Australians at War Film Archive

My parents where missionaries with CMS [Church Missionary Society] in Kenya, and I was born there. We came back to Australia, or my parents came back to Australia when I was just a bit under three, so I don’t have very vivid memories of that time. Then my father went to Tasmania where he was in charge of a parish.

Up till I was seven or so, and then he came to Sydney, and he was in a couple of parishes here in Sydney. Until I turned eighteen and he was at Campsie, where he was a rector, and then I joined the army. I had an elder brother, which I’ll talk to you about later, but he had joined earlier and had been captured in Singapore and was on the Burma/Thailand railway

and posted missing, and I was very anxious to get in the army. I had army training and then was commissioned, and then near the end of the war, at the end of the war, they were calling for volunteers to go to Japan, and because of the experiences of my brother, as far as I knew, I was anxious to get to Japan. So after two and a bit, a bit more than two years in Japan, we came back to Australia,

then I was at a bit of a loose end. This was in ’48, and didn’t know what to do. So I applied to the university to do teaching in agriculture. I didn’t want to go back to the bank where I’d been working before the war. But now I wanted to do something in the open. And a very dramatic thing happened, in my own life, in that my father, who was at that time the rector of St Stevens, Willoughby,

was on his way to visit a sick parishioner, was killed by a drunken driver, and that was the total change in my life. It’s a very hard thing to describe, but in the terminology I could put, God put his hand on me. In a sense, I like to say God called me, but it’s a very hard thing to define, but it became very, very clear to me that my future should be in the ordained ministry.

I hadn’t got my Leaving Certificate before I left school, and I decided to go back and try to do that. Eventually I got to Moore College and graduated and then, virtually immediately, became the quasi, the Curate-in-Charge, I think they called it in those days. I was the rector of Pittwater. Having done a Catechist time at Mosman, but now I went straight to Pittwater.

I was there from ’52 to ’55, and then we had applied, previously applied, to go to Church Missionary Society, to East Africa ourselves, and we went in ’55. We were there for ten years. With a break in between. We came back to Australia. And in that time, we had a marvellous decade, and I was called back. At the end of that ten years,

the society invited me to come back to Sydney to become the General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, and we spent another seven years, a bit over seven years in that, then I went to Vaucluse. Where I was the rector of Vaucluse. And that was ’72 to ’75, and then in ’75, a very strange thing happened. I was appointed to be the second Bishop of Wollongong.

Archbishop Lowe invited me, and asked me to come and tell him, so I told him I didn’t want it, but eventually I found myself as Bishop of Wollongong. That was ’75. And then in ’79, while Bishop of Wollongong, the primate invited me back to see him and said that “He’d had information from the army, that the chaplain general of the army had passed away and he had to submit a name to the army

for the appointment of a chaplain general.” And the person had to be a bishop, under fifty five, living on the east board of Australia, and with military experience. He said, “I have three names. The lot’s fallen on you”. And so, I took that on. I had to join the army again. And one of those quirks in life.

I’d left the army in 1948 as a lieutenant, and joined it again in 1979 as a major-general. So that’s not bad, is it? However, I had that responsibility with that rank, but the responsibility was in chaplains, of course. It was a very exciting time, and after a couple of years, and I knew this was going to happen, the army moved its senior rank, the senior chaplain from the rank of major-general to brigadier, to come in line with the other two services.

And we’d warned, and we were working towards the setting up of a thing called the RACS, the Religious Advisory Committee to the Services. And there were five of us, of this status, two-star status, who had the responsibility for all the policy, the church policy, the Christian policy. Or the chaplains policy in all the three services.

So I did that. I then became bishop to the defence force for the next eight years, so I did that job for ten, and in the middle of that, in 1982, I moved to Parramatta. I had been in Wollongong for those seven years, and Archbishop, well, Bishop Robinson was the Bishop of Parramatta, and he became the Archbishop, and I moved from Wollongong to Parramatta,

and my good friend and Archdeacon, Archdeacon Goodhew, then became Bishop of Wollongong. Then I was in Parramatta for the next, nearly seven years, and then I was invited to become the Dean of Sydney. So for the next four years, I moved from Parramatta, came to Sydney as the Dean of St Andrews Cathedral, Dean of Sydney, based at St Andrews Cathedral,

from where I retired in 1992. And then we retired to Kiama.

My earliest memories are Tasmania. Because I really don’t remember what happened in those years, nearly three years, in Tanzania. In Kenya.

I have anecdotes which are second hand, because they come from my parents. They told me things that I did, or things that happened to us, like earthquakes and so on, but my growing up memories were when my father was the rector of a place called St George’s Battery Point. And going to school and being with friends, and, he was a very keen fisherman, and every couple of weeks we would go down to the wharf

when the fishing boats came in and he, I can still see him, seeing fish swimming around in the hold, in water, and he would say, “I’ll have that one”. The speed and the expertise with which the fishermen caught the actual fish he wanted live, and then, all sorts of other things, trippings, and going up to the top of Mt Wellington, and yeah, it’s just childhood memories of that.

And I certainly remembered the church and the rectory, and years later, when I was invited to go back there to do some work, it all came flooding back as I walked in the rectory, and as I walked into the church. It was all there. Somehow your mind retains these things.

Well, it was big. I mean as a child, it was enormous. But it really wasn’t as big as that when I came back the next time. Two-storey rectory,

and I, I mean, from what I understand, what we lived in in East Africa was not of that standard. So this was, but it was big, and large, and it was in the area where there were lots of kids. I used to know these kids at school. And it was great to have them along and my parents encouraged us to have friends. I had an older sister and brother, at that time,

and so the house was pretty full of kids. And I remember the church experiences as a child, Sunday school and things like that. That’s the sort of, just childish memories.

Not particularly, but I remember one of the pranks the kids played on me. And that was the end of that time, because my father was invited

to become the rector of St Andrews, Wahroonga, and so we were leaving and we were going on the Zealandia. That I do remember. And the kids at school, I was sort of skiting about I was going to go on a boat, and I’m going back to Sydney and all this sort of stuff, and the majority had never been on a boat. And so they started to tease me in a kid’s way, saying “You’re going to be sea sick. You’re going to be seasick.”

No way. You know, I was sort of brave, and putting on a brave front. So when we, all I remember is that we got on the Zealandia and went into our cabin, which was down in the bowels of the ship, and for one and a half hours, before it sailed, I was seasick. And I could thank them for that, I think. It shows the strength of the power of the mind, and the teasing that goes on.

Yes, it certainly was in those days, and particularly, I think it was a fairly conservative part of the world -

that part of Hobart. And church and Sunday school was a central part of the community. Oh, if you go to Sunday school, you don’t see the significance of it. As a five, six year old, but it later years, in hindsight, you do see that significance. And I think it was important. Of the things you learnt,

and some of the things I learnt, not just in Sunday school, but my parents. My father was a pretty busy clergyman and he was involved, but my mother was teaching us all sorts of things, and she was involved in the Sunday school as well. All sorts of things from the bible, and all sorts of things on living and attitudes and priorities and values. And that was highly important for me, and stood me in good stead. In fact, occasionally

memory comes back of things that she had said, or things that she had taught me. I mean, one that flips to mind, one day, I remember, as a child reading the bible and we were reading it, and I was reading it to her, reading out loud, she said, “I wasn’t a good reader”. I don’t think, and she was trying to get me to practice. And I came to the word ‘therefore’. And she said, “Wait, let me teach you something. In the bible, whenever you come to the word ‘therefore’, you’ve got to stop.

And ask, why is it there for?” Now that, just something thrown at me, something I remembered, that has been of enormous benefit and I’ve used that little piece of wisdom from her many times from the pulpit myself.

Yes, both parents of course, but my mother, I saw more of her I suppose,

because my father was very busy in parochial work and certainly, I mean, I learnt about God and about Jesus Christ, and I actually learnt to love God from my mother’s knee. I’ve never known a time when I didn’t know of Christ because right from earliest memories, way back, I knew not just that Christ was a person, but that he was actually a personal saviour.

And so, yes, she did that, because I mean, think it was probably her responsibility to put us to bed, and things like that. But we had lots of discussions and things, not just with her, but with both parents, and so it was, yes, she had a very big influence over a number of things in my life.

Not the expectation I’d be a minister, but there was never any doubt that I was Christian, because from my very earliest days I knew of Christ as my saviour, and that He had died for the sins of the world, and that He had died for mine, and one of the things that she taught me, in my praying was, to thank Him, for who He was, saviour, and what He’d done, saved me.

And I hadn’t any doubt about that. It wasn’t something that I had to slip into, or have Paul’s experience on the Damascus road, that wasn’t my experience at all. And I say thank you to my parents for that. Because years later when we had children. We were married and I said, “What did you do?”, she said, “Well, right from before you were born, we weren’t just praying for you, but the moment you were born, you were doing the praying. We made you pray in the first person, for yourself.

We said the prayers, until the time came when you were able to pick up those words yourself, they became automatic.” And I look back and thank her for that sort of marvellous Christian education. Learning, and then the dependence on the bible and so on. And she herself came from, you know, a Christian background. Her father, who was a clergyman in this diocese, Archdeacon Begby, he, I mean that family from which he came,

it’s not just the family, but they had the real strengths of Christian understanding, and they imparted some of those to me.

Sure they have. In fact, this is out of sequence, but when my son was ordained, Archbishop Lowe rang me and said, “Do you realise he is the

first fourth graduate from Moore College, in one family, to be ordained in Sydney?” So lineage is lineage, it is an inheritance and you thank God for it. You don’t depend on it, but you thank God for it.

Sorry.

As far as I know, when he came back to Sydney from Kenya, there wasn’t a vacant parish. This is how I understand it from him. There wasn’t a vacant parish, and his father-in-law,

Archdeacon Begby, asked the then Archbishop if it was possible to see if there were any openings anywhere. And I think it wasn’t just a family thing. But questions were asked. Not just because he was Begby, but because he had the opportunities, being a senior clergyman, to ask those questions. And there was a vacancy in Tasmania. And so, I think, sight unseen, the Tasmanians invited him.

And then the time came when, I think, St Andrews, Wahroonga, and the nominators, whether they came down or not, I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. But he was nominated for there. Maybe, I presume there had been contact. Phone or letter. Or even a visit. I don’t know. But so he went to there.

Oh, yes. There were certainly those differences. But I think Tasmania in those days. It’s very hard to put them in pigeon holes, and it’s a very dangerous thing to do, but there was certainly a strong leaning towards evangelical aspects. Not the whole diocese, but in aspects of it.

And certainly St George’s Battery Point has been known for that stand since its inception. It’s a very strong evangelical parish. And I think that was part of the reason. Because he had been a minister in Sydney as a curate, before they went to Kenya, and then his time in Kenya and maybe all that is part, you know, his background and that might have been one of the reasons why he had been invited down there,

and then presumably people found out what he was like when he was down there, and they invited him to Wahroonga.

I think they made in those days what is known as an open offer and they had a strong sense that God was calling them to share the good news of Jesus Christ with people who hadn’t had the opportunity.

And as I understand it, they went to the Church Missionary Society and said, “Send us wherever you want”. As we did. We actually, we had some preferences but we never indicated them. They said, “You know, this is where you’ll go”. And actually, the family, my mother’s family, that is, the Begby family, they’ve been deeply involved in East Africa, as missionaries, with CMS. My mother’s sister was there as a missionary, her single sister.

Another sister, married, was there. They were there as missionaries, and all of that. But that wasn’t the reason. I think, she was the eldest and they were the first to go. They went in 1919 to that part of the world. So it was, my father had two particular jobs with a leave in between. He was at a place called St Stephen’s, Nairobi, which was an enormous church, I understand. We’ve been back to Nairobi, but I think it’s changed somewhat.

I understand that it could seat a thousand people, and on the big days, the high days, there were five hundred, or eight hundred to a thousand people outside as well. But only the window spaces, but no glass. No windows. And no PA [Public Announcement] system, and my father had an enormous voice, I tell you. And I understand he could preach and be heard outside as well. And the second year, second term, he went to a place in the Aberdares called Waythagga [?],

which became one of the centres of Mau Mau in later years. Long after he’d left, of course. And we had the great privilege when we were on leave from Tanzania, we went to Nairobi and we met someone who was going to Waythagga, and they said “Would you like to come and see where your father was, where you were?” I wasn’t actually, my parents were at Waythagga when I was born, but I was born in Nairobi. I said, “Sure”,

and when we got there we met people who remembered my parents. And I remember, one fellow, in the early morning. We’d talked to them at night, and they’d all been through the Maumee experience, but the next morning, one of these fellows came back and said, “Look”, well, two of them came back and said, “We want to show you something”. They took Gloria and me to a sort of an orchard. Now that’s, well, a number of orange trees which were very old and very gnarled,

and he said, “You see these orange trees? Your father planted them, because he wanted us to have an understanding of this sort of fruit”. Then he took us to some black wattle. A black wattle forest. And he said, “Your father planted this, and he taught us, and he got all the expertise to teach us how to be taxidermists”. With the bark on the black wattle, and he said, “That industry is still going”, and you know, he said, this is so many years ago now, and this guy was a very old man,

and so, they did all sorts of things. They were very primitive in Waythagga in those days, the stories my mother tells me of people getting hurt, people getting cut, and my father getting ordinary cotton and a needle and sewing them up, and doing a whole heap of medical things, for which he had no expertise. But at least he saved people’s hands or lives or something, and yes, I think it was a fairly primitive and difficult time,

but they were in a church and did pastoral work, and church plantings and so on as well.

He was, his main expertise was that he was ordained, but he had worked in an insurance company before he went into ordination. He was then ordained and worked at several places,

including Newtown, which was a very big church in those days. But he was really, very good with wood. He made all our furniture. Just as an aside, and loved it. He was really very clever. And when I was a teenager growing up in Campsie, I had a desire, you know, just something within me as a child, and I remember the many hours

that he was impatient with me using tools. “Don’t put the plane this way, put it that way”, and teaching me this and that, and that expertise. He also was a, he had a great gift of preaching. Yeah. It was really over the top. It was phenomenal really, and I’ve seen him at Campsie, sort of holding people spellbound. I was going to say an hour,

that’s too long. But a long time. So I suppose, anything, he was a very practical guy. He knew about cars. When they were coming in and things, but it was really, the ministry and the preaching and the caring for the people, was the highlight of his career, or his ministry. And as I remember, during the war years in Campsie, he visited every family,

members of the congregation, who had people going off to army, navy or air. And he had, he spent many, many, many hours sharing with people who had difficulty, in reported missing or whatever, and breaking the news sometimes to people who had lost someone. And it really took a toll on him. I mean, his pastoral gifts were phenomenal, really.

Well, I saw him visibly grow older, quite quickly. And I went off when I turned eighteen, when he was there, and the war was still on, but when I came back for leave, probably a year later, I noticed how dramatically older he looked. And I take it, I mean, no one ever said it to me, but I presume it was the effect of the war years,

and the effect on him as a minister, in a parish, all the war meant. And I mean, we didn’t suffer rationing a great deal. A little bit here and there, but it was, I think, the effect of people and the caring for people.

I don’t know.

He might have been. I mean, I was only an early teenager at the beginning of the war. He certainly had lots of trouble by sharing the news, and it could well have happened. I don’t know if it specifically happened to him. I haven’t got any facts.

Sure. Not their relationship together, but it affected her of course. And I mean, in church on a Sunday, he started a list of people,

who were members of the congregation who were now in army, navy or air. And then that went on to people who had been missing. And they were in another list, and we used to pray for these by name every Sunday, in church, until the list grew too big, and then we had to split it up, and a great caring for that. But mother was deeply affected, and I mentioned my brother. My elder brother had joined and gone to Singapore,

and then when Singapore fell, he was taken prisoner in Changi. And then we had a telegram to say that he was missing, believed killed. So there was this great question mark about his own future, and where he was and what had happened. For a long time, seventeen months actually. And my mother never gave up. She said, “No, I’m sure he’s alive”.

But as far as the army were concerned, they had no news, but they presumed, and they had some reasons, I presume, to give that information out, that he was presumed dead. And then on one day, I remember the telegram coming, and I was home for some reason, to say that he was alive, on the Burma/Thailand railway, after seventeen months. And you can imagine the scene of emotion.

And during all that time, and the time to follow, because my brother then stayed on in the Thailand railway, and then eventually went to Japan. He was taken there as a POW [Prisoner of War], my mother wrote to him every week, and she wrote three or four pages of family information, stuff that she thought he’d like, and she wrote the letter and put it in a shoe box. I can see clearly now, the shoe box in her cupboard. Shoe box after shoe box after shoe box of letters all in chronological order,

and when he eventually did come home, a very sick boy when he came home, after a while she said, “These are for you”, and he said, “Well, I don’t know if I can read them all”. There were literally hundreds of letters, you know. There were so many. He did, I think, read them. And that was her concern. So to answer your question, I’ve gone off the tangent a bit. Sure, the war and that time in the parish really affected them both dramatically. But the church filled and was overflowing.

I had to get to church on a Sunday night, half an hour before it started, to get a seat. But that was the sort of ministry that my father had.

Well, there was a heightened desire to know God and to ask questions of God, as to why these things were happening?

There was a real openness for people who understood Christian aspects to speak to people about Christ. You know, the old, old, old cliché, that there are no Christians in fox holes, ah, no atheists in fox holes. The fact that getting to that situation, there is a turning to God in the way that England turned to God at Dunkirk and all that.

They were special occasions, but I think the war, and my father was preaching in quite a dramatic way, and lots of people were becoming Christian, that is true, and I think he was preparing the congregation for what was to come in the war. And all the questions were being asked, why is the war going badly, or if it was, and what’s happening? And as a child, and as a teenager, seventeen, I can remember

dramatic times of being in the services of, you know, you could really feel that it was something special. It was something spiritual. Rather than just an orator. He wasn’t an orator. He was an expounder of what the bible said, what he was teaching, the relevance of it to us in war years, and in every day, actually, yes.

Herbert.

My middle name. Named after him.

Marvellous memories. He also had a big influence on my life. We used to, as a family, they were all close together.

And my mother being the eldest, when we were back in Sydney, at Wahroonga and so on, we used to see them on a fairly regular basis. Not weekly. But we used to see them, and my father, my grandfather was such a man of love, and a man of clean cut Christian commitment. He was a tremendous preacher. Again, I mean I’ve sat and listened to him and my mouth was open.

It was such that you felt as though you were being drawn into the presence of God, as with my father, but with him. And one of the little quirks he had, when he was the rector of St Johns, Parramatta, I think he had a car accident, and broke his hip. And it never healed properly. He had a limp. And one of the things that I used to notice, my wife and I, when we were listening sometimes, that when he spoke with such love,

he would raise his hand, and go down on this, so it was a sort of a dropping of his side, and a raising of his hand and his face would light up. In fact I had a friend who used to call him “Glory Face”, and he had a tremendous ability, with children, not just grandchildren, but all sorts of children. There was a thing called YPU, Young People’s Union, which was a junior branch of the Church Missionary Society,

and he became the president or chairman or something of that, and while he was still a rector of a parish. And he then started to get the YPU [Young People’s Union] to meet together to teach young people about missionary activity, and I have attended the Sydney Town Hall, which is full, which holds two thousand or something, a bit less, of children,

who are members of the YPU, with my grandfather up on the stage, leading us in singing and in teaching, and really being sort of enthused and drawn out. Yes, marvellous memories. My grandmother was a really 'grande dame'. She was, they had ten children as you probably know. And one died, but there were nine living, my mother was the eldest as I said, they had five girls, and then four boys. And the four boys were all clergyman,

and of the five girls, three married clergy. And my grandmother was a writer, she was a bible teacher. She used to take a man’s bible study in the city, and I’m talking about, oh, I don’t know, in the twenties or something like that. Well beyond her time. I mean, to think a woman could be taking a men’s bible study at that time, in that era, oh boy. However, they were both pretty special people.

Sure. Sure. I mean, I haven’t any idea of his finances but I know that he was a, CMS was highly solicitous. Not only CMS, but other sorts of things of course, as well. But CMS, he was committed to it because he thought that every congregation, or any church, as a group, who give,

are following the Christian principle of what Christ did, to give. Then that’s the time that God will restore or bring back blessing to those who are generous and who give. Not for generosity’s sake, but for Christ’s sake. And, yes, I’ve certainly, you know, I’ve been to his place and we’ve talked about CMS, and his face has lit up, and he’s talked about people, and he knew these people, missionaries, knew them by name, they approached him every day, probably.

I don’t know, I’m not involved in that, but it was a sort of place, a sort of home you could go to, that was full of peace, and love, and certainty, Christian certainty. It was something as a child, and as a teenager, that you came away always feeling better because you’d been there.

No. My father didn’t. No, I’m sure they didn’t, no, neither. My uncles, that is my mother’s brothers, they were all chaplains. Not all of them, but some of them were chaplains. In the air force, yeah.

Well, I think what is meant in 1941, or ’40, for him to be involved. I mean, every young Australian who had the ability and the strength and the age, and so on, I mean, it was the thing to do. It was the loyalty, it was nationalism, it was those sorts of things. That was before conscription of course,

so he was working for, with an insurance company. The same company as my father had been in, and he just went off, and away he went.

Yes. I was at Campsie. I remember listening to Churchill. You know, I was all of twelve, I think. And my father called us together and he said, “I think this is going to be a very special message from Churchill”.

So we sat around the radio with it crackling, and we put our ears to it, trying to hear, and we heard that occasion, yeah. It didn’t mean a great deal to me at that moment, I think. I mean, as a twelve year old, it was hmmm. But as the war went on and you became involved in it, and used to read the papers and listen to the radio from time to time as to what was happening in the war, and when there were setbacks, you know, my father was really up with it,

and he knew all that was going on. And was ready to answer questions if we asked them.

Well, I suppose, it came, it grew with me

as a child. I mean, twelve. And all the, slowly I suppose, the government restrictions came in, and all the advertising, of getting people to join up, and all of that, has some effect. The effect upon me, I suppose, was the world was in crisis, or certainly Australia was in crisis, and then it really became effective when the next year

my brother joined up, and then it became very personal for our family. But there were lots of people, whom I’d known, older, his age, he was six years older than I, who’d joined up, members of the church and so on, so that all became personalised, and we started to take a real interest, and things started to fall into place. You know, you’d go off to camp, and what’s camp? And the lingo started to become part of the family.

And as I said before, my father was a keen follower of what was happening and he used to get the paper and see the reports of what the allies were doing. And certainly I remember Dunkirk, a bit later on, with all the great disaster and then the great rescue, and then, you know the story of Dunkirk. And it all built up in my mind, and I was still at school, of course,

but it’s all there as part of the world in conflict. And the enthusiasm that people had for winning the war, and I suppose I started to struggle with the questions, which I tried to work out later, and I didn’t come to a conclusion then. Was there such a thing as a just war, which you know, that’s an ongoing. But is it right? On whose, like, God’s on our side, I used to think, as it were,

then you realise that there were Christian Germans as well. Is God on their side? And I suppose I was struggling with those things. But no, I can’t define any particular time that it happened. You ask me and I generalise, these sort of things came.

I can’t answer that. I’ve certainly read of him since. But they probably did.

People like Niemoeller and Bonhoeffer and others. I don’t have memory of them talking about him as a teenager. I mean, they might well have done and it’s just gone, but since then, yes, sure.

Oh, I don’t think it was a holy war.

No. Except that often you would hear the fact that Germany stood for what they stood for, a totalitarian point of view, and therefore, if they won the war, it would mean our liberty, I mean, the usual arguments that you hear. That our liberty would be taken away, and that their rule over us would mean a total change of lifestyle,

and perhaps anti-Christian, and so on and so on. I think that wasn’t just church, it was sort of the government as well, because it was a quasi-Christian, we were in a so-called Christian land, but I remember Archbishop Mole, who was then the Archbishop of Sydney, setting up a thing called CENEF, Church of England National Emergency Fund.

