Australians at War Film Archive

Yes, I was born on the 9th of October 1921.

I was the eighth child in a south coast family and I was born actually a cripple. I had a breech birth and my left leg was deformed. As a result of this, when I was three months old, my mother, who was on the south coast, said she couldn’t look after me and an aunt who’d lost her fiancé at the end of World

War I, she said that she could look after me because she was a baby health centre nurse. So I was brought up with a granny and an aunty. I had irons on the left leg and we lived at 168 Wellington Street, Bondi. From there we did move to Hornsby for a few years

and during that time I was helped with reading and arithmetic. At the end of that time we moved back to Bondi and I was then seven. I hadn’t been to school and I commenced school at the Wellington Street Bondi Public School. A few things happened there, which they took me away and put

me to North Bondi Public School. I passed the QC [Qualifying Certificate], coming top of the class for Sydney High School. I did three years at Sydney High School but because they had no cadets and I had been talking to a gentleman who had written a book and prophesised that there would be a war with Japan, I wanted to be a soldier, so

my guardians, who was then Dr Ludawesi and this aunt, took me away from Sydney High and sent me to Sydney Grammar School where they had a cadet corps and a rifle club. I joined the cadets and over two years rose to the rank of sergeant. I was in the rifle club. I got my school colours for rifle shooting and at the end of 1938, I joined the Perpetual Trustee

Company. I had already applied to join the 30th Battalion because of one of our masters instructors in the Sydney Grammar Cadets. I worked at the Perpetual Company, Perpetual Trustee Company and then war broke out on the 3rd of September 1939 and our battalion was taken straight into camp at Rutherford for one month. From then on for

the next year we spent three months in camp and three months out of camp. I wanted to join the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] but because I was only seventeen my guardians would not give me permission to join because you had to, in those days you had to be twenty one, so we continued in that vein until early in 1941. Things were looking a little bit more serious

and I went into camp at Ingleburn. From there I did the 8th Casual Battalion Camp at Narellan and then we became national service full time with a new army number. I then attended a school for officers in signals and was promoted to lieutenant

in the battalion that I’d been in. I was told by the colonel that I could volunteer or be detailed to go to the 35th battalion as sig [signal] officer. Gives you no option, so I accepted the offer and I went. I spent the war years with the 35th Battalion on the northern beaches Western Australia, New Guinea and on return from New Guinea at the end of the war I was not married. I had no points

and I was transferred to sick ship staff, which was on HMAS Manoora travelling round the Pacific. In September of 1946 I left the army and went back to the Perpetual. I could see that because it had been semi-reserved occupation that there was very little chance of me getting promotion. I was back to a junior so after three months

I left, having met, at the Perpetual, the girl that was to be my future wife, which is still my wife today, and I then started or applied for a position at David Jones and I was the manager of a department called the cash with order department handling the catalogue sales. I lasted there until

1952 and at that time there was a an opportunity for a promotion. I’d already been looking after three departments: the cash with order, the mail department and the VPP or value payable post department. I had in total sixty girls and that’s quite an experience after having seven years away with not much contact with women.

I was then, there was a vacancy in the head office for an assistant manager and I applied for that and I was told that “If I’d accepted the position and was granted it, it would cost them only so much money for the increase for me, but it would have cost a lot of money to put three section heads into the department that I was looking after,” so I

resigned and I had a car, a small Morris Minor, and I started selling. I didn’t know much about it but I read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and I started selling, quite successfully, women’s wear, children’s wear and a lot of other items, hardware, and in each case I found that the people that were paying me commission,

when I started to earn a lot of money, they’d get rid of me and get another junior and finally one of the companies that I was representing was a company called Canvas Awning and Tent Company fortunately run by an ex-serviceman and he offered me the position as salesperson. He called me in one day and he said, “You’re getting more money in commission than I’m getting” and I thought, here we go

again but he said, “I’m going to make you sales manager,” so that started the career. I eventually became manager of that company and in 19, 1960, 1966 I saw an opportunity to start my own business, which I did, in fibreglass and also polystyrene foam. We started in a small way at Hornsby, moved to

a very big factory at Seven Hills, I had thirty five people working for me and at that stage there was a company called PGH, PGH Bricks who approached me and said, “We want to get into this business. We’ll either take you over or run you out of business.” I said, “Alright, you can take me over on one condition, that the thirty five men that have helped me build this company

have got a three year contract and as far as I’m concerned, okay, I’ll look after myself,” and they said, “No, you’ll become marketing manager of the building product area and we will guarantee that your people stay.” Now that happened and it went quite successfully until a company called Felton Textile

took over PGH in a reverse takeover. They changed their name to Acmil. I was sent overseas to manage a company and build a company in Penang for four months. They sent me to Bahrain to hold an exhibition and eventually I became the personnel manager and administration manager of

this company, which is now called Acmil, and then later Acmil was taken over in a reverse takeover by ACI. I became the training manager for ACI International. Then I became executive assistant to the chairman until 1965 when I had to retire because of age. I then started my own business as a marketing consultant

and had a lot of experience looking after various companies, in particular Newsteel Homes. I was operating out of the Gosford company. Now during all of this time, from 1956, I was also looking after the members of our battalion as a welfare officer. In 1991 we became

involved and saw the opportunity for a Kokoda ceremony, which eventually became the Battle for Australia Ceremony. I was secretary of the Kokoda for many years and I’m currently publicity officer for the Battle for Australia Committee. In a couple of years ago, 1999, I was given the Order of Australia Medal

for work as a welfare officer with the Anzac Day marches and also the Battle for Australia and I guess that’s where we sit today.

Yes. It was quite interesting because, can I go back a little way as to why we went to New

Guinea?

Ah

Having served on the beaches of Western Australia it became obvious that the Bismarck Sea and this 2003 is the sixtieth anniversary of that, that they lost seven thousand Japanese troops in that battle, that the emphasis had moved from the danger in Western Australia from Timor back to New Guinea and the 9th Division

was now needed. They had landed at Finschhafen and they were required elsewhere by General MacArthur, so our battalion moved up there in January 1944. We landed at Finschhafen and for the next eighteen, nineteen months our role was to pursue the retreating Japanese up the coast from Finschhafen, through Saidor, Madang, Alexis Harbour, Hansan Bay, Ramu River,

Sepik River and finally we came under command of the 6th Division in the concluding battle at Wewak and I was there when peace was declared and then I came back to Australia, having no points, and I was given leave. They said, “I’d had a rough time” and you’ll hear later I was transferred to sick ship staff on HMAS Manoora

and spent some time at sea with that.

No, I haven’t. I

Haven’t. No, no.

Yes.

Yes, we married on the 18th of June 1948. Our first child was born in April 1950. The second child was born in 1952 and

the last little girl was born in 1957, so we had a girl, a boy and a girl.

Ten, but no great grandchildren yet. We’re still hoping. The eldest one is, you might meet him today, is twenty nine and although they have a, he has a partner and one of our other granddaughters is engaged, there’s no sign yet of any great grandchildren,

that my wife’s waiting for.

They are, yes.

Well my left leg was deformed as a result of what they call a breech birth. So at a very

early age, three months, when I was taken away from my mother, they had an iron on my leg and I can remember when I was I’d just turned two, we were living at 168 Wellington Street, Bondi. I got measles and I was put into the front bedroom and lying there, I have a very vivid recollection of

a lamp, a gas light, outside our bedroom and every night a lamp lighter would come round and light this gas lamp, and when I think of today with electricity it’s just fascinating to go back and remember that, and then when I was nearly three there was a funeral to take place at Moruya, where our family had come

from, and I was taken to this funeral. We went by train. I remember the train journey and we stopped somewhere, which I now believe to be Bomaderry and we transferred to a coach. This was a big coach with four horses and it was a dusty road leading from Nowra down to Moruya, and I was

sitting on one of my uncles, an Uncle Wenty’s knee, near the window of the coach facing the front of the coach, and just on the left of the coach in front of me at night time there was a lamp and it had a candle burning, and I can still hear the horses galloping and the candle flickering so clearly, and that happened,

somewhere in the night we changed horses and we went on. I’ve got no recollection of where I spent the rest of that night nor the funeral, which I didn’t go to, but as long as I live I will remember that coach and the dust and the candle light burning.

That had to stay there until I was seven. Now I didn’t go to school during this period because it was difficult to walk. In fact at one stage we moved for two years up to Hornsby. We went to a house, it’s still there today, number 2 Miller Avenue, Hornsby, because this aunt of mine who was a baby health centre nurse, was transferred to the Hornsby Baby Health Centre.

One of our neighbours was a Mrs Dawson, and there were a number of little children in the street, and on a Saturday afternoon she would have races with little bags of sweets and I would go in the race, and of course I’d keep falling over because I couldn’t run, and often today I think of that picture, Forrest Gump and she used to give me a bag of lollies for coming last, but I never

made it. And I had a little pussy cat there called Patty and for a little while we moved out of that house down to Nursery Street. My uncle, who was unmarried at that stage, was a builder and he built this house in Nursery Street and that was on the banks of a creek. The little pussy cat had kittens and I

was kept inside but I sneaked out and I saw him put the kittens in a bag and throw them in the creek and when I asked where the kittens went, I was told that God had taken them and I thought, I don’t like this god if he does that. What will happen if he wants me? And it was quite an interesting time really. This uncle was also a gardener, and he taught me to grow

lettuce and corn and carrots and chokos. That was very important later on during the Depression years. When I was seven we came back to Sydney and a Dr. Tate said that “The irons could be taken off my leg and I could go to school.” So I went to the Wellington Street, called Bondi Public School, which was at the top

of the street that we lived in, and I can remember going there and I knew the alphabet, I’d been learning a little bit about maths and reading, so it was a lot of fun to be with people until at the end of my. I was just turning eight and it was in

the eighth year, October, and the Walt Disney films had come out, Mickey Mouse, and at one lunch hour this little person dressed up as Mickey Mouse came outside the school gates talking to people and handing out leaflets about a Mickey Mouse film

that was coming to the theatre in Bondi Road. Now I was intrigued, I really was, and what happened? The bell went, to fall in. Everybody left and fell into their ranks except me. I stayed talking to the mouse. The headmaster sent for me and I was taken and believe it or not, I was given six cuts of a cane on each hand for

disobeying the bell. Now my hands were blistered. I came home and the aunty and the grandmother said, “Right, that’s the end of that school. You’re being taken away and you’re going to North Bondi Public School,” and that perhaps was one of the turning points in my life. At that school it was smaller, they had some wonderful teachers and

in 1933 I’d reached sixth class. In those days there was an examination called the QC, the qualifying certificate, and you go on to various high schools. If you could do well, you could go to the selective high school, Sydney High. I came top of that class with a Mr Daley. Daley was the teacher. He was a returned veteran from

Gallipoli with wounded legs. Now at the same time, during that year, where we were living at 168 Wellington, Bondi, straight opposite us was a street called Roscoe Street, and along Roscoe Street was a Major Hatfield that did the physical exercises with the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation], and also a Mr Marks, who was a journalist,

and this aunt of mine, the baby health centre nurse, was looking after his wife who’d had children, and they got talking and he was talking about the possibility of a war with Japan.

1933.

So she asked him to talk to me because

I’d been interested in the war, with Mr Daley and interested in Gallipoli. And I can always remember the 24th of May at that school, was Empire Day and we used to salute the flag and we had half a day’s holiday and we used to sing “What is the meaning of Empire Day, why do the cannon’s roar, why does the cry God save the King, echo from shore to shore,” and so I was instilled

with the feeling of British Empire. The fact that he’d been a soldier in Gallipoli, that was my master, and this conversation I had with Mr Marks. He gave me a book and that book I’ll refer to you in a moment. So I then became very interested in school work. I came top of the class to go to Sydney High,

which I did. The only trouble at Sydney High School was there was no cadets and no rifle shooting at that time, and because of the conversations I was having continually with this Mr Marks, I think my guardians, a Dr Ludawesi who’d been at Sydney Grammar School in his earlier days, and knew that there was a cadet corps and a rifle club,

Said, “We’ll take him away and put him into grammar [school].” They did and I spent a lot of time learning to shoot. I was in the rifle club. I was in the first rifle team. I got my colours for shooting. I was gradually a corporal in the cadets and then a sergeant in the cadets. One of our

cadet officers was a Lieutenant Alec Hill, who was later to become a captain and a major, and in fact he’s in Canberra at the present time. He was an officer in the New South Wales Scottish regiment. So at the end of the of the grammar, I had no desire to go to university. I wanted to, knowing a

war was coming, I wanted to be a soldier.

Yes.

Yes.

I wasn’t allowed to, well because of the iron on the leg I suppose I wasn’t allowed to play with children in case I had an accident.

I was taught to knit. I can knit plain and purl. I had a teddy bear. I knitted all the clothes for teddy bear. In fact I’ve still got that teddy bear, and I’ll tell you a story about that teddy bear later.

Okay, well after the war I had stones in the kidney. I had one very large one. This developed through the

problems in New Guinea with Atebrin, etcetera, and I was rushed into Concord [Hospital] with a blocked kidney stone at the opening from the kidney into the urethra, and I’ll never forget the operation. I was given what was called a retrograde pyelogram. The only other person that ever had that to my knowledge was Tin Leads, Tin Legs Bayer, who was a pilot in World War

II, and that meant that I was in the operating room at Concord, at the Repat Hospital, and I had my legs locked in stirrups, I had a strap around my chest, I couldn’t move my arms other than touch my head and the doctor and the nurse were there. The doctor picked up this tube

and I looked at the doctor and I said, “Doc, if I’m thinking what you’re thinking, you’ve got no chance,” and the doctor said to me, “Son, I am thinking what you’re thinking,” and he said, “The human body is a marvellous piece of machinery,” and he said, “Unfortunately, I have to reach your kidney with you conscious.” Now today that’s a very daunting thought. They have

anaesthetics today and he proceeded to pass this tube through the penis into the bladder. He then put a light through that tube and he then picked up a catheter, and I could hear him saying to the nurse, “There’s the entry to the right urethra” and as that urethra went up or as the catheter went up the urethra they pump water through it so

it would bubble and this was an excruciating pain, and finally they got to the kidney and pushed the stone out of the way and they told me later that, had they not done that I would have died from the kidney poisoning, and from then on, every three months I had to go into Concord and have what was called a cystoscopy to check the

stone had been pushed back into the kidney, and on one of these trips, it was 1953, my daughter who was born in 1950, Janine, they were packing my bag with pyjamas and some wash gear to go to Concord and she slipped my teddy bear into the bag. Now in those

days it was purely and simply soldiers and veterans from World War II, and the first thing that happened, you sat alongside your bed and sister came in with a nurse, they opened the case and listed an inventory of everything you’d brought in. Now I’m in a ward with a lot of other soldiers and I’m a lieutenant. Now I know later on after the war

I became acting captain and they sometimes refer to me as captain but I wanted to be known as a lieutenant, which I was during the war, so on my bed head was Lieutenant Frank Hawdon. All the others were privates in the ward. Out comes the teddy bear. Now if you could have heard the result in that it, just unbelievable. “Hawdon’s got a teddy, Hawdon’s got a teddy.” Dreadful it was. So that was the

story of the of the teddy bear.

Yes I was.

Yes because my name is Francis and I hated Francis because they called me “Sissy,” so I changed it to Frank. Now I’m known as Frank but my true name, my baptised name is Francis.

So

The boys at the school. That’s when I got there when I was seven and because I hadn’t mixed with people, in fact I was not allowed to go out and play. I saw my first film when I was fourteen. I was not allowed to go to the Saturday afternoon flicks, as they called them, with cowboys and Indians. I spent most of those years, and let

me say that in the Depression years my role was to grow vegetables in the back yard of the house at Bondi, cut the grass, do all the things that a man would do because my uncle had got married, he’d moved up into Military Road and Dover Heights and my role was simply to, really,

provide the food. I can clearly remember carts coming down with the fellow calling out “Rabbitos,” selling rabbits and another cart would come down and the fellow would call out “Clothes props, clothes props” and there were these long twigs as it were and

they were used to hold up the lines, the lines that the washing was on. There was a baker came down with a horse and cart and the bread was there at a penny ha'penny a loaf. The milkman came and the milk was brought in and you put a jug out at the front door and he’d put the milk in and then put a little doily over it. We had an icebox. To keep the ice, you would roll it in newspaper.

We had a meat safe. There was a night cart service and one of my jobs was always to cut up pieces of the daily paper and put a string through it and hang it behind the toilet door. There was no such thing as toilet paper in those days. A great thrill was when a new telephone book came in cause all I had to do was, there were the pages, put a hole through it, hang it up with a string behind the door and that was a god send to me.

They

Well we had no sewer in Wellington Street, Bondi at that time. We had a little outside toilet and once a week the cart would come pulled by horses and this chappie would come in. I can remember him with a sort of a sou'wester,

like a waterproof cap and cape over his head and he would come in. He’d put a lid on the toilet bowl and hoist it up on his shoulder and as he did, often if it was full there’d be slops and there was quite an odour as that went up the side passage and out to the cart, then he’d bring a new one in. They were covered in

pitch. They’d obviously been cleaned and heated and tarred and then later on the sewer came on. That was a wonderful thrill. That was round about the 1937 mark and that was really something to, in those days you had to pull the chain. In fact today, often we go to the toilet and my wife’ll say “Did you pull the chain?” We still

remember that. You don’t push a button. In those days you had a cistern up above the toilet and you pulled a chain.

Oh, we had lime. You’d put lime into the bowl and often if you had a case of sickness or diarrhoea the bowl got terribly full. On a few occasions it was necessary to dig a deep hole in

the backyard and bail some of it out with an old saucepan and that was my job. Quite incredible when you think back to what we do today, and what it was like in those days.

No. Oh no. Once a week. Once a week in those days. Later on after the war we did move to Turramurra after we were married. We had an old

house there and there was a night cart came then for awhile, only that was what we called a six door Cadillac. It was a Cadillac but six doors. It was the two doors for the driver but the other four doors were down the back and they had four bowls going into the wagon and empty ones coming off the top and they went out to a to a sewerage farm

that was out at the back of Turramurra.

No.

I spent the time learning to read. In around, when I was about five we got the first radio.

It was a crystal set and it was very dickey. Sometimes the crystals would work and you’d get a station. Then we got one that was driven by electricity. We then got the telephone on and our number in those days was FW2046. A bit different to today. That was a great thrill to have a telephone. We had a radio. The radio we listened to 2GB,

and on 2GB there were a lot of children’s shows. One particular show in the evening was “Uncle George and Bimbo” and Uncle George and Bimbo had this children’s show until one night we were listening and Uncle George said, “Thank so and so that bloody show’s over,” and he got banned and the thing went. We lost it. We would get the Sunday Sun, was the Sunday paper and in it was a

comic and that comic I would look for. It had “Ginger Meggs,” which is still there today but in those days it was really something. I sort of followed the life of Ginger Meggs. I associated with him as a boy and all the things that he got into, and Ginger Meggs to me was really my inspiration in childhood. Also in that

comic was “Nuddy Bub and Nitta Sing and the Gumnut Babies.” “Snugglepot and Cuddlepie” by May Gibbs and so I learnt about the bush and kookaburras and banksia men and snakes and lizards and really I suppose the community singing started then. They had it, I think at the Lyceum Theatre, and they would have

a community singing session for two hours during the lunch time and I’d listen to that and I learnt a lot of songs like “Daisy” and “Clementine” and old songs of the era, “Pack up your Troubles” etcetera.

No, not really because I didn’t know that much about the

outside world. I would look forward to that and see him fishing and all the trouble that he’d get into and he became, I suppose a guide to me of what life was about. I was brought up to say my prayers, to respect women and,

I suppose because of the gardening and the work that I had to do, I used to help get the dinners, I’d peel vegetables, I would be growing vegetables. In fact it’s interesting because there was a book came out called the Aspro Year Book and this Aspro Year Book showed that if you worked the phases of the moon and the

stars you could control the growth of crops. You could have, you could have crops that had roots like carrots and if you wanted foliage like lettuce you would grow at a different time, and it’s a matter of when you sow the seeds, and I studied that and it worked. I could grow big lettuces and I could grow big carrots. We had a choko vine on the

fence. I grew corn and wheat, potatoes, and we had a lot of vegetables because during those depression years I would help this aunt of mine make soap. Now a lot of people today would probably not realise how soap is made. When you grill chops or have a baked dinner, which we

did every weekend, you saved the fat and you would render this fat down and you would get caustic soda. You get a cardboard box and you put cloth inside it, like calico, and you render the fat until it’s bubbling and you add caustic soda to it. Now it gets very hot

and you pour that into the box and as it cools, you cut it into slices and that that becomes soap.

Oh an awful smell but it worked and it was soap. It was used mainly for washing clothes, didn’t go too well on the on the skin. We used a thing called ‘sunlight Soap’,

and in fact that brings back another memory. I used to listen to the radio and they had all these commercials and I knew most of them by heart. There was one in particular called 'Breakfast Delight' and it was breakfast delight time and it started like “Start the day right with your breakfast delight and you’ll find that you’re right all day long.” Another one was ‘sydney Flour’,

and because I had no one outside, I used to listen to the radio, read, do sums, and this other one was “Mother, may I go out to play?” “Of 'course you can my pet but first of all go to the grocer’s shop, there’s something I want you to get.” “I know exactly what it is,” said little Maryann, “It’s something we keep in the kitchen in the big blue can. Sydney Flour is our flour, we use it every day. For scones and cakes that

mother makes you’ll find that it’s okay, and once you’ve, that you have tried it, you’ll join with us and say Sydney Flour is our flour we use it every day” and so all these commercials. It goes on and on and on.

No, because I knitted washers and I knitted clothes for teddy bears. When I was

ten I was given a meccano set, and this meccano set I spent many hours designing trucks and cars and cranes. I even discovered that, because I had to cut the grass and hose the garden, I noticed that if you had a jet of water and you put it against things they would move. So

I constructed a wheel and put tin lids around the wheel and by putting the hose in at the lower end of that, that would spin and once that spinned I had an axle and I would put a pulley on that and I could drive things up and down. I even had like a little flying fox from the back of our house

in Wellington Street down to the end of the garden, and I could with this meccano set create little things that would run and the water would drive it and I’d turn the hose on, it would spin and this thing would operate.

No, because she was working every day and I was with my grandmother, and my grandmother didn’t have a clue what I was doing,

but I found that all the things that you look for, Christmas beetles, I used to collect them and watch them, and lizards and slaters, and all the things that you find in the garden, lady birds. I got to know all these different things because I was really confined to a yard, mainly because of the leg. And it’s

strange looking back on it, I suppose, although I was what you would call a sissy not having mixed with men or with boys, at the same time I was still very active, learning about World War I and looking to the future, and this effect of Mr Marx and Mr Daley had on me in those years.

When I was, particularly ten, eleven and twelve, I would go to school and come home, there would be homework, and I found that life went very quickly looking after the garden, and etcetera.

My grandmother wasn’t, my aunty was.

I did with my

grandmother. My aunty was particularly strict. The grannie died in 1934 and now I was left with Aunty Lil, who was, she eventually got the MBE [Member of the British Empire] for all her nursing, and she was very strict. She wouldn’t let me go out, she wouldn’t let me have people come in. I had to because

she was working every day. When I came home from school, I would peel the potatoes, and get the vegetables ready, and get the table set, and during the day, in the afternoon, I could get the bread and the milk and make sure the ice was there. It was really taking the role of a man.

Aunty.

Yes I did,

and my brothers and sisters. Being eighth in the family, I only saw my mother and father about three times in my life. I didn’t know them, they didn’t come near me. The first time they did was when I was eighteen. I went to work at the Perpetual Trustee Company and my father

came and he said, “I want you to come home and help support the family,” and I said, “No, if I’m supporting anyone, it’s going to support my aunty who’s brought me up.” She had to feed me and clothe me and occasionally I did see my sisters, there were two sisters and two brothers, and it’s quite

interesting really because I was almost an uncle when I was born because my, they were big families in those days.

Well I knew that they, well it goes right back. They would tell me a lot about the family that came out, a John Hawdon and a Joseph

Hawdon. They came out as free settlers, John Hawdon in 1932. They had a big family, they built a big house they called (UNCLEAR), a picture up on the wall over there, and they talked about the background. They told me a lot about life in Moruya as it was in those days. About an Indian traveller, a salesman, that would come down

with a very decorated wagon pulled by a horse, his name was Keeler, and they would sell trinkets and all sorts of clothing, etcetera.

No, I would see one sis, two sisters, Edna and Dot. Most of them are dead now.

I’ve got one sister living, Dot. She’s, Dot’s eighty six. She lives at Ryde, and I’ve got one brother living at Ermington. He’s my younger brother. All the others have passed on and it’s quite interesting, sort of diverting for a moment. Two of my brothers were in the war. I hadn’t seen them very much, maybe two or three times in my life,

but I knew that one was in the artillery and one was in the 2/3rd pioneers and later on, when we get to the New Guinea episode, I’ll tell you the story about him.

Well I didn’t really know that I had a mother and father because all I can remember was a grandmother and an aunty. It never really dawned on me

that one had a mother and father until I went to school and they’d talk about their mother and father, and I didn’t have one. I thought maybe they were dead or whatever. They were never referred to. The life centred around an aunty, a grandmother, an Uncle Wenty and myself.

No.

I could understand why, if they thought I was going to die, and couldn’t look after me, then I thought they did the right thing in giving me away, but no, I had no special feelings.

I did with my Uncle Wenty, who lived with us until he got married, and

he was, he taught me a lot of things about, he was a carpenter, he taught me gardening, he taught me how to use saws and hammers and make things. I could make little toys, I could make a little billycart with cutting out wooden wheels, and at this stage Aunty Lil had

a block of land in Thelassa Avenue at Corrimal and one of the greatest thrills I had was when Uncle Wenty and Aunty Lil would take me to Corrimal and we would walk from Wellington Street down to Bondi Beach. In those days there were trams and a tram went at three minutes past seven going to Central Railway.

