whatever they had. Just pushed the earth over them and they put part of a coconut palm over them. There’s a photo of it in a book over there. They put a Japanese skull

on the top of it. There were bones about and all that. Then every so often you might come across a body of a guy who'd died. They wouldn’t surrender, he must have just got into the jungle part and just died. Whereas I think an Aussie would do something about trying to surrender and

hoping for the best.

More than one. That happened more than once. Yes. I couldn’t touch him with anything, weren’t allowed to touch him. And the Indians couldn’t shoot their old guards or anything. That was just humiliation cos I knew he was humiliated. That was just my little bit of my war effort if you like. My

revenge.

No, it was the way they treated the natives and the women and all that. Terrible. After you’d seen those children and hearing the stories from the Sikhs and their prisoners of war, we’d hated them before, we hated them even more so.

No, you just had it

from the start. We knew the things that happened to our soldiers at Rabaul because some of them had got away and told us how the Japs had bayoneted our blokes. Tied them to coconut palms and that. A lot of them escaped and got through. So we had a bit of an idea. I was sitting in Melbourne Central a couple of years ago an a young Japanese student said to me, “My countrymen did some terrible things.

Were you in World War II?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “My countrymen did some terrible things, didn’t they?” I said, “Yes. I wasn’t very nice to some of your countrymen at the end of the war, but if I met them now I’d invite them to have a cappuccino with us or whatever. That was then, this is now, and you get past all that.” It took me years to really forgive them for the misery. Cos when our prisoners of war,

why doesn’t my wife do something about that? When the prisoners of war were coming home the people here waited for them to come. They knew once a week went by, or two weeks, that they wouldn’t be coming. Nobody knew what had happened to them. Just vanished. That terrible march they took them on Ambon way.

There was I think six survived or managed to get away or something like that. Japs died on that too, you know. It wasn’t easy for a lot of the Japanese guards. They were on the march, but they had the upper hand. But still, some of them got sick as well. Cos you get in the tropics and you scratch your knee or something, if you don’t treat it you’ll get some infection, usually a tropical ulcer. You can’t drink the water

and everything like that.

No, the ones they brought out of the hospital ship, we just went and looked at them behind the wire. No, they didn’t talk to us. They couldn’t speak English of course. But I was told by an intelligence officer than many of them

didn’t know where they were. Any prisoners they did get were usually wounded and they didn’t know where they were many of them. Some of them thought they were in Australia. There was no way we’d be anywhere and not know where we were. It’s just not possible.

They had been fighting a war since 1932.

They’d been in China. They had that terrible medical camp there. I have heard since the war in documentaries that the kamikaze pilots they had in the Philippines were really forced into that. They went to the air school and said, “Would you do this?” They all knew very well if they said no their families would be looked down on and so many of them didn’t want to do that. But the first base that they hit was

in ’42 was Cape Gloucester. Then in May ’42 we had the Coral Sea Battle. In June 1942 the Americans fought the Battle of Midway I think. Then they kept going up various places, landing here, like at Sausapor and Noemfoor Island and then I didn’t go to it, some of our boys went to the Philippines, but I wasn’t picked out to go. Then the Americans

went there and then went on from there. I had a chance to be in the occupation force after the war. I would have probably got the rank of warrant officer, but I thought to myself there’d be no joy in it. We’d have to live behind barbed wire, the little kids would be trying to stick knives in us, and everything. That was the way that was going to be. They were training their school children with sharp sticks and all that. But when the Emperor said, “Stop,” that made all

the difference. So I’m a bit sorry now I didn’t go into the occupation force to experience that.

Two magazines. I can’t remember whether there’s five or six bullets in a magazine. I just kept firing into the plane, working my way back through the plane.

I

don’t know. I was caught up in the moment. I just happened to have my rifle with me, and the ammunition. Cos we always had a rifle and a bayonet and ammunition up there just in case. Cos you never knew what might drop out of the sky. Now in hindsight we knew they didn’t have the planes to drop paratroopers really, but we didn’t know that at the time. Their main bomber was the Betty. Their Zero we

codenamed Zeke.

“Die, you bastards. Die.”

Sons of Heaven, Nips, and we used to often make jokes about Tojo up there in Tokyo, the prime minister.

