Australians at War Film Archive

Well I was born on the 1st of December 1927, it was a Thursday somebody told me after they did a bit of computer work. That’s all I know about it but Five Dock, a private hospital and the family then lived in Croydon. Five Dock, Croydon

and Burwood, with one move to Newcastle in that time, to Adamstown, and back to Sydney. Then back to Newcastle again about 1941, I think it was, and we lived at Hamilton. I went to school at a sisters’ [nuns] convent school at Croydon and Adamstown and Christian Brothers at Burwood, then the Marist Brothers at Hamilton. I finished up there on the 1st of December

1942. I was 15 when I left school. My father worked in a transport office as a Depot Master at Hamilton, then I followed him into the transport office and worked at the 99 Macquarie St, Sydney for a while then transferred to Newcastle. When I was about 25 I got this inclination that I wasn’t doing what I was really s’posed to be doing. I was very involved in the church

and the youth work in the church and I was president of the YCW [Young Christian Workers], which was Young Christian Workers Movement in the diocese, and I just felt that I was sent for something else to do with my life. So I wrestled around with that for about two years and I decided I couldn’t continue living like that with this thing in the back of my mind. So I took six months leave from work and went off to Springwood Seminary in 1955,

February, and then after six months I asked for another six months. Billy Owens was the superintendent, he was very helpful and he said, “Oh well, have another six months,” and at the end of that time I felt that’s where I was supposed to be. So I did the three years at Springwood then I went to Manly for five years. I was eight years going through, Springwood one, two, three, yeah, and I was ordained on July the 21st

1962. So then I took up work in the diocese then and I worked at Newcastle as the chaplain to Royal Newcastle Hospital. Sort of thrown in at the deep end, as it were, I didn’t know anything about hospitals, I’d never been in one. And then I went from Newcastle to Taree, and it was in Taree that a Bishop came up for Confirmation one time - in 1968 it must’ve been,

‘67/68. He said, “The priest in the army’s finishing up,” so he said. And I said, “Well, what’s that got to do with me?” And he said, “Well, you’re the one that’s going in.” And I said, “Oh really?” So I had to do the medical and everything and do the course at Stanley Park I think, Stanley Park or something down somewhere south of Sydney, a training course for three or four weeks it was. And then in

1968/69 I left the Taree parish after three years, and went into the army at Singleton, 3RTB [3Recruit Training Battalion]. And there I began my army career. And after about six months I was really, didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing, I was a bit all at sea and everything so I went to an old friend of mine, a Redemptionist priest, Wally Williams. I said, “Wally I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing in this army.”

He said, “Look son, don’t ever change course after six months, always do something for 12 months and then see how you feel after that.” So after 12 months I felt I was on my feet and everything was going alright. I had me uniform finally, I didn’t get one when I first went in because the National Service was in full vogue and they were churning out, I suppose, uniforms quickly. And then 3RTB went well because there was

three units there. My mind’s a bit foggy about it, but there were three groups and we used to give COs [Commanding Officers] hours and talks and go on things with fellas and all those young blokes, 18, 19 in the national service and that. And then one day the message come down the office where I had me, the chaplain’s office and said, “The XO [Executive Officer] wants to see you this afternoon.” So I thought the first thing, “What am

I doing wrong?” So I went up to see him and he said, “Oh well, the Catholic Chaplain in Vietnam is due to change over in May.” This must’ve been about March or something, and he said, “You’re the next one on the list.” I said, “Ah.” He said, “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” he said, “We’ll just go down to the next one until we find somebody who’s willing to go.” I said, “Oh no, I’m in the army so I’ll do what I’m expect to do.”

So that’s how that part of my life started. So I went off on the 6th of May, I think it was, 1970, and up to Vietnam to Nui Dat. And then 12 months up there and then came back on the 7th of May 1971. Those dates mightn’t be exactly correct but they are as far as I can work out. And then came back from the army and went to

Maitland Cathedral, which it was in those days, it’s in Hamilton now. I was the administrator of the Cathedral there for three or four years and buried Bishop Toohey and then welcomed the new Bishop in and then got to East Maitland and then to Raymond Terrace. It was from Raymond Terrace after 13 years that I retired at the age of, I turned 75 in December and I retired in the February.

That’s where I am now.

Yeah.

We were living in Five Dock, and it was a private one, Nurse Nash’s private hospital, I don’t know where it was because I was very young when I was born. That’s all I know about it see, my old aunty was about 94 when she died and I asked

her once about my birth, where I was born because she told me about my elder brother. I said, “Aunty Mauve, what do you know about me?” And she said, “Nothing,” she said, “They never talked about you much.” I was the second one, I s’pose the novelty had worn off or something. So then we moved from Five Dock, Regatta Road Five Dock to Delmar Street Croydon. And then they bought a house in Cheltenham Road, Burwood.

No. No, there’s no history of anybody in the whole, both sides of the family. Oh, a cousin was in the air force, but I don’t know if he was in it during the war or not, I don’t know.

He was in the Depot Master at Hamilton Tram and Bus Depot and he died there in 1947. Very stressful job

because the war was on and he was trying to, there was a superintendent, then the depot master was the next in charge and he was, we got the telephone on during the war because it was an essential, an important service transport. And we had the old candlestick telephone that you pick up and hold up to your ear, and I can still remember he’d be ringing up me grandmother in Sydney

in those days, and they book the call, a trunk call, and they’d say, “There’s a two-hour delay to Sydney so we’ll ring you back.” And now they ring the world in about two seconds. So that’s how much things have gone on. But I think the job killed him because it was so stressful, and every crisis at the depot about supplies or transport, trams and buses was on his lap. So he was only 54 when he died.

He was a wonderful man, a very gentle man, and a very committed Catholic man. And I didn’t find out until years later, I was talking to one of the fellows that worked with him and he said, “Your father used to go across to the Sacred Heart Church at Hamilton, which was in walking distance, very often in his lunch hour and pray that one of his boys,”

he had four boys no girls, “One of his boys would get a vocation.” And I said, “Oh, he would’ve died thinking that didn’t happen.” Yeah, he was great, I don’t know what else you can say about your father really. I was 19 when he died, so the…

No, no.

No, not at all, no.

She was a very lovely lady, a great sense of humour, and always had people laughing, and she just, one of those wonderful people. After my Dad died, she married a few years later

and then we moved house then from Hamilton to Broadmeadow.

Well we had a little dog, Trixie, a little, what are those little things called…fluffy ones? I can’t think what the dogs’ name is.

No, a bit bigger than that. And that’s the only dog

we ever had as children growing up. Trixie died and that was the end of it. Me first memories?

My first memories would be at Croydon, I wouldn’t remember much about Five Dock at all, Regatta Road. But Croydon I remember that pretty well because we were five or six or seven or something like that I s’pose. But it’s funny about, we lived on a little bit of a hill,

Delmar Street went down a little bit of a hill to Croydon Road, and every time Grandma and Grandpa were coming to visit, we’d be waiting out the front gate. And Grandpa Markner, Mum’s father, always came around the corner about 10 yards ahead of Grandma. They never walked up the hill together, she was a bit slow. And there, we were living in Croydon in those days across the road was a great big paddock and we used to go and have a…play

hide and seek in the paddock. You wouldn’t find anywhere like that in Croydon now. And at Burwood, there were great paddocks around Burwood, too, and Worth Circus used to come to a paddock in Lucas Road or something. But I’ve been down there a few years later and there’s no sign of that, anything like that.

Yeah that’s right. Yeah they’d come and set up tents in the paddock and be there for two or three nights and pack up and go again.

School, yeah, well, we used to wear straw boaters to the Christian Brothers Burwood and then they, you’d put them in your bag until you got to the school street and then you’d take them out and put them on your head. Because you didn’t like, you felt funny wearing them.

It was probably a blazer and a shirt and trousers. You look back on it…I don’t know what prices were like but the parents

must’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I s’pose they do now, but much more money around these days, but to dress kids in school uniforms. And then they gave the straw hats away and put on little peak caps with a little tiny peak on them. No school buses or anything like that. If you wanted to go to school on the bus you caught the bus at the corner and paid a penny or whatever it was. But we walked most times.

At Burwood.

It was good. I went there in fifth class in the convent. I went back to look at it in a few years, I couldn’t recognise hardly everything because all of the old rooms would’ve been pulled down. But there was grass in the yard which you wouldn’t find these days, and it’s funny, when the grass got tall enough we’d tie it into knots so that the next kid that come along would trip.

Tie a knot in the grass. And the brothers were excellent, and the fifth class and sixth class. And in the first year, we moved to Newcastle at that stage.

I don’t think so, no. I don’t remember any sort of strictness very much, no.

Well, Dad was getting

transfers, like promotions. Like, you start off as a junior clerk and a roster clerk, and he went into the roster clerks business, and there was a section where they organise all the men’s shift and everything.

Well we were in Sydney at Cheltenham Road when the war started. Of course we were having, we had visitors over, Harry Hill and Lil Hill and their two

children. Mum and Lil were great friends from childhood sort of thing and they lived in Regatta Road where we’d lived before, and they used to come over on a Friday night for just, in those days people used just to visit and talk and listen to the wireless and have a cup of tea at supper and then we’d go to their place the next fortnight or something. But I’m assuming we were in the house, in our place in Cheltenham Road, 27, and didn’t know much about the war,

but sometime in the night, might’ve been about eight o’clock or nine o’clock, they were still there and we could hear the paper boy whistle, blowing the whistle up and down the street. And old Harry, who’d been the Gallipoli, I can remember him saying, “Oh my god, it’s not on again is it?” Because the adults would’ve known the build up to it and they went out and got the paper and it was “Hitler invades Poland” sort of thing, and Mr Menzies

come on the air a bit later on or something. And a few days later or it might’ve been weeks later England declared war with this beautiful thing, “It’s my melancholy duty to inform you that we are now at war with Germany.” So Harry said, “He’d rather walk behind.” He had a son Jim was 12 months older than me to the day, and he said, “He’d rather walk behind Jim’s coffin to Rookwood Cemetery than

see him off on the troop ship.” That was his experience of Gallipoli and the war over there.

Yeah. I just missed out on the war, the war ended up on August and I turned 18 in the December.

Yeah.

No I think that, there was protected industries

and things, like people working in the steelworks and transport, essential services they called them and they were almost not allowed to join up.

At school, well we used to, we dug these, well we didn’t but somebody dug these great big trenches in the schoolyard at Hamilton Marist Brothers and

we’d have air raid drill. The siren would go off and you had to get up and line up and go down into the trench. It was great because it was off school for an hour or so. Other memories, buses were all painted in camouflage colours and all the windows were taken out. So if you didn’t open the window you didn’t know where you were because you couldn’t see out. Street lights were

very dim, they had these cups around the lights and they just sort of spotted light on the ground. The cars all had the hooded headlights that just shone down onto the ground. There was rationing on.

Not really. I s’pose my mother managed all the food

coupons and things, but we didn’t seem to, well to me memory I don’t think we seemed to be starving or anything. Food was pretty basic in those days, sausages and a piece of steak with a pocket in it from the butcher.

Yeah, well, Mum’d say, “Go get a pound of steak with a pocket in it,” meaning the butcher got the lump of meat and cut a hole in it, cut a pocket in it

and that was stuffed up with herbs and a stuffing of breadcrumbs. And I can still see Mum sewing up the end of the pocket with a needle and black cotton. And it was cooked.

Yeah.

Haven’t you? A piece of steak with a pocket in it or a piece of pork with the buttons on it?

That was the side of the pig, the sow with the buttons on it.

They don’t

do those things any more, no.

I think very much so, yeah, especially when the 1941 one, when the Japanese were at the doorstep sort of thing. My uncle who took my aunty, my grandma, who was not married, my uncle, Uncle Bill, Dad’s brother, took her up to Singleton to get out of Sydney because they all fled from Sydney. You could buy a house in Bondi for about

500 quid or something in those days. And then when the Battle of the Coral Sea was on and I was up at Singleton visiting and my old uncle, he was a bit of a pessimist and he was saying, “Our goose is cooked,” he said, “They’ll be here in another couple of weeks.” “Oh that’s going to be great, that’ll be nice.”

Well you see, we weren’t told much

because we got news, I can remember getting news that an aeroplane had flown over Darwin and dropped a few bombs. And I thought, “Oh well, that’s not much.” But, and the fact of it was that they blew Darwin to bits, sunk every ship in the harbour. We weren’t told anything like that, and I never knew that Broome had been bombed in the war until fairly recently. I s’pose as kids you don’t really

see what can happen, you know what I mean? We were young teenagers, 14 or 15 and that. And school was going on and the pictures were on and things like that.

I don’t think there were any around Newcastle.

I know the windows, we had a back veranda in Denison St, it went around two sides of the house and it was all glass and it was all taped up with tape, criss-crossed. And the night the Japanese bombed, shelled Newcastle, I didn’t hear anything because they, Fort Scratchley would practise sometimes and things would rattle a bit, the windows would rattle a bit. And going up the stairs to the upstairs room at the Marist Brothers, Brother Lucien

was walking up alongside me. I remember him saying, he said, “How did you survive the shelling last night?” And I said, “I didn’t know Brother, what happened?” He said, “The Japanese shelled Newcastle.” I said, “Oh, I didn’t hear anything.” So they dropped a few shells in, they were trying to bomb the steelworks apparently but they, a few shells landed around the Parnell place and things like that.

No, no.

Yeah, well, we had a steelworks at Newcastle full blast in those days, you’d often hear them dropping things over there, the noise from the steelworks sometimes, clunks and that. But I was a pretty sound sleeper anyhow.

The Marist Brothers yeah.

Nothing exciting, I don’t think. In those days you did first, second and third year and then most people left then. But if you were going to go to university or you wanted to be a lawyer, you went to fourth and fifth year and got the Leaving Certificate. But I left the day I turned 15, the 1st of December 1942, I left school and that was me 15th birthday. And me father said, “You’re too young to go to work,” he said, “I want you to go to business

college for a year.” Which I did in Newcastle, and did shorthand and typing and business principles and things like that.

I wasn’t playing much at all really, I couldn’t stand cricket because I’d field for an hour and a half and bat for about two minutes. I couldn’t see much future in that. And football,

no that never, I played a couple of games at the seminary but I never played at school, no. I always, I don’t know, I might’ve been a bit sort of timid as a child in that sense. And my parents never insisted on us doing things we didn’t want to do.

No, no. Well it was more or less, most kids played it. I went to swimming a few times and that but I don’t remember getting involved in any school

sports. But I can remember Clive Churchill and Brother Lucien was his coach. And Clive was in the, I was in the A class, he was in the B and I can remember him, this brother having him out in this field kicking this football because obviously this brother could see his potential. You know of Clive Churchill?

That’s right yeah, and I was saying, “Poor old Clive, look at him out there. He’s been kicking that flaming football all afternoon.” And I was feeling

a little bit sorry for him in a way. But the brother could probably see his potential and he became a great Australian player.

Well, it wasn’t my experience, no. And there was no pressure from the school

to do things. There was football and there was cricket and there was swimming, and that was about the most of it, I think, in those days. I only got the strap about four or five times. I don’t remember getting it at Burwood, ever. And I remember it because I came from first year at Burwood to first year at Hamilton in the middle of the year. And my excuse

always was, when I was asked something, “I wasn’t here when you did that Brother.” So this particular day he went around the room, Brother George it was, asking people for their, it was chemistry class and he was asking the symbols, the symbols of different things: Nitrogen – N, Oxygen – O or something. And he came to me and said, “Sulphur?” And I said, “I wasn’t here when you did that Brother.” He said, “We did that yesterday, come out here.” Whack, whack. So I thought, “That’s the end of that.”

That’s the end of that excuse.

That’s right.

Brother Urban was the principal at Hamilton. Yeah, he was an inspiration in a way because during the war the Italian battleship, Bartolomeo Colleonior something was sunk

by the Sydney or something or other and it was declared a half holiday for all the schools and he got up on the platform and said - the Sydney was currently coming into Sydney or something - and he said, “I can understand a half holiday if you could see the boat coming in but you can’t see it so there’s no point having a half holiday. So I’m ringing the bell and all back to class.” And we thought, “That’s pretty rough,” and we immediately marched back.

Well I had pen friends, I didn’t…I used to like writing letters and things like that, so I had three pen friends in America or four, and then I collected stamps. That was a pretty quiet sort of a hobby. Otherwise I did a bit of work around the backyard and things like that. But in my later days I became a great squash player.

Yes.

Yes, there was no television, so the pictures were your entertainment. And the thing was that the Century Theatre was not far from our place in Broadmeadow. Hoyt’s had the Century and the Roxy and the Regent in Islington, Hamilton and Broadmeadow. And they demolished this Century Theatre in Broadmeadow and built this

great big new picture show back in 1942 or something, ‘43 when all the building restrictions were on. And what they were saying, what the people were saying was they demolished the building down to a little bit of the wall and then they were really renovating, so they were able to get all the bricks and materials because they weren’t putting up a new structure technically. And that’s gone now, after the earthquake that was demolished so that’s gone from the scene.

Cowboys and Indians were always good, and adventure stories and things like that. They were all black and white of course. Of course you went to the pictures in those days and you’ve got three or four hours. You’ve got the preview of the coming attractions and you’ve got James A. Fitzpatrick’s Travel Talk, and you’ve got a cartoon, then you’ve got something like, Behind The Eight Ball, then you’ve got a comedy thing,

then you’ve got the B-grade movie, then you had interval and then you came back after interval and saw the main feature. It was really entertainment in that sense, you got a variety of things. And there was always a serial, Speed Gordon in the 21st Century. That was back then, but what he was doing, we’re doing it now.

No, in the 25th century it was, rocket ships and things like that,

four centuries ahead of their time.

Usually Saturday afternoon when we were kids you’d get your sixpence and go to the pictures, perhaps a penny to spend, you’d get halfpenny’s worth of those lollies, three of those for a halfpenny and four of those or six of those for a penny or something.

Oh yes…Saturday afternoon.

A, the thing about in those, I’m talking about in those days, of course it is a long time ago, but kids went to the pictures on their own and walked home on their own and now you see the parents dropping them off in their cars and picking them up in their cars. In those days you could walk everywhere and nobody cared. Nobody worried you.

It was a very strong Catholic family,

from both sides. Although both my grandparents were mixed marriages like Mum’s mother was a Catholic but her father was a Mason, one of those Presbyterian I don’t know what he was. And the same on Dad’s side, Dad’s mother was a Catholic but Grandpa Levey wasn’t. I think he became a Catholic just before he died or something like that. And they both came from mixed marriages, and Mum and Dad were very strong

faith people and that’s how it was in those days. See, in those years, the church was your social centre because you went on picnics with the church group and you had church dances, all those things revolved around your church. And then of course over the ‘50s and ‘60s, ‘60s and ‘70s, the clubs and things and all those things came in and people diversified, and I think that’s part of the

reason for the way things are now. And we never had motorcars, we had pushbikes.

What do you mean as a young guy?

My involvement as a teenager would’ve been pretty basic, would’ve been in a youth group sort of thing.

Got my entertainment basically from the church, from the church activities, the youth club dances on a Saturday night or Friday night, picnics on Sundays, family get-togethers, things like that.

Yes, it probably was only on Sundays, yeah. Later on in life I started going a bit more often because my mother was a daily church-goer

in her later life.

Oh no. We very rarely went to mass from the school, we went to confession from the school. I don’t remember going to a school mass ever from either of the schools because in those days most of the kids were going to mass every Sunday.

I don’t think I was bright enough to go any further. I got an A in English in Intermediate and three Bs and four was a, four passes were required right? But the basic pass was four Bs, but I got A in English and I got a B in Physics or Chemistry or something and Algebra, I forget now. But it was just, I just thought, “Well, that’s enough.” I don’t know whether it was my decision or not

really. I don’t know.

I don’t think so, I think you just, a lot of people in those days, young people followed their father, they might’ve changed course later on as I did, but no, I don’t think I left school with any great ambitions. The war was raging and it was a matter of getting a job and hoping

things would get better in the world.

I don’t know, were they still calling people up in 1945, ‘44? I don’t know. It never sort of came into my mind, I felt, well, whether it was just something I’d think about when I turned 18, I don’t know.

I’ve got no recollection of any anxieties about being called up or anything.

Well after that I went into the Transport Department, see. I started work there at 99 Macquarie St, I don’t know if it’s still there or not. Is it? The Transport Office?

It wasn’t hard to get a job anywhere

in those war years. You could’ve had a choice of 10 jobs if you wanted them. I don’t know whether, I don’t remember him talking me into anything, just sort of, oh well that’s it. Then I boarded in Sydney, then of course with this Aunty Lil in Five Dock you see.

Yeah, I don’t know whether it was 12 months or 18 months or two years. I forget now.

Again, I think you just took it in your stride a bit. Used to get the bus into Annandale, Johnson Street because of the fuel business and then you had to get out and get into a tram to go down to Circular Quay then walk up from Circular Quay. So, well, again I was

involved in the church in Concord, you see, that was a parish church for me and I got involved in the social activities there.

Well, I started off as a junior clerk in what they called the Discipline Section. That was a great big room where there was about five fellows working there. About three or four of us juniors. And I’m still in touch with two of them right over all those years.

See when the fella came late for work he had to fill in a form stating his reason for being late and he’d get a tick or memo or a triple memo and then a warning. And all these things were recorded in these great big books, there was a great big row of, a shelf along there. We stood up all day at these great big desks, looked like Charles Dickens I s’pose, and you pulled out this book with this fellow’s name

in it. Everybody had a minor history and a major history in the department, and every misdemeanour was recorded in the junior book, if it was a tick, a memo with a cross and a tick, or a triple memo or a warning. And after the warning you went into the major books and they were cautioned, reprimand, severe reprimand, seen and suitably spoken to or suspended or dismissed.

And all these things were written up. We’d be writing all day in these great big ledgers, and there was three blokes deciding what was going to happen to this fellow who’d been late for work for the fifth time. Or somebody who’d been rude to a passenger, or somebody whose bus had arrived late or tram had arrived late for no good reason, and all these things were recorded. Or somebody was taking the money

and not issuing tickets, he kept the money, because when he went back to the revenue room they checked his tickets and he had the money in his pocket for the tickets he hadn’t sold. So the inspector would get on the bus or the tram and check everybody’s tickets and check the timetable and everything and put in a report. Then those reports went back to the discipline office and they were assessed and recorded as a warning or a caution or something like that.

I don’t know what they do now, but then if a conductor or a driver was dismissed they had to write an appeal. And then I moved up the ladder from that particular business with my shorthand and typing experience and we’d record, come into the appeal thing, he’d come in with this union rep and the government bloke would be there, the officer

there, and you had to take down everything verbatim in shorthand, the whole thing and then write the, and you’d dread when they say, “Well that’s not what you said five minutes ago.” “What did you say five minutes ago?” Had to go back through your pages and find out what he said and read it out in your shorthand. That was a fifth grade clerk’s job, that’s when I left.

Oh yes, yeah.

Especially if there was an accident. Why did it happen? You’d have all the information. And when we were junior clerks in Sydney, two of us went out this day in our lunch hour and then we were coming back, we got on the tram and paid our fare, of course we had a pass to go work and from work, but not for other travel, and this conductor on the tram took the money and didn’t give us the tickets.

And we thought, “Oh.” So we didn’t say anything about it at the time, we’re back in the office talking about it you see and one of the seniors heard us and he said, “What are you two kids talking about?” We said, “Nothing much.” “You said something about not getting tickets.” And they called us into the boss and we had to spill our guts and say, “Well we got on a tram at wherever it was, Wynyard or something, gave him the money

and we didn’t get tickets.” “What tram was it? What time was it?” And of course they had to track the whole thing down and the bloke got the sack and we had to give evidence and all we could say was, “Well, we paid our fare,” I don’t know how old we were, 16 or something, 17 or something, and didn’t get any tickets. And then he appealed against it and of course, because we were officers of the department, they were claiming t was a set-up. I forget the whole details now but he got back on the job again now.