And he had these buildings in the front of St Andrews Cathedral, where people would come, returned service, not necessarily returned servicemen could come, and have coffee and tea and they were handed a Gospel passage, perhaps a Gospel of John or something, and it became a home away from home, particularly the interstate blokes, and women, they would come and be part of CENEF [Church of England National Emergency Fund], and CENEF grew to an enormously influential thing in Sydney.

In fact, I don’t know if any other major city had that. Mole himself, I think had had some sort of war experience in war, in the First World War, he had ribbons he used to wear. So it was all the war effort. That was the big thing people talked about. The war effort, the war effort, the war effort. And then eventually when the government brought in rationing it was all for the war effort. We were rationed on butter and this sort of thing.

Not like England. But a little bit of rationing.

There probably was. I wasn’t conscious of it as a fourteen year old. I mean, I wasn’t, you know, an avid paper reader. I used to pick up the news from the old man who used to sit around at breakfast or at tea,

and say this is what’s happened. There probably was, I think, in the church, in the congregation, which was growing, there were people in it who felt strongly that, you know, we should be pacifists. But there was a great denigration of people who refused to join, who became pacifists. And the old story of the white feather, people being given a white feather,

and they would be really, I was caught up in a group which really looked down on them. Because the right thing to do was to be involved. And these blokes who refused to be involved, were seen to be less than the best, or not standing for the nation, and things like that. And I should say, just in passing, that years later, when I read the biography of John Stott,

who as a man has had an enormous influence on my own life, and realised that he was one, and he declined and refused to go, to join up and be part of the war in England, mainly because he was sure that God had called him to this particular role. And I think, in hindsight, he was probably right, but at the time I wondered whether, you know, he wasn’t doing the right thing.

And that’s just an illustration of someone, and that’s years later. I mean, I’m talking about, I only read his biography a few years ago. But there were people during the time when I was growing up like that, yeah.

I think, yes, it had always been difficult. I mean, living Christianly, speaking Christianly, and for those who, who have a message, not just of good works, but a message of the future, the assurance of the future in heaven, the assurance because of what Christ has done, I think that has not been easy. I remember my father struggling with certain issues, in Wahroonga.

I can, as a child, and at Campsie. But there was certainly, it certainly had a far bigger place in the community than it does now. I mean, now to be thought of going to church, it’s a situation in which, it’s a very minor part of the community. As a teenager, early teenager, I was part of the Sunday school where, you asked me about it before,

but a part of the Sunday school at Campsie, which I suppose numbered two hundred and something, and we went, the Sunday school met on Sunday afternoon. Now, can you imagine that in 2004? So, I used to go to church in the morning, Sunday school in the afternoon, and church at night. I mean, as a twelve, fourteen year old. And think nothing of it. I mean, I wasn’t dragged along. My arm wasn’t being twisted. I wasn’t saying, “You have to go because you’re the rector’s son”. But rather, it was something that I wanted to do, and I used to look forward to Sunday.

But Sunday school and all my mates were connected with that. And we had a youth fellowship as I got into the mid teens, which was several hundred. And that was terrific. It wasn’t the sort of, it was simple fun. I mean, we used to go for hikes and things like that. Different sort of activities from what happens in 2004,

which is right, because times have changed. Yeah. It really did have a big part to play. And, when you go to school, you were never frightened of, or scared of talking about being Christian. I mean, I went to a technical school for a while, Belmore Tech, when we were living in Campsie, and it wasn’t Christian at any point. And from my memory, there wasn’t any Christian movement per se in the school,

but blokes knew I used to go to church, and I was unembarrassed about saying my father was a clergyman. It was not something that I wanted to hide, as I think some people try and hide these days. I’m not sure.

Oh, yes. Well, I can’t really answer that, because I’ve heard so much about it since. Maybe we didn’t, in those days. I don’t know that we heard so much. But my brother was already in the army now, and was expecting, I think, to go to the Middle East, or something, and off he went to Japan. He was part of the 8th Division, and off he went to Japan, and suddenly, from the family’s point of view,

and so my memory is coloured by that relationship with my brother. And some of his mates. I knew some of those. So yes, the focus then became very strongly on that. And although there were the two aspects, what was happening in Europe, and what was happening in, by the Japanese, and coming down Malaysia [Malaya] and so on, and of course, I’ve read lots of it since,

and it’s a bit hard to separate in my mind, what I knew then and what I know now. But, yeah, I think there was a lot of concentration. Certainly in our family, because, you know, my brother, he was one of the first to go with the 8th Division to that part of the world.

Well yes, I think so. I think they, she was pretty disappointed.

Very sad, but from memory, they certainly didn’t try and talk him out of it, if that’s what you’re asking me. I mean, it was something that every able-blooded young man did. Because of the war effort, again, and yeah, I think they realised it had to come. Yes. There was certainly support. There wasn’t any, the opposite of that, no.

No, not specifically. It might have been that I wasn’t at home. I don’t remember the location when that particular act happened, but you know, a great pall of heaviness fell on our home, and we just hoped that he would be ok as a POW, and then when the news came through that his name wasn’t on the list for some reason. I mean,

it was just bad administration, but his name wasn’t on the list. We heard later from him that he was in Changi for a few months and then was sent up on the railway, and he was on the railway for, I don’t know, more than a year before we heard that he was alive. So yeah, we were following it all, my mother especially was, I mean, both of them. I don’t say my mother especially, but both of them were very concerned, and not just for him, but for the whole,

there were scores and thousands of people involved, it wasn’t just sort of myopic. But obviously there was that personal interest.

Yeah. And he, when eventually he came home, I was in the army then. And I got compassionate leave and came and saw him. We spent two or three days in the gardens together.

He was at Concord Hospital. He’d been bashed up and we talked a bit about faith. My mother gave him a tiny little pocket bible, with India paper, so it was very fine. And he got to the point of being so desperate, that I think he sold or gave, the last twenty or thirty or forty pages, because it was rice paper,

for people to smoke. But he kept it all that time, and I think when he came back, there were so many questions, that I felt that there was a resistance to Christian things, and then he eventually went back to the insurance company, which became the Royal Insurance Company and he became the Assistant General Manager in Victoria,

and while there he had a dramatic Christian experience, where he was back on the ball, very strongly. I mean, that changed, it took years for him. In the meantime, he’d married. His wife had been in the air force and they had a family. And then, we saw him a few weeks, I was down in Melbourne taking meetings, and we saw him a few weeks after he was,

had returned to the things of Christ. He told me, if you want to know, he told me that the experience happened when he eventually was invited by a local minister to go to eight o’clock service, and he went to communion, and as he was kneeling at the communion rail, and he held out his hand, and the minister put the bread on, and he said, “This is my body”, and he realised, Stephen said,

“It suddenly came to me what Christ had done for me. He’d died for me. My body which was given for you”, and he said, ‘That was the sort of a new conversion for me. A coming back. It was a whole immediate reversal in my life back to Christian things”. And his life dramatically changed. So we saw him, and he told us all about that, which had happened a couple of weeks before. We drove back home to Sydney. And then we had a phone call from his eldest son, six weeks later, to say he’d died of a heart attack in his bed.

It was the second or third that he’d had, which obviously had been building up because of his war experiences. But yes, so it was, his going was a great rejoicing in some sense, because the certainty of him going to heaven was with us.

Yes. Yes. Yes. He had, yes, there was no doubt about that.

Yes, I think it was a struggle. I’ve read books since of people’s experiences on the railway. And they continually ask the question, “Why is God letting this happen to us?” Of course, there’s no answer to that question. And it’s not a question you ask. Because has God made it happen, and so on.

Like, I won’t go into that now. And I think he was struggling just to live, to survive, and he didn’t have, when he came home he did not have what we call a vibrant Christian faith. He attended church, and actually he went, when they were married, he went to a church in Croydon and I think he was a warden for a while, but it all become very difficult I suppose,

difficult in some ways. I don’t really know the experiences he went through. But he seemed to grow cool on the fervour that he used to have. That I remember as a child, and then this change, this (UNCLEAR).

Yes. Yes. We do, the sub situation and eventually, I think, the photos were in the paper, and you know,

I don’t think that we, they did put the air raid siren out or some sort of siren. And I don’t remember us hiding under the dining room table or anything, but yes, they do, we do remember it, I do remember it, and it was something sort of bringing the whole thing home. But it was only till many years later

that I realised that the Japanese had bombed Darwin so often. But the sub situation, yes. And since we’ve seen them. Had a look at them.

What year would that have been? Probably ’44, was it, maybe? Yes, if it was in ’44, I was working in the Commonwealth Bank. Yeah.

Yes. I left school. I left school when I was, not long after fifteen, and I’d gone to the Commonwealth Bank and I was working in head office at Martin Place. It was from there that I joined the army.

Oh, I think there was. Yes. I think there was all sorts of, the papers, the government. Who do I talk about?

The propaganda was there that, you know, we must be more vigilant, and the blackout was certainly very strong. I mean, we couldn’t let lights shine and all that sort of stuff. And the threat really came home to us that these guys that invaded, and in a mini sub true, invaded the harbour and people had been killed. Yeah. Really come home. But, for some reason it made you really more determined not to miss out

on victory, for our way of life.

Oh, there were certainly air raid trenches all around the place. Oh, yeah. There were. And I mean, they were still going. I remember when I went to Moore College in 1949, that there were air raid shelters still there, which had been dug prior to,

or during the war, and there were air raid trenches in different part of, we were living, we went to, we were living in Campsie at the time, that’s right. Yes, there were all sorts of instructions should there be, and I was involved as all kids would have been, in mock air raids, and I remember becoming a victim, in inverted commas, and having red tomato sauce or something painted on me, and get someone to come and deal with me,

and you had to lie still, yeah, we’d go through all this and see what we’d do. That was all part of the training of government trying to get us ready in case there had been a disaster. And we just thank God that there wasn’t that sort of disaster for Australia.

It was government inspired. It was probably St John, I think.

I’m actually not sure. But it could have been, it could well have been St John, St John Ambulance who ran it. They’re the most likely ones, I think.

Oh, I only did it twice but I think lots of people, there were so many kids volunteering that you had to get in queue. Just to see what happens, be in it, this is my war effort. Pretend to be a victim.

No. I think, I mean, we were told, if something happened where we were to hide under the dining room table, as I’ve said, things like that, but it was, yes, it wasn’t like UK, where kids were sort of drilled and drilled and drilled. No, I think we were more relaxed.

The expectation was there, but not as strong, not as sort of fervent.

My memory tells me that school kept on teaching the ordinary secular subjects. History, maths, and English and so on. And for three years I went, as I said, to Belmore Tech [Technical College] School

and I don’t actually remember specific Christian teaching, yeah, Christian teaching per se there. And then when I got the Intermediate Certificate there, and my father decided to send me back, I say back because I’d been, when he was, back to Barker, in Hornsby,

so I used to travel from Campsie by train every day to Waitara. There was certainly a lot of Christian activities in Barker College, which related to living Christianly in war time. Now whatever, I mean, that’s a very wide subject, but I don’t have specific memories of it, of anything that was taught, but it was part of the war effort to see ourselves as who we were and to be ready.

I mean, should the place be invaded, what attitudes, I used to think about it privately, you know, what would you do, and I was now growing and getting a bit stronger, and what would you do, and all that sort of stuff. I don’t know that, if you’d said to me when I was seventeen, “Are you ready for an invasion? What would you do?” I don’t know that I’d have a specific answer.

Yes, I was. Yeah.

Oh, just the normal cadet stuff. I really enjoyed it. Cadet work. I liked what that meant. In fact, the discipline of it did me a world of good. And we used to go away on camps and things, and all that the school cadets mean. I think, I certainly thought, and continue to think that it was pretty important. In fact, years later, when I was commissioned, one of the jobs I had

after I was commissioned was to take a couple of cadet camps at Greta, from various schools, and I was pretty enthusiastic about their role. I mean, the war was either at the end, or coming to an end, but I just tried to enthuse them with what I had experienced as a person, you know, and all that that had meant.

Oh, I think my favourite subject was, you know, trying to get home. Sport. I wasn’t what you’d call a good student, at all, at all. I tried to do my best at subjects but didn’t do very well at all. In fact, I got to the point at the end of fourth year, and ready to go on to fifth year, which was the Leaving Certificate year,

and I think I was doing so, in such a mediocre way, and my father said, “The war is so tough, and our costs are such, that you can’t continue, I can’t pay your fees”, so I left. And went to the bank. And I actually went back that year to night school to try and get my Leaving [Certificate], and failed, so when I left that and then went to the bank

and then went in the army and got out of the army eventually from Japan, and went to Moore College seven years later, or whatever it was, I did not have the Leaving Certificate, which was the basic criteria for gaining entrance to Moore College. So I had to go back. And I went back to night school and was able to do, virtually two years, fairly compressed, in about six months. I was able to do it because I had a purpose then. What do I remember?

I remember doing the normal things and trying hard. I think my favourite subject was maths. I liked that sort of aspect. But, no, no, no, I’m not a scholar, at all, at all.

Sure. Sure. Sure. And not only that, you see, but I had a younger brother and sister,

so that we had a family of five. My brother was away, my elder sister was working, and she was contributing to the household. But I take it that the salary of clergy, I don’t know the figures, I wasn’t privy to that, but I know that they were struggling a great deal to make ends meet. On a number of occasions, and it could have well meant that the war was drawing that from them. But we were pretty, you know,

the standards that we had at home were always perfect, but my, I can remember my breakfast in teen years was that I’d have two pieces of toast with beef dripping on them, and a cup of tea. Nothing was wasted. But nothing. My father started raising WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s, so that we could have eggs, so that we could, yeah, I think it was fairly hard going.

Yeah, yeah. That’s right.

Yep. Yep. And people were involved in war effort and giving money here and there and everywhere, and rightly. And he wasn’t in a position to ask, you know, he was paid and accepted it. And that was it. So, you know, people’s belts were, people had to tighten their belts. Everyone did that, and of course he was part of that, of course.

So, because he did, we did. That was the deal.

Oh, yes, Sure. Nothing special. In fact, I only dug up the other day some coupons that I found. One of those strange things. I put them in a box and found them when we moved here, six months ago. Some, I think they were clothing coupons. Yes, we used to save them up. And food coupons, and things like that. Nothing like England, but there were restrictions, there were.

Oh, I think so. I think so. The coupon you had to have, and then you had to have money to buy the goods that the coupons allowed you to buy. It wasn’t free. I mean, if it was a clothing coupon and you had to buy a shirt some time, you had to have ‘X’ number of coupons for them, and you’d save up for them, and you’d got and buy it, but you had to buy it, you had to pay the money for the shirt.

At the time, conscription had come, and I, so I expected on my eighteenth birthday to be called up. But I remember saying to my mother, or my parents, I think both of them, I said that,

“I am so angry, internally angry about what’s happened to Steve, my brother, that I actually want to get into the army”. And I went before my conscription notice came, but it came two days after my eighteenth birthday, but I was at the recruiting office on my eighteenth birthday, so I actually joined up, although I knew I was going to be conscripted.

And I actually joined up and did all the bits and pieces, and then when I, eventually after a few, when my mother wrote and said, ‘Your conscription notice has come, and you’re already in”. So the army, you know, the authorities accepted that. They said, “Where’s your conscription notice?”, I said, “Well, I haven’t got it yet, but here I am”. And so I was, I took the initiative, because I wanted to be part of the war effort, and in those days it was a spiritual issue,

eventually became a spiritual effort with me, an anger issue. I really wanted to get into the war with Japan still in it, and to do my part, and repay what they had obviously done to my brother, because by then we knew that he was on the Burma/Thai railway, and I think by then we knew that he’d already gone to Japan. He’d been sent over on one of these hell ships to Japan, and maybe not,

I don’t quite remember the actual date that he went there, but I was really pretty anxious to do my part. And he was in the artillery, he was in the 2/15th, so I tried to join the artillery, but when I went to join they said, “No, the artillery’s full. You can’t do that. We’ll just put you in the infantry”. So I became an infantryman, and glad for it. I mean, I did the normal training, etc, etc.

It’s a strong word. I had a burning desire to repay. Now, that may be hatred. I might be just being euphemistic, but a sense of, we’d heard some of the stories of the way they’d maltreated people, that had all built up, and there was a sense of,

“They’d done this to him, what could I do to them”. There was that. But I’m saying this because there was a dramatic change in me when I got to Japan. Which I’ll tell you about later, when we talk about Japan, but it was, in retrospect, really, God dealt with me on that, and I was unforgiving when I joined up, I was anxious to do my best, to become the best soldier I could be, and hopefully, in those days,

that the war would still be one and I could play my part against the Japanese. Yes. But I had that sort of, that real anger, I suppose it was anger, a burning desire to repay them for what they’d done.

No. They were pretty unhappy. My mother said, “Well, you’re going to be conscripted, why don’t you wait?”

I said, “No, no, I want to prove something to me. I’m not going to wait”. Every mother was disappointed when a son, a daughter, became a member of the defence force. And I think that applied to her, but she supported me, they supported me, and they were very supportive. As far as they were able. And after, I’ve forgotten,

we went off to Cowra for our basic training, wherever it was, yeah, Cowra, and then we came home for a day or something, and it was great to come home, and she wasn’t like this, she was very warm and welcoming. Both of them were warm and welcoming home.

No, no. I don’t think it demoralised us. We were, we used to, my father taught them in such a way, that it was, they’re part of our Christian family. The bigger, larger Christian family of the church, and therefore it’s our responsibility to pray for them, to share our prayers with them. We do not know where they are and when the news came

that they were killed in action, or had been taken POW, or whatever, then our prayers, I mean, we wouldn’t pray for them once they’d been killed in action, but we would pray for those who were related to them and they then became the focal part of our prayer. And I think it was, I can’t remember how many names, but it seemed to me as a child, as a teenager, that there were hundreds. There weren’t that many, I don’t think, but, and he’d pray for them in alphabetical order.

It was, no, they weren’t demoralised. It was part of the culture of the Christian community, it was right for us to do the one thing that we could do for them, and that was pray for them.

Sure. And we just, we went off to the basic training at Cowra. Sort of learning what it meant to be a soldier. How to put on your equipment,

and all that it meant to be part of. When I did enlist, just to go back one step, when I enlisted, I remember having my arms full of all the equipment. Boots and webbing and arms really full. The hat on top of it, and I’m still in civvies, of course, and a group of us were standing around, waiting to go and get our civvies clothes off, and get into uniform, and a sergeant was over there,

and he wanted one of us to do something, and he looked across at our group, and I was the tallest of them all. And he pointed at me and he said, “Hey, Shorty, come here”. So I walked over to him with all this stuff in my hands, and he said, “What’s your name?” I said, “Short”. He said, “Don’t you start getting cheeky with me”. So, that was just something that happened on that day, you know, I remember it. And we did the basic training, which was fun,

and learnt about rifles and .303s, and Bren guns, etc. And then, following that, I think we went to, in between I’m sure there are other bits and pieces, but we eventually went to Canungra in Queensland for jungle training, and that was getting us ready for overseas.

I remember we graduated from being a rookie and we were now allocated to a unit. And we’re part of, I’m part of an infantry unit, other blokes went to signals and so on.

Yes. I think my reaction to that question is that in the church there were probably a number of my own peers, by age, and we did lots of things together. We would go on picnics. I eventually saved up, or was given, I think, a second hand bike, and we used to go for bike rides. We’d go from Campsie to North Head and things,

and we used to do those sort of things. We used to go away on day trips, big trip down to Helensburgh, you know, and walk through the National Park. Big day. And we played sport together, and we were interested in each other in that sort of way. I think there were always, the relation of, or there were people in the community who didn’t sort of play ball with that,

and you always heard of people stealing this, and pinching stuff out of there, but the favourite place to meet was the milk bar down in Campsie main street, and we used to do that. And in those days, at sort of fourteen or fifteen, I was probably getting sixpence a week pocket money, and I used to save up for a milkshake, which was probably tuppence or threepence, or something, I’ve forgotten now. And we used to meet and yak on together and laugh, and it was pretty innocent fun.

And if there were things which happened in the community, which you’d hear about, which were wrong. I mean things today which the police would pick up on, I presume they picked up on them then. We tried ourselves to either divorce ourselves from that, or do what we could about it. Now, not that we became a vigilante group, not that at all, but we would try to play our part

in the community by saying, “Listen you guys, you out to straighten up and walk on the”, I don’t know, and you’d say it in language of that time of the decade.

Yes. A few. In the fellowship, in the Youth Fellowship of the church there were lots of girls.

There wasn’t any romance, if that’s what you’re saying, if that’s the inference of your question, but they were all part and parcel of the group. And the actual relationship between boys and girls was good. There wasn’t any sexual inference, as you would expect today, I mean, as I would accept, having the last sort of ten or fifteen years,

there were all sorts of things. Nonetheless, we were taught the things you did, and the things you didn’t do. You didn’t go off with a girl by yourself or, it was not the done thing. Maybe I didn’t ask why it’s not the done thing, but it was good that those who were leading us, my parents and others in the fellowship, and we were taught that and we accepted it. I mean, it’s not something that you question. So there wasn’t that sense of rebellion.

There was a sense of compliance, and obedience to, and willing to follow the directions of those who were over us.

Right.

Intellect has not necessarily anything to do with spiritual understanding in my view. Or education hasn’t got, not intellect but education really. I mean, I, as a missionary in Tanzania, I was really involved in many African people, who had little or no education. I began a bible school, and in the bible school

we used to have fellows who had only been two years in primary school, who would come as students. Now their education was minimal. Their intelligence was high. Their spiritual understanding was deep. So they’re not related. I mean, you need an intelligence to read some Christian literature. Some of it is very erudite. But I think there isn’t that relationship.

And if I understood the things that my parents taught me Christianly, and understood the principles. And understood all, you know, my parents used to have fun games with the bible for example. And on a Sunday afternoon we’d have all these, we used to look forward to Sunday afternoons, we’d invite our friends around, and we’d have fun games. My mother or my father would make up forty questions about the bible, and we’d have to look them up and sort of compete with each other.

But it was all a learning curve. And I had a concept of the scriptures. Now, I didn’t need intelligence for that. Or scholastic understanding. But, what I needed was a spiritual understanding, which they had given me. So you sort of, and God, God Himself sort of, there’s a phrase that says, Paul says, “Spiritual truth is spiritually understood”. It’s given by the spirits and that’s true.

I don’t know where my intellect is, I’ve had IQ [Intelligence Quotient] tests and things like that. So I don’t know where my intellect is, I mean, they’ve told me where it is but I don’t want to tell you, but scholastically, it’s, you know, I’ve never been what you’d call a great scholar. Though I must say that once I went to Moore College and was able to know precisely what God wanted me to do, I had an objective, then it gave me the ability to properly study.

And it gave me adequate results. More than adequate results.

The spiritual aspect? No. Because I was taught that it was not something of which I was to be embarrassed. I mean, I wasn’t a strong evangelist when I was fourteen at school. By that, going around talking to people about it.

But if the subject came up, I was unembarrassed. I used to say, “Yeah, of course I go to church. Yeah, why don’t you come to Sunday school? Yeah, of course Jesus Christ exists.” And it was just normal. And they would laugh at you and gig you, and you’d say, “Oh well, that’s your point of view”. I think my father taught us that if people disagreed with you, particularly on a Christian matter, you used to say, “Well, this is right. I know I’m right I mean, if God’s God, then it can’t be wrong.

He can’t be wrong. So you blokes will learn. You’ll come good.” So I used to have, not from an arrogant point of view, but from a position of strength, because you’re on the winning side as it were. That was imbued, not perhaps precisely in those words, but that was part of it. And when we got married, and our children started growing up and we came back to Australia after ten years, and some of them said,

“Oh, I don’t know. We’re getting knocked because you’re a clergyman”. You’d say, “Well, start a new system. Tell them it’s a great privilege.” Do people knock other blokes because they’re the son of a policeman or a dentist or something? Well what’s wrong with being the son of a clergyman?” And I think, yeah, they coped with it pretty well, as I did.

