Australians at War Film Archive

Neil.

I was born in North Sydney. I understand they’re

the council chambers now and I was the eldest child of a family that moved into Northbridge and I then had a brother and a sister. I went to the local primary school in Northbridge and eventually went to what was then the North Sydney, Chatswood Junior Boys’ High School and I spent, I think, four years there

before I left. And when I turned eighteen I joined the Royal Australian Navy and I spent four years in the navy. When I left I went into the Merchant Navy and I spent a couple of years in the Merchant Navy and after that I joined the New South Wales police and I had another four years in the police.

And I was invited to join a commonwealth body that was sort of anti-communist investigations. I didn’t join that but as a result of getting interviews from folk at the church we were going to I went to work for a metal company.

And I remained there for about twelve years. I left that and I joined the New South Wales government Department of Corrective Services and became a probation officer, a probation and parole officer, and I spent sixteen years in that organisation. I eventually

became officer in charge of the Bondi area with responsibility for over two hundred cases, most of them sadly oriented to drugs, and I remained there till I retired. I have been retired now for over twenty years, which is more or less, and enjoying it thoroughly. And that’s it.

Yes.

After the Kuttabul?

Well I went down to the Flinders Naval Depot when I had just turned eighteen and I was down there for three months and then I was sent to Garden Island with the view of eventually picking up or joining a corvette.

HMAS Dubbo. On the Kuttabul I was on sentry duty on the Kuttabul steps where the Kuttabul was actually tied, and on the night of the 31st of May 1942 the Japanese midget submarines entered the harbour and my relief failed to materialise at midnight and

so I ran from where I was up onto the Kuttabul, up onto the upper deck…

Jump to the next ship.

After the Kuttabul experience I went to the Dubbo, HMAS Dubbo, which was a corvette. And for a number of months we were sort of on convoy duty on

the eastern coast. Eventually went across to Fremantle. We were operating out of Fremantle, actually sort of you know, convoying ships out into the Indian ocean and I remained there for eighteen months. But when I was on this sort of convoy duty I used to notice on the stern of merchant ships there were gunners, so I volunteered for a gunnery course, went back to Flinders Naval Depot, trained to be a

gunner and eventually was posted to a number of merchant ships. Now some of the names are unfamiliar now as the names have gone on, but one of them, the last one I was on was a fleet tanker, the Korumburra, and I was involved in the invasion of the Philippines in a second convoy of over a hundred ships. And we went up and

the main part of the convoy went on to Lingayen Gulf and the Philippines. We remained in Leyte. We were refuelling landing craft and things of that nature. After that I was on a little ship that was running up to Dutch New Guinea. Dutch New Guinea and carrying up troops to… I don’t know what they were doing but we were just carrying the troops up to Hollandia [now Jayapura, Indonesia].

Near Hollandia. The other ships I was on were… One was a Yugoslav ship. The Olga Topic comes to mind. One of the things that was dangerous about that was that they were carrying iron ore and of course any time…when they were torpedoed they just sank instantly virtually. And I remained in the navy then I was discharged in 1945.

At the end of the war. I was still in uniform when I was married.

Yeah. When I arrived in Northbridge our house was the first house in Bligh Street.

Northbridge was not built on in those days as it was today. There were paddocks nearby where there were cattle and things of that nature and it was just a sort of an isolated suburb which finally developed into what it is. Then as I grew up I had a brother and a sister. My brother was five years younger and my sister was fifteen years younger. My

dad worked as a commercial traveller out in western New South Wales. So really we only saw Dad in the weekends because he used to go off on Sunday nights, spend the week away and come home, so in effect my mum raised us. The local school was in its early stages but I went there and we loved the

school and the community was quite closely knit. And my wife, who lived several streets away, and I and others joined the local swimming club and used to meet down there every weekend. There were trams running along the main street and eventually down to the Cammeray Bridge, which they started to repair and because

the trams would come from the city and stop on the Cammeray side and we would have to walk across the bridge to get into the tram and things like that. It was a lovely suburb, very, very quiet. We went to school there and later of course I went down to North Sydney for the high school and…

I hope you edit all this.

(UNCLEAR).

No.

I admired my father tremendously. He was a very fine man and I missed really the fact that as we were growing we didn’t really see that much of him, but the weekend was marvellous and he used to come home and usually bring something from the Central

Railway Station and a gift for us. Usually a nice chocolate cake or something like that. That wasn’t the reason I loved him but he was a very fine man and he was in the First World War. Served in the 104th Howitzer Battery. I have a photograph of him as, with his, he was a sergeant and with other men. But we grow up in a very, very happy home, which is a blessing to us.

And when my siblings came along it was just a joy to live here. We used to play tennis with my parents at local tennis courts and occasionally swim with them. But it was just a happy family gathering, family group.

France, yeah. He was in Ypres.

No. Well that’s one of the things I’ve always regretted because here am I today

and the years have gone by. I’ve been talking about what happened to me during the war and my family talk about it, and most recently there was a great family thrill when one of my grandsons, who was seven, joined the Kuttabul celebration with the commander of the Kuttabul and the three of us laid the wreath on the memorial there.

And I taught him quietly how to salute navy fashion, because it is different to the army, and the reaction from a lot of people was quite extraordinary because one ABC [Australian Broadcasting Commission] lady said, “When I saw the little boy saluting,” she said, “I just wept and wept.” In a sense we got the idea from watching US President John F.] Kennedy’s son salute when his father was assassinated.

And I never talked about the war with him and that I regret because as I’ve been told recently, well it was some years ago now, it is all history and it has to be recorded and that part of my life and my relationship with Dad I regret. He never talked about the war. He gave me a love for the French language. There was somebody to give me a smattering of French and while what

I have subsequently learned I have almost forgotten, he gave me a love for that language.

Yes. yes. I forget what age he was when he came back but my parents married shortly after that and I was born in 1923.

No. It was just a smattering of French words and that and when I went to school and I was put into class that learned Latin and French. I hated Latin and loved French.

Mum was marvellous too. She had a marvellous sense of humour, which was a blessing to us, and I think it’s sort of gone down through the family.

Sometimes unconsciously she was a very, very funny lady and but, we, as I said earlier, were a very happy family and Mum was the one who really, in a sense raised us, because of my dad’s absence. And they ended up, through her efforts I think, owning the little house…or the house in Bligh Street which I think they purchased for nine hundred pounds, you know, in those days.

But it was her effort and her influence. I think that just made the house that it was. Just a marvellous lady.

No. She never worked. In those days the women really didn’t work. The men went off and worked and, excuse me, she just was a house body, house person, house mum.

Yes. Both born down in…Both lived down in North Sydney really. Mum’s father, my grandfather, owned the grocer shop, would you believe, in Miller street, which was the only grocer shop in miles. And he wasn’t a good businessman, tragically – he was too kind. He was a wonderful Christian man and he was just too kind and

if people couldn’t pay their debts well that wasn’t a problem. And eventually of course he lost the business, sadly, and he moved away. And my grandmother came to live with us and she was a wonderful influence upon us too. I ran away from home as a little boy with a friend of mine who in subsequent years was a prisoner of the Japanese.

We were unhappy at the time for some reason so we ran away and he lasted two days and I lasted about four, and we just got past Gosford on our journey up to Queensland. We were silly little boys in those days. I think we were fifteen and we were going up to Queensland to cut cane and it was all very romantic, and when you look at it now, quite

silly but he came again back home and I came home very ashamed of what I had done. And of course Mum wouldn’t speak to me for a couple of days, which broke my heart, but I accepted it and it sort of blew away eventually.

Well I think we were totally just unorganised and got homesick I suppose was the major thing.

And I remember sleeping underneath a building up near, I think it’s Ourimbah past Gosford, and I slept under there for the night and then I just wanted to go home so I got home as quickly as I could.

The primary school was in Northbridge.

It was a normal primary school. We used to be very interested in sport and I remember being told that I was

the best boy at sport that the school had ever had, which was a thing of pride I think for me, but eventually when I went down to the North Sydney Chatswood Boys’ High and in time became captain of the first grade league team we played in those days. Played water polo for the school but hopeless.

I was quite shocked when I failed the… What’s the equivalent of the School Certificate?

No. No. The one lower than that. I actually failed that because I was so good at sport and interested in sport I was academically hopeless, and I had to go back for another year so that accounts for four years that I spent at the school. But surprisingly as the years went on, as

I turned fifty I did a Diploma in Criminology at Sydney University because of my working with the probation service and from that I went on and did an Arts degree at Armidale. But all these years in between I had this pool of failure over me and I couldn’t do anything academically. But as time went by I got the degrees.

It was in my mind and I held that for years until somebody came up to me when I was in the probation service and said, “Why don’t we do this Diploma in Criminology?” And because of the nature of our job the university allowed us to come into the course and there were police officers, social workers, probation officers and

so we did it and we got through that and then somebody said, “Well, try a uni [university] course.” So having a qualification meant I was let into the university on the condition that was successful in the first year, which I now was.

No. None at all. Although something fascinating happened. I was in the top class and we had a visit, would you believe, from Japanese on a training ship that had entered Sydney Harbour and for some reason they came to our school. And I can still see in my mind’s eye these Japanese sailors peering through the windows at this assembled class

and I didn’t think about it until years later till I read what is the definitive book, and I can’t recall the journalist’s name. The definitive book on the attack on Sydney Harbour. And in that book there was a photograph of these Japanese training ships and it all came back to me that there were these Japanese come into our very school.

No. No. They just came and looked through the window at us training. No comment from anyone, just by the headmaster to say that they were Japanese sailors and years later I was to see the very ship.

No. No.

Well the usual nonsense that they

couldn’t see in the dark and they all wore glasses and all those sorts of things and they weren’t, you know, they couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag and things like that. Of course they mean nothing to us but I think we got a rude shock when it came along for us. In Australia at that time we were living in a dream world really. I could tell you things about the preparation for the war that would make your blood

run cold and… But we… We were distant and we thought, never ever thought that the war would come to Australia. Never dreamt of it.

On. The navy will have to forgive me for this because I love the navy and they are so marvellous to me now as I am getting older.

Would you believe that when one of the submarines surfaced in front of the ferry in Sydney Harbour and the USS Chicago was firing, the ferry blew its whistle frantically and sort of tried to stop, and this conning tower came out of the water. We were all alert at this time. That’s another amazing thing. The fact that I went on to the Kuttabul knowing full well that there was some activity in the harbour.

But when the guns crew on Garden Island closed up to shoot at this surface submarine, the guns that they had were twin high-angle guns and as they lowered them down to fire at the submarine there was a fence in front of them. There were sensitive heads on the shells and there was no way they could fire these things because there was

a fence virtually in front of them. Years later when I was in a corvette over in Western Australia we were working with two of the corvettes and we were suddenly boarded by a lot of senior officers who came on to inspect our efficiency.

What we didn’t know that one of the party that went on with them went to the main gun on the fo’c’sle and they removed the firing mechanism off it. One stuffed newspapers into the voice tube, another one got hammered down what they call the housing stock, which means you couldn’t move the gun anyway, and then we were told by our

second in charge that – in his sarcastic way – that the two most stupid looking people on the ship would be given a card to read which would say ‘Periscope bearing green, four five’, or something like that. He got one and I got one so when the time came I sang this out, periscope bearing so-and-so. We closed up for action stations. The gun crews

assembled, which I was one of the loading number, but when we got down we found that we couldn’t move the gun… this four-inch gun. And eventually got it going and we fired at smoke floats that we had thrown over the side and we were whizzing round trying to demonstrate our efficiency and they pulled the windows, lowered down the windows on the bridge because of the concussion and the

officer in charge said, “Cease fire,” and on the bridge they said, “Cease fire.” And as the sound arrived at the voice number he said to the person who was watching all this, he said, “They said cease fire,” and he said, “You’re dead.” He said, “You didn’t hear it.” Because what they were doing was they were killing people virtually and reducing the size of the gun’s

crew so he said to the voice number, he said, “You’re dead. You didn’t hear it.” So we are still loading this four-inch gun whilst up on the bridge everybody’s relaxing, they pull the windows up, everybody’s relaxing and we are training and laying, and having loaded this four-inch gun on a smoke float and bang, smack, we are firing by lanyard. This thing went off.

Now the noise of a four-inch gun which is only I suppose fifteen feet away from the bridge would terrify anybody. They say that the senior officer just lit his pipe and this terrible noise went off. I thought they would court martial the whole lot of us. We fired this thing, made a terrible noise. Everybody nearly died of fright. So and then other things happened that we had to tow vessels and…

This was forty…I joined in forty…Be forty-three.

Well my grandparents were Christian folk and Mum and Dad weren’t really churchgoers and that. But we used to go to the Sunday School, a little Baptist Sunday School in Northbridge and of course as the years went on I was converted to the Christian faith over fifty years ago when I read a book

on the second coming of Christ. And as a result of that I now have a… I go to an Anglican Church in Moborora Road. I lead groups in my church there and I am, with my wife, a committed Christian. My father became a Christian as he was dying, would you believe. He was in a coma and Mum kissed him and he came out of it and I kissed him and I was,

said, “Dad, I want you to trust in Christ.” And he said, “I am. I’m doing a lot of praying.” And he died. Amazing. Since then the family have come, and we are, as I said, practising Christian folk. And we have been through a number of Christian churches, we have crossed denominational boarders. I think it all started in another sense when I was a police officer. I was a police officer

when I became a Christian. I worked in the fingerprints section and then the CIB [Criminal Investigation Branch] and came in for a lot of ridicule and a lot of jokes and some of it was quite funny. I can remember talking to one fellow and he said, “How do you know there’s a god?” And I said, “Well I was talking to him this morning.” That shut them up because they realised after a while that I was genuine. I had a terrible nickname in there, mainly because I used to drink fairly heavily.

I won’t tell you what it was but over the years I was in the fingerprints my terrible nickname changed from what it was to John the Baptist. When I left the fingerprints they gave me a Bible as a parting gift, which I think demonstrates that they knew I was fair dinkum.

I went to Sunday school for a number of years. And

formed friendships there which have, of course, lasted over the years. But the real involvement was much later in my life.

I can’t recall anything about the war really but in those days we only had the radio. We didn’t

have TV [television] and we used to assemble around the radio and listen to these tremendous shows they used to put on. There was ‘The Laughing Cavalier’, which always started off with this happy sort of laughter of the… We were totally involved in these sorts of things. We would go off to school on a Monday and talk about how certain characters were getting on and then we used to go down to the local movie house, which was the Bug House, as we called it.

And because the serials that they used to have in those days, when you would look back on them they were quite comical. You know, the hero would be flying a plane and it would crash into a mountain but the next week it would fly over the mountain, you know, as a continuation of the story. War wasn’t… I can’t remember anything about the war, really.

I loved reading and it is

something I value today as I am getting older. I read prodigiously really.

Now?

I can’t recall any names. Mainly sort of Biggles and all that sort of stuff and I think it was a Boys’ Own magazine and things like that we used to read. But the radio was a major thing in our life in those days and it was great.

No. Funnily enough it didn’t because Dad worked for a company and Paterson Lang and Bruce. They were mercers and they were quite large in those days. I think Bruce, the name Bruce was one of our previous prime ministers [Stanley Melbourne Bruce]. But he

was always employed throughout the Depression and we used to get our clothing sort of cheaply through the company. I never liked them as I think back now because a lot of them were a sort of country style of clothing and things like that but it covered our… You know, a need that we had so really the Depression didn’t worry us.

Well I can remember my wife telling me that

her family used to feed another family in the street whose father was out of work and they bought the Wiley girl a pushbike and things like that. But not very much. It didn’t affect me and all the people I grew up with very much.

I don’t know. My dad played good tennis and my Mum played good tennis. And Dad played hockey. No wait there. He played… I can’t think of the name of it. It is a variation of hockey, for New South Wales. For the life of me I can’t think what the name of it is. But in those days we all had bikes to ride and we were mad on sport and they were just building the oval down

near the school and we used to play cricket down there and it just developed I suppose.

We’ve been married fifty-eight years and I think I’ve known her sixty-five years. One of the lovely things about Northbridge, we knew everybody virtually in Northbridge and Peggy and

her sister Katherine and two or three other girls and about six boys were a gang. We used to go down to the Northbridge pool, swimming club. We were members of the Boy and Girls’ Club down there. And practically every Saturday we used to… We would take our lunch and virtually live down there during the summer time. And

a sort of a friendship developed and would you believe last Friday we went down to celebrate one of those girls’ eightieth birthdays. Her husband was the groomsman of our wedding. Also there was our best man and his wife. Our best man’s eighty-three, a DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross] winner during the war, and Peggy and I remember all the friends from the past.

And one of the lovely things about these friendships is we’ve known them most of our life, and now that we are in our eighties it is just lovely to go down to their home and talk over old things.

Well before… I’ve got three sons. I’ve got six grandchildren and two great grandchildren

and we are a very close-knit family really. And the extended family. I’ve got nieces and nephews and a brother still alive. My sister died suddenly when she was nearing fifty. But we are a close clan and when we bought this home we put extensions on the back for my wife’s mother and she

moved in with us and then eventually she went into a home. The boys have regarded, because of its extension out the back, one boy who has been in New Guinea regards this as the ‘longhouse’. And he was up there with Save the Children Fund and they got him to do a tropical medicine course, and now he’s a PhD [Doctor of Philosophy] and he’s living in Fiji.

But his association with New Guinea and the term he gave to the house. But the younger one is an archaeologist and he worked with Aboriginals in Queensland. And this… Northbridge is his tribal ground.

I can’t think of anything offhand but they were all nice ones. We didn’t have any problems. We just had a nice childhood and I am so grateful. We didn’t have the pressures upon us that children have today and nowhere near the pressures that…

I didn’t drink any… I didn’t have a drink of alcohol until I joined the navy. I went into a hotel with other sailors and I didn’t know what to buy. I was a total innocent really. “Can I have a drink of sarsaparilla?” or something. And I can remember Crème de Menthe was one and I just thought it was foul, but because as the years went on that changed. But we had…

I’m so grateful for the very happy, happy childhood that we had.

No. I will tell you what happened. I was walking past the recruiting, the naval recruiting officer in Macquarie Place and I looked in the window and there was this photograph of a destroyer under way in a heavy sea

and I was so impressed. I stood there looking at it and I thought, “That’ll do me,” and I went in and got the papers and took them home and to my eternal shame I forged the papers. I forged my father’s signature and sent the papers in without saying boo to anybody. To my horror, the papers weren’t correctly filled in and they were sent to my father to be

corrected and I felt terrible, you know. Anyway he was as I say a wonderful man and we talked it over and he agreed to sign the papers and I sent them in and then I joined up.