We’d go to the railway, we’d get a train to Corrimal and we’d walk down to this block of land. We would have a picnic, we would go over past a lagoon onto a beach and we’d fish, pick up shells, Aunty Lil would pick gum tips. I suppose in those Depression years you couldn’t get flowers and she would bring gum tips back, and then later a shed was built down there,

and one of my greatest thrills was to go down and spend the night. They would go on a Saturday morning and come back on a Sunday, and talking about trams, when I was at North Bondi Public School there was a tram came from North Bondi and came up a street called Curlewis Street and wound its way up the Bellevue Hill and down through Paddington and down to

Circular Quay. These trams were two carriages coupled together and they were called jumping jacks. Unbelievable. They would bounce up and down and it had a conductor that would walk along the outside of the tram collecting fares, but he couldn’t see to the other side of the tram and coming

home from school in those days, I had no shoes, and coming home from school, if it was summertime and the pavement was hot and the tar could get very hot, two of us, a boy called Clark and a Victor Dowd and myself would scale on the trams. Now to do that there are three compartments

on each carriage, and in between those compartments there’s a panel, so that if you were to get on the tram at North Bondi and you hung on and you kept low on the running board, cause each side of the tram had a running board, and lean up against that panel the conductor wouldn’t see you, the driver wouldn’t see you and that way we used to scale home,

up Curlewis Street until we got to Wellington Street, it was only about four stops, but it was a great thrill to do that when you had no shoes and it was hot, that was really something. We never got caught, and I often think of that today, and probably it was a very silly thing to do because trams would come the opposite way and they’d go very close to you and if you leant out I hate to think

what may have happened.

It was fine.

When I was seven. When they took..

Yes, it pained a little bit but the exercise soon brought it round and I often wondered what would happen in the infantry, and in 1939

we did a twenty five mile route march, and I did get pain in the leg, and the muscle is slightly tightened up and the leg is slightly smaller in the muscle than it is on the right but it didn’t affect me at any time during the war. And believe me in New Guinea, or on one occasion where we went a hundred and thirty miles by foot there was no problem.

Yes.

Well in particular with a fellow called Dick Lewis, who later became an airline pilot with a cousin of mine, Frank Berriman. He lived over in Nancy Street at North Bondi and they were a family that came from the south coast.

Frank Berriman was a sort of a boy that occasionally would visit Wellington Street and it was a great moment when he would come. The ones that I remember particularly was on the Empire Day when we had a half day holiday. He would come over and he would teach me wrestling and

later on in 1937, no 1938 I’d started learning signalling and I was only a, sort of a cadet in the 30th Battalion until I paid my, I had to pay two pounds to join the regiment in April

1939. And the threat was that if you had wrong sloped arms, they’d throw you out, and it, it’s rather ridiculous when you think you had to pay to join the army, but I was learning signalling and I knew with a flag, the Morse code, and I knew how to signal with a signal flag and Frank, Aunty Lil was at work, and Frank said to me

in the school holidays, he knew I liked fishing. He said, “We’ll hire a boat and go fishing.” So we went to Double Bay and there was a boat hire place there called Messengers and we paid a small deposit and we took a little boat with a Chapman pup engine in it and we proceeded to go out through the Heads, and in this little boat we went out with some

prawns and fishing gear. We got off Sydney Heads, I suppose round about five or six hundred yards, didn’t notice a storm coming up and it came from the west and suddenly the sky clouded over and a very strong wind came. We tried to get the anchor up and it was caught on some rocks or something out there,

we couldn’t start the motor, the seas were getting bigger and I got an oar, took my singlet off, tied it to the oar and by signalling, I signalled SOS [distress signal]. Now they’re done with, small ones are dots and long ones are dashes, so you go dit dit dit da da da dit dit dit, which was SOS. The signal station at South Head saw us and sent out the Captain Cook. The Captain

Cook threw us a line, towed us back, only problem was the Captain Cook travelled very quickly, we were a small boat, there were big seas, we would go over a wave and under a wave as we were being towed. We lost all our fishing gear, all the fish, and we had some good ones, and we got towed back into Watsons Bay where the Captain Cook was, and Messengers sent a boat, took us back, we lost our deposit and had to pay

for the boat to be cleaned and all that.

Ah at that stage I was sixteen.

Well in 1933 when I was twelve,

can I..?

Yeah well in 1933, I think I mentioned that I had a Mr Daley, who was a returned veteran from Gallipoli and had been wounded and showed me wounds on his legs and I got extremely interested in the war, and this aunt of mine, who was a baby health centre nurse, looked after

the baby that this Mr Marx’s wife had, and he lived a few doors opposite in Roscoe Street.

I suppose because I hadn’t had association with men or other children and it sounded as though it was a manly thing, not the way that I’d been brought up. I thought to be in a war

would be exciting and challenging and for some reason I just wanted to be.

No.

No, no. He told me about the mateship, how they looked after each other, how many died and how they lived and

the picture that he painted was not one that, he didn’t want anyone to have to go through it, but at the same time to me it was a sort of a true life story. It was a romantic story about what war could be like and all I wanted to do was to learn about it, and it wasn’t until this Mr Marx

came and spoke to Aunty Lil and she told him that I was interested and he gave me this book in 1933. Now that’s Mr Marx on the left.

And if you look at the name of the book it’s called Pacific Peril.

The book was basically

pointing out that Japan had a population of thirty million, Australia at that time had six million. That Japan’s long term, I suppose, plan was to conquer the South East Asia and this book specifically sets out the details of how they would achieve it by

attacking the Philippines. It goes on to say that Australians should not commit forces to any overseas war, that they’re going to be required here. It talks about the dangers of Hitler and the possibility of another European war and Australia being such a small country with a small population should keep its forces for

safety and to be prepared in Australia.

Nothing. Nothing. I knew about China, cause we had Chinese children at school, but nothing about Japan. Nothing at all.

Very little. I cannot understand the government of the day

not listening to the argument that this fellow put up in 1933, and I’ve marked different passages in this book that shows what they’re going to do. It showed that they would, that obviously there could be a war in Europe, Australia would send their troops over, Japan would attack the Philippines and America would not be prepared. They would come down through Malaysia,

they would go to the Marshall Islands, to the Philippines and they were expanding, and I just can’t believe I’ve got many passages marked in this book, which simply say that a war is coming and we had to be prepared.

No.

More important to stay at home.

Well it was, but this, if you read this book it’s convincing that what is going to happen, and all I wanted to be then, was to learn to be a soldier to protect Australia because I believed in what he wrote. Maybe that was a bit naïve of me, because I wasn’t

versed in these things, but he was so definite and I spoke to him. He wore a boater and he would sometimes come home on the same tram as I did, and we would walk up the hill and he would talk about the war. In 1938 when Chamberlain went over to see Hitler and came back and told the

British people that, “You don’t have to worry, peace will…” and it didn’t happen. Or the time that Hitler was saying, “There’s going to be peace,” he was building up ready for this confrontation and this Mr Marx told me, he said, “That’s all a bluff. There will be a war, and as soon as that comes the Australian government will send forces overseas, and when they do

then that will be the opening for Japan to start her movement into South East Asia,” and it happened.

Well I used to talk to him. I went round to his house and he was very convincing. He would cover all of the things, he was a journalist, he would cover

all the points that are made in this book, and show me a map, a large map of the world and show me where, what Japan would do, and it was that convincing that I believed him, and when war broke out, I thought, “Well that’s the first stage of what is happening,” and when Pearl Harbour occurred then

it was coming true, and the Philippines, when they fell, it’s in the book there, and Malaya and Singapore, it’s in the book. I just can’t believe that the government of the day took no notice. In fact they used to laugh about “Pig Iron Bob,” Bob Menzies, sending pig iron to Japan and we got it back again in the form of bullets and you name it, so I suppose they thought this guy was a bit

eccentric, I don’t know. He didn’t seem to me to be eccentric. He was very dedicated and very definite in what he was saying and I don’t know on what he based his intelligence.

Well they didn’t really know a lot of went on because Aunty Lil was working and Dr Ludawesi was a practicing doctor in Macquarie

Street, and I would only see him if I was sick. He would hardly ever come to the house. He was simply a guardian in name with Aunty Lil.

Well he was married to my Aunty Lil’s sister, called Alice Hawdon, and they were married and had children. They lived

in a very big house on the in the grounds of Ascham School at Edgecliff. You drove in through the gates and his house was on the left, then you went into Ascham School. Ascham now owns the house and occasionally we would go and see him. He, the only contact he had with me was if I was ill. If I had the flu or the cold or whatever, he would come.

No but he knew. He knew because he was the one that organised me to go to Grammar [Sydney Grammar].

No, at Sydney Grammar.

No

Yes.

Yes.

I loved it. I loved it. I loved the discipline and

I started as a private, as a cadet. We had Toby Lumsden and he was a captain, Captain Squizzy Taylor, they were First World War I men, and this Lieutenant Alec Hill of the Scottish regiment and I liked the discipline, I liked the training, I found that

leading men, and guiding them, and teaching them, was something that came naturally to me and that stood me in very good stead later on. At one stage I was a sergeant in the cadets and a private being trained in the 30th Battalion. It’s just one of those things that I felt it was part of my life. I

can’t really explain why but I just wanted to do it.

Only on the Sunday papers and what I heard on the radio.

Well there was very little to hear. We heard mainly about Germany, about the Nazis and the brown shirts and the Gestapo [German Secret Police] , and

there was not a lot of information coming from the outside world. It was more in Australia. We’d hear about the sheep and the droughts and the all that sort of thing. It was local news. I can remember the Thorne kidnapping, I don’t know if you’re aware of that, but a chappie down at Bondi, not far from where we lived won the lottery, and

a chappie kidnapped Thorne and demanded a ransom and eventually this poor Thorne lad was found murdered over on the north side of the Harbour. His barrister was a G.R.W. McDonald and that’s the murderer’s barrister and he was indirectly a relative of

Dr Ludawesi and he used to talk to me about court cases and about this murder case. Apart from that very little of the outside world. It was school, learning. Talking about learning, when I got to Sydney High School I did French and Latin,

and in the French class we had a fellow called Fisho Abrahams. Fisho was his nickname and he, in the first lessons of French, we started to learn a few phrases and some words and I was very intrigued with the fact that ‘la table’ was the table and so I found many

words were similar, or similar sounding in English and in French, and we were taught ‘il y a’, there is, and things like ‘what is the time?’ Or ‘ouvrez la fenetre’, open the window and I thought “This is good, I can learn this language, I’ve got this.” I couldn’t talk it, I didn’t have the pronunciation. French people couldn’t understand me later in life, but

he had a book called French Without Tears and it was the very first, like a kid’s nursery rhyme book I suppose, and after we’d been there a about a week or so he said, “Now, here’s a picture in the book,” and underneath it had ‘il ya un grande bruit dans la chambre’ and he said,

“Can anyone translate that for me?” and I put up my hand and I said, ‘Il ya’, there is, ‘un grande bruit, grande’, ‘being great’, ‘bruit’, must be a ‘brute’, ‘dans’, is in, dans la chambre, ‘chambre’ could be ‘chamber’, could be a chamber.” So I said,

“There’s a great brute in the chamber.” Well he went off his brain. He said, “Where’s the chamber?” Mind you in those days, we had it at night time, because of the night cart we had a chamber under the bed, you know and I said, “You can’t see it, it’s under the bed.” Do you know what I had to do? I had to write out that, I was kept back and I had to write out as a detention “There is a loud noise in the room.” It was

‘il ya’, ‘there is’, ‘un grande bruit’, ‘loud noise’, ‘dans la chamber’, ‘in the room’, and I said, “There’s a great brute in the chamber.” He wasn’t very impressed with that.

And on Latin we had Bedsocks Painter. Oh funny old man and Bedsocks Painter started and I can remember the first thing we had to do was to go through the verb, and it was

'I love.' If you know anything about Latin that’s how you go through the verbs, ‘I love, you love, we love’, and so on, and do you know all I can remember today, all I can remember is that, and what one of the boys wrote “Girly buss” no, “Boy buss, kissy buss, sweet girly orum, girly buss, likey buss, wante some morum” and he wasn’t very impressed with that. That’s about all the Latin I can remember except our 35th Battalion

motto, which is faithful and prepared, or in the 30th Battalion ‘in omni, in omni fidelis’, in all things faithful. They’re the two Latin things that I remember from our badges or our insignias and there we go. That was it.

Oh I was but I thought only as a soldier. If there’s going to be a war and it most probably is going to be in Australia, might be in the islands, and I was very intrigued with jungle. I had a lot of jungle books. I can remember Dorothy Lamour [actress] came out in a picture, and

there was various songs about the jungle and that that intrigued me, jungle animals and jungle, but for the rest of the world, no. I read in history books. I knew about the Tower of London. I didn’t know a lot about America. I did know about the earthquake in San Francisco,

and very little other than what I learnt in history, but I had no desire to see it.

Yes. In the cadet corps, firstly we were in platoons as it were. We were learning about the use of a rifle,

how to drill, certainly how to use a machine gun. In those days they were the Lewis gun. There was a certain esprit de corps that I noticed, that you tended to help one another, and we had cadet camps. These were extremely interesting because you would do field exercises. You would

go out into the bush. We would learn movement by a compass. We would learn how to find our position from the Southern Cross. We learnt how to find north from our watch by simply pointing the twelve hand with a little sprig of glass, ah grass. If you put the grass vertical in the watch at twelve and point that at the sun

until this the shadow of the little stick or bit of grass crossed the centre of the watch, half way between the hour hand, and the twelve was due north, and from there you could locate yourself quite easily without a compass. So all those things, and field craft I found extremely interesting because it was part of this belief that a war

was coming and that I had to learn everything about being a soldier. How to live off the land. We were told about witchetty grubs. I’ve got to tell you, later on during an exercise that we did in the 30th Battalion we were told we, “You can have a water bottle full of water, you can take

a few of these what we called dog biscuits” and we were headed towards the mountains and you had to live off the land. You couldn’t go to a shop. You had to live off the land. We’d been taught to, what grass to eat, how to eat frogs, how to kill and eat a snake, snails and witchetty grubs. Well we were pretty hungry when I decided that we would find

witchetty grubs by taking the bark off trees and looking for them. We did, we got some. Now we had no fire, so we couldn’t cook them but the book says “You bite the head off and squeeze.” Well I bit the head off, I squeezed. Now I was pretty hungry and one witchetty grub went down and four came up. I was sick as a dog. It was just unbelievable and I’ve never ate a witchetty grub again but as you’ll hear later,

I did in New Guinea eat crocodile and snake etcetera, but those were the things that we learnt in the cadets. How to live off the land. How to look after yourself. How to conserve water. How to find water. All very helpful for later on in life and I enjoyed it. I became a corporal and then I became a sergeant.

Then, nothing other than probably collecting stamps. I got very interested in stamp collecting but no other things, oh well there is one. Yes, I used to go down to Bondi Beach after school,

before Aunty Lil came home from work, and she would get home round about six o'clock. I would race down to Bondi Beach and I would go into the surf. Now in those days, I was not a swimmer but we found that if you got an inner tube, in those days cars had tyres with a rubber inner tube that you blew up.

Now by getting an old inner tube from a garage that they were going to throw out, and you get a big one, and you put it round your body and then you get some rope and you tie the front of it, so that it’s round and it forms a like a little boat in front of you that I could go out into the surf and pick up these waves and it would be like what they hired out, called a surfer plane. They

used to hire these out for sixpence half an hour, and I could go out, mind you I couldn’t swim, but I would go out with this thing and pick up a wave and come right in. It was very exciting and I was actually at Bondi and if you go into the surf, often there’s a channel and then you go up onto a sand bank, and if you got one of the waves coming over the sand bank it would bring you right back to the

beach. On one of these days I had that surfer plane. I was on the sand bank when this big wave came in and on the way back it washed the sand bank away and a lot of people were rescued. I think it was called Black whatever, Black day whatever it was, but I remember that particularly well because the surfer plane saved me and I was able to come back. I couldn’t swim, but I came back. Later on at Sydney High School,

we used to go swimming to the Domain Baths. There was a sports afternoon and we would go down to the Domain Baths and I was taught to swim and my swimming was mainly breaststroke, and right through the New Guinea campaign, breaststroke was always the way that I would cross creeks or rivers. Occasionally if it was a long way there’s a

sidestroke called a crawl, an Australian crawl where you lie on your side and do that. So yes, the cadets gave me a lot of background for when the war came.

Yes. I went out to, well firstly let me go back. I had used

the rifle in, not in the cadets but in what’s called the Rifle Club. All the GPS [Greater Public Schools] schools had a rifle team, and although we practised with a rifle in the cadets, at that stage we hadn’t used it in the field but in the rifle club we had. We would go out to Long Bay Rifle Range and we had the .303 and we learnt to fire at

these targets. Now a target was a yellow square with circles round it and if you looked at the target in the distance, the top left hand corner, if you got a bullet in that outside ring, was called an outer. On the top right hand corner, it was called a magpie. In the bottom left hand corner, it was called an inner and then the bottom right hand corner, it was a bull.

The bull being the black circle in the middle. So we had these circles and it would work from the outside coming in, there’d be inner, magpie inner, outer, magpie, inner, bull, in that order. I also learnt that in the range finding with the sights on the .303, that one inch is one

click. There were clicks on the sights. One click was one inch at one hundred yards, so if you were a good shot and you put a bullet into the inner and you knew the size of the inner, at one hundred yards, two clicks would move it to the right into the bull, and so I learnt a lot about the rifle. I went into a competition. Later

in the 30th Battalion, there were a big competition at Long Bay Range and I won it and got a prize of two pounds, would you believe? In those days a lot of money. So the rifle shooting was very important and eventually I got into the 1st rifle team and I got my colours, school colours for rifle shooting. The cadets, we would go into camp

and we’d have shooting and of course I could then shoot the other cadets that hadn’t been in the rifle club, they didn’t do as well, but the rifle became a very much a part of me and I was able later on in New Guinea to use the rifle very effectively when needed.

Yes I was, insofar as

I knew we had to grow vegetables, I knew that money was scarce. I had no shoes. I had a pair of slippers. I can remember going to school and taking my lunch and the lunch would sometimes be bread and dripping and if I was lucky I would get bread and apple. Ah slices of apple on

the bread. Clothes were very scarce. Food was reasonably scarce but what kept us going would be mainly the vegetables and as I mentioned earlier, rabbits - because rabbits were cheap and the rabbito would come down selling these rabbits and they used to make rabbit stew.

Yes. When I did the leaving certificate at Sydney Grammar the, I think I told you one of the training officers was in the 30th Battalion as a Lieutenant Mitchell, ah Hill, Lieutenant Alec Hill, and he suggested

that I should join the 30th and I went down there and they said, “We’re only taking people with Scottish background.” It was the New South Wales Scottish regiment. So I said, “Well I as far as I know, I’ve got Scottish background,” so I went back and I spoke to Aunty Lil and I was able then to work on the family tree, and I’ve got a copy over there, I got back to 1600,

and I found that yes, they came from Scotland. They settled at Durham and they were of Scottish descent. So I went back armed with this information and they said, “Yes, we’ll accept you but you’re not old enough.” I said, “Yes, I am,” and I put my age up. I said, “I was a couple of years older than what I was” and they said, “Right, you’ll be on a probationary time and we’ll see how you go,” and then in, I think it was in

April 1939, they said, “Right, you can now become a member of the battalion. You have to pay two pounds,” and I’ve got the receipt there, a copy of it, and they said, “Now if you fail in anything that we do, or you have a wrong slope, or your uniforms are not correctly cleaned and buttons shined etcetera, etcetera, you’ll be thrown out,” and that really

intrigued me. So I then joined the Scottish regiment and I’ve got photos there of what I looked like at that time and I tried very hard to be a good soldier. I bought a lot of books. I was a signaller in what was then called headquarter wing and a sergeant, Sergeant George Gill,

and we were only a few people, and when war broke out on the 3rd of September 1939, to me it was a very exciting time and a culmination of what I’d been doing and thinking about since 1933. And that night a paper boy came down Wellington Street selling these special edition of

the papers, and I have one here, which you’ll be able to see later if you wish, and it simply said, “That war was declared.” Now immediately the 30th Battalion was called up and we went straight to the Newcastle area. The battalion was split up. We had a few sigs and I was selected to go into the Broadmeadow Showground to run the signal officer,

ah signal office, with two other fellows and they put one company up at Fort Scratchley and one at Fort Wallace. The remainder of the battalion went to Rutherford.

Oh yes. Well

Well I, the war hadn’t started. In 1939,

1938 there was no war. There was no thought of an AIF and I was in the 30th Battalion CMF when,

Oh, no.

Citizens,

No. No, we only had citizen military forces. Only the CMF. Now in 1939, we were put straight into, as I said, into camp at Rutherford. At that

time the war had started. They immediately set about recruiting for the AIF and I’ve got a chart here, which you can see later, showing all the details calling for recruits, offering privates five shillings a day and telling you what you get as officers, and what your widow will get if you’re killed. Quite astounding figures and you might like to see that chart. I’ve got the original

here showing exactly what they were offering.

Right.

No, I was adequately trained. I had no problem with the rifle because in the CMF I went into this competition for the 30th Battalion and won it, so I had no trouble with the rifle but remember I’m in headquarter wing with what’s

called the signal section, so I was being taught to use Morse code, and in those days it was mainly Morse code, and to this day I can still go through the Morse code. I can still hear it, read it, see it and if you want it you go (UNCLEAR). That’s going A, B, C, D and so on. It just stays with you and we learnt to use the telephone. We learnt a Lucas lamp,

sending messages by light. We learnt the heliograph, sending it using the sun. We did signal flares.

The heliograph works by getting an angle of the sun onto a mirror and it faces you and there are various means of locating it and seeing you in the mirror, so it got the sun directly onto your face. What happens, I adjust it slightly, so that it’s off your

face. Now I’ve got a key, and if I click it quickly you’ll get a flash of light. If I hold it down a little bit longer, you’ll get a longer flash and this goes over very long distances, extremely so. The Indian Army used it and we used it fairly frequently early in the war, but not of course in the jungles of New Guinea because you couldn’t see line of sight. We had a little exchange

switchboard called a 4 plus 3, and a telephone called a Don 5, and cable called Don 3. Now the difficulty with a 4 plus 3, if a company rings, the 4 plus 3 will buzz and you’ve got to collect it. Now that makes a noise and it’s no good in warfare, so later on as you’ll hear we went to what was called a

tin line, universal call switchboard, that was operated with batteries. So coming back to the early army days, when the war broke out you had to be twenty one to join the AIF, or if you got permission from your parents to join you could. Now Dr Ludawesi and aunty

Lil said, “We are not signing your clearance.” So in the 30th Battalion a number of people did join the AIF and we became depleted. One of my best friends was in the intelligence, a Lieutenant Peter Jackson Taylor. Quite a character, a good soldier, and knew all the army ditties which I won’t go into here.

Such things as ‘the Ball of Kerrymore'

Well okay. Well alright. Now the song is on the marches, we had pipe bands of course. On the marches in the infantry, we would do very long marches. We did twenty miles out round Paterson from Rutherford and on the way back,

coming through Maitland, being headquarter wing, we were very close to the front of the battalion headquarters and Peter Jackson Taylor was the Intelligence Lieutenant and he said, “Righto boys, we’re going to sing “The Ball of Kerrymore.” Now “The Ball of Kerrymore” goes, “A ball, a ball, a ball, a ball, a Kerrymore, there were four and twenty prostitutes a dancing on the floor singing who’ll do it this time who’ll do it noo, the one that

did it last time he cannae do it noo.” I don’t know about the rest of them. I mean they’re dreadful. “The parson’s daughter, she was there, the saucy little run, but poison ivy round her hair and thistles in the cunt, singing who’ll do it this time, who’ll do it noo, the one that did it last time, he cannae do it noo” and “and when the ball was over and they all went home to rest, they thought the music very good but the fucking was the best,” and this went on and on and

on. Now we sang that coming through Maitland. The Mayor of Maitland objected to our colonel, Colonel Jimmy Russell, and said, “It was disgraceful” and the battalion got into a lot of problem for singing that in public, and that’s only one of the songs. There were others like “Sammy Hall” and “Hi hi Cathulusm, the harlots of Jerusalem” and it goes on and on and on.

Well ah perhaps, “There was an old monk from Montreal who stuffed a dame against the wall,” and that goes on unbelievable. Or, and one good one was “Roll me over in the clover.” You may have heard of this. Ah it’s “Roll me over in the clover, lay me down and do it again. The first was number one and it’s only just begun, roll

me over, lay me down and do it again. The second was number two, and I’ve got her up the flue, roll me over, lay me down and do it again” and this goes on and on and on and on.

Yes and “My name is Sammy Hall, Sammy Hall, Sammy Hall, my name is Sammy Hall, Sammy Hall. My name is Sammy Hall and I’ve only got one ball, but it’s better than fuck all, damn my eyes, blast my soul,” and when I think of these things,

Yes there is. There is and I’ve got it and it’s the most frightful thing you could wish to see. It really is, but in those days life was sort of, the war was on, and we, I don’t know, it was just second nature to sing these songs.

Yes they did and I’ll show you one later, but those songs are purely and simply 'Pack Up Your Trouble' type. You know “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bags.” All that sort of thing. I’ve got the songbook here, it was put out by the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association] and it had hymns in it as well, but not these songs, and Peter Jackson Taylor, a wonderful guy, was the first one to volunteer

for the AIF. They put it to us that “Would the Scottish regiment join as a battalion?” We said, “Yes.” Unfortunately most of us were well under twenty one and only, I suppose, about out of the six hundred, about two hundred joined the AIF.

And Peter Jackson Taylor was the first officer killed in Bardia.