I still remember the way he glared at me and the other kid when he walked out.

Well it wasn’t really a boarding house, it was the house of a family friend, and they had, this is a bit funny I s’pose, a bit personal, but, and a lot of them are dead, so…

But my first impressions of a marriage that wasn’t sort of a marriage because it was a little house and the mother and the daughter slept in the front room and the father and the son slept in the next room down. And I used to think, “Well that’s funny,” because Mum and Dad always slept in the one room. And when I came along I had to share the bed with the son and he was 12 months older than me, so I would’ve been

16 and he would’ve been 17. He was an apprentice and he used to get up earlier than me so he slept on the outside of the bed and I slept on the inside with the wall. And it was a three-quarter bed and there was two of us in it. You didn’t have much room to move around. And I’d come in from Newcastle, I’d go home to Newcastle on Friday night from Sydney, back home and I’d come back on Sunday night on the 3801, which is

now operating again, it was the first of the comet engines, and I’d get to Strathfield about half past seven. It left from Broadmeadow, got to Strathfield about half past nine, walk up Strathfield Road to Parramatta Road and catch the bus down to Five Dock. Then I’d walk down Regatta Road to their place and I had to sneak into the house because they were all in bed, and get undressed in the dining room and tiptoe into the bedroom

and crawl over Jim to get to my side without waking him up. It was all rather funny. And I remember one night I come in, they used to have the billy-cans, in those days they had to have them, the cuff of me trousers got caught in the handle of the billy-cans because they had a U-shape on them. I stepped up onto the front doorstep, clang, clang, clang. No, it was an experience, it was good. But Old Harry used to

snore, and Jim and I would say, “We’ve got to stop father from snoring, he wakes us up.” So we used to get socks and roll them up in a ball and then if he starts to snore we’d just throw them at him and wake him up.

I wouldn’t know. This happened this way because it was a family arrangement through families who knew each other

pretty well.

Oh, I think so. I think they were all right. Old Lil, she was 101 when she died only a couple of years ago. She was a bit of an old tiger in a way, and I think Harry was, he wasn’t henpecked, but she seemed, to my impression she was running the place.

It was pretty laid back, like Queen Victoria buildings was all boarded up, and they were going to pull it down at one stage I think and now they decided to restore it, which is one of the centrepieces of Sydney now, but in those days everything was, in that building was all boarded up and closed. I don’t know why but. And the tram would rattle down to the quay, the old

toast rack trams where you had two compartments at each end opened and the four compartments in the middle with doors, and if you smoked you sat out on the thing, have you seen them at all? Seen pictures of them?

Yeah. And the conductors on the footboard. Why they weren’t killed by the hundreds I don’t know, but it was all right except in the wet weather because I always sat out on the open part because it was better and you were getting

fresh air and everything. But in the wet weather it was terrible because they had these big blinds they’d pull down, and of course when he came along for the fares, up would go the blind and everybody was sitting in the rain, and taking all the fares and pull the blind down again. No, it was fun in that sense.

Yeah.

I don’t remember anything much about that, but Aunty Lil had a Chinese family, were friends, the Tacs they lived in Five Dock, in Croydon too. And because they were Chinese they got a ration of rice and of course we used to get rice from Mrs Tac, she’d send out a bag of rice every now and again because they got probably more than they wanted, of course they were Chinese and I s’pose the government thought

their staple diet was rice and they got extra rice. And some food was hard to get. Ham, I can remember there was a ham and beef shop up on Parramatta Road on the corner of Regatta Road and the old fella there, when he’d get a ham in word would go around ham was up there. So Lil said to me, one afternoon Aunty Lil said, “Go up and get two shillings of ham,” so I went up and got it.

And he used to cut it that thin, you could see the knife going through it and I brought it up and she opened it and she said, excuse me for saying this, she said, “Look at that,” she said, “You’d think he was cutting it off his arse.” But they were things like that, some things were in short supply and if you knew it, you got the word you could go up and get some. And the same with Lil would queue up sometimes, she said, for a bottle of port. Of course Harry liked a glass of port

of a night time and you’d queue up for a long time for it when it came in. So all those things were in short supply.

You got clothing coupons, I don’t remember any trouble with clothes really, no. That’s a funny story about queuing up you see, this old girl queued up in the queue and didn’t know what it was for. She tapped the woman in front of her and she said, “What’s this queue for?” And she said, “We’re queuing up for The Tales

of Hoffman.” Oh she said, “I’ll stay in here because me old man eats anything.”

Very localised, I s’pose the way you’d say. You might go to the pictures in town very occasionally but of course there were picture shows everywhere, the Burwood Palatial and the Burwood Astor, they were all

going on, so they were handy enough.

Oh yeah, the papers would inform you about what was going on and everything and the radio with the news of a night time and things like that.

I don’t think glued to it, I s’pose concerned and a bit worried but not exactly hanging on every thread.

Petrol rationing was on of course but nobody had cars so it didn’t matter very much. And that went on until about 1948 or ‘49, I think, decided to stop.

They’d have a dance every Sunday night. Sometimes they’d have theatre parties where you’d all go to the pictures together in a group.

Picnics, and of course everybody went on a picnic together. Now everybody goes in their own car and they go home when they feel like it, but you’d hire a bus and you’d all go in the bus together and have fun in the bus and then come home together on the bus and it was a real picnic spirit. It’s not around so much these days, I don’t think.

Yeah.

We had a reunion from the Broadmeadow group only three or four, maybe four or five years ago, and this fellow Bruce Neil got in touch with everybody. And we all gathered at the old church and we had mass and we had a big party in the hall afterwards.

I did have a couple, yeah, and I met one of them just recently at the parish,

Broadmeadow Parish was with our parish at Newcastle was 100 years old, 1904 was when it was set up, and they invited me to come back to it which I did, and at the dinner, it wasn’t dinner, it was just sort of lunch, afternoon tea afterwards, and I met Jeannie. And she was as lovely as ever and somebody else came along and I said, “This is my first girlfriend.” And we had a bit of a laugh about it and

I see she married some other fellow called Alex anyhow, and she said, well she said, “I must say that you are in much better shape than my Alex, for your age.” I said, “What’s wrong with him?” She said, “His legs have gone,” and of course I think he was a bit of a footballer or something in his day. But we had a great laugh.

No, not really, no, but she, I was ringing her up to go out and finally she said,

“Don’t ever ring me again about going out because I’m not going out with you.” “Oh okay,” put the phone up. But we laughed about that. She’d found somebody else and that was good.

I remember we had our photo taken in Martin Place, we all tore out of the office because I was in Sydney

working, must’ve been, yeah ‘45. And everybody was in Martin Place dancing around and singing and we from the office all had our arms linked together and there was a fellow taking shots and we’ve got that. But Nick Barton who is a great mate of mine, we started working as junior clerks and he’s moved up to Springwood now and he said, “Where’s that photo of us all in Martin Place?” I said, “Nick, I don’t know where it is, I’ve searched and searched for it but couldn’t find it.”

But the whole place just went mad. And in those days there was no air conditioning so people were throwing papers out the windows and dancing and singing in the streets, it was great.

Just the fact that it was over, but we didn’t realise the terrible price that was paid with those atomic bombs. Looking back on it I don’t know what I think about the atomic bomb, but

whether it was right or not really, it certainly saved a lot of lives from our side, but it opened up a whole new area for the whole world of devastation and destruction.

We probably knew, it was on the 12th of August the first one wasn’t it? Or something,

something like that, or the 4th, they dropped two of them a week apart and that’s when the Japanese said they’d finish up. I think, we knew the first one had been dropped I think, and the second one, and that’s when it was all over. And I think everybody thought it was probably wonderful that the war ended so suddenly and there was no need to invade Japan and all the islands and fight your way back tooth and nail but I don’t know. A lot of innocent people,

children and women, killed.

I don’t know. It was probably a long while later, like days or weeks, because there was no instant television, like something happens in earthquake in Karachi now or something and it’s on the news here tonight. But in those days, in ‘45 it was all

telephone and radiotelephone and pictures had to be sent. I can remember the Melbourne Cup in Newcastle, the Melbourne Cup would be on and then they’d fly the film up from Melbourne to Sydney and then it would be on the Tattler Newsreel Theatre in Newcastle the next afternoon or something. They’d be queued up for miles, and now you sit at home and watch it.

No, not really, no.

Yeah, I don’t remember anything like that, no. But Mavis, the girl who was at the house where I was boarding, she was keeping company with Harold, who was a soldier, and they got married and had a big family and then Harold died 20 years ago,

I s’pose. But he was the only returned serviceman, I s’pose that I had, well, he wasn’t a returned in those days, he was still in the army when he used to come visit her.

I remember seeing them but I wouldn’t have any recollection of having any contact or thoughts about them really.

I was just trying to work that out.

I was certainly in Sydney when the war ended. I don’t know whether it was 18 months or two years, I don’t know. I’d have to sit down and really think…work out the dates from leaving school in ‘42, then a year at the business college ‘43, then I worked in Sydney in ‘44, being in Sydney at the end of the war ’45.

Yeah, that would’ve been about 18 months or two years, I’d say.

No, I came back to Newcastle when he was still alive, and as a matter of fact, I worked in the office with him for a little, only a little while just doing a bit of relief work or something from the office in town, Newcastle Head Office. No, he died in ’47. I was well and truly back by then, yeah.

Yeah, it was terrible because we were just getting on our feet after the war and I was working and my elder brother was working and my brother beneath me was working and we’d just bought a, this is from a material side of things, we’d just bought an Electrolux refrigerator, which was, half of it was

engine and half, top half was the refrigerator and he was talking about, “Oh well, the next thing we’ll try and buy a little car.” Then he just got sick, and probably these days he would’ve had a by-pass operations because it was a heart condition and they were just giving him drugs all the time and he was getting very breathless when he was walking. And I know that he

used to, because he was the depot master he used to get the tram to church because he didn’t get up early in the morning on a Sunday. He didn’t go until nine o’clock and a tram would stop outside the church on Broadmeadow Road, and he’d just walk across to the church, and then when it was over, when mass was over he’d just come out of the church and stand on the footpath and the next tram would come and he’d put his hand up. They all knew who he was so he’d just get up and get in the tram. Yeah, so he couldn’t walk very far at all without getting quite breathless, then he just

got worse and worse and finally ended up very sick and tired. Both my parents died at home in their own beds, which is a blessing in a way.

No, she didn’t start work. I don’t know, I s’pose we must’ve supported everything in a way. But I couldn’t understand, from my memory I couldn’t understand why they didn’t retire my father.

But I found out afterwards apparently that if he had retired while he was sick and received one payment of superannuation and then died, that would’ve been the end of it. But because he died while he was still on the books, Mum got the superannuation in a lump sum. So that was sort of a legal technicality as far as I remember about why they kept him on the books until he died.

At the time I thought it was a bit funny. I thought, “Why doesn’t Dad retire?” But that was the reason.

I s’pose it was the plan to go back to Newcastle, anyhow, eventually, because the family was all up there, but we had, they were going to come back, we were going to come back to Sydney, that was the idea – eventually - that’s why they bought the house in Croydon in Cheltenham Road. But when Dad died, Mum said, “Well, we’re all

starting to work up here so we may as well stop here.”

No, I only had the one, I joined the Transport Department and I was there for 11 years. I was 27 when I left I think. But they bought this house in Cheltenham Road, it had a double entrance, a brick house, three bedrooms and I think it was 900 pound. They’d saved up

90 pounds for the deposit or something. And at the back of the house there was a dairy. A dairy.

Yeah, because it was a big block and the houses all backed onto this dairy. It was quite a, if you told the people in Burwood now there was a dairy here, they’d say, “What!?”

Yeah.

Well, I think when I came back to Newcastle, when I was in Sydney I was a member of the youth group but not involved because I’d go home at weekends, perhaps when they’d have a dance or something. And when I got to Newcastle, the YCW was for boys, Young Christian Workers

and NCGM [National Catholic Girls Movement], National Catholic Girls Movement was for girls. And of course NCGM also means ‘No Chance of Getting Married’. And I joined the youth group there, and my eldest brother Ken was very strong in the YCW and I just sort of got involved in that and it all happened from there I suppose. And then I got to be president of the local parish group and then from there became president of the diocese

and area. And I s’pose I was involved with all of that sort of thing and just got this inclination I should be doing something else. And as I said earlier, I wrestled with that for two years.

Trying to just think, “Was it real or what?” And because my Mum used to go to mass every morning in those days,

and I’d say to her, “I’ll come to mass with you tomorrow morning.” “Okay, I’ll call you once.” Very often she’d call and then I’d say, “Okay, I’ll get up,” and next thing you’d hear the front gate click when she was coming back, coming home. But she always said, “I’ll call you once, that’s all.” So I went a few mornings a week, I s’pose.

Well it was a big decision. I was getting up in the department and I was getting ready for a fourth-grade job and the girl in the office was really nice, June. We’re still in touch with each other.

A very close friend, I suppose. And all these sort of things were my life, going places with the job and I had a car,

a GR757, I still remember the number plate, a Holden which I went to the auctions in Concorde and bought, 1950 model or something. Beautiful car. I had a car and a job and probably a girl and everything’s going great. Jumping out of all this, “What am I jumping into?” So I just sort of wrestled like that for a couple of years, I s’pose,

and I just said, “Look I’ve either got to try this thing, priesthood, and put my mind at ease or what.” So that’s why I took the relief from work to see how that worked, how I felt about it. And after 12 months I thought, “I think this is it.”

Suppose it’d

be doing things for people, looking after people and just that sort of thing. Involvement, I s’pose, with peoples lives, with families and that.

Probably was that I was sort of running the show and everything and I was president and we used to go to different meetings in different parishes and everything. I s’pose

it was all just sort of compounded in a way, and in the local parish I used to run all the bus picnics and dances and things like that. So I was just a bit of an entrepreneurial type, I s’pose, at the time.

Yeah I was, but I wasn’t in my earlier days, I was a little bit withdrawn I’d say. But I think coming home to

Newcastle and getting involved with the local youth group and everything I just sort of…opened out or something. Life changes as you go along.

Well, there was the church organisations, there was that spirituality attached to the, we used to have leaders.

It was run by, the thing came from Belgium, the YCW, and there was workmen, a leaders’ group which would be seven or eight who would meet once a week and have a gospel discussion and a reflection on your week’s work and things like that, and what good things happened and what bad things happened and could you do anything to change the things that were wrong and things like that. And then there was the general group of everybody.

The leaders’ group and the general group. I was in the leaders’ group and I used to travel around to different parishes at times just to see how their groups were going. And that was all part of it and I just opened out to all that sort of thing.

Well, she kept telling me not to go back there unless I really wanted to. That was, every holiday she said, “Don’t go back there unless you

really want to.” “Don’t go back there to please anybody,” you know.

I think that’s what she really meant, that I had to do it, I wanted to do it myself not for anybody else.

Springwood yes, Columbus Springwood.

Well, I had a great time at Springwood, but there’s a one of mine, Chris Geraghty has written a book,

written two books, one’s about Springwood, which…I didn’t buy but I borrowed it because I thought the books were not good because he was very negative about everything about his life up there.

No, you probably never will either, but anyhow, The Priest Factory was the second one, it was about Manly and the Catholics in the Mist or something was the one about

Springwood. But according to the book he had a pretty terrible time at Springwood but I couldn’t see that because I was great friends with him. And I just read his book and I thought, “This isn’t what happened to me, or to him either as far as I could see.” But I got involved in Springwood and like, we used to have a thing called ‘society night’ which was, the students would come together and put on a concert or

Mikado or Gilbert and Sullivan or something and I got involved with those things and I just thought it was great. The old president of Springwood was, Charlie Dunn was a funny man. I think he was just trying to test you because he’d pick you up on all sorts of things, sort of humiliate you in a way just to see if you could handle things. But no, I’ve got no regrets about Springwood at all. I had

a good time there.

The worst memory I s’pose was when I, this was bitty personal stuff, I was in first philosophy and I was having a great time and I wasn’t a brilliant student, but anyhow, and I s’pose, sometimes the professor would crack a joke or say something funny and I’d have

a funnier answer. Like for instance old Doc Joiner [?] who’s dead now was giving us Greek classes and he was talking about triptychs, which they were three dimensional Greek icon things, he folded them over. I don’t want to tell you things you already know, do you know what a triptych is? No, oh well it’s a thing like that but it’s in three parts and it’s icons of religious figures and that. And it folds over and it opens up like that and he said, “Well anyhow boys, you all know what a

triptych is, don’t you?” And I put up my hand and he said, “Oh yes Les, what’s a triptych?” And I said, “It tells you how much oil’s in your car engine.” Well he went off his bloody brain. That’s right, tells you how much oil’s in your car engine. Well that, a few other things like that happened during the course of the year because the old president had gone away for three months to Rome. So the night we were breaking up I was in the dormitory, we all slept in dormitories, 35

in a dormitory, 40 in a dormitory in those days, they’ve all got their little rooms now with an en suite that kind of thing. And we’re in bed and the prefect Kevin Manning, who is now the Bishop of Parramatta, he was the head prefect and he came to me and he said, “Charlie Dunn wants to see you in his room.” I said, “Oh okay,” and I got up and got dressed. And a man you might know, John Tinkler who you might’ve contacted for this because he was an army chaplain for 28 years,

he was in the bed next to me. And I went around to see Charlie Dunn, he was reading the riot act [warning me] to me about everything and I said, “Will I come back next year?” I think that was the moment of truth, and he said, “Yes, you can come back next year, but you’ll be a nothing. You’ll be nothing in this college.” And I said, “I’ve been elected president of society.” And he said, “You’ll be nothing, you can

come back but you’ll be nothing.” I said, “What about the president of society?” “I’ll fix that up,” he said, and he told me a few other things. I went back to the dormitory and I got into bed and Tinkler leant over and he said, “You coming back next year?” I said, “Yeah, but I’ll be nothing.” “Oh, who cares about that,” he said. That was a moment, didn’t, if he’d have said, “No, don’t come back,” I don’t know what would’ve happened.

But I was playing up in the, I was, not boasting or being proud, I was sort of the fun person in the place, right? Took after me mother - she made everyone laugh, everybody who come to our place laughed, was laughing because that’s the way she was. And that’s, probably I got that from her.

I don’t know. I think they probably thought it was a bit

much. But the fact that I was an older student they thought, “Well, better learn to live with it or something.”

It was good. See, my name in the seminary was Pop, Pop Levey, and that was the name that Tinkler gave me, you see, because I was the oldest one in the class. And in those days back in the ‘50s, late vocations were very rare. See the

class was full of kids who’d just got their Leaving Certificate, basically 18, 17, 18, and I was 27. I was about 11 years older than most of them. They would’ve been 16. And that was the way it was, and I s’pose the fact that I was older was a bit of a help in a way, but I didn’t do the Leaving Certificate, you see, I, most people had to do the Leaving Certificate.

And Jack Bevan, this priest at Dubbo, great mate of mine too, he had to do the Leaving Certificate for his bishop, so he left working at the bank at 21 and went into fourth year and fifth year at the college in Springwood to do the Leaving Certificate. But when I went away to see Bishop Gleeson, you had to go and see the bishop, to be interviewed by the bishop, and I had a meeting with him and I said, “I haven’t got the Leaving Certificate.”

And if he says, “Well, you have to do it,” I’ll say, “Well, I’ll forget about it.” That was in me mind. I’m not going back to do two years of school at that stage. I said, “I haven’t got the Leaving Certificate my lord.” He said, “Oh don’t be worried about that now,” he said, “You just get off to the college and you’ll be right.” “Oh, thank you bishop.” But a lot of other fellows had to go and do the Leaving Certificate.

Well in first

philosophy they gave us marks for our exams and they gave us a place in the class right. And there was 55 in the class, 55 in one class, and at the end of the year the marks came out and I got 11th in the class. And I said to one of me mates, I said, “Either I’m an unknown genius or all these blokes are having a quiet year after the LC [Leaving Certificate].” I think that’s what it was.

It was very restrictive. We weren’t allowed out of the college grounds at all unless you were going to the dentist or the doctor or something.

Oh no, you had...Thursday was the day off but it was always in the college grounds unless there was what we called a bush picnic, when 11 would go off to a little place at Springwood in the grounds with the billy-can and a bit of tea and milk and about 12 sausages

and a bit of dripping and a box of matches. And that was the picnic…just to get out of the place. It was probably a good idea because they were on every, about once a month I think from memory. But then you worked around the grounds other times, when your other free time you’d work in the gardens or the pigsty or the dairy or something. Always find something to occupy your free time.

Well I, that’s why I got involved in the social

activities up there, because I just continued on.

Well I don’t know. That might be a bit personal for, how far does this thing go?

I mean publicly? Because I don’t want to criticise Chris, publicly.

His book was just, and most people who read it felt the same that it was very negative and it was written by somebody with a big chip on their shoulder, right. I think that’s the best way to explain it because he was describing his situation and I couldn’t see him in those situations. I could see him always as one of the lights of the college but he didn’t ever see himself as that, and I just thought

that was very sad, because to my mind, he went away when he was 12 and he did all his senior schooling up there. He’s left the priesthood since now and he’s married with two boys who are 21 and 25 or something. And I just felt that the book was not a true picture of things.

Some of the issues he raised, I couldn’t call him to mind at the moment. It was just a negative approach to the whole business. We were, well most of them felt, some of them felt they were treated like children. Well that didn’t sort of worry me. And queuing up for meals, and you couldn’t talk during meals unless there was a visitor, when the president rang the little bell. And there was silence from night prayer until

after breakfast the next morning. I think that he seemed to thing that he found all those sort of things rather restrictive and compared with today it was. But I just, somebody said to me, how did I feel about it? And I said, “Well, I just felt that if you wanted to be a priest, this is what you did. This is what you went through.” And that’s how it was.

Oh yes, I was pretty settled by then yeah. And everybody looked forward to Manly because that was the big step up. You were really on your way when you got to Manly. Of course you did third philosophy and four years theology and the great big Manly seminary on top of the hill, looking down over the people down there and everything. Yeah, it was a big major change to go to Manly, because one of the things the old

president would say to the students who were playing up, “You won’t go to Manly next year.” And there was like a terrible sense, like going to Dachau or Auschwitz or something to have another year at Springwood.

Well, most of them would go. But a lot would leave Springwood. See, we started with 55 in first philosophy, and at ordination time there was

33, I think, 34. That’s just natural wastage - fellows felt they didn’t want to continue and they just went. ‘Gates were always open’, as they say.

They were glad. That was a further step along the road.

We didn’t talk about it much, I s’pose.

I think they thought, “Well, that’s what he wants to do.” They were all married. No, they weren’t all married then. My elder brother, oh, my younger brother was, Ernie, he got married very young because they were childhood sweethearts, him and Barbara, and they got married when they were just able to, 21 or something in those days. And my elder brother Ken, he got married, he’s been married 42 years and he got married in the April and I got

ordained a priest in July. And Mum said to him, “Why don’t you wait until Levey’s ordained a priest and then he can do the wedding?” And he said, “No, I’m not waiting around for that,” he said. So they got married about two months before I was ordained.

Oh yeah. Oh, not thoughts about it, it was just the fixture in your mind. That was the conditions - that you were celibate.

Oh yes, yes.

First day in Manly…well, it was a complete change because it was a much nicer building and it was in the middle of Sydney and looked out over the ocean. Oh no, it was just a great major step, major step to get to Manly…was a

change sort of along the road. And I got the room at the back of the building upstairs at the back, and I always got the rooms at the back of the buildings at Springwood, got the worst bed in the dormitory. And then got to Manly and got the room at the back that never saw the sunshine because it faced the south and then went over to Kelly House and got the room at the back again. And I said to Tinkler, I said, “I never get a room where the sun shines in.”

That was part of it…no, it was great, yeah.

