Australians at War Film Archive

Yes. I was born 26 February 1920 at Drummoyne in Sydney at Iron Cove, just up from the point on which Dunlop Purdue had a big factory, and I went to school there at Drummoyne Primary. Most of my family

on my mother’s side had gone there, my uncles, my aunts, but they had never gone past eleven years of age. That was the typical time when they all stopped going to school and they looked for apprenticeships and all that kind of thing. My family were a mixture of Scots Irish and actually my first ancestor out in Australia was an Englishman from Birmingham called Reuben Pate who was sent out for nicking a bowl of cloth.

So I have a convict in the family, you see. I was very fortunate in going to school and getting a good education at Drummoyne – I came out as one of the top three Duxes – and selectively then I was able to go to Fort Street Boy’s High School which was out in Petersham. My sister when to the Fort Street Girl’s on Observatory Hill. We got a pretty good education there for the times but growing up in the ‘20s I think that we were all,

all of us, particularly the boys perhaps more so than the girls, very influenced by the effect of World War I on the Australian manhood you could say.

No he wasn’t. My father was a person who, he was born about 1889 and when he grew up, he grew up in a family that had an interest in the abattoir in Camperdown. He didn’t care for that so he left school at a fairly early age.

It would have been before he was fifteen at least. He became a billy boy for a cane cutting team that worked down from, or around about Tully in Queensland down to Beenleigh and he gradually became a cutter and of course he made a lot of money cutting cane in those days, and when it started to rain he’d stop and he’d spend a little while enjoying his liquor and playing cards which he played extremely well. Then he would go down into the Western Districts,

having seen his family for Christmas, go down there and bring back horses in harness and rigs, all of which he’d worked on and broken in the previous year or year before that and show them off at the Royal Show. After that was finished, once again he’d take a boat back up to Cairns and come down and start cutting cane again. He did that for a while. Eventually he came back to Sydney and they offered him a job of doing much the same thing, running the horses

and wagons and all that kind of thing for Sargent’s factory, which were noted for their pies and their cakes and all of that. He became eventually their Delivery Manager there. Very responsible job. He was married. He was married in 1913 as a matter of fact so he didn’t have to; he wasn’t obligated to go to the war, World War I in any case. I think probably my father was a wonderful person. He was a lovely, lovely man but I think he had flat feet so he may

not have gone in the army at all. My uncle on the other hand, my mother’s brother was in the Territorials and the sadness of his life was that he was left as the only male in the family that had to help with mother, keep the rest of the children alive and in food and all that kind of thing and so he was not allowed, as the eldest son to volunteer for the ANZACS [Australian and New Zealand Army Corps]. His friends went, the Burgess brothers and all of that kind of thing and I think that affected

him because Hammy was a wonderful, wonderful man. We all grew up with people up and down the street, with a room set aside for war souvenirs and there was always the solemnity of the Anzac Day parades and my uncle who was fortunate, he was a master broom maker and made good money, he would go down and stand on the corner, in the evenings, particularly in summer of course on the butcher shop and talk to the men who had come back from the war.

Many of them had lost limbs, arms, legs, etcetera and he would see that they always had a little spare change in their pockets and so I grew up that way. I never wanted for anything in a working class family sense. It was a comfortable house, all of that. Anytime I needed extra money to buy a pair of football boots, or cricket boots and things like that, I had to work for it.

I had to do chores. I had to go down to where the Dairy was, where Mr Tuffey had his horse and select some very fine manure for my uncle who was an azalea fancier, and so we made our money, and then when I went to Fort Street, I thoroughly enjoyed it but I was just a little unable to take advantage of the very high standard of education there. I simply didn’t have the brains. I had the instinct

and the need but I didn’t have the brains, and my family couldn’t help me because their education didn’t extend into say, Latin, French, Geometry, Algebra, all those kind of things. So I was struggling along. I passed my Intermediate and all of that, and when I was into my 4th Year, when I was fifteen years of age, I decided that I would leave and I got myself a course in accountancy

from a place called Hemmingway and Robertson and got a job fairly shortly after that at Dunlop Purdue factory which was just 200 yards down the hill from where I lived in Drummoyne. When I arrived I thought I was going to be a Junior Accountant but it turned out that no, I was going to be an Assistant Engineer Storeman, which was virtually a Junior Accountant, you know what I mean, and I went down and of course then for about the next six or eight months, with about forty of the

toughest fellows that you could ever meet in your life. They were ex-merchant marine, engineers and boilermakers and fitters and turners and I decided then that I’d go into town. I’d found myself a job with an assurance company in there. I worked through various jobs until I finally one time, about 1938, I decided that wasn’t what I wanted to do and I thought, gee I’d really like to get to write and broadcast

on the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Commission] and so I, as they say snatched my time at EF Wilkes, which was a big electrical firm on Castlereagh Street, and very fortunately got a little extra pay given to me. I walked down Market Street, went into the ABC, asked could I see George Ivan Smith who did a show for young people on Sunday nights. I met up with him that night, told him what I thought might make a good idea for a program and he hired me on the spot, and the following Sunday

night, not that same Sunday night, that was a Friday that I went there to him, the following week after that I was broadcasting on the ABC.

It was called “Youth Speaks” I think was the program I think he called it. I’m sure it was called “Youth Speaks” or “Voice of Youth”. “Voice of Youth” it could have been. The first one we did was on dead-end jobs, because in that particular period of time, employers were not terribly keen to

pay full wages to young people as they grew up to be able to be paid fuller wages. They would sack them and get a younger person to do the job. It was a bit of a dead-end job because where did you go to from there? How did you start again when you were say eighteen, nineteen, twenty or whatever it was, years of age? And so I wrote that and we broadcast it. I was interviewed and we did the whole thing. Later on we dramatised it as a matter of fact and did it again on the ABC. After that

I worked with George Ivan Smith on and off. Actually for that first job I got five guineas [one guinea = 21 shillings] and I thought, “Isn’t that marvellous,” so I went down and I put a deposit on an Underwood Portable. I always wanted to be a writer, you see. I paid that off as I made the money.

It was a portable typewriter, yes. I wrote and sold quite a few short stories when I was young. As a matter of fact, not to digress, I had a novel accepted

when I was about twenty-one years of age, twenty-two years of age by Lipincott in New York. I got it back sitting in the jungle in 1944 in Dutch New Guinea and I consequently never did finish that novel. They wanted an extra 20,000, 25,000 words and it was impossible. I wrote it when I was first on service in Western Australia and it was a delightful little novella, you know, short, and I never could finish it.

In that period of time it was a very opening up thing for me. I was fortunate in meeting people who were highly intelligent. Of course I spent a lot of time in the library too, self educating myself, but I did meet a lot of people who were very, very nice and cultivated people, and who saw that I read the right books, that I went to see the right theatre, that I went to see ballet, that I always went to symphony concerts

etcetera. Amongst those people were people like Norman Lindsay and others of that particular nature that were very recognisable people, and I found that we became, those of us like me, in town working in what was the information technology business of broadcasting and writing and all that kind of thing, we were very, very aware

of the politics of the day. We were aware of the many shortcomings of the English politicians and of some Australia politicians, and we were very well aware of what was happening with Hitler and with Mussolini and somebody growing up from say 1934 when Hitler began his particular stride through the European landscape and grab, grab, grab, grab, grab, and with Mussolini coming up,

the Ethiopian War, etcetera. It was something that you had to face up to that my generation was going to be the next generation to fight the next war.

Oh, it was.

It was in this particular period of time that I would go down

with a friend of mine, KT Bell, to a house that friends of his allowed him to use down in Clareville, and I went down there to write a piece for the ABC with him. He was in advertising and he was doing some painting. We had a pleasant couple of days down there, coming up to the Newport pub, and having a couple of rums or a beer or two and then going home and having some rum. It was delightful. It was very nice. Very idyllic in that particular way. I came back on a Friday afternoon,

September 1st. It was very gloomy news. There was no question about it. I sort of thought, “Oh well.” I was pacifistic by nature. We didn’t want another war. We didn’t want to go to a war. It was terrifying. We all knew how horrible World War I was and World War II didn’t look as if it was going to be any better. But still I thought “Mmm.” So I walked down Martin Place, walked to a recruiting booth and I said

to the Sergeant I would like to apply to come into the Army, be taken into the Army. He looked at me and said, “Michael, now come on. You’re far too young. You’ve got to be twenty-one. You’ve got to have your parents’ permission if you’re not.” So I said, “Oh, okay I’ll be back.” He knew that I was working in a show called “Youth Show” at GB and you couldn’t be in that show if you’d turned twenty so he knew that I was

still working in the show so I had to be less than twenty years of age at least. So I went home and spoke to my father about it and he said, “Well, Ned,” I was always known as Neddy, “Ned, I’ll tell you what. If you volunteer for the army instead of waiting to be called up,” and I already belonged to the Citizen Forces, he said, “I’ll break personally every bone in your f’ing body because it would break your mother’s heart.” He said, “Just wait until they call you up, right?”

So I thought, “Okay.” So I tried again. My mother. My mother went, oh, she just looked away. I tried my father again. My father said, “You know what I told you.” He was a big man. So I just waited until I got called up. Well I got called up in the first couple of weeks of January 1940. That was because I’d gone across about mid-1939 with some friends of mine, across to Rozelle

which was just across the river from where I lived in Drummoyne, to the Drill Hall of what was the New South Wales Scottish, or one of the Drill Halls of New South Wales Scottish and we’d put our names down. It was a Scots Regiment with the kilts and the shoes and the Glengarry and the little, you know. Of course this appealed to us being half Scotch.

It was Citizen Forces. But nothing happened.

We had a few lessons on looking at a Lee Enfield rifle and little things like that in the Drill Hall but we weren’t given any uniforms. You didn’t feel that you were in the army or anything like that. It was probably when it was done properly rather like what the reserves might be when they first started today. So when eventually we were called up into what would be the AMF [Australian Military Forces] the military forces,

and we were sent up to Greta for our first camp in 1940, we found that the Scottish which were one of the battalions of the 8th Brigade of the Second Infantry Division of Sydney, which is the Sydney Division, it was full. All those who had signed up early, the original 800, 880 of them were in the Battalion but the rest of us were put to the 8th Field Ambulance. My first unit in the Australian

Military Forces was the 8th Field Ambulance and it was so old fashioned and so fuddy-duddy. All of the officers, really, I don’t know what they knew about the world but they didn’t know as much as I knew about it, I felt, but we persevered and finally being in that unit, they then came to us after a while, many months, and said, “You’re no longer in the army.” We said, “What do you mean?” They said,

“Well, we haven’t got room for the others that we’re going to call up so you’re not in the army for the time being,” I said, “Yes, but do we get paid?” They said, “No, no we’re not going to pay you. You’re just not in the army, we’ll call you back again.” I thought, “Oh, Jesus!” because I’d already tried to volunteer for the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] and I have a lazy left eye. I just recently had the cataract done on that one so I’m seeing much better now, but I had a lazy left eye but being an actor I could memorise

things very quickly, so when I went in to get my eyes tested and they put up the sheet with A V O or whatever it was I memorised the first six lines like that, and so whenever they showed me a chart, a different chart, I only had to look at it once and say “B AC K L T V U O” whatever it was, you see. And they knew, the people who examined me obviously knew that this eye was just a little bit lazy. There was something, they looked in it, they can tell that.

They couldn’t work it out at first. I was called back again. The same thing happened again. Then I was called back the third time and this time they put me in a revolving chair and they spun me around and there’s the sign, I’m looking at it. It’s a sign I’ve never seen before and they said, “Yes?” I couldn’t memorise it quick enough to get through it, so they knew. So they thanked me very much indeed for volunteering and that was it. In any case I came out of the army and

I got some radio work. I was walking down Macleay Street, Kings Cross where I’d taken another small room for I think it was 6 and 6 a week, I had a room. That today would be worth about eighty cents a week for a room and in old Bomera that actually my father had broken horses for the person that had owned Bomera many, many years before. He was a squatter out in the Western Districts. Here we are with

thinking “What will I do?” and all of a sudden a voice says, “Michael.” I was now known as Michael because of plays that I’d done. That’s another story altogether. It was Alec Coppell who was an English producer and he said, “I thought you were in the army? I thought you’d gone away?” I said, “No, I’m in the army but they’ve just put us out of camp a few months ago and I’m trying to make a living.” He said, “Oh marvellous. Come

on down to the theatre,” the Minerva Theatre where I’d worked and played in plays before since about 1939. He put me into plays, and we would play one play at 6 o’clock at night, and then rehearse another, and we’d take the 6 o’clock play and play it for six times a week at 5 o’clock, and then we played the eight performances of the new play. I did that for a couple of months or maybe more, ten weeks or so.

I was just about to do the young juvenile’s part in The Man Who Came to Dinner, and I came home – I was living down at Elizabeth Bay at the time – and there was a little slip that says “Will you please report to your unit at Wallgrove Camp”. So I went back and went into Wallgrove but I went back into the 8th Field Ambulance, naturally. I thought, “No, this is not for me. I’ve got to be more active than this.” This was August of 1941, and the whole onslaught of the Japanese coming

down towards Singapore Island and all that kind of thing at that time, was making all of us aware that it was going to be on very shortly for us. In that area there to say nothing of the boys living in the Middle East where sadly I wished I would have been. Anyway the whole sort of feeling there in camp was that and I said, “Can I transfer to an infantry battalion?” I was pretty useful, athletic

type and all that kind of thing so, they transferred me for a very short period of time to the 30th Battalion which really I believed was what the New South Wales Scottish became, the 30th Battalion. Anyway I was there only for a very short time and then I was transferred to the 35th Battalion. Its patch was brown on green, which ultimately all of us regarded as shit on grass. That was one thing.

The division was the Black and White Diamond Division, which was the 2nd Sydney Division, so I then went to the 35th and I apparently behaved myself quite well because I was given Lance Corporal and then Corporal and I was made a Small Arms Instructor for the company, etcetera. We recruited then a lot of country boys and they came in. Marvellous guys. Slim Bennett, Darky Lowe, George Elefthuriou was a Greek boy. His father had served in the same Battalion in World War

I, and we all got on very well together and got very tough and trained up well and we could really teach the young boys what to do, grenades and demolitions, under barbed wire, under live fire and all this kind of thing which you learned to do. Finally we were then sent up to Greta and I figured that

was what it was going to be. This was now into early 1942 and I figured that we were going to be the Division that went into New Guinea. We ultimately were put onto a convoy of – my ship was the Manoora, the old Manoora and there were others, I think the Duntroon and the Katoomba if I remember rightly. We sailed on a Saturday afternoon, very cold, windy, awful, dreadful, from that Vale of Tears,

you know where Russell Crowe has just recently bought an apartment or penthouse for $14 million, and John Laws has one and they all have one down there. I sometimes shake my head and think “By God, if you only knew what a sad, sad, awful place that Finger Wharf was because that really was a Vale of Tears. World War I, World War II and I’m sure Korea and Vietnam perhaps.

It was called the Finger Wharf.

We called it the Vale of Tears because you’d see the wives, and the girlfriends, and the mothers and the grandmothers of the boys that were sailing standing there and the same with the navy boys and all that kind of thing, just crying their eyes out. They were losing their men, you now. I never told my family that I was leaving. I never told my wife. I was married at that time. My first wife. I never told her I was leaving. That was part of the code

of not discussing what you were doing in any case.

I was married Friday, March 13th, 1942. I’d married a young girl, actually from a Hungarian family who had come from Vienna. Lovely, lovely family. When I figured I was going to the Kokoda and I knew that the odds if I was leading a squad or a section or a company, a platoon, I would be

up there in front and would be very lucky to survive. We all knew that and that’s what our attitude was and so I thought, ‘Better marry her and she can have a pension’. She was lovely girl and I was very much in love with her. She said, “I’ll have to get my parents’ permission.” I said, “You don’t really need your parents’ permission. You’re beyond the age of consent.” She said, “No, I’m not.” She was actually about, at that time in what would have been

late February when I talked to her, about three or four weeks short of being sixteen. So I said, “Don’t mention this to anybody please!” But it was a case of that’s how it went in those days. We were married at the Registrar General’s office in a very hilarious wedding with two friends of hers, two Hungarians who ultimately just out of the blue decided they wanted to get married too and so I was off very shortly. I wouldn’t have told her that I was

leaving. Too nerve-wracking for people, but some of the boys that we managed to get down and get back to their girlfriends so they could marry them from camp and Greta did turn up at the boat, so they came aboard as they promised me they would because I was a little bit instrumental in finding transport for them to get back to Sydney. So they all came back. It was very, very sad and I stood on the

railing of that troopship and I looked down and you could just see everybody’s face was covered with tears and the men too, along the rail just crying their eyes out. The younger ones, not the older, tougher ones, naturally!

You mean right through?

No, no. I know exactly what you mean. Well we went on the convoy and we turned right instead of left and we picked up

two escort vessels. One was an American cruiser and the other was the Van Tromp, which was a Dutch cruiser, a very, very fine boat. Captained beautifully. We headed south into fairly heavy weather and for about the next fifteen or sixteen days we had very heavy weather. We were in thirty to sixty foot waves, like the Hobart one, terrible stuff, and it

ripped the guts out of the railings of the Duntroon and tore a screw off the American cruiser. That’s how big the waves were. I think myself and only about three others or so from the battalion were on their feet and everyday we went down and we got a big dixie of tea, milk, sugared tea and some arrowroot biscuits and we brought them up to the men and we forced them to eat because they were vomiting blood

and so that was a very heavy trip. I would spend my time either on an open back deck reading, watching the waves go up like this. It was just incredible. It was a 15,000 ton ship just being tossed around like a cork, or up on the bridge where I had permission to go up on the bridge and you’d see the whole of the nose of the ship go right down and through a wave and then come up again. Very exciting. I wish I’d have been commanding the ship. We get across there eventually.

The Van Tromp took us to Kangaroo Island, and we were picked up by air cover there because the Japanese submarines were very, very active and all through that area and sank a lot of shipping. We eventually got to Fremantle and trained there. We went north and we were pushed up in and around Moora way, and it was terribly wet and terribly cold and very uncomfortable and we dug our foxholes and stuff like that.

Slit trenches as they were called, more so. They filled with water right away and many a boy fell down one of those and was lucky not to drown. It was very unpleasant conditions and we started training fairly hard on all of that kind of thing. I unfortunately got a bronchial pneumonia and had to go to hospital for a while so I missed being called up into the navy. I’d been accepted by the navy as a sub lieutenant trainee for gunnery. Probably I was very lucky to miss that because

I’d have been on the corvettes and most of them, the early ones were blown out of the water very smartly. That was God saying, “No, you’ve got some other things to do.” I came back to the battalion to find that a few of my boys had been slightly misbehaving and I think three of them had spent some time in the stockades.

I was corporal at that stage. I went up and down like a yoyo. I was up to sergeant, back to corporal, up here, down here, back to the ranks,

all over the place. Anyway, I came back and we were working, building [UNCLEAR] and things like that, also on active patrols because we felt that the Japanese were dropping a few little survey teams there to have a little look at us. Later on, of course we did notice that there were quite a few Japanese submarines coming into the lagoons.

This was on the coast between Moora and Geraldton, in and around that particular area there.

I was down there one day, having had a swim. We used to walk about ten miles to have a swim and get back to camp just as dirty. We didn’t have much water there. Didn’t have much food either for that matter. We watched a couple of Catalinas take out a Japanese submarine that got stranded in a lagoon because the tides in Western Australia do drop up and down a bit more than most places. It so happened that we

had some active service patrols and the weather was putrid. The boys were not well and so I did the first and I did the last. I had no need to do a tour of duty but I did the first and the last, the second last, I beg your pardon. I handed my rifle over to a dear old friend of mine, a good comrade, and he was really tired and sleepy, not feeling well and he went out about, maybe, couldn’t have gone out more

than about two hundred yards down the track – and these were single patrols, you went on your own – he sat down, put his back to a tree and went sound asleep. Of course the Duty Sergeant found him round about 6 o’clock in the morning when he was just walking down around the perimeters of where we were camped. He pulled him to his feet and all that kind of the thing and threw him in the [UNCLEAR] or wherever he threw him. I was charged with negligence of duty being the Corporal, the

NCO [Non Commissioned Officer] in charge of that particular patrol of that area, I was the one to blame and so I was up for a court martial. I went up before Colonel Rae and Rae understood the circumstances naturally and he said to me, “I don’t know about reducing you to the ranks, Pate. I tell you what, I feel charitable this morning. I’ll give you a chance to revert to the ranks.” So I said, “Thank you sir, I’m very grateful for that. I’ll certainly be delighted to revert to the ranks.”

Bang! I go back to Private again. A week or two after that, I’m sure that news spread quite quickly through the Battalion and up to Divvy [Divisional] Headquarters, I had a call from Captain McAllister who was a scoutmaster in Drummoyne when I was growing up as a kid. He asked Colonel Rae could he have me up in Divvy Headquarters to write and broadcast within the Command itself, not anywhere

beyond the 2nd Division Command, some broadcasts of morale building, like propaganda, say against Tokyo Rose who was pretty prevalent in those days. She was very virulent in what she was saying. So I went up and I did that. I wrote as a journalist and as a radio journalist those kind of things where I said, “No, this is not true, this is what’s happening,” etcetera. “Don’t take any notice of her,” etcetera, whatever it was.

I was training up another younger fellow at the same time saying, “Now this is what you’ve got to look for, pull this news in, make this point, get to your point, don’t waffle around,” this kind of thing as we’re all inclined to do at times. Having done that I said to Captain Mac, “Now I’ve done that, I think I’d better get back to the Battalion.” Of course, being up there and living inside sort of a shed instead of living on the ground underneath a piece

of canvas with the infantry was absolutely charming. My clothes were clean for a change. I was always shaved. There was no dust on my hat and my pants were ironed. My boots were polished. It was a lovely kind of a way of life. It was really pleasant but say you wanted to go back to your Battalion. Mac looked at me and said, “Well, I can understand this. You’ve got all your friends down there and you’ve done a good job here for me, for this, but I think there’s one other thing I’d like to ask

you to do.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “You know this 2nd Divvy concert party that we’ve got here?” I said, “Yes, I do.” He said, “Oh yes, you started that didn’t you for Birdie Lloyd back in Wallgrove with the 8th Brigade, right?” I said, “Yes, we did do that. We got together concerts because Bride had problems with the men going into Liverpool, getting drunk and fighting and all that kind of thing. So we did that.” He said, “They’re in the showground over there.”