Well, you see, church services were something that people would go to. I don’t think everybody went every Sunday, I’m not talking about, but church was not the place that was damned as it is in our community now. It’s not down the list. The media certainly used to report church activities. Governments, generally. I mean, we had the Westminster System, which is based on Christian attitudes and concepts, and governments generally,

whether the ministers or the PM [Prime Minister] or whoever, were specifically Christian, there was an underlying feeling that there was something Christian about it. And I don’t know that that’s necessarily so today. I’ve had something to do, from time to time, with members of parliament currently, who are members of the Christian Parliamentary Group, and it’s great to see it, because

the pressure that’s on them, in government, and I think in those days that pressure was not necessarily as strong as that. I mean, everyone had their own point of view and there were certainly many non-Christians. I’m not saying everyone was Christian. But the attitude towards Christian things, and towards Christ and towards God, was far less derogatory, if that’s the right word, than it is today.

Well, chaplains, this is before I was in the army myself,

chaplains were seen as very special persons, very special entity within the forces, and to become a chaplain was a great privilege. And when troops went off, I know that people, there were sometimes people gathered together to pray, and I can remember my father, in the parish at Campsie, half a dozen people were being sent away, or a few,

and he would hold, in the middle of the service, he would stop and say, “The following people are now either being posted away, or being posted overseas. And now we’ll pray for them”. And that was an accepted thing. And it was accepted because, a) we were in church circles, but b) it was right. The community generally. Now, I don’t want to give the wrong picture. There were those who opposed God, I mean it’s always been. Those people had the choice.

But I think the media have helped, and all sorts of things have helped to make our country far more antagonistic to the things of God, and if I generalise, far more atheistic, non-God fearing, now, than it was fifty years ago.

Yeah, I think there was always in those days, religious tension, and I’m talking about from my perspective, between Roman Catholics and Anglicans. That was there. It’s a strange thing that the things that unite us seem to be far stronger than the things that divide us. But in those days, things that divided us were doctrines and things, and there was always, from an Anglican point of view, and I presume from their point of view, it went that way as well,

we had close associations, as a child, as a teenager, we had close associations with the other denominations. Protestants in the area. The Salvation Army was down the road. The Methodist church was there. And we used to know these people. But I think there was some sort of religious tension as far as the Roman Catholics were concerned. And it was based on doctrine. I mean, we’re still very different in a number of areas,

but yeah, to answer your question, I think there was some.

Portrayed?

It’s hard to know. I think there was a sense that “We’re right and you’re wrong”. From both sides. And I think that I’ve certainly been in discussions where I’ve produced a bible,

as the main authority for what I’m saying, and my Roman Catholic friends have said, “Yes, but you see, the church teaches a bit different from this”. And my argument was that my authority lies in the scriptures, in the bible, and your authority lies in the bible plus the interpretation. Yeah, in all the discussions then and since, I’ve never seemed to be able to come to a via media.

In those days?

Yeah, in the army we did. But before that I don’t think so. I mean, we were so busy, so full, so caught up in all the things that went on in our church. I said, I was part of a group of two hundred youth, kids, and there may have been ones at school, but it wasn’t an issue at school, when I was at Belmore Tech,

but I don’t, yeah, so the answer’s probably no. Not during those days. Not from choice, just from how it panned out.

Yeah, well, we went to Wahroonga and then I went to Campsie. Went to Campsie just before the war broke out, actually, so I was in both Wahroonga where my father was, and then Campsie, and then I joined the army from there.

Sure. What would you like to know?

Very different. It was a very Anglo Saxon society. It was a working class society. Quite different from, the socio-economic society was quite different from Wahroonga. But they were terrific people. I mean my, we have still got close friends with whom we communicate and see often.

Well, communicate with often, from the Campsie days, and they were really a group of people who were singly, from an ethnic point of view, a singe group as I say. I mean, Campsie and a lot of other suburbs in Sydney have changed dramatically. Since then, in fact I went back, I was invited back to Campsie for a ninetieth anniversary

or something a little while ago. And I think there were eighteen different ethnic groups in the congregation, and it was terrific to see that. Marvellous. But we wouldn’t have seen that in our day. We were all single ethnic groups.

Mmmm.

Well, it was working class then, but I think it’s more ethnically divided now.

There are so many different groups of people from different parts of the world there, and that’s fine. I mean, that’s part of Australia.

It’s hard to know. I don’t know that, there weren’t the number of people living in Australia then as there are now, of course. Immigration didn’t happen till post war.

The big immigration. We had, I mean, my parents having been in East Africa, we had, we were taught and we certainly had, an enormous love, and anyone that we’d see in the street who had a black skin, who looked like an East African, you’d go up to them and you’d say, “Hello, where are you from” And he’d say, “Nigeria”, and that would throw you back when you’re sixteen, and you’d say, “I just wondered if you’d know Kenya?” and he’d say, “No, I’m from West Africa. Thousands of miles away”,

or something. But there was, there wasn’t an antipathy towards them, not at all, and there were people coming through and I remember having Maoris come, and singing songs, and you know, welcome, but they weren’t part of our specific Campsie community. Not that they couldn’t have been, but we just didn’t have them.

I’m not sure it was prominent. I think there’ve always been groups of people in Australia, there is an antipathy towards other nationalities. We see that in our community today.

It wasn’t pronounced in those days, I don’t think. I mean, there were Chinese people and there were these people and that people. Yeah, my attitude was, so what. They’re here. It wasn’t that I’m an Australian and this is my land. But rather I’m an Australian and privileged to be so, and I suppose when you think how God led us, and eventually we went to East Africa, and we made an open offer.

We said “We’ll go anywhere you like”, and eventually we were sent to East Africa, and we were glad about that, and some of our closest friends are from East Africa.

Mmm.

Just that. We were part of the British Commonwealth.

And the Queen, or the King, was certainly part of the deal, and I can remember when the King made announcements, and they had pictures eventually of George and Elizabeth, going and seeing the bombed out people of London, they gave us great joy. I mean, we were very royalist. I think the movement for a republic never entered our heads in those days.

Oh, yeah, the Poms were always, “Oh, you’re a Pom. Don’t worry about it. You’ve got to excuse him on that, whatever it is”. I’m making a joke, but the English were, it’s hard to sort of categorise. English people were known to be, have certain characteristics which related to formality, and Australians had characteristics

which related to being able to be relaxed and informal, and I think that probably was borne out with some English people who were living in the community. And you would joke with them about it, and tease them about it, but it wasn’t vitriolic at all.

Oh, they call it the bull ring, you know, we’d go out. We’d go out on the square, learn how to train, learn how to march, learn how to deal with weapons ammunition. We’d have all sorts of training. We’d have runs here and there. It was getting strength, getting training, getting understanding of how to deal with this weapon and that weapon, and learning how to deal with each other, again.

For the first two months, I guess, I haven’t got the exact time, or going to Cowra, I was one of six living in a tent. And sleeping on a palliasse. You know, a sack filled with straw. That was my start, and I used to think, “This is pretty tough”, you know. Because I’d never slept on a palliasse before. But the challenge was to rough it, and the challenge was to be part of the deal, and learn how to do it.

This was all part of the war effort. And to become the strongest and most determined soldier you could be. And that’s what I wanted to be.

Oh, great variety really. We, not just those blokes, I suppose, but the other fellows. We came from very different, for example, it so transpired that I, when we went, when I joined up,

I was a teetotaller, and I still am, actually. But I was TT. So the other five used to go out on a bender, and used to come in, really under the weather, and I’d probably be in bed, and they would either strip me, or the blankets and stuff, or you know, do all sorts of interesting things, and it was part of my Christian challenge to see whether I would react by punching them in the mouth,

or yelling at them, or just taking it. And that was good fun too. I mean, they weren’t trying to have a go at me. Well, probably they were, who knows. But they didn’t like it. Nobody likes it in the community these days, if you have a strong view about something. I mean, I’ve been in all sorts of different communities where someone says to me, “What would you like? A whiskey, or something?” and I say, “Well, actually I’d like an orange”. “Oh, come on”, you know.

And people try and encourage you or force you into their particular way. Not so much these days. There was an acceptance of a broader understanding, but certainly twenty years ago that would have been the case, and certainly in the army, so I used to resist that. That was good for my character. I used to say, “No, let me live my life and let me go my way”. I think, eventually, I don’t know whether this is right. I was going to say they respected me.

They stopped teasing me about it, well, they did accept, whether respect I don’t know, but they did accept that about me.

Oh, I don’t remember. You know. They’d pinch your boots, because you had your boots at the end of your table. I mean, it’s just normal sort of roughing it together.

There’s nothing particular or special. I’m sure he didn’t do it on purpose. One fellow, he had far too much to drink, and he lost the lot on me. When he came in and I was sleeping there. That was an interesting experience, to get all tidied up after that. But I don’t think he figured me out especially, because I was the only bloke in there, and he sort of had to lose it. But I, you know, that’s just part of army life. It’s nothing to worry about.

Well, I used to read my bible. And right from the first night, I used to read, I had a tiny little bible. I used to read it. I don’t think the blokes liked it very much. They used to gig me. And that was all right. Then I had to try and live Christianly in the army. And I, but the challenge was to do that in a way that was the best way. So I wanted to be the best soldier I could be,

so I really wanted to achieve, when we had mini exams along the way, I wanted to achieve to show them that Christians were not wimps. And I wanted to be able to do things well, so I really worked very hard at that. As part of the Christian Witness, and I, some of them were pretty foul-mouthed, and swearing had never been part of my vocab,

and I’m sure I let a few slip, but I didn’t swear in general. And that wasn’t unnoticed, either. Yes, so all in all, my witness was to be the best that I could be at, what I was now doing that they were doing. And to be better. Not because of me, but because of what I stood for. Being a Christian in that situation. It worked out, I think, a bit like that.

Not in those early days I didn’t. Later on I did. There were some, several of them. In fact, when eventually I was commissioned, and I went to do some other work, I think in Greta and other places like that, there was a chaplain who was a Uniting, Methodist, I think, then. And he became a great friend and he, and two of us,

used to go along to the chaplain, and this, so we had a link together and we kept it up. One of those fellows has since died. And the chaplain himself has since died. But yeah, they were few and far between, really. But it was, you know. When we did find someone of like mind, and someone with whom you were free on Christian issues, and you weren’t defending yourself against criticism all the time, that made you more relaxed as well.

What’s that mean? I don’t know. I tried to. I tried to. I mean I didn’t go off womanising when they did. I didn’t go to the pub. I went to the pub with them but I didn’t drink, and that was just the standard I had, and I tried to keep it. I mean, as far as drink is concerned, it’s not specifically Christian.

I actually don’t like it, so I don’t drink. But, to show a strength of character, I think, and a discipline, because self-discipline is one of the gifts that the spirit gives you, and it’s the ability to be able to show that self-discipline, and if I showed it then I was actually, without saying this is what it is, I was trying to show it myself, yeah.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, during life in the army. When they had time off on the weekend and all that sort of stuff.

Like they always do. I mean, I think the army general view is, when you’ve got leave for a night, that time’s yours.

You do what you like with it. So, everyone knew what everyone else was doing, but if I didn’t sort of go, and they would know that, and I’d get knocked for it, so what. So the army viewed it, I think, with non-interference. If they tried to do it during the hours when they were on duty, of course, that would be severely viewed.

Oh, I think they coped with it pretty well, generally speaking. I think some blokes had pretty heavy heads. But it wasn’t every night I’m talking about. Just when they went out. I went. I used to go to the mess, I’d go to the mess to eat, but I used to go to the mess afterwards, to the beer hall, and those sort of things, because I wanted to be part of them,

to show that I wasn’t sort of stand offish, I wasn’t a sort of snob. Because that’s one of the things you can be judged for, being a Christian. But, and I used to talk around, but I must say that the conversation got pretty boring. It was all about conquests of women, and this and that and the other thing. You know, I wasn’t really in the conversation. So I used to listen for a while and go and read a book.

At what stage?

No, I don’t recall. I remember being fairly well disciplined. I mean, you’re near war, so there were fellows who had, I’m trying to remember, military experience. In the army, the RSM [Regimental Sergeant Major] was always the feared bloke.

I mean he had a lot of power. Power over young soldiers, and we used to fear the RSM. By what he said, you know, we would, jump. And there was one RSM who had, and I don’t even remember his name, he was a terrific guy, but so disciplined. He wouldn’t take any mistakes, and probably, I mean, that was his standard and that’s what he wanted to lead us to. But generally speaking, the leaders that we had,

the commanders, were helpful in that. They wouldn’t ask you to do things that were impossible. But they would ask you to do things that were nearly impossible. So that they were encouraging you to grow and try and do the things that they expected you to do.

I don’t know. Don’t know the answer to that.

I mean, none of them ever spoke to me about it, so I don’t know. Eventually, when we went to Canungra, for the jungle training, and we finished the course at Canungra, we were all ready to go off to the islands, our group. And we were about to be allocated to an overseas group. I was called in by the CO [Commanding Officer] and said,

“I’ve got news for you. You’re not going on this course, you’re not going away. You are going to become a corporal and you are going to be part of the next course going through. The officer will be so and so, but you’ll be part of this”. I said, “Well, Sir, I really don’t want to do this. I want to stay with my mates”. And he said, “No, this is what you’re going to do”. So I became a corporal and became part of the next lot,

which was, now, I’d done it all once, and now we’re doing it all again, and all the training, then at the end of that course, the second time. I had a different CO and he called me in. “Well, you’ve done pretty well. I want to say to you that I think that you’re not going away”. I said, “Oh, not again. I’ve just got used to this group of blokes, we’ve been together three months”, or whatever the time was, and I said, “I’m sorry, Sir. I must go”.

And he said, “This is an order. You can’t disobey a lawful command”. I said, “I know I can’t, but I’m asking you to let me go”. He said, “No, no”. He said, “You’re going to Puckapunyal”, which is, you know, down in Victoria. He said, “To the officer’s training college unit in Puckapunyal”. And so, all my mates had gone off to the island, I went to Puckapunyal, and I think it was seventeen weeks’ training, and I was commissioned on my nineteenth birthday, and soon after, the war ended.

So there you are. Another month, another six weeks after that the war ended, so yeah. I never saw a shot fired in anger. But I tried hard to be the best soldier that I could be.

Canungra.

Well, as a corporal in Canungra, you’re sort of section commander, and there are nine people, a platoon under an officer, a sergeant and another corporal. And down in Puckapunyal you’re then learning to be an officer, and you’re all equal, and we were all drawn from different units, and so on, and we tried, we were taught.

And it was very, very hard and difficult training, you know, they put us through the mill. Maybe not dramatically but I, you know, from memory, and it was pretty cold in Canungra at that time of the year, and we used to light a fire under the water pipe outside to melt the water, so we could get water out. And all sorts of bits and pieces. But I enjoyed the training. And there was lots of book work, and lots of learning, and lots of exercise, and lots of field work, and all sorts of things.

And then after, as I say, seventeen weeks, yeah. That was it.

Oh. That’s a very hard question. How am I to assess myself?

I don’t know how to assess myself. There’s that amorphous think called leadership, which he said I had.

I’m not sure what leadership is. I mean I’ve talked to lots of people about it. I’ve interviewed people for ministry, and talked about all sorts of things. I’ve talked to Africans about leadership. It’s the ability, I suppose, to not tell people what to do, but to lead them in what they’re doing. And the ability to do that, and the ability to make decisions. Sometimes on the run, and not being afraid to make decisions.

I think a leader, if he waits too long to make decisions, that displays an inadequate leadership. But if he doesn’t wait long enough, then that’s an inadequate leadership too. You have to be able to make decisions, but the big thing I think, is that once you’ve made the decision, you stick with it. And I think that’s been my principle. Now, some of those decisions I’ve made are wrong. So I’ve made wrong decisions, and I’ve had to live with the consequences.

But I don’t think too many people could charge me with messing around and not making my mind up. I’ll, you know, and I think that was what, what the officer said to me when he sent me down to Puckapunyal. “That you’re displaying some form of leadership and we want to draw it out and see whether you’ve got it”. And I suppose, you know I generalise, and it’s very hard to talk about me, but if the army is looking for leaders, commissioned leaders, then they have ways of testing that.

Actually, when we went to Puckapunyal, the first day we were told that we were each given a thousand OQ [Officer Quality] points. We were all given OQ, Officer Quality points. Which I suppose is another word for leadership in some way, and for the seventeen weeks, when we did something wrong, the OQ would be reduced.

So they’d come and inspect the bed and if it wasn’t made exactly correctly, or they’d open your cupboard, and if your clothes weren’t laid out precisely correctly, or if you’d fidgeted on parade, or if you had dirty fingernails when they inspected them. All these sort of things. And if you made mistakes, then those in charge of us would drop an OQ point. So eventually, those who had enough OQ points were commissioned.

And I think the top bloke got three hundred and forty four OQ points, and I think I got three hundred and forty three. Or something like that. I can’t remember. So whatever that means, I don’t know.

Then the war finished.

Well, there were blokes from the bush. There were fellows who had, one or two of them come out of university.

There were others who’d come from sort of white collar work, like me. I was in a bank. Others came from blue collar work. And there were very skilled artisans, and blokes who were then training to be mechanics or whatever. And diverse in background. Those sort of backgrounds. Diverse in schooling. It’s not something that you actually went around and said,

“Oh, well, this bloke comes from this particular area”, and you put him in a catalogue. They were part of your unit, part of your, and you just accepted that. Later on, when I was in charge of a platoon, and you found out what people’s background was, that would allow you to make decisions, or to make allowances, if you needed to make allowances for certain things.

But, like the army, I mean, any mini area of the army, like a platoon, is like the army as a whole, or like the force is a whole, it’s drawn from every part of life, and the great ability is to be able to get along with, mix with, and be a part of, and see as peers, those who are sharing the same experiences as yourself.

I was very disappointed. I really, really felt, see, as I said, when I first joined up I wanted to be part of the force, the Australian force, who were opposing Japan, because of my brother. And the fighting was still going, I think it was at Bougainville or somewhere. The fighting was still going on. And I really wanted to be part of it.

But I was shut up. That is, I was shut up to moving, because the army had made a decision. And one of the things which I think leadership is, that when a proper decision has been made, you follow it. Or to use army terms, you obey it. The word ‘obey’ is a dirty word in our society today, but it certainly wasn’t then. And disappointed as I was,

I moved to the position of saying, “Ok. Yes, Sir. If that’s what you say, yes, Sir, and I’ll do it”. So off I went. Now, as I say, I was disappointed, but as it so happened, in hindsight, now fifty years later when I look back, and God’s good hand upon me, some of the lessons that I learnt of being a young officer,

and the training, and how to make decisions, and being prepared and all those sort of things. All those lessons. In hindsight again, have been marvellous. A marvellous help to me in my own life. I’ve had to make decisions in Africa, and as a bishop, and all sorts of places, which, I think the training, and if I’d gone to overseas, and not had that,

I presume that I would have missed out on this dramatic training, which in God’s planning, was part of my life. And which I have been eternally grateful for.

Probably, it’s hard to articulate, but probably, that I’d be in a position to kill a Japanese. I think that’s what I wanted to do. Because of my brother.

I really had this inner difficulty with what they’d done. And I was very patriotic and nationalistic as we all, most of us were, I suppose. And they were still going and the fighting was still on, let me do something. I think that was what I was most disappointed in. And, you know, you’ve got to know a group of mates and blokes,

and you’ve got to know them moderately well in all the experiences of training, and they’ve gone. And having gone, then you have to start again. But that’s life, that’s always been my life. You get with a group of people, get to know them, and then you move on and to another group. It’s par for the course, really.

Only what I’d read, and what I’d been told, and some of the stories from,

I think by then, some of the difficulties of the Burma/Thailand railway, some of them had come out. And some of the propaganda, which the media was giving us to make sure that we were always ready to put them away, because that would mean we would win the war. I don’t know specifically what I knew about them, only that they were the enemy.

Oh, it was constant. All the time. It was on, and on, and on, and on. You know, our enemies, what the Japanese are doing, and if there were able to be pictures. I don’t know. I think there was a general build up. No, I can’t remember a specific article in the paper or something, but there was a general feeling that our enemy was both

the axis, the Italian, the German it was, but we were now much more concentrated on the Asian scene, and the north of us. And I think they were the enemy and they would be defeated. Because if they weren’t defeated they would defeat us, and we’d go down the gurgler.

I’m not sure. I think it was all tied up with being nationalistic, war effort, my brother, now a moderately trained soldier. I find it difficult to differentiate between those emotions, and those feelings and understandings in me.

But if you combine it all together, at the end it was my duty, and I wanted to be part of the fighting force, and I wanted to make sure we won the war. I don’t think I can differentiate.

Being a good soldier means all sorts of things.

It means having your shoes polished, and being obedient, taking initiatives where you have to, and then not taking them where you have to. And not being fed up with the army, the army so-called, when they give you stupid instructions, and they’re wasting time, which you think. But being willing to be part of the group, and being willing of the overall picture of this force, this group of people.

Particularly, in war, they have a common objective. And I was not unhappy to do that, and I really tried very hard to be a good soldier, and I’d try and hold myself erect, and I’d, you know, and I’d dress as well as I could, and I would obey as hard as a could. and I’d train as hard as I could. And in bayonet training, I’d train as well as I could. All the things that come. And you learn your weapons and I’d try to be the best I could in,

say, dismantling a Bren gun. And putting it together again, and it’s all part and parcel, I think of, as in any life. There are many compartments in a job, and if you do as well as you can in all of them, I mean, in some of them I wasn’t very good at them, I presume, but you just try and do well.

I’m not sure that I was establishing them. I thought about them. I didn’t have any answers. But I think I was naïve in a sense, of thinking that, because we, Australians, and the Brits,

lived for, stood for justice, and righteousness, and freedom of speech, freedom of the press and so on, that it was a just war, and therefore we were fighting a just war. Now, I mean there has been great controversy since, and before, I presume. I didn’t get into the theological nitty gritty then, but I believed, then, that we were fighting a just war.

Because of what I’d been taught, told, media and elsewhere, that what Australia stood for. Justice. Now, Australians have stood for that all the time. Don’t misunderstand me. We’re not the perfect goodie goodies, but the principle by which we governed, and we had, as I say, a democracy and not autocracy, and all of that. I thought, yeah, we’re fighting a just war.

I don’t know that I ever sat down and said, “We are fighting a just war and I’m going to be part of it”. It was just part of the background, in the back of your head.

I don’t know. I never faced it. It was what we were trained for. I mean, in Canungra you were trained in jungle warfare.

You know, trained in rifle and trained in bayonet, and it was getting rid of the enemy. I think that’s what it meant. There was nothing personal. You know, I never stopped to think that if I killed somebody then he’s the husband of somebody, or the son of somebody, and he might even be Christian. I never thought of those things. I never got there. And at this point, and then I was disappointed. And at this point, I’m so glad to God that I never got there.

Oh, it was a major part of training. I mean, you know, ‘the enemy’ was always out there, and we were told what the enemy did and how to overcome it. I mean, in Canungra for instance, there would be, you’d be trekking along and the officers, or those who were looking after us, would plant mines. They were only sort of paper mines,

so that they’d blow up, and there’d be trip wires. And these are some of the things that the Japanese used to do, and I presume we did to them, and if you tripped over a trip wire it would blow up. You know. You wouldn’t get hurt physically, but it would be a bit of a shock. And at one stage, we were sleeping in our tents there, and live ammunition was being fired through the top of our tent, by our blokes. Just to let you know that this was what it would be like. And you’d see holes come in the top of the tent.

And that’s just to sort of make it real. But, the enemy were there to be annihilated, and that was what we were taught. That was the army’s attitude and I imbibed it. I changed my mind, but that was then. I mean, I don’t think of the Japanese like that now, but when we come to that time in Japan I’ll tell you why I changed.