Well that night when the Prime Minister announced that we were at war and I got the paper, I was quite excited because I thought, this is what my life has been planned around. It goes right back to

Marx and all the things that happened. The cadets, the rifle shooting, everything that I had thought of, and even as I said those prayers that I used to say as a little boy. I’d kneel down by the bed and I’d say “Gentle Jesus meek and mild, look upon this little child, pity my simplicity, suffer me to come to thee, and please god make a war.” So that I must have been brainwashed or something, I don’t know, but I

wanted a war, and that’s a terrible thing to say. Today, I don’t want a war. I’ve seen what it means and the last thing in the world is we want a war, and I wanted one and I got it and I was that excited. I got the paper, it’s still here, and I kept it because that was the turning point in my life, and then to go straight into camp and then at this stage of course I had, as I mentioned earlier in my life story, I was working at the Perpetual Trustee Company,

and we did three months in camp and three months out until early in 1941. It became obvious that Japan was getting very interested in Portuguese Indies. The Dutch East Indies or Timor was divided into Portuguese and Dutch, and Japan was starting

to make overtures to have an airport in Portuguese Timor and to run an airline between Japan and Timor.

Yes.

It was coming through this Mr Marx. He said, “These are the first signs that something is going to happen,” and this was early in the piece,

but when the war broke out and this happened I felt as though it was part of my life. It’s part of what I’d been sort of brainwashed for.

Well he was a journalist, but I’m not aware, he was with the papers and I don’t know which paper. All my dealings with, were with him at his home or in Roscoe Street. I’ve got no,

possibly in the book there’s some background to him. I can’t recall what he did in private life other than that he was a journalist.

No. Oh yes in 1939.

Well all he said. “Frank,” he said, “They didn’t listen to me. They didn’t listen,” and he said, “Now we’ve got to pay the price,” and that’s all he said.

Nothing more, just that, that he was sort of heartbroken that they hadn’t listened to him, and now the war had started. Mind you, it wasn’t Japan then, it was only what he said would happen in Europe and we would be sending troops over out of Australia, which he didn’t want.

No. No, I wasn’t because what

happened we immediately were all over the place. We were away after the Pearl Harbour, we were rushed down here to the northern beaches, and I can cover that on our historical side.

Peter Jackson Taylor?

Well

the sergeant, Sergeant George Gill, was a wonderful man. We had limbers in those days, drawn by horses and there was a kitchen and a water truck and ammunition and machine guns, and we had a horse transport section and the camp was very dusty at Rutherford. We lived in tents. When I first, having spent two weeks

at Broadmeadow Showground, they then brought the whole battalion back together in October 1939, into the camp at Rutherford, so we were now a battalion together and we started to operate as signallers. We were only a signal section, and I can remember in the tents the band would come through at reveille and their role was to wake us up,

and the band, the pipe band, and so we had a brass band and the pipe band, they’d take it in turns and they’d march past our tents to wake us up and training would continue. We were mainly training in signal work and we were told that “If we were proficient, if we could go for an exam and become what’s called a Group 2 signaller, we would get an extra two shillings a day.” So

we went from five shillings to seven shillings and I really tried hard. I tried very hard and I got, I became a Group 2 signaller and that was the first step on the promotion ladder.

To be an officer. That’s what

I wanted to be. I wanted to lead men. That’s what I wanted to do and that went right back.

Well in a war. Just to have a team of men under me. Now, I’m thinking now that, “Okay, Japan’s going to come into the war. There’s going to be a war.” The war had started but I couldn’t join the AIF because of my age. They wouldn’t let me. So the objective now was to do as best as I could

in the Australian Army, on the mainland in case Japan came into Australia. So I set about then learning. When there was leave, I wouldn’t go on leave. I got books and I would study and I learnt all about signal communication, about telephones, and in the next camp I went to an NCOs [Non Commissioned Officer] camp

and I became a corporal.

No.

No, because we were as signallers you have to provide the communication to the front line soldier companies, and our role was to link battalion headquarters with the companies by telephone line or Lucas lamp or heliograph or flags, depending on where we were, and we did a lot of exercises

out round Paterson, and the infantry companies would attack hills, Hill 530, which was a hill out the other side of the Hunter River, and their role was to attack it. Another company would be on the top as the enemy, and the attacking company was given bags, little bags of flour, which represented bombs, so you would throw a bag of flour and depending where that hit, so you were winning or you

were losing.

No.

Well it was still in an infantry battalion and Captain Newton, who was later a very big figure,

and looked after people in the in the POW [Prisoner of War] camps and on the Burma-Thailand railway, he impressed on me before the war, this is while we were training in 1939, he impressed on me that the lives of the infantry soldiers depended on communication, and communication was very important in saving the lives, so you could get intelligence to the

forward companies about what was happening, and he said, “It is more important to be a signaller keeping communications than it is to be out with the rifle companies,” and for that reason, to me it made sense, and I decided, “Right, if I can be more useful in the battalion signals then I want to be a signal officer if I can.”

Yes.

But not in the AIF, I didn’t.

No, what happened, the first thing was we did these camps and when it looked evident that the Japanese were going to come into the

war, this was round about 'bout May 1940, no 1941, around about May we went into a camp at Ingleburn and at the end of that camp they called in the USPs, which was Universal Service Personnel, to build up battalions to full strength, and it

became necessary to train these people that had been called up before they went out to the battalions. And they formed what was called the 8th Casual Battalion, which was located at Narellan and by this time, I was a signal sergeant and we went to the Narellan camp in June, July and August of 1941 to train these people that had just been called up,

and they were trained. I had signals to train and others had infantry people to train, and mortars and anti-aircraft and transport and so it went on. Now in that particular camp we received for the first time a radio set and these were called 108 sets and they’re carried on your back, and it was a Sword Short Range Radio Communication, and it was called radio

telephony against the other line, Morse code, and a very strange incident took place. In Narellan on the outskirts of Narellan was a canteen. It would be about four hundred yards from the camp, and it was a canteen you could go to, to get chocolates and drinks and pies, etcetera,

and we had the 108 set and on one weekend, I wouldn’t go on leave, I had the 108 set in a tent and I picked up a message about troop movements and I recorded the frequency, and I reported this and they said, “Where’s it

coming from?” and I said, “I’ll tell you,” so I built an aerial in the shape of a square with a lot of wires on it, and erected it on a pole, put it inside the tent and had a little handle that would wind it and turn it round as a direction finder, and we used that to try and get the direction of where this signal was coming from, and then Victoria

Barracks sent a message out to me to make a fictitious story and give it to the canteen, and you’ll see there’s a full report here on that. We concocted a story that the infantry was about to be equipped with a motorised bicycle. Now at that stage of course, we didn’t know anything about Japan and their bicycles, this was purely and simply

a war over in the Middle East, and we concocted this story, and I went round with the intelligence sergeant, Neil McDonald, who’s still alive in Brisbane, and we went there and while we were having a drink, we talked about this in a loud voice, and at the end of it we raced back, we had pushbikes, we raced back and at this stage the camp had disbanded and we were the only ones left in camp

with this radio with a direction finder, and within a short time this message was broadcast that we were being equipped. Now as soon as we found that, we went to another spot. We took our equipment and did another story and got another fix. Now the fix was on the Camden Hospital area and later we found, we were told that it was somebody at the

hospital that was broadcasting this information, so it was quite an interesting experience, but at that time we became full time mainland soldiers. We were given a new number. I went from my pre-war number of 266355 to N18505 and we went then to

Wallgrove camp. We were now full time citizen soldiers as it were and in the Wallgrove camp as a sig sergeant, I was offered a position to go to the Army School of Signals at Casula, which was an officers' training camp, which I accepted and I went there. I came top of that and I was then recommended for a commission. I came back to the 30th Battalion

and our signal officer there was now Jack Simpson, and one of my great mates was Sandy Thom. He was made a sergeant, and I was commissioned in the 30th Battalion and when I became the signal officer in the 30th Battalion I was sent for by the commanding officer and he said to me, “You can volunteer or be detailed to go to the 35th Battalion

as the sig officer.”

The army’s school of sigs? So I was sent to the Army School of Signals at Casula, which was an officers' signal school. I came top of that and then I was commissioned in the New South Wales Scottish regiment, and as soon as I got the commission I was sent for by the colonel and he said to me, “You can volunteer

or be detailed to go to the 35th Battalion as signal officer. Now you’ve got no choice.” I said, “I’ll go sir.” The 35th Battalion at that stage had been reformed. It was really a Newcastle regiment. It was called Newcastle Zone and it had companies up in the Inverell area. They consisted of mainly First World War officers,

and the commanding officer was a Colonel Goldrick, who worked with the Rural Bank. Now he was going to retire and we were part of what was called the 8th Brigade. The 8th Infantry Brigade consisted of the 4th, 30th and 35th Battalions. The Brigade Major was a Major Doug Ray, MC [Military Cross]

from the First World War. He was sent to the 35th Battalion to carry out an exercise and because their signal officer had gone away to a school they asked me to go and act as the sig officer. Now this is before I went to the school. I can remember doing three days

without any sleep because I was, I wanted to do what was right. I had done the school, the sig officer’s school, so we ran the battle or this makeshift battle. So he then got command of the Battalion, the 35th, and that’s why he asked for me to be transferred. Now when I got to the 35th Battalion,

the signal officer, a Lieutenant Lance Johnson, had now become a captain and when I arrived there he said to me, “You don’t know what you’ve let yourself in for,” and I said, “Why sir?” and he said, “You’ve got the most unruly group of men that anyone could command in the Signal Platoon of the 35th.” I said, “Why?” and he said, “You’ve got a group

from the forty thieves of Ryde.” Now this was a gang that was operating before they were called up, and the leader was Thomas John McMahon. Now they were an unruly mob, a couple of them were good. I could see who I would want as NCOs,

and they had a sergeant, Alan Oxford. He was not perhaps the type that they wanted to select or send to a school as an officer, and of course he was my sergeant. He was a little bit put out over that, but that, we overcame that. Now I lined these

men up and I said, “Now look, I’ve been told that I can volunteer or be detailed to become your officer. I have no choice, so I am your officer. Now I want you to cut out smoking. I want no smoking because you will not be able to detect gas if gas is used.” They found in World War I that those who didn’t smoke saved their lives

by detecting gas quicker than those that smoked. I said, “I don’t want any swearing and I want you to be the best platoon in the battalion” and believe me, they responded to this, and I had as history will tell you, the best group of men

that anyone could ever lead in the war, and I’ll talk more about that during the war. So I became the signal officer with a group of men and no sooner had I done that than an intelligence report came in that the Japanese were going to land on the northern beaches

of Sydney and,

1942.

'42. In February '42, March '42 the brigade was moved onto the northern beaches. Now remember our 8th Division was now prisoners of war, they’d fallen by the wayside in Malaysia, the 9th,

the 7th, and the 6th Division were committed in the Middle East, and Churchill wanted them there. Our Prime Minister was asking for them to come back they said, “No,” so they were staying in Tobruk or in the Middle East, so we, the 8th Brigade was rushed down onto these northern beaches. The 4th Battalion was down to Manly, the 30th Battalion was in the Dee Why area, the 35th Battalion took over from Mona Vale

to Palm Beach, inland on Pittwater up to West Head, and a section was guarding the Hawkesbury River Bridge. So we were moved to the St Ives Showground where our battalion headquarters were. Companies were put out, we put wire barb wire on all the beaches. A tank trap was built from Bungan, Bungan beach, through to this

bay, that’s just here across the Barrenjoey Road and it had boards over it so that if tanks did land on this side and come down we could blow the bridge. We had orders that there would be no retreat, that we had to stay there and fight to the death. There was no, that was an order that came through. Now some strange things happened during this time.

The first one was our battalion headquarters was located in the St Ives Showground. The signal wire came from the St Ives Showground down the Mona Vale Road ‘til it reached Pittwater Road. It did branch off, there was C company up here on the Warriewood hill with machine guns covering the approaches from the beach.

We had signal lines out to West Head but our main problem was the sig line that ran alongside Mona Vale Road down to Mona Vale and out to Barrenjoey and onto the various beaches and companies. In the Warriewood Valley here at that time were many glass houses with Italians growing tomatoes. Today you see very little of it,

maybe there’s a few broken down ones, but it was a very big Italian area. Our signal line would be cut night after night and we were, I would send out line parties to repair it and it was always in the vicinity between Terrey Hills and where the Mona Vale cemetery is now, and

on a couple of occasions shots were fired at our signallers who came down. Now these were what we believe to be Italian super sort of people that were in link or in line with the powers that be, and we never got them but shots were fired. So I went to the colonel and I said, “Look Colonel, this is no good. Every night the line is being cut. We’ve

got to keep the communication open. I want an extension ladder so that I can put the line up telegraph poles, up the gum trees, all the way down, all the way down to the beaches and right out wherever there’s any problem. I want it up in the air” and Dougie Ray said to me, he said, “Frank, the army hasn’t got any extension ladders. Use your initiative.”

Now the initiative we could use was, we had leg irons and these were spikes that clamped onto your legs and they had spikes facing downwards near the shins and you would hit these into a gum tree and you had a belt around your waist and you would go up the tree and take the line up. That’s fine, but it didn’t work on telegraph posts and it’s not easy. If you’ve gotta run a line all the way down Mona Vale Road, it’s very tiring on the legs, on the leg muscles,

and he said to me “Use your initiative.” So I did. I noticed near the intersection of Mona Vale Road and Pittwater Road was a PMG post master general’s store, a work, sort of a work store. It was a depot. They had a lot of extension ladders. They were red. I looked at these extension ladders and I thought “Right, now that’s

what I want.” To do that I went to our storeman up in the St Ives Showground, who was Corporal Ron Gray, and I said, “Ron, I want you to get some quick drying green paint and I want you to cut out of cardboard the letters D D with an arrow pointing up” because in those days everything was marked 'Defence Force' and it was D arrow D in black, and I said, “I want some black

paint and you cut out D D in cardboard,” and I said, “Tomorrow night, I’m going down there and I’m going to bring back a ladder, an extension ladder. It’ll come back just after midnight. I want it painted green and I want D D put on it.” So he said, “Right sir.” So the next night I went down with Sergeant Alan Oxford and we

climbed over the fence, we got the extension ladder, we put it on the back of a utility and it was sticking out a mile and the driver was Eb Cruise. Now let me tell you in those days there’s a black out, so you can’t see, and all the trucks had two little slits, two tiny little lights, ah two slits on the headlights and everywhere was a black out, so I got the ladder. I brought

it back. I had it painted and it was then put up a gum tree to dry and I thought, “Well we’ve got the ladder. Now we’re right.” The next day at ten hundred hours, Colonel Ray contacted me by telephone and he said, “Frank, have we got an extension ladder?”

I said, “Yes sir” and he said, “We got a problem.” He said, “I’ve got a police sergeant here and a PMG [Postmaster General’s Department] inspector and they lost a ladder last night and somebody said that they had seen an army truck in the vicinity, in the dark, parked near the works depot,”

and I said, “Oh that can’t be right.” He said, “Well you’d better come straight up to the battalion headquarters.” I went up and Colonel Ray said to me, “Now you do have a ladder don’t you, Lieutenant Hawdon?” I said, “Yes sir” and he said, “Well a ladder was stolen last night from the PMG depot and this is Sergeant so and so of the Mona Vale police and this is Mr so and so from the PMG.

Have you any objection if we inspect your ladder?” I said, “No, sir.” You should have seen the look on his face, so funny. He said, “Right we go.” So we went down and a most amazing thing happened. The colonel and the police sergeant stood back and the PMG inspector looked at the ladder, he looked up, he looked down it, he saw the D D on it. Not only that,

he didn’t touch it. He walked round and he walked under it and he came back and he said, “No colonel,” he said, “Looks like the same type of manufacturer.” He said, “It’s probably from the same source but you see ours are red.” I got away with it. Now that was the first thing that endeared me to this Colonel Ray because he always said, he would say, “What with this and that

and one thing and another, you’ve got to use your initiative as a soldier.” The second thing that happened when we were on the beaches occurred at the Barrenjoey lighthouse. It was towards the end of May and it was about the time of the Coral Sea battle. A Corporal Hutchison was in charge of the

signal centre at the lighthouse and he sent, and messages were just, normal, urgent, most immediate, top priority, whatever. He sent a most immediate message back to me at battalion headquarters that what appeared to be a periscope was moving underneath a lighthouse. They could see it in the moonlight. A periscope was coming through the water. It’s not a

shark, it was a periscope or a stick, but the tide wasn’t running fast enough to make it go quickly and it came in and round underneath where they were looking. I immediately sent the message to brigade headquarters. Brigade headquarters sent it to divisional headquarters. It was intended for the army headquarters at Victoria Barracks. The divisional headquarter intelligence officer looked at the message and he said, “No, that’s

ridiculous.” He said, “I’m a boatie and there’s a sand bank there” and he said, “a submarine could not enter Broken Bay. It must be a bit of driftwood or something,” and he didn’t send the message on. Now later of course the midget subs attacked Sydney Harbour on the 31st of May and there’s an article there in a book that shows

that the Australian Army intelligence did not understand, did not know about midget subs and that one of the objectives was not only to enter Sydney Harbour but also to blow the Hawkesbury Bridge because the Hawkesbury Bridge was our main line. There was no road bridge in those days, there was only a punt going across. It was the main artery to get troops to the north, and

it transpired that it was possibly a midget sub that came in either on reconnaissance or whatever. Now at this stage there was another factor occurred. One of the members of the public claimed that near Paradise Beach they had seen what appeared to be a boat come in and what appeared to be a Japanese

come out of the boat and go into a house that was owned by a reverend gentleman. So the army headquarters said, “Right, what we want, we want you,” that’s Frank Hawdon, “to get a civilian car and get a girl and get the driver of the car to get a girl and go and park there for a night, leave your very fine

tail light on that’s covered with, partly black out, and observe if anything happens.” So Eb Cruise again was the driver, he said, “I’ve got a little Sunbeam at home,” that he had, and he said, “I can get the car and my wife will come with me. What about you? Where will you get a girl?” Now at that stage I did have a friend, the friend that I

I wrote in her autograph book and got into trouble, but I asked her and she said, “No way. No way.” She had to be taken up the Victoria Barracks and taught how to use a forty five revolver and no, she wouldn’t be in it. Now there was a girl at the Perpetual Trustee Company called Sheila Hall, and her father was a colonel and I rang that girl, cause I’d met her when I was working there and she said, “Yes, she’d do it.” So

she went up the Victoria Barracks and was given this revolver and shown how to use it on a rifle range, and we came back and we went down and we parked the night, we just had to sit there like two lots of lovers, just arms round each other and watch. Well a boat did come in and a figure did get out and a figure did walk, we couldn’t see if it was Japanese, it was dark and did walk to a house and we

reported this. We weren’t to take any action, we just had to make sure something did happen. We reported this and later on the intelligence, this would be, would all be recorded somewhere at the barracks, the intelligence did do an exercise down there but we never heard what happened. So on the 31st of May I was called in by, no the 30th of May just before the Jap subs came in, the colonel sent for me and he

Said, “We have an intelligence report now from China,” and I’ve got a copy of it here, “That there’s to be a Japanese landing on the west coast. It’ll be a two pronged attack. There’ll be an attack at Fremantle and one further up the coast at Geraldton and the reason for that is that the Coral Sea battle has affected the,”

well we had the Kokoda Track and all the things that were happening there, and they realised that they couldn’t get Moresby and their fleet that was intended to go to Moresby in the Coral Sea and perhaps come round to Darwin and down the coast, that was off, so there was no danger to our northern beaches and this report said, “The Japanese were now going to land in Western Australia,” so he said, “We’re going to

regroup and we’ll be leaving very shortly to go to Western Australia.” So we went to Greta. All our equipment was put onto trucks and we had our transport and all our weapons, machine guns, carriers, all that sort of thing including our ladder. In the process

of getting up there the ladder got chipped. When we got to Greta it was partly red and the colonel sent for me and he said, “By god,” he said, “You did do it.” I said, “Yes, you told me to use your initiative.” He said, “Well done.” He said, “I like your spirit” and he said, “That, how did you do it?” and I told him the quick dry and how we put D D on. Now that won the day with Colonel Ray and from then on he would

give me a lot of information and we got on extremely well. So we came down to Darling Harbour and we embarked on the [HMAS] Manoora. We were now bound for Western Australia

In Sydney.

No, some of our men do. They were coming back from leave that night on the ferry and they were involved

in it. No, all we know was, we were at the St Ives Showground and there was the black out and the sound of bombs and all that sort of thing, and stand to, but the intelligence said that “After the Coral Sea battle there would be no landing, so we were being ordered to go to Western Australia.”

Oh life went on the same. Ah

there were black outs, nobody really worried until a submarine shelled Bellevue Hill. A shell came over and landed near the Bellevue Hill School. Now my Uncle Wenty, who’d built a house up on Military Road at Dover Heights or Rose Bay Heights it was called, it was all bush in those days,

he built a house there. When this happened everyone along Rose Bay Heights and Dover Heights along the coast wanted to sell at any price. Look at the prices today and this uncle of mine said, “He was married now and he had two children.” He said, “We’ve got to get out,” and Aunty Lil, nobody would buy it. Nobody wanted to buy it. He said,

“You can have it for a hundred pounds,” and nobody wanted it. Aunty Lil said, “I’ll give you a hundred pounds,” and she said, “I’ll let my place in Wellington Street, Bondi and I’ll go and live up there cause I don’t care if the Japs come,” and she said, “You’ve got children and married,” so he cleared out. There was dances, things went on much the same in Sydney. There were black outs every night but people didn’t seem to worry. They did

start when this submarine came in but the news about the Coral Sea Battle indicated that there would be no attack on our northern beaches. So the 8th Brigade was ordered to go to Western Australia.

Oh Sheila, well that was the end of Sheila. She went back to the Perpetual and actually in my history there,

I’ve got a photograph of her sitting the day we went up to the barracks with my cap. I didn’t see her again until I went back to the Perpetual for a little while but she was now married, so that was the end of Sheila Hall. There was nothing, nothing serious. It was just in those days I needed somebody that would act the part.

No. I didn’t. I couldn’t dance. I’d never been to a dance. I didn’t know the first thing about it.

I’d never had the opportunity and I still can’t dance. You ask my wife. I can’t dance. I missed all that sort of life.

No. The danger was here. I mean Malaya had fallen,

Singapore had fallen, they were in New Guinea, there was, they’d come over the Kokoda Track, there was the battles for Kokoda, all that was happening. They were trying to get to Moresby and it was just one of those things. We knew that it was in our area now, not the Middle East and Churchill was wanting to keep the units over there. Our Prime Minister wanted to get them back, which he finally won the day

eventually.

I know.

Well let me tell you

We’re going to Western Australia.

Okay so the 8th Brigade moved. There was the 4th, the 30th and the 35th Battalions. The 4th Battalion was embarked on the Westralia, the 30th Battalion on the [HMAS] Duntroon and the 35th Battalion on what was called an armed merchant cruiser in those days,

the Manoora. We had a gun mounted on the aft deck. We had depth sounders and the other two were unarmed and we were escorted by a little destroyer called the Van Tromp. It had been in the Netherlands East Indies when the war broke out, couldn’t get back to Holland and was attached to the Australian navy. Little tiny thing it was, and we embarked on the Manoora in the morning, we were

ready by about two o'clock. We were to sail the next morning. A message came in that the submarines were moving, were seen coming down the coast, they’d already sunk a number of our ships. In fact on that particular day, there’d been a ship lost and there was a terrible storm starting and at four o'clock the, we just up anchored and took off and we went out

into this storm. The seas I’d never seen anything like it and we thought, I knew we were headed for Western Australia but the troops thought we were going to New Guinea. They all thought, they hadn’t been told. We turned, they thought we would turn left and go north. Instead of that we turned south and that had them fooled. Now a message came in which I was told by the

colonel that the submarines were waiting in Bass Strait and that the only alternative we had was to go into the iceberg area below Tasmania where the subs couldn’t operate. Now we were into a storm and the seas were unbelievable. Most of us were sick. One officer who wasn’t, he’s dead now, Bob Green,

was a dogmatic sort of person. A typical British officer. He ruled with assertion and as we went further down past Tasmania the seas were unbelievable. As we got down into the iceberg we had iceberg pickets. We got photos here. We had to wear great coats and life jackets at all times.

Most of us were sick. As we turned in the icebergs with the iceberg pickets, we could look across. The Van Trompe was going under waves. It would go under and surface, we didn’t know how. I would look across at the Duntroon, which had the 30th on, next to us, and it’s a big ship. The waves were breaking right over the top and the stern would come out and you’d see the propellers.

Now according to the officers on the Manoora, the waves were in the order of sixty feet in height and when you’re thinking of the size of the ship, we were just going up in the air and coming down. Unbelievable. Part on the way through the trip, I was in officers' quarters on the ship. There were two bunks, the top bunk

and the bottom bunk in a little cabin. I was with another officer, Lieutenant Harold Scholl, he was on the top deck, was on the top bunk, I was on the bottom bunk, and on this particular evening there was a knock on the door, the door came flying open and in came this Lieutenant Bob Green. He said, “Frank, you gotta save me.” I said, “Why, what’s up?” He said, “Those bastards Mick Humphries and his crew are gonna throw me overboard.” He’d been, while they were sick he was going round, “Get on your

feet, get on the deck, get out, get here,” and they hated him.

The lieutenant.

Oh no, this is Bob Green.

Oh some of the boys.

No, not my men.