I said, “I didn’t know that. I thought they were in Guildford.” He said, “Oh, they were in Guildford but no, now they’re here.” He said, “Could you go down? They’re a bloody undisciplined mob. They’re dirty, they’re slovenly. Their lines stink. They’re supposed to have an officer very shortly but they haven’t got one now.” So I go down and I do look at the lines and there’d be about five or six tents, one storage and five to live in and that kind of thing.

They were, these dirty clothes were hanging outside and inside there were people snoring away. It was very hot and summer weather up there of course, and they were lying around in their jockey shorts and the jockey shorts weren’t too clean either, I can tell you! (Laughs). I sort of thought “Oh my God, what do I do?” I kicked somebody’s foot or tapped him. I said, “Who’s in charge here?” He said, “No-one’s in charge here.”

I said, “Not in this tent. Who’s in charge of you mob?” He said, “I think Georgie Wallace is, down there. Junior is down there somewhere,” and off he goes again. So I walk down and I’m calling out in each tent, “Is there a George Wallace here? Sergeant Wallace?” Finally George goes, “Uhhh,” and there he is. Of course, George was one of the most absolutely brilliantly talented comedians and producers. I really think as a comedian he was probably, I say this

in this way, I thought he was better than his father. I really thought he was better than his father. He was a funny fellow to deal with when you work with him but by God, once you got working with him he was a joy. He really was. Marvellous guy.

No, I never met George Junior. I’d met George Senior. I’d met him out at Centre Sound Studios but I’d never met the son. A few people had talked about him and said, “He’s a very difficult person.

You won’t like him.” Anyway I sat down with George and I had a heart to heart and I told him what Captain Mac had said, and Des Turner who was a very clever compere and all of that, worked a great deal with the ABC – that’s the late Des Turner – he was having to go back to Sydney for something, maybe for health reasons. I’m not quite sure now. So I was going to really take over his work as compere and writer, playing the straight

man to George and all that kind of stuff. I’d had a little experience in it but not an enormous amount in that kind of theatre and so I had to learn very fast and I learnt very fast and I think I learnt a tremendous amount from George in that particular way. We sort of got the unit into shape. Mac said, “How are you going?” and I said, “I think we’re going alright.” We had three shows to do first of all that had been written and we were preparing those.

I said, “Mac, I’ll do the first three shows and that’s it, then I’ve got to go back to the Battalion.” I didn’t really want to. In this time of great stress for us and it really was – it was really approaching the fall of Singapore – all of us felt that we really wanted to be more active in the war. We were quite prepared to be more active in the war and not particularly caring for being in Australia. We would have liked to have been somewhere else. I was on transit to,

put on transit to the 8th Division I think twice, in Singapore and once in Timor over those short period of months or a year, and I was taken off each one of those particular transport or transportation orders.

Oh God, yes. It was that kind of thing. Eventually we did do the shows and I didn’t take any notice of which Units we were playing

to but the third time we went out it turned out we were playing to my old battalion, and they just gave me the biggest chiacking in the world. Here I am, they’ve seen me in dirty, dusty, stinking, bloody greens or khakis or whatever we had, I forget now, and here I am in a white tuxedo and a black tie with the whole thing – ohh sorry!

I thought I was doing my bowtie up. (Laughs). Okay.

But here I was elegantly dressed, black pants, patent leather shoes, the whole thing, and doing all this stuff up on the stage, and they chiacked the bejesus out of me. It being beer night at the Battalion, every now and again, one of my friends, all sitting down the front crouched on their haunches down the front, would get a bottle of beer and a couple of them came right up on the stage and said, “Here Mike, have a suck on this. A bit dry tonight isn’t it?”

Right. I will. What we did then was, we did an enormous amount of shows in Western Australia up and down that particular divisional area. We came back across the Nullarbor in our usual cattle trucks at the end of 1943 and we re-equipped and we went up to Red Island Point, which is the top of Cape York in

1944, and from there we did tour of duty through the Torres Strait Islands, and then we went from there to Dutch New Guinea, Merauke and we did a tour of duty around Merauke there, and from then we came back on a dirty old Chinese freighter, came back into Cairns and went up onto the Tablelands in preparation along with the 9th and others, I believe then of going into Borneo. We were up there for the better part of that year. We came down for a short leave

in early ’45. We went then from there up to – and we thought we were going to various other places – we went to Jacquinot Bay in New Britain where the landings had just taken place, a month or two before there, and we served in the Jacquinot Bay area and then we went up to Tol Plantation, which was the last perimeter in New Britain just before Rabaul, and I think there were 2,500 Australians up there against 70,000 Japanese but the Japanese didn’t want to fight then so

that was it. We came back to Jacquinot and then were posted to Lae and we came back into Lae and only a matter of about two weeks later the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the war was virtually declared over. That was us. We then came back to Sydney in November at the end of that year, 1945. We found that many of us had been deemed specialists to go to the occupation of Japan. We did

some bond tours and I finally said to them, “That’s enough for me,” and I was discharged on March 11th, 1946 at Marrickville, and I did on March 12th my last show with the Army Entertainment Unit at the Town Hall. I’ve got a wonderful photograph of that for you.

Yes I can do that from school and if you want to go through that, because those things, my family and school fashioned my attitudes and it certainly fashioned my attitudes of going into the army and I think one of the reasons I, although it was really afterwards. People said to me before the war, “Michael, you don’t have to go. I mean, you were writing,

you were broadcasting, you were doing this, you were doing that. All you’ve got to do is apply for an exemption. You don’t need to go.” I said, “No, I want to go.” I felt I must go. I would have been absolutely ashamed of myself if I hadn’t gone. You know how you feel about things like that. It’s a different world today but in those days, not that we felt that Hitler was threatening us or anything like that but not here in this country. He was threatening the whole world but here

I was very conscious of – are we recording this? No?

We are? Good. I didn’t have the opportunity of going to University as I would have liked. My family simply, although comfortable, really didn’t have that spare money that they could say, give me £200 a year to go to school. I mean £200 was twice the basic wage per year. My father was fortunate.

He earned twice the basic wage for his work, but I couldn’t ask him to give me £200 to go to university and buy my books and keep me and all that kind of thing. You couldn’t do that.

I don’t think anyone unless they were a dickhead could not have been very well aware of it. It was one of those things that permeated, not the 20’s, the war permeated the 20’s, the

men with the arms and legs missing, the eyes and the faces all scarred and all those kind of things, wonderful men but there they were and they made a big impression, those that would be standing on street corners when you were coming home from, say when I first went to work in town. At night, I’d go to the library until it closed. I’d come home, get a late tram to Drummoyne, and you’d often see very nice men standing around,

well-dressed men, and you’d smell the methylated spirits because in those days returnees from World War I could go into a chemist shop and they could get their little bit of cocaine, they could get their shots. All they had to do was show their medals. So many of the men had gotten into the habit of drinking methylated spirits. Metho drinkers they used to call them. I was down on the corner of George Street and King Street coming home

one night and there was this very elegant man who was talking to himself. You couldn’t make out what he was saying and then there was this smell of methylated spirits and a moment or two later there was a crack as a small bottle – he didn’t get it back into his pocket, it went and smashed itself on the pavement and I thought, “Oh the poor bugger.” I mean, you know

I was about seventeen or eighteen at the time and I just walked across to him and said, “Can I help you sir?” He said, “No, no. No thank you, son. I’m alright, son. I’ve just had a little misfortune here son, but I’m alright.” I said, “Now are you sure you’re alright?” He said, “No, I’m not alright.” He said, “I still think of it. But for me, those boys would still be alive, do you realise that?”

He said, “Well, maybe you don’t. You’re only a young man. I commanded a ship and I commanded it badly and the ship went down. That’s what I’ve been living with.” I’m thinking, “Gee this is terrible,” because he’s crying, tears are coming down his face, but that was another part of it. The Depression itself affected people in certain ways. First of all, it denied them many things. They had to look for other means of, men,

of finding work by going out in the country perhaps and keeping on the move all the time. Frank Huelin, a friend of mine, wrote a marvellous book about that called Keep Moving. He experienced it himself in that period. In the ‘30s where the Depression hit Australia we had Happy Valley, at La Perouse where people just went out there and lived under cardboard and tin and canvas and whatsoever or which. My family, my aunts particularly and my mother spent a great deal of every evening

of the year knitting, either in cotton or in wool, for young babies and older people if they needed a sweater or a cardigan or something like that. Every Friday night they would go in the afternoon to the greengrocer’s or to the grocer’s shop and they would buy things that you couldn’t grow like sugar or flour or tinned stuff or

stuff of that nature from the grocer, and they’d put it into a box about like this, you see, and they would go around to one of their friends or to several of their friends for that matter. I would carry the boxes for them and we walked everywhere of course in those days. We only did it within a few blocks of where my aunts and my mother and I lived. They would take these little boxes in – there may be three, four or five shillings worth of goods in them –

and they’d go in and they’d say, “Ah, here you are Mrs Skinner,” to their dear friends and they’d say, “We just happened to see these at the grocers and they were, you know and we thought perhaps you could use them?” She noticed of course that they went and got them for her, and she’d say, “Oh, that’s very kind of you. I didn’t know they had them. I haven’t been to the grocers for a while,” or whatever. She’d say, “But it just so happens that I’ve got some nice things here. Let me show you.” There would be this spinach garden, there’d be

the peas, the beans, whatever they were growing in their backyards. I remember Mrs Skinner had a rather large-ish backyard and she used to grow vegetables. In virtual fact they were all looking after each other and they would exchange something for something. Everyone kept their pride, and when you were growing up and when I didn’t do quite so good at Fort Street as I would have liked, I felt very disappointed in myself. I felt I should have done better and I should have been

able perhaps to get a bursary to go to university.

No, I was disappointing myself. My family didn’t place any burden on me about scholastic achievement.

Well, I was doing that on my own except they had to buy me – I only ever had one suit in all the time I went to Fort Street but no, I wasn’t a burden on them money-wise but I would have been if I’d have gone to university. But I did go to work at

educational classes and I did go to evening classes at the university in Psychology and Philosophy. I met some very interesting people there.

Not really, no. If it was discussed, it was discussed not as far as they were concerned because say, in my uncle and aunt’s family, my uncle was a master broom maker so he

got always a very fine salary so that’s why he was always able to look after other people. My aunt was forewoman at Dunlop-Purdue. She was in rubber goods there. She was forewoman there. My older aunt was a master milliner so she didn’t work, she kept house but she was a master milliner. The younger uncle that I had, Uncle Johnny was a master cabinetmaker and a carpenter. My father fortunately, as I said, worked at Sargent’s and so, not only

did he get a very good salary but he was also able to bring food home for that matter, Sargent’s food if he wished to. So we were never inconvenienced in that way. We were a typical, Irish, Scottish type of family that they could take a slather of vegetables and this and that and have a marvellous meal. We’d sit down to half a dozen vegetables on the table every night and things like that.

No, I only had one sister.

It was a very comfortable family in a way. I spent a lot of time when I was just a youngster, up until I was four years of age, with my grandmother McKee and she was a lovely lady. She came from Donegal – she was a McClure who came from Donegal in Ireland and she was educated in Scotland and she came out here and she married my grandfather in 1886, Christmas Eve 1886 as a matter of fact.

She spoke both wonderful English and Gaelic, and there were times when I was a youngster that I spent time with her because my mother wasn’t well. This was just before my sister was born when I was four years of age. I would be looked after by my grandmother and she would be in bed and she’d read to me and I’d sit on the bed, very pleasant. I was babysat by my grandmother. There would be

occasions when my uncles would arrive home rather drunk and I remember one night she said to Hammy, “You’ve got to look after Johnny because if you don’t, God knows who will.” Johnny was enjoying his drink and Hammy had a glass of whiskey in his hand. The two of them did when they came home. They enjoyed their drink. I loved my Uncle Hammy particularly, and he said, “Oh, I’ll take care of that, Mum. I’ll take care of that.”

He went back out of the bedroom and down through the living room, into the kitchen, into the laundry area, and I got off the bed and I went after him because I wanted to say hello to him. I caught up with him when he was in the laundry, and he was standing there – we didn’t have too many lights on in those days but there was one light on, I think, in the kitchen, and I could just see him in the laundry. He had a glass and there was about two fingers of whiskey in it and he said, “Well, that’s the last one,” and down it went.

He took the glass and he went “toongg” like that, down into the corner of the laundry, had a full bottle with him in the other hand and he went like that (indicates turning bottle upside down), emptied it down the sink, “toongg” in the corner just to be sure that it was broken, and he never drank from that day, never took another drink from that day. Another time there was a sort of – you could hear the door,

the gate – this long sort of a pathway alongside this house that my grandfather had built in Drummoyne. 30 Day Street, and you could hear the front gate go and you could hear men’s footsteps coming down the path – it was a concreted path – and I saw them walk past the window and I ran out and I’d been told to go to bed. I was with my grandmother

for the night and she was out there and of course I ran out. These were men, her cousins, mostly her cousins, I guess who had come up from one of the – this would have been about 1923. Sailing ships were still coming out to Australia in those days, and they used to unload at Black Wattle Bay and then come around and tie up at the Dolphins, just below Day Street, near Cockatoo Island dock, in that area there, and the men would,

they would be in their sea boots and particularly in winter they wore big sort of roll-neck sweaters and jackets and caps and they’d have a bottle of whiskey in one pocket and a pipe and that kind of thing, so they would come up to see Mother McKee and of course they came in and they brought her a little gift or two from Ireland or Scotland or wherever they’d come from. They’d sit down and ask permission to light a pipe and have a smoke.

They’d each put the bottle on the table like that, and what they didn’t drink stayed in the house, naturally. I would be allowed to sit on the kitchen stool, a long bench in the warm kitchen and just sit and listen. Most nights of course they spoke in Gaelic. They all spoke Gaelic so that was another language that I heard when I was a youngster. I never learned any of it that I remember. I know a few words of it now but I never learned anything of that, but it certainly was my grandmother’s voice

that influenced my voice, I’m quite sure, because my voice was totally unlike anyone else’s in the family and I don’t remember exactly what hers was like. She was a well-educated lass and she would have had a voice that was influenced by being Irish in Donegal and going to school in Scotland, so it was a lovely kind of a soft accent, it was.

No, I wasn’t,

we were not Catholics. We were Protestants. High Scots. My sister eventually belonged to the High Scots Church in Sydney. I was in the Presbyterian Church. I went to church from when I was just a nipper and I was in the choirs there. I sang in the choirs, the adult choirs. I sang a great deal at Drummoyne Primary School. We were in all the Eisteddfod choirs. I was in

four years in the Eisteddfod choirs, and it really taught me a great deal about music and probably gave me my work voice. The Protestant Church in those days or the Presbyterian Church, that’s a better way of putting it, I’m sorry, was kind of brimstone and

fire. There was the holy bush burning up there and God damned you in damnation, etcetera. If you don’t, you are condemned to Hell. It was a very severe Church in its own particular way. I didn’t care for it in that way, but I did so love going to church and singing in the choir. I adored that. I taught Sunday School and I then was asked to play cricket and football for St Bede’s Anglican in Sydney, and the Reverend Grieve

upbraided my mother so cruelly one day when she came and joined me to go somewhere else after I’d been teaching Sunday School on a Sunday, and he upbraided her so much about allowing me to go and play cricket and football with the Anglicans. So I said to Mr Grieve, “That is the last time I shall step foot in your church.” I never, ever stepped foot in his church –

he was long since dead then – but in that church in Drummoyne, which my mother was married in as the second person, but the first person on a weekend ever, when that church was built, ever again. It was just too much. I didn’t go away from Christianity, but I most certainly – that was the way it went. We were Protestants. I did have Catholic cousins.

They would never let me go onto the grounds of the Catholic Church to even to drink the water from the bubbler. Oh no, no. Couldn’t let someone who wasn’t a Catholic drink their water! (Laughs) Anyway, we all grew up that particular way and finally then, as you know I came into town to work and I went into the army, but I think all of those kind of ways that I was brought up and the people that I knew and the standards that they had,

their personal standards, their attitudes and their religious standards and all that kind of thing, were what influenced me greatly.

Labour. My father was essentially a Labor person. I think they mostly all were Labor being, and regarding themselves in those days very much as working class. They didn’t have any aspirations to be anything else but working class. They were very happy to do it.

My father was a great admirer of John Lang and was absolutely furious with De Groot. I mean, he would have killed him if he’d got him. He took me there on the day the Bridge was opened with my sister, and when it happened and my father heard about it you could see him going like this (indicates about to blow his top). He rarely blew his top but when he blew it, by God he was a big man. He really was a big fellow. He had a

fifty-four-inch chest. I have a forty-eight-inch chest these days. I started off with a modest forty-two but I built that up through running and exercise and work and things like that, but my father had a fifty-four inch chest and he was probably just about my height, just a bit short of six foot all of his life. At one time I stood about half an inch over six-foot but we shrink as we grow older, you see.

But he was a gentle person. He would not stand anybody being uncouth or foul-mouthed in front of women. It was a particular thing many men would not stand in those days. He never swore himself ever. I never did hear him swear in his whole life, or my life with him. One day we were out watching the cricket. He used to like to take me out to the Sydney Cricket Ground. We’d be on the hill

and he’d bring a whole box of ham sandwiches mainly on white bread cut in diagonals, mustard on them, heavily for his side, and not quite so much for my side, and we’d sit out there. He’d go and get me a shandy or something like that. He’d have himself a pint or two of beer. There was one fellow down the front who was obviously pretty drunk and he was carrying on and swearing and using pretty foul language, and my father

tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Just watch what you’re saying.” The guy said, “Oh bleep bleep bleep.” My father said, “I said just watch what you’re saying.” Very quietly, you see. He’s taken off his waistcoat and is sitting there in his white shirt and grey pants and his braces with his grey felt hat on his head and he’s taken off his tie. He’s having a relaxed time. This guy gets up and

starts swearing again and turning around and being very vulgar. My father said, “I told you not to do that.” He said, “You can go and get bleep.” My father said, “Oh, is that so?” He walks up to him and takes him by the nose and goes (demonstrates grabbing nose and turning fingers quickly). He snapped the guy’s nose right up there (indicates top of nose) and of course blood just came right down this guy’s front. He said, “Now, I told you not to swear didn’t I? That’s it.” Of course

the guy is running off somewhere trying to stop the bleeding. He just snapped his nose like that. Just between those two fingers. So he just sat down again, went on eating his sandwich and drinking his beer. He was a very gentle man but you wouldn’t want to cross him.

I slapped my sister once to my great disgrace. She was being very nasty to me at the time about this, that and the next thing.

“Why didn’t I get a proper job instead of trying to be an actor?” and all this kind of thing which was unfortunate. It was one of those periods where I was stretching my money out to live in between jobs when we first started. We freelanced and so there were times when it was pretty thin. She was being very nasty to me one day and I thought “Oh man” and I gave her four fingers right across her cheek and that stopped her right in her tracks. My father went to me and I just

took off up the hall out of the house. We had a semi-detached house and I took right up the hallway and my mother was saying, “Don’t go, don’t go, no your father won’t hit.” I thought, “Oh Jesus” because he had a hand on him like – it was a big hand. That was the only time and by the time I came back and apologised to my sister and I apologised to everyone concerned, he was alright but by God, if he’d have

hit me he’d have knocked me right through the wall. Anyway, all the men in my family were very manly and yet very nice, very gentle, and very considerate of other people. That was the way I conducted my life. I always tried to do the best for the men that I served with in every which way, beyond the call of duty often, but I would not stand any

nonsense from any one of them.

Yeah, I would not stand any nonsense from them. I organised the transfer of a number of men in units that I served in during the war because I just didn’t feel that they were measuring up to what they should have been measuring up to. It wasn’t being in any way nasty to them, it was just that you must protect the people that you are with. You must look after the men that you are commanding. Even just in the capacity that we did with the

Entertainment Unit. We had to be responsible for them, those of us that were a little bit older or a little bit wiser perhaps.

I don’t think there were any kind of light bulbs. It sort of happened because – it was

there rather than something else I wanted to do. I’d always, at school, been involved in writing things and I’d won a few prizes with writing so I’d always thought, “Gee it would be nice if I could be a writer.” I always read very widely; I was given books and I won books at school and at church and things like that. When I started to work, almost every week, I’d buy a small book, a Heinemann’s or whatever it happened to be. A classic; it might be Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights,

It might be Charles Dickens. I went through all of the classics, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, you name them, right through. You could buy them in those days for about four and six. And in those days, I didn’t drink. I didn’t waste my time, like a lot of people, standing up at a bar. I had the occasional drink with my father and that was about the extent of it. I smoked a little. I smoked from when I was about 15. I didn’t smoke in excess. I’d probably smoke about

3 or 4 cigarettes a day, no more and they were always top cigarettes like Phillip Morris in those days used to have (UNCLEAR) in them – beautiful smell – and I smoked a pipe occasionally, too. It was good tobacco. I didn’t waste my money and I much preferred to go and buy a book. Some of them were only books about that (indicates about 4” x 6”) big and about that (indicates about 2”) thick.

Well, as far as novels are

concerned, I was particularly fascinated with first of all the Dickens novels which I always enjoyed reading. I absolutely thought they were – when later I saw them as films, I thought, “Yes, well that’s exactly how I imagined them.” I sort of could bring to life the whole of the book themselves. My uncle gave me a gift of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. That was a precious thing. I’ve still got it as a matter of fact. It’s a wonderful, beautifully illustrated

volume and probably later then I became quite influenced by coming across Dostoevsky’s writings, which I enjoyed: The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, things like that. I probably think that as far as movies are concerned, of influence to me in that particular regard, it was the reading of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and seeing Olivier and Merle Oberon and

David Niven and Geraldine Fitzgerald who’s an old friend of ours now, doing that film so it made that very pertinent to me. I’d always been doing pantomimes and dance, end of year shows when I was at primary school and I was also, as I said before, in all the choirs.