And we used to listen to Tokyo Rose if we went to an American camp. They had wirelesses, which you call radios today. They’d play Glen Miller songs and all that. So if you’d go to a Yankee camp you’d hear this beautiful music. I can remember Tokyo Rose saying, “Hi, Joe. How are you? There’s a beautiful night in America tonight and all along the west coast there’s a car. In every car there’s a war worker

and a girl. Have you heard from your girl lately, Joe?” And it used to affect the Americans, but we used to think it was funny. But some of them, it used to make them think. It had an effect on them. They’re a very sentimental race the Americans. And very patriotic. I’ve never seen such patriotism. Even from the Negroes, even though the hard time they got. They used to talk about back home and their eyes would

cloud over. God. I really liked them, but only for them I wouldn’t be alive now, that 5 per cent of aid. The planes our pilots flew and that's why I get distressed when I hear all the anti-American demonstrations mainly by young people, because I think if Indonesia ever becomes strong it’s 100,000,000 Moslems and they look

at our country. If they ever come here, they’re our only threat. I don’t think China would ever be, cos China’s been a country that’s never invaded people. I don’t think Korea could, that’s divided. So if ever there was, there was only one country we could look to for help.

We liked each other. There were fights on the mainland, but that was because of girls,

women. Wherever women are and beer, like alcohol, there’ll always be trouble, fights. That’s just life. Even in peacetime. When we were in the islands we got along remarkably well. They used to, their navigation skills weren’t as good as our aircrews. They used to call up our signal guys to find out where they were.

But they were great blokes. I lived with the American 6th Air Force guys for six months and they were really nice to me.

I didn’t shoot it down. I don’t know, it was a twin engine, and it was smoking, but he was just in a slow glide. But I just wanted to kill whoever was in it. He must have been

controlling it. I wasn’t trying to, it was the people in, it was a 303 and from the distance I was it would have been going into the plane. I think I got at least ten shots into it. At least ten. I was very proud of myself that day.

We didn’t see it because it’s all coconut palms. It disappeared out of our sight. It crashed all right.

No, because

for weeks after they were finding Japs, but as I said I never saw a Jap ever bail out of a plane up in the islands anywhere. I did hear on a documentary a Japanese pilot in Tokyo say they, on the Zero on defending the homeland they didn’t carry parachutes. So maybe that applied in the Pacific as well, I’m not sure. I stand to be corrected there.

No, we cheered. It was like a football match. We were so pleased that so many planes had come down. When you think about it now, all those men are dying up there, they’re someone’s husbands or sons. That’s the brutality of war I suppose. It must have been terrible for the Japanese back in Rabaul when none of them came back. They really got the lot. I know that for a fact.

We got the real truth in the signals. We never lost a man that day. We had one shot down and he bailed out. His name was Sergeant Melrose. He was wounded in the arm and his plane was damaged and he…

No, that was what the survivors told us had happened

when the Japs landed at Rabaul. They had Wirraway fighters. Geoffrey La Roux, wing commander, said, “We who are about to die salute you,” and sent it to air. Boy. He survived actually. He got shot down and he got one right through the jungle. That’s how we knew about the brutality. Later on we found out that the ones they kept as prisoners they were taking to Japan, locked in the hold of a ship and an American plane sank the ship. The Japs wouldn’t open

the hatches, so they all died. There was only ever one lot of communication from the prisons the Japs had. That was in 1942 out of Port Moresby when a Jap tipped out all these leaflets from our prisoners in Rabaul. He must have had a good heart. He must have taken them and just dropped them. But they never signed the Geneva Convention

and there was never any communication at all.

Over Port Moresby in 1942, middle of ’42.

That was the only time. He must have, I don’t say he was of Christian principles, Buddhists are good people too and all that, but he must have

had some principles about some feeling for the prisoners to do that, because that was just strange.

No. You can’t. It’s still just messages. It’s nothing

exciting really. But we would see all the true things that went on. The actual losses of any planes, the actual losses of men, we had the truth. What they released to the public here in Australia I found out later wasn’t always quite accurate, because they did not want to alarm the civilian population.