What happened I was at home in Pokolbin Road, Broadmeadow, I’d come home from work, and then Father Carson, Jack Carson was the chaplain of the YCW, and he just called in…he used to pop in just to have a cup of tea and everything. And he called in one afternoon and he said,

oh, I said, “What have you been up to today?” And he said, “I’ve been up to see the Bishop, the Bishop wanted to see me.” I said, “What did he want to see you about.” And he said, “He wanted to know if I had any students for the priesthood coming up.” And he said, “No, I didn’t think so, only,” he said, “Lex Levey might be thinking about it but I don’t think so.” “Oh, well you’re dead right,” I said, “I am thinking about it.” “Oh really?”

He was playing a sort of a long shot. So then I had to go to my parish priest to get a reference from him, Dick Flanagan, who was a strange man. I think he got his nose out of joint because I wasn’t going into the seminary through him, I was going through someone else. And I knocked on the front door of the presbytery and he come out, “Oh,” he said, “I s’pose you’re looking for a reference, are you?” “Oh yes, Father, I’ve got to get a reference to go to the seminary.” “Huh, come in,”

and he scribbled out a bloody letter, “There you are.” I said, “Thank you.” And he said, “Bye.” I said, “Good-bye.” And I walked down the path thinking, “He never said ‘good luck’ or ‘I hope you go well’,” and I thought, “He’s got the poops because I haven’t done it through him.” Then I had to go to see the bishop and that’s when he talked about the Leaving Certificate, and then once I got the okay from him it was on.

I think so, yeah, I think the world experience was a big bonus in a way, yeah. And that’s why so many of the younger ones left on their way through college, because they’d come straight from high school to there, and I don’t

think they’d really thought out what it was all about in a way. Although on the other side of the coin, many of those young fellows who came in made excellent priests and bishops and everything else. So it’s sort of a – but I’m glad I went in late. I often ask myself, “What sort of a priest would I be if I hadn’t worked for 11 years and if I hadn’t been to Vietnam?” Because those two things changed

my life.

It was never talked about, but I think there probably was the attitude in the ‘50s that Catholic families expected someone to, one of their children to be a brother, a nun or a priest. And I think

some of them used to call them, later on, ‘mother’s vocations’. And I think that was true of the culture of the times.

Well, the routine, the routine wasn’t very much different to Springwood except there was a little bit more freedom and it felt like you’d been let out of a harness or something when you went to Manly,

because it was a senior place and you were treated more like adults. In that sense, the program was much the same, it was up at six o’clock and then down at the chapel by half past six, quarter to seven, and mass and breakfast at eight. And then the silence would be broken after breakfast and you’d go for a walk in the grounds, perhaps prepare some lessons you were supposed to

have learnt the night before. Or just walk around with a mate having a yarn about something. Then the classes would begin at nine and then there’d be, I couldn’t tell you the order of them now, but there’d be moral classes, philosophy classes in the first year there, then church history, cannon law, there was about five or six, I s’pose.

And they’d run through the day, and there wouldn’t be any classes after lunch, there’d be a study time or a recreation time. Sometimes there might be a class at five o’clock for cannon law or something like that because some of the professors came out from different parishes or from jobs in the city, church office there. Then there’d be study then from seven till nine, and then at nine o’clock you’d have Dooley [?], which was,

that’s when I stopped drinking milk and sugar in my tea, because the Dooley would come up from the kitchen, a great big pot with a handle on one end and this pot with a handle on the front. And there’d be milk and sugar all in a cup together mixed up, and I did it for a while but I really can’t handle sweet tea so I didn’t bother having it then. There’d be a bit of bread and jam or something with it. Then you’d talk, have a cup of tea and a yarn to, everybody’d come out of their rooms and

relax for 15 minutes and then be ready for bed. Night prayer and then bed.

Yeah, we observed all the things that other people, there wasn’t anything different, wasn’t anything more severe because you had to be in the seminary, which was the same as what the Catholics were expected to do anywhere.

Well, the Democratic Labour Party, I think, was, when did they finish up? They were the breakaway group from the Labor Party in the ‘50s. Of course Santamaria I think was something to do with it. That fellow, he was a great…

Bob Santamaria, and they formed the thing called ‘The Movement’ and became the DLP Democratic Labour Party] which

basically kept the Labor party out of office for umpteen years because they’d split the Labour vote. It wasn’t a really good thing to do really. Because once you leave an organisation you’ve no longer got any control over what happens. The same with in the church. The church has needed reforming many times in its 2,000 years history and the great saints like Saint Alphonsus and

Saint Ignatius and Saint Catherine of Sienna and all these great saints stayed in the church to work within it. And the same with the priesthood - if you’re not happy with something, some fellows leave, think they’re going to do something outside to change things, but once you leave an organisation you can’t do anything to change it anymore. And that was the trouble with the DLP, they were trying to fix up the Labor party platform or something or whatever, and when they left the party they

had no more control over it. And the same in those days when people left the church because they didn’t agree with something, well they lost control. But the great ones stayed in and worked to reform within the organisation.

I think it was an Irish church long after the Second World War ended, because most of the priests in Australia at that stage were Irish. I know like in our diocese there would’ve been, god, I don’t know off hand how many Irish priests, but a whole lot of them. Now there’s only three I think or two, and they had their Irish influence on Australian Catholicity.

And I think at the moment over the last 10 years or 15 years or so, trying to bring an Australian culture into the church.

When the Italians came out, a lot of the Italian priests came out, Scalabrinian fathers and the Polish priests came out to look after their own people, that’s still happening in a way, but not so much as it was in the post-war years of the ‘50s.

Well, in your second last year, no, in your last year at Manly you became…no, your second-last year you became a sub-deacon, which was a step up to priesthood, then the Saturday after that you became a deacon in the college chapel, and then

went home for the holidays and remained a deacon until July of the next year when you were ordained to the priesthood. Now we have people who become deacons and stay deacons. They’re married and they have a family and they work in the church and they can do baptisms and funerals. They can’t celebrate mass or hear confessions. They can do weddings if they’re registered. And there’s a few of those around the place now in parishes working like that.

So that was up towards the end of the third year philosophy, third year Manly was a sub-deaconment and then deaconment, and that’s when you sign the declaration of celibacy - before you became a deacon - and then you went home for the holidays and came back then to be, to the months up to July, and then you were ordained in your own diocese in July and came back after a fortnight’s holiday and finished off the year as a priest. Going out

to places in Sydney to do weekend work and to get a bit of experience. I s’pose in our day we weren’t given a lot of practical experience like they do now, and now the deacon would be in a parish for 12 months with a parish priest getting the hang of things. But we didn’t get that experience. Although, before we come home for the holidays, Jimmy Madden the bloke at Manly, the director at Manly,

he got up in the tub and he said that he had a very important announcement to make, the deacons were being allowed to work in parishes during the holidays. And I said to me mate next to me, “Don’t contact me, I’ll contact you.” I said, “I’m not starting work until I have to.” I didn’t bother doing any parish work in the holidays.

Newcastle, yeah. January 1963.

At, was then the Sacred Heart Church Hamilton, which is now the cathedral for the diocese, Sacred Heart Cathedral now, nine o’clock on the 21st July 1962. And there were about five or six of us ordained

that Saturday morning.

The first one I was assigned to, after that you went back to Manly, you see. Then the come back, just had a few weeks at home and then was appointed in January to Newcastle parish.

St Mary’s Newcastle, which is

closed down now because white ants were in the floor. They didn’t know why the floor didn’t collapse with the congregation, but I don’t know if it’ll ever be opened again.

Yes, that was part of it. Yeah, and I’d never been in hospital in me life. And I’m chaplain of this bloody great big hospital, the Royal Newcastle Hospital was huge in those days. Since the earthquake it’s been, a lot of it’s been demolished,

and the John Hunter Hospital, but I was going off me head. And there was the private hospital down the road and there was the Shallow Male Nursing Home up the other side of the street and I was doing the YCW group in the parish and looking after the St Michael’s Hostel for Boys. Running the housie at Carrington every Friday night, doing the St Vincent de Paul meetings. I wrote a list down one day, thinking about all those things I was supposed to do in my first year, and I thought, “God, I must’ve been

off me head.”

And that’s when I went to Wally Williams the first time, you see, because I was doing the hospital three times a week and I thought, “I can’t keep it up.” Because in those days you’d get a lot of night calls for accidents and things, people in motor accidents, and it was a big casualty area. And I went out to see Wally and I said, “Listen I’m at the end of me tether, Wally,” I said, “I don’t know whether I can keep this up.” He said, “What are you doing?” I said, “Hospital.” “How many times

you going to the hospital?” And I said, “I try to visit everybody three times a week.” “No,” he said, “Stop that.” He said, “If you’re around the place and you’re seen,” because in those days hospital priests always wore their full gear, black suits and everything, he said, “They’re not in hospital to make a retreat,” he said, “They’re there because they’re sick.” And he said, “If they want, they’ll let you know, but just as long as you’re a

presence down there and you see the ones that are really in need.” And I thought, “Oh,” I slackened off a bit after that, see, and the hospital people are trapped when they see the priest or the clergyman coming because there’s nowhere to go. They’re in bed.

Well, they’re looking to you…well, from the Catholic side they’re looking to you for perhaps the anointing of the sick

sacrament, confession, just to know that the priest has been to see them is sometimes enough, because the first thing they tell their visitors is, “Oh, Father was here this morning.” And also people that, with somebody sick in hospital, it helps them to know that the priest or the minister has been to see their father or mother or their family or something. I think it’s a great personal contact with people in their time of greatest

need.

Oh yeah, that’s when I saw my first lot of first people dying. Dead bodies and that. And one day a doctor said to me, I got to know all the doctors there because the priest before me was such a wonderful chaplain. And he handed me a really great set-up and we used to go and talk to the nurses. The new nurses had a special section

when the priest would talk to them, the Anglican priest would talk to them or the minister would talk to them and we had a half an hour with them, just to tell them what the priest did when he came to the hospital and what he expected them to do, and this great communication between all sections. And the young interns would be there, and of course they’d be with one of the senior doctors and they thought sometimes they were the ants pants. And of course the senior

surgeon would stop to talk to the priest or the minister. “Oh how you going this morning, Father?” Yap, yap, and they’re sort of, “Heavens,” you know. And that set the scene for their relationship. So one of them said to me one day, “Would you like to see a post mortem?” And I said, “Oh yeah, that’d be interesting.” He said, “Come down with me now.” So I put on this white gown and this body was on the slab and they got out the saws and cut around the bloody, took the chest cavity off and then they took the skull off and pulled the

scalp over the face. And, “Oh, this poor old bugger,” and he was saying to him, “Oh, this looks like he’s been a coal miner or something. See all the black in his lungs? That’s coal or something,” and something else they showed me. And that was my, one of my experiences.

Yes, but see, the first disappointment I got, I was up the back of the presbytery and got this call. There’d been a

mining accident and one of the miners was a Catholic. And I rushed down and of course he was unconscious and covered in coal, it was in all his veins and grains of his face and I anointed him and everything and said the last prayers, but he got better, thanks be to God. And then I went in to see him about a week later when he was able to talk and that, and I’ll say his name’s Fred, “Oh how you going Fred?” “Oh, I’m going fine thanks.”

And I said, “Oh, I anointed you when you were unconscious and gave you the last sacraments and everything.” “Oh,” he said, “You needn’t have bothered.” “God,” I thought, “Everybody doesn’t want to be saved.” That was my reaction. I said, “Oh, okay, but anyway I did it anyhow.” He said, “Oh, okay.” So that set me back on me heels a bit. I thought, “Everybody doesn’t really need me, or want me.”

Oh it did, yeah, because, see, you’d be called down to a motor accident, and this particular case I was there in the hospital for three hours with the parents. Their son had been badly smashed and they expected him to die. And when you’re in those circumstances you can’t just say, “Well, I’ve got to go back now.” So you hang around and you’ll be there in the early hours of the morning, and there’s nothing worse than the early hours of the morning in a hospital because you’ve been got out of bed and you’re

stomach’s got that empty feeling and you don’t know what time it is. Many times you stay down there for an hour or something with somebody until the decision had been made about something. That was a very good part of the work of a priest, to do with people in their time of real grief and anxiety. I did that for three years and…

Wally Williams, the Redemptionist?

Just a priest that I knew from the monastery, that’s all.

He was in a way, yeah. Strange man, if you talk to some of the Redemptionists about him, they’ll tell you stories about him. Of course when he was preaching he had stories about everything and they weren’t true. Of course during the missions, the mission priests always

started off their sermon with a story about something, and Wally had the most outrageous stories, a real character, although somehow or other I clicked with him.

Yeah he was. He’s dead many years now.

Well, I moved on to Taree then and I was doing the evening devotions on Channel 3 at the time, and bishops always seem to want

to have a reason to move you, and Toohey was the bishop and he said, oh, he said, me mother had died in the August and I was at a bit of a loose end because Mum had married again and the step-father, he was thinking of going off to Melbourne to his daughter’s place, he had two daughters. We all got on very well together and I was doing the evening devotions and Toohey said, “Oh, there’s a TV [television] station

opening over in Taree, you’d be good for that so I think you should go up to Taree.” I couldn’t see any connection meself, but in those early days of TV in the ‘60s they were opening up TV stations up along the coast. There was one at Coffs Harbour, there was one somewhere up further but they were unviable, they weren’t economical and so that’s when the amalgamation started so that Channel 3 now does Taree and all up the coast. So the TV station in Taree,

I don’t think, it might’ve opened for a little while but not very long.

Little devotionals, yeah. I don’t think the Taree, I can’t remember going to the Taree place at all. I don’t think the station really opened after a lot of fooling around and finding out it wasn’t going to work or something. But the radio station had the morning devotions at nine o’clock and we’d take it in turns, so I used to, I thought, “Oh, this’ll do

me,” so I just took up me TV things. Of course you had to write up your TV thing and learn it because when you’re on live you can’t be reading anything, so I used to do those on the radio when my turn came.

Yeah, the other devotions were, too. The Catholic ones were every Tuesday night and every second Saturday, but the other churches had Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

It was all shared around.

When I was doing them I was doing them nearly every week. A bit nerve wracking trying to think up something interesting to say…not really, but you know. For about three or four minutes you had to talk for…

I don’t think so except people recognised me from my voice. I was in a shop one day down in Frederick Ash’s buying some toilet detergent

for my brother in Bulahdelah, he had this old fashioned toilet where you tipped this chemical into it and a big pan moved around when you lifted up the lid, clunk, clunk, clunk…you’ve seen them have you? They preceded the septic tanks, I think. They said, “Will you go into Frederick Ash’s and get us two big drums of this chemical?” So I went and got it, and I was at the counter getting it and a fellow next to me said, “I know you, I recognise your voice.” And I said, “I’m sorry, I’ve never met you.” He said,

“Yes, you’re that priest on the television, I knew your voice as soon as you started speaking.” And one day going to Sydney I was picking up a bloke down the Hawkesbury River somewhere and chatting to him and he said, “I know your voice, you’re that priest that does the television thing.” And I said, “Do you get the TV down this far?” He said, “Yeah, Newcastle’s better down here than Sydney,” where he lives. That was two occasions when my voice gave me away, but I don’t think I was I ever a celebrity.

As much as anybody was, I s’pose.

I knew a little bit about it because a lad from Taree was killed in action over there and a chaplain at the Singleton army camp at the time came up and said that he had to go and visit the parents, where did they live…and everything.

That’s when it sort of first struck me I s’pose. Well, I knew the war was on from the TV and everything, I never thought I’d ever be involved with it, but there was the close contact in that sense.

Officially? I don’t think they had any…no, they probably thought it was right because see when the Vietnam was declared,

well, got its independence and the north started to take over things and the civil war was on there and they divided the country. Vietnam was French, Indochina was very Catholic and people were given 12 months or six months or three months, I forget now, to move south if they wanted to. And about a million Catholics moved south with a priest and they set up their own villages and things.

So when things started, probably 1954 I think then, and early 1960s, the (UNCLEAR) started to invade the south and that’s when things started. I think the church would’ve said it’s a war of protection of the democracy of the south, which it was. And the Catholic people had moved down there because they’d put big things around the village to stop the VC [Viet Cong] getting in, like big spikes and things so that they could close their village

at night and they wouldn’t ever get in. No, I don’t think the church had any official position, but they probably thought the war was justified because of the invasion of the north into the south, which had been divided legally or whatever it might be, and the people who lived in the south chose to live there.

I was probably dealing with it in the official way, because I think in 1968 or ‘67 Hominae Vito, I think it was, came out and that was the big decision. But in my mind I…looking back, I think that the church was so long making this decision that people in the meantime made up their own minds because they’d discussed it

for years - the morality of it. And when the decision finally came, a lot of the people had already decided beforehand that that’s what they were going to do. And I think that was one of the difficulties that the church was too long, but it was a very big issue and they felt that they couldn’t rush into it or something.

Discontent? I think a lot of them

were angry and they felt it was wrong, but it probably had an impact on the church in a way, yeah, because people felt they were practising birth control using the pill and it was against the church’s teaching, then they shouldn’t be going to church, things like that. All compounded the matter.

Could’ve been yeah, I think so, yeah.

Well I was in Taree enjoying life very much up there. The old parish priest Tom Mulcahy had been there for 42 years and there was another priest up there as well and we were all getting on pretty well there together, and then the bishop was coming up for confirmation and parish visitation and poor old Tom Mulcahy, an old Irish priest, was always in a lather of sweat when the bishop was coming, because they lived in fear of the bishop

in those days. A simple thing like this, he said to me, I got on really well with him and he said, “I don’t know how I’m going to get on,” he said, “Carving the chickens on Sunday with the bishop here.” Because that was the old tradition that the parish priest carved the chickens up and the bishop sat at his right hand. All very structured. And I said, “Tom, you don’t have to carve the chickens at the table.” He said, “Well, it always happens.” And I said, “Well, it doesn’t have to happen. I’ll carve the chickens in the kitchen

and we’ll bring them in on a plate and people can just take what they…” “Oh my god,” he said, “Will that be allowed?” “Of course it’s allowed,” I said, “Just break with it, break with the old tradition. You’re in a lather of sweat over carving a couple of chickens.” So that’s what happened, that probably put me in his good books, got him off the hook for that. And he came down very upset, I was in my room or downstairs somewhere, and he come down and he said,

“The bishop wants to see you up in his room.” It was a little tiny presbytery, four rooms upstairs, four rooms down. And I said, “What does he what to see me about?” “I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know, but you’d better go up. He’s waiting for you.” And I walked up into his bishop’s room and Toohey’s sitting in his chair and he said, “How’s things going?” general pre-prologue conversation, and he said, “Father so and so

wants to finish up in the army, he’s been there four years, he said he’s really had enough.” I thought, “Oh well, if that’s his idea, I s’pose that’s okay.” I said, “What’s it to do with me?” He said, “Oh well, you’re going in.” And I said, “Me? Going in the army?” He said, “Yes, I’m posting you into the army for a four-year term at least.” I said, “Oh well, if that’s what it is, that’s what it is.” That’s how it happened really.

So he said, “The officers will send up the papers for you,” and I had to go to the doctor for a medical, government doctor in Taree. I thought, “I’ll fail the medical, I’m sure,” but I didn’t. So that’s how it all started off. So I had no desire, no wish, no plans, anything to ever be in the army.

Yep.

A whole new life was about to start.

I s’pose in those days if the bishop wanted you to do something, you did it. Now these days they’ll question it and make their own decisions. Or some of them will anyhow. But that’s what the bishop wanted me to do, and I’d taken a

sort of a promise of obedience to the bishop, which you do at ordination and that was it. So that was it.

Passed the medical and then I stayed in the parish for a little while because I got out, my commission from the governor general, which was Kerr, I started August ‘68 and I left the Taree parish in January of

‘69 or something like that. But in the meantime I’d been down to, I think it’s Studley Park is it, down there where they do the, used to do the training for new people?

Yeah.

Yeah, we had a couple of weeks down there with Vince Shreddon, who’s now the parish priest. He wasn’t then at St Mary’s Cathedral…he was never in the army full time, he was just army reserve, and we went down there and did a few weeks of

indoctrination and living in tents and things like that, and how to march and the old bloke telling us, the RSM [Regimental Sergeant Major] was very particular about saluting. So anyhow, he taught us how to salute and everything and he said, “I want you to,” and he said, “You salute everyone you see.” So he meant the officers, I think. He said, “I want you to…” and we formed up in two lines with a space of 50 metres,

I s’pose, or 50 yards between them. He said, “Walk towards each other and salute as you pass each other.” So being a bit of a clown walked along and there was a bloke coming on each side so I went like that. “You don’t salute with your left hand!” I said, “You said salute everybody,” I said, “And there’s two coming at me.” Well, that set the standard for that.

Well, basically military, from memory it was basically military. They weren’t too interested in what we were going to do as chaplains; it was getting the idea of being in the army and things like that from my memory. And we had a sort of doing this ‘about turn’, which means you sort of stand on one leg or something and turn around and put the other foot down. I can’t remember now, but at the end of the course we all go together and said, “We’ve got to give them a pewter mug here.”

We were always giving pewter mugs in the army to somebody. So we got it engraved with a stork standing on one leg because he made us stand there one day until we got used to it. So I gave him this mug thanking him for everything with a stork standing on one leg on the side.

None. The bishop said, “Talk to father so and so if you want to know anything about it.” But I didn’t bother.

No, I don’t think, I think chaplaincy in the army is much like work in the parish, doing the same sort of things, seeing people, helping people, visiting families in the army unit…what are they? Living quarters, yeah.

No it wasn’t, what do you mean honorary? No, it wasn’t honorary.

Well commissioned into Her Majesty’s Armed Services, yeah, as a captain, yeah. Chaplain fourth class is one term but it’s the rank of captain. And third class is major and second class is lieutenant colonel or something.

Yeah.

Nothing. With my clothes that’s all, I

drove into the place and allotted me a room. I had my room allotted and my officer’s area. The two other chaplains were an Anglican Chaplain and the Uniting Church and they both lived out. They had families and lived out in the married quarters in Singleton and I went to get my uniform and the quartermaster said, “Haven’t got everything,” he said, “Wear your ordinary clothes for a while.” So I was in civvy clothes, priests clothes

walking around the place there for a while until they got me gear together.

Yeah.

That’s right, 3RTB yeah.

As I said, I found it a bit difficult at the time, mainly from the fact of the army structures, knowing who was

what and what was somebody else and everything else. And just a bit at sea for the first few months, that’s why I went to see old Wally and he said, “Don’t make any decisions when you’re in a new job under 12 months.” Well, I found me feet after a while.

I s’pose it was the whole atmosphere of leaving the parish and the presbytery

and the parish set-up and then you were in an army camp. And you’re living in the officers area out of rooms, the bedroom at the back and a little sort of anteroom at the front, which I sort of made into a chapel so I could say a mass on a week day in my room sort of thing. Just on my own. And the shower and the toilets were down the road a bit. It was all just a bit of an upheaval, I suppose,

which I hadn’t anticipated or bargained for in a way. Other challenges, saluting senior officers, I s’pose, and having your uniform on properly and things like that.

Oh yes, yeah, I think more accepted, Catholic chaplains live on the, always used to live on the

camp and the others went home, so I’d be in the mess with the fellows, the officers and that and having a drink with them in the mess and the others didn’t seem to do that, so I s’pose in that sense you had a little bit of an advantage in a way. And the diggers would see you around the place late at night or early in the morning and things like that, and I s’pose that

all was more part of the set-up.

Oh yes, it was.