Yes, well my father was very much inclined to – he loved musical comedy. He utterly loved musicals. I think he saw every performance Gladys Moncrieff ever gave or Marie Bourke and people like that. He took me to them regularly. My Uncle Hammy on the other hand adored vaudeville and burlesque so I saw Stiffy and Merlin and people like that with him. My Aunt Renée loved to take me to say, down at the Capitol or when it was called the Hippodrome

in those days in Sydney , they had the circuses and she was also, being a younger person, she wanted to go to the movies all the time. She adored seeing westerns with John Wayne and she adored George Raft and she adored early Humphrey Bogart, so she and I used to go to the movies. I used to go to the movies with my Uncle. He loved Maurice Chevallier. I was deluged. My father used to take me and drop me off to see the silent movies when I was just a kid

in Drummoyne while he’d wander up to the pub and have a few bets with the SP [Starting Price] bookmaker and a few drinks and things like that. Come back, pick me up a couple of hours later. We just walked there and never had any conveyance in the family, ever. We didn’t have a car or anything like that. We didn’t need it. We got on the ferry, or got on the bus or we got on whatever it was. I just think that,

particularly the fact that I wanted to write, that was the reason I went to the Market Street 2BL and got hold of George Ivan Smith. I think I really wanted to write. I wasn’t concerned about acting. I’d acted at school. At Fort Street I’d done a play every year I was there. The last year, 4th Year I was going to direct and act in one of Eugene O’Neill’s short plays

called “In the Zone”. It was about the merchant seamen during World War I and submarines, etcetera. I didn’t get to do that. I never thought of myself as being a performer but yet I could sing, I could dance, I could act. When I was at the ABC and started with George Ivan Smith, I had a fellow come up to me in the corridor one day and he was a neatly dressed person, a very nice person. He said to me, “Oh

Pate, I’ve got a script for you in my office. Will you go down and get it and have a look and see the rehearsals. I think the first one’s Thursday.” I knew who he was: Mr Charles Wheeler. He was one of the producers at the ABC. I said, “Mr Wheeler have you got the right person?” He said, “Yes, of course. Pate, Pate, your name’s Pate isn’t it? I’ve heard your broadcast. Lovely voice. Lovely voice. Real beautiful juvenile voice. We’ve got to have you. Get my script will you and come for rehearsal.”

I thought this is ridiculous. He doesn’t know me. He’s casting me as the juvenile in an hour play. So I go down to his office and I get the play and I look at it and there’s the fee on the front of it. Four guineas. I thought “That’s me!” (Laughs) So I started acting with the ABC and that particular, it was a very funny thing. We had a series of rehearsals. We were going to do the play on a Friday night, I believe. We came

to the last rehearsal which was on the Friday afternoon. Most of the people left immediately. This would be about 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe a little earlier but let’s say 4 o’clock. Two old actors were sitting there talking, getting all their stuff together, having another cigarette or whatever it was and one said to the other, he said, “Are you going home, Jake?” He said, “Oh yes, the wife’s got something. I’ll go home and have a quick meal.” He said, “Oh no, bugger that. I’m going to have a few drinks and I’ll

be right. I’ll have a few drinks.” “I thought you might like to have dinner with me?” He said, “You know what I mean, putting on this bloody fish and chips outfit. I don’t know why we’re doing it here for. Nobody ever sees us do it. We’re all in this bloody fish and chips and the girls are in their bloody long dresses.” He said, “Alright. See you later.” I said to him, mister whatever his name was, “What is this fish and chips you’re wearing?”

I’m thinking it’s a slang term for something. “You know boy, tonight everybody’s got to be black bloody tie,” He said, “You know, tuxedo.” I thought, “My God”. In the ABC, in a room much bigger than this but not that much bigger with a microphone around a green-based table on which we put our scripts, we were going to act. The girls have got to come in evening dress, the men in tuxedos. Black tie. I thought,

“Jesus! I’m living then on Phillip Street. I race down to Phillip Street, I get my patent leather shoes and a pair of black socks. I then race back to the Theatre Royal and old Mum Scully, Pat Scully’s wife was in charge of the theatre and I said to her, “Mum, I’ve got to do a radio play tonight and I’ve got to have a tuxedo. Can you fix me up?” “Oh sure Mike. Sure.” She gets me a coat, pants and some kind of string braces or whatever they were. Gives me a dickie

with a tie attached to it and you put it around your neck and it just sticks at the front of the thing. I go back, get dressed in the toilet and I turn up and here we all are with the black ties and all this kind of thing. I played the juvenile and Wheeler thought I was absolutely marvellous. I never stopped working after that. I was asked to go down to ARP [Australasian Radio Productions] where Doug Hyde used to have studios just alongside what was then Adam’s Hotel, which is the Hilton today, down in that area.

He said to me, he gave me this part, quite a nice part. Like myself almost playing the young man and I do it and he said after I finished, “That was very nice work there, Mike. I’ll be looking to, you know.” This is in the studio so I leave and I’m sort of going up the corridor to Pitt Street and I hear him call me.

I said, “Oh yes”. He said, “Just a minute will you Mike, I want to talk to you, son.” I went back to him. He’s a little fella. He said, “That…” and he named the fellow, “hasn’t turned up. He’s probably drunk again. Can you do an American accent?” I said, “Sure, I can.” I gave him a Humphrey Bogart and he said, “Marvellous, marvellous. Just do it like that. That will be great.”

So, I come back and I do the American for him and of course the other actor never turns up at all and Doug uses me for everything. Can I do a Spanish, can I do a French, can I do a German so that’s how I began in the acting. Then I was asked to appear on the stage in a number of plays. At the same time we always did a lot of little theatre. Then I was engaged, after I’d done a stage run of Shakespeare’s plays because I’d grown a black beard, by Charlie Chauvel

to be a utility actor for 40,000 Horseman. That meant if he had an idea and said, “I think I’d like a Sikh policeman in this scene, I’m the Sikh policeman. He’d like a carpet buyer or a carpet seller or a blind beggar, I’m the lot. I played four parts in that film. It was wonderful. I got 8 guineas a week. I was there for 2 weeks. It was just fun. So consequently in that period of time

before we got involved in being in the army, I became an actor because other people pushed me into being an actor. I really had no desire to utterly be an actor. I wanted to be a writer. I was more interested in being a good writer than I was in being an actor. But it turned out exactly the opposite. I’ve done more acting in my life than I have done writing although I do a lot of writing. I have done a lot of writing and it just seems amazing. I would have liked nothing better in my life

than to have just concentrated on writing novels or writing screenplays. Those are the two things that I prefer to write, that type of thing. That wasn’t it. It just shows you how accidentally you can get into a profession. When I first started acting, I think that I was very, very good in certain things that I did, especially in certain things that I did and so bloody terrible in some of the others. I wondered how sometimes I got a job. They all thought I was marvellous.

I was so critical of myself. I really thought I was lousy.

Oh no, no. Actors or creative people as you know only too well, can conceive of what they want to do and can see it quite clearly at times, the whole thing about it, but doing it is another matter and when you do it and people say, “Oh, you’re marvellous. You’re absolutely marvellous!” You think

“Oh shit, I’m not within a bull’s roar of this.” That’s when you flog yourself. You really flog yourself. You’ve got to watch it that you don’t become too much of the perfectionist, in italics, because that can ruin you. You’ve got to work creatively, I think, instinctively. Based upon solid knowledge of course.

The First World War. I think the First World War dominated Australian sentiment, while it was on, greatly and polarised it particularly with the Mannix and the Billy Hughes political pollings and referendums and all that. I think after the war people were wanting to forget the war,

except those that were involved in it or those that had losses in it, family losses in it. I think there was a kind of ambivalence there with people who wanted greatly to admire what had happened during the war and at the same time say, “Well, that was the war to end all wars. Thank God that war is over. There will never be another.” Suddenly they found that things were not getting too good. League of Nations wasn’t functioning terribly well.

The whole of the problems in America started with the crash of ’29. You had a lot of disturbances throughout the 20’s that were not really recognised by a lot of people in this country and that country and so it developed in those ways. The economies of certain countries were shot to pieces: Germany, France, Great Britain to a great extent. The Americans became more powerful and some of the Viennese and Swiss Bankers became very powerful. That was a problem.

You had the rise of the Communist Party in Russia.

Very aware. At school I had some very good teachers who pointed the direction. Not so much in primary school perhaps but certainly at high school I had some amazingly wonderful history teachers who just didn’t teach

you the history down in the curriculum, they taught you to have a look around the world, to read, to do this and I always grew up and worked in groups of people who were very inquiring, who read, who bought magazines, who talked, who discussed, journalists and people like that particularly. I had a great connection with a lot of journalists in Sydney. A lot of great artists, black and white artists. People like Norman Lindsay as I said, and these people really – their conversations were not about

what were they going to wear or what this or what they were going to eat or what they were going to drink, it was about politics. I mean my father, at the table with my mother rarely discussed that and he rarely discussed it with me but when we were out, he and I used to go to the Domain every Sunday afternoon and we would stand there and listen to the speakers at the Domain. I’d sit down and he’d stand there and say, “Now listen here,” and they’d all be at the speakers. I had all of this around me.

The minute I began working, apart from knowing well the particular union problems that my elders might have faced during those years, the minute I began working, I was made very conscious of the fact that I should belong to a union. The politics of it were so and so. There was a time when I tried to go to the Spanish War when I was about 17. My father was provendering ships down in

Sydney Harbour and I thought I had a merchant seaman’s ticket so I could get on board a boat and get to Spain and join the International Brigade to fight the fascists and all that kind of thing. I had no knowledge of the Communist Party except I knew there’d been the revolutions. Of course we all knew that but my father was tipped off by a friend of his on the wharves and when I went up to get the ticket, as I thought I was going to get it, the fellow

said, “No, you know young lad, I can’t give you this ticket at the moment. Your father would break my bloody jaw if I did. Right? You go home and have a chat with your father. Your father wants to have a talk with you son, right?” I go home. My father says, “I believe you’ve been talking to a friend of mine down on the wharves today?” I said, “Yes I was.” He said, “Given up the idea of being a merchant seamen have you, Ned?” I said, “Well, I don’t know, Dad.”

He said, “No, don’t get mixed up going over there fighting other people’s fights. No, no.” He had an eye on everything. We were very aware of what the politics were and of course the years that happened after the occupation of the Saar Valley. First of all, Mussolini and the Ethiopians and all that kind of thing. The Saar Valley and then you

came up all through the Anschluss [German annexation of Austria]…

Sure, sure. The thing that started the refugee movement strongly, at least to Australia, was after the Anschluss, when Hitler went into Austria,

the gal who was my first wife, she and her family were Hungarian Jews but they weren't even unorthodox, they were what we called non Jews, they were Jewish, but they didn’t go to Synagogue. They were successful very in law and their sons and daughters were successful in many areas and they went to America to live. The connections that my father-in-law, my first father-in-law

whose name was Maurice Denton, he used to be ‘Deutsch’. He and Ida, his wife were lovely people but the world they came from was protected against Hitler in many ways. Yet, my first wife, because of friends and cousins and things like that

who were unable to, went out in the streets of Vienna and swept the bloody streets for the Nazis standing over them, for the relatives who were not strong enough to do it, right. When they came out here, there was Poles from Warsaw that I knew, they never got out after the war started, these were people who left before the war mainly and they were Polish Jews and some wonderful people. I worked with them, with the sons and daughters at the Jewish Youth Theatre

and we were anxious to find out from them what was going on and so they would talk to us. They told some of the funniest jokes in the world. There was one where the boy in winter is walking along the banks of a river and it is all ice and snow and it’s terrible and

and he hears this voice calling, “Helpa, helpa!” and he looks across there and there is a man struggling, going down for the third time in the river and the boy thinks, “Oh my God!” and he goes bang into the river and he swims and he grabs hold of this fellow and he brings him up and puts him on the bank and pumps him on the back and out comes the water.

And he’s spluttering and he finally he looks up and says, “Thank you so much for saving my life, I give you anything you like, name what you want and you got it,” And the boy says, “What I want the most is a State funeral,” and the fellow says, “Why do you want a State funeral?” and he says, “When my fucking family finds out that I have rescued you, fucking Adolf Hitler from the fucking water, they’re going to…”

And they were grim jokes these Polish Jews told. But I have never forgotten that one.

No, no, I think my attitude was, and I think it was shared by quite a few other people because many of my other friends were university students at Sydney University, people like Nigel Lovell

and people like that who were studying at the University there. I feel that basically many of us were pacifists – we didn’t want another war; we would do anything to prevent it; we wouldn’t appease but we were philosophically feeling that it wasn’t a good thing to do but that was a passing faze. I mean it became quite clear that we were going to have to fight Hitler

or the combined Allied Forces were going to have to fight Hitler, and that this was going to be the crux of the present western civilisation. So that, also too we felt it was a generation thing, you felt that when you were that age and that it’s there you must accept responsibility for it. At the same time I had been doing some lectures at the Institute of Pacific Affairs

and so I was pretty well aware of what was happening, well basically in the Pacific, Far Eastern area and you became very conscious of the might of the Japanese Army Forces, Tojo and the various Generals who had been commanding them and what they had been doing in China, etcetera. I think you just felt that this was

what we were going to face. If they were sweeping down through China to Singapore or Malaysia, well obviously they were going to look for more conquests as they came down and they’d come down this way, right, along the Dutch East Indies as they were then, and to Australia. So we agreed that that was likely to be where the Australians would most likely have to fight and supporting the British Empire either in the middle east, either on the ground or

in England with the fighter pilots, the bombers, and with the navy and all that kind of thing was part and parcel of being part of the British Empire and nobody questioned that, nobody felt that they shouldn’t do that. You should support the Empire. OK they did that without question.

Oh I don’t think that there was a disrespect for the British Empire; there was a great admiration for it and a lot of people felt very monarchial. But I think that there were a few of us who were pretty disgusted with Chamberlain, you know, the politics of that time and of course we were very aware of Mosley and the fascists. There were many things that were going on and there were a lot of problems with the Irish question and God knows what. We were conscious of that because it was being interested in history and that’s part of history.

You know, we read widely and we read in the papers what we could and we discussed it amongst ourselves and went to lectures to hear what other people had to say. I think that we were pretty well aware but it didn’t make any difference; individuals don’t make any real difference in that kind of thing; they’re too small in their influence. But that’s how it was and I think there were many of us quite educated by that factor

of other people telling us what was going on in the world and there was a great deal of wonderful people who came out here as refugees whose opinions you would respect and what they told us was shocking about the Nazis. We just felt … and seeing what had happened from the 1934 taking of the Saar Valley and things like that, that started

the whole thing rolling there. I think that during the war there was a bit of a problem with… I worked in the New Theatre and the New Theatre was a workers’ theatre but it also was and did contain a Communist cell and no one’s ever doubted that and I know because they tried to recruit me and I said I wasn’t interested. I said I already belonged to one party and

that’s the Labor Party and thank you, no. ‘Cause they were very nice boys and girls, many of them. When I was on service and I was just due to go up to sergeant or staff sergeant, they would send me packages to read: Workers’ Weekly, The Daily Worker or whatever it was and they would also send me English translations of Polish and Russian novels.

They were fascinating to read, they were wonderful to read and I used to read them and pass them on. But once we had a lieutenant in charge of our unit, this was when I was in the Entertainment Unit, and he was a prying person, he really was, and he opened my mail and it was a bundles of newspapers and books that had been sent to me and he went though the roof. He cruelled my promotion and I was then, I think, being considered for a commission. I’d already been considered for a couple of commissions when I was with the infantry but we blew those.

I sort of thought, what do I do, ‘cause he dancing around you know. I said to him, “John look, I read a lot of things but,” I said, “these are sent to me and I do object to you opening them like this,” and he went on for ages.

And it was a bit sad because he had that preconceived thing that Communists were bad. The only reason that we won the war in Europe, if anyone will really sit down and say so, was not because the Americans landed at Omaha Beach or the British landed here, there and everywhere, it was the Russians who beat the Germans, you know, in front of Stalingrad and Minsk and the whole bloody thing. I mean it was the Russians who beat the Germans and beat them to their knees.

So they weren't able to offer more than eleven months opposition after the landings at Omaha Beach and D-Day. That was how long the war in Europe lasted: it lasted from June the 6th 1944 to May the 8th 1945. That has got to be one of the shortest wars ever, right. The Russians had spent since, oh about 1941, through that time, three bitter, terrible years

and has lost, estimated between the two countries, fifty million dead.

It wasn’t difficult because it was expected of you and I think that we accepted that obligation with reservations. No one wants to go to a war.

Everyone going to war knows that, if they are unlucky, they will get killed. We were all conscious of that factor, it wasn’t going to be easy. But we did it because, generally speaking, our parents and our older friends would have expected that of us. I don’t think, necessarily, our own generation would have expected that of us.

Certainly, we didn’t want to be accused of not taking our responsibility. And I think a lot of people accepted the burden of being in the armed services during the war for that particular reason. The army was one of the biggest messes in the world to be in, gathering the most stupid collection of men commanding us that you had ever run across in your life, at times.

There were some marvellous persons, too, really grand, grand men. The army was you know, you take it or you leave it. It is never a joyous occasion to be in the army, I can tell you, or any of the services for that matter, but maybe I’m being a bit harsh on the people but it comes under the heading of an ‘f’up’.

Oh, having accepted the fact as I said,

our general instinct on learning on how the general trend of history was going during the thirties and we were likely to be terribly involved in the resolution of that particular conflict, I think that we sort of felt, once it started, our natural instinct was to hope that it would be avoided, but once it started, we felt that we had to do something about it.

And so, I remember one of the reasons that I went down on September 1st was that my dear friend, Desire Guillemet from Guernsey, who had been out here in Australia for quite some time – a mob of us had all been together and we knew each other quite well as young people – after recovering from a few other things, depressions and things like that, he had

volunteered and been accepted to the 6th Division in the Army Service Corps and I particularly wanted to, well I thought when I went down and volunteered, I wanted to be in the Army Service Corps with Desire. We would go away to the Middle East, we would go to England or whatever. It was one of those things. I felt we were with somebody. There were others like Peter Finch and Reg Parry and people like that, Dick Parry, who volunteered that we all knew and were in the army and we felt, if they were going, we would be going.

It wasn’t quite the swirl and the bustle and all that kind of thing that World War One had by any means but we felt that we should go and do our bit.

No, I didn’t do that. I was a very gregarious person in those years before the war, in the first year or so of the war but I was also very much a loner, independent,

and I, you know, I looked after myself and I also looked after a lot of other people, too, loaning them money if you had it. The rule of thumb was if you worked that week you took everybody to dinner on Friday night. So we often did that. In those days you could take ten people to dinner with drinks and everything for about thirty shillings, which was about six dollars, today. If we had a good week and made a few extra quid,

we made damn sure we took a bundle of people to a Chinese restaurant or to the Florentino on Elizabeth Street or Adam’s Grill or something like that. Those were those kind of days. When I couldn’t get into the army because I was under age for what they wanted, the air force were accepting people for training at I think nineteen years of age, younger, you could get in there.

I probably could have volunteered for the navy and been there, too, but you’d have gone in as a midshipman, I think, but I’m not quite sure about that. But it didn’t happen that way and then in the army, hell, I volunteered for the paratroopers, I volunteered for the bomber pilots as a gunner. I volunteered for the navy but unfortunately I was taken ill and I didn’t get back in time to go to that particular class at Flinders Base in Melbourne. That was

probably out of feeling that I wasn’t getting to, where I would have liked to have been which was more active service in the army and so I was applying for other things. And I had a great reluctance to be with the Entertainment Unit when it turned out, when I was asked to do it, I thought, “Oh no, I have been an actor and an entertainer and all that kind of thing before the war. That’s not what the war is about; the war’s about being up there to see if the Japanese are going to sweep down on us. That’s what it was about.”

That’s the way it was.

No I think it was a normal thing for me to digest the general of it, so I got it into my thinking that what I was doing was right and so I could accept that and could do it that particular way.

It’s hard to say what you are feeling like. You are doing one thing and perhaps you are feeling another. You know its true, as I said to you before, I would not have dreamed of letting my wife or my family know that we were actually leaving on a convoy. But I certainly felt a lot of reluctance, well not reluctance but a great sadness, that I couldn’t. I wouldn’t want either her or my family to come and see me off but

I would have loved to be able to tell them that I was going. You could hint at it but you really couldn’t say it in so many words because it would have had a more devastating affect on them than not knowing. That’s probably what the attitude was. So we felt you had to bear these things individually. I know that I always accepted that for myself.

I didn’t say anything was doing it to me. I mean, whatever was there I had to take care of myself. Only I, I have lived my entire life that way. Whatever happened in my life I have always taken care of, I have never blamed anyone else. I’ve never said, “Oh, I only wish that…” or “What am I going to do?” None of that kind of thing. I’ll sit down and think what am I going to do and go about it and, hopefully, it works out for the best.

Only on that one occasion when I said to him that I would like him to sign the form and he told me no. I would meet him on occasions, either when I was on leave before I went away or on leaves that I had in the latter part of the war and would meet and sit and talk and we would occasionally go to a cricket match together. Things like that.

But I made it a rule that I wouldn’t discuss anything about New Guinea or whatever happened in front of my family or in front of my aunts and uncles, I just didn’t think it was right to do that. Although they may have wanted to ask me, they avoided asking me, too. The letters were always encouraging that I got from home and the letters that I sent back to them

were saying I’m alright, don’t worry about me.

No, he didn’t. When I left school, when I told the family that I had decided to leave school and would try and find myself a job (and I did as that junior accountant thing), he thought that that was a very good move; he thought that, if I had made up my mind that that was it and he understood, too, that it would have been very difficult to find the money to let me

go on through into fourth year and fifth year and take the Leaving Certificate and then go to university, and I particularly wanted to go because I would have quite delightedly settled for being a teacher of English History and Philology – I was very good at the first two subjects; I would have been delighted to teach those subjects all my life – but it didn’t work out that way. No, I think

my father felt that I had a certain ability to think and that I had a certain strength of character or whatever you like to call it that I could handle those things. We never talked much about those things at all. We mostly talked about what he was growing in the garden, what he was decanting from a wine decanter, you know putting wine or beer to drink or whatever, no we had that kind of relationship which was very good.

No I think maybe that’s a bit of a misunderstanding on people’s parts too. We do see in the common press, we saw it then, we see it today and God help us we do see it today so much more,

that the entertainment business is really a stuffed up kind of place to be involved in, but the one that I went into in Sydney in radio and in the theatre in the professional theatre, and in the amateur theatre, was a very disciplined place, very disciplined. Actresses weren't running around having affairs with actors or producers, not that you knew of.

It wasn’t a scandal-ridden matter to be there. When you went to work at radio it was a very demanding thing because, you would have to record twelve-and-half minutes of the episode of a soap and it had to be done within the hour. There was no fiddling around, you couldn’t do it. George Edwards, after the war when I was working for them, we used to go out and we would record about eight quarter-hours

in somewhere between five and six hours and the reason why we were doing that, and we were doing that at most stations, most recording production units, was very simply that we recorded straight on to acid tape, on thirty-three-and-a-thirds, and I've got to tell you that the reason why many of us came to work constantly and climbed up in the profession to play very good parts and leads and things like that,

was simply because we had no nerves and we had stomachs of cast iron. In other words we had a tremendous discipline in our work for radio, and the same thing for the stage. If you didn’t have it, they just showed you the door. That’s all there was to it. So it wasn’t fanciful and free. It may have appeared that way to the general public because of the publicity and things that went on, but the actual working in our profession was very much a matter of very, very strict discipline.