Well, we would have lots of long treks, route marches, and things like that. We would be taken out and asked to live on, sort of, short rations for a period of time. I don’t remember how long. A week or something. We would have to cross rivers on two ropes, one above the other.

And you would stand on one and pull yourself across if you had to. And I remember the first time I did that, I fell off. There was a sergeant who was there when I’d fallen in the river, and came up to the surface, came up for air, he said, “Get back on that side and do it again”. So I got back on that side and did it again. And that was good training. And there were, I mean,

everything was geared to make you protect yourself, your mates, and set out to achieve the objective, which was, you know, to defeat the enemy. And in the meantime, to be trained physically. And I think I was pretty well trained physically, by the time I finished. I was, you know, in good nick. In fact, when I joined the army I remember,

in old measurement, I was six feet. And when I went to Puckapunyal, at the end of Canungra, I was six feet three. That was at eighteen, so my body had stretched, my muscles had grown. And all of that. And I was in good nick. And that was part of the training, because you couldn’t have someone who was unable to cope with whatever the rigours meant. I don’t know.

I mean, these blokes who were training us had been there, so they knew what it was about.

Well, it’s part of an Australian culture, surely. I mean, I suppose it’s a part of everywhere. But the Australian mate, it really underlies what it means. It’s part of our general language now. “G’day, mate”. But I think the dependence. Here you are, you’re living in a platoon of thirty people, thirty mates,

and at any point, when you are fighting, when you are at war, you would have been dependent upon them. And they upon you. And if the mateship wasn’t there, if you really didn’t care for them. If they were just Bill Bloggs who was next door, rather than Bill Bloggs, my mate, then your attitude to him would have changed, and I think it is really, I suppose all armies, but I noticed specifically, that it’s part of the Australian culture.

And it’s not just now. I mean, it’s not just in the defence force that you find mates. You find them all over the place. And you know, I’ve got a lot of mates in the church.

Yes.

Well, they were close friends, they were mates, and we’d grown to the point of them knowing me, and me knowing them.

And depending upon, well depending, I don’t know if we depended much upon them when we were training, but we knew the situation may arise when that happened, and you’ve heard all sorts of stories of war time, when, you know, people depended upon each other, and their mates helped them out, and their mates gave their lives for them. In extreme circumstances. So I have, I mean when I left Cowra, and we all broke up, we’re all mates there. But then we broke off into all different units.

And then I went to the infantry training at Canungra, and the group that I was with, we were mates. And then another lot. And I think when I went to Puckapunyal, we weren’t so much mates, because we knew we weren’t going to stay as a unit. We knew if we were successful, we were going to be commissioned, and we would go off to different units. And there was a different attitude. It wasn’t that we were antagonistic. But there wasn’t the close mateship as there was elsewhere.

Because, in a sense at Puckapunyal every man was doing what he wanted to do for himself. In the sense he wanted to achieve as best he could. But they were still mates.

To be an infantry officer. To be a lieutenant. And leadership, as a platoon commander. And they taught you how the army functioned, what it meant. What relationships meant?

What responsibilities were? How to make decisions? How to see something and make a decision about? We were taught planning attacks. You’d have a sand table, and there’d be this and that, and you’d be asked to do that. And then they’d send you out for a couple of days to make a reconnoitre and make a decision about it. So all the way along, it was how, in their opinion, you could be the best infantry officer in seventeen weeks,

that you could possibly be. And as I said, I was the great age of nineteen when I collected the pips, and it was, that was their objective.

Mmmm. Not too many were as young as that, I think. I don’t know.

I don’t know.

Oh, I would have been allocated to a unit. I don’t know which one. And gone off. And that’s actually what happened when I went to Japan. Because I stayed in the infantry, or course, and then I was allocated to a particular battalion, and company, and I had a platoon, and that’s what would have happened. But it would have been in circumstances where the army sent you. Because in the army you don’t have any choice, and they said you would go to that area of war,

and this is your role, and this is what you do, and so you’ve got to get there and pick up the bits and pieces as quickly as possible.

Yes. I was commissioned. I became a lieutenant, or I became a subaltern, yes.

Because a month after that, and obviously it was winding down.

And I’ve forgotten the exact date of Hiroshima [6 August 1945], but if it hadn’t happened it was about to happen, or something. But the war was obviously coming to an end. And we were in limbo. I was allocated to a unit which, for a while, trained cadets, and so we used to get all these cadets from the various schools around Sydney, and get them for a fortnight, and we looked after other units that were coming through.

They were bits and pieces of jobs. They weren’t, it wasn’t anything that was specifically exciting, Nothing that I would write home about. And then, as I said, I was, the word went around, that BCOF, [British Commonwealth Occupying Force] was being set up, and that they were taking applications. And so, still with this desire, now, to see Japan, but in peacetime, and not to kill people.

Because, I mean, peace had come. I thought well, this is my opportunity. And so, I said yeah, and so I applied. I’ve forgotten the date I applied. I don’t know if it’s on record. For me it isn’t. But I remember we went in the middle of November. Sailed in the middle of November to Japan.

I think so. I mean, the propaganda, Japanese were being defeated all over the place,

and although, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were events which were sudden and cataclysmic, yet I think we were glad that it came to an end. We were surprised, in a sense, you know. Some of the things we used to say, joking with each other, “Gee, I hope it doesn’t finish before I get there”. Because it was that sort of feeling. And it ended in August [15 August 1945], and I was commissioned in July, so it was only a month.

Oh, marvellous. I mean, it was marvellous for the community. It was marvellous for us because, you know, we’d been training for this, but now we were glad that we weren’t going. And I suppose, in some cases, there was disappointment, I don’t know, that it had finished.

But 99.9% of people were delighted, and there was dancing in the street, you know, when eventually I saw my parents, they were delighted and thrilled and so on. But yeah, there was euphoria about the whole thing. It was really, I mean, no one likes war. It’s a filthy, dirty, disgusting thing, and no one wants to be involved in it. I certainly don’t want to be involved in it again. But the circumstances were such that I was, and because I was, I didn’t want to be a slob.

I wanted to be the best I could be.

Yeah. That the war had ended, that the war had ended and that all those people who were overseas would now return home. The husbands and sons and brothers and so on. And we would get back to a normal way of life.

Well, you know and I know, that it took a long time, but yeah, because it was really a big blot on the world because of the war. I mean, the war had already finished in Europe, and we knew of some of the struggles, or we heard of or read about some of the struggles but in this part of the world it had finished, so we could get back to normality, whatever that meant. I mean, for me normality, I’m not sure what it meant. As I said, when we came back,

I didn’t know that I wanted to go back to the bank. In fact I didn’t. So, but it was all over. The fighting was all over then. No more fighting, no more innocent civilians were being killed. No more this and no more that.

I think, I can only generalise. I mean, what I say someone else would totally disagree with. But I think we were glad.

There was a feeling of gladness that they had done something to end the war. But there was a feeling of horror when the pictures of Hiroshima came out, and the thousands upon thousands of innocent lives that had been lost. And the arguments that you heard people give. If these people hadn’t died, the war hadn’t finished, it would have meant another million or whatever. Maybe they’re justifiable arguments.

I think for my part, I was glad the war had finished. And I’m glad the Americans had brought it about, but I was sorry that they had done it in such a way with the atomic bombs, because of what it meant to so many people, and subsequently, when I went to Hiroshima and met people, and it was very devastating.

Yes. There were those who said, from memory. I mean, I’m going back a long time and I haven’t read the accounts, but there were those who said, “We’re glad it’s over”. But others, they started to print pictures of the total devastation, and that one building standing up in the middle, and it was, and then figures started to come out of the scores of thousands of lives that had been lost, innocent lives. And the moral issues were coming up. Why so many people, you know?

If we have to win the war, I mean, no one likes to, no one lies to kill anyone else, but that’s what war’s about. I think anyone that gets to a position of liking to do that, there’s something wrong. There was the need, in my case, I wanted to do something to repay, but I’m glad that that’s now all past. But I think there was the feeling that there was so much loss of life.

Yes, the war had finished, but the question was being asked, both in the media and elsewhere, couldn’t it have been done in a different way. I suppose those questions are always asked. It wasn’t done in a different way, and that’s it.

Very little. Very little. I mean, eventually situations came out and news came, and the picture of the mushroom cloud was published,

and I didn’t know very much about it at all. In fact, when I was in Japan, three of us, three officers, fairly soon after I got there, we said, “Let’s go to Hiroshima”. So we went down. And we spent a day or so in Hiroshima. Now, if I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have gone, because of the effect, in fact, a number of people who were in BCOF, in Hurang [?], which is not far from Hiroshima,

it’s in the Hiroshima perfecta, they’ve died of cancer, since. And it’s one of the things that I’ve been looking at in my own life. My own physical life. Just to, you know, when signs came up, and I would say, “I wonder if I’ve got cancer from being in Japan?” I haven’t, and I mean that, but I think some others have.

No. When you’re commissioned you become an officer.

So, I’m now commissioned. I’m now a lieutenant in the Australian Army. And I applied in that role as an infantry lieutenant and I was allocated to whatever, and you know, I was accepted on those grounds.

In Japan?

Well we, I think from memory,

we did all the equipment and told what was going to happen, and perhaps we had needles again, and we were getting ready to go. It was bit by bit. We were just being, the right equipment was being issued, and we were handing it in and taking it back, and just, all getting ready and all that means. And eventually, we went on the [HMAS] Kanimbla.

Well, I was born in East Africa.

And I had come back by ship. My parents had come back by ship. But this was the first time I’d gone as an adult. Out of Australia. And, yeah.

Not a great deal before I left. I mean, we were given two or three lessons, two or three lectures on it,

and although the general information was given that we were going to be the first occupation force that Japan had ever had, and a part of our role was to live in a way to demonstrate democracy, and to bring democracy to Japan, I must say, others might have understood, but I didn’t understand what that meant. I didn’t understand how I, as an infantry officer, could bring, could play my part in bringing democracy.

Sure we did all sorts of things. We went on guard and we did all sorts of bits and pieces. But it wasn’t until years later, in hindsight, when you realised that the powers that be, from General MacArthur and Lieutenant-General Robinson, and others, they, all these were planned and there were all sorts of negotiations going on in the political sphere. Of which I wasn’t part at all. But for me and my platoon, the thirty blokes in my platoon,

to do what we were told and to, you know, discourage black market, and this, that and the other thing. I suppose that was all part of it. But being there was a bit hard to see, frankly. It was only later that I came to realise the bigger picture, and we had, you know, a miniscule part.

Yeah.

Oh, I think just to be a platoon commander. That is, I was allocated to a battalion, with, I think there were three companies. And a company has, I think fifteen or eighteen platoons, and each platoon has thirty men, and I was the platoon commander of 13 Platoon in C Company.

And I was just told I would take the men, I’d be allocated, and we’d just learn what happened. We weren’t really told specifically before we went. But our officers were there. They’d come from war zones. They’d been fighting in the islands. And they’d come directly there, and they had all that experience, which we didn’t have.

And they had a much clearer picture. So we were ready to play a part in that. We were obedient and did what we had to do.

Then?

I guess about a fortnight. I’ve forgotten actually. Something like that.

I can remember when we first saw the islands of Japan coming in. We were going to sea, and it was quite something. Looked beautiful. Looked really terrific.

Oh, I think greenery, and hills and it was quiet and later, when we got into Japan itself, and went to Tokyo and other places, it was bustling. It was busy and all that, but there was a sense of,

there was a peace about it. And the fact that we’d been at sea for all this length of time and, it wasn’t a great length, but this length of time, and then you see land and you know, we realised that we were arriving at our destination, and whatever the future, the big question mark, the future held for us, and what our role was to be. We were getting ready, and it was all a sense of excitement and anticipation.

I don’t know. I had no idea. I mean, we were given pictures of it. We were shown videos or films of it. We were, and I suppose that to see it in reality was terrific.

Yes. I think so. And they showed us, you know things that had been bombed out. And they showed us Hiroshima and Kure Harbour and other things.

All of that. It was just general propaganda for us army blokes. Where we were going and what we were going to do. We were informed of what our part in the whole thing was going to be from an army point of view. And then there was going to be the air force people and navy people and so on, and the break up, and we were going to be part of BCOF, and who else was going to be in it, the British Commonwealth.

You know, the Brits and Indians, and what the Americans were doing. As far as I remember, we were given all that instruction then, but it’s fairly vague at the moment.

Oh, yes. Sure. I was, there were a number of us. I mean, there were a lot of troops on board. Twelve hundred, I don’t know. Might have been more.

And there were lots of lieutenants and captains and majors, and so on. They were all there. And lots of troops and sergeants and corporals. You know. They were all there together. I think, already, I had the thirty blokes whom I was going to be part of, and so we started to get to know each other. You can’t do much on board.

None of them were on board on that trip, from memory. Actually, I think I’ve lost touch with all of them. I don’t know what’s happened to them.

Oh, just fellows allocated to this platoon. From all sorts of different walks of life. I think my first platoon, there were thirty one blokes, thirty of whom were older than I. Some of them had war experience, so I was really a babe in the wood.

Oh, I’m not sure terribly well with them.

Yes, so life goes on.

Oh no, I don’t know. I had to learn what it meant to give orders in such a way that the orders were carried out, and I wasn’t giving it as if I was a nineteen year old telling a twenty five year old grandmother how to suck eggs.

It was a very steep learning curve for me. It was good experience.

Yeah. I had to learn about leadership. Yeah.

Oh, sure. Sure. But people know that very quickly.

Normally, I mean some of these blokes had war experience and I hadn’t.

I’d been commissioned sort of last night as it were, and I was young and fresh, as they say, fresh out of college, and fresh out of knowledge, and you know, wet behind the ears, and I didn’t have much experience. And I’m sure that showed up, so I had to learn how to respect them and hopefully to try and see that the reverse was true as well. It took a while. But it was good fun.

I don’t know whether I could specifically identify what’s wrapped up in leadership, what’s wrapped up in being a leader. It’s not your age that counts. If you are given a command that you carry out, then you carry it out irrespective.

But it’s the way it’s given. I think that was one of the things. I mean, I could say, “Do this” or I could say, “Do this”. And whatever I learnt there, and whatever I learnt in Japan, whatever it was, had been of enormous benefit when I’ve had to assume leadership roles in the church. Leadership is leadership, and just because people are Christians doesn’t mean to say that you can’t direct them.

And do what is right. But the way you do it, and I think that’s what I was learning, and I’m really grateful for this learning experience, which wasn’t the easiest for Ken Short, which stood me in good stead for later.

When we were in Cowra, we went to the Japanese POW camp there, and we just had a look at, I think there was a big breakout

that history records. Now, I think the breakout was after we were there. But we just, we weren’t taken in, we were taken as troops to say, you know, this is what is happening. It’s an incident that happens. And I’ve since been back and seen it, so it’s a bit hard to sort of differentiate, but yeah.

No, I don’t, I’m sorry.

Gone.

Oh, I think just information. We didn’t talk to any of the prisoners. This is a POW, and this is what happens. It might have been we were going on a safari somewhere, going on a trip, and we were taken and shown this place. But we’ve seen it since.

Yes.

Oh, I think they realised I was a big boy now and I made up my own mind. I think their response was, “We wish you’d come and settle down, but if this is what you’ve got to do, this is what you’ve got to do”.

Yes. He had come back, let me think. Yes, he had. He had just come back a little while. But he had actually come back from Japan. He was bashed up in Japan and at the end of the war the Americans went in, and he was actually brought to Manila for surgery,

and he was going to have his right arm amputated, but he refused. He was now in Concord. And while in Concord I saw him. So yes, he was home. And still in hospital. I think he was there for a year or something. And so I went off.

I think he was pretty non-committal about it. I mean, he hardly talked about. We had three days.

I told you, we had three days together in the gardens and he just poured out his heart. This was fairly soon after he was mobile again. And we talked and talked and talked and talked. But I hardly heard him talk about it since. And when I went off, you know, it was part of my army career. I think he accepted it. Yeah. He certainly didn’t tell me I was doing something which he disapproved of.

Of course his attitude to Japanese was such that, I think he was pretty upset at what they’d done to him, and all his mates and all those people that had been killed.

About?

Oh, yes, yes, yes. I think so. I mean, they all sort of pushed in together,

and they’re a bit mixed up. I mean, I’ve read lots of books on it since, and yes, he did. He told me some of the experiences through which he’d gone, and some of the people who’d died, from beri beri, and he’d had it when he came home, and yeah, they were pretty horrific. And he told me a couple of the experiences going from Burma to Japan, in the ship,

and some of the dreadful treatment that he received there, and some of that’s pretty clear in my mind, and it’s clear because since then I’ve read an account, a book, a few years ago, five years ago, I read a book written by a fellow who had been on one of those, and some of his experiences were identical. Like they weren’t allowed to have a meal until they produced a hundred living flies.

And when they got a hundred, because the flies were a plague and all the prisoners were down in the hold, the flies were such a plague that they had to produce a hundred living of them, before they could get a bowl of rice. And I remember him telling me he’d gone to the galley where he was on duty, he was helping, and he pinched a cork. A big cork. And he’d hollowed it out carefully and got three pins,

and every time he caught a fly he’d put it in there. They were sort of in a little cage. And so he’d take these flies, and then they were all killed. The Japanese would kill them and give him a bowl of rice. I mean those sort of things. And this fellow in the book was saying exactly the same thing. I don’t know about the cork bit, but he was saying that was the demand, and how they were kept in the hold, and they were never allowed up on deck. And they went all the way down, very far south. More south than New Zealand, I think.

Because the United States subs were chasing them, yeah. And some of those ships that went were actually torpedoed. And those sort of things I remember. And I remember some of the things he told me in Japan. And it so happened that this coal mine to which he went, was fairly near Kure, where we eventually went. Just one of those things would turn out.

Yeah.

Yes.

I think what we had to do was to make sure that there was no unrest in the countryside. We were allocated various areas of which we had patrol,

and go on guard duty. And it was pretty banal, really. I mean, it wasn’t, there wasn’t anything that we had to front people about. But if there was unrest, if there was this, if there was that, we had to control that. Or sort of report it, or be careful of it. I think a major job was for us to be seen as a unit, the company, the battalion,

and we had all sorts of things which our officers did for us, in getting us together as a unit, but in the wider company, and in some of the other things we did was to, I remember at one stage we went up to Tokyo to be outside the palace, the Emperor’s palace, and that was sort of a formal thing, but we were there quite some time. And while I was on guard duty, as the officer in charge of this particular lot,

I met my American counterpart, because the Americans were guarding one, and we were guarding the other, and he said, “Say, you ever been inside the palace?” and he’d actually found a way to get in and he took me in. Took me into the throne room, and it was one of those things that when I told a couple of my friends they said, “I wouldn’t talk about it if I were you”. This is before we came home. But, we went on guard duty

and we were a presence. We were more of a presence. It was the occupation force and we were occupying. And occasionally we were told. I remember one incident where there was a threat of some weapons, which hadn’t been handed in or confiscated or whatever, in a particular office block. So a group, my particular group was allocated, and we had to go and make a raid, and see if there were any weapons there.

And we looked it all over and didn’t find, found a couple of Samurais, but, so we asked them what they were doing, and they didn’t make any, so we confiscated the Samurais and they went back into the store, and eventually they weren’t claimed and I was able to claim one. Yeah. It was those sort of. We were an occupation force, we were occupying.

And we had to behave in such ways to demonstrate the overall picture of what democracy meant. Now, I’m not sure our soldiers demonstrating democracy, yeah. Whatever our officers and whatever the leaders were wanting us to do, I think we tried to do as well as we could. And or course we went on parade every day in our own group, and then we’d break up for various duties around the camp and things like that.

Yep.

Well, it was just, it was all clandestine, it was all secret. Because we weren’t supposed to be there, and he found a way in, and we were guarding the palace, and there wasn’t anyone in residence. There wasn’t anyone in occupation. He took me in, I remember he took me into a room, garage, call it a garage,

where there were a number of formal coaches, horse drawn coaches which I presume were used at various times. I didn’t know much about it. We went in a back door, and through various rooms. And then he said, “Look, I think I can get you in here. Let’s have a look”. And he opened the door. He’d been there before. And it was this magnificent gilded room. I mean, my memory is fairly fuzzy, and he said this is, I think he called it the Throne Room. I’m sure that’s what he called it.

And so we, all the time I was waiting for someone to say, “What are you doing here?” But we just looked around and wandered around and came back out again. I mean, this incident took a quarter of an hour, an incident in someone’s life. It’s just interesting and it happened.

I remember a couple of chairs there, but really my memory’s fuzzy. I can’t answer you. I don’t know whether there is such a thing.

But I do remember this soldier telling me that this was the Throne Room, and you know, being who I am, I believed him of course.

I don’t know. He wasn’t there. Did he have a country residence? Well, the war was over, and he probably, I can’t answer you on that. I don’t know the answer to that. I mean, we were guarding it, maybe he was on safari. Maybe he was on a trip somewhere, I don’t know.

Well, Tokyo’s much bigger than Hiroshima. And we saw some bomb damage in Tokyo. But it was nothing, nothing like it was in Hiroshima. And as I said, we went down to Hiroshima.

But to answer your question about Tokyo, yeah, it was bombed. But you see pictures of London that have been bombed, and areas which had really been bombed out, and others which were not. Well, I think we probably were moving in the areas that weren’t dramatically bombed out. We didn’t see much bomb damage in Tokyo. I’m sure there was some, but I didn’t actually see much.

Mmm. There could well have been. I’m not sure the reason all these blokes, I mean, a lot of them volunteered from Morotai or Bougainville, or wherever it was they’d come from. I think Morotai initially, and perhaps they didn’t want to go back to civvies life. Perhaps there was nothing for them to go back there.

Maybe they wanted to see the circumstances, or the environment, from which the Japanese had come. They just wanted to continue their army experience. All sorts of reasons. And some of them were really old soldiers. Old in the sense of, all of them were privates, but they’d had experience. And some of them were pretty tough blokes, but yeah, they were there for a while. They didn’t stay too long.

You know. They’d go home in the first draft, but I think some of them were glad for it.

No, I don’t think so. Of course, there were, presumably there were incidents where there was an anti-Japanese feeling. I mean, there was that, from a human point of view you would expect that. These had been our enemies. These are not our enemies any more.

But the Australian Army had a very strict non-fraternisation rule, law, one of the things we had to do. So that no Australian could fraternise in any way with the Japanese. But none. And it was very strict. Of course, some of them did, but they were breaking the army rule.

And some of the times that we would go on patrol, at night, we would walk down a street and patrol it, or walk in an area, and if there was a pair of army boots outside the house, then you could only imagine what was happening, and so you’d sort of go in and tell the bloke to go back, and take his name, and put him on a charge and so on. But yeah.

I think the idea was to make sure that we kept aloof and we were teaching, rather than becoming part of the society. And I think the Japanese weren’t too keen on, I’m generalising, on Australians becoming part of their society, either. We were the occupation force. We were, as I said before, the first time that they had ever been occupied.

Yes, and I can’t remember the name. But some of them did eventually marry the women, and they came back to Australia. And that’s turned out very well. And that’s great. But I think they probably got eventually, got permission to fraternise, when this was indicated. But in general, you couldn’t go round and sort of meet people. If they had clubs.

I don’t remember. We never went to any, but that sort of fraternisation.

Well, that’s some of the patrols we went on. These boots were usually outside brothels and they were pretty, yes, they were a major part of a soldier’s life,

and part of my role was to regularly teach on syphilis, and gonorrhoea and VD [venereal disease] and all that. And you think, you know, get them together and the blokes say, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know. And it was part and parcel of army, you know, the officers’ responsibility to teach, and whether blokes learnt it or not, not all of them did, and they would break the rules, and go to the brothels and so on.

But as I said, we would have to, we would be doing it for army discipline, as well as anything else. It wasn’t a major part. It wasn’t something that I did, you know, every week. But when my turn came, or my platoon’s turn came, and I’d go with each section, and we’d do, I can’t remember, just a few times, but we did it. And the brothels were all there, and the Japanese prostitutes were part and parcel of Japanese life,

and some of the soldiers wanted them to be part and parcel of their life.