Well I s’pose being in the youth group and working with the young people me own age all those years probably helped me in a way because I can relate pretty well to young people. And I think that, well it’s a matter for yourself, you either

go out to people or you just don’t. So I got on well with pretty well all of them, I think. And they seemed to accept you too, because at the end of their 10 weeks basic training and they had to go on a route march and it took them out to Pokolbin and right around the area for about 20 miles, I think it used to be. And there was A, B and C, there were three units of the national servicemen,

and I told the B group, I said, “I’ll go on the route march with you.” And, “Oh that’ll be great Father, that’ll be great, you’re coming on the route march with us.” And then I told the C crowd I’ll go on the route march with them, “Oh, that’ll be great Father.” The two route marches were on in 24 hours. One of them said I’ve got time, “This should take about five hours or six

hours,” I think, from memory, I’m not that clear on that. And one set off in the morning early, about one o’clock in the morning and got back about eight or something and the other crowd said, “We’re going at two o’clock, three o’clock in the afternoon.” “Oh okay.” So I did the two of them in the 24 hours. I didn’t carry all the gear they carried, but I carried a pack and water bottles and things like that.

I don’t know, but I know that the, we were at the Manly college until the day before ordination and we were on retreat and I remember walking up and down the back wall, Manly college has got great big

stone walls all around it in the old tradition of those of the day, walking up and down the back wall, “Is this…am I doing the right thing because this is forever?” And I felt a bit like, I don’t know if people when they’re getting married have those sort of thoughts, it’s a commitment of your life. Well, they should have them anyhow, that’s why so many of them…you know. And I know, I was really sweating it out

and I thought, “Well, it’s been all right so far, I’ve come this far and I feel all right about it.” But it was really a traumatic time that time before leaving the college to go to the monastery at Mayfield where we stayed the night before ordination then go to the church. But once it had happened, it was…but I did sweat it out the night, the day before, I was wondering because

I knew that this was going to be it, this was going to be for life.

No, not ever. I was, during my college time I was going to go to Rome but I said I didn’t want to go because they have certain vacancies in the college

in Rome for overseas students. And Bishop Toohey came down to Manly, it would’ve been in my first year of theology or something I think and interviewed us and everything and then he went away and the Doctor Madden, the president of the college called me up that night and he said, “I’ve got wonderful news for you Mr Levey.” And I said, “Have you what is it?” And he said, “The bishop’s chosen you as his student to go to Rome to study for five years in Rome.” And I said,

“Oh has he?” And he said, “It’ll be a wonderful opportunity, you’ll be there in the Vatican and you’ll meet the Holy Father and you’ll be surrounded…” Blah, blah, blah. And I said, “Have I really got to go?” And he said, “Oh, nobody ever knocks back an opportunity like this.” And I said, “I’d like to think about it for a while.” And he said, “All right,” he said, “you go back to your room and let me know in the morning.” But he said, “It’s an opportunity to study, and

you know, sort of imbibe the church and everything. So I thought about it and prayed about it during the night and I thought, “I don’t really want to go to Rome.” I had some personal reasons for it, and I got up the next morning and I said, “If it’s not compulsory, I don’t want to go.” “Oh you know, you’re missing out on an opportunity.” I said, “Yeah I realise all that but I don’t want to go.” He said, “Right, I’ll ring the bishop and tell him and he can nominate somebody

else.” Which they did. So that was my first denial of an overseas trip, but when the next one came up to go to Vietnam, there was no way of saying… -

Well, the fellow next door, the fellow in the room next to me was called Campbell

and he had bagpipes, he was the dentist and he was playing these bagpipes. And a fellow called Peter, I can’t think of his second name, but he was an English officer living in Australia in the Australian Army and he ended up doing the Anzac Day march in Sydney, a commentator, I just can’t think of his second name. And anyhow Campbell’s playing his bagpipes and

Peter, it’ll come to me, came and knocked on his door and told him to, “Stop playing them.” And I was in the room, they were only tin rooms like army things, “Stop playing them, you’re keeping everybody bloody awake and wake up the…” blah, blah. And I heard Campbell say, “I’ll play my bagpipes as long as I want to.” So off he went and he started playing again. Well next thing I hear is this door being pounded you see, and I looked out through the window along the veranda and there’s this Peter

what’s-his-name with a star picket battering on the door trying to break in to strangle the bagpipe player. And I quietly closed the window again, the curtain back again, nothing to do with me. But the next morning the, I think it was the bloke in charge of the canteen, I can’t think of his, everything was done by initials in the army, he sent for me and he said,

“Did you hear anything last night at all?” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Any noises or anything?” And I said, “Oh Campbell was playing the bagpipes.” He said, “Yes he was, but did you hear anything else?” I said, “No, not really.” He said, “Well, the door next to your room was nearly smashed in with a star picket, and we have to find out who’s responsible and everything else.” And I said, “Well, I

did hear a banging noise but I didn’t take any notice of it.” But I saw the bloke that did it, I knew what it was and everything, I thought, “I’m not going to dob somebody in at this stage.” And he said, “Okay, okay, if you’ve got nothing to say that’s okay.” But that was a funny incident because the whole building was shaking and I saw this Peter, what was it O’Brien? Doesn’t matter anyhow.

Oh yes, yes. I thought, “Well, I’ll give it the time and just see,” and I thought, I probably decided to be a bit more committed to it for the next eight months or whatever it was, and I think that’s how I got over the problem.

Oh yes. I’d have been free

to just tell the bishop I don’t want to stop here.

I was just telling Mat [interviewer] a few things, actually. Well, I was sort of stirring up things in the diocese with the junior clergy. Of course he had a few proposals about their remuneration and things which I could see a bit of problems with.

Well, he wanted to pay them in advance,

pay us in advance right, for three months in advance, and I said, “If he’s going to pay us in advance, he’s got to get the money from somewhere, and I’m sure that our account will then be charged interest for the money that he’s got to pay us.” That was one of his requests, it might’ve been true it may not, but I was sending out letters and telegrams to everybody to oppose this payment in advance. Anyhow, it came in and it went on for a while

but then a few of the blokes were thinking of leaving, got their three months in advance and then went. And he decided for practical reasons to pay three months behind. That’s another side issue and other things too, he wanted some information from me about some priests and I wouldn’t give it to him and a few things like that. So I was just telling Mat that I think I was a bit like Uriah in the bible where David wanted his wife so he sent Uriah, I think it was,

off to the front line of battle hoping he’d get killed and he could take his wife. I thought, I think Toohey expects me to get killed in Vietnam, be rid of this priest. I don’t think, no, it wasn’t as bad as that, but that thought went through me. I said it to a few people, that’s what I felt like. But there was no reason why he picked me, I was 42 and there was all these younger priests there. They were 25, 26, 27, would’ve been just itching to do it. And they would’ve been

not much older than the kids they were looking after, the young fellows looking after, but for some unknown reason or fortitude it was me.

No, I don’t know. You’d be attributing very good motives to him, which I never did. It might’ve been that, but there were a lot of other priests my age that would’ve…

No it wasn’t really, no. No, that didn’t sort of come into the configuration at all, no. It wasn’t until I was at Singleton for about 18 months from the February until the following May when the slot come up that the priest was coming home and somebody else had to take his place.

The same as a parish priest in life, some have got a lot of respect for you, some couldn’t give a bugger about you. The pecking order, no. You go in as the rank of captain, which doesn’t mean a whole lot, but it does give you a bit of pull if you want something done.

I think in the navy you’re the rank of the person you’re talking to. Navy chaplains don’t have a rank as such, as far I know, but if he’s talking to the admiral then he’s an admiral, if he’s talking to a something else, he’s talking to – so it’s the same sort of thing only we were captains, and if you wanted a jeep or something in Vietnam to go out somewhere or do something, well you could go to the bloke and get it because he was only a sergeant or something. So it gave you that bit of influence if you wanted

it to, but it didn’t give me any sort of administrative control or anything like that as far as I know, or was aware anyhow. I just happened to be a captain and chaplain fourth class.

No, I think…they’re the main things I think. It’s a pretty dim memory now, it’s 30 or

40 years ago, nearly. No, it was just a week or a fortnight or whatever it was of getting to know army things and sort of edge your way into it sort of thing. And we made friendships there that have endured. Yeah.

I can’t think of anything startling happening except the routine of the place was getting us into the idea of army routine, I s’pose, of getting up early and eating together and everything

like that.

Well when I went up to see the XO [Executive Officer] this day and he said, “The Catholic chaplain at Nui Dat is due to come home in May and you’re the next one on the list.” They might’ve asked others, I don’t know who didn’t, who said, “No,” because there were a lot of Catholic chaplains in the army at that time. And I said, “Oh no,

it’ll be okay.” He said, “Do you wear glasses?” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “You’ll have to get a…” I said, “I wear them for reading.” “You’ll have to get a second pair of glasses,” and then he said, “No, don’t worry about that sort of thing.” So then from there I went back, carried on for a time until the time came to go and we went to a, told my family that I was going. Mum was dead many years by this and…

Oh, they took it, I s’pose, I was in the army and the army was in Vietnam. I don’t remember any, none of them said, “You shouldn’t go or anything,” or, “Do you know what you’re doing?” or something. They might’ve, but it’s gone out of me mind. And where did we go to get all our papers and things? Somewhere in Sydney, was it Watson’s Bay I wonder? Or…I went there when we were coming out of the army.

Anyhow, ended up, my family gave me a send-off at Bulahdelah with relatives, a barbeque and everything, and they were going to come down and see me off. And I said, “No, don’t come down and see me off because I’m going away for the 12 months and I’ll be back and you’ve all got your jobs and your work. Don’t be going to Sydney just to see me off on an aeroplane.” So they said, “Okay, if you don’t want us to come we won’t come.” So I got down to Mascot and out to Mascot aerodrome and we’re sitting in this

holding pen with all the other blokes who was going. I think it was a reinforcement unit or something; it was a Qantas charter plane just for the army to take over the troops who were going to replace those who had come home or those that had been killed or something. And we were all sitting around this room and they’ve all got their families, they were all laughing and joking and everything and I was sitting there on me own and, “Oh great.” And a lady come across and she said, “Father, are you on your own are you?”

And I said, “Yes, I told my family not to come, they wanted to come but I said not to. I think it was the wrong thing.” And she said, “Yeah, it probably was, come over here with us.” So I went over and spent the waiting time with them then. Then we got onto the plane and we were all told to take a civilian shirt. See, the plane took off at some ungodly hour, I don’t know what the flying time was like, but we got to Darwin

late at night or early hours of the morning, I’m not sure, and of course we all streamed out to the canteen there and I had a beer and I thought, “This is the first time I’ve ever drank a beer at this hour of the morning in my life.” But I s’pose I thought, “Well, things are going to be different.” Then we all got back on the plane again and heading towards Singapore. We were told to take off our army shirt and put on our civilian shirt, which I’ve still got for some unknown reason, it’s still hanging in the cupboard.

Wouldn’t fit me now of course, and we got to Singapore for breakfast. And we all trooped out of the plane in civilian shirts and khaki trousers and army boots and shoes and short hair cuts and everything else that screamed army, but of course we had a civvy shirt on. I think the Singapore government wouldn’t allow troops to pass through on their way to Vietnam and that was a way of getting around the technicality. I remember coming down the steps of the plane,

being struck by the smell of Asia, which has stayed with me, and I really still love it. It was hot and steamy, but there was this smell, whether it was food cooking, I don’t know what, it was just the, if you’ve been the Asia you know what the Asian thing is. But now at airports you walk down the big air conditioned tube, but in those days you just walked down the steps off the plane. And I thought it was wonderful. So we had breakfast and then we marched back to the plane and put our army shirts back on again

and flew off into Saigon.

Well I think we were all much the same, a little bit trepidation about what was going to happen and that, you were going to a war, and yeah, I can’t remember much frivolity, it was all rather serious business.

Yes, yeah. I’d only been in a plane once before, that was when we did our

pre-training or something at Tin Can or somewhere, no that was afterwards. Tin Can Bay from Holsworthy. No, that was me first trip in a plane, me first trip overseas, yeah. And we landed at Saigon and I was met by some officer of some sort and the others went off to various places, some went and stayed at Saigon, some went to Vung Tau and some went to Nui Dat. And they said, “We’re having a welcome barbeque for the officers who’ve come today at

the headquarters at 12 o’clock. Will you come along to that?” “Oh sure.” Went along and had this get-together and a few beers.

Well I was on my own, but this fellow, this officer come over and told me it was on and they took me to it. It might’ve been at the Australian Consulate in Saigon or something, I’m not sure. It wasn’t an army place I don’t think. And then he said,

“Oh, your plane is ready to go to Nui Dat, that’s where you’re going isn’t it?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he took me out to Tan Son Nhut airport and got into a Caribou, I think it would’ve been, and flew to Vung Tau and got off the thing there and then got into another plane to fly up to Nui Dat and landed up there in the afternoon about half past five, I think it was.

Well, it was the first Asian city I’d seen, and flying in of course you could see all the rice paddies, the rice fields and little old houses and I thought, “Very quaint,” and great, well, Saigon…there was a lot of barbed wire around Saigon in those days, the streets would have coils of barbed wire and everything.

And it was the first time I saw women doing manual work, got a bit of a shock.

Of course from the airport at Tan Son Nhut, the old girls were there sweeping up the rubbish and everything and emptying garbage bins, and on the road there we saw women doing the road works, buckets of asphalt and shovelling dirt and everything. I thought, “That doesn’t look too right,” but of course they’re doing it here now so it doesn’t matter. Yeah, so the first impressions were a bit of a culture shock in a way. But these things were happening.

No, I didn’t see a lot of that, no. It might’ve come a bit later when the offensive, like after we left, ‘74, ‘75, ‘73. No, no it was just, it was Asia I s’pose, and I just really got a shock when I saw these ladies with their conical hats on and their long dresses shovelling dirt and shifting bricks and barbed

wire everywhere.

Yeah, I felt, I’ve never…it didn’t look right.

Yeah, we went out on a sort of a camp somewhere with the last of the battalion or something, or the last of the 3RTB blokes that were going over there.

I can’t remember much about it, but it was out in the bush near Singleton somewhere and we had a couple of days or nights out there, I forget, just pretending to be fighting the Viet Cong.

It didn’t worry me very much. As chaplains, we were doing things that were unreal in Vietnam.

We were singing out things, pretending to

be somebody else, and we never, that wasn’t any part of being in Vietnam at all. I just look back and I thought what we were doing was so unreal, unrealistic, but it was what we thought would be happening but it wasn’t, it was wrong.

I don’t remember getting any specific briefings about it,

I may have done but I don’t remember. There probably was some sort of a briefing. I think we were told things like we were going into a…as guests in this country, and to behave as guests in a foreign country because they’d invited us to come and things like that. And a little bit about their culture and that.

Yes.

No, I never really had much contact with the US Army really,

except when I was in Nui Dat there was a 105, 120 or something, American Field Battery outside our area where I went across a couple of times and we had a fair bit of contact with American chaplains. We used to have a, I’m getting a bit ahead of you now, aren’t I?

Yeah.

They were, my personal thoughts were it was a war of defending a people’s democracy from an invader. They were very definitely my feelings and I spoke about it when I came back and I’ve got paper cuttings of people interviewing me about it and saying, “Well of course it was

right to be there, these people were, the country was divided and people were given the choice to live north or south and now the north was coming to take over the south which was wrong, because these people didn’t want to be under the northern control.” And my idea was, and still is, that we were there to defend the south from Communism and the Viet Cong and everything that was wrong.

Yes.

I think my strongest influence was my own sense of right, that people had made a choice and they were entitled to live by it, not be overcome by somebody who didn’t make the choice. The choice was,

they chose something else. No, I think of that as a personal sense of justice and freedom and in that sense, and a right to live the way you want to live, and they were going to be losing it if we didn’t do something.

Yeah, but I think I would’ve had that position whether the church had it or not, I think, because I just thought it was an unjust invasion.

Like Iraq and Afghanistan, what else…there’s a few other places you could mention.

I don’t know what I thought really. It’s just that it was just something entirely different to what I had ever experienced. See, I didn’t go there with a battalion, I went there to replace a priest, there was two priests at Nui Dat, one was with 7RAR [7th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment] and he went over with them and went back with them and was their chaplain. Myself, I was over there to look after 2RAR [2nd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment] , NZ [New Zealand], the field

regiment, the tracks, everything else fell into my barrel, right. So I lived in the LAD [Light Aid Detachment] of the field regiment.

Logistic Aid Depot or something where they repaired things and things. So I was living there, whereas Keith Teefee, who was a great friend of mine, we were over there together, he was living in the 7RAR lines and he was their chaplain.

I was sort of a chaplain to everybody.

I don’t know how many at the time, some I never saw. And there was an Anglican, Greenshields, we used to call Greensleeves and whistle Greensleeves, the song, whenever he came. He was there with the tracks as an Anglican chaplain, and there was a Uniting Church chaplain with

the engineers and there was somebody at battalion headquarters probably.

Well, it was in a rubber plantation, and where I was, I don’t know whether it was north, south, east or west, but it was at one end. 2RAR was in another section over there, Eight were

alongside them as far as I know, then the tracks with the APCs [Armoured Personnel Carriers] and things were another area. See they were all in different areas, I think BHQ [Battalion Headquarters] was more or less in the centre. That’s from my recollection of it. And the American guns were on, ours were 105 I think theirs were 125s or something, much bigger, so when they started firing the whole place would shake where I was. They were just on the other side of our lines, of our area.

So that’s my idea, they were just there in groups, like that with BHQ there in the middle. Actually, at night time they’d show movies, but you weren’t, there was no centre to go to for a movie, you had to have your movies in your own areas because they didn’t want a whole lot of troops together in case somebody started throwing a few bombs in. And Luscombe Field was where the airfield was, and that was sort of just out on its own landing area. So

I was looking after all sorts of places in my work up there. I’d be out at the Fire Support Base, FSB [Fire Support Base] a few days or go out on a patrol with 2RAR.

There was a tent, a big army tent, and there were two beds in it in case. I don’t know what the other bed was for,

and a steel cabinet like you see in the change rooms now, a steel cabinet with two doors on it. A fan, army cot and a mattress, mosquito net, it wasn’t very much in the tent, and the front of my tent there was another little square one, light green. You still see them around the place, and that was the office, and there was a table and chairs and

telephone in there and a few things like that in the front, in the office part. So I actually had a tent to live in, like about as big, half as big as this I s’pose, and then a little thing tacked on the front as the office.

They could come into my office yeah, it was on its own. Like say that’s the LAD, well all the other things are, and my office was up here in the corner on my own, nobody near me at all.

No, no.

Yeah, there was a sign outside with ‘RC [Roman Catholic] Chaplain’ red letters on a yellow background. Didn’t have office hours. Everybody knew where I was, yeah.

No, the other fellow met me at the airport…where did he

meet me? Somewhere for half an hour because he was on his way home and he said, “Look, I’m sorry, we haven’t got time to, didn’t have a couple of days handover.” He said, “That’s the way it’s worked out,” he said, “And I’ve only got a half an hour. In the tent you’ll find this and this and this. Just make yourself at home,” he said, “And I’ve got to go now because me plane’s ready to leave.” So we only saw each other, Hank Nolan it was, only saw him for an hour at the most, I s’pose.

He gave me a bit of a run down on things.

No.

I think he was so glad to be going home. He wasn’t going to stay talking to me too long.

Well I walked into the place, and as I said to the lady on the phone, Tracey, I said I walked into the tent, somebody must’ve showed me where the tent was, and dropped me bag, me

army bag in there and got out a few clean clothes. Thought I’d better have a shower and freshen up because we’d been on the plane from Sydney and then in Saigon and it was about 24 hours since I’d had a, so I took a, stripped off everything and just wrapped a towel around meself, green army towel and cake of soap and I said to some digger, I said, “Where’s the shower?” He said, “Well that’s them over there, across the other side.” So I was walking across the other side, this is about five o’clock by now,

it might’ve been a bit later and this voice sings out to me, “Where do you think you’re going soldier?” And I said, “I’m going to have a shower.” “Going to have a shower dressed like that? Who are you anyhow?” And I said, “I’m Father Levey, Chaplain Levey, the new Catholic Chaplain.” “Oh, sorry Sir,” he said, “I beg your pardon. I didn’t know who you were. I hadn’t seen you before. And I apologise for shouting like that.” I said, “That’s okay.” And he said, “Look, we don’t go around like that at this time of the day because of the mosquitoes,

you should wear your long trousers and a shirt to the showers.” “Oh, that’s okay.” So we were the best of mates for the next 12 months. And that was me introduction being shouted at by the BSM [Battalion Sergeant Major] which is the battery sergeant major. But anyhow, it all worked out okay, got on pretty well after that.

I don’t think, so I just thought it was a learning lesson - don’t walk around like that after five o’clock.

No, I had to find and meet them myself, I went down to the mess for tea I think, and forget now, and a few of them were in. A lot of them seemed to be with the regiment, it was 4th Field Regiment or 12th Field, they were the ones who did fire support bases, which is a triangle with a gun at each point, sand bagged them, they’d be out in one of those and that means a lot of the officers are out there and the men are out there

perhaps for two or three weeks or something like that. So I went down and met who was in the mess and met the, major what was his name, Quinn, Don Quinn was one of them and Toffler, Towler or something. I just met them and they said, “Make yourself at home,” and everything. And the mess, there was two boxes of pills you had to take every day so the, make sure you take your tablets for the malaria and that and

tick your name off that you’d taken them.

I think that’s what they were basically for.

I don’t know, but when you got towards the end of your time they were called happy pills because you had seven days to go and you said, “I’m on happy pills.” They were the same pills, but they were the last ones you were going to take. And if you went out in the bush anywhere you had to take a supply with you to keep taking them. So the

mess was very good up there, the fellows were very helpful in general.

I think I just unpacked things and got things in order the way I wanted them and had a general look around the place, like when you go to any new place you sort of get orientated and work out what’s happening and what’s not happening.

Well, I s’pose the next day really. I kept a little diary, which I couldn’t put my hand on to come down today, because I wrote down where I was each day for the 12 months. I didn’t have any details, just Fire Support Base Carol or Fire Support Base Sarah or something. But, and I just sort of settled

in, I s’pose, and got to know people and they got to know me.

Sometimes they would. See, in areas like that where there’s no strict privacy, you don’t have to confess, right. There’s what’s called a general absolution, and if you went out into the jungle to celebrate mass and the fellows came around that wanted to

go to mass, you’d just say, “If you want to go to confession, we just had the act of contrition and don’t confess anything because there’s people all around and you get absolution. You don’t have to tell your sins or anything, just in your own heart you’re sorry and the priest forgives you.” Same sort of thing in a hospital. If there’s danger of anybody in the next bed hearing, the person who’s going to make the confession,

that’s sacred and personal, so that if there’s any danger of anybody overhearing anything, it’s to do it like that. But they’d come in just sometimes just for a bit of a yarn or something.

I might have his name in the book, but I don’t know what it is now.

Oh yes, they had to get to know me, and I had to

get to know them. You don’t walk into a complete stranger, and it was only going out with them on their patrols and the fire support bases where you live with them for a while, that’s where you make real contacts and relationships and things.

Well when you were in the camp area, it might be

getting up having a shower and getting dressed and everything and having breakfast and then doing a bit of paperwork in the office, it might be writing some letters home or something like that, because I used to get a lot of letters from home, and then perhaps wandering around one of the areas and just being a presence there and letting the fellows see you, and if they want to talk to you they can talk to you. That’d be a day back in the base at Nui Dat, right. And then perhaps having tea at night and going to a movie

and sitting through five break-downs of the movie.