I think so, I think the army codes of discipline are self-obvious, but I enjoyed that, and I liked my few turns that I had as Corporal or Sergeant of the Guard, and the march pasts and stuff like that, I enjoyed all of that panoply and regalia and the martial bit of that, but I think that you

learn your early disciplines from your family. I mean I learned how to shine my boots and clean my white cricket boots from my father and he would examine them and say, “Hmmm, a little bit more work there” , and so I always had the most beautifully polished shoes in the world. He never polished them for me, he showed me how and then I had to polish them.

Now if something happened he would have, of course, polished them for me, and they were beautiful. I still do that today. I showed my own son how to polish a pair of boots when there’s nothing on, how to build up the patina and all that kind of thing, and there were the other things too, that you had to help around the house, and you may have to clean up the gardens or you had to go and get manure for my uncle who was a dahlia fancier, and you had to keep your clothes tidy and try and not to get them too dirty. If it was possible

it would be nice if you could wear them twice. If not, of course, they were washed immediately and you had them clean and fresh for the next time. All of those things you had, these were the things that the family gave you and so if you had those, you went out into the world and you tried to run yourself in the world according to those things. It sometimes happened that way and it sometimes bored the bejeezus out of people that you were that kind of a perfectionist. They’d say, “I can’t understand why he’s fussing like that”,

but I always felt much better if I worked that way. It always gave me a much more solid basis for confidence in what I was going to do.

The Citizen thing with the drill hall was very much part-time. I don’t think we probably turned up at the drill hall

more than once every couple of months. I don’t think I went over to the drill hall there at Rozelle more than two or three times at the most, and then it was only just, look at the rifle, do this, do that, Lewis machine gun, I mean you know, it was just not really being in the army at all. When we were finally called up and finally put into camp the first time at Greta when the Brigade went up there, I don’t think the division was there, I think the Brigade was there, 8th Brigade,

I didn’t find it was difficult to sleep on a palliasse on the floor or we didn’t have to sleep out of doors or anything like that like I did in the Infantry all the time, but I mean we had quite comfortable quarters in Greta camp – it was a well-organised camp – and we had lectures and all that kind of stuff but I didn’t find that difficult because when I went to Primary School

I was in the drill squads there, along with the choirs and things like that, and we were drilled in that particular way by ex-army men. There were teachers and they would drill us in that way. I never found that, and I enjoyed the company of the people that I went to the first camp with. Fortunately probably for me there were a number of people

who were at that time playing with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. There was one friend of mine, Nelson who was the cellist and Cliffy Gibbs who was a violinist, and so we all sort of found each other’s company OK. We never left the camp, we never went anywhere. We would sit around and play cards or write letters or whatever and that was it. We would go on with our duties during the day. I was seconded

once, I think, during that particular camp, because there was a casualty clearing station, the 117th I think it was, in that area, and it served about, including staff about one hundred and forty odd people, and the cooks had gotten drunk and gone over the hill, they had gone AWOL [Absent Without Leave] and I was shaken out of bed at about a-quarter-to-six some morning, or half-past five or so,

and he said looking down at me, he said, “Pate, up to the kitchen at the causality clearing station, the cooks have bloody shot over the hill alright?” and I said, “Why me?” “We looked at your papers and your father was a pastry cook.” My father, when he first went to work with Sargent’s, had to have a trade and of course he had

been billy boy for a cane cutting team and so he could cook food – he was a very good cook, and they said, “ Oh you have got to have something.” He said, “What do you mean, like a baker or a pastry cook?” and they said, “Yeah. Can you do anything like that?” So he just takes the flour and kneads the thing, throws it into a tin, pops it into the oven and it comes out a beautiful loaf of bread. They said, “You’re a pastry cook or a baker.” He was a master baker/pastry cook, so when I write that down in my particulars

I naturally put down my father’s occupation, pastry cook. So that’s how they got me. You think to yourself, now how in God’s name did they know that I could cook water. Any way they drove me up to the kitchen and I went in and the driver came with me and oh God it stank. When a badly run badly cleaned kitchen first thing in the morning,

and there’s no fires lit and there’s nothing going, it is shocking. And of course, in those days we cooked on wood stoves, so you had to get them all started and all this kind of thing, no gas, no nothing. It was wood stove. I said to him, “Look, I tell you what, you go back to the unit and tell the officer in the orderly room, I need four guys with some brains, because I’ve got to get them to fix the vegetables for future meals,

and I want four guys with no brains but with a lot of brawn that can scrub with brushes and brooms and all that kind of thing.” So they arrived later, about another half-an-hour later, and I put them to work and they scoured that place, absolutely got it clean and shiny and the table and everything about it. In the meantime I’d been on the phone to the Red Cross, and I ordered dozens and dozens and dozens of rashes of bacon,

and dozens and dozens and dozens of eggs, and dozens and dozens and dozens of loaves of bread and butter and jam and tea and whatever I needed, just the essentials. And one of the nurses came in and said, “What are you going to do for the light meals?” and I said, “We will have absolutely marvellous light meals this morning. They’ll have a cup of tea and a biscuit. That’s exactly what they are going to get if it’s a light meal.”

She went (pulled a face) and I said, “Don’t worry, everyone is getting the same this morning, everyone is getting a little bacon, everyone’s getting scrambled eggs, everyone’s getting a couple of slices of buttered bread, not toasted but buttered, everyone’s getting a cup of tea with some milk and sugar and that’s everybody’s breakfast. I don’t care who you are, you or anyone else, that’s the breakfast this morning. Get out of my kitchen.” I did all the preparation and I did all the work and we cooked the scrambled eggs

in those great big dishes, and they were real eggs, they weren’t ersatz eggs, and it went very well. The breakfast was served sometime at about eight thirty. It was supposed to be served at about six thirty to seven, so now I’ve got the midday meal and now I have ordered once again from the butcher’s and where I get the meat and everything, and I ordered legs of lamb, roast beef, enough to do one hundred and forty one meals. And so I

served that up and just when I was just getting ready to serve the luncheon meals a little girl, the one who was in first, the nurse, Lieutenant, she comes back in and says, “Oh, the Commanding Officer wants to come into the kitchen.” and I said, “You go and tell the Commanding Officer she stays out of my kitchen now and that’s all there is to it. Tell her I will talk to her later, right? Some time when I’ve finished cooking for the day.”

The little ones goes, (pulled face) very pursy-lipped, and she goes. So we go on and we serve and I get the evening meal. Now the evening meal is also served with dessert and a bowl of soup. They are getting a three-course meal now by the end of the day, and when the meal is finished I am so knackered I can't talk. I’m just like that, and I sort of made myself a cup of black coffee from somewhere or other and I had a cigarette and I’m just there like this you see.

Now when the little nurse came in when I was going to cook the lunch, I could see this lady just through the sliver of the door, very tall, with gingery hair, and I thought, oh dear, who is she? Another nurse? I'd ordered them out of my kitchen.

My helpers had cleaned the kitchen up and everything was spotless and I’m thinking, oh Jesus, how long am I going to be here? I’m not a cook. I don’t want to do this, and all of a sudden another little knock on the door and in comes the same girl again and she says, “Lieutenant Colonel So-and-so,” whatever her name was, “requests

that you allow her to visit you in your kitchen.” I’m thinking it’s probably a grumpy old lady, an elderly nurse or something, and of course in through the door strides this gorgeous looking lady who I had pissed off out of my kitchen earlier on, and she sits down and says, “May I have a coffee?” and I poured her a coffee. “May I have a cigarette?” and we sit and we talk and she is absolutely marvellous and she is so delighted you see with the kitchen.

And she said, “Oh it smells so good.” So I actually stayed up there for about two weeks or so, maybe a little bit beyond two weeks, and they were getting in another cook or two, and the last time they asked me would I on the Sunday cook the Sunday meal for themselves and some Officers who they were inviting across for lunch, about a dozen people maybe altogether, maybe more.

So I got everything ready and I had a wonderful soup, mulligatawny, and I had the roast and I had the vegetables and I had a nice kind of dessert and I served it up for them and they thought it was absolutely marvellous. I didn’t need to be there. I’d cooked all the rest of the meals. This was just separate for them, and they were delighted. Then the little nurse came in again and by this time we had got really friendly – she was a very sweet little girl, and she said, “I wonder if you could make some scones for afternoon tea?”

I said, “Oh sure, I can make some scones for you.” And I said, “I will let you know when they are ready,” and all that kind of thing. I go and I mix up the mixture for the scones and I put some currants and raisins in them, really nice looking scones, and I pop them down like that, boom, boom, boom, on the trays, and I put two trays in the oven and a little while later I bring them out

and they are about this tall. I had used ordinary flour with nothing in it. I should have used self-raising flour. You could have used them for bullets they were that hard and so awful. And the little nurse appears at the door and she said, “Are the scones ready?” and I said, “Look at them.” Somewhere along the line I’d sent off somebody and they got some self-raising flour and of course we made another batch of scones.

It was quite funny and that was one of my experiences at Greta camp and after that we were just put out of camp. We were just told, “That’s it. We have to bring more people in. We’re bringing in other batches of men, and there is no room for you and we will let you know when you can come back into camp.” It was very difficult because you just couldn’t just go out and pick up, go back to radio and say, “Well, here I am.” or anything like that. I had been away from it for quite some time but I was fortunate I did make the money and I got some theatre work

and then in August of ’41 I got called back.

Oh it wouldn’t have been any more than about three or four months. I don’t think it was any lengthy period at all.

Well it was all of the instructions that you’d received as a member of

a field ambulance. It was stretcher work, it was the theory of general medicine, and first aid in the field, how to carry people and look after wounds, and of course we were inoculated for the first time up there. I was fortunate, mine was just a nice little one. Some of the people got very big marks and they were pretty sick from their inoculations.

I forget what the first one was for, I think it was smallpox. We had lectures and it was a bit fuddy-duddy. The people that were the officers or the senior warrant officers, they had been regular army before, and I mean it was all so antique. I thought bejeezus, you go into the field of battle and how are you going to fix men up with this? This isn’t going to be

a trench war like World War 1 was. It’s going to be a much more open war. So there it was and we every day had to do that. We had to exercise and we had to march and we had to generally learn some combatant duties too, because even being in the Field Ambulance you still had to be a combatant. It was very pleasant and very nice. It was kind of spring and summer weather and

it was not unpleasant at all, good food generally speaking and all that kind of thing. I mean after I came out from cooking at that casualty clearing station, I was a fool I should have taken up the offer. I was offered a school in Geelong, a catering school in Geelong and guaranteed that I would come out as a Warrant Officer Two, which would’ve meant I would have gone to Warrant Officer 1 and then probably to a commission right off, but I’d have been in catering all the war, and I just didn’t see myself throwing those scones to the Japanese.

Well I really don’t know that, but that battalion and that brigade was reforming again. They were getting to full strength and so when I went in, being the type of person I am,

I’m fairly athletic, I always was, I knew how to handle a gun, I was pretty active with my fists and I had learned how to box and things like that.

Oh yes.

I always had a Daisy air rifle and they either fired BBs [ball bearings] or they fired darts, and I was a very good shot with those. I never thought anything in those days of knocking a rabbit down or knocking a bird down or a cockatoo down, it was a different world.

I was given a Daisy rifle as a gift. I had a catapult, like a sling shot, that I could hit anything up to about fifty yards with. I was a very good shot with it. Today you can't have them in New South Wales. They are forbidden. . If you have an air rifle you must do a six to eight week course with the police.

I think that’s very good for a lot of people but a waste of time for somebody who knows anything about weapons. But any way that’s how it was. Maybe I was a bit gung-ho. I think you are when you make a decision to go to a battalion as I did to the 35th, and you want to do everything well and so I did do it probably quite well and so I was offered the opportunity of a lance corporalship and I became that and then I became up to a corporal there, and I was

in a battalion so they said, “Well you seem to know what you’re doing and you can handle it.” I also knew a great deal about Lewis bombs and how to build up detonations to blow things up and things like that, and I had learned that out in the country and various other things, so I became a small arms instructor, like “This is a Lee Enfield rifle”, and I had various ways of showing them how to do things with the rifle, and then

when we came to using live ammunition and we were using then as a supplementary weapon, Thompson machine guns, and we either had the Thompsons with the barrels, which were very, very unwieldy and if they got out of control could go… They’d go right down and could kill anybody alongside you, I mean, we almost a couple of times nearly got killed like that just in training. Or they had the long thing, which is much better, the magazine that just slotted up underneath it.

But it wasn’t for years after that, that the boys had the Owen guns, which were the best kind of automatic weapon of that kind. We had old Lewis guns we’d inherited from World War I and they were always chocking up with the revolving magazines. Vickers that ran on belts, they were better, and they did their transverses and things like that. My speciality probably was teaching

combat with a bayonet, and firing of the Bren gun which was a Czechoslovakian gun, and you could use it as a single person or you could use it on its mount on the front, and it fired twenty-five 303 bullets from a semi- circular magazine, and you had to know what pressures were and how you could fire and you could count your shots and things like that, and

I was very good with that. I could shoot the shit out of a target at quite a distance holding it like that with the handle on top. And so I suppose I got to put into that and I carried it out. We had one drill at Liverpool range when we were back, or at Wallgrove in the first place, which was close to Liverpool. There was an area staked out with barbed wire covering a lot of it and underneath which you had to crawl on your belly or

on your back, and I would take a series of men, two or three or four, maybe more, six or eight, through and underneath that while there was live fire going over the top of us and grenades and mortars going off, and the idea was to keep them calm and to show them that if they did things in a certain way

you know, moving forward, and the barbed wire was only about a foot and half, two feet at the most above us. We learned to do that and we had certain areas of trenches and dugouts where we were giving instruction in the throwing of Mills bombs. Mills bombs normally came down to a fuse of about three seconds

but we used to extend them out so that they didn’t explode for seven seconds. And I know one day I was instructing and the boy that I was instructing was very, very nervous and I was trying to get him to like here, throw, and get some aim you know, pitching it. And of course I had been a very good cricketer since I had been a youngster.

I played for Balmain top club there from Shires through to [UNCLEAR] and I was asked to practise at the nets with the [UNCLEAR] when I was seventeen years of age to play for New South Wales. I didn’t get to do that unfortunately and I am sad about that, but I could pitch and toss and bowl a cricket ball, so I was very good at teaching people how to do that with a grenade, and this poor fellow, I said, “All you have got to do,” and I said, “now come with me, and here’s where you will finish up. Take a step forward,

take aim and let it go and it goes right out over there,” and it’s a live one. We practiced with dummies first, but this was a live one, he was going to have a live practice session, and he’s nodding there and I get him to do it, and instead of stepping forward he steps back and hits his hand on the parapet behind him and the Mills bomb drops out of it you see. I’m going for it because

I’ve only got seven seconds, I know that and he’s in my way, he won't get out of my way. I eventually, it all happened within seconds, I ripped him out of the way, grabbed the thing, threw it and it exploded about three feet beyond the parapet and just went over our heads and we were both on the floor of the parapet. But those are the things that happened. Another day I was demonstrating, we were down at Bayswater and we took over that area there to guard

along with Barrenjoey, the light house and things like that. My battalion was put down there in the slopes above Bayview, and I sort of was giving demonstrations of how to blow things up, and a big gum tree had somehow somewhere before that had fallen down into the sand of the Pittwater there, and I said, “Well now look I’ll show you” and I set everything, three areas to blow it up in three parts,

explained everything as we went along, came back ready to go and I said, “This’ll break it in three parts.” and we blew the bloody thing up, and I swear to God there wasn’t a piece of wood bigger than a bloody match left. It was an empty log, I mean you could’ve crawled through it, I could’ve crawled through it. I never looked at it. It was an enormous big log It was about this bloody big and I never went to either end to look through it to see if it was hollow or [UNCLEAR] or decayed, and

I put enough bloody explosives to blow the Harbour Bridge up – BOOOOM!!! And this enormous shower of little bits of wood drifted down for about a minute or so. They were all so impressed, they were shocked to bejeezus, but I mean I had to laugh and I had to keep a straight face too because it was just so silly.

I think there were a certain amount of them that took to it very easily. I had some very good friends, even in my section - I had Darkie Lowe and I had George Elefthuriou who was the Greek boy that I mentioned, and a dear friend of mine who was Slim Bennet, and they, Darkie and Slim were, had some Aboriginal descent, blood in them, and were the most marvellous two boys. I was closer friends with Bennett.

When I was leaving the unit to go up to Geraldton to division quarters, he said to me, “What are you doing about that Kodak camera?” My Dad had given me a little folding Kodak camera you see, and I said “Oh what am I going to do with it mate?” and he said, “You’re going to be back in bloody Sydney before you know it. Going up there? They’re going to send you back to Sydney.”

And I said, “Oh come on mate,” and he said, “Gees I'd like to have the camera,” and I said, “Alright.” And I got it out of my kit bag and tossed it to him and he said, “Come on how much?” and I said, “It’s yours. I will get one when I get back to Sydney.” I’m joking with him now right? And he said, “Oh no we’ve got to set a price on that.” I said, “Oh come on Slim, for Christ sake, it’s yours, go on have it,” and he said, “No, no, I won't have that. How about a fiver?” Well the camera probably only cost about forty-two shillings, you know, two pounds two,

and I said, “Oh alright, a fiver mate that’s fine. Take care of yourselves. See you back…” and I threw my kit bag up on the truck and I’m off to Divvy Headquarters. I didn’t see Bennett until about ’48 going on ’49. He’d been up at Booloolo in New Guinea with the gold, and he’d come down. He was sitting in a little bar, I think it was called the Dunbar, or the Durban was it, up on Elizabeth Street way, and it’s a very

very sort of dark bar and I seldom if ever went in to have a drink between one studio and another, but that particular day… I only had one thing wrong with me after the war, I had dengue and I had malaria and of course you got an occasional attack of those, but I had dysentery [UNCLEAR]which affected my insides, and I was feeling pretty miserable that day with it, and so I stopped by the pub to have a rum. It was about the only thing I could drink. I could drink a rum with ginger ale, and I had a Beenleigh or something like that,

Beenleigh mainly, my father’s rum, his preference, and so ordered it at the bar and I’m just about to have a drink of it and he said, “What are you drinkin’ that fuckin’ man’s piss for?” that’s what he said, this voice from the end of the bar. And I looked up and I said, “Bennett, by Jesus,” and he says, “Yes. Ay, I’ve got something for you.” And he comes down the bar and we are only about eight or ten feet apart,

and he says, “There’s the fiver I owe you, mate.” So that was him. Bennett got himself an MM [Military Medal] in the field and he was taken up to lieutenant in the field in one of his commissions in the field for an attack on some Japanese machine gun nest, whatever you like to call them, around about the Sepik River, up north of New Guinea, and when I was talking to him that day I said, “I believe you have got yourself a commission and an MM?”

He said, “Oh yes I did.” and I said, “Did you get it with the Bren?” and he said, “Yes.” I said, “That was pretty good shooting.” and he said, “Well you know who taught me, don’t you?” So I said, “Yeah, well that’s alright mate. You did it.” And he said, “Yeah, but only because you taught me how to do it.” But he would have been

probably a few years younger than me, no more than a year or so younger than me, but a wonderful, wonderful fellow, and these were the things that we found which were absolutely marvellous about the guys we served with. A boy like that, who was used to being in the country, he had no problems. In Western Australia when we ran out of food

with our particular company one time there, he and I went out, and you must remember that all the farms right up the coast had been cleared out. All the people had been taken out of the farms and all the farmhouses were just standing empty. There were naturally a few livestock wandering around the place, so Bennett and I went out. We tramped around for the better part of half the day and we thought no, we couldn’t see a bloody rabbit, couldn’t see a sheep, couldn’t see any bloody thing to get after and kill, take back, and finally we were just about to turn back to go back to where we were,

and there was a sheep and we just slit its throat and skinned it, and wrapped the meat up in the skin and carried it back between the two of us, and the company ate very well on that particular week or so, and this was the capable type of person he was. There were other people that were ridiculous. We had one wonderful old fellow with us – he shouldn’t have been in the army,

he was a few years too old I think – and he came back very discontented there one time when we were first in Western Australia, and he had a pretty old rifle and we used to have a rack across the front of the pole in the tent and he, for some reason he stood off a bit and he leaned over and he jammed his rifle down as if he was going to put it into the thing and the bullet went off and it just went straight up there, just touched the skin on his forehead and went straight up through his hat.

Well we had him out of that tent, and on his way back to Sydney, like the next morning because he was gone, it was just too much for him.

I think it was a very good mix for Australia and I think I would have preferred, as I did, to have been with a country battalion, rather than with maybe a city battalion, because I think the boys were much more practical. They were used to be being out of doors.

They could do the things that other people hadn’t been taught how to do. Most of them were very good shots with a rifle in any case. They could skin, they could wrangle, they could do all kinds of practical things, and also too I thought that they were very equipped for living out of doors. I had Elefthuriou and I had Slim Bennett and myself and I think Darkie was in my tent, and the four of us got on like a house on fire.

We kept ourselves very neat and clean and tidy, and never had any problems with rashes or anything wrong with us and we sort of made our own fun, we played cards or we read or whenever we had time off we’d try and find somewhere to have a swim or something like that. But certainly, if I’d have seen action with those men, I would have had no concern at all. I would cheerfully

have gone into action with them. I couldn’t say the same for some of the officers we had. I think that they were silly. They didn’t understand the men as well as they should have, and one or two were gung-ho young people who had got commissions and really one or two of them made fools of themselves later on in the war. One I remember I was told of, went up to, they sort of settled on the top of a village that they thought there were some Japanese in, and

he didn’t want to go into the village particularly, he should have sent some scouts in. He ordered machine guns to open fire and whatever he had with him and they blasted the shit out of this village and there wasn’t a soul left in it. There hadn’t been a soul left in it for about two days. Those things happen and you can't tell with these men before they are put to the test how they’ll be. It’s the same with anybody, I mean you don’t know how you’ll go.

Mostly you figure that you are a bit worried that you might go badly and so therefore you are going to do your best not to, so that’s a good thing. But country boys, yes I prefer them above the city boys.

Probably people being ambitious or resentful or jealous figuring that they should have had the promotion and not you.