I don’t know whether I can answer you, but I’ll try.

Mostly about the disease. Mostly about the foolishness of either not using condoms, or in those days, there was from memory, there was a double pack of little tubes of things, which you would use.

They, not you. Blokes. If they wanted to use instead of a condom. And some of them, of course, were too negligent in doing either. Those sort of things. The protection experience of their own physical experience and their own physical life. And the results of getting syphilis and the outcome of it all. And the fact that penicillin didn’t really cure it in those days. And you would also stress the importance

of non-fraternisation as an army regulation. But knowing that men will be men, and soldiers will be soldiers, then you kept teaching in this way.

Oh well, we would always be in pairs. I’d never go singly. And I’d go with a soldier, and we’d be walking along a known area, and a couple of the boots outside,

and say, “Come on”. So, we’d just knock and go straight in. We wouldn’t wait. And we’d just say to the bloke, “Let’s go”. I think that’s probably all I want to say, but blokes were in different positions, different situations, different, and “Get your boots and let’s go”. They’d be reported of course, for breaking the fraternisation rule, but I’d try and tell some of them, a few of them, of the foolishness of what they were doing.

A simple way of answering, like any soldier, “Mind your own business”. But I was the officer and they would listen, but whether they would accept. Probably not. I don’t know. I mean, I’m not, it’s only a very few blokes, not many.

Yes.

I never went to one. So the answer’s probably no. I don’t have too much. I know there were, but no.

Oh, well. It depends on the offence. You would right his name down, and then if it was sort of in my prevue, sort of the length of time

he would be committed to barracks, so that he had no leave, or whatever, then I’d just dish that out and sign and report. Whether he was locked up, you know, put in the clink for a week or something, then you’d set the steps in motion whereby he did that. I don’t know that I used the report system very often, but I’ll give you an anecdote that,

I’m now the chaplain of BCOF and I was holding an annual service down at Millers Point, in The Rocks, about three years, three or four years ago, and a fellow came up to me, an ex BCOF bloke, and he said, “G’day. You were Lieutenant Short, from C Company, 13th Platoon?” I said, “Yes”. He said, “Do you remember me?”

I said, “Help me out of my difficulty”. So he told me his name, and he said, “I wanted to come and see you”, he said, “Because I’ve been holding a grudge against you for a little while”. I said, “What? Since Japan?” And he said, “Yeah”. I said, “Is it a bad grudge?” And he said, “No. I just wanted to come and talk to you about it”. I said, “What is it?” He said, “You put me on charge, on a report”. And I said, “Really? What for?” He said, “Well, I was the sentry at the ammunition dump,

and you came around and inspected, you were the officer on duty, and everything was ok, and you just reminded me of my duties, but then you came with a surprise inspection at 1 am”. And I said, “What were you doing?” He said, “Well, my rifle was leaning up against the wall, I had a fire going, because it was cold, and I was smoking”. I said, “Guarding an ammunition dump. Do you expect me not to put you on charge?”

I said, “I’m sorry you’ve held it against me. But I think if the situation was there, I’d have to do it again, wouldn’t I? I mean, you ask?” He said, “Yes. I just wanted to talk to you about it”. So we had a good laugh about it. I think we were very happy with each other. But I think he got a week restricted activity, or something. I mean, that’s a part of army discipline. It wasn’t mine. It was part of army discipline.

I suppose there always is, when an officer disciplines you, because you feel hard done by. And if that is the case, then, I mean, it’s the army way, you’ve got to cope with that.

So, he had to cope with it, and I had to cope with it. But I hope I can say that I’ve never held a grudge. That if someone’s done something wrong, I don’t have a black book and put his name in it and say, “Well, you’ve got a black mark, and you’ll always have it”. I hope that is the case, and I hope that I’ve demonstrated that, so when that once he was out it was back to taws absolutely. In a sense, as if nothing had happened.

If that was the case, if I was able to do that, and I hope I was, they might tell you differently, but if I was able to do that, I hope then that the relationship would build up rather than deteriorate.

Well, very little, in the sense that, for our battalion, we only had one chaplain. He was a Roman Catholic, and he,

I mean, he wandered around occasionally. We’d see him very occasionally, because he had the troops to get around. I remember going to a service on Christmas Day, in the Roman Catholic chapel. I mean, there was only one chapel. And I went there, and although there’d been, I’d never been to a Roman Catholic service as a youth, I thought, “This is the only church service, I’ll go”. I think he was suffering from the night before.

And he was fairly incoherent in some ways, but I don’t remember him having any role in the lives of the servicemen. Perhaps if someone’s mother died in Australia, he would have been involved. But a very, very small amount really. As I say, we only had one chaplain. They were few and far between, which was more the pity.

Because chaplains have a very major role. But I found the young officers, found ourselves doing some sort of, we didn’t call it pastoral work. But that’s what we were doing. We were caring and caring for when things went wrong elsewhere, and when the girl friend wrote and said, “It’s off”. You know, all those sort of things. I think we tried to, some with more achievement than others,

of being able to deal with those situations in their lives.

I don’t know. I would have thought that he might have had one too many. But I don’t know. It was, I just have that memory. Mind you, I’m going back. We’re talking about Christmas Day, 1947. Yeah, ’47, so.

Later.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I think, we never saw him. He wasn’t available. Now I know chaplains, I generalise now, are seen by army authorities to have various capacities, various roles, not least of which is social. And caring, and that’s ok,

provided it’s kept in the priority. But my memory now tells me, after eighteen months or more with this bloke that I don’t remember him being involved in social activities. But I’m sure he took services every day. I’m sure he was right, I mean, he did what his role was as a Roman Catholic chaplain, but I don’t think it had much effect on the wider army community at all. Which was fairly, from my point of view,

fairly disappointing. But I may be misjudging him, I don’t know.

No. None at all. In fact, the only time I saw him was at that Christmas service. I mean, I didn’t see him. He didn’t come to our mess. I mean, he wasn’t, he had a wide area to cover, lots of people to cover, and he tried his hardest, I’m sure.

In Japan? No. I don’t think I did. We were pretty confined. I don’t think we had Sallies [Salvation Army personnel] on board there. I mean, I’ve had a lot to do with them since in other areas. They do a marvellous job. Particularly in the social area.

You know assisting, being there, and helping and so on. They’re expert at it. I’m glad about that. But it’s not just that. They’re not just social workers. They take up the responsibility of being Christian as well. But I think they have a general picture of being seen as being involved socially in people’s needs when such are needed and they do it well.

There aren’t many Salvation Army chaplains in the services. I now speak of, you know, the 1990s. They,

they’re involved when there is a crisis and they come in, and quickly, and well, I think because there aren’t many full time Sally chaplains on deck, then their involvement in that way is different, I think. Those that are, have Christian activities to do a fair bit of. But a lot of other chaplains have these activities to do as well.

And one of my things, when I was Chaplain General of Bishop of the Defence Force was to encourage them to, not to do social work to the exclusion of their calling as a minister, or not to do this work to the exclusion of that. Mind you, lots of COs made sure they did this, and that they were involved in social activities, and they’d ask them to run clubs, and this and that, and they did, and they did it well.

But I think the Christian activity is the reason why a chaplain has gone into the forces. Not just to be a social worker. I mean he is a social worker. But that’s, that’s very important. I’m not saying it’s unimportant, it is important, but I think there is a higher importance. And that is to tell people about Christ in crises. That there is a God who cares and loves, and can forgive.

A God who is able to give them what they need.

I don’t know. I don’t know why they didn’t. I mean, maybe there was an allocation for one and they didn’t fill. I never asked. If I asked the question I wasn’t given an answer. I don’t know if I asked the question.

Other, there were chaplains, Anglican chaplains in Japan, but not attached to us. All the chaplains were fairly sparsely spaced out. Perhaps it was. I’m only guessing. War had finished. The crisis was over. And so the need for chaplains to be involved in troop’s lives was less. Mind you, I don’t take that point of view now, because my point of view, since I became Chaplain General, was, you know, there are, at that time,

there were seventy thousand people in uniform. And why don’t they have the same opportunity as people in the ordinary community, in the non-military community, to hear of the teachings of Christ and to be taught and to be instructed, and to be, it’s a very important role. It’s a highly important role. I see it as vital, but perhaps it was at the end of the war. I don’t know why. It’s just that we didn’t have one.

Yeah. I told you, I used to read my bible. I was rooming with another officer, the two of us, and I actually, from a spiritual point of view, started to go down hill, because there wasn’t the fellowship, and because there wasn’t the contact,

and I got to a point of I was believing, and I was reading, surreptitiously, my bible. The other bloke in the room’s name was Mick, and I don’t know that he knew specifically where I stood Christianly. And one day, I remember this dramatically, he came into our room. I don’t know where we were. We weren’t billeted.

And I was lying on my bunk, on my bed, reading my little bible. And he walked over to me, and we’d been together in the room for three months or more, and walked over to me, he took the bible out of my hand, and he read the spine. “Holy Bible”. And he looked at me and said, “Shorty, you don’t read that, do you?” And that was a real kick in the guts for me. It was really a call to sensibility and to realism.

So then I started to talk to him about things, and he was not terribly interested. Even though we were rooming together, and, but yeah, that was the beginning of realising that I’d let things slip, in a sense. And in hindsight, it was that I had no one to encourage me, but that’s not an excuse. I mean I should be able to encourage me myself. But yeah. And I used to get letters from Gloria. We were engaged at the time.

And get letters from the parents, and they all had Christian encouragement in them, for which I was grateful. But I, yeah that was just a turning point. A little turning point in my understanding of Christian things. And a later turning point came, later on, when this whole business of my burning desire to maltreat Japanese came to the forefront, and I’ll tell you about that later.

I’m embarrassed to say I know of no one who was converted through my time with them. There were some Christians amongst the troops in general.

But it was, because there were no chaplains, and because I had another role. Although you could do this sort of as a secondary, there was very little for them. And this is part of the reason, when I became chaplain general, that I really have been encouraging and pushing chaplains in their role, to do their job in such a way as to be available to blokes and to talk to them about Christian things.

I, no, I think it was a pretty barren time from a Christian point of view.

I think we call it Hiroshima. I used to call it Hirosheema but then I was told it was Hiroshima.

There was a captain, and three lieutenants, three of us, and the captain said, “Look, we’ve got tomorrow off, Saturday”. It wasn’t terribly far. He said, “I can get a car and would you like to go to Hiroshima?” So we said, “Yes”. It was cold. I remember I had a great coat on. But we went down to Hiroshima. Mainly, only I suppose from an inquisitive point of view.

See what it turned out to be. And when we got there, you know, as I said, we were horrified. I took tiny little pictures. My camera was taking tiny little shots of the one building standing in the middle. And we walked around and we were looking at cases of saki there, grog bottles all melted together in the heat and the fusion. And there were a few people. There weren’t many people around. And those that were, they were disfigured.

And there was another building, which was on the edge, which was tall and hadn’t been destroyed, and we took some pikkies, but the devastation was enormous. And it didn’t really come upon me until I was there in the situation. I mean, I’d seen some pictures of it. But it was so dreadful. So bad.

If I did, I didn’t put it into practice. I don’t think I did. I mean, we might have been told, but I don’t think

I would have gone if I’d known about radiation. But, I mean, the blokes were saying, you know, a bit risky to go, and you’re at that age where you say, “What’s risk?”

Well, I took my turn. Took my turn. I mean everyone had turns, when you were in certain areas. And sometimes you weren’t on duty. I don’t really know the answer. I don’t think anyone came to me and told me precisely what they thought of me. But they probably did, and undoubtedly they had views, like we all have views of people who were over us.

But, we got on pretty well, I’m generalising. I mean, I don’t remember any specific instances. I didn’t have any revolt or revolution, or you know, blokes shaking their fist in my face, or disobedience. Maybe I was starting to grow up, and enter into their time with them.

Duty officer? I was once duty officer, which meant that you slept on a camp stretcher in the Orderly Room, in the main building. You know, you came out of your house, came out of your room, and I’d done the rounds, I’d been around all the places where the blokes were sleeping,

and then I got back into bed, and it was about one o’clock. And I was violently shaken. I opened my eyes and looked up and there was a major. And he said, “Short, what are you doing in bed?” I said, “Sir, it’s one o’clock”. And he said,

“Don’t talk like that”, he said, “There’s been a major earthquake. Why haven’t you gone down and looked after the troops?” And I’d inspected everybody, and I’d gone to bed, gone to sleep, and slept through the earthquake. And we had two storey buildings, and some of them were just being completed, and there were piles of sand on the outside, and some of the blokes were so frightened of the earthquake that they thought the building was going to collapse,

and they were jumping out of the windows into the sand, and they thought the earth was opening up. And this noise came out, so, mmm, I, it took me a while to live that down.

I don’t know on the Richter scale, but it was evidently quite a big one. I was a good sleeper, put it that way.

Oh, not very well. I mean, they were breaking the law, the Australian law, rules. And they didn’t like being caught because there were consequences. So you know, it was just a, I mean, there’s only one rule in the army, isn’t there,

and that’s never get caught. That’s the rule. But they didn’t getting caught. I didn’t like doing the job very much, but you know, it was part, when I was on that particular duty that’s what we did. It wasn’t a major part of life. You know, we didn’t do it very often, as I said before, but it was, how did they like it? I don’t suppose they liked it at all. But I don’t think they grizzled too much,

because they knew they were wrong.

I can’t quite remember. I probably did it half a dozen times, or ten times, or something, in several years. Yes, not very often. It might have been once every two months or something. I can’t remember what it was.

It had quite an effect of me, because I came from a pretty sheltered home, as I’ve indicated,

and I mean, I knew life was life, and, but this was life in the raw. So it was, yeah, it wasn’t something that I enjoyed very much at all. But you put it in the book of experience, and put it down for later. And I suppose it has some effect on you. I’m not quite sure.

There were bars. I’m actually at a loss to remember whether the army set them up, or whether they were set up by some other group. I might have said, the army, but I’d forgotten whether the army had done that. If there were, then the fraternisation could occur there,

but I’m fuzzy about that. I’m sorry. I can’t define it for you.

VD.

I mean that was part of the education,

educating you about, it was all part of the deal, because it was a role then for the junior officers, amongst whom I was numbered, to talk about the moral issues. From an army perspective. Not from a Christian perspective. An army perspective. And we would do that. And it was here, if there had been chaplains, I think the chaplains could have taken a greater role.

But there weren’t any, and so, I mean, army officer did that all the time. They still do it, presumably. Yeah, there was a generalised area of expectation, and we were told what was expected, and so it was based on a sort of a moralistic approach. There wasn’t anything Christian about it, per se.

I don’t remember. Pretty normal things, like if your married you’re obviously going against your married vows. If you’re not married, you’re abusing your privileges which you have, and you know. Is it right? Of course, it’s not right to carry out this.

It’s not the strongest of teaching. I mean, now I would take a different approach. But it was those sort of things. And it mostly developed into teaching about prevention of VD or whatever.

I’m not sure I saw the effect. I mean, my understanding is that the brothels were set up. Maybe they set them up especially,

the women to make money, or whatever. And they were set up especially. I, you had a sense, an underlining sense, and I can’t define it, that they’d be glad when the occupation was over. And the sooner the better. But I am presuming that prostitution has always been part of human life, and it was part of Japan’s life.

And I think their attitudes to sex, as I understand it, are probably different in some ways from ours, in some ways. I’m not sure, I’m not sure how to define that, but I don’t know that I’ve actually seen the effect. Other people might have been closer to it, but I don’t know.

Well, we would see workmen who would come into the camp, and some of our responsibility was to look after them. We would, sort of go to places and hire people, or talk to people, and negotiate, always with an interpreter, of course, and it was at this point that, I’ve forgotten precisely when, but perhaps two thirds of the way through my time in Japan I was posted to a place on Shikoku,

which I think was called Hatsu Omatsu [?] It had been a naval ammunition, a Japanese naval ammunition depot, and there was a contingent of various BCOF people who were destroying this. It was nearly all done, and I think the officer who was in charge of it, had come back. His term had run out, or his turn, and I was sent to take his place. Not that I was personally involved in

putting detonators to grenades or something. My responsibility was to look after the camp. There was only a small group of us. And at one stage, there was a need for an extra Japanese to come and work for us in a particular role. So, through the camp interpreter, I got him to put an advertisement in the local village, town,

which he did, and he, and then we had a response. Several blokes applied, and the first fellow that applied, through the interpreter I said, well, ok, I had to interview him and see what his skills were, and whether they would fit the role that we were looking for. And so he came in and sat down and I said “Now, I want to ask you some questions”, and I began,

you know the normal details you put down on a piece of paper and after a few minutes, or several minutes, he sort of put up his hand and he said halteringly in English but certainly understandable, he said, “There may be no need for an interpreter”. He said something like this. He said, “May be no need. I actually understand and can speak English and if you would like then I can go direct”. And so we had a bit of a conversation and I said, “Yeah, that’s fine”.

So I let the interpreter go, so I asked him about himself first of all, and because it wasn’t through an interpreter, it was direct, I think he felt much freer to talk to me. I said, “Now, you’re applying for this”. I think it was some sort of administrative job. Applying for that. I said, “What’s your background?” He said, “Well, my background, I’m actually a Methodist minister” and I said, “Really? Where?” He said, “Hiroshima”.

And I said, “Tell me about it. I’ve been there”. And so he started to talk about the effect of the bomb. He actually wasn’t in the city when the bomb fell, but he lost all his family. And wife and children and church and church congregation. And he painted, as you would expect, a pretty horrific picture.

And I said to him something about, “Why are you applying here? You must hate me. I mean, I represent the allies and I represent the Americans who bombed it and so on.” And he looked at me, and he said, “No, I don’t hate you. I told you I’m Christian and Christians forgive. And I don’t hate you at all”. He said, “Because I’m Christian, I’d like to meet an Australian Christian”.

He said, “I know that you all come from a so-called Christian country, but I’d like to meet a real Christian”. And that was the beginning of the end for me. And that was my change of attitude, and change of heart, and change of mind, because here was a Japanese who had every right to hate me, because of what had happened in the bombing and all of this. So he started to work for us.

He did very well. I can remember he was quite a pianist, and we had a little piano in the mess, and at some stages he and I would sing hymns. He would know the tunes of certain hymns, which I knew the words, and he knew the words in Japanese. And we had real fellowship in Christian things. And so dramatic was that effect on me that it changed my attitude. Just something that God did in my life, and bang, it was like that.

So much so that when I come home, there was a total (UNCLEAR) change, and when I became a student in Moore College the following year, at the end of that year, another fellow in Moore College, who’d been in the navy in Japan, I didn’t know him there, he and I agreed to start a new missionary society in Japan.

And we decided, I mean, I’m glad it didn’t come about, because I didn’t have the skills nor the experience and all that sort of stuff. But I was anxious to be involved with, in being an instrument in telling them the truth about Christ. And about, not just reconciliation. About forgiveness and the reconciliation which follows, because it’s real reconciliation. It’s Christian reconciliation in Christ,

it’s not just two people being reconciled. That changed my whole attitude. Not that I had an antipathy to other races. It was just to the Japanese. But then I found that, being in Christ, I began to love them. Really love them. And that’s not just words. But desire for their good and for their salvation. I’ve supported missionaries in Japan and been involved for them, pray for them, and so on.

So, it’s a long answer to your questions, “Have I been involved with Japanese?” Yes, we met workman and different people, but this workman was God’s answer par excellence to my problem. So I look back, you know, some of the nights I used to go to bed and just think about the reasons I joined the army and what happened to my brother, and the sense of repayment that I had, which had now all gone.

It had evaporated. Because I knew that Christ had forgiven me for what I had done, as a sinful person, and he had done that for me, what could I do? What should I do? What should be my attitude to other people? And Japanese per se had not done anything to me. To my brother, yes. And it was part of war, and it wasn’t anything personal. In the sense that they chose Stephen Short to do something to, he was just a member of the POW. So, yeah, I think that made quite a difference

in my own a) understanding, and b) my ministry. It’s a long answer. I’m sorry.

He was a very, what I recollect, he was a struggling issue. I mean, Japan was so Shintoistic, or Buddhist,

that Christians were a very, very small percentage, and he’d known a missionary, and the missionary, I think I’m right in saying. I might be wrong. A missionary had come either to Hiroshima, or to another place, and had commenced this Methodist Congregational Church and he had become Christian, come to Christ through that teaching.

And had eventually been ordained, obviously, because he was the pastor in charge. So his picture was a struggling, small, yet none the less virile in some way, community. And the fact that he, himself, after all that had happened to him, was here, straightening out an officer of the enemy. That is, a young Australian officer. And he was gentle, and open-handed in the way he spoke. Open in his declarations.

He was, you know, I’ve never had contact with him since, and I’m sorry I haven’t. I mean I’m sure he’s gone on by now, because I was only nineteen or twenty. You know, I guess he was in his forties by then. I don’t know. Yeah. It’s a small situation, the Christian Church in Japan. I think it still is. I mean, I don’t know the numbers. I’m guessing it’s one and a half or two percent, if that.

Oh, I just told him straight out. He said he was looking for someone to meet who was a Christian. I said, “Well, you’ve met one”. And then I just told him a bit of my story. My background, and the great privilege of the heritage that I’d had. And told him of my brother. And that’s all right. He understood. And that was just part of the story. We talked to each other,

and I had to reserve the position. It was one of those interesting ones. I was the officer in charge of the camp, so I couldn’t sort of be buddy buddy, nor could I fraternise. Within certain limits. Yet, with him working in the office, and doing the work that he had to do, when the time was over, the day was over, we would see each other, as I say in the mess and other things, and that fraternisation was acceptable,

because it was all part and parcel of the community of the army. Yes. So we got on famously, and then when my time was up, a little while later, and I was posted back to Kure, it was a sad day for me in a sense. We missed out on each other.

Well, I’m presuming that the Australian authorities said that they did not want, they wanted the BCOF people, it wasn’t just Australians. They wanted the BCOF people would not be allowed to mix freely socially, with the Japanese, because the very different way of life that we were supposed to be

demonstrating would become blurred and we’d become part and parcel of all that. And I have a feeling that the BCOF authorities wanted to make sure that we retained the authority as victors. And not equals. When you fraternise there is a sense of equality. So I’m presuming. I’m sure reasons were given, and I’m scratching to remember them, but I’m now presuming that that was the case.

Yes, I’m sure that was the case. I’m not sure it was policy written down, but that was part of the ethos. I mean, as I said, we were, ‘we’ that is the allies, had won the war, and we were going as victors, and we had something to teach,

and if we became, if there was fraternisation, we all became equal, that was in their view, far less easy, far more difficult to teach. I’m presuming that is the case. But yeah, the Americans didn’t have such a strong non-fraternisation, they were allowed to fraternise in certain bits and pieces, and I don’t know what the great differences were. But when I met with Americans, we’d go to Tokyo and meet them there,

they would tell us what they were allowed to do, which was quite different from us. But I’m not sure it was as effective. I don’t really know.

That’s what I didn’t know, and I never knew in the beginning. I don’t think I really knew when I left. We were told that we had to be an example to them of democracy. How could a group of soldiers, you know, do as your told, marching down the street, be properly dressed.

Does that teach democracy? I don’t thing so. It might. But we were there to show the force, because MacArthur, General MacArthur and his staff and the principles laid out, was that the democracy should come into being, and we were all part, in a sense, of that. We were showing that democracy wasn’t a monster with two heads, but we were both civilised,

in a sense of not wrecking things, not being violent. We were able to demonstrate that there was a discipline and a humanity about us, and yet in a military sense. And I think that’s how it’s taught. I mean, we weren’t told that you have to go out and teach these sorts of things. Because it wasn’t our position to do that. We were just young soldiers in the scene.