I don’t know. I never know because I loved him as a man and I trusted him as a parent and I don’t know why I did that. It was just something stupid.

It was like the running away episode. Here was me in a happy home and suddenly decided to run away. I mean it’s just totally stupid. They are the two stupid things I have done in my life I think. And to be found out I think was a vital lesson I got. But he was a lovely fellow and sent them away and they called me up and because I was captain of the first grade football team and

I was involved in other sports they marked my papers with an A+ in the corner, and when I got down to Flinders they brought me out of the group I travelled with to do an officers’ training course. I had exceptional references from school about leadership and all that sort of thing. And the naval officer said, “We’ll note that and you’ll get called out and do an officers’ training course.”

But in the travelling down and the time I had spent with all these other chaps I had joined with I wasn’t interested, and when I got down I just said, “No, I would rather just stop with this crowd.” I would have liked later in life to have been able to get out of the navy as a lieutenant or something of that nature. Another mistake I made.

Yeah. I had some funny experiences with some of the chaps I had joined with. Because I had been chosen and that at that stage to join the officers’ course I was put in charge of a group of souls drilling on the main oval thing down there, and I got a bit of a shock in the navy.

The first time we ((UNCLEAR) hev) we marched because we were just roar, and this officer walked out and he was Royal Navy and he stood in front of us and he looked at us. He said, “I want to admire your field marching but I notice you have that deplorable American habit of chewing gum.”

What strife we’ve got ourselves into.

End of tape

In those days it wasn’t

the size it is today. As the years have gone they have expanded it and made a huge place. A wonderful place for the locals. In those days it was… I think thirty-three yards long and quite narrow and we joined the swimming club down there. And of course as friendships developed with the girls romances developed between us. We used to… The boys used to stand on one side and the girls would stand on the other

side and at a given signal we used to dive in and try and find one another underwater and kiss underwater. And would you believe when I was being interviewed for one of the Kuttabul things, and of course to get off the Kuttabul I had to swim underwater, my wife said to one of the Herald reporters that, “He learned to swim underwater in Northbridge baths,”

and told a gentleman about what we were doing. I got a phone call later and he said, “Mr Roberts. Is it true that you learned to swim underwater and that saved your life, the fact that you learned to swim underwater at Northbridge?” But socially that was the meeting place really for the young people of the district. And over the years as it changed we used to play water polo together down there and race, and my wife

was a very good diver but it was the meeting place for the district, really, young people.

Certainly nothing like today. Speedo was… I think I had a Speedo but they were full length in those days and of course as the years went on they grew smaller, but in those early days we used to wear

a full-length costume and I think I’ve got a photograph of the family down at Manly beach wearing the long costume.

Certainly for the girls it was the case, and Mum and Dad I’ve got photographs of… And they weren’t certainly tight. They used to go down towards

the knees a little bit. Quite hilarious when you look at it and compare them today.

They were wool. Would they have been wool?

They certainly didn’t have the modern materials that they have today. I think they were woollen. They were. They were woollen.

Totally impractical I think. Lucky we didn’t drown.

Well we played water polo for the school and locally here we played tennis, and I could beat the boys that were chosen by the school to represent them at tennis. But because I was involved with some other sport I

never played tennis for the school. But one year I was awarded the blue. School blue, mainly for the football and I don’t know where that got to over the years. I would like to have had a look at it.

Yeah.

I played lock and then after the war I played rugby for Northern Suburbs

in the junior grades of course. We had in the team in that school a bloke who played second row with me and he played for Australia, I’m sorry, New South Wales. Went on to keep in the league but the war came for me and that was the end of it.

Not very much. As I said earlier we were sort of isolated out here and it really didn’t worry us. The war was going on over there and of course now we know appalling things were taking place in Europe with the Jewish population, but frankly it didn’t worry us. It didn’t worry me. I didn’t give much thought to it at all. I remember when I left school I went and worked for

a customs agent and was with him… I went and worked for HJ Heinz, the food people, and I was in the office and the storeman was the first person that I actually met who had been in the war. He was in the English Royal Navy and he had come back to Australia and he was settling in Australia, and he was the first one that I had met. We didn’t even talk about the war. I just knew that he was in the RN,

Royal Navy.

Yes. And Dunkirk and places like that. But…

Absolutely. Until we got to an age really when we though about joining up, and of course I joined the navy.

My next-door neighbour, my mate, he joined the air force, became a DFC. Another chap joined the commandos. Another one of the group was taken prisoner at Singapore. He was eventually… He was being transported to Japan and was on a Japanese vessel which was sunk by an American submarine and he was picked up again by

a second Japanese vessel and that was torpedoed, so he had a horrendous beginning to his war experience.

I was in the office first and I think office boy. I used to go and get things and take things down to the bank. I was just an office boy and as I got older… No, wait there. Then I joined the navy and when I came back from the navy briefly

I went back to Heinz and I was a traveller for them. I was a representative for them in New South Wales. I left that and went into the Merchant Navy.

Oh he would have. Yes, he would have and within the newspapers and radio and things like that, but I don’t think it interested me very much until I walked past this naval recruiting

office.

That’s what I wanted to do very much. And I suppose before I joined the navy I had all these silly ideas about joining the army, air force and army, and then I wanted to be in the tank corps because I saw some

of the tanks racing across Africa and I thought, “That’ll be okay,” so I got interested in that. But when I started to get interested in the navy seeing that destroyer that became my object. I wanted to go into the navy and of course the extraordinary thing was with the Kuttabul… I went from Sydney to Melbourne, had three months in Melbourne, and when I came up by train to

Garden Island I had never been to sea. I have got this unique experience I suppose. I was torpedoed before I had ever been to sea! I came in to the harbour, and why I say that, I remember in the local theatre a chap put photographs of all the men from Northbridge who had actually joined up on a screen at the entrance to the theatre.

All our photographs and there was a caption under mine saying ‘And Neil has the unique experience of being torpedoed before he had ever been to sea’. I had never been outside the [Sydney] Heads. I knew nothing about it. Going outside the Heads was an experience too because we had this four-inch gun on the deck. It hadn’t been fired since 1917. Nobody knew what would happen when we fired it. So they loaded it up and

attached a lanyard to the firing mechanism and we all went round behind the bridge and pulled this thing and away she exploded. So I had never been outside the Heads.

Well it was part of

both I think. It was an adventure and in those days we were very pro England and pro the Empire and ‘King and Country’ and all that sort of thing. And my mate that joined the air force, he did training and then he went off to Europe, and because he lived next door his mum used to get correspondence and I knew what he was doing. It was just a mixture of both really. We were

very British I suppose in those days. It is different today of course.

Well I was still sort of caught up in the euphoria of the navy, you know. And it was fairly rigid, rigorous to start with and

suddenly being woken up early in the morning and sort of coming out on to a parade ground and things like that and a lot of good friendships were formed and discipline was very tight and… But I was impressed. This is what I wanted.

No. No I didn’t. I was

totally involved in it. I loved every moment of it. The only time I think I bucked the system was when I was on the corvette over in Perth and I had my hat in an un-naval sort of way, stuck on the back of my head and a sailor who was on, sort of duty and looking around the district. A couple of them came

up to me and said, “Put your hat on straight.” And I did. But as they walked away I put it on the back of my head. That was the custom. Within minutes I was sort of arrested and taken back to the ship and I had to appear before the sort of second officer for being improperly dressed. That was the only time, I think, in the whole naval career I bucked the system.

Well

we were taught seamanship. We used to go out in these longboats and five or six, I forget what they called them, cutters I think it was, and we had the big long oars and we would go out rowing. A lot of training with shell markings and things like that. We’d go down to the gunnery school. I recall that the petty officer that was questioning us was asking questions about the colour in markings

and I was sitting there with a smirk on my face because I knew them, and others were making mistakes and what he would do, he’s make them pick up a six-inch shell and carry it down to the end of the battery and give that shell to petty officer so-and-so. Well you had to pass through doors to get down. Carrying a six inch shell you’d come to the door and you’d have to hold it on your knees

virtually and go down, and then you’d find that the petty officer wouldn’t identify himself and you’d have to bring the shell all the way back to the… So that was a little bit of discipline. Because I had the smirk on my face he said, “Roberts,” he said, “what are you grinning about?” He said, “Pick up that six-inch shell and go down and give it to…” So I… “Petty officer.” So I suffered the same torture. But in the gun drill that was interesting because they had set gun drill.

And we’d practised with wooden shells and things in the battery but eventually we went down onto the promontory down there and fired this six-inch gun into the sea and that was interesting but also dangerous because there was a drill, and if I remember correctly they drilled us till we were mad with this, still, misfire,

carry on. And when we were out… And at work… because when we were out at the gun firing this thing, one of the newly trained reached for the handle to open the breech. As soon as he reached for it and he was going to open it when the shell was going to explode it would have killed us all. The petty officer sang out, “Still, misfire, carry on.” And we stopped and the thing didn’t happen.

We had a good experience. A lot of camaraderie was building up during that time and we learned to sleep in a hammock for a start, which was a bit of a problem. But I enjoyed those early days and then eventually we separated and I was sent up to Garden Island.

Well, subsequently gunnery. I had a general training in gunnery.

I eventually ended up being an able seaman, seaman gunner, which was the highest rank I attained. But when I saw these ships sailing off to Mombasa in Eastern Africa I thought I wanted to sea the world. “I’m stuck in the Pacific and all around Australia and that sort of thing but I want to go overseas and have a look.” And so

I volunteered for what they called the defensively equipped merchant ships, a DEMS gunner. And I came back to her and then did a thorough course in gunnery there.

Just an ordinary seaman and came up to Garden Island with a view to picking up the corvette and joining the corvette.

Yes.

Oh yes I think so because what the Japanese did was after Pearl Harbor they had this marvellous fleet of midget submarines and other ships. They attached… From my reading they were going to attack Pearl Harbor with these midget [submarines],

but that was put on hold and they were attacked by the carriers, the aircraft. There was one midget submarine got into the harbour I believe. Didn’t do any damage and was actually captured and that was the first prisoner of war that had been found on American soil. But they came down and they… We were then conscious of the Coral Sea Battle and things like that. You know,

it was becoming a bit heavy sort of thing and then the Japs went across to that island. Diego something or other near Africa… Below India.

Garcia. Yes. They did an attack on that.

Yeah. Yeah. Definitely because Darwin had occurred. One thing about in those days too

Darwin was a bit of a mystery to us. We all got the impression that there was one attack on Darwin, you know, and that sort of thing but there were sixty-odd attacks on Northern Australia I believe. And of course the Japanese Navy were getting closer and they were sending submarines down, down to Australia and of course when the Kuttabul blew up

it terrified the eastern suburbs, though Edgecliff was shelled a week later and I’ve learned since that there’s… This plane, this float plane that flew over Sydney, Ito was his name. He had flown over Perth, flown over Hobart and they had gone right down to the bottom of Australia and they were laying mines all over the place. We were totally unaware of all of it.

Well they were coming though. A lot of censored stuff was coming through… And was being censored rather and as far as I can recall it was starting to become obvious they were in danger, and when the American arrived here that was starting to put a real emphasis on the possibility of invasion.

And [Port] Moresby and all those other places. What they were doing as the army advanced they were opening up ports for their navy, and these mother ships were coming down and using those ports to attack shipping. But it was getting very close and dangerous, worrying at that time.

Yeah. A general expectation because we were sent in different directions sort of thing. Some joined the best, some of the bigger ships in the navy. A number of us went to various corvettes. I think there were fifty-six corvettes built and they were all over the place and so it went on. An expectancy was rising no doubt.

At sea it’s funny. It’s not too bad really. When you are on a… They say of the corvettes that they roll on wet grass. And believe me, they rolled. When we left Sydney we went along coastal duty for a while and then we went across to Fremantle. Going across the [Great Australian] Bight on this corvette and as we got to the end of the

Bight we were turning to go up to Fremantle. The skipper actually had piped it through, had warned us that we were going to find some heavy weather. We went to Albany, round that area there and when we went round we were rolling… I honestly didn’t think we’d ever reach Fremantle and later on, when we were working out of Fremantle,

one of the corvettes, the three corvettes working with us was rammed by an American freighter.

I suppose I did. I would have liked the bigger ships if I’d have had a chance but…

And I didn’t know really the function or the way corvettes worked but I suppose I was in a sense just happy to get into the actual navy itself because passing by all the training to get into it sort of thing.

Yeah. I loved it. I

really did. I loved it and I was tempted at the end of the war to stop on in the navy but I didn’t and… No, I enjoyed the navy and since, in latter years the navy is… I have a tremendous admiration for the way that they honour their deceased and the way they look after those that survived. It is really good.

No. We didn’t have… We seemed to be drilling all the time. I did have… If any disagreement occurred between and the fights developed, what they would do is take the two combatants and give them a pair of gloves and do it properly. Have a fight properly. And everyone was assembled to see some of these hilarious fights because some of them couldn’t fight their way out of a

paper bag. But sport was… We didn’t do anything that I can recall… Oh we used to go out to a gunnery range and fire at aircraft towing these drogues. That was part of the training. It was interesting because on one occasion they put us into a machine that fired rockets and

I got into this thing and I had to… I wasn’t quite sure what I had to do. Pull this knob or push this knob. And as this drogue came past I thought, “I’ll shoot the plane down as sure as eggs,” but I didn’t. But it was an experience. And then we had an experience in the bush. An army group came down and tried to capture us and we had to, you know, play war, war games with it. All interesting.

Not too well. No. We were better on the water than we were on the land.

We had machineguns and Oerlikons and things like that. All light armoury really and this monstrous rocket launching machine

which funnily enough turned up on a vessel later. And the vessel, Islander I think it was. We were transporting troops up to Dutch New Guinea and this thing was on the stern. I recall going looking at it and to see a soldier that we were transporting lying underneath this thing and the nasty end of these rockets were about there. And if

anything had gone wrong it would kill him. So we got him out of the way but we never ever fired this silly thing. We were nervous of it, you know.

Yeah. That was an exciting experience for us. Firing this big one was a bit of a noisy episode and then they put us on a three-inch gun which had a terrible noise when it

exploded, when the shell went off. It was a very sharp clap whereas the bigger guns seemed to be more of a woof and this other thing, I remember the sort of hurting eardrums type thing. And we didn’t do it very often. We were mainly training all the time. Learning and it was good.

I…

We really didn’t discuss that. There was folk from all the states and that was one of the sad things about the navy is that not like the army where you usually recruit…all come from the one area. But with the navy you are likely to be on a ship with people from all over Australia, and after the war friendships you made during the war you couldn’t sort of cement them by being near to people.

And but I know one fellow was an accountant, at least he went on to be an accountant. And I don’t think we ever talked about our past, really, what we were in our work life.

Yes. Yeah. And some of them just

went for their life. Left and got into all sorts of trouble. Not many of them but there was a certain camaraderie that developed with the training corps. And of course then we went. We used to go ashore as we termed it, up to Flinders, and one of the things about the navy there was fashion was a big thing, and we were issued with these

issue clothing which weren’t tailor made, to put it likely. You know, they just hang off the shoulders, virtually. But within the navy and contrary to discipline and that there were groups of… There were a couple of tailors. They used to make a proper fashionable sort of suit. The word was ‘tiddly’ and ‘pusser’, the two words they use.

Pusser was naval issue. Tiddly was contrary to naval issue. And we used to… And the thing was getting the tiddly suit out of the depot. All the tricks of the trade to try and… When you lined up for inspection you’d have an overcoat and you’d have the tiddly suit up the sleeve of your overcoat, you know. You’d be inspected

and they would inspect the issue stuff, but when you got ashore the place you went to was where you were stopping and it was to change into this very tight fashionable stuff, so tight – and this is true – that you had to get a mate to pull it off you if you ever got into it, you know. And the hat fashion changed too and there was a sort of tiddly hat and away you’d go. And whether it is human nature and

we used to go up to Melbourne there and try and impress the ladies, you know. And tell them all sorts of outlandish tales about where you’d been and what you’d done, you know, short of winning the VC [Victoria Cross] or something. And when I look back at it it was hilarious. We would try and win the hearts of some of these lovely ladies and tell all the lies about the place. Then of course reality develops and

when you get a way into and things start to happen it’s a different life really; it’s a training life.

Tighter yes, And even a better material. And another thing they used to issue us with was a canvas suit. It was canvas. The whole thing was canvas and

we had to go down to the pool and swim the length of the pool in this canvas issue suit. Would you believe there were people in the navy, in the class, who couldn’t swim? Fancy joining the navy and you couldn’t swim! And then eventually of course we got a white suit made. There were tailors ashore, tailors in Melbourne that you would get this lovely white suit, which we thought we looked beautiful in, you know.

But that was a big thing, fashion, would you believe?

Yes. You would buy the suit from them and they were usually permanent sailors, we were reserve, wartime reserve. They were permanent sailors and they developed their skills and they were good, really good tailors. And

instead of putting on the issue shirt we used to have what they called a dicky front, which was just a square down the front there and a square at the back, and you’d tie it round your waist there and you’d wear that instead of wearing the full naval issue shirt, which was terrible. So we… But that was a big feature those days.

And of course when you got away from the depot you never wore the issue stuff at all. You had all this fashionable tiddly sort of stuff. Hilarious.

Well mainly we’d go straight to the hotel. That was the big thing, straight away and

then we’d wander the streets. It was open slather really in Melbourne and you had no difficulty at all in getting a friend, and romantically it was quite an exciting time for all these young men.

Yes. All that sort of nonsense, you know. It was really

comical. When you look back at it now it was hilarious, you know. And of course they were woke up to it, the girls but I met some… Would you believe I still correspond with one lady who was a nurse? Very, very nice, lovely lady and she sent me a letter. She saw me, would you believe, on the TV, one of the Kuttabul

things, and she wrote me a letter and the letter said, “Are you the Neil Roberts that I knew in Melbourne in 1941–42?” She said, “I thought you died during the war and I saw you on the TV.” And so we corresponded and she wrote me recently. She is dying of cancer and just a nice friend formed in those really hilarious days and I…

I came from sort of a non-drinking home and I suddenly was thrown in to a… I had friends who were sailors who were sort of used to them. And I suppose with some bravado I went in to the local and I didn’t quite know what to drink. And then we tried

sarsaparilla, which is terrible, and then this crème de menthe, and I don’t think I’ve tried liquor since, you know. That was just something that I didn’t do. I haven’t done. But mainly beer and yeah, pretty hilarious.

Well that was one of my problems. I didn’t really smoke until I joined the

navy but I started to smoke and it was just the thing to do. You know. I used to go out with a packet in my pocket and another packet stuck under my dicky front here. After the Kuttabul I smoked fairly heavily… I now have, as a result of that I developed asthma. I have chronic disorder of the airways, which is a breathing difficulty and it all goes back to the days

when it was the custom. It was the thing to do was to have a cigarette and you just wouldn’t go ashore without… And the navy used to issue them and they were just something we did.