I don’t think so. We just went along and everybody did what they had to do.

Yeah, we’d get a signal about a troopship bringing someone. No, we wouldn’t get signals about a plane bringing a planeload of guys up to Port

Moresby or Milne Bay. There’d be some notification, but I can’t remember it coming through us. The signals we handled were mainly to do with the war and things like that, from memory. As I said, parts of my memory are fantastic and others. Cos I would have preferred to be doing something else, so I didn’t find it exciting

reading about these things that I would have liked to have been part of.

Yes. Do you want me to hop back to after the war? Where would you like to go?

Yes we got paid

in guilders when we got to Dutch New Guinea.

’44 in the Dutch New Guinea. So it took us till 1944 really to get there.

I think morale was good all the time. I was

never frightened that the Japanese would suddenly break through or anything. I was always optimistic. We were pleased about over Kokoda and Buna and the Bismarck Sea Battle and the Battle of the Coral Sea and then about the Yanks at Midway. It was great. The Japs must have found it hard to get supplies.

They were so many of them scattered around, they must have been living in misery really. Many of them would have just died there.

Excuse me. Not that long.

I arrived in Noemfoor on the 16th of October and I left there on December the 9th 1944. I remember when I got to

Morotai I arrived in the morning and I was on duty all day and all that night for some reason. I didn’t have any sleep. I think I arrived at nine something in the morning and I went straight on duty. Because they’d got their sights on the big push to the Philippines and all the rest of it so there must have been a lot of signal activity.

I did two shifts.

it must have been twelve hour shifts. I’m not sure really. But whatever it was it wasn’t normal to be there all day and all night, so it must have been special circumstances. Whether the other chaps were ill or what I don’t know.

They’d be just like me. Other airmen. Some would be AC1s, some OACs [Officer Aircraftsmen], some corporals. I was a sergeant. Then there’d be an officer in charge. It’d be the same way with the guys taking the signals on that type of machine they had.

In my mind I can see the type of machine where the signals came in on, but I don’t know what they were called. Something gets in my mind AR7, but I don’t know whether that’s it. But there was some name like that, but I don’t know at that point in time.

No, I don’t really know. I didn’t have anything to do with that, it was just passed to me. They were there and I was back here.

If I’d known this was gonna happen I would have taken more notice at the time.

Yes, the same sort of work. Just a coral island. There were probably a few air raids, but no big deal. I wasn’t there that long and we moved onto the

Halmahera Islands. We only had one little small bit of the Halmahera Islands, but the part nearest the Philippines, and all the rest of this was Japanese and over there were the Celebes, the Japanese, and Java, they were everywhere. They weren’t getting the supplies so they couldn’t do much harm I don’t think. But there were a lot of them about the area.

About six months. I don’t know why I was attached to them, but I was, and it was great. As I said my living standard went up.

First of all, if we came along we pitched tents. The tents we had on Morotai and all other places were like World War I type tents. The first

one at Milne Bay was that one we scrounged, the American tent. When the Americans came along they had everything. We would pitch the tent and then we would dig a bit of a drain around it for drainage for the heavy rain with picks and shovels. That’s the way we did it. The Americans would come along. They had equipment. They would clear the ground.

They would go away and find little stones somewhere and spread them. They had trench diggers. Their kitchens were all flywire. They had everything that could open and shut. Never seen anything like it. They still lived in that climate, but their conditions were so much better. And their rations were so much better too. Also, they might just ring up and say, “Send a plane down to

Townsville and bring back this or that.” Whereas our commanders couldn’t do that. Everything had to be requisition orders and signatures and all those kind of things. But they were out here and they were a law onto themselves. They were nice people.

I can’t remember, but I know it was better that ours. I can’t remember at this

point in time. Cos after all it was only that one period of time, whereas I can remember what we had all the time, the Australian rations, which was bully beef. That would have been all right if you had refrigeration or something so you could get it cold. But the weather’s hot and steamy and this is not cold. We had what we call fish, which we called “goldfish.” When you opened the tin there all seemed to be little

white eggs on it. There was M&V, which was meat and vegetables, which was repulsive, but we ate it. When the American 6th Army was coming to Milne Bay we didn’t have many rations, we went on short rations. That’s why my cousin and I went out to that barge hoping to get food. Though he was all right in the navy. They could go to Port Moresby and have a great meal.