No, these were the transport. Mick Humphries. If you look at those videos, you’ll see he was a real devil. He was a despatch rider so he came in and he said, “You gotta save me”

and I said, “I don’t think I should.” He said, “Please Frank.” I said, “Get under the bunk,” and I dropped the blanket down so that he had about that much room underneath the bottom bunk. A little while later the door crashed open, in came these guys and they said, “Have you seen that bastard Green, we’re going to throw him overboard?” and I said, “No, but if I did I’ll give ya a hand.” Green, he never spoke to me again. Ever. Never again. So

that was one of the events that took place. So then we get to Western Australia. On the way over a submarine sunk a ship off Fremantle and was believed to be heading towards our convoy. The convoy split up. The Van Trompe and the Duntroon and the Westralia in the morning could not be seen. We were being used as a decoy and we had everyone standing by with depth sounders, and

goodness knows what, ready in case there was an attack. We were given drill. There were some life boats and we had to keep our life jackets on, what was to happen if we were hit with a torpedo, but it didn’t happen. We got to Fremantle. We went straight up to a place called Chidlow and we went into a camp there and that, oh the second night we were there the CO [Commanding Officer] sent for me and he said, “There is a report

that a force has left Timor and it’s bound to, bound for the Geraldton area,” and he said, “We’ll stand to, we’ve gotta be prepared to move in the morning.” So we talked, got all the signal gear ready. Six o'clock the next morning the stand to order was called off. The ships had turned round and for what reason we don’t know except

it’s possibly something to do with what was happening at Darwin at the time, and the American air force, they had a Liberator air strip near Kalgoorlie and it could be that reason. I, we never heard. So life started then doing exercises in Western Australia. General Bennett had escaped from Singapore

and because he escaped before the surrender it was not the thing to do. If they’da surrendered and he’d escaped it was what a soldier has to do. When you surrender the objective is to escape but you don’t escape before you surrender and he was ostracised by Blamey and the other powers that be, and the government, but General Bennett was able to bring in new training. For the first time

we left the old World War I type of open warfare training. He taught us about jungle training, encirclement, about how the Japanese would come towards you, but they would send troops right out around your flank and come in behind you so you were bottled up, and at that time the Americans, MacArthur was here

and the whole of the signalling operation changed. We had a different phonetic code. We used to be Able, Blanket, Charlie, Dog. Now we got a new one and they brought in new frequencies and new methods of communication. So I was sent to the 3 Oz [Australian] School of Sigs to learn all this new routine. Each sig officer, I was there with

Alan Cordukes from the 4th, Sandy Tong from the 30th and a number of other battalions that were over in the west at the time. We tried very hard. I came top of that school. We came back. By now the battalion was located at Moora at a little place called Dandaragan in Western Australia, which is well up towards Geraldton and

our company, which was now headquarter company, and Captain Johnson was our commander, he wanted half my platoon every day on either latrine duty, or peeling potatoes, or cookhouse duties and I’d just come back with all this new information and I went to the colonel and I said, “Look Colonel, I want to take the whole of my

men out for two months. I’ve just been trained on this new American communication system to work with the Americans, to work,

Well it was new frequencies, dealing with the Americans. All the different frequencies and codes and a new a new system of communication. Radios had come in more so. We

were given a very large 101 set and our role at that time was coast watching. We were right up and down the coast. We had two men, two signallers with a radio set located on each headland all the way from Perth to Geraldton. In fact on the 9th of October 1942 the day that I turned twenty one, I visited one of these outposts because our role at that time

was to go up and down the coast, a little dusty track. Today it’s a six lane highway, but a little dusty track up the coast. Made dust and our troops, our units, our cars, our trucks had to keep going up and down, blitz buggies, utilities make dust, because sitting off the coast were submarines, off a place called Jurien Bay we could see them.

They’d surface at night. You could hear their batteries charging.

I had a revolver. The boys had a .303 and we were on coast watching posts, and on the twenty first birthday I arrived at this headland and the lad, one of my sigs said, “It’s your twenty first birthday skipper. The only thing I’ve got’s a tin of condensed milk,” and believe me that was something in those days

cause we only had biscuits and rations, and a submarine surfaced below us and they came ashore with a little rubber dinghy. The first one I’d seen. They blew it up, and they went to our water point and they filled up a cask with water and they took it back.

Well, wait’ll I tell ya. We got on the radio. Sent a message.

“Japanese submarine surfaced from so and so. Collecting water from a water point.” The message came back from 3 Oz Corp, “Do not attack the enemy. The air force is on the way.” Now what chance had we got? The submarine had a great big .5 machine gun on it. I had a revolver, a 38 Smith and Wesson. The two boys had .303 rifles.

What could we do against a submarine? And the air force, the submarine heard it as we heard it, was one Avro Anson with one bomb. That’s all we had at Pearce aerodrome, and as it came the submarine heard it and we heard it. They had time to put the cask of water on, deflate the dinghy and get underway and the plane,

an Avro Anson, was an old training plane. It made a terrible noise. Its top speed mighta been a hundred miles an hour but it was doing about seventy eight into a head wind and it started its bombing run and let this one bomb go and it was two hundred yards behind the submarine, so that’s what life was like in those days along the coast.

Ah from July 1942 until August 1943.

No. No.

No, Casula was when I did the Army School of Signals.

Way back in 1940 '41.

Yes, yes.

Yes.

In Western Australia. It was called the 3

Aust [Australian] School of Sigs.

And it was held at a place called Northam in Western Australia.

Six weeks. So being so important, I think when I came back to the battalion and the company commander was wanting to take half my platoon every day for latrine duties or cook house duties,

I went to the colonel and I said, “Colonel, I want a marquee and I want to go out and take my platoon for two months to train them in all these things that General Bennett has brought back to the new signal system,” and you know what he said to me, “Use your initiative.” Now to do that, the biggest

problem was water. The first thing I had to do was to find a creek or a spring where we could use water, and I did and I brought samples back to the battalion. It was tested and found to be clear, so I knew that I could get water. What I had to do was to get a cook house. I had to get latrines. I had to get a lecture

hut and we were now at a place called Dandaragan, which is well out of Moora towards the coast, and on our travels in the area moving up and down the coast I’d seen some houses. The whole of the of the area had been deserted. The civilian population had been withdrawn

and I saw a big weatherboard house and I thought, “Right now if I could move that I’ve got enough material there to do what I want.” So I got a Corporal Joe Hutchison, Kenny Maher, Harry Bromley and one of the transport drivers and it was a full moon and I took them out and I said, “Right we’re going to pull that house down.

We’ll take it down and then every night during the full moon at one o'clock in the morning we’re going to move it fifteen miles around into a property called Yathroo,” which was a big sheep station in Western Australia which had this little creek running through it that came from a spring. Good fresh water. So we did. Each night we would move it, and we built a bridge first off,

all over the little creek. Further down stream I built a latrine that wouldn’t give any trouble with our water. I built a cook house and using some gum trees and big logs, I built a like a big shed. No side walls, and I put the iron over the top. I used the weatherboard to make tables and

we had logs to sit on. So I now had a lecture hut and this we did for two months. Some of the amusing things that happened during this time was on one occasion Harry Bromley, who was a real bushie, and Lindsay Whiteman, who came from the Riverina, went out shooting and they shot a kangaroo

and Harry Bromley skinned it, and later I sent that skin home to be tanned here in Sydney, and the meat looked good and that day, what was called a hot box, a big zinc lined box came out on the battalion truck with our rations. Included in the rations was two legs of lamb and

when they were skinning this kangaroo, I said to Harry, “That, can you eat it?” He said, “Of course you can.” I said, “Well listen what about, can you cut off two legs of kangaroo?” and Harry said, “Yes, I can.” So I said, “Right. I’ve got an idea.” Now our cook was Billy Gow. He was the son of Gow’s Chairs here at

Leichhardt and I said to Billy, “Listen Billy, tonight for our meal I’m going to give you two legs of kangaroo. I want you to keep the two legs of lamb in the hot box, they’ll keep ‘til tomorrow, and tonight we’ll have kangaroo but I want you to do two different dishes. Call one fresh lamb and one kangaroo

and we’ll see what happens.” He couldn’t believe it. He cooked it. Comes mess time. My boys came along and I can remember one, Aussie Hawkes, saying, “No, stick your kangaroo. I want the fresh lamb” and many wanted fresh lamb. Others said, “We’ll try the kangaroo.” Now one of the men that tried the kangaroo was Bernie Wren,

good soldier, good signaller, and Bernie Wren was a butcher in private life and he had the lamb. He said, “No, I’m not gonna have your kangaroo. I want the lamb.” At the end of the meal there was a little bit left over and we had the usual thing if anyone wants seconds they can come and get it. I always made a practice right through the war,

everything I did I would eat last. Wherever I was, I wanted to see my men fed first and that was one of the things that perhaps endeared me to the boys right from the beginning. That other officers would rush in and eat but I said, “No, I won’t eat.” Sometimes if there was very little left, I would have very little. So when they had seconds those that came back for fresh lamb had fresh lamb. Those that had kangaroo came

back for kangaroo. That night or that afternoon actually some of the boys said, “I don’t suppose it could have been kangaroo,” and Bernie Wren said, “Look, I was a butcher and I know lamb when I taste it and that was lamb that we had.” He said that. That night they, we used to have a few bottles of beer.

I’d buy the beer and bring it. I’d allowed two bottles per man. I used to buy it out of my own money because they could relax and we’d have a sing song, and that was sort of building an esprit de corps, and I always worked on the basis that you led by persuasion not assertion and you got more out of the men if you were with them and that sort of thing.

Ah a fair bit, but I wasn’t married. I had,

I was getting money as an officer and I could go into Moora, I would often buy chickens or some extra food other than the rations. Certainly when we were in this camp

Oh two brands, Emu and Swan, and the boys liked the Emu because it had the kick of an Emu. Boy, would it, had a very high alcoholic content and if you had one bottle of Emu it was equal to

probably three or four bottles of today’s Tooheys New. Oh there was plenty in the town. We could get it, we weren’t allowed to have it of course in the camp but there was no beer, the boys would get beer if they went on leave but not in the camp. But in the sig what I was doing, I figure that it was the way to go to relax them, and they were living away out in the bush. There was no leave. They couldn’t go to a, into Moora

to the pictures or whatever. That night they got talking and Billy Gow had too much to drink and he started to laugh and he said to Bernie Wren, he said, “I thought you were a bloody butcher,” and he said, “Come and have a look,” and he took him to the hot box and there’s the two legs of lamb. Now the, I had gone, I was in a tent. I’d gone to sleep. I was in pyjamas,

so Bernie Wren decided, he’d had a few drinks, so he got Kevie Knight and one of the other lads, Keith Breheny, and they came and dragged me out of bed and they took me down and threw me in the creek. Unbelievable. All I could do was laugh. I said, “Bernie, you’re a bloody butcher and you couldn’t tell the difference,” and I said, “There you were eating 'roo [kangaroo].”

Unbelievable. Anyway, we finished the school and we came back to the camp.

All the stuff that I’d learned at the 3 Aust [Australian] Course School of Sigs. All the, for argument’s sake they made us, insisted that we understand what electricity was. Why does that light up? Why does a signal line,

why does a message go over a telephone? And we had to get down to atoms. The fact that an atom comprises a nucleus, and on the outside of the nucleus, there are protons and on the outer circle or orbits are electrons, and if we can take an electron from one end of a wire all the electrons from the other end’ll rush up to that end, and if you put a thin wire in a thick wire and you move the electrons through it, it would

glow and this is how we transferred speech into a magnetic and electronic signals. All that sort of thing we covered.

Oh yes.

Yes.

Yes, all the new equipment and radios and how they wouldn’t work in the jungle. How we, and we had to introduce pigeons now. I’ll tell you about pigeons when we get to New Guinea and,

We did.

Yeah we did.

We did. That’s another story.

So we go back to the camp and suddenly our colonel had gone up to brigade headquarters, which was in an old house at Moora. In fact there’s a photograph there and it’s on the website I think of the offices, and

on the battalion orders it said, “Missing, one house from map reference so and so. Anyone having knowledge of this please report to the orderly room.” Now because Colonel Ray was up at brigade headquarters, the Second in Command was Major Lex Shaw. I went up, saluted the major and I said, “Sir, I took the house.”

I can still see the major to this day. He was speechless. He said, “Not you Frank. No, no” he said, “You wouldn’t do a thing like that.” I said, “Well I did sir. I was told to use my initiative and I did and I took the house and I built that school that you came out and saw. That’s where the house is,” and he said, “You know what’s happened, don’t you? You’ve got to go straight up brigade headquarters.

The police are looking for you, the owner of the house is looking for you, the brigadier’s looking for you, the colonel’s looking for you.” So I got the jeep and I went up the brigade headquarters. I was paraded in front of the brigadier, Claude Cameron, and Colonel Doug Ray

and I got blasted. The brigadier said, “I was a disgrace to the army.” What I’d done, touching civilian property. “You’ll probably go to gaol and you’ll be demoted to a private,” and I took a long roasting from him.

I was. I was. I thought well this is

it, but we got a trained group of fellows now ready for this new communication system, and he said, “You’re dismissed.” Now I saluted and I turned and I walked towards the door of this room in the house at Moora and there was a big brass handle. I can see it to this day, a big brass handle. I put my hand on the

handle to open the door and the brigadier said, “Come back here Frank.” I went back and he said, called me son. He said, “Son, you did a bloody good job,” and he said, “I’m proud of you,” and Dougie Ray said, “He always uses his initiative,” and I was dismissed and then the brigadier and the colonel got the police sergeant from Moora

and the owner of the house down to brigade headquarters. Scotch was very hard to get in those days but the brigade headquarters had plenty. The police sergeant came down and what happened, they told me later, the brigadier would have scotches with the owner and the police sergeant. Then Colonel Ray would talk and he would

have a scotch with the owners, the owner and the police sergeant. In the finish, the police sergeant dismissed the case. The owner said because the war was on and what was happening in Western Australia at the time that “He would donate his house to the army.” Now the army from 3 Aus [Australian] Corps sent up a medical officer from the

hospital, the repatriation hospital in Perth, he came out, saw the camp, saw the conditions, tested the water and he said, “We’ll turn this into a rest and recreation facility for the returned diggers,” and so throughout the war what we built did become that. Now at about this time,

Ah it depended. You could commandeer telephone lines, you could commandeer vehicles but they’d never specified houses. You could occupy a house, you could have a headquarters in a house, you could do many things like that but you couldn’t destroy a house. You couldn’t destroy property. You can commandeer, you can use it.

About what?

Ladders? Well,

I’d never took a ladder. It was green. They never found that.

No, cause the army had no ladders and there was no way at that stage that, I don’t suppose anyone had thought of going to the PMG to get a ladder, and there wasn’t time anyway. Our lines were being cut every night and if we had to go through, I can imagine going through brigade division, corps headquarters,

getting permission to come back through the PMG. It’d take days if you ever got it. The simplest way was to knock one off [steal one].

That’s right.

That’s right.

So. Right, so now in 19, 1943 in March the battle for the Bismarck Sea, you may have

heard of that.

The Battle of the Bismarck Sea took place and some seven thousand Japanese, they were the reinforcements coming round to Lae, that was destroyed. Many Japanese were drowned and others, so I’m told, they were machine gunned but they, that was a force that now put an end to any danger from

Timor. The 9th Division was wanted by MacArthur to move further afield into other islands and the thought was then there’s no threat to Western Australia, so we then embarked on a ship called the New Amsterdam.

Yes we did. We did,

because of the intelligence. We had it. We were told it. We saw the submarines and that was clear enough that they were casing the joint, they were there, they were sinking our ships off Fremantle. We lost quite a few ships there and the people in Perth felt it. There were black outs and they’d been evacuated from the coastal areas. There was a lot of,

a lot of worry, more so than in the eastern states. They knew, I think more so because the Japanese had been there in many great numbers working the pearling.

No, because there was,

there was always the danger, we thought it was still there, that we knew that there were many tens of thousands of Japanese on Timor. They were still there and the intelligence told us they were there and there was still the thought of the attack on Western Australia. The mere fact that the submarines were still there, were still active, it was enough to keep us on our toes.

Oh much more. Much more. That report which we had from China showed what would happen. Now remember that the Coral Sea Battle had prevented a lot of reinforcements and a lot of the danger to Australia. Now the Bismarck Sea had prevented the reinforcements coming round to Lae,

so the danger had moved from the troops on Timor coming to Western Australia. So we were immediately brought back on the New Amsterdam to Melbourne. We then trained to Sydney. We went into a camp at Wallgrove. Before we did leave Western Australia, we did a jungle skills at Collie. That was where we went through

water and creeks and jungle and understood this encircling move, and that type of thing. So we came back to Sydney. We went into camp at Wallgrove. We marched through Sydney. We were told we were going to New Guinea or we were going north. They didn’t say New Guinea. We were going north, but we knew what was happening. We were given final leave,

and we were very close to Penfolds vineyards on the road, the Great Western Highway. It was just the other side of the Wallgrove camp. Many of the older residents would remember a plane that was there, an air craft, and it said on the wings, “Don’t crash, get Penfolds.”

Our boys found that they were brewing or making wine and sometimes the batches were not up to standard, so if you took a billy can and went round to the vineyard, for threepence they’d fill it up. I had a few of these forty thieves of Ryde which were now good soldiers, Tommy McMahon, Ronny Dent,

Les Clough, Steve Brown all would go round and get billy cans of red plonk [wine] as they called it. Now on the day of the final leave the colonel said, “Now we’re going to have a muster parade at four o'clock in the afternoon,” and

we were to come back from leave and be ready while everyone was checked that they had come back. Now this Steve Brown got full [drunk] on plonk and he decided that he was going to kill the colonel, kill and I should say that Colonel Doug Ray was a very good soldier. Tremendous. He built a very wonderful

battalion. He was strict and he was very good at fining people five pounds. A very strict soldier but a very good tactician, a very good leader of men and some of the boys didn’t like him for that reason, including Steve Brown, who’d been caught AWL [Absent Without Leave] in Western Australia and put into the clink [jail] and fined.

So he got full and decided to kill the colonel and he’s running round looking for the colonel. One of the sergeant majors tried to stop him and he got cut on the hand cause Steve was running round with his rifle and a bayonet. They called the provo [Provosts: Military Police] or the military police. They came down with a medical officer and they overpowered him, gave him an injection and carted him off

into the brigade lock up [jail] which was brigade headquarters along Wallgrove Road, near the intersection with the Great Western Highway. He was locked up in, they had two lock ups, and that night the train was leaving at 23:59 from Rooty Hill Station to take us north to Queensland.

So the brigade had already moved, except the brigade signal section, which was commanded by a Captain Curly [Clifford] Camphin and a new brigade had taken over the brigade duties, so the brigade guard did not know anyone from the 8th Brigade.

I’ve got one of my men locked up in brigade headquarters and the train’s leaving at 23:59 that night, so I said to my sergeant, who was now Len Dixon, I said, “Len, you take charge of the platoon and you move them up to the train tonight and Colonel Ray will be looking for me.” The reason

is that in any battalion there’s what is called an R group and the important group is the colonel, the adjutant, the intelligence officer and the signal officer. They’re the ones that do all the strategic planning and I said, “He will be looking for me. If he comes to you he’ll say, “Where’s Hawdon?” and you say, “I just saw him down the end of the train sir, and keep that up so keep me away from the

colonel.” I went to Curly Camphin, the signaller, the Brigade Sig Officer and I said, “Curly, I want to borrow your jeep,” and he said, “What are you gonna do, shoot through?” and I said, “No. I want your jeep. I don’t want you to ask any questions. You’ll find it at Rooty Hill Station tomorrow morning with the keys up on the front wheel on the driver’s side.” He said, “What are you gonna do?”

I said, “No, I’m not going to tell you but I want your jeep.” He said, “Okay, I trust you.” So I got his jeep. I then got a great coat. Now remember I’m a lieutenant. I got some more pips and I put an extra pip on each shoulder, so I’m now a captain. I got some white rag and I made an armband and I put a blue cross on it with some crayon,

and I took Harry Bromley with me and I said, “Now Harry we’re going to spring Steve. We’re going to get him out of this lock up” and I said, “We’ll get up to the train at about 23:55 at night,” and I said, “Len Dixon knows now that I’m going to arrive just before the train pulls out and I’m going to have Steve with me,” and I said, “And I’m going to pull this off.

I’m going to get him out. He’s coming with us.” So we arrive at the guard house. The guard fell out, in other words formed up. I sent for the officer of the guard who was a lieutenant. He saluted me. I saluted back and I said, “I am Captain Francis from the psychiatric centre at Rozelle. I understand you’ve got

a very dangerous prisoner here. I’m to take him straight back immediately for treatment,” and the officer said, “Alright, I’ll come with you sir.” I said, “No, no. No.” I said, “You give me the key, he’s very dangerous. We know how to handle these prisoners.” So he gave me the key. We went up into the lock up, turned the key, opened the door and there was Steve Brown in a singlet and underpants. That’s

all he had, and my nickname was Sam, taken from Samuel Hawdon who was a big departmental store here. Hawdon Brothers. They’d call me Sam and he said, “Sam, what are you doing here?” I said, “Clock him Harry. We did unarmed combat.” So he gave him a chop across the, you hit that there - the nerve across the neck and he goes unconscious and we used that during the war on the Japs, and

he’s unconscious, so we take an arm each and we come out and they said, “What’s up?” I said, “Oh, we’ve had to give him a sedative, an injection.” So we put him in the jeep and we get him up and sure enough, everything’s right. The colonel didn’t see it. We came, we were in the first carriage and they were box, the old carriage had box compartments, not a corridor, and they’d kept a place for me,

and Harry and Steve in the first box compartment, and we pulled up near the engine at Rooty Hill, round the front of the engine, quickly into the carriage. We had two minutes to spare, it was well timed, and the train pulled out. Now Steve came to. Somehow the word had got out that we were moving and when we were going through Ryde

Station and most of our battalion, a lot of them came from the Ryde Eastwood area. We had the forty thieves of Ryde on board as you realise and a lot of them had been called up from that area and as we came into Ryde Station, they pulled the emergency cord and of course the engine stopped, the train stopped at the station. There were all the girls and sweethearts and the wives all there. Not all of them, but a lot of them were. I had nobody at that stage and what happened?

Steve crashes through the door, he still wants to kill the colonel, he gets out in his underpants and singlet, he’s looking for the colonel still. We subdued him and got him back on the train. The colonel had no knowledge of this. Now let me let me jump forward into when we landed at New Guinea. We go into a camp at a place called Kelanoa. The colonel

sent for me and he said, “Can you, do we have a Private AO Brown, annex so and so?” I said, “Yes sir.” He said, “He’s one of your signallers, isn’t he?” and I said, “Yes sir.” He said, “Well look at this message,” and there was a message from Australia. “Can you locate Captain Francis? This captain, allegedly

from the psychiatric centre at Rozelle, took a prisoner out of the brigade lock up for psychiatric treatment and Captain Francis and the psychiatric disappeared” and Dougie Ray said, he looked at me and he said, “You’ve got him?” I said, “Yes of course sir, he’s with us. He came up on the train with us. He’s been here all the time.” He said, “I can’t understand it,” and he looked at me and he

said, “Your name’s Francis, isn’t it?” cause they only knew me as Frank. He said, “Your name’s Francis, isn’t it?” I said, “Yes sir, but look I’m only a lieutenant” and he was very suspicious but he said, “I think we’ll let the matter drop there,” and I said, “I think it’d be a good idea sir.” He said, “There’s probably a good explanation.” I said, “There probably is sir but I think it’s better we don’t talk about it,”

and I got away with it. Anyway, we now…

No. No. He was one of my men. I would not leave him.

No. No.

Not at all.

No.

Never. I

Because I was

responsible for them. I was to lead them. I was to try and keep them safe. I was to look after them and see that they didn’t get into trouble and I’d do anything for them, and that’s what I did. That was my whole, the whole rationale, I could not leave a man behind. I couldn’t. He was one of my men and he was going to get into a lot of trouble, so maybe, but even now if I had my time over again, I would do it again. I’ve got no qualms about it.

No, we’d been trained for, I suppose brainwashed too, for action and we were looking forward to whatever was going to happen. Now on

the final leave on the Saturday before we left, a lot of the boys had gone back up to Inverell to, some to Newcastle, some down to the Riverina, but the boys from the local area that had been called up and given to me, I booked a hall in the Parramatta Police Boys Club and I paid for it, I arranged for a dance and a party and a farewell.

They’re not supposed to tell them that they’re going away but it was quite obvious if we had final leave that something was going to happen, and we did. We had an evening there and one of my boys, Lou Taylor, who was called “Kanga” because he looked after a little baby kangaroo in Western Australia, he was an artist and he prepared a chart,

which went up on the wall, and that chart is over there on a chair, which you may like to get a photograph later because of the people there, there’s only three or four of us alive today, but they came with their wives and their sweethearts and funnily enough I brought this girl. When I came back from Western Australia, I saw this girl that I’d written the thing in

the autograph book and we were quite friendly. We went out a few times. In actual fact I had never kissed her because of the way I’d been brought up. We were just friends. A bit different to today, and the mother said to me, her name was Georgie, and I’d written a little book of poems to her at one stage when I was in,

I’ve forgotten where I was, but that little poem book is still here, she gave it back to me, and the mother said, “I think you two should get engaged.” I said, “No. In the infantry we know we’re going into action,” and I said, “It would not be right.” I said, “I’m not thinking of getting engaged or anything serious until the war ends.” Now

we promised, and she was with me at this particular night, where we had this thing in the police boys club, she promised to write every night and so did I, and to cut a long story short I did, and our first mail came in after we landed at Finschhafen and it was under an air raid and we landed, we went into this

little camp at Kelanoa and that evening the first mail came in that we’d seen for a long while and our postal sergeant was Sergeant Perc Maloney, and Perc is still alive, and Perc Maloney brings the mail in. A great moment. I had a cake from Aunty Lil that was sealed up in Hessian, inside a tin, like a cake tin.

When we opened it, it had gone mouldy, so it didn’t do any good and I got one letter. Now I expected a lot of letters from the girl. I got one letter to say, “I’m sorry to tell you but I’ve met and married an air force officer.” Now that is staggering because even though you have a friend, a girlfriend, it’s something that you sort of can relate to but suddenly she’s gone and Perc Maloney who was

engaged, got a letter at the same time saying that the engagement was off, she was engaged to another guy, so we were both left stranded as far as a girlfriend was concerned.

Yes we did.

Yes and I felt it didn’t matter if I got killed, what would it matter? And that in many ways saved my life because I did a lot of silly things as you’ll probably hear later, which today

knowing fear and knowing what can happen, I would not have done had I been older, but in those days life was death, didn’t mean anything. You were sort of being trained that you could get killed in the infantry and it’s a strange thing. We had a Padre Parsons with us who used to say, “You place your hand in the hand of

God and God will look after you” and he was our padre through the war. In fact I got him to marry Joan and myself after the war because he was a tremendous strength to all the boys in action, and it was just one of these things so no, I just felt that I didn’t have a girlfriend,

and what did it matter?

Because they were signallers. Because they’d been well trained.