Capstan Blue. Blue Capstan. It is the only one I can remember. Yeah. That’s going back a while. Capstan Blue. Yeah. That’s going back a while.

Capstan Blue I think it was.

Yeah. Everybody. Everybody smoked. There was few people and they were unusual people that were disciplined well enough to… They didn’t drink or smoke, some of them. And that was something I found remarkable as I went later into life, you know, that

there was… On the ship that I was on, the corvette, there were eighty-two in the crew. There was one practising Christian out of that whole eighty-two and his life was quite remarkable. The testimony of his life was quite remarkable. And that affected me, but more particularly affected a friend of mine

and would you believe ten years later when I became a Christian through the reading of a book on the second coming of Christ, I went off to the first church that was nearby and opening the door was this fellow who had been on the corvette and who had been converted on the corvette? And we became lifelong friends after that, you know. Similar beliefs but generally speaking

most of the people smoked and drank and… It was just a way of life, you know.

I don’t think I did. Do you know that?

Look to my shame I don’t think I did. I know that Dad sent me a course, correspondence course in accounting

and said to me, you know, “Utilise your time.” And I had spare time of course at sea and that. But I didn’t finish that even. But I can’t recall sending Mum anything, do you know that? I don’t think I did and we weren’t getting paid very much, I might add, you know. In those days the nett cost of living and that were different. No. I used to use it all, I’m afraid.

Well it was… I joined in September forty-one. I went to Flinders after the three months training course and I would have arrived in May 1942. The Kuttabul was exploded…

The torpedo exploded and a lot of historians early day used to make mistakes about this. They used to say the Kuttabul was sunk on the thirty-first of May 1942 Well it wasn’t. It was the first of June that year. But I was reading a book and this chap said it was done half past eleven on the thirty-first of May and I rang him up.

And I said, “Look,” I said. “Neil Roberts is my name.” And I said, “You’ve made a mistake with the date and the time of the sinking of the Kuttabul.” And he said, “How would you know that?” And I said, “Well I was on it when it blew up and it exploded in the early hours, about half past twelve on the first of June.” I said, “It is only a technicality.” Now

it is only a technicality but now he got… And all the other people who were writing about it got their information. But a report from Rear Admiral Muirhead-Gould, and his report was wrong and I’ve sort of been a little bit annoyed about it, you know, that they’ve got the thing wrong and the number that died. And they were all saying nineteen died. Well that was wrong. That was twenty-one. And I corrected it and the chap that wrote the book, when I told him

my story he republished it but got my name… Got my experience but with somebody else’s name. And gradually now of course it’s very well recorded, written about.

Well after the training course I came by train up to Sydney and eventually went to Garden Island where the Kuttabul, which was a ferry, was moored. And it was commissioned by the navy and it was used as sort of a depot ship

for people that were passing. And I came there and my duty in the time was as a sentry on Kuttabul steps but my… I was going to go to a corvette which as yet hadn’t been commissioned and they were still completing that, and that was the purpose of the Kuttabul because people were coming. And a friend, a survivor from New Zealand, he was going to the eastern fleet,

overseas, and people were going in all directions. So anyway we arrived and we were sort of put onto the Kuttabul itself, given hammocks and all sorts of things and that. I can’t think of the date of that but we found out later that Colin and I… Colin is one day older than I and we’ve become close friends and I travelled on the same train from Flinders up to Sydney.

He was on the guns crew on the island and I was on sentry, the sentry, one of the sentries. Well on the thirty-first of December forty-two the Japanese mother submarines were about thirty-five miles north north-east of Sydney and they’d launched this float plane.

They actually carried a float plane which could be assembled and they launched this float plane and that was flown by an Ito, I-T-O, and he flew over Sydney, flew over Chatswood, Ryde, and Mascot. And actually the story is that when he flew over Mascot they actually switched the lights on for him to land thinking that he was a float plane from the Chicago.

And he flew back to the mother submarine and as he was coming to land in a heavier sea than when he had taken off the thing crashed, and he got off it and his observer got off. But they were… When they were flying over Sydney they were just finding out where the ships were in the harbour. So then the submarines left the mother ships and they came towards Sydney Harbour. The problem was…

Not a problem for them. Sydney was alight and the lights on Garden Island where they were still working, building various things on the island, were just bright lights. And they navigated towards the place and the first one that came in… When it crossed over between the Heads there was a cable that runs between the Heads. And it was noted that something was coming in.

But nothing was done about it.

One of the shore people noted that something was coming in. But it is believed that these midget submarines were two-men torpedoes… They came into the main harbour and then across from Middle Head over to say, I forget, Double Bay or something anyway.

There was this net that could be opened for any ships that were leaving or coming into the harbour. And the Manly ferry came and this first submarine that came in was manoeuvring to follow underneath the Manly ferry, but because they were difficult to manoeuvre it missed the gate and he went into the net and was caught in the net. As yet they were unnoticed.

But a water board employee was rowing to have a look at the net and he noticed that something was in the net and he raised the alarm, but would you believe they virtually took no notice of it?

That would have been… Would have been ten o’clock or earlier. A bit earlier than that. It took us several hours. I forget the times now but it took several hours for them to actually

notify the authorities. Well the second one that came in that did all the damage, he followed underneath the ferry and he eventually positioned the submarine near Clifton Gardens and his purpose was to destroy the Chicago, which was a heavy American cruiser. And he fired, from there fired two torpedoes

and both of them missed the Chicago and the destroyer that was alongside the Chicago, travelled right across the harbour and one of them went up, would you believe, onto a wharf! Actually went up onto the rocks near a wharf. And didn’t explode. It burst open but didn’t explode. But this other one came across… Now tied alongside the Kuttabul was a Dutch submarine.

Went underneath the submarine, underneath the Kuttabul and exploded against the sea wall. Now I was sentry on Kuttabul steps and to be relieved at midnight and when my relief didn’t turn up, I ran, contra to naval discipline, but I left where I should have been and ran right up to where I knew who slept on the top deck.

About twenty past twelve. I woke him up and ran back and was waiting for him. He came down about half past twelve and the thing that saved my life was that he said, all apologies and he said, “Sleep in my hammock.”

I don’t know. And fifty years later something happened where I… I’ll explain in a moment.

But I don’t know who he was. But when I went… He was all apologies, “Sleep in my hammock.” I went onto the Kuttabul past where my hammock was in a hammock bin and where twenty-one died where I normally slept, and I went up and got into his hammock on the top deck. And as I got into his hammock Colin Whitfield, who was in the…got out of the hammock alongside me

was going on duty. Now he had been awoken late. My relief hadn’t been awoken, you know, by somebody who should have done both of those things. So I got into his hammock and I just took my shoes off and I lay back and Colin was getting dressed alongside me. Well the torpedo exploded and as it was a wooden ferry you can imagine

the effect it would have had on it. And all the blast went backward. It has been recorded that it actually lifted the Kuttabul out of the water. And I could have stopped, would you believe, in the hammock and not moved but in the panic I knew how I had come in so I… There were tables and this is the things I can never understand.

There were tables between me and the stairway and I don’t know whether I went over them or around them or what, but I suddenly was at the top of the stairs. I knew that… I was going to go out the big exit. You know, with the ferries there is a big wide door where everybody comes in. But as I was starting to go down the steps the thing was sinking rapidly and the water just gushed up and I got caught in the stairwell. So I took a deep breath

and I swum underwater to where I hoped the exit was. And eventually I found the seawall and climbed up there. And the thing that gave me the biggest fright was that when I stood on the seawall I stood on wires, overhead wires and I thought, “I’ve got out of that and I’m going to get electrocuted,” would you believe? But as I was standing there a chap ran up to me and he said, “Where are all the officers?”

And I said, “I think everybody’s dead,” and I really thought that. I thought I was the only one. I said, “What do you want the officers for?” He said, “There is an unexploded torpedo up at Gun Wharf, which is the next one up. Now fifty years later I was asked to speak on the ABC Macka show and before I came on he read a letter and the letter said, “Nobody

would know this but I stood guard over an unexploded torpedo under Gun Wharf,” and it was the very same fellow who had run up to me fifty years earlier. So they put me… Took me and put me into the sickbay and I had nothing wrong with me really apart from a terrible fright. And I know that my naval papers say that I was suffering from shock and immersion and they

put me into the hospital. But Colin, he couldn’t walk because the concussion had shattered both his feet. And he worked his way to an exit and just dropped into the harbour. Bill Williams, who died recently, he was the one who had come down… He had missed his own ship and was spending time up at Kings Cross. He… As

he came down they said to him, “Grab a hammock and we’ll deal with it in the morning,” because he was AWL [Absent Without Leave]. He was only two hours on the thing and he was blown out into the harbour. And a friend of his was in charge of a pinnace and they dragged him out of the water and they thought he was dead and they put him with the bodies on the wharf, and as Bill tells it, finally he sort of stirred but he didn’t know who he was, where he was or anything. He had lost his mind for a while.

Colin they picked out of the water. Now there was a bandsman by the name of Cummings who dived in and was rescuing people, and there’s an edition of the paper that came out in the next couple of days that quoted me as saying that the real hero of the Kuttabul was Bandsman Cummings. He dived repeatedly into the water to save… The funny thing about it, I’d never

met… It was my name but somebody else’s quite. But with Colin they took him off to the hospital and the officer came round and said, “I’ll have to amputate both feet.” But the sickbay attendant put the feet into splints, bound them up and the next morning the doctor came round and said, “Oh, I can save those.”

He didn’t remove them and sixty-two years later Colin is still alive, and he is wearing calipers on his legs from that incident. He actually went back to New Zealand, would you believe, and got onto a New Zealand cruiser which was torpedoed, so he had two in no time. But Colin comes over, came over, except recently when he has had a stroke. And we’ve become close friends. But when I…

I was all right. I had a little minor cut on my wrist, which was nothing. But it gave me a terrible shock and the funny thing is that over the years it’s never emotionally worried me until on the fiftieth anniversary I was being photographed for some reason by somebody and they showed me a photograph of the Kuttabul, what was left of it, and

I started to cry, and I cried like a child and that was the only time really that it emotionally affected me. I have been moved when I spoke at the commemorative service on Garden Island and I got halfway through what I was saying. There were three hundred-odd people there and I stopped.

I couldn’t talk. And I stood there and there was a pregnant silence but, believe me, I got going again. And it just struck me. I couldn’t talk. A commodore came up to me afterwards and he said, “Are you all right?” And I said, “I’m sorry about the tear.” And he said, “Never be ashamed of tears.” And that was

just how it affected me.

I’ve got no idea. Just that one because they showed me a photograph of how I got off it and because I’ll show you photographs of it later and there’s not much left of it. And on the other occasion, I don’t know what it was. It suddenly struck me and I couldn’t talk. It was so emotional.

Well as I said it was sort of a depot ship and on the deck I was on, which was sort of upstairs, there were dining tables

and we used to eat up there. And there were hammocks all over the place. You know, wwing your hammock there and sleep there at night. I didn’t, funnily enough, get to know many people on the Kuttabul except I’ve met Colin later and Bill later. There was just… I was only there a brief time really and…

I think it was only a matter of days. I can’t recall clearly but it was only a matter of days

and I just went about my duties and… Because I lived locally. I lived at Northbridge and any leave I got I went straight home whereas others from other states couldn’t do that. But it was just a ferry that was used by the navy to house people waiting to go to other vessels, and we just ate and slept there and really didn’t spend much time on it. And although I have learned subsequently that Colin

did. He got to know quite a few people and there was one chap there particularly who had been in a previous lot of trouble and he couldn’t write and Colin wrote the letters for him and things like that. But living locally it wasn’t really home to me, and I could go home and all this. When it happened, because the noise alone startled

Sydney and the activity on the harbour and the cruiser was firing, and I’ve got friends who were on what they called ‘the Hollingwood Fleet’, they were sort of commandeered yachts or launches and they were whizzing round Sydney to try and locate them and…

No. That’s one of the things that puzzles me. I can’t believe that I went on to the Kuttabul after some

of the noises on the harbour. Another thing, none of us were warned. Nobody came and said, “Don’t get on the Kuttabul.” No one dreamed torpedoes would be fired. And I just went on it. It’s unbelievable when you come to think of it!

I was on the wharf where it was tied and that was my role. As motorboats would come in I had a…

I’ll tell you something funny. I was responsible for those that came up in the sense onto Garden Island and of course when my relief came eventually I just went straight up into his hammock. One week later the submarines shelled Edgecliff and that area. I was out of hospital and I was on duty as sentry further up the wharf

and throughout the island. And Sydney was blacked out and I was still nervous, of course, and I went up where I knew there was a phone and I went up to see what was happening. I couldn’t find out. And when I turned round the only light left in Sydney was a fire that I had outside the…

my little box I was in. The sentry box. And I thought, “Golly, the only light in Sydney is me, mine.” So I ran down the track, would you believe, to kick it and I eventually kicked it into the harbour. But in my running down the track I eventually tripped into a hole. Most undignified. I fell smack into this hole.

And would you believe, the night of the attack the officer in charge was actually told, “There are submarines in the harbour,” and he said – and I’ve got records of it – he said something about, “Did he have a beard,

the Japanese?” And no sooner said that than the whole thing exploded. Panic reigned supreme because, contrary to whatever we expected in Sydney Harbour during that war, we were actually invaded and the submarines were actually in the harbour. So when I got sort of out to it…

I went back the next day and had a look at it and I found that I could have just stopped in the hammock without moving. I could have just stopped in the hammock.

Because the water… It only sunk so far down and the water had come up. It was only about a foot below the hammock I was in. I’ve seen from the War Museum. I went down to a book launching and I went down to the records section.

I asked them did they have any photographs and I have actually seen the interior. I’ve seen the interior and the Japanese bodies and all of that, but I actually have seen the interior or the Kuttabul and the way I got out. And so I still don’t know whether I got over them or around them or through them, you know sort of thing.

No. I’ve never realised this until recently. I was speaking at a meeting of, you know, a number of folk, and when I went down the stairs I entered the area where there’s an exit sort of thing. There’s this main area, people,

and where the hammock bins were where I normally slept. And it was sinking down. That was the thing that frightened me, really. When I was in the stairwell it was going down and the water was coming up and I was in water and I thought, “This thing is going to catch me,” and so I took a breath and slipped into it. And I didn’t realise until later,

only recently somebody said, “If they were still sleeping there you must have swum through the bodies,” and that never occurred to me. It was just pitch dark. It was half past twelve at night. There was no lights that I could… Nothing to illuminate it of course.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, as I say, I could have stopped in there

but when I started to get… I knew physically where this wide door was and I know that the lander was there sort of thing. If I’d have swum on the other side I would have surfaced and perhaps been picked up, but I was going towards the seawall and I just knew, instinct told me. I knew where I had come in and I knew I could get out that way if I could find it. And

so I just kept swimming and, funny thing, I didn’t pray. I wasn’t praying.

I was terrified, I think, to be quite honest. And was sort of in survival mode. You know, that sort of thinking.

Oh that’s funny. That’s another thing that I can’t hold. Apart from the explosion I was not conscious of noise

or voices or anything. And when this fellow ran up to me I honestly believed I was the only one. I couldn’t hear anything, you know. And when he said, “Where are the officers?” I said, “I think everybody’s dead.” I really thought that and it wasn’t till I got out and they took me into the sickbay that others appeared and I thought you know, “It must…” And then of course the poor reporters came down the next day and

it was a real commotion. It was terrible. And later they got the four submariners’ bodies out of the midgets and…

Yeah. That’s exactly right.

Yeah. They were just near where I was, where they would have died. And I was just swimming through there.

Beforehand.

No. I can’t… The only person I spoke to would have been the chap who came off and apologised for being late. And then I got into the hammock and I saw Colin, who I didn’t even

speak to. I didn’t know Colin then, and then we became friends, close friends, and we talked about age and he’s one day older.

Oh they’d have had all manner of jobs. Some would have been in the guns crew; others would have been, well could have been clerical people on Garden Island.

All manner of people. That was the only facility to sleep on. It was brought in there as a depot ship. And I don’t know. I understand there were two Royal Navy people. I can be corrected on that. But there was one Jewish young boy because our ages ranged from eighteen, just on eighteen and I think he was much the same age, but

it also went to seasoned sailors that had come back from overseas and were going elsewhere. But there was one Jewish boy and every celebration, every commemoration a rabbi… It’s a big service. The navy is marvellous the way they do this.

He died.

Every commemoration service… The navy are very good at this.

They are excellent at it. Very well drilled in things like this. The naval fleet band is there. And then they have a party. I can never think of the word for this. A special party of sailors with the reversed machineguns. They hold them upside down, boy and girl, which surprised me, and they slow march down and stand around the four corners of this memorial thing we have with the names on it.

And the band plays. They play the Last Post and it’s very well done… But there… And then there’s… The padre, naval padre or chaplain, as they call them, speaks. But every year a rabbi comes down and he sings one of the psalms in Hebrew, whether it be the twenty-third or what,

and he sings it for this boy who died. I think his name was Asher. A-S-H-E-R. And then of course we have a lot of the visiting dignitaries come down.

No.

See it was then. It would have been half past twelve at night. I would imagine they had either come off watch, having been better organised than either I was and Colin was. Everybody was asleep. There was no noise at all. I can’t recall anything.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

Well, what I think had happened. I’ve thought about this. The thing went under the Kuttabul, under, the submarine, under the Kuttabul, exploded on the seawall. Being a wooden vessel it would have just shattered. And when I… I’ll show you photographs of what remained in that sleeping area there, from where I got out, right up to the bow

or the stern or the thing there’d be people. Now one of the problems is nobody knows how many were actually on it. And nobody knows how many actually got off it. Because being close to Kings Cross and sailors being what they are there were people who should have been on it but were at the King Cross. And running from the Garden Island up to the Kings Cross area

was what they called the Burma Road. It was done when they were building the dock. When it exploded, anybody who should have been on it started to hasten back. In the paper the next morning they had survivors from the Kuttabul. What they were photographing were just sailors in their uniform and I suspect a lot of them just should have been on the Kuttabul but weren’t.

They think that of those that were on it nine got off it. Nine survived. That’s as close as we can, because I’ve got a photo of survivors, obviously survivors, because they are wet. With Muirhead-Gould, our rear admiral. So it’s probably nine got off it, how many? Twenty-one died. But they really don’t know. It’s not defined, really.

All those bodies, yeah.