Sometimes it was just a matter of just having a yarn, they didn’t all have problems or anything or they wanted a bit of advice about, perhaps things at home weren’t too good or something or their girlfriend hadn’t written for a while or something like that. And you’d just try and help them to…

“Lots of things might be wrong, she might be sick, she might be away,” or things like that. Sometimes it was a personal problem. One fellow on the SAS [Special Air Service] said to me one day, and he was very disturbed because he said, “If we drop into an area, and there’s a contact with the VC, and,” he said, “Two of them are wounded,” and

he said that, “The idea is that you don’t leave the wounded because they know how many of them are, if there’s nine of them or 10 of them, and which direction you’ve gone.” And he said, “What are we supposed to do, shoot them or what? Because they can tell their mates, “There’s only eight of them and they’ve gone down that track or gone in that direction.” I couldn’t think of much to say. I think you tie them up to a tree or

something, and if they die it’s not your, you haven’t killed them, it’s just that their injuries are so much that you couldn’t do anything about it, and it’s a real dilemma. I don’t know that I was able to help him that much because he couldn’t very well go against the orders, I s’pose, but you can see the situation. They would drop in somewhere and there would be a contact

and perhaps some of the VC might be shot dead, some might escape, there’s a couple of wounded there, if you leave them and the other fellows come back and they say, “Well there’s only 10 of them and they’ve gone that way two hours ago,” well, it jeopardises the whole group of men. But you can’t, that’s what happens in war, these real dilemmas, and of course at Nuremberg a lot of them said that they did the thing under orders,

and they said they were doing those things…

Oh no, no nothing like that at all, no. I think you were accepted and the people who have faith in any denomination, they respect you for it, and those without faith they don’t sort of,

no.

Oh no. No, in the Australian Army the chaplain is more or less left to his own devices, but an American chaplain said to me once when we met him at a retreat, he said, “Have you done your returns yet?” And I said, “What returns?” And he said, “Don’t you have to put in a return?” And I said, “No, we just do our own thing and wander along.” He said, “Oh my god, we have to put in returns

of how many interviews we’ve conducted during the month and how many conversions of some other faith and how many of this…” And I said, “No, we don’t do any of that.” He said, “You just do your thing and nobody worries you?” I said, “That’s right. We just do it and nobody worries us.” “Oh god.” That’s Americanism - returns, figures, and statistics.

Yeah, completely on your own devices, yeah.

No, I never got lonely. You mean Vietnam?

No, not really, no, because there was always people around the area when you were in Nui Dat in the tent, and sometimes you’d just want to be lonely.

Yeah, but on the specific religion area. The

mass and confession was Catholic but other people could come along if they wanted to. The mass times were up on the different, there was about four chapels in Nui Dat in different areas and the mass times were displayed on that, and then the other denominations would sometimes have a general chapel or they used, they all used each others. Most of them only had the one. Catholic times this, Anglican times this, Uniting Church times this.

Yes, well we were all a little close community. There was the Anglican fellow, Glen Greensleeves, Greenshields, Alen Greenshields, and the block in the track area, the engineers. There was Teefey at 7RAR, yeah, there would’ve been probably six chaplains

in Nui Dat, two Catholic, two Anglican and two OPD [Other Protestant Denominations], we used to call them.

Excellent.

Yeah. We didn’t see each other all that much because we were living in different areas and going to different places. Oh no, there’s never been any problems like that.

Split? I think it all sort of runs in together. What do you call ‘purely religious work’? Mass and things like that?

Oh yes, yeah. And sometimes they wanted to talk about something private and they wanted confidentiality and they knew it wouldn’t go any further…something worrying them, and they’d come and talk to you about it, knowing that when they walked out the door, that

was it. It wasn’t going to go around the camp or something, or told to anybody else.

I s’pose while you’re in the base you’re on call all the time, a bit like in a parish - 24 hours. And while you’re there, you’re there. No office hours or anything like that.

Yes.

No, not in Vietnam, but I did have in Singleton and Holsworthy later on, but not there. A fellow might come around and collect your clothes and they’d go off to the laundry in Baria to be laundered and everything and bring them back to you when they came, but that’s all. You looked after your own place otherwise.

Oh great.

Never had any difficulties there, no.

We were best of mates after we made that initial contact.

No, I never felt like that ever. I think the ones that, people appreciated you being there, and the fact that the church

was concerned about your spiritual and physical welfare no matter where you were and that chaplains or priests were prepared to come up and be with them in that area, whether it was Vung Tau or Nui Dat.

It was probably personal little worries that they might’ve had about things at home.

That SAS one was the one that stayed in my mind because it was a very serious one, a dilemma to me to know what to say, but others were just the same things you’d get in parishes in a way. See, I got a fridge off an American chaplain for the tent, and another story for cold beers in the fridge you see. Well they, you were entitled, I think,

to two beers a day or something, and they’d come along and say, “Can you swap us some coldies for some warm ones Father?” I’d give them some cold ones because they wouldn’t have fridges in their tent and the canteen might’ve been closed. So I’d take a few warm beers and put them in and give them a couple of cold ones.

I didn’t get very many

of them, no. My memory mainly recalls maybe one or two, but not any more than that.

Sometimes the CO [Commanding Officer] would send somebody to you and they’d say, “Have a talk, there’s something on his mind.” And he’d, “Go and see the chaplain.” They were personal matters.

Oh, they probably were but they didn’t speak about it much, I spoke to, the Nashos [National Servicemen],

they were there for financial reasons because they’d say, “When I get home Father, I’ll have a deposit for the house and something to do this with.” A few of them with a comment like that, that was the reason, one of the reasons they volunteered to go over there. Because you got tax free for the year and you got $28 a week or something or other, I don’t know.

They had a disregard for them verbally, but I don’t know if they did in full terms. Without being too vulgar, when they were going to have a business in the bush they’d say, “I’m going to go and lay a nasho.” That’s what the Regs [Regular Servicemen] would say.

No, I didn’t. I was out on patrols with them for two or three days. I went out on fire support bases for three or four days at a time basically to bring the spiritual and comfort of mass to the people. I’ve got some photos in me bag there about places that I used to say mass, a tree stump in the jungle or

ration boxes, jerry cans…make an altar out of jerry cans. Ration boxes, tree stumps, but as I said, I never ever used ammunition boxes for an altar; I thought that was a bit over the top. But you’d just get two jerry cans and put one across the top and put your altar cloth over the top of that.

Well you had a little plastic box

which the other chaplain left, things they’d made up, and took the little white cloth. You took a chalice which screwed up into three parts and fitted into each other, so you had a thing like an egg cup with all the inside. Had a little silver plate for the communion and then a couple of little plastic bottles for the wine and the water, an alb that’s made out of parachute silk

out of an old parachute that’s sort of brown, and just a stole. That’s all you wore out there. Didn’t really have to wear all that probably, but that’s what I used to wear. And it all fitted into a little thing about the size of a cake tin, little cake tin. And I left that over there for the next fellow.

Yeah, you had black crosses -

like these but black. That was the only one you had out in the bush, and your name, I think you only just had your name on your pocket, Levey I think, it didn’t say who you were or anything.

No, I didn’t. I only carried one once because I was told if I didn’t take a weapon, I would not be allowed to go on this patrol. Who was the officer, Tam Roberts I think it was, the major,

and I said, “I’ve never carried a weapon.” And he said, “Well Father, if you don’t take one you’re not going to go because they’re not going to be looking after you if anything happens.” So I said, “Okay, give me something.” So he gave me an Armalite and a few bullets which I carried around for the next three or four days and gave them back to him when I came home. And I think there’s a photograph of me there with them, I’m…lying on a log alongside me. But there was another chaplain over there

that never moved anywhere without a bloody revolver, even in his briefcase. “Roy, what have you got in that?” “I wouldn’t go without this,” he said. You see, the fellows respected you, he was the only chaplain I knew that carried a gun all the time, but the fellas respected you because you weren’t armed. One time we were camped out somewhere or other and they ran a string around the bivouac area in the

jungle, so that was the perimeter, and you had to have, and to go to the toilet. You had to take a shovel and go out beyond the string. So this kid was sitting there on the end of the thing with a machine gun there one, evening and I said, “I’ve got to go out there,” so I went out, I tapped him on the shoulder I said, “Look, I’m going out there and I’m coming back so when you hear somebody coming through the jungle it’s me.” “Okay.” Because they would be a bit on

edge because of the night time settling in and everything. No, I just thought it was contrary. Most chaplains never carried weapons to my knowledge, it is contrary to your role.

About the middle of it. There might be six or eight fellows in front of you and four or five behind.

Well, I just felt that that’s what I was supposed to be doing. I mean, if they’re going out into danger, it’s not my job to sit at home in the tent. I just thought if I’m in the army, my chaplain world, you do this, this is what you do. And I thought I gave the fellas a bit of support to know that the priest was willing to go out and slog through the jungle with them.

I s’pose I just felt that that’s what a chaplain was supposed to do, and that’s what I did. Used to go out to fire support bases where the gunners were and I’d stay with them for a few days and have mass out there and that. And that meant flying out in a helicopter to the area, which is a triangle, I explained earlier, with the gun at each point and they lived inside. That’s where one fellow stopped me when

I was coming back one time and said he wanted to talk to me and I said, “Okay what’s the trouble?” And he said he wanted to become a Catholic, I don’t know whether his girlfriend was a Catholic or what it was. But I said, “Look, it’s very hard to do that here because it involves a lot of talks and discussions. Wait until you get back to Sydney,” or wherever he lived, “and see somebody, see the chaplain down there if you’re still in the army, or the local priest. But it’s a bit awkward up here.” Two days later he was shot.

I always felt funny about that. Just stood up on the bund or something and got the odd bullet. I still remember his name, too, I looked for it on the War Memorial the other day, when they opened the one in Canberra, and I saw it there.

Yes, but they wouldn’t be firing all the time. They’d only be firing when there was a contact or something, so a lot of the time it was just routine army stuff.

Good. I went okay. There was one incident where I was on patrol and we had to climb up this pretty steep little mountain

to camp on the top of it and I was going okay and the kid behind me tapped me on the back, he said, “Tell them to stop, I’m going to be sick.” So I tapped the bloke in front and I said, “Somebody’s going to be sick tell them.” So the officer, would’ve been a lieutenant or something, might’ve been a sergeant in charge I forget now, he come down the line see, looking and he said, “You’re sick are you?” And I said, “No, I’m not sick I’m fine, it’s the fella behind me who’s sick.”

“Oh,” he said, “I was sure it would’ve been you.” I said, “No, it’s not.” So we had to pull over and just sit down for a while, this fella got his wits together again. Probably had a bad night the night before or something.

Well you carried your bed, your roll pack and everything and your rations for the time you were out, the only thing I wouldn’t have carried would’ve been a rifle.

People used to ask me that and I thought, “I don’t know, I’ll wait until it happens.” I thought I’d pick up a shovel and hit them on the head with it.

If need be, in some way. Oh yeah, you’ve got a right to defend yourself. If your life is threatened, you’ve got a right to respond.

Oh no, no. No you’re just one of the patrol or one of the blokes, the FSB or something.

Well, I think that’s typical of some people in every army,

but it doesn’t portray the whole army. I think that they’d go down to Vung Tau to the baths and that in the night when they were on R&R [Rest and Recreation], they’d go down to Vung Tau for that. I don’t s’pose that they were any worse than Australians in Cairo during the First World War or anywhere else. See Nui Dat was a closed camp

and there was no chance for prostitution or drugs as far as I know, drugs at any rate. Up there of course it was a closed area and you were living in a little Australian enclave sort of thing. But down at Vung Tau, was a seaside town and you could go out and walk around the streets, and that’s where the things happened, I suppose.

I don’t think I gave any much at all really. If they wanted to go to Vung Tau and get into a brothel, well that was their problem. But if they caught something that was their problem too. There was a funny thing, one night I was in Nui Dat and I was in my tent and I went across to the doctors, Ian Isaacs I think his name was, who was across the road, and at the edge of the road there were big pits full of

coils of barbed wire. And a little walkway across to this tent. And we had a cup of tea and everything and there was a, the lights went out which they did some times and I said, “I’d better get back.” I think it might’ve been curfew or something, I said, “I’d better get back to me tent.” And he said, “Be careful of the tree when you’re walking out, don’t walk into it.” And I was so concerned about now walking into the tree that I fell into the pit of barbed wire

coils. And every time I moved you bounced and my shirt got torn and I got scratched all down and a couple of marks on me face and I finally got me way out of it and went back to his tent and sang out to him. He put his torch out and, “What happened? What’s happened to you?” And I said, “I fell into the trench of barbed wire trying to avoid that tree you were talking about.” So he gave me a tetanus injection and fixed me up. Well the next morning at breakfast I had these scratches on me face

and I went down to have breakfast and the blokes were looking at me and I said, “Oh, what a night in Vungers last night,” I said, “she was a tiger.” And they all cracked up.

Oh yeah.

Well I think people of religion are always portrayed poorly in any movie,

the English television things, when the vicar comes he’s always some poncy fellow with a great big collar and it’s unreal, but that’s the way it is. I don’t remember the chaplain in the, but I just know it was a very good movie of that because that’s what it was all about.

The Odd Angry Shot? Because at that time it probably was, there

wasn’t a lot of intense activity after Long Tan and there was skirmishes and patrols but there was no heavy bombardment. And a lot of fellas went over there and never heard a shot fired.

It was at times, but as I say, you were

rationed to two, I think it was two a day or something. But if you went out on a patrol for four or five days you came back and they were all waiting for you. So often when the fellas came back from the patrol or an FSB or something, they’d get a bit stuck into it because they had a backup of booze. That’s my recollection of it anyhow, but it wasn’t a terribly great problem except that you got stuff in the canteen at Nui Dat and they’d open the

tin because you weren’t supposed to be keeping them. Something like that.

Physical location, also it would be much quicker because if you’re out in the field anything could happen, so, and you had a gathering of men around you and they didn’t like to be gathered in a little group for too long

because it’s dangerous if anything starts and if they’re grouped together, well, they’re the target. So mostly we had to be pretty quick. And the same thing for confession, I’d say, “If anybody wants to receive forgiveness and absolution, just in your own heart confess your sins,” and act of contrition, that took about a minute and a half, I s’pose.

Yeah, it had to be.

You wouldn’t preach too long in the jungle.

Yes, while you were celebrating the mass, they would make sure there were fellows facing outwards ready to deal with any trouble that came along, but thanks be to God nothing ever did.

I think there are.

Well we went out this day from somewhere down the road, not from Nui Dat, but somewhere down the road, and there were some caves in the side of a hill which the Viet Cong were using and they couldn’t get into them with gunfire or shells, artillery and so they decided to send this patrol out to destroy them, physically. And there was an American truck with us and we were on the back of an APC,

I think it was about five or six vehicles went out along this track, and we got out there and they did what they had to do. But on the way back we hit three mines, we didn’t hit them but the truck in front hit one and the one behind us hit one. They were American, they were a big wider than the thing we were on, so I don’t know whether they were detonated manually or the wider truck was wide enough to hit the mine and we weren’t. But the last

one that went up, we got all showered with dirt and rubble, went up in front of us, and they were towing a tank of some sort on wheels, like a water tank, and that went flying through the air and I thought it was a body until I saw it land and I thought, “Thank god it’s not a person.” Of course the diggers were saying, “We’re lucky with you here Father, you’re a good luck charm for us today, nothing’s happening, they’ve been blown up all around us but not us. What time’s

mass on Sunday?” I said, “It’s at nine o’clock.” “We’ll all be there.” I said, “Okay, see you at nine o’clock Sunday, but I won’t put out any extra chairs.” Then by the time they got back and had a few tubes, as they called the beers, Sunday came and went, the danger was over. That’s human nature though. We pray like mad when we’re in trouble but when things are going fine we go back to our old routine.

No, I think they went to mass out of a sense of real devotion and faith, as it was in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The Sunday masses were reasonably well attended. Sometimes on a Sunday a lot of them would be way out in the jungle somewhere on patrol or something like that.

I don’t think so, don’t think they’d be much safer next to me than anyone else.

No, I don’t think so. I think they were having a bit of a joke when they were saying they were lucky I was with them.

Yeah, a few times, yeah. Well many times actually. One night we were

out there and we had to camp for the night and had to dig a shell scrape so you could be down level with the ground and then they’d radio the position to the FSB and they’d target in on where you were so that if anything happened they could fire immediately in the surrounding area to support you. And I was lying in the shell scrape and, with the hoochie [plastic cape shelter] up, and there’s nothing more

nerve wracking than the sound of a shell going overhead. And I thought, “Hell.” And one of the blokes said, “Don’t worry Father, when you hear that, they’re going over the top. The one that lands here you won’t hear it at all.” That sound’s been with me ever since, it’s a real haunting sound. But anyhow, they didn’t have to use them that night, but that was one of the times. On this patrol when we caught the VC, yeah, there

was several times when I was a bit frightened.

Yeah, but you don’t, I don’t know whether you pray automatically or not, I’m not sure. I don’t know. People often say to you if they’ve had an accident or something they say to you, “And the only thing I didn’t do was pray, Father,” this is civil, in civvy street. “I didn’t say a prayer.” I’d say, “Oh well, you’ve said enough in your lifetime probably.”

Well a lot of it’s myth about people; the first thing they want to do is bellow, “No atheists in fox holes.” Well I think there are.

Well one was we were in a bivouac one night out in the jungle somewhere, Barry Peterson was the company commander and he said to this young fellow, “You go and hoochie up with the padre,” because you weren’t to sleep just on your own, you had to have somebody. We had these hoochie things which were a bottom and mosquito net at the side and tent over the top, individual ones.

So we hoochied up and I met this young fellow at the Port Pirie reunion about four years ago and he was remembering it, and Barry Peterson flew from Bangkok to the reunion, told the story. And when we’d hoochied up, Barry called this young fellow up and he said, “Which way are…did you put up father’s hoochie?” He said, “I just put it up.” And he said, “The Catholic priest has to

always sleep facing the east.” “Sir, I don’t think we’re facing east,” I got all this story later on. And Barry called me up when the kid went off somewhere, he said, “Look, I’ve told him about you facing east,” so I was in on the joke, too. And then he came back and said, “I’d better shift these hoochies, Father.” I said, “What for?” And he said, “Well, you’re not facing east.” I said, “Aren’t we?” He said, “No, I’ll have to find out which direction it is so we can fix them up.”

And I said, “One night won’t matter, we usually do, but one night out in the matter, I don’t think anybody will worry about it.” “Oh no, I’m sure I’ll fix it up.” I said, “Don’t worry about it.” So the joke went on for a while and it was related at the reunion and everything. Another one was we were on this patrol and they must’ve choppered in a chainsaw to clear an LZ [Landing Zone] for the chopper to come in and resupply,

and we were walking along the track and he’d sent a couple of diggers on ahead to chop down the trees and have everything ready. And we were walking along the track and he said to me, “I can’t hear that chainsaw, they wouldn’t have cleared all that area by now.” And of course when we got up to the designated area the two fellows were sitting on a log and the chainsaw was sitting in front of them and they were swearing. All the usual army language, and I said, “What’s the trouble?”

And they said, “Chainsaw won’t start,” blah, blah, blah, raving on and everything. And I said, “No need for all that language, it just needs a blessing.” This is a true story and it went all around the area, I said, “Just put the chainsaw down on the ground there. “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” I said, “Pull it now.” And it started straight away. “Oh that’s great!” That went all over Nui Dat that story and if I was walking anywhere and some machinery had broken down, “Father, over here,

come over here.” I said, “No, I’ve only got a limited number of those blessings and they have to be kept for special occasions.” So that story went all over the place. Sleeping business. I wrote a few of them down in my case over there to remind me.

No, no, I s’pose I sort of adjusted to that at Singleton. Anywhere where there’s a whole lot of soldiers, there’s always bad language.

Yeah I think so, but in the secular world, well, in those days you didn’t hear a whole lot of language

like you do these days. Girls walking down the street are terrible sometimes, you wouldn’t ever have heard of that back in the ‘40s and ‘50s I don’t think. But no, language, I used a bit of it myself actually. People sometimes in confession say, “And I swore.” And I say, “Oh really, what’s the oath you took?” “I didn’t take an oath.” And I say, “Well swearing is taking an oath that you swear before God what you say is true. What did you say,

bloody and bugger and that? Don’t worry about that, that’s just bad language not fitting for a young lady but don’t be worried about it.”

I think there was a real problem for some, others, things affect people different ways. Some people just breeze through a bad situation, others

it stops them in their tracks and dwells with them, stays with them for days. Stress, as you know, everybody doesn’t get stressed do they? Some people never have it and other people are never without it. I’d imagine diggers going off on a patrol and they’d be pretty stressed as to relying on one another for support and everything else.

They cope in different ways, I s’pose.

For myself?

Yes, I know fellows that I was over there with, one lived in the parish I was in a while before this one and he came home and he looked to be quite okay, but about 15 years after he was back he just fell apart. And he’s still

under treatment. And one of the priests that I know, I believe he’s not travelling too well, but he was up there in the thick of it. Yeah, I think it…people probably dwell on it a bit or something. When I come back I used to make a joke of it because every time I’d hear a helicopter, chopper go over whether Westpac or something, I’d say, “Under the table everybody, here’s the chopper coming.”

But that sound took you straight back to Vietnam every time you heard it. It’s stopped now, but it was with me for years and years afterwards.

No, they seemed to be all right to me. What they had bottled up inside you wouldn’t know, but for some of them it’s taken a long while to surface. They’ve kept it under,

which probably makes it worse when I finally breaks out.

Me? No, no. I’ve just thanked God for the experience. I never thought I’d go to war, I went to a war and survived and did a lot of the things that a priest does. I think helped a lot of people and a lot of experiences and I often wonder what sort of a

priest I’d be today if it hadn’t happened.

No, not directly because it was so organised that if there was any casualties they were immediately flown back to Vung Tau to the hospital there, so the chaplain down there was dealing with all that sort of stuff.

No.

Yes.

No, all the bodies came back to…there was one contact we got word of, I went out with them and there was a fellow called, what’s his name…he used to take out orange juice and things, had the orange juice tent and everything. Like the Salvation Army but he wasn’t Salvation Army, he was something else. And there was this contact and I went out and took the mass kit out and he

came out with the orange juice and that and it was quite strange because some of the diggers said to me, “At a time like this we don’t need orange juice, we need some spiritual thing.” So I was able to do something for them out there and stay with them for a few hours and that. They’d had a nasty little contact and a few fellows got wounded, I don’t know if anybody got killed, but I just thought it was quite strange when a few of them said that.

“You don’t want a glass of orange juice when you’ve been through this.”

Well, I’ve got, I’ve covered most of them I see by now because I’ve got a list of them here. The chainsaw, sleeping arrangements…oh, visiting the orphanage was always great. At Baria there was an orphanage run by Mother Augustine and she made it a real little oasis for the Australian soldiers. Of course you could go down and call in there and she’d get the

little kids to come out and sing some songs for you and give you a glass of orange juice or lemonade and everything. And of course on the way to Vung Tau so very often soldiers going down in the trucks would call in, we helped them, too, we got them some ration boxes and tins of stuff and that. But it was a real little escape from the routine of the army and the war. She wrote to some of us after the war to say that she was all right, but I haven’t heard.

No, no, a Vietnamese nun.

There’s a photograph of it over there.

A pretty basic sort of a place, and about five or six nuns there, and they had all these little children up until the age of nine, 10, 11 and something, and they

were teaching them in the school and looking after them. I think they were mostly war orphans or kids whose parents had run away or something. But it was always a place to go, basically it was sort of a bit of concrete and bricks and corrugated iron and things like that.

Might’ve been 50 or something, I s’pose. Then there was another one

further out where Old Mama san [presiding matriarch] was, and she always wanted salt, this other old nun, but they were having a real struggle because they were a big out of the area and they had a farm there and they were trying to grow some vegetables and things and we thought we’d do a great job for them by getting them a electrical, the emergency electrical things – cond… you know what they are…

generator.

So we got her this generator run on petrol, you see, and thought you could plug it in and run your fridge off a generator and run your light off it, but what we didn’t realise was that they had no idea of running a generator. So after a few times they just seemed to put it in the back shed somewhere because they didn’t know, if it stopped halfway through they night they just didn’t know how to start it again. She only had about 12 or

14 kids in that orphanage but every time we called to see her she wanted salt, “Salt number one.” “Okay,” so we brought some salt next time we came through.

I don’t know, I s’pose it was a basic need for cooking and things like that yeah.