They didn’t have to live on rations. I think they had powdered scrambled eggs at times. Not that I saw much of that. But it was very boring. We had rice. Boiled rice. I swore I’d never eat rice again, but I did eventually and I do now. Boiled rice, every day would be boiled rice somewhere in there. Maybe with the M&V.

That’s just the way it is when you’re away like that. Didn’t expect anything else.

Yes, all that. They didn’t send me, I stayed there.

The Tarakan landing, there were Australians in that landing. One of our best soldiers, Captain Tom Derrick was killed on Tarakan. He’d enlisted as a private and he was to win a Victoria Cross over there in the Middle East. He was Sergeant Tom Derrick, he became a sergeant, and then

he was commissioned. He was killed on Tarakan. He was shot in the head. Some of our air force guys like me were there. That’s as far as we went. I think Tarakan was on Leyte from memory. The rest of the Philippines were the American troops. But our aircraft were involved. There were American bomber planes on

Morotai. We had Beaufighters and they put rockets on their wings. So if they went somewhere they could come in low and fire these rockets into the tunnels that the Japs built, a new idea. Cos after the war, when the war finished we would go down and fire the rockets into the sea. There was a lot of air activity from Morotai. Off they went and the landing

was successful.

Yeah, that’s where I was, in Balikpapan and, that was also the Australians, Balikpapan. But I didn’t go to either of those places.

Look, we must have been, from Tarakan, but I can’t recall one of them. But we must have got a report back about how

things were going, but I’m sorry, I cannot remember one of them. I doubt if we would have got anything back from Borneo in our area. Maybe army signals got back. Cos I don’t know whether any of our guys were in Borneo. Might have only been army. I’m not sure. I’m uncertain about this part.

Yes, there was W Bostock, there were big shots there. But a

sergeant like me is not involved in that. There must have been a heck of a lot of signal traffic. I can’t recall much of my time. I can’t even recall what my building was like I was in. I’m sorry about this. I don’t know why. But I remember hearing that the landing was a success, so we must have got signals about it. I can’t remember any of the details.

Yeah, the Americans were there. And also on Noemfoor Island. And Americans were at Milne Bay. There were Americans at Port Moresby. Always Americans.

That was Morotai. Liberators were the planes. That was the squadron, Liberators.

American 6th Air Force I think it was called.

Yeah, I must have been in their signals, but I can’t remember. I wish I could. I’m sorry. I never thought of this before.

It’s just now that I realise I can’t remember what I was doing with them. I must have been doing something. They might have attached me to their signals for a while in their coding place. But they would have had different codes. So maybe, look, I can’t guess at this. I’m sorry. I must ask, if I can find some of the other chaps, I must ask them. Jerry Fitzgerald might have an idea. Next Anzac Day.

Are we after the war yet?

He was one of my tent mates. He was a wireless operator. I’d grown up with him, his family.

There was a big family of them in Kew. His father was better off than other people in the Depression. Jerry and all his brothers went to Xavier College. So they had a good education. As I said, Paul became a painter that painted the Queen and Menzies. Brian became the top music man at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne. Paul, I forget what Paul did, but they were a very talented

family and very nice. He was a very nice man.

Yeah, he was on Noemfoor Island with me, and I’m sure he would have been on Morotai with me, though I don’t think I was in the same tent as him. I was on Noemfoor Island. So I must ask him next time I see him. He did eventually, after the landing, go to Borneo.

Yes, he did, because I said to him one day, “Where were you when the war finished?” And he said he was on leave from Borneo. So there must have been some RAAF chaps were in Borneo. So perhaps he wasn’t with me at Morotai. He might have been gone home on leave and then been sent, but I’d have to ask him about all that.

Yes, I just recalled that, cos I asked him

if he got one of those medals and he said no, he was on leave.

Yes, Noemfoor, yes. Definitely.

There’s this Wack Smith and Doran and Darkie Calvin. But I don’t think

they were with me at Morotai. I think we’d been separated. But they’re the ones I remember from the war. We were very close mates cos we’d started off in Townsville and come to Port Moresby and were in Milne Bay together. Perhaps after that we were separated. We went in different directions probably. Cos we weren’t in the unit where the unit moved as a whole.