No I can’t, funnily enough. I can’t recall that either. Well there wouldn’t have been empty hammocks because the hammocks always stayed. The navy’s very organised, you know, and you don’t sling your hammock and leave it there. Your hammock is in a bin, where mine was, and when I went upstairs all I can recall now

was this fellow’s hammock and Colin. I can’t recall anybody else, funnily enough. But it all happened so rapidly and when I got to the stairs, as I said, what worried me was the black water. I mean there was no light there. There was this hold of water sort of thing coming up and I’m in there and this thing coming down. Because

the whole vessel was coming down. And so I just took the breath and took a punt. I mean I knew where the exit was and I just swum underwater. Now how far it is, I don’t quite know distance wise how far it was but it would have been… Well I don’t know. It’s hard to tell but I held the breath long enough, apparently, to make it

and ran into the wall. I put my hands out and ran into the seawall.

No, I’m sorry it would have been when he came out. When he came downstairs, come from the Kuttabul it was about twenty past.

I think it would have been about half past.

It would be around that time. It

would have been, maybe twenty-seven, I don’t know.

I had a watch on, and it was given to me by Mum and Dad and in those days watches aren’t what they are today. And it stopped just on half past twelve when I was in the water. It never went again, that watch. I should have kept that as evidence.

I wasn’t frightened of water. That didn’t worry me. My major problem was where the exit was. I didn’t have any major problem going under the water but I… It’s how your mind works. But I knew I had come in

and I knew where the stairs were in relation to the exit and the water didn’t frighten me, really, because as a child we used to live down the baths and swim. But finding the exit was the problem, the major problem.

May. It would have been. But I didn’t notice the temperature or the water or anything, and when I got out I can’t remember anything.

But somebody grabbed me and took me into the sickbay.

I don’t know. I know I took the shoes off and knowing I was coming back in three hours and a half to be there I would have just taken my shoes off, got into his hammock, because sleep was precious in those days. You know, four hours on and four hours off. Becomes a burden, you know. And I can recall when I got onto the corvette

I used to be helmsman on the corvette and I would steer for an hour with a mate and I would lie down at his feet with a duffle coat and cover myself. I would sleep on one and cover myself with another one. And at the end of the hour he would give me a nudge with his feet. And I would sleep for fifty-five minutes, I reckon.

So although this was early days, sleep was still very precious.

A good question. I have never thought of that but I imagine that finding my hammock in the hammock bin,

taking it to the area where I hooked it up sort of thing would have been time consuming. I think. Thinking back now it would have been a time factor. Knowing that I was coming back in less than say three and a half hours.

No I think. Nothing at all, honest. I had dropped off. I slept. I think I would have been asleep really. Although it was only seconds I would have been just dozing off.

I was tired and I went bang. And because another thing too. Colin disappeared and it was pitch dark and I didn’t know where Colin was, you know. He was the last memory as I saw him getting out. We didn’t speak.

We really didn’t know one another and I can’t remember seeing where Colin was. And I suppose it was a panic mode, you know, the way my mind was working: “There’s an exit over there and that’s the way out.” And I could have stopped in the hammock, as silly as it is.

No. He was getting out of the hammock.

Yeah.

He was going to the guns crew. He should have been woken half an hour before that. He should never have been on the Kuttabul, would you believe? If the rating whose responsibility was to wake people, Colin would never be crippled for the rest of his life because he would have been off the Kuttabul on dry land, on the guns crew, ready to close up.

We never know. We have never found out who it was that failed to wake him or to wake my relief. Actually, when I think of it, if my fellow hadn’t come and relieved me late, if he had come down at twelve o’clock I would have gone in, got my hammock, and I’d have been in where the twenty-one died. So I would have died.

He may well have been. You come up with some wonderful thoughts. I’ve never thought of that.

Yeah. The navy were alert to it.

Well. Perhaps this can explain it. The week later when they shelled the harbour, Edgecliff way, I ran up to find out about it and I ran back and fell into the hole. Eventually I got to the brazier thing that was burning and I kicked it into the harbour and

Sydney was blacked out. While I was standing there an officer came up to me and he said, “They’re coming in again.” And he said, “I want you to stop here.” And I said, “Well look. All I’ve got in this sentry box is six bayonets.” And I’ve got an enormous sense of humour. I said to him, “Do you expect me to stand here throwing bayonets at invading Japanese people coming up the steps of the wharf?”

He said, “I’ll go and get you a rifle.” And I never saw him again. Now one wonders, you know. It was just disarray, it really was. And a lot of brave things happened with the rescue but there was a lot of things should never have happened. And we… That’s getting back to the fact that we never expected anything like this. We weren’t prepared for it.

And we had the lights on. They found their way in and the aircraft flew over and was mistaken for an American float plane. They got three submarines into the harbour, probably four. It’s a bit dicey as to what actually happened. And nobody came to me and said, “Look. Don’t go onto the Kuttabul.” And nobody said, “Now, you’re sentry. Stop people getting on to the Kuttabul. It’s going to be torpedoed.” We didn’t know those sort of things.

End of tape

Yeah. In the explosion they were knocked down and disconnected, apparently, and they were dead. But I got a fright when it occurred. I thought, “I’ve got out of this thing and bang, I’m going to be electrocuted.” But in the explosion it all fell down, apparently.

It was disconnected.

That’s right.

Yeah.

Quite possibly. The water wasn’t deep. Of course if I’d have sunk I’d have sunk onto the floor of the Kuttabul. When I

got beyond the Kuttabul I would imagine that there wouldn’t have been too much water there because it was right close to the seawall. So I don’t think that would have affected me really.

I didn’t see very much at all because I

no sooner got out and I was standing there and this fellow ran up to me, and within no time others were there around me because I was dripping wet and they took me off into the sickbay. So I was not conscious at all of what was happening behind me. No. I can’t remember any of that at all.

No. I didn’t see that and

I understand that in my reading of the episode that they lowered a man down onto the buoy to release the shackles and various things and they sailed without him. Now here he was in the middle of the harbour, on a buoy with no identification papers with him, and speaking with an American accent. He was eventually picked up and sort of identified. They went in a hurry, apparently, because in this confined space this heavy cruiser was

pretty vulnerable. They didn’t know what else was going to happen.

No, well a lot of that occurred before – I was on the wharf and I wasn’t in a position to really see that. And I was conscious of things going on but I can’t recall any of that really, and of course then it all

happened and I was inside in the sickbay. I didn’t see any of that.

Yes. I was interviewed and my name was taken and a quotation from somebody else was published with my name on it, and I have no idea who the person was and I certainly hadn’t said what he said because I didn’t see Bandsman Cummings at all.

The father of a girlfriend that I had worked on Garden Island, and he got in touch with my family almost immediately and let them know that I was all right. I can’t recall how much later I went and saw the family. It must have been

perhaps a day or two and I got to see them. But this fellow rang Mum and said that I was okay. Apparently he found out that I was okay and that’s how they knew.

Oh yes, yes, they knew. And funnily enough, when I got onto the corvette, the Dubbo, and we sailed out of Sydney Harbour I actually when I was on the bridge, I looked down into a passing ferry

and there was Mum and Dad on the ferry, would you believe? They had come down in a way to say goodbye to me as Mum and Dad, and they were on the ferry. As we went outside the Heads they were coming in this… Like a Mosman ferry at the time.

Well I think it suddenly woke everybody up because

I’ve met people over the years who know exactly where they were at the time. Seams to me a majority of them were at the kitchen table when all the explosions took place. But I’ve met people who were on the ferry, a woman was on the ferry that suddenly had to stop because the thing had surfaced in front of them. I was asked to speak to a seniors group at Paddington, and

people that were living in those days came to the seniors meeting that had been actually shelled, when the shells came in. And a naval officer and I, he gave an account of the war thing and I gave my personal experiences to these people and then we answered questions from the floor. And I was listening to people who had actually been shelled, you know. It changed Sydney because immediately land values in that

area slumped and people were… The stories were that people were heading to the mountains sort of thing to get away from the coastline. And it did have a terrible impact. It made, you know, an enormous impact on Sydney. It was suddenly the war had arrived in our town and people were very conscious of it and frightened, I suppose, and all that.

Yeah. Oh well, there were a lot of criticisms of the officer in charge. He was the officer in charge of the defence of the port. And he was very strongly criticised. I don’t know what happened to him eventually, but it just sort of proved to everybody that we were totally unprepared for

this. And then of course, you know, off the coast ships were sinking and I didn’t realise. None of us knew these things. It was sort of censored. But I’ve got a book that showed the number of attacks on Sydney, on the Australian coastline, of submarines and a German submarine too. They were off the coast, would you believe, and these incidents

were unrecorded. Ships were sunk and submarines were sighted and all sorts of things. And we were in a sort of a coma, I think. We had no idea these things were happening till later.

Certainly as far as defence of Sydney was.

I mean our navy of course had been in the Mediterranean and you know, they had done marvellous things over there and were doing marvellous things on convoy. And I think… But as far as the actual attack on Sydney, I think they were all prepared for it. And of course as the Japanese start to come down the coast. They were off Newcastle and one of these mother submarines surfaced and shelled

Stockton. They were up at Newcastle and the artillery at Stockton fired back at them, and so we were becoming aware of things and then suddenly the terrible shock of Sydney would have woken everybody up.

Nothing. No contact at all.

As far as I know there were two. There was the Chicago and there was this destroyer alongside it. But living in Sydney I wouldn’t have gone to the Cross and places like that. I was going home because I had really no movement at all in Sydney as such. I would be home with the family and things like that. So I didn’t have occasion to meet them. I certainly met them

later when I became a gunner on merchant ships, when I became a gunner at the New Guinea ports and things like that. I had some amusing experiences with the Yanks. But I had one chap came up to me and he said, “Where do you come from?” And I said, “Australia.” He said, “That was where Heddy Lamar was born.” And I said, “No that was Austria.” And he’d say

to me, “Speak some Australian.” And I didn’t know what to say. And I said, “Sheila.” He said, “What’s that?” And I said, “We call girls a sheila.” “You don’t call them that to their face, do you?” You know. They had no concept, no idea some of them. And so I met them and they were most generous people. I’ve got to say in all honesty they were the most generous folk when we were up on the [Pacific] Islands, you know, with providing things for us and

we couldn’t complain about them at all.

Well mainly because I lived… And that wasn’t my life, that sort of thing. I wasn’t a drinker. I had a girlfriend at home in those days and it didn’t interest me really.

Oh I’ve been up there, yes. Yes certainly.

Yeah. There were a lot of servicemen up there and all manner of things. But that wasn’t my lifestyle. I was at home and sort of with my mates and things. And…

No. There were a lot of… As far as I can recall and understand. Talking of, say, Melbourne, they were on the streets virtually.

And Sydney I don’t know, although I lived there. But I imagine it would have been that way.

I think two days. Only two days. I just had a minor little cut on my wrist. And another thing interesting too was in those days you weren’t counselled.

If anything happens today suddenly you are surrounded by counsellors. Nobody said boo to me at all. And as I indicate, it wasn’t until years later that I really became emotional about it. And there was nobody who came to me and said, “Well look, you’ve been torpedoed. You are suffering from shock and immersion. You’ve had a terrible fright.” Nobody

said that at all and it was funny. When I got onto the corvette, the fact that I’d been torpedoed gave me some notoriety and I can remember a conversation, somebody said something and they said, “But Robby…” That was my sort of nickname. “Robby’s been torpedoed.” That gave me a little, sort of elevation, some sort of status

on the ships but it’s… I suppose that’s navy, you know. It’s…

Yeah. It gave me a sort of a sort of bit of status. Silly as it sounds. Sort of…

Well that’s perfectly true. And only last Friday when we were meeting with these friends of ours from old, sitting alongside me was the DFC pilot. He’s won the DFC. He has other decorations from Normandy and

those things. They were bombing the radar station. And really in comparison I’ve had a very easy war apart from the initial trauma, but over the years it’s become something. I’ve been on all the TV stations. I’ve met the prime minister. I’ve spoken to Jeff Kennett [Premier of Victoria] in Melbourne. I’ve spoken to all manner of people and it’s sort of grown.

It’s become, not a monster, but it’s sort of grown. I’ve been invited down to the Museum and all my story is down in the archives. I’ve been invited to a book launch and all these things. It’s grown. It’s grown in an amazing way. I speak at schools. I was invited up to Newcastle to speak at one of the high schools over there. I spoke to

seventeen hundred-odd children in the big assembly. So it’s grown from just a sort of thing into something that’s sort of quite large.

No. It doesn’t bother me for this reason. When the fiftieth anniversary came along – that’s twelve years ago – two girls from the War Museum came

along. They rang me and asked me would I speak about it. And I was resident and up to that stage I had never been to the service or anything like that. I was reluctant to talk about it but one of the, when they came they said, “Mr Roberts, we have asked you to speak because it’s becoming, it’s history and we want to know about it and generations want to know about it.” You know. And for that reason I don’t

hesitate now. If somebody wants to interview me now I’m quite happy. And just to talk about it simply on the grounds that it’s history. And when I regret the fact that I never spoke to my father about his world war and I know nothing about him except this friend of mine that’s very interested in the episode of the Kuttabul, a regimental sergeant major, and we’ve become friends.

And he said, “What was your dad in?” And I said, “Well, he was in the 104th Howitzer Battery.” And he said, “That’s my battery.” And he went through the records to find out about my dad because I never had the opportunity to talk to him about it. That’s all I know about it. So that’s the main and only reason. I don’t promote myself in any sense at all. It’s just that people ask me and it’s history.

Surfacing. Yeah. I think because it was Sydney and it was local so it’s become of interest to local people and local schools. When we had this meeting down at Garden Island we had busloads coming down from various schools. We had all manner of people coming to,

just to that service because it’s history and I’ve helped kids. I went down to the Memorial Museum there once and I walked in to where they had bits of the Kuttabul. And the kids were sitting on the floor, primary school, and they were doing a project on the Kuttabul and I went up to them and I said, “What are you doing?” I told them and I said, “Would you like to talk to somebody that was

on the Kuttabul when it blew up?” And I ended up on the floor with all these kids around me and a couple of nervous school teachers wondering who on earth this fellow was. And they came across and I said, “Look. It’s no problem. I was actually on it and could I tell the young people?” And then also in Canberra they’ve got an annexe, Tailor Annexe, where they’ve got boxes, six boxes,

and one box has got my story in it and a bit of naval memorabilia. But they’ve got a squadron leader from Darwin, they’ve got a gunner from Darwin. They’ve got a gunner from Newcastle and their stories are all in it because it is history. And these things are recorded for the next what generations that lie ahead.

I don’t know. It sort of… I put it out of my mind the whole lot and when I went along I got an invitation. And actually what happened too was it became big. It suddenly became something that the navy wanted to promote. And in those early years there was just one or two would go to it and then it became a thing

with the navy and they invited me along and I went. I met Colin. I met, funnily enough, another friend who wasn’t actually on it at the night but he’s become a close friend. He was ashore. But it became a big thing and as the years have gone I got to the stage where I speak about it and

that’s just the way it is. But it’s magnified and grown.

No. I’ve had nothing like that at all. As I get older I must confess, Matt [Interviewer], I’ve become more emotional than I used to be and

it used to be a family joke that I cried in midday movies and things like that. No. It hasn’t affected me really and I think one healthy thing is the more I speak about it the less it worries me. Get it off my chest, I’m thinking.

I suppose

it would have been a couple of days or a week or something like that. And eventually I went onto the Dubbo and it was commissioned and we went out and fired the big gun outside the Heads. It frightened us all. And then we got into convoy duty on the coast.

Well it was built in Sydney. There were fifty-six of them built.

It had a crew of about eighty. The skipper on the Dubbo… The first thing was a Merchant Navy skipper, and he was commissioned by the navy and came… The other officers were sort of… One fellow was from South Australia. And various officers came out. I think three more officers. A gunnery officer and that. And a very young crew. We had

a couple of senior folk on the lower deck. It was a very mobile, if I can say it like that, a very mobile craft. And in any sea you had to get used to it because it was very violent, and unfortunately for one chap I recall he couldn’t bare it. He was sick all the time and they eventually sent him ashore and put him on large ships.

I didn’t. I never got seasick while I was in the navy. Would you believe that? But when I was in the Merchant Navy I was, on one occasion, seasick. It didn’t worry me. And it was always a sense of excitement about it, you know. And then these convoys we’d go up and down the coast and eventually went to Western Australia.

Yeah.

Well they had on the fo’c’sle this four-inch gun which was, I think, 1917. It had Oerlikon guns, which was a long-barrelled thing that fired… Quite an effective weapon. Depth charges. We used to go out and drop the depth charges and

I don’t think we had much armoury apart from just the Oerlikons and the main gun. Our depth charges. I think we probably had a Vickers gun or something like that. I can’t recall that.

Well what they had… In a convoy they had what they call asdic, anti submarine detection equipment, whatever, and we used to… In convoys we used to get out in the convoy and we’d

be pinging for submarines. The thing was that they would send out a charge, an electrical ping, and if it struck anything it would come back to the vessel. And on the bridge, in a little compartment on the bridge we had these trained operators and they would be just searching the harbour on searches, re-searching the water for anything. They were trained to distinguish, I believe, the various sounds that returned to the

thing. And we’d be… We’d be working in a convoy, mainly up the front of it. Or with individual ships we’d work. And we’d be sending out this asdic thing into the ocean. We never encountered, while I was on it, any submarine activity at all as far as I’m aware. But when we got to Western Australia

I think that one of the best thinks the Dubbo ever did to my knowledge is that our sister ship, the Wallaroo, was rammed by an American freighter. And the idea was that we would sail about a hundred miles out to sea and at midday the corvette would turn to starboard and come back to port and the freighter would go on to Mombasa and places like that. On this occasion

the freighter started to alter course at five to twelve and the corvette at twelve o’clock. Altered course and now they were on a collision course and just ran straight into it. There was only one died, actually, he… I’m sorry, there was one that died. He jumped over the side and got onto a sort of raft thing but they couldn’t manoeuvre the

stricken corvette. The freighter has backed out and left a huge hole in it, in the corvette, but the freighter then had turned around and went back to Fremantle. But during the collision people who were on the bridge jumped onto the freighter, would you believe, two of them. The other chap floated away – they couldn’t manoeuvre. Eventually the water… They shifted depth charges and things to try and get some balance but it eventually it just rolled over.