Not that I remember, no. They were pretty much all right, yeah. But it was quite funny because they used to put ice in the drinks

sometimes, and one day this other fellow and myself were walking down towards the orphanage and we saw this kid come back with a block of ice, he was on his little pushbike and the ice was tied up with a bit of rope on the ground behind the bike. And he was driving the bike along and the ice was going over the road and through the paddock. I thought, “There’s the ice, we won’t have any ice today.” Yeah they were, the orphanages, most of the chaplains would know about the orphanages and many of the soldiers

would, too, because they were a real little focus point of dropping in and that.

Yeah, I think so, to see some women, nuns, and see some kids normally without them being in the village where they’re likely to throw a hand grenade you or something, which did happen at times.

I wouldn’t know. They were probably South Vietnamese,

I would think. I don’t know.

I don’t think from that orphanage, but I think some have adopted Vietnamese children after the war.

Just talk to the kids and they’d sing a song and you’d have a glass of orange juice and a biscuit or something and then talk to the nuns. That was

all.

Yes, the kids couldn’t understand you very well but the sisters could speak French and a bit of English and that. The difficulty with Nui Dat was a closed area and Australian was spoken, English was spoken in the whole area so you didn’t get a chance to learn much Vietnamese, and you could say something and the pronunciation would be crazy.

Like an American chap who gave me, he said, “I’ve got a box of goods, I’ll send some down to you.” So he sent down this box of Immaculus medals and holy chains and other things, holy pictures and things. When 8RAR [8th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment] went home, Vietnamese Battalion moved into their lines and they were completely cut off from us because they closed the fence up and everything, and on Sunday I’d go around to their place for mass and I’d get a

jeep and drive out through the main gate and along outside the wire and have mass in their chapel. And I made up a notice using a dictionary saying, ‘Medals and chains are available at a box outside the chapel if anybody would like one’. And I thought, “That’s all right, if they want medal and a chain they’re out there.” But when I came out of the mass that morning, they were all walking around bent over and laughing, bent nearly double and I thought, “What the hell’s wrong with that?”

So I took the notice off the wall because they’d read the notice and burst into hysterics, and I took the notice back to Sergeant Rung, who was living in the area near us, and he was the interpreter, I said, “Rung, what’s wrong with this notice?” I said, “I’m trying to tell them there’s chains and medals available.” He said, “Yes, but that chain word means a bullock chain, where a bullock is chained up to a cart. That’s why they’re walking around, because

they’re saying they’ve got a heavy bullock chain around their neck.” And I said, “Would you write me out the notice out properly?” So he did that. So those sort of things happened.

Not really. I think you were kept so occupied with everything, and we went in once a month to Saigon to build quarters for the American Catholic

priest in Saigon, not in the army, but he had the parish there, The Lady Queen of Peace, and we had a retreat there every, the last Friday of the month or something, and we’d go in about half past nine and have a spiritual talk and a time for confession then have a barbeque on his veranda. And the American chaplains would come in too, so there’d be anything up to 16, 18, 20 people there, the four Catholic chaplains and the Yanks, and

getting towards the end of the operations up there, for me anyhow, we were all on the veranda one day talking and I heard this American chap one day say, “Ice-boxes, I’ve got five of those god damned ice-boxes.” And I thought, “Ice-boxes?” And I went over and said, “What are you calling an ‘ice-box’?” And he said, “One of them little ice-boxes, you know, the white things that keep the food cold.” I said, “Oh, a refrigerator?” And he said, “Yeah, do you want one? I’ve got five.” And I said, “Yes, I’ll have one. He said, “Where are you?” So I wrote it down in his book,

“I’ll send you one.” And then we got back to Nui Dat and a few days or a week went past and I just thought, “He said, ‘Do you want it?’ but that’s all about it,” and I got a phone message, a phone call and they said, “Father Levey?” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Get down to Luscombe Field, there’s something coming in for you on a chopper and you’ll want to take a little truck down with you.” “It might be the ice-box.” So I got the little jeep out and drove down to the field and the plane come in, little chopper and the thing

was boxed on the, tied on the side of it on one of the runners, little Busby thing, whatever they call them. And the diggers are down there saying, “What the hell has he got on that thing?” And I said, “Yeah, I think I know what it is.” “How in the hell would you know what it is?” And I said, “I bet it’s a refrigerator.” “A refrigerator? Bringing in a refrigerator strapped on the side of it?” And I said, “It looks like that to me.” And of course when the thing landed, that’s what it was. So he had tapes all around it so the door wouldn’t open.

And I got back up in the tent and opened it and it was full of cheese and beer and all this beautiful food you hadn’t had in a long while. And that’s how I started the cold beers for warm ones, because they plugged in and I had a little fridge. But that was an interesting experience because the Yanks were very good that way. They’d give you anything you wanted from that point of view.

One of the worst mistakes I made, you know what a screw is in Australian language?

Salary.

Well that was the old meaning for it. They’d say, “What sort of a screw are you on?” “I’m on 20 quid a week.”

When I was young and innocent and I said to one of these American chaplains on one of these retreats, we were talking about things and I said to him, I said, “What sort of a screw are

you guys on?” “My god, Father, we’re not on a screw, we don’t screw around.” And I said, “I’m sorry, that word’s got a different meaning in your language to ours.” So to quieten him down, “I’m talking about what salary do you get?” So there’s a word in two languages that was, like the bullock chain and things like that. And one of the big nights was Christmas up there, L.A. Morgan, the bishop

of the forces, flew in from Canberra and, to do the Christmas masses, the midnight mass at Nui Dat. And Keith Teefey and I were going around hearing confessions in different areas…oh, that’s right, we went over to the Vietnamese area and had mass at a quarter past nine. And old L.A. Morgan says, “We’ll hear their confessions before mass.” I said, “I don’t speak enough Vietnamese to hear confession.” “Oh it doesn’t matter, you sit behind the

alter then, I’ll sit over here.” So they all came in and, “Cha, da mung chow, cha, mung ka din,” they could’ve been saying, “I murdered me mother and I want to drown the three kids in the bucket,” or something. I was saying, “God bless you, in the name of the Father and the Son…” So we were going to, Luscombe Bowl was the place for the midnight mass and that’s the area, it’s like a big bowl, a bowl with the airstrip in the middle of it sort of thing but the sides were all banked up and everything. And L.A. says, “We’ll hear confessions before mass and Keith Teefey and I

said, “I don’t think we’ll have time.” “Oh yes,” he said, “there’s three of us here, we’ll have plenty of time.” We got there and there’s about 1000 diggers sitting in Luscombe Bowl because it was a truce for the Christmas season, and old L.A. said, “Heavens, we can’t possibly hear, can’t possible hear confessions, I’ve give a general absolution.” So that’s what he did, he said anybody who wanted to be absolved, to sort of kneel down and confess their sins in their heart and that’s how we got around that, but that was a really great

experience, that mass there, because the three of us celebrated it, and all these soldiers were there this Christmas night.

I think they would come because they wanted to be at church. And the funny thing about it was, when L.A. Morgan arrived at the BHQ at Nui Dat where I was called down by the general to meet him and everything and the brigadier was saying, “Now,

Bishop Morgan wants to celebrate mass for the Vietnamese Troops where 8RAR used to be.” And I said, “Oh yeah, I go over there every Sunday.” And he said, “What are your arrangements to get there, Father?” I said, “I get the jeep and I drive out through the main gate and I drive along the perimeter fence on the other side until I get to their line.” And he said, “The chaplain of the forces is not going out through the main gate and driving along the perimeter fence.” I said, “Well, I do it

every Sunday.” And he said, “Well, he’s not doing it.” And they pulled the fence down that they’d put up to isolate them, and they had two sentries on each side and we walked through it. I thought, “Well, the chaplain general gets this and I drive out every morning through the gate and along the side.” So that’s how the Christmas masses were up there.

Bob Crawford?

I think I might’ve got that, I think Crawford is the bloke in Saigon with the parish there.

I think I might’ve called him something else, did I? I don’t know.

Well things you would cover in any retreat. A retreat is a place where you withdraw to like a retreat, but it’s a place for spiritual – well the talks can be about anything, about the church, about Christ, about the sacraments of the church, about the scriptures, the bible,

prayer life. You ask yourself all these questions about how you’re going with your prayer life, how you’re going with your divine office and they might talk about some of the things of the Vatican Council. So it’s a spiritual input. And these talks in Saigon would’ve been general talks about spirituality and things like that.

I wouldn’t remember that much about them

to be able to comment. But I don’t think they would be, they’d be just talks to priests which would be given anywhere.

I s’pose God was on your mind a fair bit because people didn’t know when they were going to meet him or anything like that in a place like that.

No, you just sort of, well I felt that he was there, his presence was there, and I don’t know that me faith got any deeper. It might’ve done but I wasn’t conscious of that at the time.

No, it never entered my head, no. I was just there to do the job of a chaplain to the soldiers. But I s’pose in that sense basically to the Catholics, but to anybody else at the same time because when you went out on patrol you weren’t going out with a patrol of Catholics or when you were at Fire Support Base you weren’t there with a

Fire Support Base Catholic, so you were a religious person, padre or chaplain to everybody. But when I came to Sundays or things like that it was specifically Catholic.

Well I s’pose for a start you’d never ask anybody that came to you unless they got on to some specific

issue, “Are you a Catholic?” Because if they came for advice, you gave them advice. And if they didn’t identify their religion, you didn’t ask them unless it became something that needed to be identified. So I wouldn’t know if they were Catholics or not.

Well, that’s the one that stayed in me mind, but there probably were others of a similar nature. But see, it’s…I s’pose nobody shoots anybody else in cold blood in war. You shoot because you’re defending yourself. It’s not like murder where you decide that

you’re going to get rid of somebody and you plan it and carry it out. I think in a war you’re firing sometimes in anger and fear and you don’t get a chance to psychoanalyse your actions. You might afterwards think that you’ve killed somebody’s father and that some kids have got no father now because of what you did, or some wife’s got no husband,

but I think they’re all thoughts that come to you afterwards because in the heat of something you act from knee-jerk reactions in looking after yourself. I think sometimes fellows did feel that what they’d done was, did they really have to do it? And all you could say was, “Well if he was going to shoot you, you had to shoot him first.” It’s pretty cold blooded, but that’s the only way you can look at it, I reckon.

Well I would, if anybody was worried about it, I said, “You were in a contact, you shoot, and you shoot to kill because he’s shooting to kill.”

No, you were given a completely free hand. That was my experience.

No, I don’t know what would happen in that case. They might call you

up and say, “Look, the advice you’re giving to people is not right because it’s impossible and they can’t do it and advising them to do things that placed them in an impossible position is not right.” Which is true enough. But no, I don’t think they’d ever give you any directions as to what you should do. You were given a pretty free hand, and I s’pose they realised that most chaplains in the army are

fairly experienced in things and leave you to your own devices.

I s’pose the same as myself. We were all on the same boat as it were.

On their side? No, I couldn’t really, because I wouldn’t be there when they were facing them,

and they were never sort of discussed very much because we weren’t together that much up there because we were in different places. We didn’t eat together in the camp in Nui Dat or anything like that, everybody ate in their own mess area. A lot of the acquaintances were just casual.

Well, I would go to Keith Teefey because he was the other Catholic chaplain and he went there in, he was there before me because 7RAR was there and he came back with them. They left before I left so we had six or seven months together. And he was one I’d go to for

spiritual help or anything like that.

No, I don’t know. I don’t know.

He was a great fellow. We met each other up there and we’ve been very good friends ever since. He’s pretty down to earth and pretty straight.

Yes there’s a picture there of he and I in the Badcoe Club in Vung Tau because we used to go down on R&R for a few days together, yeah.

Badcoe Club.

It was a tin shed sort of thing, it was nicely done. I think there was a swimming pool there and it was a place for R&R for all the troops

that come to have a few days off. They’d go down there and that’s where they used to get into all this bother with the girls and booze and that.

And they put on concerts down there and things like that.

No, they were probably too ashamed of what they did.

About what again?

No, I don’t remember anybody worrying too much about that.

I think the ones that act like that would do the same sort of thing at home.

No, I think that if people act overseas the same as

they act when they’re at home. If they’re hooligans and roustabouts at home, then that’s what they’ll do over there. And if they’re morally good people at home they’ll be like that over there.

Well, that’s my view of things.

As I said, I think they didn’t behave any

differently to soldiers behaving anywhere at anytime.

Well to my family, sometimes I’d write off eight or nine letters if I’d come back from being away and have a day in me tent and postage was free. So there was no problem there,

and there was an old nun, Sister Agnes who was in Taree when I left and she was one who kept in touch with me, you see, and she used to send me a fruit cake every three or four months, all wrapped up and everything, and I used to write back to her. And about 18 months ago…she died only last year, she rang me up and she said, “Look I’m cleaning up,” because she’s getting on in years, 80-odd or something, “I’m cleaning up some papers and I’ve found all the letters you

wrote to me from Vietnam and there’s three or four of them and would, I don’t want to keep them any longer because I’m trying to clean up, but I thought you might like to have them..” And I said, “Oh yes, send them down.” So she sent them down. And I read through them and they were so wonderful, I thought, “God, was I doing that? Was I doing this?” So I’ve still got them.

Like going to a village for the 40-hours devotions and having the dinner with the visiting priests and that. Just general things like that but things that had gone out of my mind, but I couldn’t recall them specifically now.

Yeah.

There were a whole lot of them there. What we used

to have in the church was a thing called 40 hours when devotions would start and go for 40 hours, day and night. There’d be about two and a half days, and at the end of it there was usually some sort of a little celebration. But over in those countries, they really celebrate things, not like here, we’re so sort of, we don’t have that culture of great celebration. And so we went out to the final

day and we had dinner with them - I can’t remember any of their names now because there were so many of them - but they’d come from all over the countryside to visit a particular place. And the village was all decorated up with things on the street and everything. And the big banquet, and I remember we had beer but the beer was always warm and they put ice in it. And having seen some of the ice being carted across the road…

And they’d give you a glass top to put on your glass so the flies wouldn’t be diving in. All those sorts of things. And somebody’d be fanning the table to keep everything in movement. Yeah, it was great.

Only Catholic priests, Catholic chaplains probably, meself and Keith Teefey and somebody else when he went home.

Devotions would be the blessed sacrament, would be exposed on the altar in a thing called the monstrance, it comes from the Latin word monstare, to show and our word demonstrate comes from that, when we show somebody something. And it’s on the altar for the 40 hours and there’s lots of candles around and flowers and people come and make visits and they might say the rosary or read their prayer books or something and a lot of it’s just quiet time in the presence of the lord and the Eucharist.

And that goes on for 40 hours. We don’t have it now, but I went into the army and all these things were going and I come out of the army and a lot of them stopped, died out or whatever happened. Like the banns of marriage, we used to always call them marriage banns before I went into the army. That means the three sermons before a wedding you’d read out, “Mary Jane will be married to Robert so and so in this church on the 29th of August.”

Then you read it, “And anyone who has any reason why they should not be married please come forward.” That would happen on three Sundays, they were the marriage banns. Well they don’t do that now. All those nice old things are gone.

I think so, yeah. Part of the Catholic culture like not eating meat on Friday, and we used to have five holy days in the Church,

Christmas Day, New Years’ Day, Ascension Thursday, the Assumption and All Saints’ Day. Now we’ve got Christmas Day and the Assumption.

Well Catholics in all other countries, especially Asia and parts of Europe, Spain, they have great celebrations. We were

in Spain years ago, a long while ago now with a couple of mates and we got caught up in this big procession and they were carrying a statue of Our Lady as big as that light. Men had the big poles on their shoulders so we joined in and took our turn with the poles and ended up with sore shoulders, and at the end of that procession they took the statue into the church into the town square and the carnival started. Hurdy-gurdies, hoop-la, drinks, parties, crackers, flowers.

I thought what a way to end up a procession. What do we do? Put everything away and all go home. And the Vietnamese had a great sense of celebration too, crackers and special food and everything too, moon cakes and all that sort of thing.

Yes, but conversing was very, very difficult.

But no we went to other churches when we got the opportunity but it wasn’t always available because it meant you had to go outside the base and had to have somebody else with you. But I remember once I was saving up these lollies, because in every ration pack you got some Hershey Bars and things like that, and I thought I’ll take this down to one of the villages and give them to the kids. Well talk about a frightening experience, I had

a driver with me and he said, “What are you going to do?” And I said, “I’m going to give the kids these lollies.” He said, “Okay, I’ll wait here.” Well I got out in the little square and the kids all fuss around because the army comes in and the kids all, and I started to give out, well there was a stampede. I’ve been scared…and I was really scared that time, because I had no control over those kids and they were all screaming around me and trying to grab the lollies and I was holding the bag above me head and finally an old village, probably the village chief

or something came out with a big stick and he got stuck into the kids. “Oh,” he said, “don’t do that, don’t do that. You give them things to me, I will give them to the children.” I said, “Thank god you came, I was going under.” It was terrible. I thought, “Never again.”

I did the Christmas Mass and the Midnight Mass and the Vietnamese Mass.

I used to do the mass at Vietnam, at the 8RAR lines, but I’m trying to read, looking back on it I don’t know what I was saying, I was reading out of a Vietnamese prayer book and I didn’t know the pronunciations or anything. Me tent one day, I was sitting in me tent one afternoon and it’d been up for a while and all of a sudden I heard this snap and the whole tent just slid down the pole, the centre pole on top of me. So I climbed out from underneath it

and went down to the quartermaster and I said, “Jack, me tent’s just collapsed.” “Oh, I’ll get the boys up there to put it back up again.” I said, “No you won’t, you’ll get the boys up there to put up a new tent, it’s rotten, it’s been up for a couple of years and it’s not worth putting up again. I want it replaced, I want a new tent.” “Very well Father, very well Father.” So I got a new tent, because in the tropics the rain then the heat and things just rots very quickly canvas and things like that.

Ice-box, masses, I think I’ve covered most of the things I’ve jotted down here, but I s’pose there’s some I haven’t called to mind.

Oh, R&R.

Yeah, well on the December, I’d been the May, late November it was my turn to go on R&R. So you could go to

Hong Kong, Bangkok I think or Sydney and most of the, or back to Australia. And most of the fellas came home because they had wives and sweethearts and things, so I opted for Hong Kong so I went off to Hong Kong at the US army expense, stayed at the Park Royal Hotel, six days. Had this long list of shopping to do for everybody who didn’t want to go anywhere

but home so I spent at least a whole day buying stuff for fellas back at the camp.

Cassette reels, those big old reel things you used to have in those days, big reels, clocks and perfume and dress material and things they wanted to take home with them. So I did all that and I thought to meself, “Never again.” And what else happened there?

Oh yeah, Pope Paul VI was due to visit Hong Kong on the 6th of December and that’s when I was up there. So I thought I’d better, I’ll go and see the Pope. But somebody tried to stab him in the Philippines or something and so security was pretty tight. And I went there, I thought the concierge would probably know what’s happening so I went down to the fellow standing at the front of the church and said, “Excuse me?” “Oh…?” “Can you tell me where

the Pope is coming today?” “Pope is what?” I said, “Tell me where the Pope will be today?” “I don’t know any pop, poppy day.” And I said, “The Pope, the Catholic Pope is coming to Hong Kong today and people can go and see him.” “No poppy, no poppy, don’t know any poppies.” So I thought, “Oh god,” so anyhow, I went back into the desk

and I said, “Look, the Pope’s coming here today.” And the woman said, “Yes, I know the Pope is coming, the Catholic Pope.” I said, “Where’s he going?” “Oh, he’ll be at the big sports ground.” And I said, “How do I get there?” And she said, “It’d be easier if you take a taxi out the front.” So I took a taxi and I said to the taxi driver, “The sports ground.” And I gave the name of the sports ground she’d written down. And he drove me along this road and he stopped and I said, “There’s nothing. Where’s the sports ground?”

And he said, “I cannot go any further. All traffic stops here today because of security.” I said, “How do I get to the ground?” And he said, “You must walk down and around…” Anyhow I found me way down there and the place was all locked up, all shut up you see and I said, “I’m a Catholic priest on leave from Vietnam, I’d like…” “Oh,” they said, “you must have a ticket, because nobody’s allowed in without a ticket.” And I said, “I’ve come all this way

and I’d just like to see him.” “Well, stand there,” he said, “because in about half an hour he’ll come out of that gate in an open car and you’ll get a good view of him from there.” I said, “Oh okay.” So I was standing outside the gate a bit further along the road, had the camera around me neck and I was sort of tuning it in and next two great big fellas come and stood one on each side of me. “What the

hell do they want?” you know. Anyway, the Pope drove out and I put up the camera and one of them went like this. I said, “I’m taking a picture, picture.” So anyway I took a couple of good photos and then they walked away. They probably thought I was going to shoot him or something. And the other funny thing about that Hong Kong business was I wanted to go on a train ride, wherever I go on holidays I always go on a train ride wherever it might be. So I got on this train up to the boarder

somewhere and it was crowded. It must’ve been a Sunday because there were people going up there and they were all getting off here and there and I stayed on the train and it came to a place called Luwow, I think it was, some name like that, and this big advertisement, announcement came over in Chinese. And a few people on the train just got off and I was in the carriage by myself and anyhow, another big advertisement and then the train moves off very slowly and I’m sitting and thinking, “Everybody’s off and I

don’t know what’s going on.” And there’s a big notice as big as that wall, appeared in English and Chinese, “You are now entering a prohibited area. Do not enter without permission and special permit,” blah, blah, blah. I thought, “Well, I can’t get off a moving train so I might as well sit down and enjoy the view.” So I arrived up at the next stop and it stopped and I got off and as I got off the train, this British soldier came up and he said, “Can I see

your papers, Sir?” And I said, “I haven’t got any papers.” He said, “You’re here without any papers?” And I said, “Yeah, I just, I’m an army chaplain on leave from Vietnam.” And he said, “But you should have papers to be in this area, didn’t you hear the announcement back at the last station?” And I said, “They said something in Chinese, but I don’t speak Chinese.” And he said, “Well you can’t stay here, look down the front of the train, that’s the Freedom Bridge, the British flag’s flying on this end and the Communist

Chinese flag’s flying on the other, so this is a forbidden zone.” “Oh,” I said, “I’m very sorry but I just came for a Sunday train ride.” So he said, “You must come with me,” and he took me to the boss’s offices on the station and told him what was happening and he said, “You’ve got a camera?” And I said, “Yeah, but there’s only two films left in it.” He said, “Don’t take any photos here otherwise I could take your camera and your film. And you must get on this train and go straight back.”

I don’t know why I say these things, I said, “I haven’t got a ticket.” He said, “You won’t need a ticket, just get on the train, it’s leaving in a minute and,” he said, “go out of this area, you should not be here.” And I said, “Oh, thanks very much.” So that was a good story to tell back home. Of course in those days Communist China was forbidden territory and this was the bridge across into China. So I got back on the train and thought, “That’s an experience.”

Yeah, that’s right.

Well at Nui Dat you could always have a drink if you were in the base. There’s a canteen in every area and there’s movies on, I think, nearly every night there was a movie in

each group. You couldn’t have a big group together, you’d have little groups everywhere, and you wouldn’t really care what movie was on, you’d just grab your chair out of your tent and walk across and plonk it down and wait for the mechanic to get the movie machine going. And they broke down so often, and of course there was three breaks between the movie because they were old three wheelers. So that was basically your recreation in the

base at Nui Dat. But otherwise we’d go down to Vung Tau and team up with the air force chaplain down there, Jack Randall who’s now parish priest at Portman. And we’d have a big of a gung-ho in the air force mess or we’d go down to the Australian chaplain Jim Boberg, who’s dead. But Jim was an old sober-(unclear) in a way, he didn’t drink very much, and we went down there one

day, Keith and I, and said, “Jim, have you got a cold beer?” “Oh,” he said, “there’s some over there in the old tin trunk.” He opened it up and there’s one rusty can of VB [Victoria Bitter] floating around in about half inch of water or six inches of water where the ice had melted and he hadn’t emptied it out. We took our patronage elsewhere after that. They were get together days; I don’t know how often they happened now, but the one in

Saigon for the retreat day was always looked forward to and you’d go to that unless there was something very urgent or something else very important on. So the days went by pretty quickly.