They knew exactly what to do. They’d done unarmed combat and they understood jungle warfare. We’d been trained in that from General Bennett. They knew what to look for and how to be prepared. Remember that most of them would be always with the with the company headquarters. They wouldn’t be with the forward scouts. They would be with a platoon headquarters or a company

headquarters, that was not right in the front of the contact with the enemy. They might be a few hundred yards behind but never situated where they would be actually faced with the enemy, face to face.

Yes. Yes, there were occasions though with malaria

and I lost one man with scrub typhus. That’s a blow when it’s an unseen thing, diseases in the jungle, you can’t combat that. You can’t combat the Anopheles mosquito. You can’t combat these other diseases that are in the jungle, but as far as the men were concerned I had faith in them. They had faith in me and

I knew that they could do the job. I wasn’t really, in fact I never gave it a thought.

That’s what the colonel said, and I did.

Well that was very worrying. When I lost Bobby Sharp

at Madang through scrub typhus, actually I attended his burial and read a service there, that was a blow and two of my men, a Lou Taylor and Harry May, developed symptoms of scrub typhus. It starts with like a cold. A bit like influenza. Now at that

stage anyone who got scrub typhus was taken to the CCS [Casualty Clearing Station] in Madang and if you got it, you died. There was no cure and we lost nine, nine of our men from scrub typhus until a turning point occurred. They were all men, all males in the CCS. They brought some nurses up, and

for some reason these men that hadn’t seen a white woman for many, and almost a year and a half, they turned every one that got scrub typhus after that lived, and we believe that it was the effect of the nurses, and when my two men developed these symptoms, I wasn’t as worried about it, that they would die, because they were recovering, but as it turned out they didn’t have it.

Sleeping, lying down in your wet clothes, crossing rivers, not realising that you had no change of clothing. That hadn’t occurred to me that in the jungle it

rains nearly every day. It’s hot in the day, it’s cold at night. When it’s time to rest you lie on the ground. You’ve got a ground sheet and a mosquito net. You lie on the ground, you get wet and strangely enough none of us got colds. I cannot believe to this day why we didn’t get influenza or a cold or pneumonia. There were no bridges across creeks. There were no bridges across rivers.

We had to, if you crossed a river you would go to the mouth of the river where there’s probably a sand bar and you go out into the sea and come round that way. Food was a problem. I used to worry about the men getting sufficient rations. We carried a thing called bully beef, which was a tin of something like corned beef and biscuits that were that hard that in our

little dixie, we’d soak them all night in water. By the next morning they’d still be hard, so food I worried about. I would endeavour to get natives to get me bananas and paw paws, and later I’ll tell you about as we went up the coast, about how we caught fish.

I suppose shaving, washing, eating, not being able to light a fire to cook. Not having a hot drink or a hot wash, using salt water as salt,

any water that we got from a creek had to be treated with water purifying tablets, an awful taste like putting chlorine tablets in it. Prickly heat, perspiring, having to have salt to keep the muscles working, lack of salt and our muscles tended to become sore.

There’s so many things.

Actually, we sort of treated it as a joke. It was part of life. It was, none of them would ever complain about it. We’d swear and curse but we’d think it was fun. There’s, it’s hard to

put words into what we thought, because we accepted it. Life just went on and we had one objective, to keep chasing the Japanese.

Yes. Yes, we’ll come to that, that was in the final battle at Wewak.

Yeah, yeah.

We came under command of 6 Div [Division]. We’d already moved up the coast. We’d gone through Alexis Harbour, ah Madang, Alexis Harbour, we’d captured Hansa Bay, which was a hundred and thirty miles north west of Madang, and we crossed the Ramu River, and the Sepik River and we did a landing

at Wewak and we took over from the 2/3rd Machine Gun Battalion.

The closeness of the Japanese. They had nowhere else to go. They had moved up to all the, through the different areas from Lae, Finschhafen, Hansa Bay and they were now the whole of the remaining Japanese army was concentrated in Wewak.

Yes, we were in an area called down from Cape Wom or Wewak Point at an area called Dove Bay and two plantations, Mandy and Brandy plantations. Now this was right on the coast. There was thick jungle and swamp behind us and a mountain not very far away, and on this mountain

were Japanese mountain guns. A lot of Japs were there and these guns would fire and the shells would come over. There was infiltration of course, of Japanese and we had one of our boys, Private Kraut, killed and cannibalised and eaten, and the particular Japanese who did that was a Lieutenant

Dezaki and he was to be killed, but he was given a life sentence, but the main.

Oh yes, yes. I go back now, we go back to when we landed at Finschhafen

I didn’t see it. I saw his clothing cut up. I didn’t actually see it, no, but he was.

Well,

we were under fire from the Japanese on these mountain guns and infiltration from the Japs. To give you an example and to understand what General Bennett had taught us, whether you were a platoon or a company or a headquarters you had your headquarters in a given point and around that you put a circle of troops called the inner circle, and outside of that

was another circle called the outer circle. The outer circle had slit trenches and they had machine guns and these machine guns were enfiladed, so that if at any one point somebody said, “Every gun fire,” you would fire out three hundred and sixty degrees of your location. They were all enfiladed, so that they crisscrossed and the machine gun fire,

that was a Vickers gun, would go out right round the circle. If anything moved between the outer circle and the inner circle at night it was presumed to be the Japanese that infiltrated. The inner circle could not fire. There was to be no shooting between the inner circle and the outer circle. We had to use the bayonet or unarmed combat or on one occasion, one Jap infiltrating

was a very strong big fellow and we had to use unarmed combat, and I was with Jimmy Grant and he had a sword but he had grenades, and what they do is they try and kill themselves and you too, and we did unarmed combat,

but he was so strong. I was holding his arms and I said to Jimmy, “Give him your morphia needles.” We each carried two morphia needles in case we were wounded. You give yourself an injection. So Jimmy gave him his two morphia needles, nothing happened, he was still trying to get to his grenade and pull the pin out. So I said to Jimmy, “You grab him, I’ll get my two,” and I gave him my two injections and we were

fighting. Nobody could come to our aid because there was no firing between the inner circle and the outer circle and we had headquarters behind us.

Well there was, there was something coming towards us.

Oh yes. I was with Jimmy and you could see this

this figure. Now we knew it couldn’t be one of our men because the words, the words were, “No movement.” Now we couldn’t shoot, we only had unarmed combat or the bayonet.

Well it was fairly open jungle. There’d been a lot of bombing with the air force and the navy, so the jungle

was fairly well flattened in the particular area where our headquarters was and we were in a very small trench, it was low down. You’d dig as far as you could in the jungle and you’d get low to the ground and we saw this figure coming towards us. It was dark, there was no moon, but you could see, you could hear the rustle and you could see the movement.

No.

No. On many occasions I would, I should be in the headquarters but I found right through the New Guinea campaign if you went with the men, if they had to be on guard or go into a trench or stay awake all night, I would go with them. Now more for two reasons, morale building and excitement because

if you were in the headquarters and you had a good night’s sleep, okay. I was looking for excitement and many things happened later, which I will tell you about that were more than exciting and probably in hindsight, stupid things to do, however.

Yes.

Well as he came closer, I signalled to Jimmy that I would take him. Now you couldn’t see how big he was, it was just a figure coming towards us. Now he didn’t know where we were. We kept very quiet and he would be passing, probably just to the left of me if he kept going, and as he got close, I jumped over onto his back and started to pin his arms and that’s when I told Jimmy, “Quick, give him your morphia needles.”

Just crawling, just coming forward.

No, on his body, not hands and knees. Coming along like a lizard on his tummy and it was a matter then of, I only had a pistol and Jimmy, he had a rifle and a bayonet but I was closer to him and if Jimmy had got up or moved, come out of the trench with the bayonet he would

have heard it, so all I could do was stay was very quiet ‘til he got almost level with me, probably a little bit closer than you are to me, but in the dark and in the jungle he couldn’t see, he couldn’t, I made no, I was hardly breathing and all I did was to launch myself over onto his back and pin his arms and that’s when we started. He rolled backwards and unbelievable, there was no time to give him this chop across the neck because he was a

strong bloke. He was I believe a major. I got his sword and some epaulets, which are now with my son down at Batemans Bay.

I called out to Jimmy. I said, “Morphiate, give him the morphiate,” and Jimmy got them and jammed them into his buttock and nothing happened. He got two

and then I got my two while Jimmy held it. He, I had one arm, Jimmy had two holding him, I got the morphiate needles out, you break the point off and you jam it in and we were scuffling and he dropped dead. We gave him too much morphiate. He just pfffd, gone, finish. That was it.

Well, we were holding him.

We were still fighting and he was trying to get, pull the pin out of the grenade but he dropped dead. That was it.

No, because nobody could move. It was every man to himself. You don’t move in the circle. You, if anything happens, that’s it. One of our boys did actually at a later stage get killed, a young lad from Queensland. They,

it was a mistake actually. There was a password and he got agitated and was disorientated, I think and tried to come through and was killed. That’s the only one.

Oh well, the next morning it was taken away. We’re not sure what happened to it.

I just got rid of it like all the other bodies that we had.

Well of course. You couldn’t move. Where else could you go?

You can’t go back into headquarters. You gotta stay put.

I think, I think it happened afterwards. At the time it wasn’t but

it’s one of those things. When we realised that he had two grenades on his belt and was trying to pull the pin, you realise then that I think nerves take over and you think how close it was, but at the time you did not think it.

Strange feeling.

It was a tendency to shake. I can remember feeling cold and sort of shaky and thinking, well that was close. That could have been it, but the next day it had gone. We were back on the job.

Oh the next day, of course.

Well just another one of these things that happened, the infiltration that it happened often between the outer circle and the inner circle. In fact, it was only a few nights later that, in the jungle at night there were things called fireflies and there were thousands of these little flies flitting around with a light. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen them. We

found that if you get a handful, and our little bottles of purifying tablets for water, when they were empty, if you stuffed the flies into the bottle and put the cork on and deprived them of oxygen, they would all put their light on, and we had now like a little neon light, and that we could read messages with at night and this particular evening in the, I wasn’t there, but in the outer perimeter there

was a sergeant and a private on the machine gun, and in front of them there was a track leading down through the jungle and there were fireflies flitting all round the place, and as the sergeant looked down and keeping an eye for any movement, he saw a group of fireflies stationary and possibly moving, he couldn’t tell, but looked as they were moving.

Now he knew that just before Stand 2 there were no spider webs and fireflies can’t not flit around. He pulled the pin out of a four second grenade and threw it down the track and killed three Japanese, and the leading Japanese had one of these, a bottle with the fireflies in and he was leading them up the track. These are the sort of things that people don’t realise that you have to

use your initiative. You’ve got to use what I call brainstorming. You’ve gotta look at both sides of the coin.

Yes, but wait a minute. When you’re trained as an officer you’re trained to make what is called an appreciation of the situation. Now to do that you have to set out what’s the objective, what are we trying to do? Then you list all the courses, either written or mentally, all the courses open to the enemy and then all the courses open to you.

Then you consider the factors that could attain to the prevention of the objective. What are the, all the factors that all the enemy have got, what are the advantages, what have you got, and out of this you come with a plan. You have A, B and C. If A fails you’re ready to fall back to B, so that in all decision making all through the, right through the war you are mentally making

an appreciation all the time of what’s going to happen, what are you going to do, how will you handle this, and it’s part of the training. And that incidentally has stood me in great stead, in great stead throughout my civilian life and took me to a lot of positions ending up as an executive assistant to the chairman of an international company, through making these appreciations and getting the right answers for companies.

Oh no. There’s not time. All you know is that okay something’s gotta happen, you’ve gotta wait and see what are you going to do? Now you know you’ve got unarmed combat, you know you’ve got a bayonet, or at least I didn’t, he did. I only had a pistol, I couldn’t use it, I couldn’t shoot. So we had to think, “What are we going to do?” and it’s just a matter of when we get close, we’ll use unarmed combat and you’re

thinking in that sense what you’re going to do.

Yes.

Absolutely.

Because you would come up with what proved to be the right decision in many, many times. It, and this was

installed into us by that Colonel Ray. He taught us one thing. That if you say to yourself, if you think you can you will, and if you think you can’t you won’t. Now later in life I found out in my training, when I was training manager at ACI, I found that there was a

science called psycho cybernetics and this is the power of the conscious mind over the unconscious mind, and if you have like okay, I was a heavy smoker and because of health warnings and thank god I did, because later I had a quadruple bypass open heart surgery, in 19, 1976 I decided

that I would stop smoking and I stopped in a day and I stopped by imagining myself not smoking, but sucking a tic tac. These little tiny things, little peppermints, and by the power of concentration I stopped, and the tic tacs took over, but mind you I got hooked

on tic tacs for many years. In fact I’ve still got some in the pocket, so it is it is a strange thing that I can remember one of our lads saying, “I think I won’t come back from New Guinea. I think I’ll get killed” and he was. I can remember some saying, “I think I might get wounded today skipper,” and he did. If we said, “I’m going to live today, I’m not going to get

wounded,” that happened and in our battalion we only had ten, eleven, twelve casualties and nine of those came from scrub typhus.

Well if you say that you’re going to, if you think you can, you will, and if you think you can’t, you won’t.

If you think you can, you will, you’re making the appreciation and you’re anticipating. In the jungle does a leaf move? You’re watching. There could be someone there. The birds fly out of a tree for no reason. You’re sort of making that appreciation all the time. You’re looking and watching and I suppose

like the old padre said, “You’ve got to believe in God, that God will look after you,” and that’s not strictly true when you hear some of the reports out of Malaysia and what happened. Terrible atrocities occurred there, as you’re probably aware.

No. There were things that weren’t in the textbook, like fishing with grenades for fish and two officers, or one officer got injured twice because he didn’t appreciate what the natives were telling you when to let the grenade go and that was well, perhaps at this stage I’ll tell you about one particular

incident that occurred. We were a bit short of food, we’d only had bully beef and biscuits. The Japanese had cleared out all the native gardens and we decided we’d get some fish. We had the PIB, the Papuan Infantry Battalion, part of the Pacific Island Regiment, with us and members of ANGAU [Australia New Guinea Administrative Unit], the carriers, and

native tribesmen. As we came to the different villages where natives had lived or had moved back when the Japanese went through, the lulua said to me that “We can catch fish with grenades.” I went down with the one of the boys and the lulua was standing by the edge of the ocean.

It was fairly shallow. There were waves breaking not very big and he said, “We’ll take an eight second grenade,” they’ve got colour markings to tell us what a grenade is and he said in pidgin English, “When I say right you let the handle of the grenade go.” We know it’s got eight seconds and then he goes one, two, three,

four throw and so on the fourth stamp of the foot you throw the grenade and it hits the water and goes off, just as it hits the water. So we stood there for over half an hour, nothing. Now there wasn’t a ripple of fish that you could see. I could see nothing and he said, “Em, I come now master.”

So I let the pin go, and he goes “One, two, three” throw, and it hit the water and you should have seen the result. I don’t know how he knew that the fish were coming but they did, they had some instinct and what happened, all these big silver fish not unlike what we call here a silver or a black bream, came up to the top and there were, I don’t know.

Many, many dozens of them, big fish, stunned. We went into the water. We stripped off our, I only had a shirt and trousers, took them off we went in, you don’t have underpants, went in the nuddy and collected the fish and when we got these back to the shore, he had a big basket woven out of palm leaves,

we put the fish in that and he said, “More fish I stop,” and we went in the water and that’s when we learnt that the grenade, I think it’s where the water is in the fish’s gills. Some come to the top and many go to the bottom and there on the sand were all these silver fish, as many were on the top were on the bottom. I was up to my chest in water going down picking them up

and suddenly coming towards us through the water is a shark fin, travelling very fast. I took off. So did my mate. Ran out of the water and he came back and he said, “Master I’m I prim bilong yu.” I said, “Yu mi no prim bilong me.” “Yes, me speak tru masta. I’m I prend.” Now you can’t lose face with the natives.

You can’t do that. You have to always trust these natives. They were unbelievable. They could smell a Jap and hear a Jap before you’d even know there was a Jap in the jungle. So we went into the water and I can tell you it’s a funny feeling when you’ve got no clothes on and you’re up to here and there’s a shark there eating fish off the bottom. We were picking them up and you know this shark

he grazed all the leg. He was getting the fish and he came past, he was very rough, and I got a, it was grazed and I thought, oh dear that’ll be blood, that’ll make him go for me. I thought about the John Thomas too and the result was, when we came back later we were talking to this native and he said, “No, no teeth.” He made noises like a, and turned out

to be a gummy shark and they can tell by the shape of the fin and this sort of endears you to the natives, and many other times on the mouth of the Ramu River the only way we could cross was in big logs, no outriggers, big logs that the natives had hewn out and they paddled. The Ramu River was running very quickly and to get to the other

side they had to row up close to the bank on one shore and then when they got up about a quarter of a mile, they’d aim the canoe straight across the river and by paddling hard they would come back as the current took them out and you would land on the far bank and that’s the only way we could get the troops across, and I was waiting for a canoe on the bank of the river. Standing very close, very muddy river, running very fast, and this native

said to me “Masta puk puk I come.” Puk puk being the pidgin English for a crocodile. “Puk puk I come.” Well I couldn’t see any sign of a crocodile, nothing, there was not a ripple and he said, “Puk puk come” and all of a sudden he grabbed me and threw me backwards and this crocodile came, launched itself out of the river onto the bank. Now how they know that, I’ve got no idea.

I just can’t believe it and it was well in behind the Ramu River that we came across a native tribe. This native tribe worshipped the moon. As far as we could determine, the lulua that was with us could speak a little bit of their dialect and there was no indication that any missionaries had been in touch with them.

I have maps of New Guinea taken from the air, which show us that in these areas head hunters and cannibalisms, cannibals still exist. That’s printed on the maps that we can show you later, so here was a tribe that grew vegetables and fruit and they worshipped the moon and they explained that they had a god and the god gave them

certain commandments which were not unlike our own, and they said that “They come from the moon and their god’s in the moon and when they die they go to another world” and he said, “Come masta” and do you know they took me to a bush and on this bush, which was round about

a little bit taller than I was, there was a big green caterpillar. He must have been all of nine inches long, very big, eating leaves and he said, “That that caterpillar,” or that grub as he called it, “Will die and he will die and he’ll be encased and out of his body will come the big blue emperor butterfly,

and the butterfly is going to fly up into trees and flowers, that the grub could not ever conceive because the grub was on one tree and couldn’t go anywhere,” and he said, “That’s what’s going to happen to us. We believe that we will change. We cannot imagine where we’ll be going or what we’ll be like. The grub couldn’t imagine that he had wings and fly,” and he said, “We will

change and go to another world that we can’t conceive.” Now isn’t that a wonderful lesson and I’ve told that to many people through my life that they say, “Well we had an atheist with us” and he said, “There can’t be a god,” and we were in New Guinea and I said, “Look, at night lie down, look up there,” and there were the, oh in New Guinea where there’s no lights the stars are so bright and I

said, “You look up there and I want you to imagine that you could go up and up and up and up, can your mind accept that perhaps there’s no infinity. What created all this, what created our world? Where did it come from and how do you know that there’s not another sort of universe, something different?,” and he changed. He was no longer an atheist. He said, “I believe.” Purely and simply lying on his back and looking up into the heavens

and listening to what the natives told us.

Well I had never realised that there was a race so primitive, so back to basics. The thing that I remember most of all was we had

native carriers. They would carry a lot of our equipment. We carried our ammunition, our rifle as we went up the coastal tracks and particularly as we approached we were chasing the Japanese and approaching Hansa Bay. One of the native carriers came up and I was just behind the colonel, and he said to the colonel, he wants to stop and the colonel said

“Why?” and he said, “Mary have picannini.” Now his wife was carrying on her back and she was pregnant with child and he said, “Mary have picannini.” Now the colonel said, “We can’t, we can’t stop. We’re advancing,” and he wanted ten minutes. They could, they understood time, hours and minutes. Ten minutes.

He disappeared into the jungle, went down to a creek and so help me goodness in ten minutes he came back, the Mary was carrying a picannini on her breast and we started the march again. Now that sort of thing when they, I knew that there were hospitals and people were going and having babies and in maybe a week or two weeks in hospital, to have a

baby. I said, “How?” and they went into the water, into the creek.

Yes.

Yes.

There was ah in,

certainly in 1941 and 1940 there was but after the fall of Singapore that changed because they could see there was a threat to Australia and we were no longer referred to as chocos because they were over there and we were here and the word choco seemed to disappear. A lot of our boys got white feathers [as a sign of cowardice]. I know in the company

that I was with, Perpetual Trustee Company, because it was dealing with wills and death we were made semi-reserved occupation and some elected to stay and others decided that they would go and that became a problem area. In fact the management said to me that “I had been trained in trustee law, as a probate officer

and that I shouldn’t go” and he said, “We won’t give you leave. We can we can stop you,” and I went to our colonel, at that stage Jimmy Russell, in the 30th Battalion and I got a letter from him to say that I’d been trained and I was needed in the Australian Army, so that was that, but let me tell you that when I came back from the war, it was

in October 1946 that I rejoined the Perpetual. I only stayed there three months because I could see that those friends of mine who had started when I started and who had elected to stay were now in top managerial positions and I could see no chance at all of getting anywhere for many years to come, that’s why I elected to leave and go to David Jones.

Yes. Me.

I got one. I got one from a girl at Perpetual and quite a few of the other lads they got it, but that changed of course. One lad that got it was a great friend of mine. We worked in the same department, Bob Davenport, his initials were R.W. R.W. Davenport. He got a white

feather, but that didn’t mean that he necessarily joined the AIF, but he did. He got permission from his parents and he was actually killed in New Guinea and the girl that sent him the white feather was very upset about that.

And the one that I got, well that was old hat. I couldn’t do anything about it. I wasn’t allowed to join the AIF and a white feather meant nothing. I was already doing my bit and that

was that.

Yes. Yes I do. Yeah.

Oh because she had a boyfriend in the AIF and she was in the copying or duplicating department in the Perpetual Trustee Company. Her name was Field and she was the one who anonymously sent it. I got this. There was no clue

who had sent it but later she said to me, “Did you get a white feather?” I said, “Yes, and I know who sent it now, you did,” and there we are.

Well I wasn’t present. I wasn’t present when she was

told. I was away at the war, but I know she broke down and had to have some medical treatment because of that action.

Well having sent the white feather and then he joined the AIF and then he was killed in New Guinea, when the message came through, I think it had affected her greatly and she was very upset and had to be given leave for awhile.

No.

No, because what could I do about it? I was under age. They wouldn’t let me join the AIF and I was already in the militia.

I don’t know what was behind it except the name that we’d been given as chocos, as chocolate

soldiers, and the fact that there were troops overseas and I think it was just a phase that they went through. It was only a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK ’s feather anyway.

Having arrived in Western Australia and knowing that there was a threat of Japanese invasion the powers that be decided that the unit should become AIF because we would be engaged in action against the Japanese, so they lined us up and they said, “All those that are prepared to join the AIF would they

one pace step forward march. Most of us did, including myself, but I qualify it to say that I get, had to get permission, I was still under twenty one, and a very few didn’t join and the strange thing about it is those that didn’t join still went with us. They went to New Guinea, as an N number not an NX number, and

they received all the benefits of a returned soldier. So that we did have some with N numbers and also when we had reinforcements in Queensland at Atherton Tablelands, we had Q numbers. In fact that mate of mine, Bob Sharp, was a Q number and he was the one that died of scrub typhus at Madang.

No.

No, that was Steve Brown. No

That’s a different story.

We’re gonna come to that later.

Because let me tell you now that after the war I decided that with my knowledge of probate law and I suppose a legal aspect, I became the welfare officer and I’ve done over twelve hundred cases for the veterans and when we say twelve hundred, some of them I’d take to thirty per cent

and then others would perhaps go to sixty per cent as they got older and their disabilities got worse, then up to a hundred and many to the EDA [Extreme Disablement Adjustment], which is the next level, which means with this extreme disability adjustment, should they die being hit by a bus or drowned, their wife will automatically become a war widow and get a gold card and in the case of Steve Brown in

1983, we received a phone call here from a Mrs Mary Brown to say that was I the lieutenant in the signal platoon of the 35th Battalion where A.O. Brown was? We knew him as Steve, was and I said, “Yes,” and she said, “He died and I’m in very poor circumstances

and I need a war widow’s pension.” So I said, “Right, the first thing we do is we apply to Veterans’ Affairs, I will do that and I’ll get a copy of your service and medical records, so that I can study it and I want a copy of the death certificate.” Now he died from a tumour on the brain and that of course is not included in any war disabilities. It could happen to anyone and two things happened.

When I knew it was a tumour on the brain I contacted the Sydney University and the University of New South Wales oncology departments and I found that all the causes of a brain tumour, one of them was shock treatment. Now Steve Brown did have what we call tropical or jungle madness,

and he went what we call ‘troppo’ [mental instability caused by war] in New Guinea and he was sent back to Australia and was given shock treatment. Now in his medical records that I received, and remember I’m doing the case now, to prepare a case for Veteran Affairs, when I look at his service records, they’re still looking for Captain Francis. They said, “He had psychological problems” and he did,

he was to go to the psychiatric centre but we can’t get any clues and I had the giggles cause here’s me doing the case and they’re looking for me still. They haven’t found me yet. So I was able to argue with the tribunal that his medical condition was due to his shock treatment and it was granted and she became a war widow but it’s funny how history

repeats itself in strange ways.

Yes I do. I do.

I do. I do.

Well I feel that probably he was already unbalanced when he was drinking the cheap wine from Penfolds back at Wallgrove and when he decided when he was going to

kill the colonel, and when we think back, he would say funny things on the telephone. In Western Australia he was telling us one day that “He saw cockatoos on a signal line doing loops, going round and round and round” and he did a few very strange things

in New Guinea. For argument’s sake, one night he told the boys “He was taking a piece of string to lie down on his ground sheet” and they said, “What are you taking the string for?” and he said, “To measure how long I sleep.” Now these were all indications that he was unbalanced but there was no sort of medical diagnosis at that time about him and it

wasn’t ‘til he suffered a break down in, when we reached Hansa Bay that he was sent back for medical treatment and shock treatment.