We got up, word… We were in harbour and we eventually got this word to go out and pick up survivors and we went into a heavy, a heavy frontal sea. A Catalina [flying boat] came over and flew out and found them and came back and one of the asdic with the Aldis lamp told us where they were. So we went out and then the ship had gone. But we picked up

seventy-nine out of the water and it was the skill, I believe, of the skipper we had that enabled that because what we did we got on the weather side of these people because it was rolling like mad. I had a chap say to me that, “We prayed and we prayed that you wouldn’t roll over before you got us,” you know. And this funny story came out of it. On this thing there was one Christian fellow

who later became a Baptist minister, and because everybody knew what he believed everybody crowded round him in the water. And there he was, this one bloke and all these others in the water and we laughed about it after. They were telling us when they got into our vessel. But the skipper of… We made one mistake. We were trailing what they called a clasp line with a little buoy on the end

of it and they were swimming. The survivors were swimming to this thing we were towing and then we’d pull them in. But it got caught around our propeller and we couldn’t [(UNCLEAR)] anyway. But he came down, the skipper, and he jumped over the side to have a look at it and then he went up and reversed the engines and it just unravelled and off it came. But we got seventy-nine out of eighty or eighty-two.

Well they, as I said earlier, the corvette rolled on wet grass. And any sea they moved, they were mobile. But we were getting this heavy sea coming over and we were rolling too much. We had landing nets over the side, not on the weather side but the other side. We were copping the heavy sea on this side and we were just rolling.

And by simply leaning against the gunnels we could reach down into the water. See as we rolled over they would come up and we were picking them, just grabbing them as they rolled back. And they were on the side of the vessel and we pulled them in. And one, the skipper and the coxswain of the Wallaroo… The skipper was struck by an Oerlikon I understand and they got him onto a minesweeping float

and he was isolated. We were picking all these people up round there. But on our vessel, one of the chaps, George Johnson, who was a lifesaver from Nobbys Beach in Newcastle, we tied two heaving lines to this fellow and without a murmur John heaved over the side, jumped over the side and swam like a lifesaver,

tied the heaving line to this float thing, put his hand up like the lifesavers do and he swam back in this heavy sea and we pulled these two in. And it was one thing in the war that was never rewarded. You know, if anyone deserved something, George did. And… But it was just a matter of getting them out of the water and getting them back to harbour. Seventy-nine we got.

Yes. Right over the side.

He was a marvellous bloke. He wasn’t overly popular I understand in later years with other officers or a particular officer, our other officer. But he was to me just a merchant seaman captain who knew his job, very professional and…

Webber, W-E-double B-E-R. Webber, Webber. A very professional man. I met him in the city, would you believe, many, many years later walking down George Street. And there he was. And of course I didn’t know him apart from his role and I had great pleasure in going up to him many years later and thanking him.

And I met his family and I gave the eulogy at his funeral later on. And I mentioned that the family knew that he had gone back home. And there was a sailor came up to me and thanked me for what I had done during the war. I suppose he got a few thanks, really, but…

Most uncomfortable. It really was because the vessel I saw on the window, photograph, was a destroyer. What I eventually got onto was a much more volatile sort of thing and movement wise. At the time I enjoyed… I love the sea. I really did love the navy. But I never got seasick. It was

quite wonderful in a way.

It’s very crowded. And one thing about the navy they are very, very disciplined, very tidy. You just can’t leave anything lying around in a… Because I can recall in our training days they showed us… It was a staged thing but they showed us the danger,

perhaps, of a towel left lying on the floor. Or left hanging somewhere. It could be… If anything happened to the vessel. And it showed they were putting pipes in to try and suck water out and the towel got caught and sucked into the tube, into the pipe. They showed us all manor of things; for instance, if you went over the side of the ship, say, and you were in the water

the idea was to grab a bucket and invert it and trap the air in the bucket, a shell cartridge, take that over with you. All manner of things. And what to do if oil was seeping, you know. All these were part of our training. But on the actual ship you were very tidy. You put your… You had your own locker, a small locker for personal gear. You had the hammock

bin where the hammocks were put during the day and except for an area where if anybody was on watch all night they could sleep in a certain area. The food we used to have tables running up and down the ship, inside it, and food was good, a galley, we used to eat fairly well. And on duty I was up on the bridge most of the time

as a helmsman and it was all very good and every comfortable in a way, apart from the movement. And sleep wise, I think I said that I used to sleep of a night. If I was on the twelve to four shift I just used to lie down at the feet of your partner and sleep.

You get used to it. You know.

It certainly moves, you know, up. And you might bang sometimes, like a ball. But no, they are quite comfortable and warm. And we had sufficient clothing and things like that. We never suffered physically in any way. And but no, I enjoyed it.

No. No. Not in the main deck. You would get a lot of water if you went outside. You know, there would be a lot of… Through the gunwales and things like that there would be water in heavy seas. But it was a bit of a challenge, I think, to ride it. Yeah.

Well we had a crew of eighty, or it was eighty-two I recall from the other vessel.

And that… There was plenty of room. As small as it was there was room. You know. We weren’t overcrowded really, and the officers had their own quarters and we didn’t really see them apart from up on the bridge and things like that.

I was… I went from an ordinary seaman to an able seaman and

my role was mainly on the bridge as a helmsman. I also had a position in the whaler and if that was lowered I had to get into that and sort of row. It wasn’t a motorised thing. And so that was my main duties up on the bridge as a helmsman working four on and four off. And sometimes during the day time your four off was spent… Your hour on, you’d be steering for an hour

and an hour off during the four-hour period, but when you weren’t actually on the wheel steering you’d be out on the wing of the bridge as a lookout. And I recall when we were picking up these survivors that I was out on the bridge on the wing of the bridge and the skipper… What happened is that as the Catalina came over it dropped rafts into the water and they

sort of filled up, self-inflating things, and a number of people who got into them, they started making their way back to land. But as we were going… The skipper said, “We are going to get those in the water,” and these people in the rafts would be okay. He said to me, “Wave to them and let them know we’ve sighted them,” because the sea was big, growing. And there was one standing up in this raft with a paddle waving to us, you know.

So we had to wave back and let them know we’d sighted them.

When we got there she disappeared, yeah. And they were just floating in the water and floating with anything that floated, virtually. And the other ones in the rafts, in the self-inflating rafts, they were by then miles away. They were getting back to the land.

The vessel, the American freighter didn’t stop. It just turned around and…

Oh, that’s something that’s always been a lot of criticism about it. I don’t know what cargo he was carrying but he just went back to port. When we got back into harbour, because the navy knew about it, other naval vessels knew about it and

as we came back between Rottnest Island and into Fremantle and all the gold braid was waiting for us, and of course a lot of congratulations and things like that that. We got so many of them.

I didn’t… I’m a people person, Matt.

I don’t have difficulty relating to people. It’s part of me, I suppose. I got on well with them and we were a pretty tightly knit sort of group in a way. But there was a division of stokers and seaman and we sort of just kept in the seamen’s mess and the stokers kept to themselves, really.

Yeah. That’s right. It’s just a… You sort of stick with your breed kind of thing. But generally speaking I had no trouble with them and enjoyed those years. And then of course the sighting these gunners of merchant ships. Going off to exotic places appealed to me so I volunteered. I went off the Dubbo and back to Flinders and did this

gunnery course.

Yeah.

I have copies of papers out there. The first thing that

came out was – I forget which paper it was – but there was sort of a whole page. There were photographs of people who weren’t actually on it but were, I think, supposed to be on it. And then it listed the various interviews but I can’t… I spoke to somebody but what was in the newspaper was

attributed to me but wasn’t actually what I said. I can’t recall actually what I said. But then there was another photograph taken in the hospital. There was Colin, Colin Whitfield. And there was a friend of mine. I can’t think of his name offhand but he was actually in the same class that I was during our training. He was

in one of the areas and he was actually blown up, would you believe, into the next deck. It was all shattered. He lost several fingers and I spoke to his wife some years ago and she said that he really suffered from it, you know. It really affected him and he subsequently died.

But apart from that I can’t recall very much of what’s actually in the paper, what was in the paper.

I’ve got it outside there. But Daily Telegraph probably. I forget now but they came down to the sickbay attendant at the sickbay where I was and interviewed us, and

in the days that followed that there was quite a lot of materials in the paper just dwelling on what had happened. And then eventually they start to raise the submarine, the midget submarines. They recovered the bodies of the four submariners. One chap went down to defuse the

torpedoes that were in the submarines and then eventually they buried the submariners. Rather, they buried folk out at Rookwood Cemetery – I’m not sure who it was. What I do know is that they sent the ashes of the submariners back to Japan. I think through the Swedish consul. And in the documentary

that’s come out about the attack, the Japanese, one of the Japanese interviewed commented about that and said how high regard they had for Australia as a result of that kindness. And because the Japanese with their own ancestor worship and stuff like that it was very well done by our navy. And it seems to

me from my reading that there was a sort of a special relationship between navies rather than between armies. The Japanese servicemen… The army were quite brutal people and some of the things that they did to our soldiers in Sandakan was it, and places like that, was quite terrible. But from my understanding

there seems to be a culture between the navies because of that behaviour. I’ve met on a number of occasions the Japanese consul down at the memorial service and they speak very highly of that incident and what took place. There was a Mr Nakamura, I think, was the gentleman I

recently spoke to, and he seemed to be very impressed with what we went to. One odd thing happened is that one of the occasions the Tokyo TV approached me and Colin for an interview and Colin refused. He

holds a bit of bitterness still. And the young Australian girl who was working for Tokyo TV and I said, “Well, we won’t, if you don’t mind,” on that occasion. But since then I’ve had Japanese folk approach me at the meetings, at the service, and I have personally given interviews to them. Now I

don’t sort of hold any anger, or a lot of anger or any feeling about it, really. It’s gone. Whatever there was there has gone. And I think a lot of people… Some people still hold the bitterness and that’s their business, not mine. But I seem to get on all right with them and there’s no problem really.

I don’t think so, but I know that relatives have come to Australia, wives and whatever.

After yes. They came. And when the documentary was made by Claude Gonzales and when he went to Japan I

think it indicated he had an interpreter, and a woman that schooled him in the various courtesies that had to be paid and he said that the relatives were very grateful that he had come to interview them and, you know, understand in time that the video, the documentary will be shown in Japan.

Yes. It was only recently. It has only just been finished,

the documentary, and I think he’s been twice to interview them. And one of the sad things in the documentary was I think a brother of one of the submariners. He was very grateful for the interview and that and he said he waited for years for his brother to come back, and I think he says that he would even… If it was only a shoe he would

have been happy, you know.

I don’t know. I think very quickly after. It had gone through diplomatics.

Yes. While the war was still on. It had gone through diplomatic channels. I think it was the Swiss or Swedish consulate.

Rookwood cemetery.

Yes they were.

No I didn’t really. A friend of mine did and he was in the firing party. I don’t know why. I don’t know where I was at the time. Oh well, I’d probably be on the Dubbo. Away somewhere. But this friend of mine, he was in the actual firing party at the ceremony. Keith Roberts. No relation, but a friend.

I think so. I didn’t have any complaints about it but I know that as the years passed they… And this would be in the last ten years I think that they re-enacted

the attack on Sydney Harbour and that came under a lot of criticism.

I don’t know who did that. And they had a… I’ve got no idea who did that but it was re-enacted and they had a sort of a video, and it was humorous in the sense that they had guns firing that weren’t fired, you know.

You know, like coastal guns firing. And one of the shots, I think, was upside down so that they could get the right effect and they just staged it a bit. But I recall there was a lot of criticism by some people. They thought it was insensitive and for those that had lost people during it… I can’t think when that was now. But as far as the newspapers were concerned I would have no criticism of it except for the photographs of

those that weren’t on it that were supposedly on it. That was a gross mistake, you know.

No. I think a lot of people would have feared that but I don’t think the papers took it up that way. And because we had… At the time with the Americans here

and the battles that were going on at sea, it was pretty comforting to know that we were knocking them out battle wise as far as Americans and Australians were… I think the fear of invasion would have been in some minds but I don’t think it was too bad, really. They were getting closer, certainly, but then we had the extraordinary thing up in New Guinea where the Australians were

the first land force. The Australian forces were the first to stop the Japanese. And whilst they came under a bit of criticism, wrongly criticised by, from what I gather from [General Sir Thomas] Blamey insultingly criticised by him, which is another story, really. I think they did marvellously well and they were the first people to stop the actual Japanese soldiers

in their tracks sort of thing. And whilst the Americans claimed a lot of that, it was our fellows.

I wasn’t really in Sydney, I suppose, at that…

Just after that I went away from it but there’s a lot of people of my age who are very, very grateful for what American did. And a lot of people are growing up and they have no knowledge of what American did for us and that I think is pretty sad because I, for one, am grateful. With all their faults, I am grateful for what they did on that occasion

and…

And the war years that followed from then on. I’ve always been grateful. I found them… When I was up on the Islands they were very generous people and no, I don’t think there was any increase in the… Oh I don’t know, the attitude of people. I just don’t know what was happening really.

I’ve got no idea. I’ve got it outside somewhere. And I’ve seen… I actually saw his wife interviewed. He went down and deloused, defused the submarines and the torpedoes.

Bandsman Cummings.

A naval bandsman.

No. He would have been… No, that’s a point. He wouldn’t have been on it when it happened but he may have been on the island somewhere, but from what I can understand he went on and dived in and saved folk and

dragged bodies out and things like that.

No. No. That was just diving in. It wasn’t very deep, really. No he just… By pulling people out of the water and others were, too. There were a lot of folk involved in that rescue aspect of it but he was mentioned and I know what he looks like. I’ve seen his photo but I never

met the… And yet I quoted about him.

I don’t really know. All I know is he is mentioned and highly regarded by the navy, and whether he is decorated for it I don’t know, but he’s one of the heroes of it.

No. I think the navy contacted me or I responded to any contact would have been a long, long time after that. See soon after it I was away. I went into the Dubbo and then I went into all these merchant ships and I was actually up in the Philippines

when the war ended so there was no contact made with me. No.

No. No. There was nothing. I think there were other things that were around that they were interested in. All this really started… All the talking about it really started about the fiftieth anniversary, a long time after.

Colin may have. Colin may have because he used to come over and he rarely missed a year when he wouldn’t come over after he was discharged. He had a son who is apparently quite wealthy and Colin was just, would you believe, a shepherd in New Zealand and

his son lives in Australia, now in America, and he’d have helped Colin come over of a year. Colin was very faithful and they had no… Like the set-up they’ve got now is very well done but it was nothing like that. I think he used to come over and they would throw a few wreaths onto the water or something like that. Today it is big time. You know, they’ve got all these people there and…

No. There was nothing like that. And from what I can see of the photograph I think there were about nine of us.

Yeah nine. And as the years have gone, of course, they’ve died off and there’s only myself, Colin and a chap from the West, from Perth.

But now it’s different, you know. They’ve always sort of… Something’s happening, you know. I seem to get involved. As I’ve said earlier, it seemed to become a big thing to the navy and…

No. I don’t think so.

I don’t know. I don’t think so.

I know that there were some nice comments about the admiral, but really in a sense it was a real muck-up, you know, mainly in the sense that we were so far away from all the world. Stuck out there in the Pacific and when you stop to think about it the Japanese could navigate into Sydney from miles away by the fact that it was a light.

It was so different to other war areas where blackouts were… We didn’t have anything like that, you know, then.

I can’t… I honestly can’t think of anything. I think I’ve covered it just about all so

I can’t think of anything.

A freighter.

It’s been a source of amazement to those that know about it, but

whether any investigation was made I don’t know. I’m not au fait with those things. But to other sailors and folk who were aware of it it was just something you didn’t do, and why they did that… And we passed them – as we were going out, they were coming in. And except for the two that actually jumped up on it when it took place… Quite extraordinary, this big

bow suddenly comes out of the darkness, you know, and they jumped up on it and they were taken back to harbour on the vessel and I don’t know what happened after that really. I don’t even know the name of it now.

Well, here I was

around the coast of Australia, that was, West Australia was new to me and all that sort of thing. I love Fremantle and Perth. As a matter of fact I almost took my discharge there, I love it and the people so much, but I didn’t.

Oh well, it is just a beautiful city, Perth and Fremantle, and the people were marvellous to us and I thoroughly enjoyed them over there and had some very pleasant memories

of it. But when I used to see these vessels sailing away to Mombassa and places, all these romantic names, I thought, “I’d love to do that,” so I did the gunnery course and qualified and then, to my horror, the Australian navy decided that DEMS gunners would remain in the Pacific so I was stuck. But then I started

to move away from Australia up into the Islands and this little islander, we used to go into Hollandia, and like Dutch New Guinea up the river. That was quite extraordinary that.

I went back to Flinders Naval Depot. With the gunnery course it was an addition to what I’d already learned as a seaman

and we went through all the markings on shells, and there were various types of guns that we learned about and became, I suppose, skilled in those. And I forget how long that took but then I was sent… I went to Newcastle and I picked up a merchant ship there and I think I had… I forget now. I think I had about a dozen, would it be a dozen,

different ships, merchant ships where I was a gunner on it? Now one of the interesting things on it was we were navy but we weren’t navy sort of thing, in the sense that on one ship that I was going on we were expected to work as seamen on the ship but we demanded that we be paid because I think it was a Yugoslav ship I was on

and we were navy but we weren’t navy. I grew a beard, for instance. Now in the navy you grow beards with permission but I didn’t, and I grew one and when I was growing back to Australia I used to shave portions of it off. I would shave half a moustache off, half a beard off and I would come back with a beard on that side of my face. But with the gunnery course we just became more skilled in the various

guns that were available. And I can’t recall much about it, but I think what I’ve already told you is probably mingled in with the training initially and the training as a gunner.

No. Still the same place. It was still full of servicemen. And it was the navy

down there and Flinders Naval Depot. And, no it didn’t change to my knowledge.

I did. I did, yes. That’s right. But it was happy days for us down there. And then I think I went to Newcastle, I forget, but I got onto these merchant ships and we were… But we were doing… We were sort of working as seamen

on the…for instance.

Well we were…with rust and painting and chipping rust away and things like that at sea. And the gunners were… There were… On one occasion, one ship I was on, there were some English gunners on it. They were marines on this ship.

But they were mainly Australians and some English people on the ships and we got on fairly well together. There was no problem. And I got on to this fleet tanker and we had… I think there were sixteen gunners on it. And we were carrying fuel and we got involved. We went up to New Guinea. I forget the name of the town now.

Had a very sad occasion up there. An incident happened when one of the merchant seaman had built himself a canoe and when we got into this harbour he used to go rowing, go paddling away in this canoe. One night as he went away from the ship a valve on the tanker burst and fuel

sprayed into the ocean around us. After a while that was finally controlled but what he didn’t know… What happened to him was that he was in this canoe….

In the harbour. In this big harbour. And he went over a reef and holed the canoe and because he had worked on it for ages, you know, he decided to get out of the canoe and get at the stern of it and

keep his feet and take the canoe back to where we were. But what happened, apparently, we couldn’t find him. He disappeared and they believed that because he was so low in the alter, this little canoe, the water would be there he was inhaling all these fumes of the petrol, not petrol, oil and, he died, would you believe? And we had to go bury him up in this… I can’t think what the port was. A very sad sort of thing

for us. And then we left. We used to have… We were anchored there. This was a bit of a problem. We were anchored there, full of oil and submarines used to come alongside.