Well, it’s in the general area of keeping the discipline in the region. We got fairly bored after a while, to be quite frank. So the authorities arranged all sorts of things. Inter-sport matches between different battalions, and between the army, navy and air. Mostly air, because they were around,

and we went on guard duty in Tokyo, as I said. We would be very formal and go on parade, and those sort of things. I think we were there to protect and look after. I remember, although I personally had nothing to do with it, about returning Japanese ex-servicemen from war. Some of them came back through Kure, and they were being repatriated back through the port.

And although my particular group had little to do with that, yet I know a lot of others did, so they were there to make sure that went well, and it was anything that was post war, connected.

Yes. This is not my knowledge from the time, but since. I mean, I’ve been involved with BCOF now for many years,

and I should say in passing that one of the things that I’ve been bitterly disappointed in is that the Australian Government has failed to recognise BCOF as military service. And there was a Campbell Report, which was recently delivered, and I read a number of the submissions to that, one of which, I think, indicated there were eighty people

who lost their lives during their time in BCOF. In various ways, and various reasons. Some of them in blowing up the mines, or the ammunition. And I know someone was awarded some form of military award because of that. So that there was a risk involved. But just, the Australian government has said the Campbell report,

I’ve seen parts of it, and the report said that the soldiers who went to Japan from ’46 to ’48 were, should be recognised as veterans, but the Australian government has never done it. I mean, I don’t have a gold card of anything like that. We who are now part of BCOF, this little tiny group, there were fifty or sixty thousand of us, and it’s obviously diminished,

but we feel that we’re the lost group. But, that’s where I got the information from. Where I read this.

Oh, some people died, yes, that’s true. But I didn’t know the number. I mean, I got this number just a few years ago.

I don’t know. I don’t know precisely what the differences were. All I know is that they were freer. I mean, they were free in all sorts of ways. They had these big canteens where they imported stuff from America and they sold them to the troops very cheaply. High class stuff. And we would try and get to know an American and go to the RX, PX [American canteen unit],

whatever it’s called. And try and buy, you know suitcases or food, and all sorts of things, and that enabled them to have a means whereby to fraternise. You know. They would have all this cheap chocolates and stuff. But I don’t precisely know, all I know is, as I said, that when I met with Americans, they would give a picture of the freedom which they had, which was different from ours, and I dare not tell you the difference,

because I don’t know what it is. I wasn’t privy to that.

I’d seen a few of them in Australia, during the war. I met a lot. In Sydney, there was thousands and thousands of Americans there. And they’d come for R&R [rest and recreation], been on leave and so on. Yeah. That sort of contact. I don’t know that it was personal.

They were in the area a great deal, and my wife worked in a photographic studio, colouring photos, and she often spoke of how Americans would come in and get their pictures taken, and she would colour them. And whereas the Australians would order two or three copies, they’d order twenty or thirty, and the cost was no problem. And, all of that. And there were lots of strange things that were said about Americans,

during the war, by we Aussies, we civilian Aussies. Don’t ask me what they were, because I’d be embarrassed, but ...

No, no, no, no. I think, yeah, the answer to your question is, yes, I’ve met them. And some of them I met in the army were very fine blokes. They were good soldiers.

Oh, they were just brash and,

you know, loud, and disregard of certain standards of living, and certainly, we were fairly critical, I generalise, of them then in their attitudes to the way that their commanders used to throw lots of troops in at a particular place. It appeared to us, from our vantage point, that they didn’t have much regard to the loss of life.

To the number of American soldiers that were lost. Whereas, certainly in my officer training, we were taught that life was precious, and that every life was as good as ours, and we had to, that’s only, that’s a generalisation which was a sense that came to me, and I certainly can’t prove it. But certainly their losses were very significant, numerically, and you know, they won battles, and it was one of their principles.

Except for when we were in Tokyo, you know, they weren’t anywhere near us, so I don’t know in general. But in Japan they were Americans.

Not really, no. There was official contact, as I say, with employing people, or seeing workmen, or those sort of things, but I didn’t have any casual contact.

Apart from this fellow in Hatsu Omatsu [?].

Well, when we would go on a day’s leave, we would see the way the Japanese people lived, their social, maybe not social. Their way of living was pretty marked. You know, would stand out. For an example, I mean I’m going back many years, and it may be a very silly illustration.

But some of us were walking down the street, and there was this large building being built, and the scaffolding, which I think was bamboo, was all up, and was, I don’t know, several storeys high, perhaps three or four, and a large storm was blowing, and these fellows were working. And as we watched, in front of our eyes, the scaffolding started to wave like this, with a few workmen on top, and they were yelling out.

And a crown gathered around, and the crowd started to clap, and laugh. Now, I thought that was a strange reaction. It’s not the sort of reaction I would have expected from a building collapse in Sydney, then or now. And when it did collapse and they fell, some of them were hurt pretty badly I think, but there didn’t seem to be the desire for compassion, or the desire for rushing to help.

There was the standoff. As I say, there was a bit of laughter about it. From our point of view, on another issue, in the camp where we were, there were some scraggy dogs which had come in. They were local dogs of course, and we tried to give them something to eat, so the order came out, one of them got, I don’t think it was rabies, but it was some disease which they get,

so we were told that we had to get rid of them. So we, that’s easy done, you’ve got a rifle, go and get rid of them. Because they were diseased. But we were told, the orders were to get rid of them, but those who worked in the camp said, “No, no, no, no, no. Let me have them. Let me have the dog.” “What are you going to do with them?” “We eat them”. And at that time I didn’t realise it was part of their diet, and I thought, “Urhhh”.

And mind you, I’ve eaten different things since. But it was those sort of things of understanding the culture of Japan, and the attitudes. You know. They’re always bowing, and they’re always, sort of respect. Respect for older people. That in itself was something that was very marked, very marked. And you know,

you’d wait on a station to catch a train, and the train would pull in. And it’s not like standing on Wynyard station at five to five, or five past five, on a Wednesday afternoon. There wasn’t a sort of a surge forward. There appeared to be a pretty much politeness. Now, I don’t know if it’s like that now. But you didn’t have to fight. When you got on, you didn’t get a seat, because everyone else had occupied them, but there was that general attitude which was probably different from ours again.

I mean, I think we were first in best dressed. I’m just reminiscing as I go on.

Yes, I think we did. We went up to them. But you see, we didn’t have any language. That’s the problem. And some of the blokes had learnt a few words, but “What do we do? What do we do? How do you call, you know emergency?”

We didn’t have phones. Mobile phones weren’t in, and we didn’t have any access. And so, actually, we tried to, I think, but it wasn’t very successful. And I think the police, or several policemen came, and from memory, an ambulance came. Or several came. But yeah, you know, again we couldn’t do anything because we weren’t able. We were just restricted. It’s all very well, someone lying down there, and if you want to say, “What’s your trouble?”,

you can’t say it, because you don’t know how to say it. It’s very frustrating not being able to talk the language when you live with people. As I found out, went to Tanzania at the beginning.

They were very restrained and very restricted and very polite. There wasn’t any objection, generalised objection, to it.

They accepted it, which I think was a big plus for the Japanese. But that’s part of their nature, I suppose. A part of their society. This situation had arisen and so they accepted it.

I held myself aloof a fair bit, because I had this sense of, you know, a) I was trying to understand them, and b) I didn’t want to mix and I really was feeling, as I’ve explained, because of my brother, I had an antipathy, and I just noticed that this happened. Not that they respected us necessarily, but you would notice

that when people would stop and bow, and they’d begin a conversation, and, how did I react to that? I suppose I accepted that that was their way of life. But it wasn’t ours. I mean, there was that sense of dichotomy.

No, no, he didn’t have any. He’d, I mean we were on a different island. We were many miles from Hiroshima. And he’d come, I think he was looking for work. He was so devastated by what had happened. There was no work in Hiroshima. And he’d come to Shikoku, and he was looking for work, and no congregation. He wasn’t a pastor,

he wasn’t living as a pastor any more. He was living by doing this administrative work for the Australian Army, and I, you know, just held body and soul together. I think he was very hard up. I don’t think he’d remarried or anything. I think he was on his own.

Well, I think I’m talking in terms of ’47. So Hiroshima was in ’45, so it’s three years. Give or take.

Well, nick attitudes. I mean, I suppose they had nick names,

Yanks, and so on but there were generalised attitudes. And when I say generalised, they’re not necessarily specific. And I’m talking about a teenager and going back a year or two, to what I remember during the World War II and living in Sydney. Those are the parameters. I generalise and say that Americans, obviously, had a lot more money

than Australian troops, and they would throw that money around and a lot of people capitalised on the fact that they were rich, in comparison with us. Taxi riders would immediately charge twice, three times, five times the amount. If a shopkeeper saw an American walk in they would immediately double the price. It wasn’t a very happy situation, but that’s what happened.

And with the money, then they would be able to invite girls out, so they would get what they wanted, whatever it was, because money spoke, and there were a pretty number of disappointing things that happened. Of course, history tells us that there were difficulties, there were one or two Yanks who committed a few murders in Sydney, and things like that.

I think we looked upon them as they were, again a teenager’s remembrance. They were arrogant, in the fact that they were, there were many more, they kept on calling themselves the victors, and we had little part in it. So we were led to believe. And if there were troops together, say at a pub or a club or something, Yankee troops, Aussie troops,

you couldn’t always be sure that they wouldn’t mix it, that there wouldn’t be a punch up somewhere. All of this attitude. Now, that’s general, but there were many fine blokes among them, and there were a few who came to my father’s church, and who were Christian, and worshipped there. And that’s the other side of the coin, as there is in any community. And they were humble, and non-arrogant.

But if you asked for a general feeling, general look at it, and that was that, and we, some people, the general feeling I think, was that they were glad when the war was over, and the Yanks went home. Mind you, a lot of girls married Americans and have gone back, and been very happy, and that’s great. I’m glad for them.

If there are I can’t remember them, for the tape.

No, I actually don’t specifically remember, what the names were. Other people may remember and they could call that to my memory.

I don’t remember. When did the elections come up?

I didn’t come home until March ’48. So probably the answer is yes. But I’m not sure that it had any effect on me personally. I was not politically aware of things, of which government was in power. I probably knew who the prime minister was, but it was so far removed from my scene.

Oh, I’m sorry. I though you meant Australian elections. You know, I don’t remember. I remember MacArthur, and things happening, and probably so, but whether it had any effect upon us, that I don’t remember. I’m sorry. It’s something in which I wasn’t involved,

and with my age it’s slipped out of my memory. I’m sorry.

I think we were told the time would be getting close, and people were coming home. It wasn’t a specific length of time for which we stayed. But I was,

I was told that my time would come in ex number of weeks or something, and to be ready to come home, and did I wish to be discharged, etc. And when it did come, it came very quickly, because two Australian destroyers, the [HMAS] Warramunga and the [HMAS] Arunta, had been on service with the navy in Japan, and they were coming home. And I think there was room for eight army people

on board. And I was offered a place on the Arunta and accepted it. Which was an interesting experience for me. I’m a very bad sailor and it was an interesting experience. And they come home in convoy together and did things together, and you know, had exercises together. But they were very cramped quarters.

Nothing like a troop ship. It was very, very cramped, and the beds seemed to be about five feet long. But it was good fun, and I was glad when we got home. I mean, on the way home we called in at Hong Kong, and then Cairns I think it was, and then came home eventually. And we landed at Man O’ War Steps near the Opera House. In March. I haven’t got the exact date in my head. But it was March some time.

On the ocean. Seeing how the navy lives, seeing how their discipline was.

Well, navy discipline, all of that that goes. It’s a very different way of life. I mean, I knew what army discipline was, how we did things, and being the only Australian Army officer on board, I was, you know I’d be in the ward room with the other officers, and from time to time I was invited up to the bridge

to get an understanding of navigation. Not that I was being taught navigation, but, and then when the two ships had a flying fox together, and they would transfer people across as exercises. I don’t know that I was offered, but if I did, I didn’t go. To watch all that. And then they had depth charges. And they were still, post war, still keeping in the business. All of that was different from the experiences which I’d had.

Those sort of things. That is, we’d be battling through rough weather or whatever, and then I’d be told on the side, not that I was part of the information, but I’d be told that we’re going to chase a pretend submarine and depth charge, and things like that, so if you like to come and watch, you can see them getting ready,

and shoot the depth charges out. The explosion. And yeah, it was interesting in that sense. I mean, I’d not seen it before and therefore it was interesting.

Not much! I’ve said before that I think I’ve been across the Equator thirteen times in my life. That’s thirteen times too many. I normally have,

when I’m at sea, I normally have six meals a day. Three down and three up. And I hate it. I really do. I loathe it. And when I went back to Africa as missionaries. It was disgusting. It was terrible. I hated it. And you know. Flying’s ok, travelling in cars is ok. But for some reason as I told you, going back to the Zealandia experience in Hobart, maybe it was all psychological. Maybe it was, but it still doesn’t help.

Well, I was debating. I really loved the army as an experience, and I really got bored in the last six months in Japan. I mean, there were the same things all over again. Mounting guards and doing guard duty, and so on. And I didn’t see much purpose in that.

And I came back. My time was up. My time of duty was up and so I had to work out whether I wanted to do that or not. And when I came back I don’t think I’d yet decided. My parents met me, and Gloria met me at the wharf, and as I say, it wasn’t a proper customs thing. There were just a few of us getting off. And then they presumed I was immediately getting out of the army.

But I hadn’t made my mind up. But in time, on reflection, in thinking back, what the future held, I came to the conclusion that being back in Sydney life was better than being in the permanent army. Although, if somehow or other I’d been convinced that the permanent army was for me, I would have stayed in it. And it would have become part of my life.

And some of the fellows with whom I worked in Japan, some of the other officers, in other platoons, whom I met later when I became chaplain general. I used to go to Canberra and Russell Offices and so on. I’m now, on my shoulders, having a major general, and they’re the rank of brigadier, one below, and they’ve been in the army all that time. And it was most embarrassing. I mean, not that a chaplain general, he has the rank, but he’s really only a chaplain in a sense.

And so they were very happy in the long term. So I had to make up my mind whether I’d stay. I didn’t know what to do. As I said before, I’d worked in the Commonwealth Bank, and after, oh, a period of leave, I’ve forgotten how long it was, a period of time, sleeping in, etc, I went back to the bank, and I said, you know “I’m back here”, and they said, they made sure I did come back.

They kept, they knew of my movements somehow, I don’t know, and I was sent back, I came back, and I had a terrific interview with one of the managers in the bank, and he said, “When you were an ordinary soldier on six and six a day, we augmented your pay. We put it aside from whatever you were getting in the bank”. Wouldn’t have been much more than that, but it was put aside, and they had all the money, which I would have earned, had I been a member of the bank staff still.

Aside, and it was there. And they said, “Now, we want you to understand this, that we’re going to give you this. But we’re not going to buy you. If you come back to the bank, it’s yours. If you don’t come back to the bank, it’s yours. But we’d like you to consider your needs in this way”. So I thought of having been out in the open for all this length of time. You know, the years in the army,

who wants to be shut back into four walls again, sort of. And then as I said, I struggled with what I should do. Eventually, I didn’t know what to do. I talked with different people, my parents, with Gloria, with others, and I thought I wanted an outside job, but I found that I was doing a lot of teaching in the army. Teaching map reading and teaching this and teaching that,

and so I said, “Well, let me become a teacher”. “Can I combine the two?” “An outside teacher?” “What’s an outside teacher?” “Agriculture”. Do I know anything about agriculture? Not a thing. I know plants grow, but that’s all. So I decided that I should go back, go to university, and I went to see, I went to university, made an application, they said, “Yeah. We’ll let you in but you don’t have what they call a War Matric [Matriculation]”.

In other words, you’ve got to pass in four subjects instead of the normal five, and your pass when you did the leaving at night school was not good enough. “We’ll give you a pass in one maths”, I think it was, “But you have to go and get another subject”. I think it was Geography. “Oh, you’ve got to get at least two other subjects. English and something”. So I said “Ok”.

This is now, I’m talking in terms of, when I was discharged, May, June ’48. Then I decided that I’d go to night school the following January, and I got a job in the city. In Broadway, actually, just in an office, an office clerk, and I decided to go there and give myself six months break and start to study again.

And then this dramatic thing happened, not that it matters much, but it was on the 30th July, 1948, that my father was the rector of St Stephen’s, Willoughby, and I was living at home, and he was driving across to Campsie, to Canterbury Hospital actually, and was killed by a drunken driver. He died three hours after he was hit. And of course, we all gathered at home with my mother. And my POW brother,

he was working in the city and had just been posted to Inverell. He and my elder sister who was at home. My younger brother and sister were at home. And we, so we were distraught, as you can imagine with a sudden death like that. Sudden death on the road. So he died on the Friday, and on the Saturday. And this isn’t a story I often tell because it’s pretty personal,

but I was walking up and down on the lawn outside afterwards, feeling as if I wanted to tear limb from limb, the bloke, just a natural reaction. This bloke who had done this. And all the feelings, anti-Japanese were now coming back, although it was now focussed on this particular guy. And you know, I was very angry with what had happened, and I was very upset, and we’d been crying,

so I was walking up and down the lawn of the rectory, and my elder sister, it was about lunch time, and I think she was going to get lunch, and I heard her call out, “Ken”. And so I didn’t turn around. I just said, “Yes”, as I was walking, and so she called me for lunch. When I turned around she wasn’t there. And I thought, “What’s happened?” So I went back to the house, and I said to her,

“Did you call me?”, and she said, “No”. So I went back outside, and I said, “I don’t know what’s happened, but God, did you call me?” I felt a bit like Samuel. I mean, it’s an experience which is a one-off as far as I’m concerned and I don’t expect anyone else to have it, but it was a real experience. And just then the sense came upon me. That the task, or the role or the job that my father had had of being the pastor of a parish, was mine,

and that I would follow him. And I knew it like that, and I knew it immediately, and I knew it without doubt. And I suddenly changed. Instead of wandering around and looking, for I’d just had my twenty first birthday, and my father had been there, just three weeks before. But now my whole life was redirected. And I don’t care

whether I’ve been a good or a bad clergyman. In the last, you know, nearly sixty years. I don’t care. I know that God called me to it. And I know that that was the role. Whether I fulfilled the role in His eyes, or not, I undoubtedly failed Him many times, but that’s what I had to do. I went into my mother, I said, after lunch, I said, “Can I have a yarn to you?” and she was a distraught,

but very Christian, caring mother and she said, “Look, you’re very distraught. You’re very upset. And I think you want to wait a few weeks before you make this decision. I mean, don’t make a decision like that on the spur of the moment. It’s a major decision. You’re changing direction.” And I said, “But it’s made. I don’t know whether I made it. It’s been made, it’s in my heart. It’s in my head. I’m going to do it”. And she said, “Oh, just be careful. You know. I don’t want you to make a wrong decision.”

I said, “No, it’s not the wrong decision”. And she said, “Well, ok. Be careful. I don’t want you to tell me about it, don’t talk about it for a couple of weeks, and then we’ll see”. So, if you want the details. What happened after that? My father’s funeral was on the Wednesday. Enormous funeral. And on the Friday, that’s a week after his death, I rang the Vice Principal of Moore College, Marcus Lone. And I said, “Canon Lone, I want to come and talk to you”. I told him.

And he said exactly what my mother had said. “This is a distressing experience. You’re upset. You’re uptight. And I’m not trying to denigrate it, but I think you ought to give it a bit of time.” I said, “I don’t want any time”. And he said, “But I want you to have time. Come back and see me in a couple of weeks”. So I said, “Well, if I go to Moore College, what do I need?” and he said, “Well, you need to get your Leaving Certificate”.

I said, “It’s the same as getting into uni [university]”. And he said, “Yep”. I said, “Ok”. So, on the Monday, after seeing Marcus Lone, I went to MBC. Metropolitan Bible, MBC, Bible College. And signed up to do the leaving certificate in eighteen months time, because I hadn’t been to school for seven plus years. And I did English and Geography,

and I didn’t have to do maths. History, I think it was. And started. Started to work. And I was a long way down the track. I mean, the year was half over. And to cut a long story short, and I won’t go through it, because it looks like I’m saying the wrong things, but I went back and saw Marcus in a fortnight, Archbishop Lone as he became. A very great friend, and I went back and saw him in a fortnight,

and I said, “I’m sure it’s right”. So he quizzed me, as if he was interviewing me as a prospective candidate, and he gave me stories as to how I’d react to meeting someone who had an accident, and about to die, and things like that, and he said, “Well, all other things being equal, in eighteen months time, when you’ve got the leaving certificate, I won’t promise you now, but there will be, it seems as if you’re heading in the right direction. So let me encourage you

now to get past the exams. And then, I’m not declining. I’m not saying no”. So, I started to really work really hard at MBC [Metropolitan Bible College]. I studied, I went there four nights a week, and I’d get home. I started at six o’clock and go to ten, and then I’d get home, and study till about two or two thirty, and then go to work in the morning, whatever it was. Nine o’clock at Broadway.

And I did that, and I worked hard, and then about three months later, one of the teachers came around and said, “For those of you who are doing the leaving certificate this year, these forms are to fill in”. I don’t think they had trials in the MBC. I don’t remember. They didn’t there. But they said, “This will be the exam at the end of November, and these are the subjects you’re going to do. Fill it in and give us your money.”

So I said to him, “Look, I’m not ready to do the leaving certificate, but I’d like to do it. I’d like to give it a burl so that I know what the study’s like. I mean, I haven’t studied like this for years, and I’ve really got my head down and so on”. And he said, “Well, it’s a bit of a waste of time because you’re so far behind”. I said, “Give us a go”. Mind you, what I’ve said before, I’m not a student. And so I filled out the papers, and I got 2Bs and an A in Geography, and passed.

In less than six months, or about, yes, less than six months, and I saved a year of my life, and I got the results, and I went back to see Canon Lone and I said, “I’ve got the results”. And I went through the normal selection process, and bang, I was in college at the beginning of ‘49. And that again was God’s hand on me, because I wasn’t a student. And suddenly I had learned how to study, and suddenly I’d learned how to remember things,

and suddenly it fitted into place. And the study of Greek was very hard, but the study of the bible became a very exciting thing. And sort of fitted into place. I became a catechist at Northmead, Dundas. The rector left to go somewhere else. And for three months I was catechist in charge, you know, a first year student. And then we went to Blacktown and I was preaching four or five times a Sunday. Those were the days, of course. And then I went to Mosman as a catechist with, as he was then, Archdeacon Hugh Moir,

who later became Bishop to the Defence Force, and I followed him in that role when he died. So, God opened it all up for us. And I’m sorry. The question was a long time ago, and I’ve waffled on, but it was a very exciting and stimulating and learning time of my life, and in the middle of all that, just to finish the story.

Gloria and I had got engaged before I went to Japan, so at the end of first year at Moore College, we’d been engaged three and a half years nearly, and no one in college was married. So I said, I went to Canon Lone, and I said we were thinking of getting married, not right at the end of the year, about half way through first year,

and he said, “Well, you’ve got to get permission. The Archbishop has got to give you permission”, and I said, “Well, I’ll write a letter to him”. And he said, “Ok”. So eventually I wrote the letter, and the Archbishop wrote back and gave me permission on the understanding that I’d never be a financial drain on the Diocese because of my marriage. And I said, “No, no, no”. I mean, I was getting a repat allowance for study, and Gloria was working at Peter’s Ice Cream,

so about July, or something like that, Canon Lone said to me, “Where are you going to live?”, and I said, “I haven’t any idea”, because housing was at a premium with all the fellows coming back, so he said, “What are you going to do?” and I said, “Well, we’re praying. God will supply”. He said, “Are you sure?” and I said, “Yeah”. And he asked me that every month. I mean, he was a real test, you know, he’s a terrific guy, but every month he’d say, “Have you found anything?” “No”.