They were on once a month. I think they were a Friday, and I was just explaining we’d go in about half past nine and somebody’d give a spiritual talk then there’d be time

for confessions and then there’s be mass and then we’d have a barbeque on the veranda afterwards.

Which chaplains do you mean?

The Americans and that?

Well they, probably similar. I think so, but

they were a pretty wide-ranging group from all over the place, whereas we were pretty compact. No, it was just general things. They asked us about Australia, we asked them about America and chatted away and had a feed and a few beers and they went off to their places and we went back to ours.

We’d probably go down in a Caribou or something. When a plane was going, we’d make arrangements

to be taken in there, and they knew what it was about, it was the chaplain’s get-together and there was never any difficulty there. I don’t think we ever went in by road - might’ve done once or twice -but I think the army always preferred us to fly because of the danger.

There was a very nice church there,

Our Lady Queen of Peace church, and Bob Crawford was the parish priest and he had a, might’ve had a school and a presbytery and they, this big area where we used to have our retreat on the veranda with a barbeque was upstairs. Traffic was tearing by on the road outside, all the noise and smoke. Probably worse now. Yeah, he was pretty well set up, he was an American, he come out of China and he said he was a missionary

in China and he’d been through the things up there, and he said if it happens here, he was going to leave before it happened. He said, “I couldn’t go through that again.”

Yeah, I don’t know what happened to him, he’s gone.

I wouldn’t call them privileges, but I think we had a lot of freedom. See the army never seemed to my mind, gave you a pretty free hand, expecting you to be responsible and accountable. There was no sort of restrictions in that sense, I didn’t have to apply to anybody if I wanted to go out to a FSB or

go out on a patrol, just tee it up with a company commander or something and off I’d go. No, they gave us a pretty free hand, the chaplains to my mind, I think. Privileges, I s’pose one of the privileges was to be free enough to do your own thing and duck into Saigon for the retreat days and go to Vung Tau when you had a couple of days spare.

Fly down there. I remember one night Keith and I went down to Vungers [Vung Tau] one afternoon and we had a session in the air force canteen with old Jackie Gravel [?], Jack Gravel, and we had a few drinks and there was a couple of fellas there having drinks with us and they got a bit over the edge really, and the next day flying back in the Caribou I said to Keith, I said, “That bloke in the dark glasses,

he was with us last night in the canteen, now he’s flying this bloody plane. He wouldn’t even be sober yet.” Keith said, “He’s probably done it many times before.”

Yeah, well it was a fairly long drive down and it wasn’t a very pleasant journey by car really, by truck.

Well it offered a meeting with the other chaplains down there, go out to a movie or a restaurant in Vung Tau somewhere or a café and have a decent feed. Just to be out of Nui Dat for a day or a few hours of an evening. I know Keith and I were at a restaurant one night and there was a wedding on and they invited us to come and share the wedding banquet and everything because the people were like that. They saw we were two Australians

and so we joined in the celebrations. Another night we were down there and I saw the table cloth was a bit messy because it was sort of messy food and the man came out to clear the table and I said, “Look I’m sorry, I’ve made a big mess here.” And he said, “That means that you have enjoyed your dinner, that is wonderful.” And one night we were at this place, I’m not too sure where it was now but a French lady was running it and we were drinking these

Nicholoskis which is, you have a glass of brandy, half a glass of brandy and put two toothpicks across it with half a slice of lime and then there’s brown sugar on one side and brown coffee on the other and you pick up the two things and put them down and then you swallow the brandy straight afterwards. It’s got a bit of a bite to it, a bit of a kick. And then the

curfew went, or the time and she said, “Look you must go.” So we said, “Okay we’re going back now,” and we went to the American camp for some reason and before we went she said, “Look, I want to give you something,” and she brought out this box, “open it when you get back to camp.” And we were a bit worse for wear because a couple of these Nicholoski things, a bit stunning. And I remember going through the gate at the American camp, I was singing, “Oh say can you see,

the banner’s red glare…” And there a big Negro guard said, “Good evening, Sir, you’ve had a good night, Sir.” “Oh,” I said, “we’ve had a wonderful night.” And there was too many of us on the bloody vehicle you see and he stopped it and he said, “You can’t have that number on the vehicle.” And I said, “How many can we have on this little jeep?” He said so many, safety so and so, and three of us jumped off and he drove the thing through the guard post

and we walked around and got back on the back again and drove off again. But the rules were served and he observed the vehicle with five passengers or something. Yeah, I remember that bloke saying, “You’ve had a nice night, Sir.” “Yeah, I’ve had a great night.” Then we got back to the tent, we opened the box and there was four wine glasses and a bottle of brandy and sugar and coffee and grounds and lime, so what a lovely lady, we continued the party.

People still do when a priest goes into a pub or something. I was waiting for you down here this afternoon with me cross on and someone, “What’s a priest doing in the club?” Still is the same sort of reaction, but I think in the army they, you wouldn’t do it so much at home but

there where all the things were a bit stressed and tight and that, and to see the priest or chaplain just being with the fellas enjoying himself, and having a few beers with them was good. That you weren’t a sort of a stand-offish prude who was looking down his nose at all sorts of things. I think it’s important.

No, there was a little prayer book that somebody got out early in the Vietnam war, A Soldier Prays in Vietnam, and I kept a copy of it for years and we’d give those to the soldiers if they wanted them, and they were just ordinary prayers with little references to safety and protection

of the people of Vietnam and things like that. Then there was the combat rosary we called it, you know the combat rosary? It’s a thing you put on your finger and it’s got 10 little knobs on it and a cross and you could say the rosary just with it on your finger. And somebody said, “Every barmaid in Vung Tau has got a combat rosary hanging around her neck,” which was pretty true. They were using them as decoration.

The soldiers must’ve been giving them to them. But I’ve got one in me bag there I think.

No I don’t think so, no. Church services were fairly ordinary, you might say a special prayer for those who lost their lives or something, but basically it was pretty straight forward.

Would’ve been the same as the chaplain at Vung Tau, he’d be there when the hospital chopper came in, Dust Off they called it, and he would anoint the ones that were badly injured and the dying and pray over them. The same as I would’ve done if it had happened where I was.

Yeah, had all of those things.

No, I didn’t,

I don’t think I did. I don’t think, I don’t know, I may have, I’m not clear on that.

No, I didn’t, but I fired a mortar once because I was with the mortar platoon and they were firing them away and I had a – I had a photograph with me but I haven’t brought it down. And one of them said, “Do you want

to fire one, Father?” And I said, “Not really.” “Oh, this is just a curfew one which has to be fired at certain times in the afternoon telling them, if they were still out in the bush, they’d be regarded as enemy.” I said, “Okay, I’ll fire the curfew one.” So I just dropped it down, block your ears.

Oh yes, I’d stay there for two or three days at times.

Well

like everybody else, I s’pose, but sometimes they didn’t fire at all. But the worse ones for noise was the big American battery, which was just next to where my tent, was just over the track a bit. And if you were sitting on the thunderbox when they started firing, you’d get all the vibrations.

Yeah, they were, ours were 105s, I think, and I think theirs was 125 or something like that, much bigger.

No, not two, might’ve been 155 I think, much bigger than ours. And I went and said mass there for them once or twice, then they packed up after a while and they went.

Well I think the Australians took it

much more seriously. I mean, the Americans were great ones for playing the wireless loud and smoking and chewing and doing all sorts of those things. I think the Australians took their commission or their mission much more seriously than the Americans, because the story went around that the Americans down at the horseshoe where 7RAR had a Fire Support Base and their colonel went down from

7RAR and the Yanks were down there playing the bloody wireless loud and smoking cigars and he went over and told them to quieten things down, it’s supposed to be a war zone. And you know they’d expect their ice-cream every night and all that sort of thing. They were just spoilt, I s’pose, in a way. And they were a big undisciplined, I think, too.

No, they were all the same, treated the same and acted the same.

Oh definitely, yeah. I think that they did it tougher in many ways, amenity wise and everything else. Americans had everything laid on, we never got ice-cream out in the field. They complained in they didn’t get it.

Out in the field we were eating those ration tins, they were American rations. If I went out for two or three days I’d take enough rations with me because I’d have to, because they had no cook house out there and they’d fly in, the FSB they’d fly in a hot box tea at night and then the chopper would come out with the hot food. ‘High cart’ we used to call it, “High cart’s coming in.”

Then the officers’ mess at Nui Dat there was might be three cold meats, chicken, pork and beef or something. But I said if you blindfolded yourself, it was all processed in rolls and sliced up, I said, “If you blindfolded yourself you wouldn’t know what you were eating because it all seemed to taste the same.” But the food was okay, we got by on it.

And we were living in the field on American ration packs, C-rations they called them.

I shouldn’t say it, but I haven’t got much of an idea really. I s’pose it’d be eggs and bacon and that sort of thing. Cereal if you wanted it.

No, I think a lot of, some foods from Australia come over from Australia, and sometimes they’d fly over half a sheep or a couple of legs of pork or mutton and they’d freeze them here in Australia, wrap them up really tight and get them to the post office. GPO [General Post Office] blokes were excellent, they’d just get it through straight away and get it onto the plane and it’d be over

before it thawed out. That happened a few times, some special treat would fly over. But you’ve got no idea of the ingenuity of people in the army and the services. They can work wonders with their lurks and perks.

Yes, sometimes we’d eat in the,

you were allotted a room from memory. You’d be given a room in sort of the visitors area and you’d have your meals there. But you really went down there to have a bit of a change so you’d go out in the evening to a local restaurant and have a feed there. The Bah-mee-bah.

Bah-mee-bah. That’s beer, that’s their beer 33 I think, Bah-mee-bah is Vietnamese for 33.

Haven’t you come across that before, Bah-mee-bah?

Oh no, I don’t think I tried that, I don’t think I know what the hell that was.

Over there? No.

No, I got a bit of trouble with me big toes at the moment. I think they must’ve got infected over there and when I come back to Australia

the doctor in the camp at Holsworthy took me toenails off because he said they were, there was no pain involved they were so bad. But ever since then I’ve had very discolour toenails and I’ve just finished a course of drugs from my own local doctor to try and clear it up. Taking all these big tablets every day for two months, it’s been

and reading the brochure about it, it said if it’s really bad it might take up to six months. I said, “I’ve had them for so long Doc, I’ll just leave them.” He said, “No you can’t, they might go to some other part of your body and they should be fixed up.” So I’ve been taking these things now for six weeks, took the last one this morning and they seem to be a bit different, but it’s something that’s right in the root of the nail and he said, “People could get this

sort of thing sometimes here and they put ointments and creams on it but it doesn’t do anything because the thing is in the root of the nail, it’s got to be cured inside your toe.” So I’ll just wait and see what happens there. That’s the only thing I brought back with me, I think.

It didn’t really manifest until I came back I don’t think, when I was at Holsworthy camp.

No.

Terrible. There’s the dry season and the wet season, and the dry season is terribly dry and hot and the wet season is terribly wet and humid. I used to say mass down at the battalion headquarters on Sunday afternoon at three o’clock, and it was in one of those galvanised sheds with the roof and the louvres on the side, and after the mass you could wring

things out, you were just drenched because the afternoon was so humid and hot. And we were on a truck one day coming back from Vung Tau with a few other diggers and we were sitting on the back of this little jeep, like side seats, and it was the wet season and we stopped, the driver stopped for some reason to go into a place to do something and we were sitting out in this open truck because you couldn’t put covers over them in case you had to

get out quickly. So the idea was that if anything happened you could just jump over the side, because if there’s a cover over it you’ve all got to get out the back door. And it was teeming, we were sitting in this flaming back with these bush hats on and the water was dripping down, I just got the giggles a little bit, it was so funny with all these grown men sitting in the pouring rain. And one of the fellas got upset, he said, “What the hell are you laughing at?”

And I said, “I just think this is so funny, we’re all sitting in the back of this truck getting drenched by this torrential downpour and we’re just sitting here.” “What do you expect us to do?” I said, “Nothing, but don’t you see the funny side of it? At our age, sitting out in the rain?” “No, I don’t.” I said, “Oh well, I did…I’m sorry if I upset you.” A couple of the other blokes started laughing then. But I just thought it was so comical, in the middle of this road in the rain. You could hardly see across to the other side. And when it rained

it just certainly teemed. Then it’d stop like somebody turned off a tap. And then there’s the dry season and it’d be all dust. And that’s what struck me, because I left there in May in the middle of the dry season, May, and I got to London on this long overseas leave, and I was coming into the airport in London in the bus, maybe Gatwick, I don’t know where we landed, and I was looking out the window and I couldn’t believe me eyes,

May in England. Springtime. Everything was green and there were flowers on the side of the road and the rosebushes in the gardens and I was just blinking and saying, “What a change.” But it always stayed in my mind that terrific cultural shock of England in May from Vietnam in May.

They were always, just walking around in the heat and the hot, you’d be sweaty, and they used to sort of wash them in the laundry in Baria, and sometimes they sort of, some sort of starch they put in them so sometimes they were really difficult to wear. Some of the fellas wouldn’t send their laundry in because they could just wash them themselves and leave them floppy.

There was some contractor in Baria, apparently, Vietnamese

I s’pose. They used to take everything in there and bring it back again - you had your name of course on everything.

I supposed you missed a lot of things, security and family

and friends. I wasn’t drinking whisky in those days so I didn’t miss that.

I s’pose you missed a baked dinner and those sort of homely things. But in your ration pack there was always

cigarettes and sweets, Hershey bars and M&Ms [chocolate candy] and things like that that we hadn’t really heard of in Australia at that stage.

Some called me padre, some called me chaplain, some called me father, I s’pose depending on their own particular…see padre’s a very English word, the Australian word for that is chaplain, in England they were padre, so you’ve got three.

Sometimes they didn’t call you anything.

Yeah, all chaplains were called ‘sky-pilots’, I think that was the word.

It didn’t worry me. I’ve been called ‘Pop’ all through the seminary, so names don’t worry me.

Yeah, of course they did, at times things were, I said stress treats people in different ways, but I think sometimes things got stressful when you tried to organise things to go somewhere and you just didn’t seem to be getting anywhere because the bloke running it didn’t care or something like that. Yeah, I think your spirits go up and down, I think that’s why you get six days of R&R when, in the middle of your time,

so it’s a break to go home and things like that for blokes who wanted to go home and have a few days or go to Hong Kong or something.

I don’t remember looking forward to it with a great deal of intensity, because after 12 months you settle into things and you know the routine. And then I decided

to go and see the rest of the world while I was that far from Australia. So I wrote to L.A. Morgan, the chaplain general, and said I’d like to take leave overseas and he wrote a letter back and said, “Certainly,” gave his permission and said, “Take as much as you want, and when you get back to Australia, contact me for your next posting.”

I just didn’t really want to come straight back to Australia. Me mother was dead, and me father was dead, and me three brothers were married and I thought there’s nothing to rush home for. So, “While I’m here, I might as well have a look around.”

Well I had to apply to get a passport because our passports were stamped for Vietnam only,

the ones we were issued with to go into the country, and to come out I had to go to England, another place, I had to get an Australian passport and an exit visa from the Vietnamese government, and when I went to collect my passport the adjutant said, “You’ve got to pay,” whatever the money was over there. See we had military payment certificates, so if we went in to buy things in a shop, we didn’t use their money, we’d use these MPCs [Military Payment Certificates].

So we didn’t have much to do with their own particular currency. And he said you’ve got to pay so much, I said to Kylie [interviewer], I said, “Look, I’ve been over here 12 months trying to save the country, now I’ve got to pay to get out of it.” Father said, “Just pay it,” he said. Which I did, and I went off with my proper passport.

Yes, that was all my own expense, yeah. And see what happened, when I was leaving I’d arranged to fly to Saigon and then from Saigon to Singapore and being in the army all those years, they said to me, “Now the plane to Saigon leaves at fourteen hundred hours, be here half an hour earlier.” So the 1400 hours for some reason my mind clicked on the four and I got up there at half past three

and the air force bloke said, “We waited for half an hour, we couldn’t wait any longer.” I said, “I’m here early.” He said, “1400 hours, Father.” “Oh my god, that’s two o’clock.” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “I’m sorry I thought it was four o’clock.” So he said, “Have to make some other arrangements to get you down there.” So I missed me things from Singapore to Saigon. I had to fly Air Vietnam down to

Singapore, and then Stumpy Williams [?] was the chaplain there in Singapore, because we had an Australian attachment in Singapore at the time, and I booked on the charter flight from there to England. They don’t do them now, but the charter flights they’d have a plane and people would just buy tickets and when the plane was full they’d go. So you had to be near a phone for the next two or three days so they could ring you up and say, “The plane is leaving in another four hours,” or something.

And everybody’s paying different fares. On the plane we were talking to people and somebody’s paying $300, somebody else is paying $99 because I think as the plane gets fuller they want to fill it up so the fare drops. And it was the most terrible, awful plane trip I’ve ever had in me life because it stopped everywhere and people were bloody sick and we stopped somewhere out in the desert in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain or somewhere, some

god forsaken place, a little room about as big as this, hot as anything and they said, “There’s no crew to take the plane on the next leg so you’ll have to wait for a few hours.” So finally they got some French pilot from somewhere and he was on the next leg and then got to London. So we got off the plane and I said, “It was a cheap trip, but I’ll never go on a cheap trip again.”

That’s right, yes.

I think it was Air Caledonia or somebody like that.

Well without, you’ve got to be, you can’t say some things without boasting or skiting or putting yourself up or anything…the feedback I’ve got over the years has been excellent. I didn’t do anything special over there, I just did what I thought

you had to do but when I got back I got feedback from people who’d been over there with me and I got letters from people and saying thanks for everything you did. And the bishop, the chaplain general wrote and said, “We have reports your service in Vietnam has been excellent and thank you for everything.” Now everybody might’ve got that, I don’t know, but I got it and it was very

gratifying. You felt that you had done, and I said to some other chaplain, some other Catholic bloke, I said, “I didn’t do anything spectacular over there.” He said, “No but you must’ve been on the ball and gone to places perhaps where other people didn’t go and did things other people didn’t do.” So I felt very happy about it.

I think so, because, I

don’t know, well there were two of them up there that I know that never did, and I don’t know what they did all day, because you couldn’t stay in camp all the time when the blokes were out everywhere else. So I think that was a plus, yeah. It was hard work, it wasn’t a picnic carrying your bed on your back,

and one night we were out somewhere and we had these little pump-up pillows, or I had one and I pumped it up and there were mosquitoes and I put some mosquito repellent on me face and everywhere an went to sleep on the pillow and woke up the next morning and the pillow was stuck to me face so I had to peel it off. Another thing that stayed in me mind, when we went out somewhere and they said, “Don’t wander around too much,” because there were these big wells

sunk in the ground obviously looking for water but no guard around them. And I went out the next morning to have a look and I saw one of them and I got a real fright because if you’d have walked on it you’d have fallen down this great big hole. No fence or anything about it, just a big hole in the ground. Those scary things stay in your mind a bit.

Well that question didn’t arise, but no, I think 12 months was probably long enough, but if they’d asked me to, I would’ve stayed. And if they’d said, “Would you go back again?” I probably would’ve, I think. But I certainly would’ve stayed a bit longer if they’d wanted me to, I wasn’t counting the days to the 6th of May. Would I go back again? I don’t know whether

I would’ve gone back again, but that didn’t happen because 18 months later the whole thing folded up, in ‘73 or something.

I’d say, “Well congratulations, it’s a great opportunity in life, behave yourself

and don’t try to be one of the boys because they don’t expect you and they don’t want you to be like that. Just take care of people that come across your path and do the things that you’re supposed to do as a spiritual man.” They don’t expect you and they don’t want you to be just one of them, they expect you to be with them but – that’s how I feel anyhow.

No, I don’t think it gives you any authority but I think if you’re a spiritual guide for people there has to be some sort of no-man’s land, or whatever you might like to call it. Some priests today have abandoned that idea and they’re just Jack or

Fred or Harry because they want to be, we’re all the same. We are all the same, but we are different in that sense. Some of them don’t want to be called ‘father’, people say they feel it sets them apart, but most people expect to call the priest or the minister reverend or father. I said to one fellow that was talking to me, I said, “You don’t go into your doctor and say, ‘How are you going Fred?’ You say, ‘How are you going, Doctor.’” And I said, “It doesn’t put you apart in

any way, it’s a position that you have and people recognise it and you don’t expect any favours because of who you are,” but I think there’s a sort of, to my mind anyhow there is a sameness, but there’s also a separateness. And I think if you went into the army just as one of the boys, they’d lose their respect for you.

Yes, see it happened in Singleton, the Anglican chaplain, he didn’t, he left, he didn’t go any further than that, I think, he got out of the army, but he was walking past the cookhouse one day and the diggers were there working and they all stopped and they saluted him because he was a captain, and he said, “Don’t worry about that fellas, forget all that stuff.” But the company CO saw it and called him up and he said, “When

troops salute you, Reverend, you pay them the courtesy of returning the salute and you don’t tell them not to worry about it because they’re trained to respect officers.” And he said, “The way you’re acting is treating disrespect, so when my troops salute you anywhere, you will return the salute.” The CO told me that.

That was only

practising.

I think it was just a sort of holiday, sight-seeing, see the world business. I did it on my own and met a priest in England who’d been with me in Taree, and he returned to England to work, he was an Irish lad and I s’pose I didn’t go just to see him, but I thought maybe I’d

stop and see Jerry and then we went to Ireland to see his mother and his farm where he grew up and everything. It was just a sort of a holiday place. We flew off to Amsterdam or somewhere, caught the boat train back from there to Copenhagen. Might be back to front might’ve been Copenhagen and back to Amsterdam. Funny because in the train this fellow was, only two of us in the carriage and he was

talking to me and he said, “What religion are you?” I was dressed in civvies and I said, “I’m a Catholic.” And he said, “Oh, I’ve resigned from my church.” “Oh,” I said, “people are, in Australia don’t resign from the church, they just stop going.” I said, “What happens to their money?” And I said, “What money?” And he said, “The tax.” I said, “What do you mean the tax?” “Well” he said, “in Europe in a lot of the countries you register your religion and the

government takes the money out of your pay to give to that religion.” I said, “That doesn’t happen out our way, the plate goes around.” “Oh.”

Then I got to Amsterdam, I think, and it was the night of that Amsterdam had won the World Cup Soccer, I think Holland won the World Cup Soccer. And I was wandering around the place and there was crowds of people all shouting and waving and I went into a little bar and I said, “What’s going on out in the street?” And the fellow said, “Didn’t you know we’ve won the World Cup Soccer and we’re all celebrating? You should really go back to your hotel

because,” he said, “this is going to go all night.” So I said, “Okay,” so I went back to the hotel. And there was noise and that like Greeks when they won the thing the other day. Then from there from Amsterdam went to Hamburg, I won’t tell you the story about Hamburg, wandered around there for a while and got lost in the street.

I got out of my hotel and always tried to walk in a square in a strange city so that you always ended up where you started from, but of course some cities don’t lend themselves to squares. And I wandered around Hamburg and ended up on top of this big ship over there and I was right down the harbour area. I thought, “I don’t know where I am,” so I wandered back up again. Apparently it was a pretty dangerous area, too, the dockyard and everything. And this fellow was sitting in the, a woman it was,

she was in the railway, and the trains were going overhead. And I went over and spoke to her and she said, “Just one moment,” “Une moment,” because the train was coming in. And even in those days she was there selling tickets, collecting tickets, directing the trains out of the station, into the station, things that we’re starting to do here now 30 years later. And I had, lucky I had the card, I always take the card of the hotel with me when I go because you can show it to a taxi driver and she said,

“You’re a long way, long way, the tram will come along here in a little while and you get on the tram and show the conductor,” in broken English, “your ticket and he’ll tell you where to get off.” So that happened and the tram finally stopped further down and he said, “You go down there.” So I got home and I thought well, that was a bit dicey wandering around the city like that on your own and getting completely lost. Then I

went to Paris and had a few days in Paris and then I thought, “I think I’d like to go to Lourdes,” so that’s the big Catholic shrine in France where Our Lady had appeared. You’ve heard about it, I s’pose have you, Lourdes? So I thought I’d go to Lourdes and so I booked the trip on the plane through to Lourdes, stayed there just for the night and the next day then I thought, “I’d better see a bit of Spain while I’m here.”