Like a squadron would or a maintenance unit. They would move all together. And the army. They were in 6th Brigade, the 6th Brigade would stay together. With us it was higgledy-piggledy. Shoot blokes in and move them out. So I’ve really got no actual unit to go to for a reunion, being certain I’ll know the majority

of the chaps. I might know one of them who would have had to be in my unit at that time. That’s the way it went.

6th Air Force.

Yes. I met Sabu. He played the Elephant Boy in a Hollywood movie before the war. They were

all very friendly. Yes. They came to Australia and loaded up a Liberator with beer I think, or drinks. When it landed it went too far and crashed at the end of the strip. All the bottles exploded. That was a terrible tragedy.

They were lovely people.

Yes, quite often. My friend Teddy Ryan, another friend, he was on the Beaufighters and one of them had crashed on takeoff and burned. I went down

to see him and he said, “We make jokes when we take off now. We say to each other over the mike, ‘Can you smell smoke?’ See that pilot there? He likes his wine. He’s a bit frightened and always drinks wine before an operation.” It was sad what happened to him. He’d been a footballer, he even played for Collingwood and Williamstown and very athletic, always looked after himself. His brother, Phil Ryan,

played for Hawthorn and later was president at Hawthorn. His brother Jack was a famous Victorian diver, this is way back before you were born. His other older brother, Chris, was a good cricketer. But Teddy got MS [Multiple Sclerosis] after the war, which was sad, and it killed him eventually. Terrible disease that. Wonder why a guy like that, who’s so fit, would get it.

John Gibby, he’d been a bomber pilot in England, and John, I don’t think he ever drank or smoked, he might have had an odd drink, and he came back after the war and married Teddy Ryan’s sister and then one day he became ill and they found he was rotten with cancer in his tummy. You wonder. His lifestyle wasn’t such that he should have that, but that’s what happens.

It was his time. That’s the attitude we had if you heard about someone dying. My mate got killed at Buna. He’d just come up to Port Moresby and they were fighting at Buna. It was December 1942. He called to see Padre Tracy. I called down that night and Padre Tracy said, “You missed a friend of yours, Tim Mitchell.”

He’d gone out the airstrip and he’d been taken over, they must have had a small landing strip by this time, at Buna. Yeah, they must have if they took out. I don’t know what. It couldn’t have been very large, otherwise it could have flown in supplies. They wouldn’t have needed the biscuit bombers, would they? Tim went out on his first patrol and got caught in a machinegun ambush and killed. He was an orphan. He’d been reared by

his widowed old aunt. She was determined to go to New Guinea and pray at his grave. She had to wait till 1947. He was in the Port Moresby cemetery. So he was unlucky. Just a couple of days and the war was over for him.

No, I think I talked about them before.

Ian Tolman, Billy George next-door who got killed. His mother was very angry about it. He actually was married and they lived next-door. His mother said to my mother, “What kind of a god let’s Billy’s lifeblood run out of New Guinea when he’s got a wife and child?” Then there was Frank Doyle who had been through the Middle East. When he got killed there were a couple of our mates with him. They were all in the infantry. And

there were the others that disappeared with the Japs on (UNCLEAR). And a few boys I went to school with, not close mates, but boys I knew. But nothing like the casualties of World War I.

No. I don’t think so. The strafing, none of us got hit. In the bombs none of us got hit.

That was good.

No. Morotai.

Yes, shots being fired, wondering what was ahead of me. Then staying up there for so long. They used to

give us information of what happened behind the scenes during the war just to keep us happy. That was quite interesting.

Yeah, in the war. They told us things that went on.

Yes. About the Jap recce [reconnaissance] over Port Moresby the way they jammed the enemy signal and all that. I

have a map there the (UNCLEAR) officer gave me of all the Japanese airfields in the Pacific, which would have been secret. There was a lot of them.

When I say that, the way they plan campaigns, what was. But they were just general talks. I can’t

remember it all. I can remember the Port Moresby one, the jamming of the signal and that.