Same answer. Then I think it was in November, something like that, he called me in again, and asked me, probably the fourth time, and I said, “Well, Canon Lone, I don’t know what’s going to happen but I know God, and he’s put me here. I don’t have any doubt about that. He’ll supply. I don’t doubt him.” He said, “You really mean that?”, and I said, “Yeah”. And he said, “Well, for four months I’ve known that Moore College Council

have sent me on a year’s sabbatical. I’m going to England. My wife’s going’, I think she went to Perth with her brother”, he said, ‘And we’re looking for someone to look after the vice principal’s house”. He knew this all the time. It was a real test. We got married in January, ’50, so we’ve just had our fifty-fourth wedding anniversary, and we went and lived in the vice principal’s house for a year. Which was exciting, we were right in college and etc, etc. I’d better shut up.

Yes, it was right. I’ve given the same sort of advice to people in later years. Not under precisely the same circumstances,

but to wait, and to see. Particularly when I was General Secretary of CMS and numerous people were coming to see me about being a missionary and I would assess. I’d pray for wisdom, but I’d assess that their situation was that if they needed time, or if they needed to develop skills, or they needed this or that, and so I’ve given the same sort of advice in the general principal. And it was good advice.

And my mother was delighted, and later, I didn’t know this then, but later she actually wrote me a letter, and said that she and my father had been praying that God would bring me to the ministry, right from early days. They never said it to me, they never said, “You’ve got to go into the ministry”, because that’s not the sort of thing, you know, I mean knowing the rebellious son they had he might have rejected it. Sort of wandered off somewhere else.

But they’d been praying. So, my father was dead, but my mother, so away we went.

Not now. I was myopic, single minded. I stayed on the RofO, Reserve of Officers. And I was frightened they were going to call me up again. But because I was a theological student, I was exempt at that time,

and so I didn’t worry about that, and when I became the rector of Newport, I still remained on the RofO [Reserve of Officers], I had no contact with the army per se, and I remained on it even when we went to Africa. I was still, I mean my name was on the list, as it were. But I didn’t have a desire to go to war again, I didn’t have a desire to be an infantry officer, I’ve got a new job. A new role.

Not that I’m denigrating that. I mean, I was so glad to have that experience, and all the things that I learnt, the discipline, the training, and being on time, all those sort of things, they’ve stood me in enormous stead. But I hate war. I mean, I think it’s a disgusting thing, and I encourage chaplains for the role that they have, and it’s this dichotomy again, but to answer your question, no.

I followed the history, in the media and elsewhere, but I didn’t actually see myself involved, because I knew God had put his hand on me for this. Maybe, maybe if I’d been ordained with experience behind me, and later on, if Korea was still going, I might have thought of offering as a chaplain, but that didn’t come up immediately. And I was so involved in the immediate, of being well trained

and being the best chaplain I could be, or the best clergyman I could be, no, the short answer is no, I wasn’t anticipating or looking forward to that.

Ok.

Archbishop T C Hammond.

He was a character with a capital K. He was a real character. Lovely Irish bloke. He’d retired in Ireland before Archbishop Mole brought him out to be the principal. And he was brilliant intellectually, and he was brilliant in teaching, brilliant in theology, we learnt lots of things from him theologically, in sort of normal teaching,

but he had, one of the things he taught me was, of course. He was in the Sinn Fein, and had been, he had been persecuted, literally physically persecuted by, sorry when I say he was in the Sinn Fein, he was in the Sinn Fein time, and as a Christian he had been persecuted by the Sinn Fein. And he had all the opportunities of holding grudges and things,

and he used to tell us stories, anecdotes, illustrations, of what happened, and he always used to, one of the things he used to say was, he used to say “My friend”. And named a person. And we thought it was just a way of describing someone. “My friend Bill Bloggs”. But we realised it was true. That although these people were politically at enmity, he really had got into the position of counting them as friends.

And although, in that era, and I’m talking about the late forties, and earlier, when he was concerned, there was this great tension between Roman Catholic and Protestant denominations, and he was caught up in that. And he used to talk to us about it. Yet there was never any animosity. He would show the differences, and I accept the differences, and still do,

but it was done in a way in which, he wasn’t vitriolic. And I’m talking in general. I mean, the things he taught us. I’ve read his books. He was erudite, he was complex, he was complicated, and some of the things I couldn’t understand, but he was there all the time. He was with it. You know, and I’ve seen him argue cases,

and remember books that he’s read, thirty years before, and he could say it’s on page 420, in the second paragraph on the page. That sort of memory. Which just sort of left me stone cold dead in the market.

There were so many, I can hardly remember. A lot of them were funnies, funny stories. I don’t remember the anecdotes, just that there were so many. But he became part of our lives, we, the students.

And I for one am eternally grateful that he taught me theology, he taught me the bible and showed me the breadth of the scriptures, and showed me step by step, and how it all fitted in. Over and over again, things that I’d known as a child, sort of taught at my mother’s knee, in inverted commas, or at Sunday school, now fitted into the overall picture of the biblical concept.

Through T C Hammond, and with the other teachers, Canon Lone, who was there, and the other teachers, and they were, and it was like a revelation for me. Wow, of course, it fits in, yeah. That sort of stuff. And he would talk to us about how to preach, and what to do, and how to prepare, and there was a lot of practical stuff. Yes, he was a great teacher. And I’m glad. See, he was the main member of staff, and the Vice Principal was Canon Lone,

and he also was brilliant. I can remember sitting in first year lectures, and Canon Lone’s responsibility was to teach us New Testament. I can see him now, taking out of his pocket, a tiny New Testament, this size, opening it up, and that’s all he had, and he would teach us out of the Gospels, out of the letters, for any hour. With points, and references and theology,

and we were taking notes furiously. Yes, it’s always amazed me that God had given him such a gift. Yes, a terrific gift that he has, and there were other members of staff. We had Keith Cole, who was, he eventually became a CMF missionary in Lamuria, in charge of the Theological College there, and then he went down to Bendigo. He taught us Old Testament.

We had a fellow called Minn, M-I N N, he was a New Zealander, and he also taught languages and New Testament stuff. So it was, yeah, it was a furious time, I suppose less furious than it is now. I presume at Moore College, these days, there’s far more emphasis on other things, but we were taught theology and ministry, and there was an emphasis on the ministry that we had to be qualified ministerially.

Qualified, and people came in from outside. Like older, Archdeacon Robbie, Archbishop Robinson’s father, he used to come in and teach us about preaching, and pastoral care, and taking funerals and weddings, and all the pastoral activities which are involved in a minister’s life. And we were given advice. Yeah. So it was, I’m grateful for that.

I think it’s different from Moore College now, because as I understand it now, as my son and two sons-in-law have gone through Moore College. And I’ve been in touch with people all the time since, and people in the parish here. But yeah, I’m not ungrateful.

Broughton Knox was getting his doctorate in England at the time. And he came back just at the end of my time,

as did, he then became Archbishop Donald Robertson. He came back. He was also studying in England. Because Broughton had been in the navy, and Don Robby had been in the army. He’d been an intelligence officer. But they’d been studying I think, Donald Robertson was at Cambridge, and I don’t know where Broughton Knox was, where he got his doctorate, I’ve forgotten. It was sort of at the beginning of his career, and at the end of mine.

The person who taught us language was a fellow called Allan Cole. Who became a very great friend. We worked together in all sorts of areas. He taught us language and he was brilliant at that, of course. Yeah. So ...

Not T C Hammond. TC was an Archdeacon, and Archbishop Mole gave him that role.

I think he probably would have been too old to have been elected Archbishop. And he became, he stayed on at Moore College for a long time, but also became the Rector of St Phillip’s, Church Hill where he had a Sunday job to do, but Archbishop Lone, or Canon Lone, became the Assistant Bishop of the Diocese, under Howard Mole, and then,

following Howard Mole, there was Gough, Hugh Gough, who was from Sydney. And when Hugh Gough left, the Diocese elected Marcus as the first Australian Archbishop.

Sure. UK.

Oh, I think in a sense we wanted to be Australian. The sense of evangelical identification. Not that Howard Mole wasn’t evangelical, he certainly was, but there was a sense of, “Let’s do our own thing, we’re grown up”, and this,

I think it’s all part of the culture, the growing culture, and ...

I think the Anglican Church, per se, was moving away from being Church of England,

and becoming the Anglican church of Australia, and that was part of it, of course, but, yes, I was not part of Synod when he was elected. I was in Africa. We were, but this is what I’m told, of how the arguments went.

I did catechist work while I was at college.

And then I was sent as curate

back to Mosman. I went to St Clement’s Mosman. Archdeacon Hugh Moir was the rector. A fortnight after ordination and he announced that he had accepted the parish of Summer Hill. So off he went to Summer Hill, and the fill-in was a fellow by the name of,

it’ll come to me. I’ve got this senior’s moment. He was the Federal Secretary of CMS for a while. Hewitt. Canon Hewitt, he became the locum for Mosman, and I stayed with him for another two months, I think. He was there for six weeks or two months, and then his replacement by the fellow Dillon, F.H.P Dillon was elected, was nominated, or chosen,

and soon after Dillon came, and we’re now talking about May, ’52. I had an invitation from Archbishop Mole to go and see him, and he told me, though I was still a deacon, he was sending me as rector to Newport, which was just breaking away from Narrabeen. So they’d broken away from Narrabeen, from Warrimoo, Mona Vale, Church Point, Newport, Bilgola,

Avalon, Palm Beach, that’s yours. So this is my first parish, and it was their first time of being independents. And that was good fun. I had a fellow called Archdeacon Wade, who lived in the parish at Avalon, and he’d been the Vice Principal of Moore College, so he took all the communions for me, and he was still lecturing in Greek and if ever I mentioned a Greek word in the sermon, and it wasn’t correct, he gently would put me right, and I was glad about that.

But that was a great time, hard work, but very exciting, and our first child, Cathy, was born while we were there, and yeah, it was terrific.

It had been building up for a while. It wasn’t sudden. We’re going back to Moore College time, actually.

And we’d heard someone speak about Hudson Taylor and his two-volumed biography. Which was very old fashioned. And someone said, “You ought to read it”. And so we saved and saved and saved, and bought it. And we read, Gloria and I read it to each other. We’d read a chapter or a half a chapter, depending on how tired we were, before we went to bed, and the experiences of Hudson Taylor,

and the way he trusted God, and the way, well just the way he lived his life, was really the beginning of a catalyst for us. And we started then thinking, “We’ve got so much here”, and Gloria was very anxious to be involved in that. As a matter of fact, she was more positive about it before we were married. And she’d done training in Deaconess House

with that in view, and so on. So we started thinking about it and I can remember the newly-appointed Bishop of Central Tanganyika, a fellow called Alf Stanway, who came to college and we talked to him about it, and he gave me the advice that I’d been given before. You know, “You’re not ready yet”. You know, finish it, run the course, finish what you’ve got to do. But give it, start praying for people. He gave me advice.

So, when we went to Newport, or Pittwater, this was in our minds and hearts. It was always there, it wasn’t that we were sort of submerging it. But I can remember about, the end of ’53, Gloria and I saying to each other, “We should apply to CMS. We’ve been here eighteen months now, and we ought to go. God’s calling us to do this.” And there was a sense that we’d be disobedient if we don’t do it.

So we did. And we filled out all the papers, and had the medicals and all that sort of stuff. All the theological papers. And I’m guessing. I haven’t got the precise time, but it’s about the end of ’53. And then, the normal routine of the Missionary Society was to call you up to meet the executive. You had private, a couple of private interviews, and then you’d meet the executive. And we were called to meet the executive.

Now, at that time we got the letter, the letter came from Clive Curl, who later became the Bishop of Armidale. But he was the General Secretary of CMS. And he said, “The appointment’s been set down for such and such a date, and we’d like you both to be there. And you’ll be interviewed with the view to us making a decision, final decision, about your acceptance”. I got the letter and I was very disturbed. I didn’t say anything to my wife, for a day at least,

if not more, and then I just said to her, “You happy about that letter from Clive Curl?” She said, “Well, I don’t have peace about it. I’m unhappy about it”. I said, “So am I”. “Oh, are you?”, she said. We hadn’t discussed it. We’d, neither of us had talked to the other. And so, we decided that we would decline the invitation to go and see the executive then.

I don’t really know, except it wasn’t God’s timing. I mean, that’s easy to say now. We looked at the members of the executive, and it wasn’t that we were frightened of them. I mean, half of them were my relatives, so it wasn’t that. But so I wrote to Clive Curl and said, “I’m sorry, we can’t come”. He said, “Well ok, the last thing we want to do is to try and force you into a position. When you think you’re ready, let me know”.

Well now, in hindsight, and this is not real theologically correct, but that year, the year 1954, was a year that we learnt things from God that we couldn’t have learnt any other way. I mean, God can teach you anything in any way. There were tensions in the parish, there were situations to develop, there were private issues that we worked out. Which have stood us in marvellous stead,

all the rest of our lives. And God in his kindness taught us during all of that year. With the new year coming up, near the end of ’54, I wrote back to Clive and I said, “We’re both very happy. God has been kind to us and taught us a number of things, and if the offer to come and see you is still there, we will”. We saw them and we sailed on the 15th January, 1955. For Tanzania.

Yeah, so that’s how it all worked out, so it was good.

It was in two, in general overall picture, in two lots. The first lot, which was five years, just on five years. The first few months we were filling in. We were at a place called Konja [?], where our theological college is now, and we didn’t have any language, but we went there, and I was asked to do some interesting things.

As a brand new missionary without language, I had to build an extension to the hospital ward, had to build a new meeting room for the theological college. And when I say build, I actually didn’t do it, but I had to plan it, and draw it, and make sure it was done, and the walls were in line. Good experience for my time in technical training at school. And then after we were there for a few months,

we went to a place called Tabora. Much further west. And I was their chaplain for five months, at the English-speaking congregation. And then I was sent by Bishop Stanway to a place called Manswa, which is in Vittoria. And it had, it was a chaplaincy, now by that, by that definition it’s an area, a fairly large area in those days, about the size of the half of the state of Victoria.

And in that there were nineteen English-speaking congregations and eight African-controlled parishes. Locally-controlled parishes. My job was to be in charge. I had to look after all the congregations. All the nineteen English-speaking congregations, and give encouragement to, and advice for, and share with the Africans, in their role.

So I became a chaplain to the English-speaking congregation. Some of them were administrative centres, some of them were gold mines, some of them were diamond mines. Williamson’s Diamond mine was in the area. All sorts of interesting things. And I would travel from our home at Manswa, to a place. I’d write beforehand and go on a weekday. I’d go Monday one day, Tuesday, Wednesday,

Thursday come back home for the weekend services. And all the places I went, I don’t think there were any other chaplains of any denomination anywhere. So I went right. Say I’d go to the Administrative Centre. And I’d end up at the club, or the whatever they called it, the club area. And there’d probably be eighteen Europeans living there, and they were all in the club, sort of, that time of night of course.

Because it was the only social place you could have. So I’d walk in and have an orange drink. Then at half past five I’d say, “Righto fellows, it’s five thirty. Or twenty five past five. At five thirty I’m going to shut the bar, and have a church service”. And this was my normal routine which I did for four years. And everyone stayed. Callithumpians, Roman Catholics, the lot, the lot. The atheists, the lot.

So we’d shut the bar, and put out a little table, put a bit of a white cloth on it, and I used to carry a cross because that was the only thing that would make people realise I was a chaplain. And I’d hand out hymn books. And hold a service. And people were converted at some of those services. I had confirmees who wanted to learn. I used to carry books and sell them. And I had great rapport with so many.

Then at night the boss of the station, or the manager of a mine or something, would give me a meal, a bed, and I’d go onto the next place and do the same. And I did that for a bit over four years. Away from home twenty four days and nights every month. Just doing this on the safari work. Which was pretty tiring, I did lots of miles, and lots of Ks [kilometres], and lots of experiences, and my chaplaincy went across the Serengeti, so I’d got from Mwanza north,

up to Mesoma, which so at least once a month, I’d go there twice. Once there and once back, which was good fun too. And eventually I had a church army lady, girl, English girl, who came to work with me, so she’d look after Mwanza and do all sorts of things. And lots of people would come and visit us there, because Mwanza was the end of the train line.

The end of, or the airport, major airport. And the shipping from Lake Victoria would come in there. So all sorts of people would come in and stay, overseas people, people we’d never heard of. Missionaries. Gloria would have to entertain them while I was away, of course. We had a two-bedroom house. It was just very exciting. It was really terrific. We’ve got friends now, and we’re still in contact. I rang one of our friends from those days, two days ago. Her husband’s just died in England.

And we’ve had close relationships. And close Christian relationships. Then at the end of, David was born, our son David was born while we were there. At the end of, just on five years, we came home. We came by train from there down to Dares Salaam. Caught the ship back through Bombay and back home. I was home for nine months.

Acting General Secretary of CMS for five or six of those, while Geoff Fletcher was away. And then I went back. We went back, sorry. And just before we went back, Bishop Stanway had written to say “He had decided to start a bible school, and that he had appointed me as the first principal”. And I knew nothing about running a bible school. I mean, only what you pick up. But I didn’t have any expertise. Didn’t have any training. Didn’t have anything.

But he said, “You’re Swahili, as good as it is, is not high enough standard”. So we went back to Tanzania, and we went to a place for the first five months, to a place called Barayga [?], where there was an Australian doctor, called Juliet Backhouse, who was brilliant in Swahili, who was brilliant at doctoring, very heavy, hard Swahili work under her. And Gloria was about to have Marian and she wasn’t too involved in that studying. And looking after two kids, and home-schooling Cathy and so on.

So at the end of that time, we went, we went to Salaam. But Barayga, just incidentally, in 1904, there was a lady called Katy Miller. An Australian Deaconess. She’d been through Deaconess training. And she went as a CMS missionary to East Africa, in 1904. And in 1906 she went to Barayga

and she was there for the rest of her life, for nearly forty years. But she was my great aunt. She was my grandmother’s sister. So Katy Miller, she was single of course, and all of four feet, four feet eight, I think she was, or four feet ten. So that was another link. A family link. Going back there with my great aunt being there for so long and well remember, or course. Then we went to Dodoma, and eventually moved into a house at the Salaam bible school.

A house with cement rendering, cement floors, no ceilings, and we built the bible school, got out first students, and I started to learn how to run a bible school and what to teach, and all the things that I learnt in the army, so many of the things, came back, came back, came back, and it was, you know, many times I’ve thanked God for the provision of that. It was really marvellous.

And so we used to run three month courses, and a couple of six months, and a year’s course. We were there for just pushing four years again. And the time came to end the story in Tanzania, when Cathy, our eldest, had finished primary school. She was going to a local English medium primary school in Dodoma,

with David, and Gloria used to drive them in the seven miles each day, and pick them up and so on. There was a great question mark about where she should go for secondary school. In Salaam the government had built a girl’s secondary school, but having, they replied to my enquiries to say that no European was allowed there, because it was built for Africans only, so she wasn’t allowed

and there was nothing in Tanzania, and there was nothing in, we might have got her into a school in Kenya, but the standards were such that we were very dissatisfied with that. We didn’t know what to do. And we could have got her in a school back here, and then gone back again, and we, you know, we were thrashing it around. And all missionary parents have this question to ask themselves.

And I’ve counselled people, many of them in a similar situation. And I can remember Gloria saying, “Well, I don’t know what the priorities are. God’s called us to this job. But you know what? He called me to be a mother first, he called us to be parents before he called us to be missionaries.” You think the priority and timing. It wasn’t that Cathy couldn’t have coped back here. She could have. But we had a responsibility for her, and it was a

pretty specialised sort of living that she’d had. There were few people in the school. The school was very small. I mean, at one stage, she was the only child in Class Five. I mean, it was a single-teacher school of all the grades. So we made the decision, because, it was a temporary decision to come back to Australia. And we came back for a couple of years and see how she went,

and then David would then be getting ready for secondary school, and when they were settled, and perhaps our family could look after them. And they could look after themselves. And they were quite able to do it. So, lots of sort of agony, and crying to God, and so we made the decision, and how well do I remember. We made the decision and I wrote to the chairman, who was still Clive Curl, the General Secretary, and said to him,

and wrote to Bishop Dane, Jack Dane, who was then the Federal Secretary of CMS, he wasn’t a bishop then, that we were resigning, temporarily, for you know, several years, and we had personal reasons, and we would tell him about them when we came home. But we were resigning, and we were sure that this is what God wanted us to do. We sent the letter on the Thursday, and on the Friday, when the letter was on its way to Australia, we had a cable from Clive Curl.

And the cable said, “CMS has never done this before, that is inviting a serving missionary to become the general secretary, but we’ve made this decision to invite you to become the General Secretary of NSW. And we’d like your answer”. So we said, Gloria and I said to each other, “If you want confirmation of what God’s done, what He wants us to do, there it is. They want us”,

and I didn’t know anything about that of course, so we came home. So we had a very great and marvellous times in Tanzania. Very thrilled.

I’m sorry.

Paul White.

Sure. He did four years in Tanzania, at a place called Boomi, where Marian was born, our youngest, was born there, and he was brilliant

in the sense of being able to take a local situation. He was a great doctor. I mean, stories abound with people whom he’s healed and, more, led people Christianly into Christian things. Great stories. But he would take those stories, and he had such a mind and such an ability, to take a truth and turn it into parable, when he’d go back in the jungle doctor stories, and working with people like Clifford Morne and others,

that it was, it became really top hole stuff. And for many, many years the Jungle Doctor books were well known, and then his stuff was reproduced in Clifford, not Clifford, Graham Wade produced his stuff in flash cards, and stuff like that, which I used in Tanzania in the bible school. I used to go on evangelistic trips,

walking trips, every weekend with some of the students, and I would show, you know, use these flash cards. Jungle Doctor stories. Which were very applicable, because they were based upon, like little leopards growing up into big leopards. Like little sins growing into big sins, and things like that. Yeah, he was a great character, and his wife was very unwell. His wife there, Mary, and she actually died not long after they came, well, some time after. But I think. As I understand it, her medical condition

was the reason why CMS couldn’t continue to send him there. And he came home. But he never looked, you know then she passed on, and then he remarried.

Not translation. I mean, we had specialists who were translating. By the word ‘translation’, I take it you mean

translating the scriptures into English. I used to translate when people came. For example, when Bishop Lone came and visited East Africa, I asked him to give a few lectures. And Jack Dane. I would translate for them into Swahili. It’s not that translation. No. But I wasn’t involved in the translation, but we had local, we had Australian people who were translating into the local language. Of Cheoga [?] And published a bible in Cheoga [?].

And we would use the Swahili bible, which was a very good one.

I’m sure there were lots of them. Not that particular word. I mean, there’s a word in Swahili, “Moia”, which can mean not just the thing that sends the blood around your body, but the centre of yourself, but sometimes there are words which you have to use, and describe, and I mean, something comes to mind. When I was at Barayga, learning Swahili, I got one of the gospel recording machines

where it ran on battery, four batteries, and you put the batteries in, and I got gospel recordings, gave me little tapes of the local people, both Wakaguru people and the Masai.

I had the Masai telling the story of the lost sheep in Masai. And I didn’t know Masai. But some of these Masai were there, coming into the hospital, when it was the hospital base, and I would set up this little recording after my study time, and I used to call them over in Swahili. They knew Swahili. I’d call them over, and I’d say, “Listen to this”, and I’d just turn it on. And their eyes would, and they’d be listening to their own language, and the story of the lost sheep,

and the relevance of it and then the application of it. Now, the end of all that is, that the local Anglican rector, pastor, who was then an archdeacon, who had been converted under my great aunt. He came. And he knew this. Because he’d asked me previously. But he came in front of the Masai, and he said to them. “Well, that’s a great machine you’ve got there”, he said, “How does it work?” And I said, “Do you mean what drives it?”

And he said, “Yeah, what drives it?” So I opened the back and showed him the four batteries, and the word for battery in Swahili is ‘stone’. It’s the same, it’s a ‘stone’. Then he quoted that bit out of the gospels that even the stones will cry out, which Christ said, and he preached a sermon. And he said, “You know, this is exactly what Jesus was saying. You try to shut people up, and even the stones are crying out”. So, it’s not the same indication as what you said about heart and liver,

but you know, you’ve got to be ready to pick up the words and roll with them. And he was past master of it.