No. American.

And one of them came alongside and… They used to come aboard and talk to us, you know, and find out

where we were from. And this big American Negro came on one of the ships alongside us and wanted to know where we came from and I said, “Australia,” and he said, “That’s where Heddy Lamar comes from.” He wouldn’t have a clue. He wanted to look at our coin. Wanted me to speak Australian and… But they were very generous with us. You know, they would bring food on and that sort of thing because we were the poor relations, really. And anyway this

submarine came alongside and we tied it up. And one of the young sailors came on, we got talking and he said, in his American brogue he said, “Would you like to go to the movies?” And I said, “Where?” And he said, “We’ve got movies.” So to my amazement we climbed aboard the submarine and right up at the very fo’c’sle they put a screen up, this big screen up, and we all sat in front of the conning tower and they all had this big projector

and they showed a film, would you believe it, in the islands. They were miles away. I can’t think of the name of it but later it reached Australia, type thing. But we had those sort of experiences with them. And they would go away and we remained there for months as a ((UNCLEAR) paired). But eventually got into this big convoy and we set off on the second invasion

of the Philippines. It was the relieving of the Java occupation. The first convoy in front of us was huge.

Oh love, I can’t think of dates.

It was towards the end of the war. It would have been.

1944, yeah. I would imagine. But this huge convoy in front of us and we were a hundred ships in our convoy

and behind us there was another one.

It was the Korumburra.

Yeah. And we were… Because of the nature of what we were carrying we were down astern, behind everybody sort of thing and there were, they were all in rows, in a sort of a file and I forget how many, it was a hundred anyway. We were right down the stern and then behind us were two

aircraft carriers. They were converted merchant ships and they used to fly, I think it was Hell Cats or Wild Cats or something, and on the side of us there were a number of, excuse me, destroyers.

No. All sorts.

Yeah. All sorts. Going up to the relief of… When we got close to the Philippines the main convoy went off up

to Lingayen Gulf, which was up near the top of the Philippines. We went into Leyte. Now Leyte has already been taken with the previous convoy and two ships, ourselves and another one went into Leyte and we parked, for some reason, miles away from all the other ships that were in there. So one day I was up on the gun. A Bofors gun was on the… A Bofors gun on the bow. And I sang out to a chap working

on their gun over on the American ship. And I said, “What are you carrying?” And he said, “Ammunition.” And we are carrying oil and he is carrying ammunition so they isolated us and put us a long way from everyone else. When we arrived there we were told not to fire at any aircraft unless it was directly attacking our vessel. And our quarters were down the stern and I was one of the guns

crew on the Bofors which was right up the bow. So I had a routine. I used to use my lifejacket as a pillow. I had a knife on a lanyard which I put on the door handle. I had cut-down shoes. We had cut-down shoes and we used to make slippers out of them, just where I put my feet when I got out. I was dressed, sort of in shorts and that, and

we hadn’t been there long, just going to sleep and there was a claxon on the other wall, just outside the wall where I was. And the most hideous noise, you know! And we were sleeping away and then this went off. And what I used… After a while I got quite accomplished at this. I would swing my feet out and put them straight in my shoes. Put my lifejacket on. I used to have all my wallet and those sorts of things in a plastic

type container and I’d swing my feet over and then I’d get them. And as I was going out the door I’d grab my knife and put my lanyard round my waist and then run up along a catwalk to the Bofors gun right up the top. And would you believe every time I ran along the catwalk I hit something that was in the catwalk. It was round and at the end of the catwalk. I used to hit that with my foot and I would always end up at the catwalk

with one shoe on and one shoe off. And my role as loader is I was standing loading these shells down into the things and the other two were sitting down so I was standing. I was six foot and a bit in those days and I used to think… I couldn’t crouch. I had to stand to do it. And there I was sort of standing and we weren’t allowed to fire at anything unless they were attacking us. And then that particular night a DC3 plane flew over, right close over us.

It was coming in to land when the airfield was attacked. And we could see that in the distance, you know, all the shells going up over there and the defending of it. And that happened time and time again and here we were sort of ammunition ship, tanker, and every body was over there sort of thing.

A DC3 I believe it was. Yeah.

It was just a fighter. Like a DC3. One of our

people coming in to land and they couldn’t land because of the attack.

The Japanese were attacking.

Yeah. Attacking the airfield and so yeah, we just had to sweat that one out. And then we were there and the Australia, HMAS Australia, came in. Now it had been attacked by the kamikaze planes and it

has just come in, was waiting there to go south, and we got in a boat and rowed across to have a look at it and of course… I think it was five planes landed on it. You know, the hole in the side and the gun turrets were missing. So that was an experience for us.

Well there was a hole in the side. There was holes on the upper deck where these planes had plopped straight into them.

I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t know. Probably not because there was explosions. But one thing I read later, and I don’t know how true this was, the Australia had to leave because of the damage and this further war going on and the admiral in charge of the fleet, the heavy stuff, warships, sent him a signal.

I think it goes something like. “Thank you Australia. You are my favourite aircraft carrier.” And she went south. A lot of funny signals passed between ships in the navy. It was a sort of thing they did and they would send a signal to another ship; for instance, when we were with our sister ship coming out of Fremantle.

The Wallaroo.

Yeah. Which subsequently sunk.

And we were lying on her stern like that and for some reason it was getting away from us and it sent us a signal, a sort of a humorous sarcastic signal about, “Why can’t you keep up with us at the speed we were travelling?” And it said something like, “Have you left your propellers on the wharf?” And our skipper sent back,

“Not using propellers. Travelling on reputation.” They were the sort of funny things that were passed between ships. Anyway Australia came back and they did a marvellous job. And then we stopped there and we heard that the atomic bomb had been dropped.

In the Philippines. Yeah. We got ashore in the Philippines and just to walk round a village, have a look at it, mainly to see who had actually set foot in it.

But then the bomb was dropped. We learned about that and then we

No. Leyte. We didn’t get up to Manila.

Further south, yeah. And it… The bomb dropped and that was virtually the finish of it. You know, we…

Yeah. We heard when we were on the ship.

Well would you believe I sat down and wrote a letter to Peg and I cried and I cried. I just thought it was all over; we can go home now. But…

Yeah. And I eventually… I forget what dates they were but anyway I got home and we got married before I was discharged and then I was discharged in February forty-six I think it was.

And that was the end of the war. For me.

No. I didn’t know what an atomic bomb was.

No. I had no idea in those days. It was just a bomb that had been dropped and the war was finishing. I think Nagasaki came after that or before it.

I had no idea. I had no idea what it was even.

We had no knowledge. We knew nothing about that. Nothing. We had no idea what an atomic bomb was. We were just glad to turn round and go home eventually and go our own ways.

Yeah. Sat down and wrote a letter and I forget where

I posted it now. It was… I think we stopped in Brisbane on the way home.

We didn’t know anything about it. We didn’t know what it was. It was just something that came over the wireless, apparently, and word whizzed round that a bomb had been dropped and we had no idea how immense that was or what damage it would do. And so that was the end of it, really. And

we got home and I was discharged and we were married and…

I imagine it would be just a revision of what we learned, plus extras. And see the point is that you could have been

appointed to a ship with just yourself and another man and any type of gun. So the skills we developed would have been to cover all of that, anything that may occur in your appointment, and to just so that you could go and be confident when you went to the thing that you could handle a particular weapon. And we

trained on Oerlikons and Vickers and the larger guns. One vessel I got on was the tanker and I think we had a four-inch gun on the back of that and on another one we had a three-inch gun. So you had a variety of weapons you had to be competent in.

Yeah definitely. Quite a variety

because a lot of the stuff on some of the vessels were last war stuff, you know, and particularly like the foreign vessel, the Yugoslav one that I was on. What was it called? The Olga Topic was the name. I forget what they had but you got sort of vessels like that. They were sort of ancient. And so it was a motley sort of collection.

Well it was just a matter of letting the officers on the ship I was on, the Dubbo, that I wanted to apply for a gunnery course and increase my knowledge, and then it’s all done internally within the navy and suddenly I find myself on a train

travelling across the desert to Flinders, to Melbourne.

It was terrible for me because one of the things was when you leave a vessel you go to a depot, a local depot, and you do a medical in the depot and they examine your teeth. And in those days they didn’t mend teeth; they used to extract them.

I did the journey across the desert with two teeth having been extracted, bleeding, and it was most unpleasant. But interesting going across the desert. We would stop at various places and that would be known to the local Aborigines and you’d stop for a meal or something like that – it would take a few days to go across – and suddenly out of the desert would come these full-blood Aboriginals

and you’d share food with them and things like that. But it was unpleasant for me physically with these two teeth bleeding and it didn’t stop till I virtually got to Adelaide, you know; it was just bleeding away.

I don’t know. I often complain to dentists now that I don’t have teeth in my head that I should have. They should have been repaired

rather than extracted. I think it was just a convenience for the navy.

Pulling the teeth out.

That’s right. Yeah.

I don’t know, mate. I think it could have been just a seat. I forget now. But it wasn’t a pleasant

trip for me and it seemed to be overly long, and we had these little stops that were interesting, and no I can’t remember what seating I was sitting on.

Well that was what I applied for. The gunnery course that I did in the initial

training meant that I served on the gun, the four-inch gun on the corvette as a loading number. I was capable of taking any other position in it but when I went over there it was a case of specifically applying to go onto DEMS, defensively equipped merchant ships. And when I did the course they certainly put me on them. I wasn’t going to go over there and go onto a course or something like that.

I knew where I was going.

Yeah. Yeah.

A particular ship. It’s within the powers of the navy, the administration. I don’t even know why I went onto a corvette, you know. These things were all mysterious and suddenly

you got a direction to go and report down to a certain wharf and take your gear, you know, that type of… There was no discussion about it.

It was just where the vessel was working. For instance, the one going up to Dutch New Guinea was operating out of Brisbane. The one that I was on, the Yugoslav one, was going around to Port Pirie and places like that

so we didn’t have a base. It was just where the ship was working, whatever it was doing.

You’d be there for months I suppose, and pretty boring stuff really and a little bit of danger attached. One thing about the navy really is that you are constantly under the threat

of damage, sort of thing, and as things… Well certainly round Australian waters. It wasn’t as bad as if you were doing a trip to the Murmansk convoys [north of Scandinavia to the Russian port of Murmansk] and things like that where you were lucky to get to one end of the trip, but you still were under the threat of what may happen round the coast of Australia, and then certainly as we got up to the Philippines the threat was

increased. But I rather liked it. It was different to the navy. You were freer than you were elsewhere and perhaps not under the discipline that you would have been on a bigger vessel, naval vessel.

No. I think we were pretty right. When we travelled in convoy it was well done. For instance, in the invasion of the Philippines we… These aircraft carriers would launch… If there was any possible threat to the convoy they would launch aircraft, and they’d fly away and when they’d been away for a while and then they’d come back and they’d start at the top of the convoy and do these victory rolls right down the length of the convoy

whether that was indicating whether they had got somebody. On one occasion we were watching and one of the planes went off the end of the carrier and straight into the water. Killed him straight away. But in a convoy you are fairly well protected by surrounding vessels. I mean the destroyers and things like that.

Well they were first rate. I mean their seamen are full-time occupied as seamen, and particularly with command and things like that area down there I travelled on a couple of funny ones. I travelled on one and I can’t think of the name of it where it was reputed that one of the…

I think he was a Dane, had actually murdered a man and that was the story going round. Some of them were pretty rough, the crews, you know. But we were separate. We were of them but separate from them sort of thing and we really didn’t worry about it.

Well the ones

that could speak English we related pretty well. No, we had no difficulty with them.

Oh yeah. Yeah. There was one fellow that we used to… It was a coal-burning ship, this one, and he was from Latvia and he would get into

the…where all the coal was. And he was experienced. He wouldn’t get on top of the heap, he would go halfway down and he’d start to dig into it and cause an avalanche and it would all fall down. Whereas the untutored like me would get up and stumble around. We worked on that. The pay that we got was very minimal and I think unofficial, and we seemed to get on all right. All sailors together type thing.

Yugoslav. We met them and Latvian and Chinese. Various groups, you know. No, not American. British. British, British folk but not a great variety really.

No. It’s…

Well I suppose it depended on the type of gun. On the… I think we had sixteen on the tanker but that was a fleet tanker. It was part navy, part not. But the other ones I was on I don’t think there’d be more than four gunners, four gunners and that depended on the type of gun or guns that they had on there.

It varied. I was just… You were sort of appointed to a gun, whatever position you took on it. Well you could take any position really, but with the Bofors that I was on the tanker with I was loading them with that, and I used to get a bit nervous standing up above everybody. I always thought I was seven foot tall, you know. But that was okay. We didn’t suffer too much with that.

Clips. Like that. About that big and put just put it in and pushed them down into the Bofor.

Yeah. Just a thing sloping down into the gun and you just whacked them down. And…

Yeah. I suppose so. But I can remember on that particular thing we were

sailing on an absolutely flat calm sea. There was not a ripple on it and I was on duty. I was up in the gunnery position, up on the bow, and I got the fright of my life because a Lightning, one of those twin-tail fighters, Lightnings, came from nowhere and it went zoom past our vessel. And I

didn’t hear it coming and I was sort of just standing there and this thing flashed past. It was so low to the water that it gave me a real fright. Being up in the front there in violent electrical storms and things like that’s a bit nerve racking because the quarters were way down in the stern, you know, way down the back. And I had a few frights that way. But in the waters we were travelling through, they were just dead calm.

We were on, I think, like a general call. We didn’t work shifts. We were just there and if anything happened well we were all called out. We used to occupy our time playing cards and reading and apart

from when we were on vessels where we were sort of invited, or expected to work. We actually had trouble with one skipper, I remember, and we refused, the gunners refused to work on the ship and he attributed that to a mutiny type thing. And he went ashore – we were in the Philippines, in Leyte type thing – and he went ashore to complain that we weren’t working. But he came back with his tail between his legs and of course

we weren’t expected to work and whatever work we did was sort of on a voluntary nature.

Painting and

Yeah. Yeah.

No. We were separate and we had separate quarters, excuse me, separate quarters and we were separate from the crew. We were not

expected to do that. And what work we did we were paid for, but that was in a sense and illegitimate I think.

Yeah. The skipper of the ship would have paid us. Yes. But it never amounted to anything, you know; it was just token money.

I don’t think so.

We were really kept to ourselves a lot. We had our own quarters down in the stern and we kept to ourselves and I don’t think there was any hard feeling at all.

I can’t remember some of the New Guinea ones but the tanker we spent a lot of time anchored in

one of the major ports up there. And we would move from one area to another and we would meet up with these submarines, and also we used to refuel these torpedo boats and they would come alongside or be in the vicinity. I don’t think we refuelled them, but they would be in the vicinity. And we’d have submarines, landing craft, and these things

used to go past us at tremendous speeds, you know, with a great wake behind them and disappear off somewhere. I can’t think of the New Guinean places, but then round Australia we were touching most ports and the lower part of New Guinea, Dutch New Guinea and Moresby and mainly Pacific. Mainly in the Pacific.

Oh I think the disappointment passed, you know, because you get… It was all new country to me. It wasn’t the exotic country that I wanted to go to and pull into London or something like that, but it was all new territory to me and I was… I think I remember the first time that I saw on the horizon a new country. It was quite a thrill to me, you know.

I can’t think where it was. It was probably some desolate island or something. But it was new and I wasn’t bored with it and…

We had very little in some places. I remember when we went up into Hollandia, into the Dutch New Guinean river – I can’t think what it was – and we pulled alongside the wharf and we got off and we walked through the

village and that was interesting, and then when we came back and we were pulling out of the river there were crocodiles, huge things, on the bank of the river and we weren’t allowed to fire at them but we were tempted to have a crack at these crocodiles there.

No. With the Oerlikon.

Or with a Vickers or something like that. You know.

We weren’t allowed to but that village was interesting. It was fascinating, you know, and I forget… They would be Indonesian now, I suppose… No, it would be Dutch New Guinea. But anyway, gentle, lovely attractive folk just going about their daily lives.

Yeah.

West Papua [province of Indonesia].

Yeah. That’s there. Yeah. Which in my

days, those days was sort of Dutch New Guinea, you know.

We were taking… Well we left the sea and we went up in the entrance of this big river and we had troops on it and I don’t know what they were. I suspect that they were going into the jungles wherever they were. And we just pulled alongside a wharf and left eventually without. So…

Yes. Australian Army. I don’t know what they were, maybe commandos. They never

discussed it with us. We just did a couple of trips up there and came back and picked some more up and… Because the ship that I was on was a fairly small one, the Islander, and I think it was one of the local shipping companies things that were being used.

Yeah. Just a little coaster. So we used to sneak up there.

Oh a variety of stuff because the Olga Topic was iron ore. We’d pick that up, load that up, but I never really was interested. It was just a variety of cargoes or whatever. There were no

war sorts of things. There weren’t any tanks or thing like that on them.

Not over much, but they certainly had a reputation and I think a deserved reputation in those days. And they had

stoppages unnecessarily stopping things going and there was a lot of resentment within the general public, I think. But I can’t recall any problems with them when I was on those vessels. I can’t recall any of that.

Yeah.

Yeah. Very small ones, Yeah. And then later, because I joined the Merchant Navy I was in the Merchant Navy for a period so I had a bit of experience then because I had been a gunner on merchant ships. It was something that was an experience going into the Merchant Navy.

Well food wise they did themselves very well. I can remember they would bring into the mess a tray that long and about that wide just laden with eggs, poached eggs, and things like that and they did very well, you know, for themselves. And in the Yugoslav ship the toilets were totally

different to what we were used to and just a sort of footprints in the, sort of, deck and they had a hole sort of thing. And those things were a bit strange, hard to accommodate. But oh, I think we lived fairly well. I really do.

No. Not that I was aware of. They seem to have been catered

for pretty well and I wasn’t aware of anything like that at all or anything. No.

Well it wasn’t up to the navy. The navy was… As I said, mainly because of the quarters you couldn’t afford to be untidy or dirty or and

you know, the areas were always kept clean and things like that. It wasn’t the same standard, I don’t think, as the Merchant Navy people had.