I had a few occasions of that where I had people were very deceitful and devious and untrustworthy, and broke the code of dobbing people in, because they were jealous of me gaining a few stripes and things like that. I had a couple of unfortunate experiences with one man in particular and I straightened him out like a bent nail, I mean I just took him aside and, you know, gave him R and R [Rest and Recreation] for the day and he never did anything like that again.

He wouldn’t have been game.

Well yes, it is, I mean you feel that if someone has done something it really is basically their problem to take care of. For instance he dobbed me in and that was one of the reasons why I did a Court Martial on board the troop ship on the way to Western Australia, because

he dobbed me in for organising some of my men to get back to Sydney now that they knew that they were going on a convoy, to be married, and I certainly did it. I organised a truck to get them into West Maitland to get the train to get to Sydney. I did that and I put about six or seven boys that I knew that wanted to go back to Sydney – they didn’t realise, they hadn’t got it into their heads, that they were going away, and so

they had been putting off getting married, putting off, putting off, and I organised them into a truck. We all knew each other. They drove them into West Maitland late at night. They got on a train and they were in Sydney in a few hours time. The next day they got married. Now we didn’t sail for another week or more after that and I said to them, “Now there’s one thing you must do and you must promise me. Go down, and I’ll take responsibility for the fact that you are not here if I’m asked or if there’s reason for me to be interrogated.” and I said, “The only one thing I ask of you

is turn up at the ship. We will be going from the Finger Wharf, and I figure it will be in about ten day’s time. I don’t know when it will be, but be sure that you are there.” and I said, “If not, never talk to me again.” And they all turned up and they all did a stretch in the brig. They were all

Court Martialled and their pays cancelled and the whole thing, and they all did time in the stockade, but that was good and they were appreciative and their wives knew – they were some of the ones that were crying on the wharf. They came down every time they knew there was a troop ship, or they were down there, camped down there looking there, and when they realised they saw us come down in the lorries from the trains

and embark on the ship, they came and they joined us.

Oh I didn’t mind it. I thought we were going up to New Guinea. I was convinced we were from what I had learned and what I had been told by various people and by the type of training that we had been getting. It seemed to be slightly different from normal… well what was normal? I mean we figured that we were fighting in the jungle, and it was a different kind of warfare from what it had been.

Even in the desert, in the Middle East it was a different kind of thing. None of us really knew what it was going to be like. Nobody really knew what it was going to be like, but I was quite convinced. I had no qualms about it. I had my kit bag packed, I felt ok, I was in good shape and mentally in good shape. Actually I stood on the port side, as the ship turned north I was

on the left hand side of the ship and I was going to be looking back at Sydney Harbour for a last look, and the ship did turn a little bit like that, and then it started to go the other way, so it was turning south and it was a dreadful afternoon. The seas were very heavy outside. We’d been bombed in Sydney by the Japanese submarines just only a matter of a few weeks before that I think, and I’d happened to

have leave that night and I was with my wife and friends in Bondi when they opened up overhead and had all that [UNCLEAR] in the harbour with the Midget subs and things like that. So we were quite prepared that we could be attacked in a convoy, and we picked up our two escorts the Van Tromp and the American cruiser, about five or six miles off the heads, and then

we all turned south. We just made a big circle and went straight down south, and you know when you’re thinking where the hell are we going? I mean, where in the hell could we be going? Are we going to Melbourne? Are we going to Adelaide? We never even thought about going to Fremantle or going to Western Australia. See the politicians and the news papers had been agitating for a Division to be sent to Western Australia because of the possible attacks by the Japanese

on the West coast of Australia, and of course they only had a lines of communication – I think it was called the 4th Lines of Communication Unit, and that wasn’t a battle combat division. So they got us, and we were the one prepared and equipped Division. Some were sent by train across the Nullarbor and some were sent to Guildford and we were sent by boat.

Well I don’t think that there was anything that you could... no, if you talked to anybody nobody would tell you anything. The officers concerned wouldn’t tell you anything and neither would necessarily the seamen or the naval people on board the ship. It wasn’t their job to discuss things like that with you, and into the bargain – I’m not quite sure how many men we had in our battalion, but we could have had the better part of nine hundred men in the battalion,

and they were all ill. I mean the Manoora and Duntroon and the Katoomba weren’t equipped like some of the American ships with bunks, where everyone got their own separate bunks. These boys were lying on the floor, and some of them had palliasses and some of them didn’t, and they were all very violently ill. They should’ve been brought out on the deck, made to stand around in the fresh air,

given something maybe to settle their stomachs, some sugar or something, I don’t know, and forced to do that all the time. But no, they put them down into these lounge rooms and cabins and all this crap and they were in the confined spaces spewing on each other, all the time retching up anything you put in their mouths. I used to go down and get them arrowroot biscuits, coffee biscuits, you know the type, Arnott’s biscuits, of those days, and big dixies of warm sort of milky sugary tea,

and kneel by everybody’s bed there and give them a mug of tea and some biscuits so that they had something down them to throw up because they were throwing up mucus and blood. Some of those boys weren't fit to do anything for three or four weeks after we got over to Western Australia. They were very, very high seas. I think the journey took about sixteen days, altogether, and I think we had about fifteen days virtually of fairly high seas. Certainly we had fourteen days of very high seas,

and when I say high seas they were thirty to forty to fifty to sixty foot waves. They were enormous bloody waves, and so when people are confined and there it was they didn’t do much. I just spent my free time with a book, a paperback book or whatever I had to read, sitting in one of the back decks and just watching the waves go up and down, or on the bridge where I got permission to come up on the bridge

and stand there behind the glass and watch the boat plough through the water.

I enjoyed it. No, I’m a very good sailor. I have always… I’ve been very rarely at any time ever close to being seasick. I have been fortunate that way altogether. I have been out on charter boats, sailing boats, on boats like that and I did three or four convoys during the war.

I think I made all together about five convoys. No, let’s not call it convoys. Transportations by water is a better way of putting it.

No, I had never been on a big ship before. I had been on all kinds of ferries, launches and sometimes in turbulent water. I had never had an opportunity to sail as I wished I would’ve in the eighteen footers and the sixteen footer skips.

I followed those very much on ferries with my Uncle Hammy. He used to love to take me to that. We used to go on Sunday afternoons to watch the big ones race and they were most exciting in those days. If the boat was too heavy when they got down to the ‘Sow and Pigs’ and they wanted to fly back on the nor’easterly, they would tell six of the crew to jump overboard. They had crews of twelve, fourteen, fifteen men, all in their football sweaters, and they’d jump overboard and they would cling to the ‘Sow and Pigs’ buoy until somebody

came back and picked them up. They lightened the boat so that they’d get the speed going down the harbour on the nor’ easterly, and vice versa on the way. If they were coming up the harbour they would toss them off at Bradley’s Head or somewhere, and they would swim ashore and sit there on the rocks waiting to be picked up because they wanted to lighten the boat to catch the damned wind. But anyway, the boys didn’t survive the trip well. They got off the boat, and they were

still very ill, and when they came to this camp the camp wasn’t really settled for them. We had to do a lot of work to set it up, and it was winter and it was raining all the time. It rained and it rained and it rained. It was most uncomfortable altogether. I don’t know why, I went down with bronchial pneumonia. I wasn’t feeling good a couple of mornings. I went up to the Regimental Aid Post there and the

Medical Officer said to me, “What's the matter?” and I said, “I don’t feel too well,” and I wasn’t quite able to get it out. I was very short of wind, you know, very short of breath. And he said, “Here, take some of these,” and he gave me some aspirin or whatever it was, and I took them and I went back. I had this bloody fever, and I took the aspirin and I went back to my palliasse on the very wet ground on top of the groundsheet,

and I was you know a bit chilly. Anyway I got through the night and the next morning I woke up and I was really feeling terrible, and I went on medical parade again, on sick parade, and I got up to him and he said, “Oh you’re here again. Did those aspirin work?” and I went…I don’t know what happened to me, I really don’t know, and apparently they told me later I just spun and I just went down, and the next thing

I was aware of I was in a train heading south, I was heading back to Guildford or somewhere down south where they had the major hospitals, the general hospital. I wasn’t really conscious. I was dreaming. I could hear the train, and they got me out on a stretcher and rushed me into the hospital and I don’t remember much after that except waking up some time later

and I couldn’t draw a breath, and I went, “Ahhhh!” and started hitting the wall, and a nurse came into me and she grabbed me by the pyjamas that I was in and she went whoosh – she must have been a strong girl, I was about a- hundred and eighty eight, a hundred and ninety pounds in those days – and choom! she sat me up and banged me against the backboard of the bed, said, “Stay there,” and came racing back

in again about ten seconds later with some pills and went… poured the water down and then kept lifting me up like this and eventually I took a breath. The doctors examined me – I thought it was tuberculosis or something, I wasn’t sure – and it was just a heavy bronchial pneumonia. And I had to go down to Busselton I think it was and I was down there for about three or four weeks convalescing, or more.

It was bitterly cold down there but it was nice. We could go and play billiards and things – there was a billiard hall down there – and that’s when I came back and I found that I had missed my call up to the navy to go to Flinders for that particular thing. The boys revived after that and then when it came into the spring weather and the summer weather, like say up through September-October, into

that area there, they were feeling a bit better, but they weren't being fed properly, they were living in the dirt, they were only able to have a shower once in a blue moon. It wasn’t very nice for them and they worked us very hard. We did one forced march of fifty miles, from the day through the night and into the next morning, and I think only about… well I know from my company there were only about four of us finished the march, and

I finished up carrying two rifles on each shoulder, and we had trucks travelling alongside us that just took the gear and the webbing off the boys and threw them into the trucks along with their rifles so that they could just walk. But you see you have got to know how to walk. I was a bush walker before the war and I spent a lot of time hiking through the national park and things like that. I could walk cheerfully thirty miles in a day without

any problem. We all did it from Waterfall down to a certain spot. We swam at maybe lunch or something like that. It was a good ten miles so that you could bet that you walk there and then you walk back and that was twenty miles that you did in a day which wasn’t too bad, and so, also too you have got to know that if you walk on too soft a surface like too much sand, it is going to put a strain on your foot or on your calves and things like that.

If you walk on good firm grass it’s a little bit better. If you walk on tarmac or bitumen, hard roads, asphalt, that’s going to go doom, doom, doom, and suddenly your legs go. There is no way in the world you can walk. I also made it a thing, same thing when I played football and cricket, I always wore two pairs of socks. So in the army I had to do a march like that or march my men from Wargrove to Liverpool for a firing range

exercise, I always wore two pairs of socks, one a thin pair, cotton and then the woollen pair on top of that and then the boots. And so I looked after myself there but other people didn’t. They didn’t know how to walk. They’d never had any experiences of things like that you see. That’s why country boys are so much better than city boys.

Oh I don’t think that, except for those of us who were older in the head like in my particular immediate area, like Elefthuriou and Bennett, not Darkie, Darkie wasn’t all that very aware I don’t think in that particular time. Bennett would be, I would be. We were aware that somehow we really should have been in Kokoda but that we were in Western Australia, but eventually we would be being sent

up there because of the way things were going very badly naturally. Our attitude was pretty clear on it but I don’t think some of the other boys that it had quite sank in. They were homesick, they were unhappy about living that kind of a life. I don’t think they were concerned that they were going to be in danger, I don’t mean that at all, but I just don’t think that it sank in on them, what the war was going through at the time. They weren’t terribly interested to read anything about what was happening in Europe or what was happening here or the Russian front

or anything like that, or what was happening in the Middle East with the Africa Corps there etcetera, and the Italians, and they sort of, that was out of their minds. They would sit there and they’d play cards or they’d read or they’d write letters or they’d do nothing or they’d stare in the distance or whatever. There is nothing wrong with that, that is fine if that’s what they want to do, but I don’t think that they had the intellectual capacity to be worried.

You know it may seem surprising but you have got to have a little brains to be worried about something, and I would often be called upon by one or other of the men that I served with in any one unit that I was with, and particularly in the Infantry and even with the Entertainment Unit, and they would very much like me to talk to them, like I was a psychologist, and it was obviously because I had been engaged in the work that I had been engaged in, and also too

I was I imagine pretty well-known as a young actor before the war. I wasn’t necessarily known as a writer but I had published quite a lot of stuff with the Australasian Magazine, with Sydney [UNCLEAR] Smith. I’d had a short story published in Harpers Bazaar in 1941. Gosh, I mean I sort of was probably considered a bit of an egg- head

by the general ones in my battalion, I’m quite sure. The others sort of went though the days and nothing worried them much. We never let that knowledge confuse us. We had a job to do as an Infantry Battalion to keep in touch with ourselves, with training, with being ready to move with all those kinds of things, and that’s what we did to the best of our ability.

Oh well of course. We all missed that. I didn’t miss my family because I hadn’t been living with my family. I missed the fact that they were my family, all of that kind of thing, and I kept in touch with them by writing letters, and I kept in touch with my wife by writing letters, naturally. I wrote many letters during the war. I had a stack like that, a jute bag full of my letters to her, and I said to her one day, “What happened to that bag of letters of mine?” I wanted them for some reason or other.

“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t think we needed those. I threw them out.” That was one of the times I could’ve killed her. Another time I had beautiful pairs of boots that R.M. Williams made for me in 1947, and I had beautifully handmade kangaroo hide and bullock hide whips, I had three sets of reins, I had spurs

and things like that, and in one of my untidy moments because there didn’t seem anywhere to put them in the Neutral Bay flat that we had, I had thrown them under an old-fashioned sofa bed, a three-quarter sofa bed, and of course when I asked my ex- wife to send them up to me she said, “Oh I threw them out.” She was very good at throwing things out, and I said, “Why did you do that?” and she said, “Oh they were all covered with green.”

I didn’t want to say anything to her, but all you’ve got to do is take some methylated spirits, and these were beautiful handmade boots. These were when R.M. Williams himself was in Prospect, in South Australia, and I had a pair made for when I did Sons of Matthew, and they cost me all of three pounds, two shillings, sixty-two shillings for a beautifully handmade pair, laughing sides, Cuban heels so you could come off a horse and slide like that, and then when I did

Bitter Springs, Ralph Smart said to me, “You might like to get some boots for yourself,” and I said, “Well look I will just wear ordinary Blundstones,” or what ever we called them in those days, and with the leather things, because I was playing a Northern Territory police officer. “Ah no” he said, “You want to be comfortable. Order yourself a couple of pairs of boots.”

So I rang up R.M. Williams again and I spoke to the old man and he said, “I have got some wonderful stuff here,” and he made me a matching pair, two exactly the same, in a beautiful kind of a – this is a word we don’t use much these days – ‘nigger’ brown leather, with straps on them and vents on the side, oh absolutely gorgeous, and so I wore those all through that particular… I should have taken them with me to America because

I didn’t … I took a little QANTAS bag with a toothbrush in it when I went to America.

All got thrown out. There was a beautiful heavy bridle, there was a light bridle, there was a hand-plaited kangaroo bridle and all that got thrown out.

Oh swimming, that was the main occupation. We didn’t have anything else. We didn’t play any cricket, we didn’t play any football. It was all too hot in New Guinea, all too wet. We got our main relaxation in our unit, swimming. Georgie Wallace was a very good swimmer, [UNCLEAR] was a very good swimmer, I was a very good swimmer, and we used to think nothing of going out, say at Geraldton,

and within the wharves themselves, and we would swim up and down a quarter of mile or more at a time and we would probably do three or four miles in the afternoon just swimming. Great fun. We came back from Jacquinot Bay over to Lae – this was just before the war finished – and we were in the (UNCLEAR) area which was one of the army areas,

and we decided that we would go up to Malang beach and surf. We had never been there before. We had never been in Lae before. We had come in by boat and passed through Lae but we had never stopped off in Lae. So we go up to Malang and we look at it and we say, “Jesus look at that. You say this is a bloody beach? It looks like a bloody coal tip. What are you talking about? A beach, a bloody black beach for Christ’s sake.” We were also standing around like this, like those boys were, you know, and I said, “Oh well bugger that,” and I said, “They’re coming in there fine.” It was about a meter and a half, and I go down and I hit the water and I go out about fifty yards,

I pick up one that’s about a metre-and-a-half, and I [UNCLEAR] it up and I come right down like that, and I’m right within about ten yards of where they are standing in the edge of the surf and it cuts out from underneath me like that, the wave, and I can't get up to go like that, because I am coming in surfing like that. BOOM,

and I hit, and I must have skidded for about three or four feet through the sand like that, with very little water if any underneath me. I stand up, and we are all show offs, and I said, “How’s that?” and I lift up like that with my arms, and Kaff says, “Jesus, mate. What have you done to yourself ?”

and I said, “What have I done?” and he said “Look.” and I look, and there are flecks of blood all over me. The little basalt chips had just got me, including my dick and my nose and my chin, tits, everything. I’ve just got nick after nick after nick, just tiny little ones with just tiny little spurts of blood , and that’s what that stuff did for you if it hit you in those sands. It would just strip you. Anyway we did that. We had another area that we had when we were there.

We had to cross a creek and the creek was running out, very heavily out of a hole in the side of the mountain and we’d put a rope across it. We had to take small arms with us, so we tied those around our necks and put them there, and if we had any shorts on, if we’d wanted them on, or a towel or anything, cigarettes – put those in condoms, or tobacco and paper in condoms, so you could always have a dry smoke.

We asked for them. They were up there in certain areas. I used to go and get them for my men. They used to say, “What do you want condoms for?” And I would say, “It keeps the tobacco dry you see.” That’s what we did. We kept them dry because we never knew when we were going to be in water, or going ashore we might’ve got in water, but anyway there was this rope thing and really we’d had a lot of rain and it was really running, this creek,

running about three or four feet deep, and you really had to lay out on the rope – because you couldn’t cross it by foot, it would knock you down – lay out on the rope, and you just let yourself swing out into the water and then, arm like this, you go along the rope and over you got to the other side. So two or three of us went across at first, and Wallace is there and he was always the clown, a very funny man, and so he decides that he is not going to come across in the orthodox way, not at all, no, no. He is going to go turning over all the time and doing one hand and the other hand,

like a monkey, and he gets about half way across and the water is very strong, it is really rushing down. It must have been doing about ten or fifteen knots. The water is rushing down this creek bed, and the beach is about another twenty yards down there where it runs into the surf, and he lost his bloody grip and he went down into that creek in about three or four feet of water, arse over tea kettle. You have never seen anything as funny. He finished up a good ten, fifteen feet into the surf,

so he decided to come up the other side of the creek. This was something that was quite the norm. The girls did the same thing. They had a little resort, not a resort – what am I talking about – a camp or otherwise in Salamaua which was across the bay from Lae.

The AWAS girls, the Australian Women’s Army Service , and they would be allowed to go across there two or three or four at a time, under guard and supervision

naturally in case there were any wild natives around. They had a pleasant little time across there where they could swim, and some of my friends in the AWAAS who I knew up there, who might either I had known through the church or at university, and when I say university the night classes that we went to. They were good swimmers and one of them today that I often say hello to, she’s a very sweet lady,

she still swims at the old Dawn Fraser Baths down at Birchgrove, and she gets in there. She must be about seventy-eight or seventy-nine, going on eighty I think, and she still goes down there and swims her gentle lengths up and down the thing. So this was, for our generation, one of those things where if you couldn’t play tennis or cricket or football or

whatsoever you played before, lacrosse, God knows whatever it might be, swimming was the next thing you did, the only thing you could do up there you see?

Well in a way yes, although Western Australia had certain elements to it, towns, where if you were close to… Inevitably you got to know some of the town folk. You would go in for a cup of tea or coffee

a pie or say in Dongara where you would go in have some crayfish and things like that when you could, and you got to know a few people so there was a little break in the army life – I’m speaking of the Entertainment Unit, not of the infantry, naturally – and I think that that was good in that particular way. We did have a break. Once or twice we were asked out to places, Mullawah and Mingenew and places like that in the slight interior, away from Geraldton, where

the temperatures got well up into the high hundred and twenties. God it was hot out there.

I didn’t write while I was with the Infantry there. I did write when I went up to the Divisional Headquarters with Captain Mac. He asked for me to come up there.

in order to write, well I suppose anti-propaganda, you know, that type of thing, and I said to him, “What is it?” And he said, “Well it is kind of like closed circuit radio that’ll go into the tents where the men are gathered to write their letters or to have a cup of coffee with the Salvation Army or you know, various areas like that.” This was within the Division area naturally. It didn’t go out any further than that, but because we had a lack of availability of newspapers,

and I don’t know, it could have been but I don’t think New Guinea Gold, which was our newspaper, was published at that time, or at least we were not getting it there in Western Australia. So he said, “Well now what I want you to do is to write stuff that is optimistically combating this rubbish that Tokyo Rose is putting on the air.” And I listened to a few of her broadcasts, and they were such exaggerations and they were, you know, the poor Australians were dying left, right and centre.

Oh she was a very good broadcaster, she was an American Japanese, and she just put out the propaganda that was typical of those war years. For instance, the Germans used to put out the… The Italians would come up to the men when they surrendered and give them little

books on the various sexual positions that they could enjoy with Italian girls or otherwise and all that kind of crap, and I saw a few of those that the boys brought back to the Middle East. The Germans used to put out handbills that says, “You know the Yanks have arrived in Sydney, Aussies, and your girls are still back there. Where are you?” Those type, quite crude, and her attitude was,

she was much more refined than that naturally. She was saying the Australians were being devastated etcetera, and this was, of course, in 1942. The whole thing was, you know, ‘boom boom’, you had a feeling that everything she was saying could really be right, and of course it wasn’t. That’s all there was to it.

Well we had Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941 and we had very shortly after that virtually the fall of Singapore in early

1942, and so when you had those things combined, I mean people were getting very depressed thinking what the hell are we doing here? There was nobody coming out to help us even when Singapore Island went and the Repulse and I think it was the Hood [actually the Prince of Wales. Hood was sunk by the Bismarck on an earlier occasion, and the Prince of Wales was damaged at the same time. This may be the source of the confusion] went, and they were sweeping down everywhere, and around here and there and they were dominating everything. Hell, even though they weren't doing

any good then when we went up there in 1943, ’44, Washing Machine Charlie who was driving a big Japanese plane, was still going overhead Thursday Island taking photographs and wondering whether there were troop [UNCLEAR] going on, because we went up to Red Island Point and that whole total area up there was opened out as a staging camp.

A Japanese observation plane.

He was flying right up at the limit of where you needed oxygen. You could hear him on a clear day, and the engine was going, propeller-driven. Hell, one time I nearly bought it from a silly bloody Dutch flyer who got pissed and took a Zero, a Japanese fighter plane that had been brought down from Hollandia to Merauke up,

and I was standing with a couple of friends of mine who had just built an incinerator as a matter of fact, and we were just standing there and we heard this plane coming at us about two hundred yards away, beyond a long line of very tall palm trees, and it came up above the palm trees like that and I thought, shit that’s a Zero.