Crying. He’d break down. We were going into action and he’d say, “I don’t want to go,” and he would make mistakes in signalling and we had to report this to the regimental aid post

and they looked at him, they called the doctor and the doctor said, “He’s unbalanced and we’ll have to send him back,” and he was sent back to Australia.

No. The only case I know of. Only one.

Well it’s what we call going troppo and quite a few felt like it, I mean there’s no doubt about it, but they, it didn’t go to the extreme that he went to.

It is possible. Actually, we hear a lot about homosexuality in the infantry today. I can assure you that in the 35th Battalion where you lived together, you’re in tents together, you’re very close

together at all times, there was never one case of any suggestion of anyone being even effeminate and there was certainly no sign of any homosexuality. Mind you they used to, whenever we had tea they used to put bromide in it. Now bromide, so they’d claim, and it seemed to work, deadened any sexual desires that you might have and

although we had no sign of any white women, we did see, well the natives, the Marys would walk round with bare breasts. There was no suggestion of cover up. They’d have a grass skirt and that’s all but as the boys said it made no interest to them because they had an unearthly smell. Now the natives could smell us and we could smell

the natives. Strange thing, but there was never any thought of sexuality amongst our battalion and there was nine hundred people. We lived closely together and never once was there any indication of anything like that.

Never. No. We do today. We hear about the navy and all these things but in our day, no. It wasn’t

even talked about. Wasn’t even mentioned.

Well I think it was never discussed. They had their letters. Some of them were married, some of my lads. Some of my boys, my sergeant was married, my storeman was married and they would have their letters.

All officers were censors. We had a censor stamp and we had to censor the letters. Now I knew my men well enough and they said, I would ask them, I said, “Now on your honour, you’re not revealing any military intelligence,” and they would say, “No,” and I believed them and a couple of times I said, “Well I’ll just do a check to make sure,” but there was never any sign of it. Now they did

talk about their married life but there was no thought of women. It’s a strange, I can’t believe it that I could go all those years at that age and not think about sex but mind you it’s a different age that we lived in then. Different to today. Sex was never thought about, never discussed.

Strangely enough I never heard anyone mention it. Never. Never. They all said, “Whacko when we get back, when the war’s over, but let’s get this war finished first.” They didn’t discuss sex and I should know, goodness, I as a censor I would talk to the fellows and there was

never any suggestion of any problems. I know it’s hard to believe in this modern age but that’s what happened in New Guinea.

No, no. We’ve heard about the possibility of masturbation but we never saw it, we never heard of it. It just didn’t exist and our colonel said, “Well you don’t have to worry because we’d put it down to the bromide in your tea or bromide

in your water,” or whatever we were drinking.

No, I didn’t. I never saw it, but they told me it was there. Now it could have been a con trick. I don’t know if bromide was in the tea but it was stated. You could ask the cooks and the cooks would say, “Yes they’re putting it in,” but I never physically saw a bromide

powder or anything put into the tea and I could never detect it in the taste, the reason being that all our water had been chlorinated and it was a very strong chlorinated drink of tea that you got.

Yes.

Yes, well we’d already done a jungle school at Collie in Western Australia and remember we were now AIF, and we were taken up to the Atherton Tablelands to a place called Kairi. This was very tropical vegetation and we did exercises there

out towards a Lake Eacham and the only recollection I have, and we were doing exercises of course, the only recollections I have of any note is a very stinging nettle bush called Gympie bush and because in the need for doing the daily dozen it’s quite

funny because the war establishment, and you wouldn’t believe this, it shows everything that a soldier has to carry and how it’s worked out and if you look at the war establishment it says, “Paper, toilet, troops for the use of ,allocation males, three sheets per day.” Later when the women’s army started, the AWAS [Australian Women’s Army Service] and the WAAAFs [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force] and all that, the number was increased to five

in the war establishment, but with the three sheets per day, per soldier, the boys used to say “Oh good, one up and one down and one for polishing.” So often we had no toilet paper, so we would use the broad leaves of the jungle undergrowth. A banana leaf was excellent. We had a little trench tool, a little shovel, with an extending handle and to go to the toilet,

when you were out on exercises, you had to dig a hole that was the width of the little trench tool, which would be about three inches, and nine inches long and as deep as you could go and you’d leave the daily dozen in that, and you would clean your back passage and then you would cover it over to prevent blowflies and disease spreading.

One, two lads picked the wrong leaf, cause we had no paper. They picked a leaf of the Gympie bush and believe me they were hospitalised. It’s an excruciating pain. I rubbed against a Gympie bush and up to five, six years even after the war at times these bubbles would come up on the hand where I bumped it. That I can remember

so well. General Blamey brought up to Kairi some women of ill-repute because General Blamey said that “The soldiers needed some outlet” and although we were not there, we were not involved, there was an AIF unit that had come back and was being retrained in jungle

warfare and I think there were eighteen women installed in a little hotel, and that didn’t win him any favours. It was well known and well publicised that he was bringing prostitutes up to Kairi. It’ll be probably be in the record somewhere. Maybe it’s never been told, but it was true.

Oh yes.

No.

No, he was interested I believe in the welfare of the AIF units that were being retrained in jungle warfare prior to going to New Guinea. So we did our training and then we came down to a place called Gordonvale and we were due to embark, which we did on a Liberty ship, the Andrew D White. Now a lot of people don’t realise

that Liberty ships were built in America, turning out one a day. They were iron ships.

They were

Yes. We knew where they were coming from. It was general knowledge and these ships were very basic. They had hulls down at the bottom for merchandise and tanks and foodstuff and then you lay on sort of palliasses

or straw in a bit of hessian, and at night time they travelled in darkness, the captain would announce there’d be no smoking on the upper decks tonight. In darkness, and of course there was no smoking but let us now look at the Liberty ship. It was a captain. He had his own cabin and

a toilet. The crew consisted of a few engineers. They had two toilets. There were no other toilets on the ship, so what they did, on the port side of the Liberty ship they got pieces of two by two and if you could imagine they made crosses and in between the top of the cross they put corrugated iron,

and it started from the bow of the ship and came down to midships, on the port side, where it slewed over into the sea, and they put the sea pumps on and they’d pump water from the bow of the ship and it’d pass down this channel and out over the side and every couple of, about twelve inches they put little bits of two by two across the sides of the

corrugated iron, so in all you could get round about fifty bottoms onto the toilet system at a time. Now I want you to imagine that this ship is sailing through the tropics. It was so calm, beautiful days, warm and they were giving us reasonably good meals. They had a galley and you

would go down in different groups. We had nine hundred on the ship. Very cramped conditions. Now the first ones to have their breakfast went up and took their places on this toilet arrangement and most of them would sit there and they’d bring up a book to read. It was beautiful in the tropical air and the sea is calm. Now the next lot.

I was in another lot with Mick Humphries and we came up wanting to go to the toilet. Nobody moved. We waited ten minutes, nobody moved. They were all having their daily dozen but sitting there reading in the sunlight. So I said to Mick “I’ve got an idea. We go down to the cabin, I’ve got some old newspaper there.” I went down and got it and I said, “Now we’ll go right up to the bow of the

ship, we’ll crumple it up and I want you to light it and we’re gonna drop it in the water” and we did and this burning paper travelled very quickly down along the water and you shoulda seen the results. All the bare bottoms hopped up, they just got a little bit of a singe but it was travelling too fast. They jumped up, we walked over and had a seat and they realised what had happened and they thought it was

funny in the finish. They were gonna throw us overboard for awhile but commonsense prevailed and then on the way up we could smell food. We could smell pineapple and Len Dixon and Ronnie Gray saw an air vent coming up from the hold and inside this vent was a ladder. So they

went down the ladder in the dark and they found amongst vehicles and some Bren gun carriers, they found boxes and boxes of food and one of the boxes contained pineapple, so they came up, we alerted the sigs and with our bayonet we opened tins of pineapple and we had a great feast. The only problem was that the smell of pineapple went right through the ship and we

got away with this. They said, “That somebody had been down.” We didn’t know anything about it, but we had a good feed of pineapple. Now when we came into Finschhafen we were on the Liberty ship and they’d bring LCMs or Landing Craft Marine alongside, you’d go down the ladders, rope ladders on the side of the ship into the landing craft and we were taken ashore.

Now in Finschhafen, the Americans had built quite a substantial sort of almost a city there and they had lights, except when the air raids came the black out was on, and the 9th Division had taken Finschhafen. They’d landed at Scarlet Beach and they had quite a few casualties. Now my brother, the first eldest brother was Aussie

Hawdon and he was a Sergeant cook in the 2/3rd Pioneers. He was on the other side of Finschhafen and although I knew him, I hadn’t seen him since I was about fourteen or fifteen but I knew where he was.

Yes I, well I knew he was the 2/3rd Pioneers. I didn’t know that he was there but through the telephone line I established that he was there, so I went to our colonel, Dougie Ray,

and I said, “Can I borrow your jeep? I want to go and see my brother,” and he said, “Yes, I’ll lend it to you but you’re going through an area where there’s infiltration of Japanese.” He said, “If you get killed you stole it. If you get back I lent it to you.” I said, “Right, that’s a deal.” I went down, saw the brother and he said to me, “You know, to mark the occasion I’m going to make some scones.” Now remember, we hadn’t seen scones for ages.

Oh when I was about fourteen, fifteen. A long, long time. I hadn’t

Oh I could recognise him, yes. You see, I hardly knew my brothers. Some brothers I’d never seen but this one I had seen because he’d come out to Bondi on one occasion and I had met him and I’d heard that I had two brothers in the service, Les in the artillery and Aussie in the 2/3rd Pioneers.

So I went down and he said, “I’ve got a lot of turtle eggs we collected off the beach this morning and I’ve got flour and we’ll make some scones,” which he did and believe me, they turned out alright and I came back and that was the last I saw of Aussie until about 19, 1960 when I saw him fishing up at Lion Island.

I love fishing and we did, he was fishing at Lion Island in the Hawkesbury and we had a talk but then at age sixty five he died. He died of cancer from smoking and the funeral was held at the crematorium at Northern Suburbs and funnily enough, he wasn’t a religious man, and they had a padre that was on circuit. He was eighty

six years of age, came from the Blue Mountains and he stuttered and he said early in the piece he said, “Now do you know any history of your brother?” and I said, “Yes,” and I wrote down how at Finschhafen I’d been down to see him, how he made a batch of scones out of flour and turtle eggs. So the ceremony starts. He gets up. He talks about the brother. My sisters and his wife and his

boy. We were all tearful. Aussie was a bit of a character. He used to drink a lot of beer and he was a fairly wild sort of a guy but full of fun, and the padre says and he stuttered and he said, “And and and d d d d during the war his his bro his b b brother

Frank Frank l l l l landed in Fischhafen and went and and went down down to see his b his bro br br br went down to see his brother and to mark the occ to to mark to mark the the occ o o o occasion he he he made he made some some he made some s s s s scones and he made these

scones scones” and he’s reading, “scones out of f f f f flour out of f f f flour and and flour and turds” instead of turtle eggs. Well you should have heard everyone. It’s from crying, they’re laughing and there it was. He said they’d been made out of out of flour and turds and Aussie was sixty five when he died.

My other brother, Les, in the artillery died at sixty five. I turned sixty five and I went to Concord [Hospital] for a check up and they give you a check up. They check your heart, they check everything and finally you go to a psychologist or the psychiatrist. My wife Joan was waiting for me outside and this was taking, I rode a bike and they checked

my heart and oh all sorts of things. Took nearly all day. I came to the psychiatrist, which was a routine thing that had to happen and this fellow, his name was Brady, and he sat there and he wore glasses on the tip of his nose like this and he said to me “What is your name?” and I told him. “Where do you live?”

and I told him. He asked me about the brothers and sisters. I told him that I’d lost Aussie at sixty five and Les at sixty five and he said, “You think you’re going to die at sixty five, don’t you?” I said, “Never gave it a thought.” He said, “Where do you live?” I told him. “How old are you?” “What is your name?,”

and he went on with more questions and believe it or not after half an hour he said to me, “What is your name?” “Where do you live?” and I said to him, “Listen doc, that’s the third time you’ve asked me that question. Now one of us a gotta be stupid and it’s not me.” He went off his brain. He grabbed me by the back of the neck and the seat of the pants and he threw me out and I went down to Joan.

She was waiting in the car and I told her and I said, “I just can’t believe this guy. He’s mad. I’m not, he is,” and he wrote to my doctor, Dr Taylor at Mona Vale and he said, “This man is subject to mental disability.” That’s what he said to him. Now the doctor knew that I’d just been executive assistant of the chairman of ACI International. I’d been to Bahrain.

I’d been to Singapore. I’d run training courses. I’d lived in Penang for four months. I did all these sort of things and the doctor said, “Well,” he said, “I know there’s nothing wrong with you but I’ve got a letter here to say that veterans should be checked when they’re over sixty five, see how their heart is and they should have a stress test,” and he said, “I’m going to send you down to a Dr David Grout

at Dee Why for a stress test.” I said, “Look doc, I don’t need it. I’ve had a full test at Concord a little while ago and I’m okay” and I had a touch of flu and he said, “You’ve got a virus. I’ll give some antibiotics but I’ll make an appointment for you.” I went down to Dr Grout and they gave me a stress test and he said, “I think we’ll have another look at your heart in

about, I can’t get an appointment for three months.” I said, “Okay.” I came back here. That telephone rang and he said, “We got a cancellation tomorrow. Will you take it?” I said, “Sure.” I went up to the San Hospital. They gave me an angiogram and Dr Farnsworth, who trained with Dr Chan that was finally murdered, and Dr Grout came in. This is 1987 in March. He said, “Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

I said, “I’ll have the good news,” and he said, “We’ve tested your blood and you haven’t got AIDS [Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome].” That was the big scare at that time. I said, “Now the bad news.” He said, “You’re gonna drop dead any second. Your main artery’s blocked. You’ve got three other arteries blocked. You’re gonna drop dead any minute. You shouldn’t be alive.” I said, “Okay, what’s that mean?” He said, “Immediate open heart surgery.” I said, “Okay, let’s go” and he said, “No, I’ve gotta because of the AIDS scare, I want to take some of your blood and we’ll operate

on the 1st of April,” which was about ten days later and as we got ready for the operation, he said to me, he told me what’s gonna happen, “They’re gonna use a saw and cut down the sternum, they’re going to open the ribs, they’re gonna take my heart out, they’re gonna put in it some kind of a gadget and they put me on an automatic heart machine, they’re taking veins out of my legs and veins from all over the place and they’re going to graft them in” and he said, “Are you worried?” I said, “Not a bit.”

He said, “Why?” I said, “I had too many close shaves in the war,” and I said, “Once you give me that anaesthetic, if I don’t wake up I’ll never know, but if I do I’ve got a chance of winning,” and he said to me, “Son, you’re right.” He said, “I’ve done over two thousand and I’m not going to lose you,” and he didn’t. That was 1987. He said, “It’ll probably only last ten years.” That’s '87. I’m still going at 2003. That’s a lot more

than ten years, and that was one of the things that I can really thank this Brady, for telling my doctor that I was a screw loose [mentally unstable] and I was gonna drop dead at sixty five. Now if he hadn’ta done that I would of dropped dead. Isn’t that amazing? But I didn’t.

Yeah, well it was a fair way to go across through the Japanese infiltration area and a lot of Japanese had been killed, many hundreds, and because of the jungle they couldn’t dispose of the bodies and there were a lot of

native huts and Captain Chapman, one of our company commanders of Charlie Company, decided that the best thing to do was to pile the bodies onto these huts and set light to them and as I went down, none of our troops were in the area, we’d already been issued with Owen guns. I had a pistol but also an Owen gun and as we went down

past the, where these bodies were burning a strange thing happened. With the wind blowing the bodies nearest to where the wind was coming from, with the heat, suddenly seemed to come to life. I got the Owen gun ready cause I thought they were alive. Instead of that the bodies started to sit upright they were in the nude, they started to sit upright

on the edge of this hut and they had an erection and they started to pass urine and I was ready to shoot, and then they just fell back and that was the heat causing all the body to start to contract. An amazing thing. I often wonder what if that’s what happens in the crematorium. So there was no sign of Japanese. I got through and I got back.

Oh yes it was, only we landed under an air raid. An air raid alert had come and the blackout took place. We were put into big American trucks and I had a negro driving. I was in the front alongside him and I had my troops in the back,

and as we proceeded away from the wharf at Finschhafen the air raid alert sounded, the lights went out and I said, “Right, off the road into the jungle,” and he turned, and in the jungle a lot of secondary growth, as you hit it. You can nearly blow on it and it’d fall over like paw paw and that, but we found the one tree and we hit the tree, I went forward and I broke the bone up under the

eye there, and they couldn’t do anything about it, it’s still broken. It’s still there and then we went on to Kelanoa. We moved up the coast a little bit to a place called Weber Point and Gali. Now at this stage the Japanese had been leaving Lae and leaving Finschhafen and they were bypassing it to get up to

Madang and they were using inland tracks away from the coast. The intelligence and the planes flying over saw all these troops moving on inland tracks. Strangely enough in New Guinea any jungles will have a top, a peak, a ridge and when it rains all the water will run down either side and cause

the jungle to grow, but on the top there’s not much, doesn’t stay, and the Japanese found it, the natives told us and we knew it, that if you go from A to B, you follow the ridges and this is what the Japanese were doing. So our battalion was given the task of going up and cutting this line and killing whatever Japs we could. They were retreating to get to Madang.

What was, oh well first of all to kill, to take prisoners and get intelligence. We knew that they were short of food. We knew that they were, they had malaria and diseases so the battalion moved up into what was called the Finisterre Ranges. We went up through

places like Ruange and or Wandokai and eventually to a village called Tauta, that was a thousand feet up into the Finisterre and Don company with a great man of mine, Captain Frank Farmer, was in charge. They passed over five hundred dead Japanese. They were dead on the track.

Of disease and malnutrition. They were moving that quickly and they had no food and they were just dying. We killed a hundred and fifty two. The Papuan Infantry Battalion that was with us, amazing people, they could tell if a Japanese was in the jungle, I don’t know how, but very close to them. They could move

very quietly through the jungle and they killed over three hundred and they lost not one PIB [Papuan Infantry Battalion], which was a native New Guinea soldier.

The first, oh we’d had skirmishes around the Masarang River, but nothing serious. We might kill twelve or fifteen, but no big quantity. These were only stragglers.

No, I had a pistol.

No. No, I hadn’t. At this stage I hadn’t. So being in a battalion headquarters, it was the companies that were running into the enemy. Now Captain Farmer was approaching the village of Tauta and the forward scout reported that they were all sitting round fires and eating. Now Captain

Farmer encircled the village and on a command opened fire and they killed fifty two Japs. There was one of our fellows had a bullet through the hat, that’s all. Now when they got into the village they found that these Japanese were cooking and grilling meat. Now there’s no meat up there, there’s no animals

and they found in a hut six Japanese bodies that had been cannibalised, and in the dixies were steak and they had hearts and livers and they were eating their own men. Now that’s contrary to the report that we’ve had since the war that the Japanese authorised at that time the soldiers to consume enemy flesh

but not their own. They weren’t to kill their own men, only the enemy and they could eat it if they needed food.

Not that one. Not that one but I was at the battalion headquarters when the message came back from Captain Farmer and the message is in the book there explaining that these soldiers, Japanese soldiers had been killed, you could tell by the agony

and the looks on their faces and when the message came back, it was almost unbelievable and the colonel said to me, “Now there’s other reports now of cannibalism at a place called Wandokai,” and he said, “We must have confirmation of this,” and he sent the intelligence officer, who at that stage was a Lieutenant Des Sainsbury,

and myself as signal officer to go up and view the fact that there was cannibalism to confirm what Captain Farmer had reported. This was a village much closer to the coast. We went up and of course we did see it. We saw the cannibalised bodies. We saw the results, just unbelievable. Now at that stage…

Well,

you would see, you would see bodies with all the meat taken off the thighs, they’d been de-bowelled, they had kidneys and hearts removed, all the meat taken off the arms and mind you this was Japanese, not our men but…

Proof that they were cutting up and eating

human flesh.

Well the fact that the bodies were there with all the meat cut off, and in fact in one case in a hut there were bodies strung up by the ankles and they’d had their throats cut and de-bowelled like a butcher’s shop and they had meat cut off them, and there was plenty being cooked and there was no meat. You don’t find steaks up in New Guinea in the jungle. The biggest animal was a ‘cus cus’ like

a monkey, or a crocodile, but then that’s a white coloured flesh, and the pythons, very seldom could you get one, and the snakes were only small. It was different flesh but to find a steak like we know a sirloin steak or something, just is impossible.

It was.

It was and now

Repulsive. It was unbelievable. We could not believe that a human person would do that to another human person, but later on, not only did it happen to Japanese but we had some of our own men shot, killed and consumed.

Well it makes you mad. So much so that the brigade was asking for prisoners. We took no prisoners after that, no prisoners were taken. I can recall coming into a sweet potato patch and

there was a Japanese badly affected with dysentery and he was very weak, he was lying in the potato patch and I was with my sergeant, Len Dixon. We came across him quite accidentally on a track along the coast.

We were heading out of or towards the Ramu River.

We were going along the coast of New Guinea.

Ah advancing. We, the whole battalion. We were, we moved quite a few hundred miles. If you look from Finschhafen to Wewak, it’s a long way up the coast and we always moved along the coastal tracks, and we came across this Jap and he was making signs and the sergeant said to me, “What about it

skipper?” and I said, we knew that they committed this hari-kari [suicide] and we used to call it hari-kari with saucy waucy cause it was all the blood and guts with it, and he said, “What about it skipper?” and I said, “Yeah, throw him your knife.” We had jungle knives and this native, ah this Japanese knelt and he took the knife and he plunged it into his stomach and he cut to the right

and he cut to the left and he cut down and he cut up and all his stomach and guts fell out, he never said a word and finally he just fell over and died. Now later I was talking to this Captain Yanagoa and he told me that they were the samurai, the lowly educated Japanese soldiers.

A lot of the marines and officers were different. They didn’t want to die in warfare but the samurai did and it was a great honour to be killed.

Yes. Yep. We couldn’t believe it but we were not taking prisoners. We’d seen cannibalism and it was just one of those things. Today, I couldn’t do it. When I came back from the war, I was given a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK [chicken] at Turramurra,

a live one. I couldn’t kill it. No way and I can’t believe that in warfare you get to the stage where it’s their life or your life and you do these things. You gotta be brainwashed. You’ve gotta be.

Oh in a couple of times, yes. Yeah I, oh not as much as the forward troops. We would only get it when the forward

companies had gone forward and Japs would infiltrate into our headquarters.

Ah yes, yes. On one occasion, you see in the jungle a Jap could be as close as you are to me. You can’t see them and there was a movement, we knew that there were Japs in the area,

and this guy I could see the rifle coming up, I had my pistol and fired and he dropped. Dropped dead. It’s unbelievable that you can do these things. I couldn’t do it now and I couldn’t do it later in life. Can’t understand how, it’s a terrible thing war, but when it’s your life or their life

you’ve gotta do it.

Where? As we approached a place called Hansa Bay and that brings up another strange story, inasmuch that on the 22nd of May 1944,

as we were advancing up the coast the thing that was delaying us was getting a signal wire out. We had to keep communication back to brigade headquarters and the coastal track had been, there was no roads but the Japanese had made two little wheel tracks through the coral sand between the coast

and the swamp, and there was always swamp on the left and sea on the right, and the colonel sent for me and he said, “We’re advancing too slowly. We can’t get the communication, the signal line out.” He said, “We’re at Ramu River, 22nd of May 1944,” and he said, “I want you to look at these aerial photos that are just been flown of the area ahead of us where the Japs were retreating,” and he said,

“Now according to the report from Blamey there’s many thousands of Japanese located there,” and he pointed to a spot on the map which was about five miles ahead of where we were and he said, “Have a look at this aerial photo? Do you think there are any Japs in the area?” and we had a thing called a stereoscope that you looked down

on the maps and like a magnifying glass. You have two photos. You bring them together and it brings 'em up in third dimension.

And I said, “No.” He said, “Why?” I said, “Because across the wheel tracks I can see watermelon vines and I can see small shapes like cucumbers.” Now the Japs were eating anything. They’re eating these land crabs, big yellow crabs that go running across all over the place and he said,

I said, “There’s no sign of a Japanese there whilst there is a watermelon like that.” He said, “That’s the conclusion I’ve come to.” He said, “To make a speedy advance, would you be prepared?,” they’d already brought his jeep in on an LCM [Landing Craft Mechanised] and we were able to use a jeep from river to river and then when we came to a river, it would be taken out onto an LCM and taken to the, round the river onto the next track,

and he said, “Could you get up to, could you do five miles of cable in the morning, so that we can make a speedy advance?” I said, “Yes,” and he said, “You realise that there’s a possibility of land mines.” I said, “They’re retreating too quickly. I don’t think there’ll be time for land mines,” and he said, “Well would you be prepared to take some sigs and lay the cable?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “I want you to put five

miles of cable out so we can move very quickly tomorrow.” I said, “Yes.” So on the morning of the 23rd, I got his jeep and he said to me, “Now if you get killed you stole it,” his old story, “If you get back, I gave you the order and lent it to you.” I said, “Okay.” We shook hands on that.

Why was it?

Oh yes, I had the signal

wire. I was the sig officer. I had the wire. I had my pistol, they had their Owen guns and what he was saying “Would I quickly run the cable out to where Blamey was saying all these Japs were?,” and I said, “There’s no Japs there,” and he said, “There’s no Japs there,” and subsequently I’ll tell you what happened later, but Blamey was making a lot of story about where the Japs were and what was happening in New Guinea in his reports,

so I took Harry Bromley, George Brown and Bob Duck and we started out. We laid the cable. Saw no Japs.