Well, at the end of my four years at Vaucluse, as I think I told you, Archbishop Lone invited me to go to Wollongong

to take Graham Delvidge’s place, which I did. And that was very, it was terrific. It was very exciting, very happy. And he then became primate of the Anglican Church in Australia. As I said before. But he then invited me in and said, “The fact that Bishop Hugh Moir has died, and was Chaplain General and Bishop to the Defence Force”,

or Bishop of the Forces as it was then, “I’ve been asked to nominate someone who could take his place. Now”, he said, “The army is going to relinquish this role. The head chaplain as a major general and come back to brigadier, from two star to one star, so I’ve been asked to submit the name of somebody who is”, as I think I said before, “In episcol orders, he’s a bishop, because we know that his role is going to develop in the army to be a bishop.

Somebody’s who’s been a bishop, somebody who is a bishop, somebody who lives on the east coast, because it’s too far away from West Australia to be involved. Someone who’s had military experience, and somebody who’s under fifty five.” And from what I remember him saying, there were three. He had a choice of three. But he said, “I’ve thought and prayed about it, and I’m inviting you to take the job”. So I said, “Wow. How long have I got?”

He said, “Well, if you can let me know today, or tomorrow, I would appreciate that”. So I came home to Gloria and I told her about this, and you know, all sorts of questions. What does it mean about being Bishop of Wollongong, and so I just felt it was right to do it. I hadn’t lost my love of the army which I’d had, although I was glad what I was doing now. I wasn’t hankering after it, but this seemed just something else. And so I went back

and I think I said “Yes”. So my name was submitted, and eventually the army agreed with who I was, I had to go through all the security tests, and so on. And had to go to the Executive Council and the Governor General. And do all this. I’ve got that Executive Order still there. And I was appointed. So I had to join the army again. Medicals, uniforms, etc, etc. Remembering all the protocol and what happens, and for some years now,

I’d been a bishop and in a church set up you come last, as a mock show of modesty, I think. But now, as a general, you always go first, you know. You’ve got to take the lead all the time. And I had all sorts of interesting things to learn and so on. So I came in and I became the Head of Corps. In other words, the head of all the army,

all the chaplains, and all the decisions, and all the reports on them. They had to come through my hands, and I had to mix with the chaplains. And there were those who were not happy with me being appointed because, I generalise, some of them felt that some of those who’d seen the long and the burden of the heat of the day as a chaplain in the army, should have been appointed, and I’d never been a chaplain in the army.

I mean, I left as an infantry lieutenant. And I was now a chaplain major general. And we got over that all right. And then, Frankie Moir had been the Bishop to the Forces, which was a quasi role of caring for, but not having pastoral concern over the chaplain, but sort of caring for pastorally. And navy and air force people as well.

And I picked that up, but for two years, I had that role in the army. And all the time negotiations were going on, which I knew they would, for the change of direction for the army chief chaplain. And the evolvement of this new role for bishop to the defence force, because no longer was it ‘forces’, no longer was the army, navy and air force ‘forces’, it was now one defence force,

of which the army, navy and air are a part. And so eventually the government, all of us negotiated and so on, we became part of this little group which I mentioned before. The Religious Advisory Committee to the Services. And there were five of us of two-star status. There was a Roman Bishop, an Anglican Bishop, a Presbyterian,

a Uniting Church, and another bloke who looked after all the rest. That is, he looked after such people as, you know, Salvation Army and anyone else, congregational, who came in. And we used to meet, and our role was to decide the policy. The chaplaincy policy for the three now. I mean, I’d left the army and handed over to one of the army chaplains, as the brigadier,

and also included in this five, but of a different status, there was a Jew, Fabian, who had been a chaplain in the war, I think, and he was a delight to work with. He really was. He didn’t impose himself. But then we, what we had to do was go and visit all the chaplains and in my role, from an Anglican point of view, to take confirmations and pastorally care for them,

and I followed on what bishop Hugh Moir had done, I called a conference every year. A bit like a Synod. But I used to hold it at Gilboran [?], the place that we had and I used to write to them and say, “I’m not inviting you, I’m telling you”. I mean, you can do that. There was no excuse. Unless you’re overseas on a task, you’ll be there, and we got, eventually we got the Defence Force to pay for them,

their travel, and so on, and we would hold it from say, Sunday night to Friday afternoon. At Gilboran . And I did a number of things there, and I found them very useful. On the Sunday night, we would meet together with a first service and share together. On the Monday I would set aside as a synod, and we would have a sort of committee and

we would have discussions about what was going on, and make decisions, and get resolutions, and it was really full time, writing down notes and stuff. And then Tuesday, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, we would always invite someone to come and take bible studies. And they would come and share it and we would listen to the studies, and go up and reflect on them, and have some spare time.

And then on the Thursday night, or no, on the Friday, the last study would be Friday, and Friday lunch time, we would have a service. A goodbye communion service, at which I would read out the ordination powers. Which they had all gone through previously in different diocese and places. Because they were all over Australia. And I would make them recommit themselves to the promises which they had made. Some of them just five years before, and some of them twenty five years before.

And I’d read the ordination service, and pause, and make them answer. It was a recommitment. And that, in itself, I think was a pretty good spiritual exercise for a lot of them. Then, they’d go back home to their particular units. And I kept in touch with them. And I would write to them. And the three principal chaplains of the army, navy and air became archdeacons.

The primate appointed them archdeacons and they became my caucus as it were. My executive. And we’d meet together monthly and talk about all sorts of things. And I really, really, really, enjoyed that decade of being both chaplain, captain general, and then bishop to the Defence Force. It was an exciting, fulfilling time. It was hard work on me. When I was in Wollongong, I appealed to the archbishop for assistance, because I was the archdeacon as well as the bishop.

And he eventually, he said that “He would appoint Harry Goodhew”, who had come down from Coopooroo and become the rector of Wollongong. So he was appointed archdeacon, and when I was away, he so kindly and so faithfully and very well, fulfilled stuff. And then I went, I was transferred to Parramatta and my Archdeacon there was a fellow called Newmarch, Walter Newmarch,

with whom I’d been at school at Barker. And he’d had a lot of army experience himself. So when I was away doing stuff and there were crises arose, he would fill them out, or keep in touch. So I was doing, I guess, a hundred days a year in the Defence Force stuff.

The role in general was to

recruit new chaplains when there were vacancies, care for and pastorally encourage and look after and chaplains while they were there, and when their turn of service came to an end, because some of them sign up for five years or longer, it depends. When the term came to an end, to get them a job back in the diocese from which they’d come. Or if they don’t want to go back, to do that.

So that’s sort of the general picture. The recruiting of chaplains was an interesting task, and not particularly easy. Because of my own theological background, I had certain criteria which I set, which had not been necessarily adhered to before or after. And yet I had to be able to roll with it all. In the second part of caring from them, yes,

there were times when they had to be reprimanded. There were a couple of chaplains whom I told that I couldn’t accept them going on as chaplains because of their attitudes or, one of them, a South Australian chaplain, got involved with the grog so badly that he was called by his commanding officer, his officer commanding, he was in the air force, to come and see him. He and the officer commanding,

so I arranged for him to be discharged. There were, there are times when discipline is necessary. And sort of internal discipline. Not major matters like that, but I can remember saying to one fellow one day, “Look, I want you to remember that your first calling is a priest, in holy orders, you’re a priest, and next you’re a social worker”.

Because I think he had given away his, as much as he could, the responsibility of pastoral work, or church activities, and was deeply involved and doing it well, the sort of, the other bits. And there were all sorts of other, there were running incidents, and running situations, but now, in a sense I wasn’t autocratic. I hope I was never autocratic, but I had the three archdeacons,

and if there was a problem in an area, navy, army, or air, we would share it together and we would discuss it. Being in a military situation, as a senior officer, you can actually say things, and give commands, and expect them to be followed. Not that I was ever “Do this” attitude, I might have been that when I was nineteen, but I certainly wasn’t later. And yeah,

it was, it’s part of living, but generally speaking we got on tremendously well together, and I laid down some rules about how we would dress theologically. I mean, you know, in church services, and how we would do this and that. And there were people who didn’t agree with what I was saying sometimes, but that’s all right. Life goes on.

And they’re in the army. I mean, they’re first of all a clergyman, and secondly they’re in the army but they have to obey their officer commanding. If he gives them a proper order they’ve got to obey it, because they’re in the army and they’ve accepted that restriction. And they accepted my order as a bishop. In the Anglican Church, that role. See, the authority of a bishop is not something that you are given. You earn it, I mean, it’s all very well to say,

“You’re an elder. You’re an episcopes.” But if you haven’t earned the right to give that command, you’re really pushing up against it. And so my role was to be part of them, and listen to them, and share with them, and some of them were going through very difficult personal problems. Their kids went off the rails, drug wise and other things. And I would listen to them.

And some of them had wives who died. So you would share in all their problems, but yeah, trying to keep them in touch with God, and I would, when I went to Gilbora [?], for that conference every year, just to fill that out a little, I decided that some of them, when you eyeballed each other, it was a fairly, it could be a bit difficult,

for some of them to eyeball me, and I’m asking them direct questions about their job, so I instigated a thing in the first year, where I’d go for a walk, and I would arrange, say we’d have forty at the conference, and I would arrange forty forty-minute walks in the four days. And they would fit them in. And I would take them away and we’d walk around Gilbora, and down towards the piggery and so on, and up to Menangle station. And we would walk

and I’d always get back in time for the beginning of the next forty minutes, because it’s military and you keep time. And they used to gig me about that. I understand that they still joke about it, but this guy used to take everyone for a walk. Mind you, I kept fit and I was pretty tired by the end of all this walking. But I could walk next to a bloke and talk to him about a difficult personal situation, which might have been, and I think, some of them,

felt more at ease talking looking at the grass, rather than looking me in the eye. We would always pray when we got to the end. Pray, and then we’d come back and, next please. And I found that I was really able to get on side with, and share with, a lot of the blokes like that.

Yes. It’s not a good.

It’s not a good witness. It’s not a good sign. I mean, COs, if a man’s got to be the commanding officer of a unit, or officer commanding, he is well-versed with human nature and its failures. But the expectations of chaplains is different from the expectations of other officers. And I think rightly, myself.

And if they didn’t fulfil those expectations, when I would visit a camp I would be asked by the chaplain to go and take confirmation, or I would just go on a visit, because we had enough money, and the government would give us money, and the five of us in the RACF [?] would say, ok, each month that we met, “Who wants to go where, and let’s agree that two of us won’t go to Darwin, and use up all that money,

or go to Perth. One of us will go there, and one of us will do Sydney bits and so on.” But the COs were well aware and they’d say, “This fellow, he should have a different standard”. The particular bloke, of whom I spoke, the CO said to me, I remember, “You know, every lunch time, when we come in for lunch, very few of my officers have a drink at all, at lunch.

They might have an orange juice, they might have a squash, they might have one beer, but it’s very limited, because it’s lunch and because they’re going back to work in forty minutes. But this bloke goes straight to the bar, puts his foot on the footrest, and away he goes.” And he said, “He’s mocked. People laugh at him. And what he has to say as a chaplain isn’t recognised”. And I mean, immediately I saw that. So yeah, the COs, it had a bad effect upon them, in a sense.

But this bloke was a failure. And he was a failure as a chaplain. I mean, he might have had internal reasons for his problems, I mean we all have difficulties. None of us is as we want to be, but I think that’s the general answer to your question.

Yes. Not just to be a go-between and to soften the blow. He doesn’t always necessarily have to do that,

although that’s a good general description of Colin Powell’s, but where there are pastoral needs, and every unit, every group of blokes, girls and blokes, have, there are needs, and their spiritual needs. I mean, there’s social needs. But their spiritual needs. I mean, there are lots of social needs, for example, and I really don’t want to develop it, but I’ll just make a statement. Since the Defence Force opened its forces to women in a general way,

there have been fairly obvious social needs which have developed between the two sexes serving together. And a chaplain can be involved in that. Now, other officers are too, and the blokes themselves. But the chaplain seems to have the right to be able to talk to them about such issues. Or there are other needs, which, I mean he holds church services and there are all sorts of things the chaplains can do.

One of which in the air force, when I was there, he was actually posted to a new place, he went to Richmond, in the air force, and there were only two, I think only three, I think of all the families that were at Richmond, only three families lived on base. So on the weekend, he had no one coming to church. I mean, if they were church people, they wanted to go, they were living, you know, Windsor or wherever, and he said to me, I said, “It’s a big challenge for you”,

and he said, “Yes, thank you. I’ll work on it”. About, I don’t know, a few months later, I was living at Baulkham Hills at the time, he rang me up and he said, “I wonder if you’d care to come, in a fortnight’s time, on a Wednesday”. The story was that he been to his OC, officer commanding, some while before, and he had got him to agree to this. That on a Wednesday,

that all the training unit, all the training unit has lunch time at the same time. On other days they were staggered according to what the unit commander wanted. Lunch at the same time. He got the officer commanding to agree to the local band, the air force band there, to be available for forty minutes, or whatever it was. Lunch time. He got the chapel opened up and cleaned out, by the time I got there, and he’d been doing this for several months,

and he asked me to go and speak at the church service, there were a hundred and something people there. And this was his pure working the system, getting on side with people, showing that the chaplain had a message. And he was a strong evangelical. If I can mention names, there was a bloke that had been before me, for two weeks, he was a fellow called John Chapman. A chap who’d seen several people converted. And the chaplain himself, was a fellow called Jim Doust,

who was a marvellous air force chaplain, and he and I had been friends. Had been friends before he went into the air force. But he’s done all sorts of other things, and when he became the Dean of Cairo, as a CMS missionary, he was instrumental in getting the bishop to invite Gloria and me to go to Cairo, on two occasions for a month, and we took conferences, and I preached in the Cathedral, and currently, and today is the beginning of February, ’04.

Currently Jim and Elaine Doust are in Algiers. As missionaries. Trying to get a church together. And he’s pushing seventy. Really, that’s the sort of guy whom you like to see as a chaplain, who works the system, and is upmarket and gets on well with people. All this is a good example, or a good witness of what a Christian should be.

There’s a lot of interdenominational working together. Because, you see, on a base, on an army, navy, air force unit, chaplains would work together. They would cover for each other in all sorts of ways. On one base, there would be one Anglican, and perhaps a Roman Catholic and perhaps one other. And he might be Uniting, he might be whatever. He would cover and they would cover each other in a number of ways.

Not necessarily the nitty grit of the church services, because Roman Catholic Church services and Anglican Church services have a different import, but for example, I opened, it was then the new chapel at Townsville. Limerick barracks at Townsville. And it was a chapel that the three of us, that is the Roman Catholic Bishop to the Forces, me,

and the Uniting bloke, we opened the chapel for multi use. Yeah. It wasn’t a rivalry. There was a, the rivalry issues, they used to say, “We don’t have the luxury of really working hard at the rivalries. We have the luxury of working together for the cause of Christ”. Now, that was watered down with some people’s attitudes of what the cause of Christ really was,

but yeah, I think there was a good happiness of working there in that role.

I don’t know that there’s a definite answer, or a definitive answer. There have been times, it fluctuates. With the present Bishop to the Defence Force,

at the beginning of ’04, Dr Tom Frame, he was a serving Navy Officer for twelve or fourteen years, and he’s really, we’ve seen a revival of interest in chaplaincy work. His knowledge of the inner workings of the navy and he used to be, I think he was a speech writer for one of the senior naval officers and so on. And he’s written a number of books.

And because of his, somewhat because of his influence and somewhat because of the quality of some of the blokes that he’s recruited, and girls, there’s been this upsurge, and also because of all the defence, the peace keeping jobs, all the Timors, and even Iraq, and Timor etc, people are being posted there, and that in itself,

he’s been able to put the significance of a Christian role in the chaplain’s role there, and they’ve had a particular role. I know in East Timor, he’s had chaplains there, you know permanently for a long time, and they’ve had a particular role in that.

Yes, a fellow called Riley,

who was the Chaplain General. Yesteryear. Frankie Moir, whom I’ve mentioned, was really a very great chaplain. He joined the army as a chaplain and he was in Tobruk and in the Middle East. I think it was Tobruk. If he wasn’t in Tobruk he was certainly in the Middle East. And had all the experience of North Africa and elsewhere, and came back to the islands.

His successor was a bloke called Allan Begby. Chaplain General. And he’d served in the islands. Got a mention in despatches and so on. They’re the current, sort of in the last fifty years, these fellows. And they have been chaplain leaders, and there have been others, like I’ve mentioned, and probably at different leadership levels. Fellow like Jim Doust and, there’ve been a number.

I don’t want to choose people out specifically, because there were many of them great chaplains. The Dillon brothers, great chaplains, and really worked hard for the things of God. And it’s interesting to me, from my own background, and I generalise, that whereas a chaplain has a clear understanding of Christ and is Christo-centric in his thinking,

rather than denominational-centric, my generalisation is that he’s a better chaplain. Because he has a purpose, to introduce people to the hope to come, to the assurance of everlasting life, and some of the blokes who applied to be chaplains in my day had none of that.

I mean, I used to try to set up a role play for them and ask them questions about, if someone was about to die, I’d say, “Now let’s pretend that you’re an air force chaplain, and the pilot’s told you you’re all going to prang” and they say, “What will I do, what will I do?”, and the answer, several of the chaplains that I interviewed, as a possibility, and they didn’t become them, had no view of the significance of the transcendence of the greatness of God.

Or the fact the He was who He was. And it was, “You’ll be right, mate. It’ll all work out in the wash”, sort of thing. Well, I didn’t want people like that as chaplains. Not at all. There is a vast difference of churchmanship, and I acknowledge that and accept it. But even within the churchmanship there is a desire to understand Christ. And to put Christ in the right place in the lives of the servicing people.

As I said before, when I was there, there were seventy thousand people who were in uniform. And if the chaplains weren’t introduced to that, and these people didn’t have the opportunity of hearing about Christ, then I think that’s a very damning and derogatory situation. Or it’s very significant. Not that they went out evangelising, as a Billy Graham or a John Chapman all the time, but, some of them were pretty good at it.

But they had to work the system. They were in uniform as the others were in uniform. They had orders to obey as the others, but in doing that, there was the scope to do it, and they did it well.

I see chaplains as non-weapon carrying. It’s an issue all the time. And I mean, we weren’t at war when I was there. They had no wars, or local insurgence. And I know the issue has come up. I’ve seen discussion of it in the emails

in the last two or three years, but my view is that once a chaplain becomes a fighting chaplain, by the word ‘fighting’, I mean you’re armed, you’re actually taking away a significant role that the chaplain has. He’s both a peacemaker and, I mean, if he gets shot by someone coming upon him, I think my answer is “So what”.

I hope that doesn’t sound too blasé, but my view is, when I was in the infantry I was glad to have a rifle. Glad to have a Bren gun, glad to have a pistol, but when I became a chaplain, when I left that, and was converted in a real sense. I mean, I’d been converted, but a new calling, and in the RofO, I mean, I knew I’d never carry arms again, and I have a real strong antipathy to that.

Mmmm. Mmmm. No one ever had arms.

Oh, things like in Gallipoli, someone was going to come over the top. Or Kokoda Trail. You know, we think it’s right that just in case. Like hedging your bets, and having a bet both ways, as it were.

But I think we have, the moment you do that, I think you’re opening yourself up to severe criticism from those whom you’re working with, because you’re there representing Christ, who is the King of Peace. Now, peace in war? Oh, come on, It doesn’t work. No, but it’s an inner peace, and you don’t grab that by sort of putting a bullet hole through your opponent’s heart.

Yeah. It’s a very difficult subject, but I still have not moved from my conviction that the chaplain should be unarmed.

Oh, it might have. I mean, I didn’t know all the circumstances of that bloke.

But he was really not visible to me as a junior officer. There may have been very strong Roman Catholics who would go to him on a Saturday or Sunday, but he wasn’t visible to me, and that had an effect in a sense that I used to really encourage, and it was very easy in war time, and very easy in the training when I used to go around and see them, because my role was to visit them and encourage them and to be visible.

For them to do that. And I used to ask them what they were doing? How visible they were and what their activities were? I used to ask them things like, “What are you reading in the bible?” “Is God answering your prayers?” some of the questions some of the chaplains didn’t like answering very much. But I think, sort of challenging on those sort of questions. But yeah. To answer your question. It could well have had an effect. I never sat down and said, “Well, this is what I saw”. But in the back of my mind, the picture that I painted for you today has been there,

and it probably did.

That it is really a terrible, horrible thing. Now you don’t have to be a brilliant bloke to say that. I understand war, as I’ve thought a lot about it, to be the result of sinfulness in the world. I mean, there are all sorts of different wars. I’m now not talking about national war. I mean, there are domestic wars

and trade union wars, and political wars and so on. And I use the war in a general sense, that is, opposition to where people have a point of view and try to move it. Actions go together for war. And they are trying to get their own way, through force, and the whole nation is committed and there is so much loss of life, and so much expense, and so much effect upon the population, not only where the war is, but the population after the war, wherever.

I mean the population of Germany and Japan after the wars, and in England. I think there’s been a shift in the last twenty years or so as far as we are concerned in this country, that we’ve not been to war, in the real sense. Perhaps the four days in Kuwait, Iraq, the first time, but we really haven’t been as a nation to war. Sure we’ve had,

where there’s been insurgents and where we’ve had peacekeeping jobs, and where there have been war situations, and I think there is some validity for keeping the peace. Establishing a force whereby it can be kept so that the innocents in both sides can be protected. I also think that as far as the peace keepers and the others are concerned

that we have a responsibility in Australia. See, we are called the defence force, and it’s very rare that we’ve done anything but defend. And I think I’d like to keep it like that. That we are defending, and rightly defending. I mean, to allow an overseas force or group to overtake us is to say goodbye to, not just our heritage, but a whole heap of things,

including Christian things, for which we stand. And I think there is a right which is implicit in Christian activity, in defending what we have. I mean, there is certainly a picture in the Old Testament, certainly a picture of God’s people defended. And they did go to war. But I have always been glad that I was a member of the ‘defence’ force. More often than not the word ‘defence’ isn’t outlined,

isn’t held strongly, because people think war is taking the initiative, and taking the aggressor role. And I think that was part of the major problems that lots of people had when the present government decided to go to war in Iraq. Now, it was, in a sense, defence, and the prime minister has said that. “We’re defending ourselves against terrorists”, and I understand and accept that argument.

But I think it’s, we need to be careful. There is a place, therefore, in defence, I think. When an aggressor tries to come and take over, and that’s why at the end of the Second World War, when I was becoming involved and Japan, and the Japanese were coming down, and obviously Australia was a mark, I was a member of the Defence Force even though we were going to be, in a sense, aggressors.

We had to go and meet them where they were, at the Kokoda Trail, Though no one ever did. But I think that that’s the role. It’s a defence role, and it’s therefore a legitimate role. But the moment we become aggressors, if we see something that’s happening in Indonesia or India or now I’m just choosing names out of a hat, I have no reason to choose them. But why we want to become aggressors, then I think that’s totally and unmistakably wrong.

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean chaplains have problems like these sort of problems. They have problems on why should I be, like when the government decides to take action, to send peacekeepers. And the chaplains, as I’ve said before, have a role with the people with whom they’re responsible. To not just hold their hand, but to tell them of the things of Christ.

And sometimes, when a group of service people are in a tension situation, like there could well be in a peacekeeping job, the chaplains there to teach them, tell them, instruct them, of the role that Christ has. And he has a role, and a particular role. And the role of a Christian. And also to teach them things about prayer and dependence on God.

Which is vital. So I wholeheartedly support the role of chaplains in the defence force. And I say again, without proviso, provided it’s seen as a defence force. And we have the role. All these people, we shouldn’t leave them shepherdess. Without people to care for them.

Your patience has been terrific.