I had never seen a Zero in my life before, but you saw designs and drawings of them, and I thought Christ, and it tips down like that, and I could hear the sound of the shots going off and you could see the swathe of bullets just coming right along the ground at us. I went this way, they went that way, and the shots went straight up the incinerator.

And what had had happened was the Dutch squadron had been grounded. Actually they were I think supposed to be flying Kittyhawks and one guy had taken up a Kittyhawk and nobody could bring him down. He was going to come down and show everybody what great fliers the Dutch were, and I think he buried that Kittyhawk from around about eight thousand feet. And here was another drunk. This plane had been flown down, captured up in Hollandia by the Americans, flown down to Merauke and landed at the

base where there was an American photographic team working out of heavy bombers and stuff like that, and used to go up and photograph, and he’d gotten in but the thing that happened with the machine when they brought it down was that it was virtually out of gasoline. It just had fumes in the tank but it hadn’t been de-armed and somewhere in the controls of the Zero, apparently the firing mechanisms were close to the joy stick

you know, to control the plane, and when it dived over like that or it got up and it faded and maybe the gasoline ran back or whatever it was, and his thumbs were on the thing, the minute he came down and he’s trying to pull it back, and that was it. He got it down again but of course they threw him in the hoosegow and he never flew again, but I mean we could’ve not been there again either. So they were the silly things that happened up there.

It was just like you were in a small studio, much the same as if we were here now, and I was sitting here at a desk and there was a microphone there and there was a control operator for transmitting it in the way that it can be normally be transmitted. There was a mast and all that kind of thing, and I guess he was putting it out and being received within the area that the Division wanted it

to go out to or could go out to, and I just merely wrote and said, “Let me give you a true picture of how the war is going for the Allied Forces, this date, the 17th of June, 19…” whatever it was, and I would say, “I have listened to the reports of Tokyo Rose,” or what ever, “and she is saying this that and the other and it is quite untrue.

It is impossible that that could have happened in any case and the truth of the matter is so and so, so and so.” It was just a very factual, kind of like a news read. There was nothing emotive to it, there was nothing combative about it, there was nothing aggressive about it, there was no real other what you would call counter-propaganda about it. It was just countering her propaganda. It was saying, “No, this is not true, this is not what she is saying.” And I did that for

a few weeks, I don’t know now how many, probably about three weeks or so or more, and he assigned me and another young person, I don’t know what rank they were, I think they were just a non-commissioned officer, and I would show what I had written and how it was broadcast and let him have a go – he wasn’t transmitting – and that’s when I went to Mac and I said, “ I think I have done enough. I’ve shown him how to do it now.” It was a mere matter of

taking the news and receiving our news from wherever it came into us on information, and that would come out in the order of the day or whatsoever it happened to be, and making it into legible sense that someone listening to it in a Salvation Army tent, or a United Services tent or wheresoever they happened to be gathered, and it was broadcast of a night, so that the men would be there playing cards or listening or whatever it was.

It went out over the loud speakers in those particular things for a period of time. I don’t know how long they continued it. I wouldn’t have and idea because I never had any connection with it after that. But it served its purpose because when you are isolated like that and you are not getting news and you’ve got a division of men of fifteen thousand men or more, maybe fifteen to twenty thousand men, they can easily get disgruntled if they hear that type of thing being pummelled at them all the time or read about it or even catch a broadcast of it,

and her broadcasts could be picked up, I don’t think by anybody outside of experts in the division. I don’t think any ordinary person could have picked up the broadcast, but it was just saying that this is what she said and it wasn’t true, because whether the civilians could hear her broadcast, I couldn’t tell you at that time because I

wasn’t in Sydney, naturally, but when I was on leave I certainly never listened to the radio. I was too busy doing other things.

No, we got one or two leaves in Sydney during the war, but I had one short rest and recreation leave of about four days that I took at a little place, well really an R & R at Northampton which was

north of Geraldton, and I got there and I found some non-commissioned officers and some officers there and oh they were a very slovenly lot. They were just slopping around and there was no food and there was all full of flies and ….yuk, and I thought, ‘Not for me, digger’. I had taken my own supplies in my own haversack. Somebody had shot a kangaroo

and they didn’t know what to do with it. It was a small Euro, it was just a very small one, wasn’t a big one, so I said, “Oh well, that’s alright mate,” and I had a half bayonet that I’d sort of taken off on the grind stone, and I had made it into a knife, sharp as a razor, and I always wore that down my leg.

So I skinned the Euro – well I skinned the necessary part of the Euro, I cut the tail off and skinned that and got it so that you could have the joints for soup, mulligatawny, or whatever, and I cut off some steaks and stuff like that and I said, “Don’t eat the steaks,” and I said “has anybody got any beer?” Somebody had a bit of beer and I said, “Ok have you got a bowl?” I put the steaks in, poured the beer over it and I said,

“Let it marinate ‘til’ tomorrow and it’ll be edible and don’t cook it too much, don’t overcook it. And I said, “Now have you got any vegetables?” And they had some scrawny looking vegetables in a pot, so I made them up a soup of the kangaroo tail and dropped it in and said, “Let this go and any fat take off the top of it. It’ll be right. But I said, “Don’t drink too much of it, don’t have too much of it no matter what,” I said, “because it is a diuretic and it’ll go through you like a packet of Epsom Salts”, which it does.

So the next morning I got up and took a dive into the bloody ocean and took a swim and came back and said, “See you back”, and I walked up the beach for, oh not tremendously far, probably about seven or eight miles or so that first day, and I made myself a little meal with what I had taken with me.

I tried to catch some fish but I couldn’t get them. They were caught on the tide. I did get one or two by hand, and I slit them and I grilled them and I had them very nicely, but I couldn’t catch any with the stuff that I took with me. I didn’t catch any that evening, and the next morning – oh it was wonderful – I woke up the next morning , it was just so gorgeous. You could hear

the surf going all night, it was just so gorgeous, it was wonderful. And I’d noticed walking up that particular day – I didn’t leave until after breakfast, I had a cup of tea or something and I took off then, and I stopped and had a little chew on something, some cheese and onions or something for lunch, and went on, and I had noticed that, and of course the sand was very hot

and I had my boots on, and it would crumple like you would walk through the crust of a pie, and it was about that thick of salt. And I thought, my God I am probably the first person to walk on this beach for how many years? It could be for a hundred years. I mean who knows? I don’t, and the next day when I walked on for another, I guess I walked on for about another three or four miles or maybe more,

and I turned and then I came back to the spot where I had been the first night and then I came back again the next day. That sand was even thicker covered, you know it was crested over little bits of rock and stuff like that. Other times it would be thin and your foot would go right through the sand crust, but it was just fascinating to think, for how long? No-one had ever walked up that beach but me, and I just adored it. And during the day I would stop, and I was walking with a pair of shorts on.

I had a shirt for the night and I had a blanket with me so that I could wrap up if it got too cold, which it did at night, and I’d just duck in and have a swim and wander around and have a look at things and sit in the sun and have a cigarette and walk on a bit more. It was a wonderful period and it was just very restful, just by myself. I never got bored with myself.

Well the reason was that after I had done that little job of writing and propaganda and broadcasting for Mac, I said to them, “I think I had better get back to the battalion again” and he said,

“Why do you want to go back to the battalion? We could use you here all the time.” And I said, “Oh come on Mac. I should go back to the battalion,” and he said, “Look, do me one more favour before you do that,” and I said, “What is it?” And he said, “Well you remember back in Wallgrove,” – because Brigadier Bernie Lloyd asked you – “you and the others did those concerts for us.” It was in the boxing ring. We just took down the posts and things, and we just did it in the boxing ring, and all the boys sat in the dirt and watched us.

And it was a very primitive type of show but it was like a rock concert type of thing today, you know, bits of lights here and there. He said, “We have got that concert party over here,” and I said, “I didn’t know that, that you had formed a divisional concert party.” Because the 6th had formed one, the 7th had one and the 8th in Changi had one, the 9th

in the desert had one, and I said, “That’s interesting.” and he said, “Yes, yes, they formed up that unit and they haven’t got a Commanding Officer just at the moment but they are getting one,” which they did, and he said, “Oh they are so sloppy and they are so bloody undisciplined.” He said, “They are a nuisance, everywhere they go I get complaints about them.” He was the Amenities Officer you know, in charge of all the amenities.

I said, “Well what do you think I'll do?” He said, “You are a smart Infantry boy. They should be dressed like you are dressed.” He said, “Lying around and sloppy and the lines stink I hear,” and he said, “you know the whole thing is undisciplined and they drink too much and Des Turner,” and he said, “Do you know Des Turner?” And I said, “Yes.” “Des is not too well at the moment and we are going to transfer him back to Sydney, so George

Wallace has simply got nobody to be straight man for him and nobody can compere. You know all of those things. You can sing, you can dance, you can fill in. Go across and talk to them and straighten them out and give me a report on it.” So I went across and I walked down the lines and they stank. This was in Geraldton and of course that’s where I’d got up to. That’s where the Divisional Headquarters was.

They had originally been, when they first went across quite some time before, in Guildford, which is a town lower down the coast, but now they were up in Geraldton proper. There were some very talented boys amongst them, any number that I can mention to you, like Darcy Caffey, Col Croft, Ronnie Patton and people like that who kept themselves immaculate, but there were others who just did not and the discipline was very loose. They had no Commanding Officer, so who was

in charge? A senior sergeant or someone like that. It doesn’t work. You have to have some figurehead to head up a unit even if he is silly and he doesn’t do anything. You’ve got to have him – he is the titular head of the unit, which we later had, a very fine fellow called Freddy Hughes, who was an English actor/manager, a very fine old fellow, far too old. He was fifty one or two and he was up in New Guinea with us. We sent him home, we got him home. He shouldn’t have been up there with us, that was too heavy for a man that age.

But I will tell you about him maybe later sometime. Anyway I went down and I looked in the first tent and they were all asleep, laying back and the whole place was like a pig sty and I kicked this kid’s, whatever he was sleeping on, and he woke up and he looked up at me and said, “Ohh,” and I said, “Where’s your Commanding Officer?” I didn’t know then that

actually they had not a Commanding Officer in actual fact. He said, “We haven’t got a bloody Officer,” and I said, “Well who’s in charge of the unit?” And he didn’t know who was in charge of the unit and I said, “Well who’s your Senior Sergeant?” “Well Doug Cross, but he’s not here.” So I said, “Who is the senior?” And he said, “Georgie Wallace,” and I said, “Where’s Wallace?” and he said “He’s down in the other tent somewhere,” and goes off to sleep again, because it was very hot, and they’re lying in their tent, they’d been out probably ut the previous night either working or pissing up, so they’re not in great shape.

So I walk down and I finally get to the tent that Wallace is in, and I've been told gently that he is not the easiest person in the world to talk to and that he is full of himself and all that kind of thing, which was quite to the contrary because George was a marvellous person. He’s a little difficult to get on with at times, great demands made on himself.

He was a superb comedian. I think he was better than his father actually, in that particular way, but anyway he and I had a good talk about things and I settled in to take Des Turner’s place and I had to learn a lot of routines that George did and had been doing for quite some time, and some new stuff and it wasn’t easy for me to learn to do that.

No, not at all. I was seconded from my battalion to go to Divvy Headquarters,

and while I was in Divvy Headquarters I was under the command of Captain McAllister, and so whatever he asked me to do and wherever I said I would go and do it I was still under his command as Amenities Officer. I was no longer under the direct command of my Battalion Colonel but I was responsible, or they were responsible, to either say, “We are sending him back to you” or “we are keeping him”, so it was up to me to decide did I want to be with the concert party?

When we finished the tour of duty in Western Australia we were drawn back to…we were heading to New Guinea or parts thereof, wherever it happened to be, and we came back in cattle trucks.

I forget where we picked up the train, at Narrogin or somewhere there, and we came across the Nullarbor in cattle trucks which wasn’t the pleasantest way to travel I can assure you.

Alright. Well we just simply came across there. We stopped off in Melbourne, we changed trains and we came up to Sydney and we arrived, and I think we had come through Melbourne on Melbourne Cup day, the first Tuesday in November, of 1943, and so we had a bit of leave, and we got back into the showgrounds. That was our headquarters in those days, and we re-equipped and within no time we’d put together an additional show. We had taken on new players like Wally Nash and George Pomeroy,

and we were ready to go back again and we went by train to Brisbane, we picked up a boat there, and we found ourselves up at Red Island Point, which is right at the tip of Cape York.

Specifically in my own unit?

No

Well there were a number of them that did go on to do a lot of work after the war. Not everyone did. Many of the musicians did, not so many of the entertainers.

My unit at that particular time comprised a collection of people and I’ve got a list of them here that might be of interest so that I can read them out. There was basically the main Sergeant who was heading up the unit as producer and writer and comedian, was George Wallace Junior, and he was supported in the musical end of things by a person called Doug Cross who was our band leader. And of course, in the early days of

the formation of that particular 2nd Division, concert party as it was called then, for quite a while, they were known as the Black and White Diamonds, because Black and White Diamond was our unit badge on the Division, and they had with them another Senior Sergeant called Aussie Stutchberry, and Aussie was a very sort of buttoned-up type of character,

and very sort of formal and all that kind of thing, and wasn’t, I don’t think, terribly popular with the rest of the boys because of that – a bit old fashioned and a bit fuddy-duddy, a very fine pianist – so he was with the unit, and then we had, following that, we had Fred Fisher who was one of our mechanical people who ran the transportation and our generator, and he was an older sergeant and a very tough guy.

He could put his hands in amongst the generator and you would see the electricity flying off him. He would just do it – he was absolutely marvellous like that, and a very, very hard worker. And then we had another marvellous pianist with us who was a jazz pianist, and his name was Darcy Caffrey. He could play anything, and a terribly handsome man. He was older than most of us but he had a beautiful physique, and he

loved to sun tan, and he and I swam a great deal together, and we were always looking after our teeth. We managed to get a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and if our toothpaste was running out we’d get some hydrogen peroxide, we’d take a mouthful of salt water, we’d put the hydrogen peroxide in there and (gargle) and put the sun on it, and our teeth were always white. We all smoked in those days of course, and so you didn’t have anything to clean your teeth with except doing it that way, so always our teeth were very, very clean.

Darcy was a charming person with a great wit. He was very funny and he played cards, and he was really, really a boulevard type of person, a handsome person. Then we had Jack Conjures who was on alto sax, and Ted Cole, who was a very funny person, very sort of basic and crude at times, but Ted was a great player and he was on double bass, and he was a general utility person around the place – he could do electrics or he could

drive. And we had then Colin Croft. Colin was probably one of the most brilliant of the younger comedians and dancers and impressionists, and he played dames and he played children and he played everything. He was absolutely… a very stunning talent that had started with the Young Australia League in the mid ‘30s, when he was only just a baby. We also had a wonderful magician and his theatrical name was ‘De Maestro’,

and he was elegant with a sort of evening jacket, you know, the white tie and tails and that type of thing, and he did all these magical tricks, and he took quite a lot of equipment with him. The only problem was when we got to New Guinea and places like that where it was raining all the time, some of the equipment jammed, and he had one marvellous act where he got someone up from the audience,

and one of our female impersonators stood by in a glamorous gown was helping him and they would get this fellow eventually. They would show him, on the guillotine, how it snapped down and went straight through a pawpaw or a coconut, and they’d say to him, “Now are you willing to risk your neck inside that? And we assure you that this magician is so skilled you will not feel anything. Your head will not fall off. You will be protected.” And all of sudden you could see the kid’s eyes start to roll.

He’s beginning to see that it’s fun being up on the stage and all his mates are waving at him, and so he very reluctantly puts his head in it, and of course with the fanfare and the band and the roll of the drums and everything, and de Maestro would bring down the guillotine. And it would normally go straight down so that it looks as if it chopped his head off, and one night it jammed, and it jammed

down there and they couldn’t get it up again, and for about ten minutes on the stage we wrestled with this bloody guillotine and I finally said, “Get him off the stage,” and he walks off the stage with a guillotine around his neck. He was a great manipulator – he could take ping pong balls between his fingers and manipulate them. He’d take coins and run them along his thumb. He could do card tricks and fan cards,

that you wouldn’t believe what he was doing, and a very majestical act, very good indeed. He’s no longer with us unfortunately. Greg Ginnery was a marvellous trumpet player, a beautiful trumpet player. He was a painter by trade and a very quiet boy, very handsome. My sister was very fond of him during the war years. Norm Hetherington, he’s still alive today. He and his wife live in Mosman. Norman was the gentleman who invented the one with the pencil, the one on the ABC, Mr. Squiggle.

He used to do his act of, well various types of acts, but the one he did the most was the artist with the beret and the smock and he did these lightning sketches of the personalities in the unit that we were visiting, and it was a very good act, a very clever act. He would go around and talk to them and put them down, and I’d help him

with a little bit of continuity if necessary, and then he would sketch them as cartoons on sheet after sheet – big sheets like this of paper, and you could not see the pencil marks unless you were close up to them. And he’d take his brush and he’d go…and he’d do these kind of gestures with these beautiful lines that he did with the brush, and all of a sudden out of nowhere appeared the colonel of the regiment.

It was a very popular act and Norman was very good at that. Hal Harper was a Salvation Army boy who played the trombone and still played it until a few years ago when he had a heart attack and his doctor wouldn’t let him play any more. He was a wonderful fellow. Frank McGann was a number of things. He was a ventriloquist, an impressionist, and we forced him into doing female impersonations. As a ventriloquist he had two dolls. One was called Hiram

and the other was called Valdeine, and they used to have conversations with each other in male and female voices, a very talented boy. And then there was a fellow called Michael Pate and he did a lot of things too, and then Ron Patton who was a wonderful baritone. Ron is still alive and still as handsome as ever. Peter Potter was a kind of utility man with us for a while. Then Warren Aussie Richards,

who was our main female impersonator, and really looked gorgeous. On a dark night with not too much light on him you might have been tempted. He really was a very good female impersonator without going at it too hard, he just had a natural way of doing things, very feminine. Eddie Smith was a violinist and Basil Spencer was a bloke from England who’d come out to Australia and he joined the army out here and he was a trumpeter, and he was a

maddening perfectionist trumpeter. He practised every day, every bloody day for hours and hours on end. He drove us all mad. And if we said, “We will take the trumpet and you know what you can do with it”, he’d just take the mouthpiece and blow that. He would do it all day long and we would have to come across and take the mouthpiece out of his hand, and his fingers would still be like that (curled up) and this is how they practised. They were very good.

Who else was there? There was Des Turner who was the original compere – and he wasn’t really well and he went back to Sydney – and Les Rollins who was the drummer, and Les Rollins was one of those young drummers who I think was the equal of anything that was in the American bands. He really was a great, great drummer, he would make drummers today look stupid, he was that good a drummer. That was the basic

sort of thing about the unit. We gained some extra people. After that we had Wally Nash and Alan Nash come into the unit, we had Bobby Clements come into the unit, we had George Pomeroy come into the unit, and who else did we have? I’m just trying to think, see if I can get a few notes here somewhere but I can’t think who it might have been. Now, we had Neville Chynaweth come into the unit. Max Daley came in to play double base and viola,

and Vern Haycroft was on the…what do you call those things where you ding a dang a ding a dang a…

Xylophone. And of course he was also a very funny comedian and so he worked in the sketches with us. So that’s how the unit sort of worked around. We’d lose some and we’d gain some, and it progressively went like that throughout the year.

I probably replaced Des Turner more that anything. I forget what they’ve got me down here as doing, or what I put myself down as doing, I beg your pardon. It said: “Michael Pate, compere, straight man, actor, was in the original show at Wallgrove, seconded etc. etc. and taken over from Des Turner”, and I also wrote part of the show with George Wallace. I wrote some of the individual speciality acts for, say Frank McGowan, and later on for a musical and otherwise two-handers for two women,

two female impersonators, stuff like that, vamp and song vamp and so on, and so I was engaged in quite a bit of work in the unit.

The first three shows that the unit did were called Blitz and Peaces, from bits and pieces, I imagine.

The second show was called Turkish Delight. The third show was called Those Were the Days which we did an old-fashioned melodrama in and George Wallace was terribly funny. He played the villain in it, and he had this very bendable cane and he used to do these incredible pratfalls at which he was very, very good, and the people would just be convulsed the way that he…he was a good acrobat and tumbler and he just did them so beautifully and so funnily.

All of the scenas that we did with George were very funny. I did a couple of doubles with him, two-handers with him, one of which was called, ‘Let Me Tell You How To Press Your Suit’, and it was how to come on strong to a girl, how to make out in other words. It was very funny stuff, and we could do that in a couple of minutes, five minutes. Depending if the audience were with us we’d keep extending it. We did it for up to twenty minutes one night, no effort at all,

just kept joking and doing some things like that.

Scenas are usually in vaudeville terms, a combination of a story line, a little sort of vignette sketch – they’re called sketches – and they can be done with music and dancing and singing. They’re put together, that’s called a scenas. A two-hander means that if you and I are doing a play or doing a sketch,

or doing a song or doing a female impersonation or whatever, that’s called a two-hander. If I’m doing it on my own it’s called either a one-hander or a one-man show, and those are the kinds of things that we used as terms on the stage in vaudeville particularly, or burlesque.

Most of the two-handers as we got them and the scenas

were mostly comic. Sometimes we pulled a little phoney drama – I will tell you of one of those perhaps – but they were mostly comedic. We would put any of the drama, as you might call it, let’s say the pathos, into violin numbers or into songs that were sung straight. We had wonderful baritones, we had good tenors,

and sometimes George Pomeroy would sing a song. That’s about the extent of it. But they would sing the romantic, tearful songs of the day that made everybody cry and want to be with their mother and that type of thing. But no, we tried to keep the shows light-hearted. They went for, on an average, between two and two and a quarter hour shows. We did about two and a quarter hours. We had twenty-two, twenty-three items in our running sheet, what we call a running sheet –

that’s from the first one right through – and I probably, along with George would’ve been in at least a third of them if not half of them, and I also too had the job of compering and introducing acts all the time which I introduced everybody in the show where it was necessary, and build them up… “And here is …” and on they come, you know, that type of thing,

which was effective out there when you’re playing to a thousand men or two thousand or whatever it happens to be and you’re in the darkness, and it was rather like that you know. You really had to lift things up. The band that we had eventually got up to around about fourteen pieces, and they really played the music of the day, the popular music of the day, the Glenn Miller stuff, the Tommy Dorsey stuff, Frank Sinatra type songs, all the stuff, ‘Caravan’, ‘Begin the Beguine’ , the typical songs of that particular period,

and some of the other songs that Vera Lynn did, and ‘Berkeley Square’ ,and the war songs of that particular period. We didn’t dip back into World War I for songs of that nature because they didn’t seem to be, in an Australian sense, they may have been more in a British sense, related

from World War I to World War II.