Oh yes. Our lines had stopped where the colonel was. We had no troops forward. I was going into Japanese territory or what was allegedly Jap, well it was, it wasn’t our territory because we had stopped at the Ramu River

and we went, we laid the cable out. In fact we even came to a creek where the jeep had stopped and I said to the boys, “Now we’ve still got a mile of cable. We’ll go across this creek,” it was fairly deep, “And we’ll continue on and get rid of the cable because the boys’ll be able to cross. The jeep won’t, but the boys’ll be able to cross,” and

they cross by putting outposts with weapons in case crocodiles come, and I said to Harry Bromley, “You cover me.” He said, “We’ll never get across there. We can’t throw the cable across, how will you go?” I said, “Well what I’ll do, it’s by the look of it, can’t be all that deep. I’ll take the mile drum of cable, and I’ll hold it up over my head on a bar and it’ll

go round as I walk. I’ll go down. If it’s too deep, I’ll take a deep breath and keep walking and come up the other side.” So we agreed on that and I said, “All you’ve gotta do is to keep the crocodiles away, if any come,” and usually they would not attack underwater, they’d come across the top of the water without any movement. So we crossed it and put the cable out, came back.

Well it’s quite an amazing situation because you’ve got all your equipment on, you’ve got your pistol, you’ve got your grenades on your belt, you’ve got your ammunition and it’s a matter of getting the cable across. The only way I could get it was to take the drum of cable across and then we could get it up on trees over the water and it’s a strange feeling because you’re not sure if there’s crocodiles, and how deep it is,

but it wasn’t that wide. It would be the width of this room and I can remember going gradually down and it was a bit muddy and then I went down under the water, I took a deep breath and kept going, it’s a bit hard with the orientation. With the water running, you’re wondering if you’re going in the right direction cause you’ve got your eyes shut, and you could feel the water and I felt as long as the water’s coming on my left side,

I must be going across at right angles, and finally I came up the other side and that was it. It’s, looking back now it’s probably scary because of the crocodiles and what might happen. I might get washed away, I might drop the cable, I might get tangled round my legs, I might drown, I don’t know but it didn’t happen.

No. No. I was intent on getting across. No, I never gave it a thought. I did think about the crocodiles because I know they were in all those rivers.

Yes, not in our battalion. Some did in the 30th Battalion, but not in ours. We always posted weaponry on either side and you’ll see photos there of the guys with their Owen gun

covering the troops as they crossed the water and on many occasions they did shoot crocodiles, but no one was taken by the crocodile. It’s quite a scary thing cause there’s a lot of them up there and I’ll tell you about crocodiles later. Now as a result of that having proved Blamey wrong, we eventually captured Hansa Bay.

Well he was saying to big note himself and the war in New Guinea, that there were, I think it was fifteen thousand Japs located there and I went a mile past them. Never saw a Jap. The Japs were still moving up the coast.

No. No, they were extremely,

they had no food, they weren’t getting a lot of supplies. The supply lines had been cut off. They were most of them had malaria, a lot of them had dysentery and that’s why we passed those five hundred-odd dead bodies. Sometimes, I didn’t actually witness the shooting, but I saw the aftermath of it.

One of our boys shot two Japs that were having intercourse. Two males and one bullet got two soldiers and we laughed about that to think that we could kill two at one time.

Well they didn’t see, it was John

Simpson he did, they didn’t see him coming. They were in the middle of the sexual act and he just came up and put a bullet, mind you - we’d had all this cannibalism, and he just came up and put a bullet through the two of them. One bullet went straight through and killed them both.

Yes. Yes, they’re strange things that happen and they all carried

condoms. There’s one in our history there. We took many condoms. They were called ‘bonne heure’, which is French for good hour, and Japanese writing on it and they’re a strange looking condom. You can witness one, you can see it there. To me it reminds me of some kind of an animal’s skin. Plastic wasn’t known in those days

and it’s certainly not silk. I’ve got no idea what it’s made from and I never really checked it but I kept one because people couldn’t believe that Japanese condoms existed, and it’s there in that book that I’ve put together.

One of the dead Japs. Oh I coulda got more. We got as you’ll see, we’ve got invasion money.

They had pounds, ten shillings and shillings all printed for the occupation of Australia and that’s printed in English and there was much of that money. There was a lot of Japanese money we took and let me say that later on, I went to Japan and I thought, “Boy, with all this money, hundreds and hundreds of yen, I’m gonna have a ball,” but I didn’t because MacArthur got there first and he

printed a little sticker and that was the only way, you had to have a note with that sticker on to make it legal tender. It was occupational yen and it was, it was quite funny because I figured there’s got to be a black market somewhere and I found one, there was a printer printing it and all they wanted was butter or sugar, and on this troop ship that I was on, I got the cook to give me butter and sugar

and I went and I got about twenty of these things and I bought silk and other things.

No. Actually when we, one of our camps at Rutherford,

they had what was called a blue light tent and you could, if you went into Maitland, to have sex you could, this is early in the piece, this is the three month camp in 1940 January, January February and March. You could go to the, to this blue light tent and you could get a condom. In those days they were called French letters and if you did have intercourse,

when you came back you had to have the penis washed out. They had some kind of a disinfectant or something. I only know of one of my men that did it and he said, “Never again.” He said, “The wash out was worse than the intercourse.” Yeah. So that was the end of that.

Well remember the world that I knew before had been coloured, I suppose, with all these stories of Marx and what was going to happen.

Well it

It didn’t. Certainly it was nothing like the war that we originally thought, like had been fought in World War I where you were in trenches and you had enemy one side and us on the other side and trench warfare. That didn’t exist. This was jungle warfare and entirely a different scene,

but to me it was all a great adventure and that’s a funny thing to say, but I enjoyed every moment of that time in the army and particularly the time in New Guinea. I had a wonderful group of men and we worked as a team. I never gave an order that

I wouldn’t do myself and that came out later. Perhaps I should tell you. When we finally captured Hansa Bay a couple of strange things happened. The first one was, it was a very big Japanese depot with aerodromes and planes and fuel dumps and even Ford trucks taken from the Americans. When we got there

the first thing that happened was the colonel sent for me and he said, “How many Japanese battle flags have we captured since we left Finschhafen?” and I said, “Well there’s only one sir, that I know of and that’s held by intelligence.” Subsequently I did get one, which is on the

table over there but at that stage we only knew of one, and he said to me, “Has one of your men traded thirty battle flags with the visiting American warship for cigarettes, for Lucky Strike and Camels and whiskey, spirits?” and I said, “I’ve got no idea sir,” and he said, “Well you’d better find out because,” he said,

“At fourteen hundred hours today the captain of the ship with an American-born Japanese interpreter will be here to get the story,” and he said, “They’ve been out there trading and getting all these cartons of American cigarettes and bottles of whiskey and spirits.” So I said, “Who was responsible sir?” and he said, “They’ve

the man that went out,” and we had, we had a Japanese inflatable, there were a lot of these inflatable boats that the Japanese had, and he’d gone out to the warship on one of these inflatables and traded and he said, I said, “Who was it sir?” He said, “It’s one of your men. Thomas McMahon.” One of the forty thieves of Ryde. Smart operator, but a little bit punch

drunk. He’d been, he’d been forced in fights at the Sydney Stadium and he was at nineteen years of age, he’d won the junior crown in boxing and he was partially sort of punch drunk but he wasn’t stupid, he was a good signaller. In fact his photo’s

in there, and I went to Tommy and I said, “Tommy, we’re in trouble.” I said, “At fourteen hundred hours today we’ve gotta see the captain of that Japanese warship and an interpreter.”

American, what did I say?

Oh no, no. American warship, get carried away with the Japanese flag.

And,

I said, “Fourteen hundred hours we’ve got to face them,” and I said, “Tell me Tommy, how did you do it?” and he said, “I took it off the dead Japs.” I said, “But Tommy, there aren’t that many Japanese units in the area. You wouldn’t have thirty regiments that we’ve come up against. They’re retreating sure but you’d have to be Houdini to find thirty Japanese flags amongst the dead.” I said, “We’ve only got one

so far,” and he said, “Oh I got them.” So I said, “Alright, well you got to have a very good excuse how you got them.” We go up at fourteen hours, we go up to the CO. The captain of the American ship is there with the Japanese interpreter. So the Japanese interpreter has one of the flags and it looks good,

it’s silk, it’s got a red circle on and it’s got Japanese hieroglyphics up either side and he said to the interpreter, “Now what does this say?” and the interpreter read, “This side up. Stow away from boilers,” on the Jap flag. So the colonel said, “I want an explanation McMahon,”

and Tommy said, “Well sir, that American plane that crashed on the air strip at Hansa Bay, there was some parachutes there. We cut out silk squares the same size as the Jap flags, we drew a circle and we used a thing from the RAP [Regimental Aid Post] called mercurochrome,” which is a red dye you put on your cuts, and they painted a red circle and he said, “We weren’t too good on Japanese, so we got

some kind of a marking thing that the Japanese had,” ah not the Japanese, the natives gave them like a black ochre that they made for something, for their war paint and that and they got some driftwood, there was any amount of driftwood and, there are photos in their boxes and ships sunk in Hansa Bay, funnels sticking out of the water

and all this driftwood and he said, “We put the silk over the driftwood and we copied it.” Now the pieces of driftwood that they picked up from the boxes obviously read “This side up. Stow away from boilers” in Japanese. Now when the Japanese interpreter, that’s the American-born Japanese interpreter read this the captain burst out laughing and he said, “I’ve got to hand it to you Aussies.

That is really something.” He said, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do.” He said, “We will keep the flags and you can keep the cigarettes and the scotch and there’ll be nothing more done about it,” and we were dismissed and Dougie Ray said to me, “God,” he said, “You’ve got some great blokes there,” but he said, “I want a bottle a scotch.” Yeah.

We had a lot to do with it because as we came along the coast the natives would come back into their villages and we would trade anything for some fresh fruit and vegetables. They were much our way. They’d had some terrible

experiences with the Japanese, Japanese raping their women and actually killing them and for that reason they saw us as saviours for their way of life, which was very primitive, and the other thing was rice. The Japanese had that much rice that as they moved up the coast the rice was rotting, they couldn’t take it with them, and the stench of that

rice was unbelievable. When we got some good bags of rice, we cooked it and only, I suppose, in the last two years could I face rice again because we’d have rice at any time, rice all the time.

No. No, not really because we were moving that quickly that you would see them,

we’d talk to them. One in particular and I can’t recall his name and this took place in Hansa Bay. Let me tell you that just after this episode with the flags both our brigadier, Claude Cameron, and our colonel, Doug Ray, were relieved of their command by Blamey for the reason that they had proved him wrong and they had advanced too quickly.

So they were sent away and a new colonel came, a Colonel Egan. He’s dead now. Colonel Egan came from the 2/11th Battalion, the Western Australian Battalion that had been in the Middle East and they were over I think in the Rabaul area. He was relieved of his command for reasons that he was not a suitable leader

and he was posted to replace Colonel Ray and there were some unbelievable things happen. The first one, he decided that we weren’t trained in fire orders, and he was always well dressed and wanted to teach us more of the Middle East type fighting and we had been used to jungle fighting, so he

created a sand pit map and he had little villages and little bits of palms and little bits of bush and he got all of the officers together and he said, “Now I’m going to teach you to give mortar fire orders. I’ll give you the range and it’ll be either 'charge one, charge two or charge three'“ and a personnel type explosion

and he took each officer and he’d say, he had a long stick and on the end of it was a bit of a wire and a bit of cotton wool and he’d go, “A Japanese has just left this hut and gone to that hut” and we would give a fire order but Lieutenant Mal Mitchell was the next one up and Colonel Egan said, “A Jap has left that

hut and gone to that hut.” No fire order and the colonel said, “When are you going to give the fire order?” and he said, “I want to see what’s going to happen next.” So the colonel said, “The Japanese with two more has gone back to that hut,” and the colonel said, “What are you doing?” and Mitchell said

“Holding my fire, sir.” “Four Japanese have left that hut and run to this hut.” He’d given us the range of three hundred yards and what he should say, “Number one gun charge, two range three hundred yards, fire.” No fire order. Now he was getting exasperated and he said, “Four, five Japanese have left that hut and gone back to that hut.” Nothing happened and the colonel said, “Mitchell, when are you going

to give the fire order?” and Mitchell said, “When I get all the bloody Japs in the one hut.” You should have heard him. That was the end of that that exercise. Now at this stage I had acquired by various means a lot of Japanese earphones and at Hansa Bay, I set up a radio to pick up Australia and I was able to

in the evening pick up the ABC and then having learnt a lot about wireless I could build little transformers and little amplifiers and with the troops, while we were resting they were in tents, I ran wires out and put amplifiers and I would give earphones, we had three hundred, earphones to the troops and I would then monitor Australia and put all the news through

all these amplifiers and Colonel Egan sent for me and he said, “I want to hear the ABC news at nineteen hundred hours tonight,” or seven o'clock, and I said, “Yes sir.” So I ran a line over to his tent and I put a pair of earphones there. I had one speaker to monitor in the sig office, which I’d got by writing to 2KY in Sydney and somebody

sent one up to us. We needed a speaker. So I checked it, everything was working and at twenty hundred hours he sent for me and he said, “Hawdon, why did I not hear the news?” and I said, “Well I checked the earphones sir and you probably didn’t listen,” and he said,

“I’m not going to listen to earphones. I want a speaker.” I said, “Well I’ve only got one sir and that’s for the monitor. We can’t spare it,” and he said, “For disobeying my command you will pack your gear into full marching order and at daybreak tomorrow morning you will march to Sekwanam,” which is seven miles out into the jungle, through Japanese territory, where standing orders

said no patrols less than seven people can operate, and he said, “You will go alone and when you get there you will report to me by telephone.” So I saluted and I said, “Right sir.” So I got my gear, I got ready, I went round to ANGAU and I said, “I want seven carriers, I want them armed, we’re going out to Sekwanam in the morning and it will be a full fighting patrol.”

I said to my sergeant, “Now I’m going to obey the order and this is my report. I want you to send it to brigade as soon as I leave in the morning at daybreak.” At daybreak I was in full marching order, packed the lot. I went round, the colonel was asleep in his mosquito net on a ground sheet and I think he had a ground sheet

suspended between a couple of poles, and I shook him, woke him up, he was in the nuddy, I saluted and I said, “It’s Hawdon leaving sir.” He said, “Just for that for waking me up, you will not go until the sun comes up at 0900 hours.” I said, “Right sir.” Now what I didn’t know was that Dickson sent the message. It’s gone to brigade. Meanwhile

Frank Farmer, or the captain, had complained to the colonel about the action that was taken that I should not move alone in this area. I had, previously a Japanese, an American plane had run into trouble. The skipper got all the crew to parachute out, they were all collected except one who was hanging in a tree

about three miles into the swamp into the Jap territory. They’d sent out Captain Escott with A Company and he came back and he said, “There’s no way we can penetrate the swamp. We can’t get him. So I had a look at the map and I said, “I know the bearing. What we’ll do, I’ll take a little boy from 6th Brigade called Alan Nicholls. We’ll get their dinghy,

their life raft, we know the bearing where he is. They’ve seen that where he’s hanging in a tree,” and we paddled all day through the swamp and we would mark the trees as we went and I took one native with us and that native was the one that I really knew and was very friendly with, in answer to your earlier question. So when we got roughly in the area

I sent him up a tree and he could see the airman and he went over and cut him down and I’d given the native a message to say that, “If you are the airman, I am an Australian and we’re here to save you.” I wrote it on a map and he came back and we’d paddled all that day, came back through the swamp, brought him back to battalion headquarters. Now the CO, Colonel Egan, had recommended me for

a decoration for going through the swamp and the Jap territory to bring him back and save his life and already Captain Farmer had a decoration suggestion sent in for his work at Tauta and what happened then, when Egan woke up it was now 0900

hours and there was to be breakfast. There was no breakfast. When he went into this little tent where the officers had their breakfast, there was no breakfast. He called for his jeep. The jeep was up on blocks and all the wheels were off and he realised something was wrong and he said, “We’ll take further action on this.” Now at that stage, believe it or not fate stepped in, I collapsed

with a pain in the kidney and I was in a lot of agony and they put me on a hospital launch and took me back to the CCS at Madang by water. I was placed in the CCS and I saw my first white woman for many, oh over a year, and I’d grown a moustache and I had it twisted out here and she said, “What have you done

to yourself soldier? What’s that thing on your upper lip?” and when I got better I shaved it off, and I’ve never had one to this day. Now the message had gone through to brigade and brigade agreed that the colonel had given the wrong order. So he was immediately dismissed and he was told to report back to Australia and as he came down through Madang he visited the hospital to see all of our wounded and chaps that were there. When he came

to where I was lying in bed, he just looked the other way and Major Delbridge told me later that “On his way through brigade and division he had taken out and cancelled the recommendations for these decorations.” So that was the end of Colonel Egan.

Well I thought it was wonderful with

Dougie Ray and Brigadier Cameron. When they went, we saw a new breed of people that had come from the Middle East. They were no longer World War I officers and they treated men entirely differently. They were giving orders, I had one case, Colonel Armstrong took over. Now he was a real gentleman from Western Australia. He was what I’d call

an officer and a gentleman, whereas Dougie Ray was an officer and a soldier. Now he came to me and he said, “I want you tell me what happened with Egan,” and I told him and he said, “Well that was very wrong of him,” and he said, “I hope we’ll get along well together,” and we did. Now

Well I didn’t know much about him. I didn’t like what he

did at Kairi, bringing prostitutes up. I didn’t like the fact that he was making all these statements about the Japanese that were in front of us that weren’t there, and they were the two things that I thought, well I just didn’t like him, nor did the other officers. They didn’t think highly of him.

Yes. Yep.

No. No. It was too far removed from us. I mean you could do nothing about the chief of the military forces. You couldn’t, you couldn’t do anything.

No, because we didn’t hear what

MacArthur was doing in the Philippines and elsewhere.

No, we heard

We heard whispers about him being in Australia. We got a lot of whispers about the Americans running off with the Australian women. That sort of upset the boys a bit. MacArthur no,

we, he was as far as we were concerned the supreme commander and as he said, “I will return” and having seen what the American equipment was compared with to us, we realised that without the Americans we’d be gone.

Well the Americans had moved on to the Philippines and so had the 9th Division and the other divisions, we were a brigade of three battalions, which had taken over from a division of three brigades and nine battalions and it was true the Japanese were retreating

and our role was to keep them moving until we bottled them up at Wewak. We had the 6th Division landing at Aitape and they were coming down towards Wewak. We were moving up the coast and chasing the Japs into Wewak and it was just one of those things that we accepted.

Yes.

In hindsight there was. At the time we didn’t think it and we got one awful surprise when the war did end and, let me say that a lot of Japanese did not accept the end of the war. In fact on the day that the war ended A Company, which was down below one of these mountain guns in the hill, stripped off and ran into the sea in the nuddy. Now the mountain gun opened up and you should have seen the

result. With soldiers, no clothes on, running back into their weapon pits and manning their guns just in the nuddy. It’s quite amusing. It sounds like a comedy, and they shelled us and all that night, the 2/1st Artillery in Wewak fired over one thousand rounds onto the mountain, and even then they didn’t get the gun.

The gun was in a tunnel and they’d bring it out and fire and go back in, but let me tell you in the Hansa Bay area before we got to Wewak, I found the first case of insubordination. Our battalion headquarters were at Hansa Bay and we had A Company under a captain at that stage, Delbridge, located at the mouth of the Ramu River,

and there were Japanese inland a little bit. We knew where they were because we were being fed once a week by a Walrus. A Walrus was from the 8th Communication Squadron based at Madang and it would bring up some fresh meat and mail. It would come every weekend and strangely enough it was piloted by a Scotty Allen that I knew from Rose Bay,

and Scotty came up and we got talking and he said, “Do you know where the Japs are?” I said, “Yes,” and he said, “I’d like a bit of action.” He said, “I’ll teach you to fly if you’ll take me over the Jap camps and we’ll throw grenades at them.” I said, “Okay, you’re on.” So we did. Each Sunday, the first Sunday we took off and we flew up towards the Ramu, and over the Jap camps and

we had these eight second grenades and we pulled the pin out and he would throw them and the Walrus is a strange plane, it lands on water or on sea and it’s a pusher, the propeller’s at the back of the top wing, and the second time, oh he taught me to fly. I couldn’t land and I couldn’t take off but I could fly by keeping the horizon where it was and all that. The next Sunday he said, “Let’s

do it again.” I said, “Right.” We made the fatal mistake of picking the same Jap camp. We went in, we flew over the Japs pulling out the grenades. The Japs opened fire and hit our fuel line and the fuel was running out. We were well away from our headquarters. We were in behind Jap lines and he said, “He could see in the distance a lake, a Lake Annanberg” and he said, “I think I’ve

got enough petrol to keep me going and if I can’t I’ll glide and land on the lake,” and we did. We got down safely. We agreed that if the Japanese came that we’d fight them off as long as we could and we each kept one bullet, we each had a revolver, and we would shoot each other on the count of three, so they wouldn’t get us, and they’d kill us anyway, so we shook hands on that, and we spent the night sitting

on the wing of the aircraft and it was a moon and we saw what looked like a bow wave coming out and we said, “This is it,” but it turned out to be a big crocodile and it wasn’t the Japs at all. The next morning I got on the radio and I called up Madang and they sent another Walrus out with the things to repair the fuel line and fuel and the adjutant of the 8th

Communication Squadron said, “Now you’ve got to come back with us.” I said, “No, I’m gonna stay with Scotty.” Now the lake was on an angle, it was like a right angle, and he said, “Now to get the aircraft off, it’s dual control, I was sitting on the starboard side and he said, “We pull back and we thump the nose down, we pull back and we thump and eventually we’re thumping that hard that the plane will lift.” We tried to do that

and we couldn’t lift and he said, “There’s not a long enough runway. What I’ll have to do is to yaw the aircraft and go up the other leg of the lake,” and he said, “When we get to that point let the controls go because I have to yaw the aircraft round. If I put the float under the water, we’ll tip.” So he’s going full bore but we’re not lifting at all. He’s

building up speed, he yawed the aircraft round and he said, “Right now.” So we’re now round the corner and we’ve gained speed and we’re starting to try and lift the nose. Now we’re going towards the end of the lake. I can see the trees, all the jungle round about, and the opening in the trees where a stream came in was narrower than the wings of the aircraft,

and as we approached this we finally lifted and we’re flying towards these trees and I thought, this is it. We’ll never get through, we’re gonna crash and Scotty put the aircraft into a bank and I was on the starboard side, so I’m right looking at the water, he’s up above me, and we went like that and through the trees and up and when we got up above the jungle I said, “God, that’s fantastic,”

and he was out. He, he’d fainted. He was lying in the seat cold. So I was able to fly the plane and eventually he came too and he said, “We can’t, it’s not in the book. You can’t do that. There’s no way you can do what we did,” and I spoke to a number of people and they said what happened - the creek and the jungle and the rotting vegetation had put methane gas or a gas. Hot air was coming

down through the tunnel and as we went like that it lifted us and that’s the only conclusion that we can come to. Now a few days after that

No.

No, as a as a signal officer I could go out, visit the troops. I could do anything.

No. No. They didn’t know. How would they

know? No way.

What Madang?

Madang, the 8th Communication Squadron. The adjutant way back in Madang sent the plane out, another Walrus, to repair us and bring us fuel.

Yes. Yeah.

Well Scotty got into trouble but, for flying over Jap camps and trying to throw bombs at them, but they thought that was funny.

They said, “You’re mad. Both of you are mad to try it. You could have been killed.”

I do now but not then, it was exciting. I mean he was doing that to teach me to fly and I wanted to fly, and a few days later our company at the mouth of the Ramu River was due to attack a Japanese force further up the Ramu and the plan was that the Americans were going to come up

and bomb and neutralise the camp at 0730 in the morning, and our company was to cross what’s called a start line at 0730, so they would start moving towards where the Japs were, the planes would bomb and then we would move in and at 2200 hours that night a message came in that the bombing raid had been delayed to 0830.

So we had to get a message some twenty miles up to the mouth of the Ramu River to stop the company not to start at 730, if they did they’d be in the bombing area at 830. They had to delay their start to 830. We went to send the message through. The line was cut so the normal thing, if you can’t get through I sent a line party out. We had a

jeep there. We had Tommy McMahon and Ronny Dent and a jeep driver. Two sigs and a jeep driver. Took some cable and all the gear to repair the line. They went out and at some point they got fired on by the Japanese. They’d cut our line and were waiting in ambush. They got out of it. They came back and they said, “We

can’t get the line fixed. There’s no way it can be fixed. The Japs are sitting on where they’ve cut it,” and they said, “We’re not going,” and the jeep driver said, “We’re not, I wouldn’t go out there again,” and they said, “We refuse.” I said, “We’ve gotta fix the line,” and they said, “Well we’re not going.” So that was a trial and I said, “Alright, I will drive the jeep,” and I lined up the few

boys that I had at the headquarters on parade and I said, “Anyone that will come with me - one pace step forward march.” They all did, including Tommy McMahon and Ronny Dent, and I said, “Right, I’ll have you and you,” and Tommy said to me, “We’re going to get killed tonight skipper.” I said, “No we’re not. You know where the Japs are,” and he said, “How are you going to do it?” and I said, “When we’re getting near where

you were fired on I’m going to cut the line and I’m going to take a mile drum of cable. I’m going to join it up to battalion headquarters and I’m going on a compass bearing about a quarter of a mile,” and you know by distance with paces, “About a quarter of a mile into the swamp.” There was this narrow track, swamp on the left, sea on the right and I said, “I’ll go in and then through the compass I’ll turn through ninety degrees, I’ll go

up half a mile, I’ll come back ninety degrees about a quarter of a mile and I will have encircled the Japs,” and Tommy said to me, “What about the crocodiles in the swamp?” and you could hear them barking, the little ones bark like a dog. I said, “Tommy, what do you want, the Japs or the crocodiles?” and he said, “I’ll take the crocodiles.” So away we went. He told me where we were, I cut the line, talked to the battalion and we went into the swamp

and we did exactly what we said, came back, cut the line and talked to the company, gave them the message, and Tommy said, “I’d never have thought of that skipper.” I said, “How are you going back Tommy?” and he said, “Follow the line back,” and I said, “No, you’re not. The Japs will have already found it and they will be setting an ambush somewhere on that, in the swamp. We’re going into the sea.” He said, “You can’t go into the sea.” I said, “Yes you can, what you do, we’re going in

and we’re going out to a point where we mustn’t have this side of broken water. If a wave breaks we’ll be silhouetted against the waves against the whitewash. We’re going out into the swell and we’re going to a point where in the swell, we will breathe. The wave will go over us and then it’ll break towards the shore, no

one will see us,” and Tommy said to me, “What about the sharks?” and there were a lot of sharks up there, believe me. I said, “Tommy, what do you want, the Japs or the sharks?” He said, “I’ll take the sharks,” and we did and we got back. We went round, came back, got the jeep, got back to battalion and never again did anyone disobey an order. That was the first one ever that they’d disobeyed. Now I could have taken all sorts of action but I didn’t and having done that, they

never again disobeyed an order.