Well it was just an appointment that came to me and I accepted and went on board and our journeying were further. I mean we went from Brisbane up to the Philippines, you know. Our actual journeys were further than local port-to-port type things and we had… A naval officer was aboard, in charge of us, a naval officer, and we had the

I think sixteen it was, crew, and we had our various duties to do and we actually had a swimming pool, would you believe, a little swimming pool on this thing and I used to swim. Because of the size of it I would… I think it was that one. One of the vessels I was on had a swimming pool and I used to wrap a towrope round my leg to keep me stationery

and I’d swim overarm. It’s coming to my mind. I think it was the Merkur, M-E-R-K-U-R, I think. And we had a fairly, fairly big crew on that.

A merchantman. Yeah. That was a… I forget what it was. Yeah. The Merkur I think it was. I forget now.

It was on the deck. Just a sort of above-deck type thing, a tank type thing, and I used to get in it and swim with rope tied around my legs so I wouldn’t move. I was just working my arms and we had… We didn’t have any excitement on those things. I can remember going past what everybody thought was a mine floating and nobody ever knew what it was, we went past it so quickly, and I would have like to have a shot at it.

But they wouldn’t let us because whatever it was was adrift. And I remember once on the corvette that we went out into the Indian Ocean, to actually return to harbour a landing craft, and this landing craft was by itself miles and miles out to sea with nobody on it, nothing in it. It was just floating. So what we did, we put a chap on it to

steer it, if I remember rightly, and we towed it back to Fremantle. Just out of the blue, as though someone had dropped it out of the sky, I don’t know where it came from, but on the Merkur was… It was actually a sort of half passenger thing that used to travel around the islands. I’m getting a bit vague now with some of these things.

Never.

Never. As a matter of fact I really had a good war in the sense that my problem started initially when I joined up. For the rest of my war the only thing really is that we were constantly under threat and when we got to the Philippines, of course, it was a little bit too close there. But generally speaking, no, never ever. I never shot in anger.

Always threat from submarines, wherever you were you were, always under threat with the subs. And particularly because they had such a marvellous submarine fleet, the best in the world, the best torpedoes, the biggest submarines. They were just constantly a threat, really.

It wasn’t a comfortable thought but I think you get used to these things, and it’s always a case of it will never happen to me, type thing, and…

Well I’d had mine. I had had mine so it wouldn’t occur again. No, I don’t think we used to worry about it at all.

Petrol station. Yeah. And because we were carrying heavy oil the submarines would come alongside and the landing craft and we’d be just sitting there.

No. We’d just sit in this harbour up in the north area of New Guinea there.

Aitape comes to mind. Aitape.

Something like that. That comes to mind. I think it was Aitape. And then I think we went to another place further along where the submarines used to come in to us, and they were operating all over the Pacific but we were just stationed there. And then we joined that huge convoy.

We carried a fair bit and then we’d go south somewhere. Pick it up again…

No from shore. And we were in… We used to travel a fair bit because I can recall us actually steaming through another convoy and we were very nervous about that.

And I was up on the Bofors again and we were just sailing into another convoy and they had a recognition signal between ships and I can’t think what it is. It is no flashing thing. It is just something that is up on the wheel or the bridge or the masts which identifies other ships, enemy or foe type thing. That was a bit nerve- wracking.

Well that’s it. See in pitch darkness you don’t know whose where and who’s what. We didn’t. Of course the captain would have. Yeah.

And landing craft. These landing craft and the… One of the submarines was the Bluegill, I remember that.

The Bluegill. B-L-U-E-G-I-L-L. I think I read later where it was sunk. That was the one we went to the movies on.

Yeah. It was all American craft. Yeah. We were in sort of an American zone, you know, and we were just refuelling American stuff.

No. I didn’t have much to do with the navy. I was sort of now on merchant ships working in the area. But no, I don’t think so. I think they had… As a matter of fact, from what I read I think they had a very high regard for the navy, our navy and we were just… We weren’t in the war sort of fleets, we were in

merchant vessels that were travelling to and fro.

Just were friends. We were friends all our life since we were little ones, but it was only when I came back to Sydney that I used to see more of her and the friendship developed

and we were married on 23 December 1945.

Oh, not very often really. I think she had a list of other boyfriends and I had like a list of other girlfriends, sort of thing, and it wasn’t really until I got back to Sydney that it developed. Because we had

been friends for years, you know, and it wasn’t a very large step from friendship to love and then the type of wife type thing.

Not a permanent girl I don’t suppose. There was one girl in Melbourne and a couple of others, I suppose.

I’m admitting things that I shouldn’t put on tape.

Yeah. That’s right. Well said, Matthew.

We used to correspond by letter and that on a fairly regular basis. And because I had a brother growing up and a little sister that I loved and

I kept in touch with them.

No, no he wasn’t. No, he wasn’t. And then my sister came along. She was fourteen or fifteen years younger than I was. My brother was five years younger so he was never in a situation where he had to join up.

I tried to count the ones on the horizon and I couldn’t with telescopes and things like that, but I found it a most… probably the most exciting thing that I saw during the war. The mass

and might of the ships, you know, with aircraft carriers, three or four destroyers and these. And right up in the very start of the convoy there were these sort of very large American… Well they weren’t merchant ships. They were special navy ships that had all the gear on them that you can imagine, you know, electronic gear. It was just amazing! And there were a couple of those right up the very front.

But when we… When there was any attack on the convoy we used to always go to port and turn away and the parallelogram became somewhat different in the sense that we were on the last ship in that end of the convoy. When we turned that way we were definitely the last ship and it’s sort of known that submarines would attack the last vessel. Because we were restricted down there. We were the slowest, one of the slowest vessels too.

We became a little bit apprehensive when that happened but we had these fighter planes whizzing over us and aircraft carriers and these destroyers, American destroyers, with us so they were a comforting thought, they really were.

No. No. We didn’t get any news at all really. It’s only when we came back to port that

we realised that things were changing and we… The war in the Pacific, of course, well certainly the war in Europe was drawing to an end and we were getting close to it. And when we heard that the bombs were dropped on Japan.

No. No. Not really. It was...

Without confusing things… And I now know there was really no indication that the war was drawing to an end really. When this bomb was announced and it was announced that things were finishing, it came as a surprise in a sense because we were moving north, sort of thing. The various islands, apparently, had been taken and then the fact that we were going back into the Philippines

was an indication that things were going well.

Well we didn’t have any movies, any convenience things like that, and a motorboat would come alongside our vessel and we could be invited across to one of the big American vessels and we’d

go aboard and they’d have a big movie show on. And they would give us things to eat and ice cream and things that were never dreamed of, you know. In that sense they were very generous. Yes. We were sort of stuck. I don’t think we had a motorboat on. No, we didn’t. And they used to come alongside and pick us up and take us onto their vessels.

I don’t know that I felt that really. I think we envied what they had but we weren’t used to anything better than what we had and they were a different world to us, you know. They had everything they wanted and when you went ashore, I think it was Hollandia, we went ashore and they were burning magazines. You know, a pile of magazines

and they were just burning them and we wanted them and they wouldn’t give it to them in that case. And they seemed to have everything in measure over and above what have. And yet in many cases very generous with it.

End of tape

No. Not at all. No.

No. I think it was what we were carrying

and the speed we were travelling. That sort of governed it. And the convoy had to keep to the speed of the slowest vessel, and whilst we were bigger than some that were with us on the last line, I think they were catering for two things: one, what we were carrying and two, the speed we were travelling. I think that was the reason. I’m sure it was, yeah.

No. I don’t think they… They were probably low flying bombers and things like that were bombing the airfield and the airfield of course were firing back at them. But the kamikaze aircraft seemed to be concentrating on the fleet and they certainly,

and as newsreels have show subsequently, they were coming in quite amazingly too into the fleet. Mainly attacking the warships and the Australia being on of them, she copped I think it was five on the deck. And then on Movietone things that I’ve seen subsequently that seemed to be the

main role. Take the fighters and aircraft carriers and whatever. And of course they were coming into a tremendous barrage of shells. They were actually firing the larger guns at them when they were coming in. They weren’t restricting it to the say Oerlikons and Bofors and things like that. They were firing big stuff at them.

Well one of the things about them

is that they were a group of pilots that were dedicated to dying for the nation, type thing. And they just went in with a bomb underneath and that’s the way they delivered it. They didn’t fly over and drop it. They just flew straight into the sides of ships. Incredible! Incredible bravery.

Well I think I was glad to get home. I had been in the navy now for over four years and it became obvious when we heard of the bomb dropping that the end was near and I just wanted to get back into my life and to see the family and to get back into a normal routine, I suppose. As much as I loved the navy I wanted to get home I suppose, mainly.

No. We had known one another for most of our lives. It was only after the war… No, I’m sorry, right at the very end of the war when I got back to Sydney that any thoughts of marriage sort of developed, you know. One good thing about a marriage is that if your partner ends up being your best friend as well as being your wife it adds to the marriage. I think that we’ve

known one another for sixty years and been married for fifty-eight years, so it’s established. It’s a good basis for a relationship if you are mates as well as… And we were a gang, the whole lot of us, and Peg and I married, several others married within that group.

No. No. It was not that, but there was that relationship. It was an early development which lasted and has lasted.

Been good.

No. No. They wouldn’t have known the movement of the ship at all. I just arrived, you know, and went home, you know, and met them, went in to see them.

It was great. It was great. I had a… As I’ve indicated, I had a great family and

I think Dad thought the sun shone out of me, and I had an adoring little sister and a brother and a loving mum and it was just great to get home. It really was. Very good.

I was discharged in February. We married in December and I was discharged in February. And

then I didn’t quite know what I was going to do. I went back to work for HJ Heinz company for a short time but I wasn’t sort of happy on that so I…

I don’t know really. It was… They were very good to me. It was a good

company to work for but it just wasn’t what I wanted at the time. And then I joined the Merchant Navy. Because I was an able seaman in the navy they took me straight away into the Merchant Navy and I sailed on… Again limited to Australia, sort of thing. I sailed mainly on the coast. Actually, on one vessel I was on we were sailing happily along

coming home to Sydney and suddenly we ran into the coast, would you believe? I had just left the wheel and the chap on the wheel at the time had sort of… When you steer a ship you’ve got to be careful how you steer it, and instead of steering outside the course he was steering inside the course, which over a distance was drawing us closer to the coast and

we ran into the coastline. And I remember how things stick in your mind and when we got on… I ran up to the upper deck and there it was, there was the side of the coast there. And I remember the cook used to stutter and he said to me, “R-r-r-r-r-obby, we’ll we be a-a-a-ll right,” you know. And when we tried to get the boats off the other side

we couldn’t because they were in such badly looked after that you couldn’t get the thing to work. So there we were stuck on a huge shelf on a bit in a big cliff up there.

Pardon?

It was down near… Down the south coast. And we were carrying metal, iron ore. No, blue metal. So that’s a small coaster and it was

down near Jervis Bay, down that way somewhere. And the skipper was very calm, fortunately. We were in real trouble but the skipper was watching the rolling waves coming down and when one came to us he revved the, put engines in reverse and we went off this shelf. And I felt we were going to go straight down and we kept going but it took us hours longer to get to Sydney. And when we arrived in Sydney

and they put it up on the slip to have a look they found that of a three-blade propeller there was only two there. One had been torn off. But I enjoyed that. I used to go over to Fiji a lot on one of the vessels and again I was helmsmen because of my past experience. And the officers suggested that I might, rather than remain on the lower deck, apply for my tickets

in navigation and things like that. And I thought about that quite seriously but then suddenly I wanted to get off and get away from it back to normal life. And I didn’t know what I was going to do so I joined the state police, New South Wales police.

We were going across and we were picking up molasses, would you believe? We used to go across to Fiji and pick up molasses and we went to…right round Fiji to Ellington and Lautoka and Ellington and down to Suva. And we used to pick a crew up of workers in, say, Lautoka

and they’d travel with us. They used to be Fijian people. And one thing that sticks in my mind is they used to sing hymns and they used to sleep in the hold of the ship. And they used to sing these beautiful hymns. They were very melodious and beautiful singers. And then they’d come down and we’d work and they’d work and we’d load up with molasses and we’d come back to Sydney or Melbourne and unload it.

Oh no. This was after the war and…

James Patrick I think owned the vessel. So I stopped on that for a while and then I got onto another little local vessel. And I was quite amazed one day. I was invited to go to a union meeting

and when I arrived at the union meeting, as I thought I suddenly found that I was in a communist cell and I couldn’t believe my ears! Suddenly they used to speak about dialectical materialism and all the phraseology that they had and I said, “What am I attending?” And it turned out that the bosun and a number of the crew were card carrying communists.

This is when [Prime Minister Robert] Menzies introduced that anti-communist law [he attempted to ban the Communist Party of Australia but it failed in the High Court]. Or introduced it. And I suddenly realised that I was in this cell, you know, C-E-L-L. And when we got back to Sydney later the bosun left and another bosun came along and he was a communist too. Because the Seamen’s Union was strongly

communist dominated type of thing with the officials. And I didn’t go along with that at all and they said to me one day that I was, what was I? Petty bourgeoisie. They said, “You’re petty bourgeoisie. That doesn’t mean that you’ll never work with us sort of thing, overthrow the government.” But what I learned then was that one of the reasons they were on this little vessel, and we were constantly

calling into Sydney and they were available if there were to be any maritime strikes, any Seamens’ Union strikes, and that’s what they were doing. Both were from overseas. They weren’t Australian folk. So anyway I had enough of the sea by then and…

Well I joined the police in sixty-eight, so in the early sixties.

No. I’m sorry. Sorry I joined the police in the… It would be the early fifties, I think.

Well I…

No I can’t think now. I think it was the early fifties when he did it.

Something happened. When I joined the police the Menzies bill was coming in and we were obliged as police officers to report anything like that so, and I won’t mention the man’s name, but it dawned on me that I sort of had a responsibility. So I went to a police group, which was

sort of an undercover group, and I told them what had happened.

But I was only in the police for about four years so it would only have been twelve months that I actually told them. But the reason I told them, I got into a tram and I was sitting there in my police uniform and would you believe one of the bosuns on the ship got in and sat dead opposite me.

Here we were, former shipmates, me now a police officer, knowing that he was a card carrying communist. And neither of us looked at one another. We sort of ignored one another. When he got out – he wasn’t sure who I was – but when we got out of the thing, walking through Wynyard he walked in front of me and suddenly he stopped and turned around and had a good look at me. And then it dawned on me, you know, that perhaps I should tell somebody about this bloke.

When I went to the police group – and it happened to be a chap who happened to be a brother of a girl I went to school with – and I mentioned his name and they said, “Oh, we know him very well. We’ve had a great file on him, you know.” So I didn’t have to tell them anything really because they knew all about him. Then I… What did I do? I was at Regent Street police station,

which was my first appointment. Then I came to North Sydney and I became a cyclist in the force and I worked from there to Neutral Bay and then eventually into the fingerprint section.

I wouldn’t have been… Oh, just over twelve months I think it was.

After the war, yeah.

It wasn’t very long at all.

Oh no.

Oh I had had over five years at sea now and I just wanted to get ashore. I suppose that was the main thing. And then I applied for the police and funnily enough I had a

lot of short-lived jobs, you know. I was in the police for about five years and in the fingerprints section, which was the happiest and funniest job I’ve ever had. I worked with a number of police officers and they really were the funniest, most humorous group of men that I’ve ever met in my life. I laughed

for years in that place there and I’ve still got friends from there, some of them, and we talk on the phone and laugh our heads off over stupid things. But I enjoyed that. And I had an approach from a commonwealth anti-communist sort of group. They were recruiting ex-servicemen police officers and I went down for an interview and I had to get referees of character

for them and the church that I was going to. I asked a chap there would he mind, which he did, and he said, “What do you want to do? Are you getting out of the police?” And I said, “No. Well I’m thinking about it.” So he said, “Come and work for me.” I didn’t get into anything. I left the police, left this other group, and worked for him for… When he died it was about twelve years for that company.

A small

metal company that used to manufacture solders and various other things. Washers and things like that. Just a small company but I enjoyed the… The staff were good.

No. I can’t recall any difficulties at all.

I went briefly back to Heinz, left them and then went into the Merchant Navy. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do in those days and I had no academic qualifications, any training or anything like that and so the… I just sort of grabbed whatever I could do in the navy and then the Merchant Navy and the police.

I’ve got no idea. Just the… I know that there was a police superintendent lived in the street and I was friends with his son. And that may have influenced me, I don’t know. But as I say, I enjoyed the police but when I finished up on the fingerprint section I laughed like mad. They were comedians, some of these fellows.

And then when this other offer came I thought that might be an advancement for me but one thing stopped me. Really it was that our second boy, the doctor, he was asthmatic and I to go, when I could ((UNCLEAR) discharge Johnnie). And I had to go to Woomera Rocket Range to serve over there.

To go over and serve with this department. It was the Department of Supply and they had Woomera Rocket

Range. And I had to go and work there for a while. Really what it was was just checking out on the employees that were coming into some of these organisations. Checking on their background and political orientations and that.

It was a… Yeah, it was a commonwealth thing.

No. This was the government Department of Supply in those days.

Something like that.

So I went and worked for this other fellow for twelve years. He died and his partner died and the company was taken over by a major international company and so I… Something strange happened in that a friend of my son came down from the country and something happened and he had to go to court, and

rather than tell his family about it he asked me would I go bail for him, which I was prepared to do. But I went to the court to hear the minor case – it was only a minor matter – to hear that, but of course he didn’t turn up and the bail was forfeited, which was the way. But as I was sitting there I saw some of these probation officers working and I thought, “Well I can do that easily,” you know. And so I went and saw a friend of mine and

to my amazement while I was sitting in his office he rang the director of the probation service and said some flattering things over the phone. The director asked me to come straight in to see him. He told me that I was exactly what he wanted to make… They wanted older people because they had a lot of young folk.

It was sixty-eight. Late forties, I suppose. Forty-five I was.

And so but he said, “You haven’t got any qualifications, really. You’ll have to do an in-service course for twelve months.” And I’ve always had this pall of failure from my early school days hanging over me….

Yeah. Mainly sport. And I was worried about whether I would get through this course. And it turned out that I did very well. You know, I was amazed.

It was an in-service course for the probation and parole service and it had all manner of subjects that one would do to qualify as a competent probation officer.

No. No, things… Mainly, and I’ve got all the list out there, but it’s mainly sort of counselling and law and bail and all those sort

of things. The Bail Act.

Well but I got through it. I did quite well. I was amazed. And I started as a field officer and I worked there. And then whilst I was there somebody said to me… Well what had happened was that the university of, Sydney University

were opening up a course on criminology and they were opening the course to… Not to graduates. It was a post graduate course and they didn’t open it to graduates, really, but they opened it to police officers, social workers, probation officers to do. And it was… There were four subjects that we had to do in the exam. But we were lectured in Sydney there and there was forensic psychiatry and criminal statistics and all those

sort of things, causation of crime and… And I did that and I didn’t find it difficult, except the statistics. But I was coached by a dear friend of mine who was brilliant at that. I got through that and eventually I became a senior officer within the department and then I became an officer in charge and I was in charge of Bondi district office.