It was Corpus Christi, must’ve been, in June and the luggage got lost and everything and there were buses out taking people everywhere and I don’t know where me luggage went to but when I got to the destination there was me luggage, they’d finally found it in a cloakroom, and I wanted to give the fellow some money who’d found it. He said, “Oh no, it’s my service to look for your luggage, I found your luggage.” So I got the luggage back and then I was flying by Air

Lingus, is that the Irish Airline? Air Lingus from there to Rome and I got to the airport and I’d been listening to people speak in French and Spanish and broken Spanish for the last four or five days and I thought, “Oh god,” so I got to the Air Lingus check-in and the boy said, “What can I do for you?” And I said, “Could you say that again?” “Say it again?” I said, “Yes, it’s the first English I’ve heard for a long while.” So I flew over to Rome,

and by the time I got to Rome I was feeling a bit jaded, I s’pose, and I’d seen a few of the things in Rome you’re supposed to see and I thought I think I really want to go home. So I went into the Qantas office and I said, “I want a ticket to Sydney, straight to Sydney.” So I got the ticket and the next day I jumped on a plane and come home.

I don’t think so, because everything was so new and different. I think it was just a real let-out sort of thing. I don’t think I thought about it too much.

No, not that I can remember, no.

Cook, Cardinal Cook.

Yeah, he was the chaplain general of the US forces, I think he’s dead now, but he came to Saigon to visit his chaplains and everything and L.A. Morgan came, it must’ve been about Christmas time I think, and L.A. Morgan was there to visit his chaplains and troops and that. And we had this beautiful mass in Bob Crawford’s church

in Saigon and had a big dinner afterwards and the American Admiral was there I think, Cardinal Cook and all. It was a really lovely day. It must’ve been around Christmas time, I think, and they had this big box of cigars on the table, beautiful wooden box, and the American admiral or whoever he was, was handing them around and the box was empty and I said, “What are you going to do with the box?” “I’ll chuck it away, I’m not carrying an empty box.” I said, “Can I have it?”

He said, “Yeah, take it.” So it’s got something written on it about the boat it came off, the US ship it came off and sealed by the Philippine government and everything. I didn’t smoke cigars, but I’ve still got the box, it’s full of trinkets now. Badges and bits of paper and things like that. But I just kept it, it’s a really beautiful well-made polished wooden box.

Ah yes, we all met each other and shook hands and had a bit of a yarn and everything, yeah.

Oh yeah, he was interested in all that, how are you going and how much longer have you got to go and things like that. Yeah, he was good.

Well I’d been aware of it before I went actually because it was, it started very early in the peace.

Oh no, I was angry about it because I thought the war was justified on account of the fact that they’d signed a peace agreement and divided the country and everything was going to be all right. But like all these agreements where they’re in the Sudan or in India or anywhere else, they never sort of draw the lines in the right place or something. No, I was just angry that people were

so unsupportive of the soldiers over there and everybody was trying to go in there to try and help another country, Southeast Asia, and of course the theory at the time was a sort of domino theory, that if Vietnam went Communist then Laos would go Communist and Cambodia, and then it was just going to be a domino down to here. But it didn’t happen that way.

I’m not sure about that. We must’ve got newspapers, I s’pose, but I’m not, I can’t have any recollection of it. I’m sure the papers came over in the mailbag from Sydney, they’d make sure of that. I couldn’t comment on that really, I don’t know.

No, I think they were over there and they were, a lot of them were angry too, they felt these people back home were unsupportive and they were a pack of no-hopers, I s’pose, just making a noise. And I think they felt that they were there and that they would rather have a bit more back-up from the country because of the, once they tried to stop them loading the ship or something

of supplies to go over there and those things are very unnerving. I mean, every other war we’ve been in the country’s been behind it except the present business. And when you get a divided community, and I think the fellows that were over there felt they would’ve liked a bit more back up and support and get a newspaper that doesn’t say, “Martin Place is crowded with anti-Vietnam demonstrators,” and especially politicians like

Jim Cairns, I think, and people like that that were all against it. It became very political, that was the trouble.

Well I sort of slunk into Sydney on my own and my brothers came down and met me and drove back up to Newcastle and I

was just amazed at the new roads and that. And I said, “Aren’t we going through…?” And they said, “No, we don’t go through there now, there’s a new road.” So all those things were eye-openers, things that were strange. But a lot of things were the same, I think you can go away for years and you come back and a lot of things are the same, but some things have changed.

I think I had changed, yeah, I think it was an experience that changes you.

Might’ve had a broader outlook on life, perhaps, had experience of being in a foreign country, and yeah, I didn’t, they never asked me much about it and I never talked about it much. I probably talk about it more now than I did then.

Family and friends.

I make jokes about it a bit now, but when I came back I think I was probably a bit on the quiet side. I went to Holsworthy where they were still getting ready to go some of them, I was with the camp in Sydney here. And went from Holsworthy after about 18 months there up to Queensland, Wacol, a camp up there.

And we used to go up from Wacol to Canungra on Sunday for mass and that was a training area for Vietnam and that. So it was still all in the back of your mind. Like you feel like you’d done your turn, but others were still to go.

I don’t think so, no, I think I just kept going and that’s it.

I went, “So they’re going, it’s their turn.”

They may have, but I’ve got no great memory of long sessions about it. I probably would’ve said to them, “When you get over there, you’ll find out and adjust to things.” I don’t think you give people great advice because they’ve got to make their own way, even in civilian life.

Of course they probably won’t take the advice you give them anyhow, let them find your own feet.

Yeah, maybe.

No, I don’t know, it wasn’t because they weren’t interested. I just think

that it was something that you didn’t really want to talk about too much in a way. Like some people come back from the Second World War and never ever spoke about anything. That old bloke that died recently only started talking about it when he was 105 or something. No, I think sometimes it takes a while to get back into the Australian culture and way of life and you’d been away from it for 12 months in a foreign land and you just

want to settle in a bit.

I think the people that cared knew you’d just been, family relatives and friends, and I s’pose other people didn’t really worry much whether you’d been there or not. I never got any abuse or anything like that.

I really can’t remember much about time coming back.

I think so, yeah.

I became more open to people and to humanity and to failings and faults in people, not to be judgemental, because sometimes you leave the seminary after learning all the things, you feel that you, you can

feel that you know everything about everybody and you can be very judgemental about their life and that. But I think I changed all that over there because I saw people under different circumstances and they made their decisions about things and I wasn’t there to change them or convert them or anything, accept people as they are. Unless they’re doing something really, really bad

to themselves and to other people. But I think my mind’s broad enough to say, “Well, that’s the way they want to live.”

Oh yeah, because I went to Holsworthy and lived in the barracks there at 7RAR and had the little chapel with the living quarters on one end of it, which was like living in a little box because there was

an office on one side and a bedroom on the other and a shower recess about that big and a toilet. And that was the chaplain’s office and living quarters, and there was never mass in the chapel because at that stage they’d built St Christopher’s church chapel at Holsworthy, just outside the Holsworthy area in the army area, and that was the mass centre then, so we used to say mass around there. But then later on I moved around there because there was a chaplain’s house built by the

priest that was there, chaplain’s department. And I moved into that after a while and took up residence there, and then went from there to Wacol, but the St Christopher’s chapel in Holsworthy was visited by people in the area, they’d come to mass there because it was the nearest church. They used to have a mixed congregation on Sunday of army and civilians who’d come in.

It’s in that paper there, but well, I was in Sydney and these people were standing around Martin Place down towards the end of it near the George Street end, I think it was, and with their guitars and their long hair and singing these protest songs and carrying on

with waving, you know, I think they were waving Viet Cong flags or something and I thought, “I can’t stand this.” I was going to wade into them, I s’pose. Luckily the policeman was there watching them and must’ve been watching me too, I think, because when I started to move in he moved over to me and said, “Where are you going?” I said, “I’m going to go and tell these people a few home truths,” I thought, “There’s bloody Australians up there giving their lives and living under

those conditions and this is what this yahoo mob that probably don’t work or anything….” He said, “Don’t inflame it, that’s what they want to get the publicity. They’ll get sick of themselves and they’ll go away after a while.” “Okay.”

That would’ve been 19..well, I came back in ‘71, it would’ve been late ’71, I suppose.

I don’t know that I noticed that. See Taree was a rather conservative country town in those days, and then into the army, which is a bit of a culture shock, and then to Singleton and then to Vietnam, so I s’pose my mind might’ve been in a bit of a cultural swirl or something. No, I didn’t,

I s’pose, in a way I didn’t know what was going on in Sydney anyhow before I went away because I wasn’t there, hadn’t been there for years.

I wrote letters to the editor a few times and the local paper in Maitland when I came out of the army

trying to straighten out a few things, and then the papers, the local papers started to ask me for articles. When something would happen, they’d ring me up and say, “We’ll send a reporter and a photographer down,” that’s why there are so many photographs of me in the paper, and just get a statement and say something or talk about it. So that’s how those things came about.

They were the local papers in Maitland and around that area.

Well, things were reported in the papers that I just got angry about because I knew that perhaps they weren’t exactly the true situation.

The protestors saying we shouldn’t be there and everything, and I did an article on the domino theory and said we should be there because

otherwise it’s going to just go to another country and another country. That didn’t happen, but it may well have not happened because we were there and they felt if they attacked another country, they Communists, they’d be in the same situation, that outside help would come in and they wouldn’t get anywhere. And I felt that way about the things and I was angry about the lack of any welcome

or thank-you from anybody as a country, and that’s why I didn’t go to the welcome home march. I said, “I’m not going to march down there, the hypocrites, they took that long to say thanks, they can jump in the lake.” When the memorial was being dedicated, I thought, “Well ,that’s a different thing.” That was in Canberra so I went down to that.

No, I don’t think I wrote about that issue particularly, but I wrote letters to the editor about the justification about it all being happening, to my mind it was right to do what they did. But then after the years it got so very, very political, and that’s where the whole thing fell apart really.

Well the political side of the fence in Australia, half the politicians were against it and half were for it and the whole country was sort of divided and then the decision to close the thing down was more of a political pressure. The Labour party got in and Whitlam abandoned national service overnight, which was, might’ve been good in a way but it was bad in another because some of these, and the army said, “They all just walked out,”

some of them, out of the camp and then they got no record of their discharge or anything else for later on in life. I don’t know whether that’s been rectified or not but this particular person said it was a bad thing to do because they should’ve been properly processed so it was on record that they were discharged from the army at a certain date and things like that.

No, this was in 1970…when did Whitlam

come into power?

It was later than that, wasn’t it? No, it was later than that I think, and those sorts of things that were all a bit much.

It was just, somebody’s got to say something about it, and then when they came to me for

those particular articles and other ones I haven’t kept, I just stated how I felt about things, a few truths about what I felt. I’d always write them up and most people seemed to think they were all right.

Yeah. Well that was the dedication of

the Vietnam memorial in Canberra, and we went down there and…

Nineteen…it wasn’t that long ago really. I didn’t put the date on the paper, actually, that’s a copy of the paper there and I didn’t put the date on it. But it was a long while after the welcome home march and the Vietnam Memorial was unveiled in Canberra and there was a big parade down the Memorial Drive and everything and myself and old Jim Boburg [?],

we were standing in the marshalling area, just in our clericals and medals and things, and this fellow come up and said could he interview us? We said, “Oh yeah, that’s okay.” He said, “I’m from The Canberra Times and this is a recording, I’ve got a cassette set-up here, so when I say, ‘Yeah, okay,’ everything will be on the cassette.” So

he spoke to us about things and I told him a few things, home truths that are in the paper there not knowing that they were going to print it all back verbatim and they did.

That they can all jump in the bloody creek because it took them long enough to say ‘welcome home’ and a few things like that that I said. And they were all in the paper the next morning. So that was one article there, the other one’s a paper from the

local paper, The Mercury or The Raymond Terrace Examiner when I was a parish priest there for 11 years, and Anzac Day they’d often come up and ask me something about Vietnam or my attitude to something. Some of them I kept, some of them I didn’t.

No.

Well I did the dawn service at Maitland for, when I come out of the army for I don’t know how many years, they’d just take it for granted that I would do it. And I got a little bit upset because they never wrote to me, they wrote to me the first time and then the Secretary, El Champagne [?], he’s dead now, he’d just meet me a few days before Anzac Day and he’s say, “Oh Father,

you’ll be right for morning service, dawn service?” “Oh yeah okay,” and that, and I just felt that they could’ve written a letter or something. So that went on for years and years and years and then I moved to East Maitland and it continued, it might’ve been 20 years or so, 15 anyhow, 16. Then I went to Raymond Terrace, and it was funny there because the first Anzac Day I went down to the Memorial and all my medals and everything, and

I’d only been in the parish not very long, admittedly, but nobody spoke to me. I thought, I went down and I said, “Where’s the march start?” And the bloke said, “It’ll be starting here, just wait here and we’ll walk down to the memorial.” So I walked down there and did the service and nobody spoke to me, nobody said, “How are you?” or, “What are you doing?” or, “Are you a Vietnam veteran?” or anything. So I never went back to that again. I went back to East Maitland

where I was a member of the RSL sub-branch.

No, just didn’t. There might’ve been a lot of other people that weren’t spoken to that day either, I don’t know, but I was one. I thought somebody could’ve said, “Welcome” or something or, “Glad to see you here.” It might’ve been because I didn’t belong to their sub-branch or something, I don’t know. So I went back to East Maitland then and march with them

every Anzac Day. And then of course I was in the Vietnam Veterans Legion and they had their thing on Long Tan Day in August. And I went to that every year until the last couple because I was away the last two Augusts and I couldn’t go. But they gave me a plaque in 1986 from the Legion, appreciation. I think I brought them in the bag, too, I think, and then they gave me a

very nice stole, that’s what the priest wears around his neck, and it’s got the map of South Vietnam on one side of it and flags on the other. And no, I really thought that was great, I didn’t expect it. One night for dinner, we used to have a dinner after the ceremony and everything, they called me out and I said I felt a bit overwhelmed.

No, I marched, oh the big march in Sydney. No, the welcome home march in Sydney, I wasn’t going to go to that.

Always went.

Yeah, I know, with the Vietnam Vets, yeah. I’ve been in all the marches in Maitland and everywhere and down in Newcastle, the Vietnam Vets, I had no trouble with that. But the Welcome Home March after all that time, in Sydney I just

said, “No thanks very much.”

No, I never copped flack from anybody really, I s’pose.

Maitland yeah, the cathedral parish in those days and I was the administrator of the cathedral for four years.

A bit over four, it was nearly five, yeah. Yeah, it was hard to leave, I didn’t really want to but the bishop said there was an emergency in the diocese and he asked me to come back so I did.

Of course I did, yeah. I was getting to, back in Australia I was getting to enjoy army life again.

I s’pose the fact that you were now a veteran,

I never expected to be a war veteran and that gave you a sort of a little bit of an edge on things. Especially in the army, if you were sporting your Vietnam ribbons on your uniform, well that was a little bit of an upper.

Yeah, that’s right. And I was transferred up to Wacol, which was a very quiet camp up there, I didn’t really like that very much, there wasn’t a great deal to do,

I went down to the Gold Coast a couple of times when I had a few days off and wandered around there. So that’s where I left, from up there actually.

It was good, yeah. Good people, were very welcoming, and they’d known I’d been to Vietnam and in the army and they, I don’t know whether they expected special things of me because of that,

I don’t know. Sometimes people do.

Well, because you’d been an army chaplain and been to the war, there must’ve been something special about you to have all those experiences.

No, I haven’t felt special anywhere, really.

Yeah, it was a lovely parish, we had great people, and I s’pose I started a lot of things. We built a place called the Terry Centre, because Father Terry was the first priest in Australia. In 1820, he was given permission in 1820, Catholics weren’t allowed to have mass or anything in the first years of the colony, a persecuted people.

And he was the first priest in 1820 given the right to operate as a priest and he came to Maitland, to East Maitland on his rounds from Sydney to the Queensland border and back again. That was his parish, there was only one priest in Australia. And so I built this, when I went there, they were giving a send-off to somebody and I said, “Where do we have the send-off?” And they said, “Down the back of the school yard there.” I thought, oh, “What happens if it rains?”

And they said, “If it rains, we just cancel it.” So that went on for a while, and then I thought this place really should have a big centre, so I had a meeting with the people and proposed that we build a centre, which we did then, and what was it going to be called? It was going to be called the Bishop Toohey Memorial Hall because he’d just died and that was a bit of a mouthful so finally we came up with the Terry Centre. Well now the Terry Centre in Maitland

is one of the places in the town, wedding receptions and functions. It was never designed for that, because the kitchen isn’t big enough and it’s going to be in trouble one day with the health department because we’ve designed it as a Parish Hall for parish events, but it was taken over by the town for everything. So that was one thing, I did some things at the school. The highlights would’ve been the opening of the Terry Centre

I s’pose in 1979. Other highlights I s’pose were feast days with St Joseph’s Parish, so on St Joseph’s Feast Day, the 19th of March, I’d put on a big dinner for all the local priests and we’d have a big, you know, in the middle of Lent, but on St Patrick’s Day and St Joseph’s Feast Day Lent is suspended because they’re two solemn feast days and you don’t fast on feast days.

So we had this big dinner party and everything.

Oh yes, in Maitland too because we started to have Christmas parties and all up there. Because the first one I put on, I said we’d have a Christmas party in the hall and have a concert, so we organised a few items and that. It was going to be on about half past seven and at about twenty-five past seven I said, “There’s nobody hardly in the hall.” They said, “Don’t worry, they always come a bit late.

it’ll be full by a quarter to eight.” About twenty to eight it was full. So I thought me first one was going to be a fizzer, but it wasn’t.

In Maitland, yeah.

Well it’s not that far away really, it’s only 16 kilometres across the floodplain, Millers Forest and those places. Well, they wanted a new church there but

we never got around to building that, but we did a lot of big things at the school with extensions and things like that and that was a lovely parish, too. People are lovely everywhere if you treat them right. If you go in and you’re going to turn the world upside down in the first week you’re there, well you’re going to get people offside. So you go to a new parish and you just sit there quietly for a while until you get the feel of things. Then you gradually change what has to be changed.

Of course it has been an issue for every clergyman. It’s not only the Catholics, it’s the Anglicans and everyone else got the same crisis. And I think it’s the culture of our times, that there’s so many other things on now, distractions, and

I think the central point is the relationship with Christ. I ask people, “How do you see Jesus? Is he somebody walking around in a big long white gown with a blue thing thrown over his shoulder and a halo over his head walking six inches above the ground and not having any fun? Well if that’s you’re vision it’s an unreal one.” I’ve sometimes said in homilies,

especially when the Marriage Feast of Cana is the gospel, I just say to them, “Now just think for a minute, what’s Jesus doing at the Marriage Feast of Cana?” I just say, “Sit quietly and just get your image of that marriage feast, Jesus and Mary are there and the apostles. Is he sitting there looking down his nose or is he having fun with everybody else?” I said, “He’s having fun with everybody else, he’s totally human and

totally divine. He’s enjoying his life, he’s enjoying his friend’s wedding and his friends are all there and his mum’s there, and,” I said, “He’s laughing and smiling and everything else.” But a lot of people never see a smiling Jesus. You know there’s no statues of Jesus smiling, no pictures, photos, not pictures, didn’t get his picture taken, but paintings of a smiling Jesus, but he was human like us in all things except sin and also totally divine,

he was God. God made man, that’s the mystery that we can’t understand. But unless we have that image of Jesus as genuine, not a false image of him, well religion becomes a bit unreal, that’s my view.

The Vietnamese people?

Yeah, well Keith Teefey, we’re still great friends, I saw him only just a few weeks ago actually. Bernie Maxwell who’s a priest in Canberra, he was up there with us at one stage and I still keep in touch with him. Some of them have died, Jim Boburg has died, he was up in Vung Tau. One of the other ones has died, because

we’re all getting older.

That’s right, over in Port Pirie.

It was great, we all got invite…and the next one is going to be in Albury, Albany, what’s the one near Perth?

Oh no, not down there. Fremantle it’s going to be, that’s right, and it was going to in three years time. I didn’t go to that because it’s a long way

over. I don’t know where the next one’s going to be, but it was good. See, that’s where a lot of these stories were told, you see, at the reunion. The CO of C Company, Barry Peterson, told the story about the chainsaw and he told the story about the sleeping arrangements, having to point to the east if you’re a Catholic priest and all those things. And I was glad he told them because the fellows were saying, “I remember that,” I remember this, I remember that because they’d probably forgotten about those

things, you tend to forget funny things, but you remember the serious, sad things. So we told all those stories and the kid that was in the tent business with me, was sitting on the table, sitting there so we were looking at each other enjoying the joke.

I think so. I think they’re probably more important overseas because you go to a strange country and you don’ t know the language and it’s good to have your priest or minister or whatever it might be with you.

In the army?

I s’pose Vietnam would be one of the highlights, I never expected to be there.

The time was difficult at times but it was an experience you look back on because so much happened and it changed your life around a fair bit. High points in priesthood, I s’pose my 40 years celebration at Raymond Terrace parish, 40 years of ordination two years ago was one of them. My 70th birthday was another one, because I celebrated that. See the trouble with me in my life, my two big events

happened within six months, me ordination anniversaries in July and my birthday on the first of December and each of them were run parallel, so 70 years of life was 35 years of ordination and 75 years was 40 years and they were all too close together in a way. But it’s okay, you can’t do much about it.

See, I was ordained when I was 35.

Yeah, well, to sum up, I think I would have to say my life’s been wonderful. I thank God for every moment of it. As a lay-person until I was 27 I enjoyed life, I didn’t leave work because I was unhappy, I was very happy with everything. My priesthood’s been very enjoyable, it’s had its ups and down sharing people’s sadness and joys and that sort of thing.

The army come out of the blue with no intention of mine or plan of mine, and I think sometimes in life we accept things that we don’t expect, they always work out if we go about it the right way, work out good. Then of course Vietnam came up out of the blue, I didn’t expect to be there and that was an experience that changed a lot of things in my life. And I look back on that

with, I s’pose, a sort of degree of satisfaction, because when I came home I got so many reports and feedback from people and things that I didn’t really expect. And I often wondered why they were saying those things because I felt I didn’t do anything very heroic in that sense, but I must’ve done things that were touching people somewhere. And been out with the diggers and the patrols and Fire Support Bases and things like that,

that’s all part of what I thought the army chaplaincy was about, not sitting behind a desk or anything, and so I didn’t do that, I didn’t sit behind a desk. And again, over there with the fellas that would sometimes have some problem, a personal problem that you could help them with, and being there when they needed you sort of thing. And coming out of the army in Holsworthy, that was another, that’s where I started

to play squash. Played in the seminary a little bit then got out of the way of it, but I became a very intensive squash player. Used to play with the local member in Maitland, Alan Walsh, who’s still in touch with us, and he was, he took photos of us on the squash court and put them in the local paper, “When the priest and the politician meet,” sort of thing.

All send-ups, and they were great because people would read the paper and, “There’s Alan playing squash,” and so that was all great, and then back to the parish life in Maitland and East Maitland…I’ve only been in five parishes in 42 years except for my time in the army, so it’s been wonderful. Enjoyed it. And I say to anybody as I say, the armed forces are there to do a job, they don’t do much for years

and years and years, but when the time comes, they’re the ones that are front line. So pay them due respect and encourage them and support them.