No, no I don’t need it, I don’t think I need it, it was to help myself with names there before, because you can't remember everything. Well of course you can, but anyway. What were we talking about?

Well they played, each one of the different orchestras for each one of the different units, had their own particular style

that they preferred. It also depended on the composition of the orchestra. We were fortunate that we had some very good bass players, Ted Cole and Max Daley were both very, very good. Max was a brilliant player of the viola, he really was a lovely player of the viola. Eddy Smith was a tremendous violinist, he was really good.

Cliffy Gibbs and people like that were really fine violinists, and they could meld into an orchestra absolutely beautifully. Most of the pianists and most of the conductors of the orchestras, like Wally Nash and Nev Chinnerworth and people like that, could also play absolutely brilliant accordion. They were absolutely great on the accordion. We had specialised accordion players. We had Lou Campar and we had Lou Topano, and Lou Topano

became very famous. His brother was Enzo Topano. Enzo is the father of the Topano gal that was married to Kerry Stokes on Channel Seven. So we did have those individuals and of course Horrie Dargy was a very good musician in that particular light too, so the quality of the musicians… For instance, Max Jost was a sensational concert pianist,

and Charley Munro and people like that, their standard of musicianship was just great. Well they all played in great orchestras. You had Frank Coughlan, you had Wally Portingale – they all played in the Trocodero – Frank Coughlan ran and conducted the Trocodero, which was a big band dance auditorium, and there wasn’t a musician with us that wasn’t a first class top musician.

And when you put them all together you just had beautiful stuff to listen to all night long. I mean it was great.

No. Most of them were professional musicians or entertainers before the war, and they joined up or were called up or whatsoever, and they were in the army and then when we started the 6th Division and others

started forming units, they knew of or they went around and they found in their division, those types of people, entertainers etc and they seconded them to be with the concert party or the entertainment unit or whatsoever. I think generally speaking most of the musicians and the entertainers were quite grateful to have been seconded to those units. It was just a bit more pleasant

than bloody dirt and the slush of Kokoda Trail and of all the dangers of active combat service, there is no question about that, and I think they responded to it on the whole terribly well by trying to keep a standard of perfection for themselves. And of course There was that little bit of sloppiness that was there with the 2nd CP [Concert Party] when I was asked to go across to it, and that happened undoubtedly from time to time with units, but the object of the exercise,

when you got the unit up to scratch, was to keep it there, and there were problems. Boys went down with illnesses – they went down with malaria, they went down with dengue, they went down with injury, they went down with terrible rashes and stuff underneath their armpits and in their groins and under their genitals, and these were the things caused by the conditions of New Guinea, you know, damp and all those kind of things, but I would say it was remarkable how

they kept their good sense of humour. We would laugh at the silliest of things. I mean, some of the food that we ate was all so strange and mixed and dubious I think and by the time you fed yourself on meat and vegies and all that kind of crap for so long, your stomach is probably a boiling cauldron of gases and stuff like that. We might some nights be in a tent or we might some nights even be in a native hut and someone would start to fart

and you would probably get a chorus of farting that was just like a symphony orchestra playing, and people would be just dying with laughter, and also too, someone would say, “Ahhh! I don’t know when this bloody war is going to finish, do you Harold?” and Harold would say, “Ahhhh, go to sleep!” And they would start this comedy routine. They were just doing it deliberately.

They couldn’t sleep, it was hot and humid, and everyone would start adding to it, something or other, and the whole bloody place would be just laugh, laugh, laugh, and you’d think, you’d say, “For Christ sake, fellows, stop it. No more please. Quiet. Let’s go to sleep. Let’s go to bed.” and you’d have silence for about twenty seconds, and someone would say something and you would be off again with the giggles.

It seemed rather silly, and you’d think well these are grown men doing this. I saw a dreadful commercial on television the other day, I think it was on the ABC, and this girl says, “This is real fun”, and bends down and farts at a candle and whatever that commercial was. Did you see it on the ABC? Oh you should’ve caught that, that was a really good one. I have seen, just for fun and out of boredom, was somebody that had a bellyful of gas in the pitch black of the night, and when the

moon goes out in the tropics it goes out, and when it comes out it’s like daylight, and just go up there and say “OK. Let her go.” and you’d strike a match and out the flame would come, and as long as the fart lasted off the jet of gas would be the flame, and these were the silly things that they did, but I think it was the good humour and the ability to laugh, and the ability also to help the other person when the other person wasn’t feeling too good,

or to say, “Mate, you’re not feeling too good today. Bugger off will you? Piss off back to your tent, and go to the RAP [Regimental Aid Post] and get something for it. Go on, piss off.” And you looked after people like that and you did their work for them. Many times we all did that. So it was that comradeship. You take into account that people are fallible. We were caught once in a terrible downpour

and we had just arrived at this particular place we were suppose to come into in New Guinea, and we were shifting camp, and we were allotted a certain area but we had to build our own camp. We had to put up our own tents and all that kind of thing, and all of a sudden, at a most unexpected time of the day – usually it rained more towards the evening – but this was like in the middle of the afternoon, and this downpour came.

And we were struggling to put up tents and someone was holding the pole of one tent, and someone is stretching out the canvas line, and I’ve got a cord and I’ve got a spike, and I said to Norm Hetherington, “Where’s the mallet to knock this in with?” And he said, “I don’t know.” And I said, “Take that bloody shovel, come on and hit the fucking thing, will you please.” and he hit it alright and took the skin off my knuckles the first time. I said, “Come on, hit it again,” and he hit it again

and he hit me right in the face. It didn’t chip any teeth, it just split my gums entirely around here, the inside of my mouth I mean, and he looked at me – and he is a big gangling fellow, a wonderful fellow – with this rather funny face, and I breathe out and this enormous gob of blood goes out like a plum, and his eyes rolled up and I thought he was going to faint.

For years afterwards – we didn’t see each other for ages after we were discharged – he said to me years afterwards, he said, “Mike, I thought you were going to kill me that day when I hit you with that shovel.” I said, “Norm, that wasn’t your fault, that was my fault. I was in the way. It had nothing to do with you mate,” and he said, “You gave me a look like you were going to kill me,” and I said, “No, all I was doing was running my tongue around me teeth to see if my teeth were still there.”

I said, “I may have been grimacing,” but no, we all looked after each other.

No, I think there were people who were closer to each other than to the general group of the unit.

Oh they worked alright, they had their preferences of companion. Eddie Smith, Georgie Wallace,

Darcy Caffrey used to like to go out some nights and try and see if they could pick up a few of the girls that were in the tents, you know, the AWAAS, that was fine. I wasn’t intent to do that, I had friends amongst the AWAAS whom I’d known for years so I could at least go down and…we used to go out and sit down and listen to some classical music, have a cigarette, you know, talk and all that kind of thing. They were charming girls that I’d known for many ,many years.

One was the minister’s daughter, one time when I was a youngster. I would find that I was looking after some of the younger ones in the unit. I’d be looking after Frankie McGowen and people like that, and some of the newcomers, and spending time with them and talking to them. If they wanted to play cards I would play cards with them. I did play cards for money for a while with the unit, but

I was a very good card player, a very fine card player I must say for myself, and I was stripping off them, and I finally said, “No, I am not going to play for money any more”. The fellows played for fun. We played a lot of euchre and five card draw and poker and stuff like that, and they were losing money to me because they really didn’t know how to play it properly you see. I would go out and play the games here there and everywhere, and whenever we travelled on a convoy I’d be the person who would have the black jack game,

and I’d just put out a couple of blankets and sit on the deck of a ship, and we’d get three packs of cards and we’d say, “Ok, the game starts”, and the boys who were backing me would give me fifty pounds each, so I had a bank and I would add my own to that naturally. As they sat around I would only play up to eight players,

I wouldn’t play any more than eight players. I preferred to play five or seven to tell you the truth, because you know five players was enough for me. I’d play eight. I made a lot of money on the troop ships because I mean a lot of boys think they can play cards but they can't, and you make your own rules for what is needed in black jack in that particular way, and we had a lot of fun doing those kinds of things.

There was a good sense amongst the boys. We all had to work together to get the hard work done, to put the stages up, to do the show, to bring the stages down, so we all had to be sure that we got into it there, but from a companion point of view there were some boys that kept very much to themselves, like Norm Etherington. He used to love to be on his own. He used to sketch and he used to illustrate stuff,

and it just depended on your personality.

Well some of them were very lonely. They were away from their families, and also too, although I was only about a couple of years older than them but I was much more worldly wise I imagine, and

they felt that they could learn something from me talking to me. Say for instance when we came down once or twice into the Perth area when we worked Rottnest and a few other places like that, and I would take one or two of them, Frank McGowan and people like that, into town, and we would have a nice meal at a pub or something like that, and we might go to a movie or we might go to a museum or something like that,

just as something different for them. Frank and I used to knock around like that together. It was quite nice. Also too people would come to you, they were having trouble with their wives or something has happened etcetera. etcetera. They needed somebody to talk to and some of the other boys didn’t want to spend time with anybody. They just wanted to be by themselves or

do what they wanted to do. So I got a little bit of that father figure stuff for some reason or other. I often said I should hang my shingle up and charge them.

We would be allocated to a sort to brigade area or a division area or otherwise, an armoured division or an infantry division or

lines of communication or an artillery regiment, and there would be various units in that that you might entertain. Then again you might only entertain only once in an area. They tried to put us into an area by going out some twenty, thirty, forty, fifty miles in a circle from where we were.

We could service those particular units in that particular place. Whenever we moved in they more often than not had a line of tents up for us. Otherwise we had to put them up for ourselves, but once or twice – and we refused, our Commanding Officer said no, he wouldn’t allow it – we were asked to join with other units in other work. That would have been labouring right? No way. We were specialists and

we were not going to do that kind of work and our officer made that very plain to the Commanding Officer of that particular area or district. We could, if we wanted to, eat at the mess, at the kitchen of that particular area, and that was fine. If we didn’t, we carried a cook with us, a utility person and he was a very good cook, Tom Bonet,

and we could draw our own supplies and he could cook for us. And there were certain areas where we did that. We did that in Dutch New Guinea and we did that in Red Island Point. We didn’t do it on our trips through the Torres Strait because we went from place to place. We did do it, at times, in New Britain, at Jacquinot Bay.

We were an independent unit and we had our own autonomy within what duties we’d been told and what scheduling we’d been given to entertain, and it worked quite well. We were only a small unit – we were only twenty, twenty-one with an officer, not always with an officer but mostly with an officer. We always had one person in the office. We had a batman to the officer concerned, and we finally came down to, if someone was ill there was only about fifteen or sixteen of us

to do all the hard work.

Oh we had to construct our own stages at one time, on forty-four gallon drums, and you know tent boards and floorboards on top of that. That was very early on, and then later we had a truck that was designed to all fold down and come up again and make a complete stage,

just on the back of a truck, and it worked very well for us. It was quite a good thing, but still you had to bring it down, you had to put it in place, you had to run in power to it off a generator, naturally, you had to put it up, and canvas cover it, and when you’d finished the show if you were moving on and doing a show in a different place the next night, naturally you had to bring it down, pack it up and put it away,

pack up the lorry and drive home. We were doing that every show that we did, and that was the work that was probably the heaviest on us, in climates that were sometimes very torrential rain, always very humid and hot, and sometimes during the day, the steel of the stage itself and the roof of the stage was so hot that you could hardly bear to pick them up. You’d sometimes have to take a piece of towel and put that around. I finally, through an American friend of mine late in the piece up there, got a pair of leather gloves

from an American that I knew up there, and he gave me this pair of pig skin gloves. They certainly saved my hands just a little bit because that bloody steel was hot as anything to hold onto.

I think we talked. There had to be a better way to get our pianos and our generators

and our costumes and all of that to where we were going rather than putting them in a truck and then putting them down and trying to see how it was and how we would protect them with maybe a lean-to or something with the stages that were being offered, because although there were some established stages that we would go into and be able to work on, so I mean we talked about it, and I said well the very best thing is if we could

get a lorry that we could fold down the sides and the back and extend that so that we had an area that would be called the stage, and that on the side of it we could have underneath it duck boards that we could stand on when we had to make clothing changes or make-up and all that kind of thing. And I said it shouldn’t be very hard to do that and put up a framework that will work, and so we all talked about it and I think

somewhere along the line I either, when I was coming back through Melbourne, I can't be quite sure now, I was asked to submit a detailed description of it, and I did through those sources, and I guess it must have gone back to 1st Army in Melbourne and people discussed it, and low and behold very shortly after that, the New South Wales lines of communication, called the Waratahs Unit,

had one in Victoria Barracks and it worked. So then everyone eventually got that kind of truck and so when we travelled, where-ever we travelled, whether it was by road or by train or by boat, that would be wheeled along with another truck for us, and a jeep. That was our transport.

Well we had some footlights, we used to use footlights, and we had some overhead lights that shone, and we had individual band lights so that the bandstands that the players were using were illuminated properly, and we had a spot light on the front of the stage and that was on us in various colours, naturally – Tom Bonner used to use that, and generally we were lighting an area that was about twenty four feet wide by about, I'd say,

fifteen feet deep, and you had the height which was, lets say ten or twelve feet above you with a fringe across the front. See here, that’s kind of vaguely what we used to look like. I have a big one of that somewhere (cover of book showing the stage). That’s how we looked, with Freddy Hughes, an officer there, that’s one that he did for us, all caricaturing us

– we were all exaggerated. In that period of time I had buck teeth and so he exaggerated my teeth, and my hair was a mass of black hair that used to fly all over the place so he did that for us and he gave me, and I have got the original copies of those that he did.

Oh, a very simple microphone

as a matter of fact, with a chrome cover around it. You had to learn to use it because it would make noises, you know, it went… but we got very skilled I guess at using that, and people said they could hear us, and what we did have, we pressed our officer into service and we had him walk around the back of the crowd all the time, and he would have to come back and tell us that we could be heard properly

and the band could be heard. And we would try and adjust the acoustics of the microphone to that. I don’t know quite how it was translated from the microphone to the loud speakers that we had, or how many loud speakers that we had. I think we had two on either side of the stage, and we used to have, like here, with a loud speaker on the top out on the fringes of the crowd. I seem to think we worked that way when we could.

But generally speaking the stage was adequate. Some nights when it rained and the rain sort of blew in on us, that made it very tricky and very difficult, particularly for any dancers.

Well on that particular transfer that we got towards the end of 1943 – and I think we got to Melbourne on Melbourne Cup Day – we came back and our headquarters were then at Sydney Showground and many units were at Sydney Show Ground. It was used for that.

We had I think, about a month’s leave, I’m not quite sure, it was around about that, because we had been away for about eighteen months or more, and so when we came back we prepared another show. We were told that we were going to go north, and nobody ever revealed to you exactly where you were going to go. When we got the show together and rehearsed it and it was in good shape and everyone agreed that it was –

you had to give a performance of the show that you had in mind – and then it was checked and OK'd, and if not you had to work on it until you got it right, and as quickly as possible, and we were costumed and we had whatever we needed to take with us, everything was in order, new members of the unit acquired etcetera. We were put on a train and we went to Brisbane and we stayed at Indooroopilly I think.

That was a dreadful, seething sewerage spot I can tell you, full of all kinds of rotten diseases and stomach and gastroenteritis and Christ knows what. I never ate there. I just went in the first day and smelt the kitchen and walked straight out. I came into town, I knew a few members of MacArthur’s staff and I went straight to the American Club, which was on Queen Street then,

and just said to the people inside, I wondered if I could have the privilege of the club because I was waiting to see so and so. And he said, “Oh yes of course,” so I waited and those people never came in that night, so I sat down and I had a very nice steak and a glass of beer and went out and, “See you back to tomorrow night?” And I said “Yes, we are not leaving for a while yet,” and I was back in the American Club every night having a nice meal.

Oh you bumped into them at various places and where they worked. For instance, when we were in Western Australia I came back into Perth once and there was an old girl friend of mine, well not a girl friend a person that I had known and been out with a few times in Sydney, a clever girl, she was working at one of the big department stores in Perth, if you could call any of the stores over there big in those days. But she was working

there in the cosmetic area of it, and we fell onto each other and said, “Oh isn’t it nice?” and her fiancé was away with the air force and she lived in Perth in an apartment just on St. George’s Terrace. And she asked what was I doing that night, and I said, “Nothing in particular. I just happen to be down here on a few days’ leave in Perth,” and she said, “Oh well, we are going out tonight, a few of them, to Cottesloe.

Would you like to come?” And I said, “That’s very nice.” And she said, “I tell you what, we are going out in so and so’s car. Can you meet us at…” wherever it was, her address, which I did that night and we all drove over to Cottesloe. When we got out there we found that it was mainly a gathering of United States submarine Officers with a few other brass, and it was the first time

I ever learned how to make a twenty-one parts gin martini. And as I said, I never drank much in those days, I didn’t even drink beer very much. I never really cared for beer. I had the occasional drink of whisky, and so when I got to this party, this big tall American submarine Officer

came up and said, “Well hello buddy, gee I’m glad they have got some Australians here tonight,” and he was a bit pissed off with the Dutch I think. Anyway he said, “What are you having to drink?” and I said, “Well what are you going to drink?” “Oh,” he said, “shit mate I’m going to have a twenty-one parts gin,” and I said, “What's a twenty-one parts gin?” And he said, “Let me show you.”

He takes a big sort of vase of glass, throws some cubes in it. He gets a bottle of vermouth, and I used it later in a play. Someone spoofily had put a perfume dispenser on the end of the thing, he goes whiff, and so he goes…spray, spray over the rocks in the thing, and he said, “I don’t want to spoil it with too much vermouth,” takes a great big quart bottle of Gordon’s gin and he pours

it in and he puts it down and there is about that much left in the bottom on the bottle and he just stirs it very gently like that. By the time he got a glass and he poured me one, it was icy cold. It was a very fine drink. Warm weather out there. I said, “Isn’t that nice.” And he pours himself one and they were generous glasses

and I thought gee this tastes real nice. Because before when you wanted a so-called martini people made you what was a gin and vermouth, which is a horrible drink. It was only Americans who really knew how to make them. I’d had that kind of martini before with the American Consulate in Sydney, in Edgecliff – Tommy Collins used to run it before the war – and I did some shows with the ABC where in one of the shows we used the members of

the American Consulate against us as a team in a quiz, and then we went out to his place in Edgecliff – he was the Consulate and we had drinks there – so I went “Mmmmm,” and he said, “Oh excuse me for a minute. I have got to take this drink across to this gal.” So he takes the drink across and then he comes back in about three or four minutes later and I had practically finished the martini by this time, and I’m thinking gee, that tastes absolutely marvellous.

And he said, “Well now let’s see what we can do next, buddy.” And he takes the gin again, pours it in and throws in maybe one more cube, doesn’t bother about the vermouth at all, gives it a little stir and pours me another one. Oh boy, I had hardly taken a sip or two of that second one. I was as shickered as anything. I was absolutely stonkered. I couldn’t move from the bar.

I hadn’t had much to eat during the day. I really wasn’t drinking any heavy or hard liquor or anything like that, and this just really got to me, and I had to lean against the bar, having a cigarette or two, for about the next twenty minutes before I dared to move. We did bump into a lot of Americans around the place, and we bumped into them on Thursday Island and we bumped into them on the other islands. They said, “Oh well if you are ever down there in the American Club in Brisbane, buddy,

you just drop in and mention my name”, and you’d think what was their name? You never knew what their names were. You’d only met them in passing, and you would remember one or two, and so you could mention that. And I met one guy there who was Chief of Staff for Macarthur at one time – I don’t know where I met him, whether it was Sydney or up there – I came to play him in a film that was made in Melbourne called Death of a Soldier,

which was on the Brownout Murders that was in Melbourne at that time. The guy who actually played the prosecuting attorney in it, the United States officer who did that, was played by Jimmy Coburn, and I was asked down there to play the part after Arthur Dignam had some kind of a tizz and he didn’t want to play it, something happened and he didn’t want to play it. I was to play some other part, and so they said would I play this part.

And I thought, oh that’s nice. I knew him. He was real West Point, you know, cropped hair, tough as nails, cigar, and I thought, gee that’s nice I’ve sort of remembered him. Only met him just like that, in passing. I didn’t really know him all that well, but I’d been told more of him, and when we got down there and got into this scene with Billy Hunter and Murray Fields –

I think they were the main ones in the scene – this person was tearing the arse out of these people. He really was after them in this scene, and it was written that way, and I thought it was a very good, strong scene. And Phil said, “How are you going to play this?” and I said, “As it’s written.” and I said, ‘He’s just tearing the arse out of these people.” and he said, “Was that the kind of character that he was?’ And I said, “Well

I know he was a tough son of a bitch. I don’t know whether he was that kind of a character or not.” and so he said, “Alright.” And he was not terribly sure you see. So we do the scene and the scene plays absolutely marvellously with a lot of power in it, and then Phil comes to me and he says, “I like that, I like that.” And I said, “That’s good Phil, thank you.” He said, “Someone has just turned up I want you to meet.” and he brings the man forward and

it’s the guy who was the prosecutor, the part that Jimmy Coburn is playing, and he says to him, “Did you see that scene?” And he says, “Yes I did. Very interesting, very interesting.” and Phil says to him, “And what did you think of Michael’s characterisation of the Major General?” And he says, “Shit, spot on man. That’s how that son of a bitch was all the time. He would be the biggest shithead that you’ve ever run across.’

And he went on describing this particular character which was exactly what I had said to Moray you see. And so I played him in that way with a few other little changes, naturally, of mood and all that, for the whole film and it proved very interesting, but he was one of those typical West Point officers. That was his total life. There was nothing else outside of that.

Well if you looked at the guys, the submariners in Perth, you would have to say that they were a very fine force of people. They really had some very good equipment and they were dedicated navy men, there was no question about that. In America many years later I met many of the same type of person. They were dear friends of mine.

They had all retired down San Diego way. They had married, some of them, Australian girls and that was the reason we all got together, the American Australian Club in America. That was in Los Angeles. And the other ones that I met – I met some on Thursday Island and they were just ordinary navy ratings and they were fun. They had just arrived in, they’d come in.