Exactly.

Mine.

Well, make an appreciation of the situation. Find out what to do, what courses are open to you. You do that and you say, “Right, what do we do?” and the answer was don’t go out where the line’s cut, go round them.

Never gave it a thought. I know that sounds stupid, but in action you don’t think. You don’t think about your personal safety. You’re a soldier, you’re to do what you’re supposed to do and you’re conditioned even to the point where if you have to die you do. Now you’ve got no ties, I had no girlfriend remember, and

I didn’t think of death. Never gave it a thought except that if it was to happen, it would happen.

A couple of the married ones did. Len Dixon, my sergeant, used to say to me “We’re gonna be lucky to get through this one,” particularly at Wewak. “We’re gonna be lucky to get out of this,” and I

said, “But we have to be positive and if we think before we act and we do the right thing we will get out of it.” On one occasion in our headquarters, we were right on the beach, I was in a dugout, and it was quite funny, this Colonel Armstrong, great man but he wouldn’t communicate his orders and he, a message came from the brigadier

to say, “Do this and do this and do this,” and the next day he’d say, “We’ve got to do this and this and this,” and he’d catch us unprepared. The intelligence officer had the maps, I had to do the communication. So I said to the intelligence officer then, who was George Brown, I said, “George, what I’m going to do, I’m going to tap the brigade line and I’m going to run it through our little dugout on the beach and I’m going to put a light there so that when a message comes it will

activate a battery and put a light on and give us a little buzz.” So we were in this dugout this night and we knew the mountain gun had been firing at us and the light went on. I said to George, “Right, let’s throw the switch.” We throw the switch and we had a little speaker there and it was the brigadier talking to Colonel Armstrong and he said, “We’ve now got

an aerial fix on some mountain guns and we want intelligence. The artillery hasn’t been able to knock it out. Will you send a fighting patrol up and check it,” and he said, “Have a look at your battle map, colonel?” and the colonel said, “Ah yes sir, yes sir, just a moment.” Now what we didn’t know was that George Brown, the intelligence officer, had his battle map in our dugout.

We’re listening. Out comes the colonel, walks into our dugout and says, “George, can you give me the battle map?” and with that through the loudspeaker comes the brigadier’s voice, “Are you there colonel?” and Colonel Armstrong, “Yes sir, yes sir I’m coming,” and he didn’t realise and he got out and walked back with his battle map. Now we didn’t tell him about that ‘til after the war cause we would have really got into strife for doing what we did

but at least we knew then what was happening.

Never. Never. You’ll see in the history where Colonel Ray and Major Shaw and Colonel Armstrong, they said that “I was as an officer,” probably

one of the most, I wouldn’t say intelligent, “But the most dedicated officer in the battalion and I got away with murder.” I did. Whatever happened, I never got into trouble and I never put anyone on a charge sheet. Never. Other officers did and they paid the penalty but never did I put anyone onto a charge

sheet, and when the war ended we had that message and that’s when the, when A Company went in the nuddy and they opened up. Now I stayed on and we got one heck of a shock because nearly eight thousand Japanese surrendered and came through our lines. Eight thousand and in our area we were only

about eight hundred, nine hundred men. We had eight thousand out there and they came in well equipped with weapons, with ammunition, with swords and that’s when I sat down with Captain Yanagoa. He had been one of the marine captains. He had been educated at Cambridge in England, could speak perfect English. We talked about Australia

and he said to me, “We made our biggest mistake in looking at a map of New Guinea and thinking we could land at Lae or Buna, Gona, Sanananda area and just walk over a little distance on the map to take Port Moresby. We were then in a position to have an airbase to attack Australia.”

Well,

it was quite strange. There was no ill feeling. He’s suddenly there talking English, explaining to me about the maps, telling me how when we did shoot a Japanese, and he opened his fly and grabbed the penis, he said, “They’re the samurai. They’re ready to meet seven virgins because it’s honourable to die in warfare,” and he said to me, he said, “Believe

me Frank,” he said, “Our long term objective is to take Australia. We’ve got over forty,” or thirty million I think it was at that stage, “Thirty million Japanese, you’ve got all the resources, we want Australia, and you’re only about six or seven million people,” and he said, “We’ve tried to get it by warfare,” and he said, “Our long term objective is to get Australia,” and he said, “If we can’t get it by warfare we’re going to get it by economic means,”

and as I went through life I saw Japanese come here, I saw them buy all the marinas around Pittwater, I saw them buy the Regent Hotel, I saw them buy everything at Cairns, they opened all these different Japanese factories, they’ve got a Japanese school up here at Terrey Hills and when I think of his words it still makes me feel that behind the scenes somewhere they

realise the need to expand out of Japan and that of course was brought out by this book.

No. I might have if there had not have been the cannibalism.

When they came in, they were just people, just

soldiers like we were and they were downhearted. You can see pictures of them there on the beaches. They came in, they handed over all their equipment, their swords and they just became people and they were taken away. They went to camps and they were repatriated back to Japan

and subsequently, of course that’s another story, after the war we stayed at Wewak until December 1945 processing these Japanese and looking for war criminals and particularly that one that killed Private Kraut, and the General Adachi, who was the general, he was held responsible and he actually committed suicide at Rabaul

because he was in charge of over a hundred and ten thousand men, he lost a hundred thousand in New Guinea, which is a tremendous number, and there were only about, round about eight to ten thousand did get back to Japan.

Yes.

Yes.

It came through a paper called Guinea Gold. We’ve got copies here. It was the first time we’d heard about the atomic bomb and that was really the thing that ended the war. After they did Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was quite clear that Japan was defeated and that brought about the

surrender. We dropped leaflets to the Japanese telling them what had happened and telling them to surrender and that we would treat them as human beings. There’d be no problems. Now

Absolutely.

No, no. They, all they wanted to do, was in their mind, the war

was over and get back to Australia.

Yes it was except I had no points. I wasn’t married and therefore you don’t get points for discharge so in December 1945 they put me on the aircraft carrier Implacable. I came back to Sydney. I was given two weeks’ leave and then I had to report to LTD [Leave and Transit Depot] at Marrickville. I went there after my leave and

they said, “You’ve had a very hard time. You can stay here and sign leave passes until you got enough points. It’ll probably be four or five or six months depending on the discharge system.”

Yes.

No.

No, no you had to wait ‘til you got your points up for discharge.

You can’t just say, “We’ll walk out.”

No.

Well,

Well I wondered what I was going to do in civil life because remember seven years virtually I’d gone into this new, actually I believe it was like a university, the training in leading men and understanding life, I think was wonderful, however they asked me to sign leave passes nine to

five and I could live at home. I went back to Dover Heights where Aunty Lil was.

Yes it was, it was and don’t forget we’d been taking Atebrin and we were very yellow and we had lost a lot of weight. We were pretty thin and it was very strange coming back to civilian life.

Yes. A cousin of mine, Jean Hawdon, came out to Marrickville because we’d come from Woolloomooloo by double decker buses with signs on ‘returning AIF' and she was out there at Marrickville and she met me and we got a taxi home, yes it was emotional at the time.

Well it was like a new life and we arrived home. Aunty Lil of course was working and she came home that night and we had a long talk. She had all the letters saved that I’d been sending and we had the first grilled lamb chops that we’d had for a long while, and

then I was, I told her that I was going to work five days a week signing leave passes and I had to get,

Yes.

I was not the little seventeen year old that she remembered. I was now different, as the photographs will show you.

Well she was very pleased that I’d come back and to think that I had lived through it, because a number of times messages would come back. On one occasion I’d been reported missing because a barge that I was on ran into a storm and actually had to put ashore on the coast of New Guinea, and we couldn’t leave there for a week and we were presumed lost at sea. All those sort of things

happened.

No. No, I didn’t. No. There was no one. I mean I didn’t have a girlfriend. There was nobody.

No, I’d sort of lived a new life and my life

was what was happening in New Guinea. No, nothing there. Only meals. I used to dream about baked dinners and baked vegetables and Weetbix, not Weetbix, Rice Bubbles and Aeroplane jellies and things like that, but the strange thing happened at LTD. I lasted one week. I was signing these passes from nine

to five and on the Friday I said to the to the captain there, I said, “Look, this is no good for me. I can’t get out,” but I said, “Send me back to New Guinea” because my battalion was still up there. A lot of them were, married men had come back, and he said to me, “The smart bastard, are you?” and he said, “I’ll fix you. There’s a jeep out there” he said, “You leave straight away,” it’s Friday evening, “And

report to LTD at Liverpool.” So I saluted and I said, “Right.” The jeep driver took me out to LTD and there I ran into Major Bill Banner, now Major Banner had been with me in the 30th Battalion before the war and he went right through in the 30th. He was blown up with a land mine as they approached Madang, 25th of April

1944, and he wasn’t badly injured, but he was repatriated to Australia. I walked in and he said, “What are you doing here, Frank?” I said, “I’ve been a naughty boy and I’ve been sent out here for reposting,” and his exact words to me were, “Do you know anything about being a quartermaster?” I said, “Absolutely,” and he said, “Good.” He said, “You go home, get your gear and report to number 2

Woolloomooloo at 0700 hours tomorrow morning,” and he said, “Here is a colour patch,” and I’ve got one over there. It’s a T troop ship and he said, “You’re immediately transferred to sick ship staff,” on which is now HMAS Manoora, which is a troop ship, and he said, “We’re sailing in the morning and I need a quartermaster.” So I went home, told my aunt I was going.

I didn’t know where. Came back and as we sailed down Sydney Harbour on the Saturday morning

Well I couldn’t get out. I couldn’t get out. I had no points. I was going to be somewhere.

No, no. No. If you’ve had an active life in the jungle and you suddenly have to sit behind a desk all day, that was absolutely,

I did it for one week and I couldn’t do it any longer. It was boring. There was no activity in it. There was no future in it. So we sailed the next morning and as we went down Sydney Harbour they had an amplifying system on board and they were playing music. There was “Rum and Coca Cola,” ah “Drinking Rum and Coca Cola,” The Andrew Sisters, and “Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night of the Week.” Now

would you believe that our first role was to go to Wewak to bring back the 35th Battalion? As we came into Wewak, there was a jeep on board and there was an LCM. They put the jeep down and I was sent as the liaison officer to liaise with the army and organise the movement of troops. I went up to

Wewak Point and the colonel and the adjutant, Van Adcock, said to me, “You can’t come back tonight. You can’t come back now, Frank. We’re going home this evening.” I said, “I know, look” and I had a little 35th patch but a big T for troop ship. I said, “I’m here to take you back,” which we did. We brought the battalion back. We then sailed to

Mackay in Queensland and picked up a lot of Indonesians. We took them to what was in those days called Batavia. We came back. We sailed to Biak and then we took some reinforcements up to Japan from the British Commonwealth Occupation Force known as BCOF [British Commonwealth Occupation Force] and quite funny because we came into a port called Kure,

and one of the first things we did was to get the jeep and we were going to be there for ten days. We wanted to see Hiroshima. We were driven down there and we actually saw the results and I’ve got pictures that I brought back. It was absolutely incredible. We met a Japanese who could speak English.

It was in the marketplace, it was cherry blossom time and I was looking at the cherry blossoms and this girl came up and she said, “This is our national emblem.” I said, “You speak English?” And she said, “Yes,” and I said, “Well what do you know about Hiroshima?” I called it ‘Hirosheema’ and she said, “No Hiroshima,” and she said, “I lived with my parents on a mountain

overlooking Hiroshima,” and she said, “On this particular morning we heard a plane and down below us was a big city. There were trams, buildings and houses and it was just like a city,” and she said, “A parachute was seen high up in the sky and we thought the plane was in trouble,” and she said, “Then there was an almighty flash,”

and about two seconds, three seconds went by and the city that she saw collapsed like a pack of cards and another two seconds went by and there was a very big eruption of flame and smoke. The mushroom cloud went up and at eight seconds later, she was bowled over by a wind force and knocked unconscious.

I couldn’t believe that anything could cause such devastation.

Yes. We were told later that we would probably die of cancer for going into a radiation area but we, in the town in the city we looked at the rubble and we could see a saucer was left

completely intact but from the centre it was radiating out in circles almost as though it was a pattern. It was still intact but it had split outwards in circles. I’d never seen anything like it. It was just a complete devastation. Cars were melted, the trams, all that sort of thing where they’d stood. There was still

the stench of death and then I was taken to an American hospital. We got talking to an American and he said, “I’d like to show you something.” I don’t know how many people have seen this. I was taken into the hospital and there in a saline bath was a human form. It had

no legs, no arms, it was blind and it was being fed intravenously. You could see the chest moving in the water. It was breathing and I said, “Why?” and he said, “We have to understand the effect of atomic radiation and what happens,” and there were a number of these. I only saw the one and I

found that very disturbing and to this day I can still see that human form that couldn’t speak, couldn’t see, had no arms, no legs, yet was being kept alive in the saline bath and that made me think what a terrible thing this bomb was and what the future held in the world if this thing got out.

Yes it did.

Well, on the one hand I realised it saved a lot of lives because the alternative was to attack Japan and that would have meant a lot of loss of life. So on the one hand I realised it had to be done. On the other hand the devastation and the loss of life was

unbelievable and I thought it was so wrong in this modern age. It was the first thing of a war that was what I termed unconventional. It was the thing that just shouldn’t be and I wondered what the future held for the world if that was the beginning of it, maybe future wars would do the same thing and wipe the world out.

Well it was no more, no longer exciting. I realised the absolute waste of life that wars cause and at that stage I became I suppose anti-war and I wanted to live a life, get

married, have children, forget the war.

It changed. It changed. I spoke to children and they, the Japanese people, to the occupation forces, were so friendly. They had geisha houses and the geisha houses were of two types. One was a brothel, the other one was a true tea house. The engineer commander

on the Manoora said to me, “I’ve got the jeep,” he said, “Can you take me to show me one of these geisha houses - that’s a brothel.” I said, “Yes, I know where there is one. They’ve told me. It’s called The Flower Garden up behind Kure on the hills of Hiro.” So away we went. He’s got all the gold braid under the sun. We go up there, we go into this geisha house. The madam met us and I said, “Now look, we’re only here to see what it’s like

in a geisha house. What the rooms are like,” and she said, “Remove your shoes,” so we had to take our boots off and we were told to go up the stairs and we’d find an empty room, she did give us a number, and we went into this room. It was very elaborate with silk and beautiful beds and decorations and a window which went out and went down onto a garden on the side and down to waterways

and ponds and water lilies. We no sooner got in there and we were examining this, then what the British Red Caps raided the place. They would do this frequently looking for Australian or BCOF members in the brothels. So I said to the engineer commander, “Now we can’t have you caught in here. What you do, I’ll join these sheets together. You go out the window and get round the back of the of the geisha house, get into the jeep and drive away. I’ll talk my

way out of this.” When the Red Caps came into each room I was there and I explained to them that I was there making a report for HMS, HMAS Manoora and the Australians so as I could report on what a geisha house was. I talked my way out of it. They let me go back and get my boots and I had to walk back to the ship, which was a couple of miles, but I met a lot of children

and they were all so friendly and as I’ve gone through life now I realise that the old Japanese, they were war-like out of the true Samurai. The children today are wonderful. I’ve got no qualms at all with the Japanese people. I quite like them and I think they’re a fine, in fact, they will probably be our allies in the,

in any war that may come and after the war I did join intelligence and I was in air photo interpretation Victoria Barracks, and the danger is other islands just to the north of Australia with a big population that may in the future have eyes on Australia and again we have to look at America for

our protection, and that’s why I was very much in favour of supporting the Americans in the war in Iraq. It’s an absolute essential act that we had to do, to be their ally because in the future there will be eyes on Australia, there is no doubt, and we’ll have to rely on America.

No. The reason I didn’t feel guilty was I knew the tremendous saviour of life that had taken place in case America had all the plans to invade Japan.

In September 1946, I went back to the Perpetual Trustee Company because you had to go back to where you were and they had to take you back. When I got there I realised that those that had said they wouldn’t go because of the semi-reserved occupation were in the managerial positions. So that’s where I met my wife and I decided

that I would leave and I would go to David Jones. I applied for a position and got that.

No, because the war was over. As far as I was concerned the danger from Japan had passed, the war was finished and now I realised that the objective was to be married, to have children, to live a life

away from what we’d been through.

Very much so because I was now a junior. I had filing, I would answer a bell, the bell would ring and the manager who was let’s say a chappie who started about my

time, we’d been friends, he would say on one occasion he rang the bell and he said, “Mr Hawdon, I want you to take this telegram down to the GPO [General Post Office].” In those days, telegrams to England and other places of out of state matters were sent by telegram and I said, “Okay,” let’s call him Bill, “Okay Bill,” he said, “What did you say?” I said, “Okay Bill, give me the

telegram I’ll take it.” He said, “You’ll call me Mr So and So.” I said, “No, no Bill. Out there you’re Mr So and So but in this room we’re gonna be Bill and Frank.” And he said, “I’m taking you to the managing director.” And I said, “No, I’m taking you to the managing director.” And we went down, I’d been there three months. We went down and I said, “I’m resigning,” and they

said, “You can’t, we’ve got to look after you,” and I said, “Well he can have his say,” which he did and I said, “Now I’ll have my say.” I said, “He can’t resign, I’ve got to resign. He’s had all these years of experience, he’s in a managerial position, he’s in charge. I’ve come back as a junior to do filing and start all over again and

for that reason I respect that he’ll be Mr So and So in front of people but together we’re going to be Bill and Frank as we were in 1939,” and he said, “Well I’ll move you down to the Albury branch of Perpetual Trustee Company,” and I said, “No, no there’s no way I want to stay with this company,” and I walked out.

Well you had to be taken back, that was the law. The company would be charged if they didn’t give you the job back but estates people had died. The people that I was looking after had died, the estates had been distributed. I had to start again.

Learning all the names, the files. I’d file the letters, check the probates.

Very difficult. Very difficult. Extremely difficult. The only thing that saved me was the fact that I had met my wife, who was in the enquiry office, and that made life bearable because I would see

her and we went to a ball and I was sort of now ready to settle down, so I found it extremely difficult, and that’s why I applied for the position at David Jones.

Very difficult because at night time it was often hard to sleep. You would

be thinking, you would get flashbacks to dead bodies. To death and to the things that you did. I did find it difficult but as soon as I got to David Jones and I had something eventually like sixty girls to look after, I found life was very fulfilling and,

No.

But I was engaged while

I was there. I had to get, two reasons I got engaged. A) I decided that this was the girl I wanted to marry but I had to prove to the girls there that were chasing me, oh you’ve got no idea what it was like. They wanted to get me, oh unbelievable. Unbelievable.

Always the scenes, the main scene was cannibalism and the stench of dead bodies. The stench of death. In fact I can still see it, I can still smell it. I can see the jungle. I can see the, I can smell the rotting rice and I can I still remember as clearly as anything what it was like,

but life goes on and you say well, “If you dwell on that there’s no point. You’re not getting anywhere.”

No.

Well they had no conception of what it was like. Nothing at all. They’d think you had a bed to sleep in, they think

you could change your clothes. They think you could have a hot wash. In fact I’ve done these twelve hundred cases for the veterans since 1956, and I go as an advocate into the court and on one occasion I was because we had been drenched from the air with DDT [dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane], we were moving up the coast and we’d been saturated with DDT and every one of us developed a form of prostate

cancer. The colonel, prostate cancer, died. The adjutant, prostate cancer, died. The intelligence officer, prostate cancer, died. The sergeant, prostate cancer, died and so this went on. I developed the early stages of prostate cancer but a native told me that there’s no prostate cancer in New Guinea because they eat paw paw, so I started to eat paw paw and I’m even taking a

concentrated paw paw now, and the fact is that my PSA [prostate-specific antigen] count is coming down and there are signs where the biopsy, where there has been some kind of problem there, it’s cleared up but I was going to court for our Intelligence Officer, George Brown. I did seven hundred pages of research all round the world on the effect

of DDT. Now we’ve heard of Agent Orange in Vietnam and I maintained that DDT had been tested on mice and rats in Japan and had caused cancer. It was causing breast cancer and I went to the court and I was arguing and I presented my case and they said to me firstly, one of the panel said, “Mr Hawdon, when you were saturated

with DDT, why didn’t you have a hot wash and change your clothes?” Now I said to him, “You know you’ve got something there. If we could have talked Japanese, we would have called, told the Japs to call the war off. We would have heated some water and we hadn’t seen a fire for months on end, I suppose we could have got the air force to drop us some new jungle greens and boots, we’d been in them for three months, crossing rivers,

sleeping in them, rain in them,” and he couldn’t believe it. Those conditions.

It gets me so mad for our veterans who have suffered this and the Minister for Repatriation, I’ve had a lot of

correspondence with them, with our Member, and they came back and said I had letters from all round the world. From the Health Organisation and they said, “Unless you can produce proof that DDT like Agent Orange [defoliant used in the Vietnam War] has created prostate cancer or cancer in males,

we will not re-examine the case,” but nowhere in the world has a test been made of DDT on human beings. I’ve got it, it’s all documented, I’ve got it on rats and mice. We know that DDT has caused, through animals and milk in DDT areas which were subsequently banned got into the milk, and it did cause breast cancer in women,

but I’ve got nothing on men.

Well I think it was essential

in what we did then, but it’s very soon forgotten. The people who didn’t get to go to war got into very high managerial positions and they looked on the soldiers as being stupid for going to war and to a degree we were ostracised and I eventually formed my own company,

saw opportunities for it, and rose to managing director, was taken over and I became a manager in ACI International. I was a training manager. I then became an executive assistant to the chairman and so life treated me very kindly again because of it making an appreciation of the situation. I can recall

once with the company Acmil, they wanted their shares to go up one cent a share, would make a big difference to capitalisation, and the chairman said to me, “I want you to mount an exhibition of all our building products in Melbourne.” He said, “Will you take the job?” and I said, “Yes,” and he said, “But where will you go?” I said, “I’ll find a place.” He said, “You can’t. We’ve done it, our examination, and there is

no premises in Melbourne,” and I said, “I’ll go down there and I’ll find a place.” I went down and went to Worth’s Circus and I said, “You’ve got a big marquee. I want to borrow it for two weeks and I’ll put it into Victoria Park,” and while I was there looking at Victoria Park I saw Nauru House, forty two stories high, and up the top it had 'For lease 42 and 41'.

I went to Nauru House and I said, “I want to rent that for two weeks.” He said, “You can’t rent it for two weeks, we want to lease it.” I said, “You haven’t got anyone leasing it. We’ll pay you for two weeks,” and he said, they looked at it and they said, “Right.” Now I came back to our managing director, I said, “Right I’ve got the location,” and we mounted this very successful exhibition. After that I did exhibitions in Adelaide, in Sydney,

they sent me to Bahrain and I could tell you a lot of stories about that, but I know

Time doesn’t do it.

Yes.

What the army life?

Yes. We, our battalion meets on the last Friday, we’ve got a meeting tomorrow, the last Friday in each month and

I’m the patron of the battalion. As welfare officer, I’ve done cases for everyone in the battalion and do a lot for their widows, and in a sense I’m still reliving those exciting days. I spent a lot of time preparing records there of everything that happened. All those, a lot of the, most of the experiences I’ve told you about today,

are there recorded.

What do I?

No. If I had to have my life over again, I would do everything exactly the same, provided I didn’t know then what I know now.

Well if you look at that book that we were given in 1941, the little Serviceman’s Book, it points out that Australia will be White Australia and suddenly we’ve seen, and I could understand why, they’ve brought immigrants in to increase our population and the world has become a smaller place with the advent of air travel,

and I’ve seen a big change in Australia. Australia is not the place that I knew in those years. We see, well recently only a few weeks ago I drove through Campsie and we did, we saw one Australian. They were there with veils and goodness knows what. Now a lot of them are here because of their

condition in their country and they’ve added a lot of wealth to this country. The Italians particularly in the building industry are remarkable workers. They work much harder. They’ll work seven days a week, whereas the Australian has got into the way of perhaps using these immigrants to do the work while they sit back and want managerial positions.

Well again it goes back to what is the meaning of Empire Day? I was brought up in the tradition of the British Empire and the flag and suddenly to me Australia is not the Australia that I know. The British Empire has sort of disappeared. We’re really now

Australia. We don’t have our great ties with Great Britain that we had and we are an independent country in my eyes and therefore Australia becomes the focal point of the future, so Australia is really one of the dominant countries of the future but we’re going to have a very dangerous path in reaching it because of the

vast area that we have, the raw materials that we have and the fact that we don’t have a big population.

I feel that in a

hundred years from now Australia will not be as we know it today, and it will be brought about by the decisions made by our government.

To be very careful on choosing immigrants. To make sure that we’ve got reputable people,

and to coin a phrase that we use today, no one with a terrorist background and that they must live a peaceful life. We’ve got all the raw materials, we’ve got everything to live peacefully, we’re a big country. We’re surrounded by oceans, therefore we’re not like Europe where countries are bordering each other.

We don’t have that problem and it will be a matter for them to decide a matter for the governments to make a very good decision on how they manage this country and if they do, within a hundred years I would say that we would be very much like England was or what the UK [United Kingdom] was in the 19th

probably even to the 20th century, and even more so than America. We’ve got the, all the foundation of being a wonderful nation and in a hundred years I just hope that I’m like that butterfly in another world where I can come back and just have a look at what’s going on.