We never talked about it, even amongst ourselves. If we got a signal that was it, it stayed where we were. We even never told other chaps about the tiger signals, the man in enemy territory. No, you just was very conscious about it, it was all secret. Just like the radar boys up the road didn’t tell us how the

radar worked, what they saw on the radar. They were tracking planes. Our own, as well as enemy planes.

The ack-ack gunner would have been alerted, that’s anti-aircraft gunners. They would have had the ammunition. Our

fighter squadrons would have been alerted. Our radar would have been tracking as they came. They would have had Coastwatchers probably sending signals to us where they were if they passed Gasmata, a certain point. I just can’t remember any. I was probably off duty that time. That's why I was out there in the open. So I must have been on the nightshift or something, and this was happening in the middle of the day.

Then they blew the silence to alert the whole area. I think the alert was what they called a yellow, and finally there was the red, that means they weren’t far away. I think there was another signal that you had to take shelter that they were almost here. So everybody knew they were coming, but most of the guys would not have known there were 100

planes coming. I must have been in that room. I must have been. I must have knocked off cos I knew they were coming. So I must have been on duty and there must have been a change of shift after the information came from up near Rabaul. This’d probably be hours before. So that’s how I would have known. Then the shift must have changed and I must have been off duty. All the other people in the area would not have

known how many planes were coming.

No. You would get the alerts, it’d be treated like an ordinary air raid, which it was. There’d be the signals that go that say there’s an air raid pending. I think it was called a yellow. Other people with a better memory may be able to tell you more.

Then there was the red, which I mentioned on that piece of paper there.

No. I might have said, well, we all knew there was a raid coming. But I would not have said to anyone, “There’s going to be 100 planes up there.” No, that was all in there. But everybody would have known

a raid was pending, but it could have been two planes or 20 or 30 or anything. But most of them would have expected this, because there’d been two 100 plane raids in the last week. If they were coming to us they would have realised it was going to be a big one for the islands like you were if there were 1,000 planes. And here that’s a big raid, 100 planes.

I came home and got discharged. I think I worked with the Department of Disposal here in Sydney. I finished up at the wool school at Geelong.

I don’t know,

I think we came by aircraft, but I can’t remember getting on a ship. But we came via aircraft I’m sure. It must have been to Townsville because from there on it was a troop train all the way to Melbourne. I can remember getting to North Melbourne Station and realising the next station was Spencer Street. I started to tremble

cos I suddenly thought, “I’ll never have to go away again.” Never again would I be going away and the next stop was Spencer Street. I remember getting out at Spencer Street and walking through all these crowds of people, but I knew no one. They were waiting for others. They were all looking for their guys. I got on the tram in Collins Street and got home. I made up my mind I’d never leave Melbourne ever again. But when

I did my family history in 1999 my son is in foreign affairs, he was in Washington a time and shouted my wife and I a trip. And I walked in Paris and London and went to Ireland and found the village of my ancestors, which was all great.

It wasn’t a very good lifestyle up there and I’d had almost three years up there. I thought,

“I love my Melbourne, this is where I’m going to be. No more trains going anywhere, no more aircraft, no more ships. Then the first year I didn’t go to Sydney straight away, I must have been working in Melbourne. The first year, in one way it was wonderful to be home. You were your own boss. And the football season started and I’d go over to Collingwood to the football and after the match we’d

go to the pub near Johnson Street Bridge and Southerly Park Road, and the pub would be full of ex-servicemen and their wives or girlfriends. Someone would be playing the piano and we’d sing the songs and we’d have a few drinks. It was really wonderful. Just so relaxing. It was great. Then I went back to the boys’ club

and we all met. We even played a bit of football that winter. But gradually, we were all mid 20s by this, so there were girlfriends and marriages. Then every year on Anzac Day we’d go down onto Kew and have a church service. Then we’d march down to the RSL [Returned and Services League] in Kew, many of our members were in the RSL, and they’d join with us and we’d all go to the Kew War Memorial on Anzac Day and have the Anzac

Day service. Lay the wreath and the “Last Post” and things like that. But gradually that stopped cos our lives, we were married and children and living different places and all that. I finally went to Geelong. I didn’t go to Geelong after working in Melbourne and Sydney till ’49.