And I had a staff and I had the responsibility of nearly three hundred cases that were in our care. I really enjoyed that job because I’m a people person. I don’t have any difficulty with people and I met some crazy people and some wonderful people too.

Sorry.

Darcy Dugan. Have you heard of Darcy Dugan. Darcy Dugan was a major criminal. I interviewed Darcy Dugan once. But I met, I’ll repeat to you things like this. A chap came in to me from the court and he was terribly embarrassed and it was just a driving offence, you know, and I had to go through a social history form.

I went through it and I got down to his interests and I said, “What do you do? And what are you interested in?” And he said, “Chess.” And I said, “Would you like to teach me chess? I’ve never played chess in my life.” So every week for a year he used to come to the office and we’d sit in the interview room and play chess. You know, when he left he cried when he left. He didn’t want to go. And like the legal ramifications

finished. And I met people like that. I met a girl that was party to a murder and she was an accessory to murder – lovely girl, brilliant mind – and she became… She got into difficulties after she was with me and I had the power to put her back into gaol and

but I persevered with her and she disappeared for a while and came back and sort of surfaced. She was very bright. I put her in…got her into a drug referral centre. American drug referral centre operating in Australia. She went through it like mad, you know, and she really did very well so

I felt that I had an influence and an impact on these people, something I liked to do and I met all sorts of people. I met mad people.

Darcy was a well-known criminal and he got caught and he was in the cells at Central and they asked me to go down and interview him. And part of the charge – he’d had a gun

and he was robbing a service station – and I said, “Where did you get the gun from, Darcy?’ “That’s no problem,” he said. “You know you just go…” Anyway he went off to gaol again. But I was meeting people like that from a different culture to that I’d experienced. And I met some lovely people. I met some terrible, terrible people, you know. But it was educating and I enjoyed that. That was the last job I had. I worked for sixteen years

in that and finally I retired and I’ve been retired for twenty years, I believe, loving it.

No. It wasn’t really. It was just to check on the people who were being… I didn’t ever do the job.

This was the type of job that I was going to go into. It was just to investigate their background and to report that to other people. That was that type of job. But within the police, we were obliged because of the act that never got through, which was going…which was sort of presented by the government. We were asked, “Did we know anybody who was actively engaged

with the communist party?” and of course I knew this fellow.

Well having experience with the waterside workers and things like that I wasn’t impressed with them at all, you know. And no, I… Well I knew the, remotely knew the doctrine,

you know, what they preach and that, and whilst in my mind there’s some very good things in sort of socialism I never was impressed by the communist sort of side of it, and in particular with the… And I’d read previously and subsequently read about the kulak class [well-to-do peasants or traders in Soviet Russia] that were moved, you know, out into Siberia

and placed like that and millions of people died. So whilst my knowledge was a bit limited I wasn’t very impressed with them and certainly with what happened on the waterfront. That didn’t impress me in the slightest.

Just a general knowledge of it. Nothing specific but it was generally known amongst sailors and that that if you went into a port you might

stop there for a year. They wouldn’t move your ships, you know.

No. During the war they were denying troops certain things that they wanted. They’d go on strike and they wouldn’t be moving whatever the troops wanted. That didn’t impress me and…

No. No. Not to me, no. It was just a general knowledge. And of course when this fellow, these two fellows fronted

they were sprouting this sort of doctrine which… See, I was raised in a fine home, Christian home and all those sorts of things, you know. And suddenly I was confronted with this sort of culture and ideology and things which wasn’t my cup of tea, you know. And whilst I related well with them on the ship, when I got into the police it became a different view. They in a sense

were the enemy.

No. In a sense so. It was sort of a direction that came through. If you have any knowledge of that you are obliged to do it, and being who I was I didn’t hesitate. But I didn’t have to do anything. I didn’t have to say a word. When I just mentioned his name they said, “Oh no, we know him.”

It was… It’s over fifty years ago, but I don’t think I mentioned when I was on the corvette, on the Dubbo, we had… There was one Christian on it out of eighty-two and his life and the way he lived in all the shambles of life was most impressive.

And his life really affected one other man and the change in this man’s life. And that’s what always impresses me. It’s the change in the direction of a man’s life. And this second fellow, his life just changed overnight, virtually, and that impressed me tremendously. And when I… Will I share this with you? I was up in the bow of the ship in the Indian Ocean

and the most beautiful sunset, which I can still see. I didn’t know how to pray, I didn’t know what to say and I just said, “God, whatever’s happened to so-and-so, I want that.” There was no bolt of lightning. There was nothing dramatic happened, you know. But what did happen ten years later was quite extraordinary, really. I was given a book to read about Christianity and about

the return of Christ, and in the Bible it mentions that He will come again. And I sat on the back steps of my home in Crows Nest and I thought, “Boy, what happens now? I’ve had it.” Because I had a background as a child in Sunday School and these things became very real to me. And so I said to Peg, I said, “I’m going to church on Sunday.” And she wasn’t interested because of the life we’d lived. We’d only been in church

to get married. I said, “I want to go to church on Sunday and so I’ll go by myself.” I walked up the hill in Crows Nest to go to Presbyterian church and as I was walking up the hill I thought, “No, I’m Baptist. I’m normally Baptist. That’s what I used to put down.” So I walked across to the Baptist church. I hadn’t been to church for donkeys ages and I didn’t know whether I was dressed for church, you know.

I sort of wandered around for a while and I plucked up courage and walked in and standing in front of me handing out the books, four thousand miles away from where I’d last seen him, was this second man! And we just looked at one another and he became a big brother to me in the faith. But the extraordinary thing, really, was apart from that strange meeting with him… And I’d learned that as a

baby, twenty-nine years before that as a baby I’d been carried into that very church and dedicated to Christ. It was part of the service. Twenty-nine years before! And I had never set foot in the church and I wandered off into life and I came back into the very same church that I had been presented in as a baby. Peg became a Christian shortly after that and it’s gone through the family.

But it was so remarkable, really, that it seemed to confirm a number of things in my life. You know, here I was a baby, just off my believing partners, wandered off into the world and came back into the very same church. I don’t regard that as coincidence. I regard that as the grace of God. And since then of course my life is around the church and I

am very involved. We are both very involved in the church and loving it. You know.

Yeah.

Well it started when I got involved in the fiftieth anniversary. I had nothing to do with it at all prior to that. And it was then that suddenly I find myself at Garden Island. I’ve got photographers photographing me. I’ve got people wanting to know about it. And then gradually as the years have gone on I’ve become part of the service down there.

And it’s grown enormously, really. And when I speak down there the commander, whoever’s commander at the time… And there was a lady, Vicky McConaghy, she is now a captain in the navy. Brilliant, brilliant woman. Master of Arts, Master of Law, and she really whipped it all up and made a big thing of it. And suddenly I find that

I get a phone call from Veteran Affairs [Department of Veteran’s Affairs]: “Mr Roberts, would you mind at this year’s anniversary speaking to so-and-so?” And they actually had a girl within the department who was organising me to speak. I spoke to Jeff Kennett, who was in Victoria. I’ve been in every newspaper. I’ve been on the ABC. I’ve been on every TV station.

And suddenly from nothing it’s grown into something huge. I speak at schools. I speak at men’s meetings and, you know, it’s just… That’s what’s happened. And I get an invitation to the ward room from the Kuttabul. I arrive at the ward room with Peg for a lovely big huge meal, dinner, you know, and there’s a

row, a table full of officers and their wives and all this thing. And the hilarious thing was that I was an able seaman! I was nothing exalted in the navy. I remember one occasion with Colin. We were in his son’s car. We were going from the meeting back up to the Kuttabul for morning tea. And in the car in front of us was the admiral and as his car went up to enter into the Kuttabul establishment in Potts Point there

they raised the barrier and they piped him aboard, but as we were so close to him we were piped aboard too. Two able seamen piped aboard a naval establishment! I wrote to the commander shortly after that and I said history’s been made. This is the first time in naval history that two able seamen have been piped aboard a naval establishment. And then I get

invited to the ward room and we sit down. It’s highly formal. I was sitting here. I had a seaman behind me, actually, and if I moved out of my chair they would pull the chair back, you know. Peg’s there, the commander’s here and there’s all sorts of naval officers and that, and I looked at the menu and it said, “Speaker. Mr Neil Roberts.” And I was unaware. Not that I have any difficulty, as you can see, in speaking I suppose. But

I got up and I’ve been on a diet and I got up and I said… Because the food was gorgeous, you know, and actually I had two helpings of the sweets. And I got up and said how pleased I was to be here and I said. “And I’ve just finished two sweets and I’ve been on a diet for a month, and if I put on weight, I’ll sue.” That sort of got them on side. Those sort of things are happening to me and I’m not

sort of seeking them, you know. They just sort of come. That’s what’s happened. It’s been incredible.

It was too. Yes.

Yes. In the nineties.

I’m used to it and I don’t mind it. I spoke a lot at my church and I used to preach a lot for a number of years. I don’t mind it. It’s just happened, you know. And this thing’s became so large. Did I mention that I spoke at a school up at Newcastle? Seventeen hundred children, one thousand seven hundred children in a huge assembly hall. And those sort of things are happening. Becoming

not a monster but it’s getting…

End of tape

Well I went into the section and initially you learn the craft sort of thing, and once you understand

that you… The role of the fingerprint section is to receive information from the various courts throughout the metropolitan area, and the fingerprints would come in and the fingerprints would be searched against the number of fingerprints on record. Initially I think I started off as a cyclist. I was a cyclist at North Sydney

and then I went as a cyclist into the fingerprint section and would call at the courts and pick up the fingerprints at the stations and that and take them out to the fingerprints section where they were classified and searched through the major thing. Now today it is totally different. I wouldn’t have a clue what they are doing today with the various equipment that they’ve got. But in those days it was a physical searching

of what came into the section against the records. And it meant looking through a magnifying glass at the prints. You would classify them and then go to the section in the classification and you might get one, you might get fifty, you might get two hundred fingerprints in that particular file. Well then you go through what’s been delivered and you flick through

the things until you locate, or you may never locate. There are sort of quick ways of doing. They may have a scar and you could quickly flick through just looking for the scar. But it affected my eyesight after a while, these constant hours of looking through fingerprints. And then that was one section and then the next section there was the records section and

that contained thousands upon thousands of cards with the records of people, various people that would come before the courts.

Yeah. It really was. And I think the humour of the place helped enormously because it really was a boring job, the searching part of it. And then of course from there, of which I

never reached because I wasn’t actually an expert because I wasn’t there long enough… I think it took five years before you were an expert and then you would go into a single fingerprint section. This one had the whole hands like that in that order on the form. But you would graduate from there into another special little division where you would be searching prints found of robberies

and things of that nature, and that was a single individual fingerprint grouping. But it was interesting at the beginning but it became pretty boring after a while, and then I spent all those hours searching for them.

You’d get them fairly regularly, really, because a lot of them… Fortunately with some of the criminals about and some of the offenders that they

repeat, you know, they are coming in recidivists and they keep coming back before the courts and you’d have no great difficulty sometimes in finding them. Once you classify them you know that you go to a certain section, pull out those prints and just flick through them and get it…

Well yeah. That was possible, but it was done two or three times. See I would do it

and would go to a senior officer and would go to somebody else, perhaps. And that would be done and it would be looked at three or four times, perhaps, before any decision was made as to what was there anything new.

No. No. The ones who testified in court were the experts, the ones who had done the five years. My role was mainly in the office, and I was limited too

because I hadn’t driven a police car. I had driven a police bike but I had to be qualified in driving a police car. And the police car used to go out to the robberies and assaults and whatever. I was pretty limited to what I was doing. Just stuck in the office, mainly.

Well I think I was in an era where it was fairly okay, but in the twenties it was really a violent place. We had the razor gangs and things like that. But I had the feeling that it was not moderate, but it wasn’t to the violence that was then and the violence that we have today. And no, I don’t think it was too bad. We had our murders and all sorts of weird things like that, but I

don’t think it was as violent as it used to be and as it is now.

I was isolated from that. Of course being in the office, being stuck in this fingerprint section I never had anything to do and the only meetings I had with other detectives were when they would come in

to the office in the nightshift and I would be perhaps by myself and they would ask you to look up some material for them. So I had no evidence, really, of anything else. You used to hear a lot of stories but I had no evidence at all or any contact with that sort of life. And was just foreign to me.

Which is unmentionable.

No, I can’t give any hints at all. No. I’ll have to bypass that one.

The job? Oh, I really loved

the job. I thought it was great and I had opportunities. It is funny when you look back on your past history. I can’t really point to many successes. You don’t know what’s happening in people’s lives, but I like to think I had influence on several particular cases and that was just a matter of… I think in my day, and I started in sixty-eight,

it’s different to what they have today as far as I can gather but we used to have a people-to-people type thing. But today I understand it has developed into a sort of casual reporting in some cases. And they just sort of come into the office and they’re dismissed, but ours in those days in the beginning of it was pretty thorough counselling and things of that nature.

A number of them are very frustrating, particularly those of them involved in the drug scene. And I’ve had people, you know, they look you in the eye and they would lie their heads off. You would know they were lying and you couldn’t do much about it. It was just a matter of getting alongside them

and trying to encourage them and point out the dangers of what they were involved in, their lifestyle and things like that. But that part of it was very frustrating and the tragedy was that when you were working alongside a person and you were getting alongside them and trying your utmost to… Suddenly you’d get a phone call and they’ve had it, you know. Now that’s a bit hard to take, particularly when you get close to them.

I often feel sometimes I went beyond professional bounds. I got attached to some of them. And again you have your successes and that is an absolute joy. But it is not an easy job if you really are involved with them and it is difficult. Yeah.

No. No. Nothing at all. It wasn’t part of me. You know, I just didn’t have any. Although I had a beginning in the Sunday School and that sort of thing and I had a foundation, I suppose, it really wasn’t my life. I was too involved in other things. But what happened was quite startling and

then as I’ve been a Christian for so many years it is my life now. It’s totally my life. And my wife’s. It’s just wonderful.

No. I don’t think it was at that

level really, but they were a separate group within the department and they were seeking ex-service policemen and I went along. I didn’t get involved in it beyond just the initial interview because, one, I learned that I had to go to Woomera. I didn’t. For some reason, because of my asthmatic son I said no.

Yeah. Something like that.

Well that was a side I didn’t know much about. Just that there was a group within the police and we were told virtually ordered to go and if we had any information just to pass it on. There was a group. There was a sort

undercover group that were operating, and they would have been in the state police operating too in conjunction with the federal. Federal groups. Things of that nature.

I am a member of the RSL and only recently I spoke at a

Probus meeting, which was like a branch of the… Can’t think of the word. Anyway, I spoke there and that happened to be in the RSL, and I had a funny experience there, too. When I had finished speaking there was question time and one chap stood up and in a very aggressive way he told me that the

ferry Kuttabul wasn’t what I had purported it to be. Well, I had said it was a wooden ferry. He went on and as he was talking I thought to myself, “Well, I had better be gracious about this,” and when he had finished I said, “Well I’ve learned something. Thank you.” And that took the steam out of the thing. It could have been nasty but I learned later that that’s his habit. You know.

But I do… I am a member. I am a member only. I don’t get involved with the RSL, really, in any of their meetings and things of that nature.

I am a member of the Corvette Association, which is quite big really. I receive their publication once a month, a couple of times, about four times a year, but I’m not really involved

in that. I’ve got too busy a life, anyway, and that is really just a little internal thing that comes to former folks on corvettes and interesting reading but that’s about as far as I’m involved.

I haven’t marched for years and years and years. When I was in the police I had to march. We used to form up and

police uniform group used to be first and then plain clothes police, which I was. We also had to march. And I haven’t marched since I was in the police. I don’t know why. I sit home and watch it. I sit home and… I can’t march now but in years gone by I didn’t march. Mainly because, as I said earlier I think, the navy…

When I was on the Dubbo, all the Dubbo people came from all over Australia. Now they’d be marching in Australia and there was only one I know who marched in Sydney and he didn’t march very often. So navy wise I didn’t have any friends I could march with. And the DEMS was another limited sort of thing because they were a very small organisation and I wouldn’t have known anybody really. So I cut out

the marching and I used to watch. I watch it every time.

Yes. I go to the one at Chatswood and I went to one recently. I was invited to go to that because the minister that was speaking wanted to illustrate a point and I was one part of the point that he wanted to illustrate, and the Japanese son of one of his congregation was there and he asked me to come along

and be there. I didn’t speak, but something strange happened at that. While I was standing after the service a priest came up to me and he told me something very sad, in a way. His father was on the Kuttabul and he swapped with a friend of his so that he could go ashore and see his future

wife. The friend that went on to the Kuttabul got killed. That was a blow that was known in the family, just that his father going ashore, and he lived and this chap who took his place, he died. Yeah. So I go to that occasionally. I don’t go much.

Look that’s strange. I really haven’t and I can’t recall anything really. And of course as the years have gone all that sort of thing has disappeared. And I know that there are ex-servicemen that hold bitterness, you know, and to some people that’s a bit of a joke, I suppose, they wouldn’t buy a Japanese car and things like that. But no, I haven’t really.

I’m being quite honest about that. I don’t feel anything. And then again of course I’ve had Japanese neighbours who are delightful people, and so that’s never been a part of my life.

I suppose so, general type thing. They were the enemy I suppose. I did have… I must have had.

Yeah. But I can’t ever

remember getting up out of the water and shaking a fist at the submarines or at the midgets. I must have had, I suppose. Being human, I suppose I must have had some feeling. But I’ve noticed that when at the ceremonies when Japanese people approach me I don’t feel anything against… As a matter of fact, I must confess to an admiration for their submariners to do what they did.

Highly trained, very brave. And I make a point every time I speak down there and I usually finish up my talk by saying that we must also pay tribute to the bravery of these men. I haven’t got any feeling about it.

Right, well I suppose it was an honour to do it and I certainly have a great deal of admiration for the navy. I enjoyed the years I spent with them. But the thing that impresses me, really, in later life is they honour those they lost, and that’s admirable really, and

they are very gracious, extremely gracious to me and to those who survived the Kuttabul. And they’ve been generous. I’ll find that I’ve decanter out in the room – I’ll show you in a minute – which is full of port, beautifully engraved in it, which was presented to me and

my son said, “Don’t drink that, Dad. We’ll keep that and we’ll have a wake when you go and consume this decanter of whatever.” No. I loved the navy, I really did, and greatly admire… And I’ve met so many very, very fine folk. They were (UNCLEAR). It has just been part of my life.