I did my wool classing course. No, ’48 and ’49. That was a very pleasant time.

February 20th. I don’t think I got back till after Christmas, cos I’m sure I never had a Christmas in 1945. I’m sure.

No, we just, there was nothing to do. In that photo over there with my medals, I’m home here in Melbourne and I’ve got a brand new uniform on. So they must have given me a brand new uniform for some reason. I don’t think why. Before I discharged I just lived at home and I don’t think I had to

report anywhere. I must have been on a leave or something. I remember still going into those rest huts in the city. I can’t remember being anywhere unless I was at Point Cook, but there’d no memory of that. That’s remarkable, isn’t it? They surely wouldn’t just leave me at home. Look, I’m sorry about that.

I did very well in the course. I did animal husbandry, farm bookkeeping and wool classing. But I actually topped the course in the final exams in 1949, but I wasn’t the best of them. I did it with theory. I got 100 per cent in animal husbandry and all that, but the boys that had worked on farms and amongst wool,

they were better classers than I would be. I might have had the prestige marks, but they were better. I had to go out and catch up on what they learned when they were younger. The instructors took us away the first year and I was one of the ones who were picked. He took us to a shearing shed in the Western District. While he classed we did the shed hand work and he showed us what he was doing.

I got into some nice properties, like the Manifolds. The second year I went with a classer called George Monahan to the Riverina, 80 miles out from Deniliquin. That was really hard work. Then later on when I graduated I worked the various wool brokers and I went to various shearing sheds. I met small owners with just a

few hundred sheep. I went to Tasmania. I did some of the leading stud over there, Clooney. After 50 years my son took me back to Clooney and there was the son there and he was so pleased to see me. He told my wife they were frightened I wouldn’t come back each year, so they must have thought I was good at my… But I was conscientious, I gave my all. Then I went to the Riverina to a place A.J. Simons was the owner.

He had a daughter named Dottie. Oh God. I’d never seen anything like it. They had three-day parties. Dottie was driving the car and the channel came up and she missed the bridge, she tried to jump the car over the channel. God, he used to drink a bit. Then I got up near Hay and met the boys from Hay. Really tough men. The cook had been charged with murder, but had been dropped down to manslaughter.

He went to great lengths to tell me that my wife would be playing up down here, “We can’t trust women.” Cos he caught his wife in bed with some guy and killed him. That was manslaughter. I told him I didn’t drink. I had a drink of beer at the time, but I told them I didn’t drink, cos they drank in the night. They were hard workers and hard players. Tough boys.

Shearers and shed hands. Call a spade a spade.

No finesse there. One of them brought me back a bottle of lemonade at the weekend cos he thought I might like a drink, but I was very low key there.

I was the classer and bookkeeper. The classers on staff usually live with the family. But up in the Riverina I lived in the huts so I was mixed up with shearers and that. I never met such tough men

as those men, and such hard working men too.

Yeah, but lots of the shearers weren’t like that. Lots of men would have a little property and they’d go shearing to get some money, cos it was good money. There were great shearers. The Darkville brothers in Tasmania and there was Ivan Orchard, he was one of the best. He drank a lot though and he was killed in a light plane crash. Then two of the best were from Colac and they had a bit of a property

and they were sensible people. It was the big Swede and the little Swede. They were brothers. Lindquist was their name. Big Swedes. They were wonderful shearers and sensible with it and ran shearing teams. Whereas the guy that ran the shearing tem up round Hay was wild. Then there was the Darkville brothers was a shearing contract with Jerilderie and he’d never let you kill a snake.

He’d catch it and crack it like a whip. They were pretty wild up there too. There’s one of these Darkvilles, he could wind up two long stock whips in each hand and crack them. These are the real 30 footers, or whatever they are. I went to Tassie and the old lady and the old man, he was 85 and she was a bit under, they’d waited to meet the classer and they lived in a home that

was way back in 1900. There was no electricity. When they went to bed she had a staff and she took his arm and he carried the candle. Her side-saddle she had as a young girls was down in the cellar. I was taken into a room and it was the old washstand, the jug and the potty and everything. I’d be trying to read by candlelight. They didn’t have a bathroom, but because of

classers that had been there before me they’d put a bath in the shed out the back. Everything was painted brown, you could hardly see. They’d put tins on the stove to heat water for me to class. The sons were all right. They had lovely homes with electricity. The only concession the old couple made was they ran an electric line from the shearing shed to their lounge

room for their radio to get the weather forecast. The old man was 85 and he told me when he was young he remembered men with all the marks of the flogging on their back, the convicts. He also told me that in his lifetime the weather in Tasmania had changed. It was all different. She had three sons and she told me that when the time came that they were up to riding a horse to school, she

put them on the most flighty horse, and if they didn’t get tossed off well, it was OK. The punishment, she told me, she used to twist their ear till the blood came. She used to give me a pound to take back to my little boy. I’ve never given it to him. I must owe him thousands. But it was an experience. Then I went to the next place, the son’s place. Their sons were in their 50s. His son came in and said one day, they talked like

English, he said, “Dad, there’s poachers down that paddock.” I thought, “Poachers?” The sheep used to be away from the property and the first night I got to the old place they said to me, “This is Mr Jim Watson, our shepherd.” I wondered what I’d struck, cos I’d got off at a little place called Jericho and believe it or not, the River Jordan ran through it, and they had a little Anglican church there and they used the water out of the Jordan to baptise the kids. They

called the cigarette pack with 20 in a “double”. Cigarette papers were “tissues”. But they were great people. They were so kind to me. Then I went to Major Boden’s place and then I went to Hollow Tree, and there’s classers they’d had previously that drank too much and they thought I might. They had all the money in the world, but the owner didn’t talk to his wife.

She chatted all the time. He’d push his cup towards her for another cup of tea. God. The son took me down to Hobart, but he was worried that I’d get on the grog, but I didn’t. The wealthy people have their troubles just the same as anyone else. It’s not all sweetness. Major Boden at Clooney was a great chap.

He used to get invited to government house and visitors used to come from overseas. I picked out a special bale of wool for him. I had to do that cos he wanted to beat his neighbour. It topped the sale in that section and it beat the neighbour. He wrote me a letter, which I sent back to his son a couple of years ago. The first Sunday I was there I thought, “I’m pretty fit, I think I’ll walk the six miles into Bothwell to go to church.”

When Major heard that I walked into Bothwell and walked back he said, “Major Boden’s classer is to be supplied with a motorcar. I’m not gonna have it said that Major Boden let his classer walk into Bothwell to go to church. He’s to have a car.” I hadn’t asked them. It was an interesting Anglican or Presbyterian church there. The whole back wall was like a fireplace. You could have put half a tree in it. They used to light

fires when they had weddings and things like that. It’s full of history, Tasmania, but it was lonely for me once I got married to be over there for four to six weeks and the weekends would drag. Is there anything you want to ask me? Anyway, once in Victoria I was classing in the Western District and this shed hand kept asking me to take him to a place called Minimay to a dance on a Friday night. I kept him stewing,

but I took him. I was there and I’d had girlfriends, and I wanted a wife, but something seemed to go wrong and I just knew it wasn’t the one. I looked along the row of girls to ask one for a dance and I suddenly saw this girl and I just somehow knew I wanted to know this girl better. When I danced with her I found she was related to the Hogans in Deniliquin that I knew. I asked her where she was teaching and I said, “Do you mind if I come up and see you sometime?”

So I was up there the next day at the tennis court. When she saw me coming she fled into the school cos in a little country town, and I was wearing a brown suit, buckle shoes and brown hat. I lay down on the seat near the tennis court and watched the tennis. She got up and stood and looked out. She had to come out eventually. That’s the one I married. Best thing that ever happened to me. I just knew.

“Yes. This is it.” Don’t ask me how.

I think it was all an experience, World War II. But I wouldn’t wish it on anyone because it breaks up marriages,

people and families go, the prisoners that never came back, destroys people’s health. It’s not good. It seems to lower the moral standards amongst people at the black markets, though I part of that with the whisky selling to the Americans, but civil life I mean. Not good. But there’ll always be wars, but we just hope they won’t be in the scale

of what we had. World War I and World War II.

Thank you. I hope I’ve been of help.