Of course Thursday Island had been very severely bombed and there was one wonderful place I’d discovered there which had been a Japanese brothel and it was the most marvellous structure, but it had been ruptured very strongly by bombs, and it had an enormous bath of blue and white tiles, those typical Japanese tiles. There would have been

oh, this room quartered, that’s how big the bath would have been. Boy those boys were so excited. They said, “I wonder if you could tell us where we might look around Thursday Island. We want to see what's happening here.” So I said, “Ok, hop in.” and I popped them into a jeep and I drove them around to these various places and they were thrilled to pieces and I photographed them and all that kind of thing, took the reel out of the camera and gave them the reel after I’d finished the reel. And

they wanted to be photographed in the bath, this broken bath almost full of tiles, in this Japanese whore house you see, and they said, “By gawd, we don’t know how to thank you for this, buddy. I mean this has been the thrill of my life.” And, “Fancy meeting you today,” and they went on and on, and they said, “Is there anything that you want? How about a couple of cartons of cigarettes?” I said, “Well that’s nice of you. Thank you, the boys will enjoy them,” and they said, “Is there anything else you would like?” and I said “I’ll tell you what I’d like,”

I said, “have you got any skivvies, T-shirts?” The Americans always had the white ones, the navy particularly. “Oh buddy, that’s not good enough. Buddy, come on.” And I said, “Two of those? Fine.” and they gave me two and I wore them and I had them right to the end of the war. I’d only wear them on special occasions when you wanted to feel really clean. I’d wear them with a pair of khaki pants instead of green ones. Anyway that’s another story altogether.

Anyway in the latter days in Lae I knew a few of the American engineers who were still in the area and as a matter of fact I got a campaign battle jacket from them which I wore after the war, and I got a pair of combat roughout boots, which had – they were very new in those days – the rubber indented soles on them. I used those and I dyed them eventually, black, and used them in The Sons Of Matthew.

And what they gave me, they gave me a tremendous grip if I was climbing rocks – and we did a lot of rock climbing in The Sons Of Matthew, or on springboards cutting trees down, going up the base of a tree, and they were very useful to me. They were some of the other ones that my first wife failed to send on to me.

Well, no. When we went to Brisbane as I said, to Indooroopilly, we went aboard a ship, a boat, and I think it was one of the boats that used to cross the Tasman. Even in the calm waters of the inside of the reef it was still rolling a little. It seemed to be doing that all the time (swaying). We docked at Red Island Point, which is right up the top of Cape York, and we got into

lorries and buses or whatever they had and, along with a lot of other guys on the ship, we went maybe ten miles south, and there they were setting up a staging camp and of course they’d put the bulldozers in and they’d cleared everything out to a great extent. There was quite a lot of troops going to go into there. What they’d done was they’d disturbed every snake and every scorpion within a hundred miles I’m sure.

Poor Bonet ignored what I said to him on the first night. I said, “Now fellas, be damn sure that when you take your boots off you put your socks in them, right? Close the top of your boots and put your socks in them. Nothing can get in your boots. Knock ‘em out in the morning just to be sure.” Tom forgot, woke up sleepy, got out of bed and wanted to take a leak, pulls on his boots and he’s got a scorpion.

So he was in hospital for about two or three weeks because that was very poisonous for him. They cleared this vast area and they put troops into it under canvas and we were there for a certain amount of time. Then we went to Thursday Island, and we then toured to the other islands – Horne and Prince Edward I think were two of the principal ones that I can remember, and we went by pearl lugger

and it was quite delightful, with the exception that you get the trades and the south-east chop all through those areas, and one night we did a show on one of the islands which had heavy guns and there were two boys that I went to school with, and they were in the Sergeants’ Mess and, of course, they had to have me in for drinks after the show, and they were drinking what they call Hen and Chickens,

and they were in what we called a ‘Lady Blamey’, and they were named after General Blamey’s wife, Lady Olga, and it was that you took a beer bottle and you cut off the top at the shoulder of the beer bottle with hot wire, and it made you a tall glass, about that tall, and when you went into a Mess in those days you’d put up your own bottle with your name on it

whatever it happened to be that you managed to get – gin, brandy, whisky and if you could steal any or get some from an Officer or something like that, and these boys had a number of bottles each up there that they’d managed over a period of time, kept for visitors or friends coming in, and the two brothers and another fellow each insisted that I must have a shot from whatever I chose. So I said, “Well I tell you what, who’s got the whisky? Two whiskies? Ok, fine. Give me two boilermakers and give me a shot of brandy

at the same time.” Two ounces each, and so I have about three ounces in the bottom of this thing. They fill it up with beer. Now the beer isn’t cold particularly, it’s just lukewarm, and I’ve got to tell you that that after you were very thirsty, and it was a hot humid night and it was raining outside, that first Lady Blamey

really tasted wonderful, with the whisky and the brandy and that beer you really drank it down and you thought, aaaaahhhhhh, mmmmmmmm, gee you could feel it going down, doing you the world of good, particularly when you hadn’t been drinking. We only got a drink every three, four, five months or so. We were never in the right place to collect our beer rations, and our officer at that time was a wonderful fellow but he used to get his ration of gin and he’d put his gin in his tea.

He used to drink his tea with a shot of gin in it. We never could get his liquor in any case. And so I said, “Ok, that’s fine.” And they said, “Ok, how about another one?” and the other guy had left by that time so I only had two shots of whisky in the next one, and I’m really spiflicated. I mean I’m feeling good, I think I’m doing fine, and eventually it came to lights out.

The Mess had to close, and we walked to the door and they took off and there was one light shining above the exit to the Mess, and I had a little combat torch which had a slit – we used to have them there – and you only used them on very rare occasions. I would take that with me, and so I was now going to find my way home. And we’d been bivouacked up on the top of a cliff in fairly high American tents, in double bunks.

Well I went the first circuit and I arrived back at the Mess again – blinding rain, you could hardly see six feet in front of you. I went up these flooded steps, right around, missed the tents where I’m supposed to be, came down a path, down here, turned, came back here again and I’m at the Mess again, right? It took me three shots to get home, and when I got home I was on the top bunk. There was nobody on the bottom bunk and I was on the top bunk, and I was so full of energy that

I just put my hands on and I sprung and I got up on the top where my bed was, and I rolled off and fell out of the room, and I’m lying there with the rain falling on me, and I’m wet to the skin of course, and I’m thinking now how did that happen? And I’m trying to work out how I’ve landed out in the rain again, and so I got up and I thought, oh there it is, and so very carefully that time I got out of my clothes and I climbed up into this top bunk and I got to sleep.

But waking up the next morning – and I didn’t wake up until about six o’ clock or so when we were all getting up, and we sort of had a very hurried cup of tea and maybe toast or bread and jam, and we walked down to the pearl lugger and we were going to the next island, and of course you have got that ground swell up there in New Guinea and it comes in great big ground swells like this.

It goes up and it goes down and so the lugger is going right up like this and going down, and so I just walked forward and I sat in front of the forward mast and I just sat there with the hangover of all time. It was just incredible. But at night it was just lovely. We sailed occasionally at night, and it was most wonderful to be with those Torres Strait Island. They would bring their guitars and they would sing their native

songs. It was just absolutely peace and perfection, and occasionally we tried to return the favour to them and we’d have some rations, we’d have some instant American coffee or some cream or stuff like that in tins, and then we went out one afternoon with them and they speared three or four fish and we discovered a turtle and we found about two dozen turtle eggs, so

I skinned those and made scrambled eggs and we gutted the fish and put them onto fronds and grilled them against the fire, and we all sat down and we had the fish and we had the scrambled eggs which were very, very rich – turtle eggs are very, very rich – and then we had this little bit of condensed cream over a little bit of fruit salad in a tin. It was only like a spoonful each we had, but

it was so rich, and it was amazing, and we were absolutely full because we weren’t used to eating a meal like that. You ate enough to keep you from not being hungry in the army but I never gained any weight in the army.

They were mainly on gun emplacements. They were heavy and light artillery emplacements so that they could be injected into any action that was off their island in that particular area,

or they could guard against the incursions of ships that might be wanting to invade. I think that they were an earlier idea. I don’t think after a certain time they were effectual at all, not at all. They had no purpose.

Oh well, naturally, they were bored shitless. They were totally…they had nothing else to do. They stood to duty or they stood down from duty all day long and at night they weren’t concerned with that. They just did a day duty I believe, although there would have been somebody on watch

throughout the night, naturally. But they were so glad to see us and they wanted us to stay another day or so and just sit around and talk – what’s the news and all that kind of thing, but that was that and then we went back to Thursday and then we went to Merauke and we entertained in and around Merauke. There was a mixture of troops there, of Dutch and Javanese and

Australians in that particular area, some Negro [UNCLEAR], and there was a United States squadron flying photographic out of there and the Australians were flying a squadron of Kittyhawks. I’m not sure whether they were in action at that particular time. I know the Dutch had been grounded. They were not allowed to fly there. Then we went up the Tanamera River and we didn’t go up terribly far, we went up

about twenty-five, thirty miles and we stopped off at little detachments of Australians that were there, or outposts you could call them almost, of administration and things like that, and we gave some entertainments there. I started a show one night and sort of figured I’ve got time to go out the front and see what it looks like, and I stood out there, oh no more than fifty yards from the stage in a bunch of palm trees

and I could hear after a while something behind me going…and chewing, behind me you see, and I thought, wait a moment and I look around and I look around and it’s not here, where I turned around. My eyes are level with the breasts of a man with carvings on his arm, and I look up a little further, a bone through the nose, sharp

teeth like shark’s teeth with sharp points, mouth is absolutely stained with betel nut, and it’s a head hunter, with his friend, both stark bollocking naked except for a little thing holding up their you know what’s, spears in hand, the whole thing, and grinning down at me like this. I thought Jesus they gave me the start of my life. And the next day we were in a village and oh about a dozen or more pygmies

and their wives came through. Of course the pygmies had blow pipes – that’s how they kill their game and stuff like that – and it was very interesting, all those villages, and we came back to the wharf on that particular occasion and one of the sea rescue launches had just shot right through the eye a twenty-seven foot crocodile that had been hauled up onto the wharf and the neck

hacked off by the natives. It was over five foot long, the neck, and I paced out the rest and it was twenty-one feet. No sooner had it landed on the wharf then they chopped its head off with machetes, and they had stripped and turned it over and were inside the belly getting the meat and guts and everything out of it. Incredible, these little pygmies with these machetes. It was quite crazy.

Well I enjoyed that aspect of it very much because it was fascinating to me. I mean, you know, Dutch New Guinea was a very strange place. Up at the end of the Tanamera River was the original Dutch penal colony up there which was really bad news, and the Dutch were very, very cruel colonial administrators and they used that particular part

there, that prison there, to put their political prisoners from French colonies there. Papillon, that type of thing. I didn’t particularly care for the Javanese Officers, who are now the Indonesians. I didn’t find them trustworthy although I went out and hunted wild pig with them several times, which was quite enjoyable. Dealing with the other guys that came with them, the labourers, the Javanese labourers and that, you couldn’t trust them further than you could see them,

and they were very devious and I didn’t care for them at all. But we got along and I enjoyed that part and I enjoyed going to the tokos. Tokos were the general stores where you could go and have some Indonesian food. That was pleasantly enjoyable, the whole of that there, and before I went up there knowing that we were likely to go, I’d learned Low Malay which is about four hundred words, and you can

get by with four hundred words in Low Malay, and so I spoke a little of the language and I could sit down and have a bit of a yap with the Javanese or one of their officers or one of the men, and that was in its way quite fine. The natives themselves spoke a mixture of Dutch and their own dialects and they didn’t speak pidgin English like it was spoken

in Papua New Guinea, that I knew of, and in Papua New Guinea once again I learned pidgin, spoke pidgin over there while I was moving around, so I put my mind to doing something that I could find out more about the people and the place.

I think that it took me a while, as I said before, to realise it. I think probably

the first jolt I got in that particular way, if you want to call it such was when I played to my own battalion, and the boys said, “Oh mate, come on, this is more important. This is what you do. Stick with this. Don’t bugger about. Anybody can be back in the battalion.” and all that kind of thing, and I thought to myself as I wrote in a letter there once to the family, yeah, you know it’s probably quite true. I would be more useful doing this kind of thing, but I had to get rid of that feeling that I was… and it’s

the imp of perverseness that plagues us all, you know. I think it was Edgar Allen Poe who wrote about that if I remember rightly, that we feel we should be doing something that we are not any longer doing or vice versa, and I think that it took me quite a while to find a real pride in the fact that we were entertaining, and I don’t think that I found it while we were in Western Australia completely. I enjoyed it and I had people tell me that they enjoyed us,

but it wasn’t really until I…I had one experience across there that really made me feel that I was ok, probably one of the two. I was in Red Island Point up in Cape York and then through the Torres Strait Islands and then to Dutch New Guinea and back, that I felt I was taking place in what I considered was the real war, and I was still going on there.

One instance I found very heart-warming in Western Australia – it was very hot dusty weather and we were coming back in a truck and I was standing up in the back of the truck and leaning on the cabin, and ahead of me I could see somebody and I thought, who in the hell is that out there? Christ, what’s he doing? He’s waving a golf club. And there is somebody up there, about a hundred and fifty yards away, and he’s hacking at these golf balls but you can’t see any flying.

There are none going through the air. So we get up to him and bang, he’s hacking at this bloody ball laying in the dust. He’s got a few other balls strewn around, and as we go by I say, “Keep your fucking head down you stupid old bastard!” or whatever I said, something very disrespectful. Now here’s a middle-aged man, not a middle-aged man but certainly not a young man, standing there,

stripped to the waist in a pair of armoured regiment pants which were a different kind, and he’s got nothing on, he’s got red hair, he’s got a beret on, and he’s sweating in the sun – he’s bathed in perspiration, and he’s whacking at this bloody golf ball. Now I was a pretty good golfer back before the war and after the war, and I give him this…and he says, “What did ya say?” and I said,

“Keep your fucking head down you silly old bastard, and then you’ll hit the ball.” and we go on. So that night we played at the Armoured Division Headquarters. We had a very good show and we had a good turn out, I forget how many – it’d be fifteen hundred or something like that, and I’m invited back to the Sergeants’ Mess for a drink, and we have a pleasant beer. We’re into our second beer

and there is clicking of heels at the front door of the Mess, and the Mess Sergeant for that night shouts…..that meant, “All to attention!” and in walks this very elegant tough looking son of a bitch with…I don’t know what he had, Major General? Lieutenant General I think it was, up here, (his shoulders) or Brigadier General probably it was then,

and he walks straight across to me and he said, “Oh you were the one offering me some bloody advice on how to play fucking golf this morning were you?” Red Robbie [General Robertson] who commanded in Korea. And I thought, ‘Oh Jesus here I go again,’ and I said, “Yes, as a matter of fact that was me, Sir. I was hoping to be useful, helpful.” and he said, “Hmmm. Do you play golf?” and I said, “Yes.”

He said, “What's your handicap?” And I said, “Well it’s about four.” “Oh,” he said, “well you play pretty good golf then,” or words to that effect. I said “Well you know,” and he said, “What kind of advice would you give me?” And I said, “Well you see the first thing,” and I figured in for a penny in for a pound, I said, “the most important thing about hitting a golf ball is not moving your head, so you can come back a little bit from the ball. You can’t lift it up and you can’t look quick to see where it goes, but you’ve got to keep your eye on the ball and you can't have it going up and down like that.”

“Oh,” he said, “that makes sense, but how do I do that? I seem to look up all the time.” And I said, “Well there’s a very simple way to do that, sir. You get a piece of string and you tie it to your tongue. Then you stretch it down and you tie it around the tip of your cock.” And I said, “Then you face up to the ball and you swing at it, and if you don’t keep your fucking head down

it will tear the top of your cock off.” He looked at me and he said, “That is the funniest fucking story I have ever heard in my life. Jesus,” he said, “drinks all around, give this boy a fucking drink will you please?” Funny time. What a marvellous guy he was. I thought he would tear the shit out of me, but that’s what I said to him, because that’s an old joke and I made it up myself.

He was very good fun and a great soldier.

Lady Olga Blamey? That’s where the famous glasses were named after, but yes she was in this particular… Ravenshurst or somewhere up there on the Tablelands near Atherton, and we went up there for a period of time, I think really to service the unit but they were sort of getting their units together for the invasion of Borneo at that particular time.

We were giving a show one night in an indoor stage. It was a hall of some kind, rather large and very pleasant with a good stage, and we were told that we couldn’t start the show until about seven fifteen or something, and we’d always planned to start at seven o’clock, outdoors. Well it was a difference now indoors and we thought, oh well, seven fifteen – that’s alright, and at seven fifteen I said to the guy, “Well who are we waiting for?”

“Oh,” he said, “Lady Blamey,” and I said, “Oh really, is she coming tonight?” and he said, “Oh yes.” And I looked through the curtains of the stage itself and I could see that there were about two rows right in the centre. There was a big block in the centre, two on the wings out here, but in the centre there was two rows of seats, I would say about thirty odd seats that were vacant. And so it comes to another quarter of an hour and I said, “Come on, what are we doing?

It’s half past seven.” And he said, “We have to wait for Lady Blamey.” So I told the boys and they said, “Ok.” and we come to a quarter to eight and I say to the guy again, he was the Liaison Officer, and I said, “Well now come on, we’ve got to go,” and he said, “Yes I suppose we have.”

So we are just about to strike up the band and I am just about to come on, and the band has struck up actually and I’m there just about to begin and there is a file coming down the aisle led by the Lady, with some female Officers and some male Officers particularly behind her, quite a gathering, about twenty of them and they all file in and she sits right in the centre and they all file into their seats. And I just said to

the band, “Hold it, we’ll go again.” and I’m just about to say, “We’ll go again band,” and I’m off in the wings over here, and I’m going to walk on again to start the show, and she pulls out a cigarette and I swear the whole two rows held up a light. I am exaggerating of course, but it seemed from the blaze around her of people leaning over and wanting to light her cigarette... So I let that go down, and I say, “Now if everyone is well lit, we will begin the show.” and I said,

“Give it a go, right,” and bang and we go into ‘In the Mood’ or whatever it was, and on with the show and I do the spiel. And this was her. She just had her own way of life. She just ruled the roost so very strongly in that area, and Blamey didn’t have all that much better reputation amongst some of the people, but I think he was, in his own way maligned in many ways. I don’t think it was fair in many, many ways.

He was a little dominated at first by MacArthur and people like that and it was a bit unfair to the troops, and the Americans were very unfair to some of our troops too. The Americans didn’t do so well in New Guinea from what I heard from friends of mine who happened to be in those areas with them, and so it was a bit of a shame that there was that kind of thing happening up there at that time. But with us on the Tablelands we were eventually brought back to Sydney, I think

after Christmas of that particular year, and we had leave and we got refitted again and we took off again and this time we came up the Whitsunday’s, and I think we had a boat, I’m not sure whether we got it from Sydney, I think we did that time, and we went right up and we went right up the Whitsundays and we had Vern Haycroft with us who was our xylophonist. He was pretty new to the unit then, and we had said to him,

“Now Vern if you are standing at the rail we want you to keep a good look out for Japanese submarines.” He’d never been on a ship or a convoy before, and this was an American troop convoy and below decks it had bunks and all that kind of thing, very different to what we had been on before. And so he’d be up there on the rail going… looking for Japanese submarines. There wasn’t a Japanese submarine within about two thousand miles.

But one day as he was standing up there – and I don’t know how be believed us, he may have been putting us on a bit too – all of a sudden he gives this tremendous shriek and we rush across to the rail and we say, “What is it Vern? What is it?” And he said, “It’s a Japanese submarine, look!” And alongside of us a whale was doing that just with its back, and for all the world if you looked out, it looked like a submarine coming up, and when he saw that it wasn’t – the fluke all of a sudden went like that and then he turned and he dived again.

It was the funniest thing in the world. Vern was a wonderful, wonderful comedian and he played the xylophone superbly, and when we got up we got to Jacquinot Bay that first time and we settled in there, and they wanted us to muck in and work with some of the other engineering units and our officers said no so we didn’t, and we prepared the show and we started to work and

it was actually a very good area. We played a lot or shows in that particular Jacquinot Bay area. I spent a deal of my free time on the lagoon, and friends loaned me two kinds, one was a surf ski and the other was a surfboard that was on a wooden frame, but with stretch canvas on it, which was ok. You could go for a skull all around the lagoon.

And I was out there floating around as usual stark bollocking naked one day, on one of the wooden frames with flattened tin all over it – it was a beautiful ski – and I could hear voices saying, “Idiot!” “Yes, well you know what I mean sir,” and “My glass is empty and I need another one,” and I sort of get myself up and I sit up on the ski and I look over there,

and it’s the Duke of Gloucester [the Governor General] with all of his aides de camp, you see, and the water of the lagoon was never much more than about four or five feet deep, and all of a sudden I am drifting past them about thirty or forty yards away, and they’re all loaded, and I hear him say, “I’ve got to take a leak. I really

have to take a leak,” and he gets up, and he stands up on the side of the lakatoi [canoe] unbalances and goes right into the water, and they all come out of the lakatoi, there’s about eight of them standing in armpit-deep water bringing him to the surface, and he’s spluttering all over the place, poor bugger. Lucky he didn’t drown you know. The other time when he came down to the air strip there at Jacquinot Bay he was flying in an Avro, and the

air strip at Jacquinot Bay was quite high, and so you had to know when you came into it from being on practice you had to come into it high, and so you could see the strip in front of you, you see. If you didn’t, if you came in like this and you drifted down a little you were coming up at the strip, and so I think that the pilot who was flying the Avro who was bringing him in took about three runs at it before he was able to set the Avro down. And he sat it down –

we were up there with some friends of ours that particular day, with the New Zealanders, and didn’t expect to see that, to see the Duke of Gloucester, and the Avro had a door on the side with steps that lifted down, and the poor unfortunate – he was probably drunk once again as he usually was – he came out and his heel caught on the step and he went on his head right out of the plane, and I thought, ‘What an unfortunate thing. What does he do with himself?’

You know, “Go out there, Bertie, and have a look and see how those Australians are doing at Jacquinot Bay.” “Yes mother. Certainly mother.” Terrible.

To a certain degree. I had news that a number of my friends had been killed during the war.

Georgie Anderson who I’d played football with, I learned he’d been killed in Crete. That saddened me. He was a wonderful little football player and he was a sweet boy. I liked him very much. It was a bit of a shock to learn that one of your friends that you’d played football with was killed. Then another friend of mine, I knew his sister very well, he was killed in action and that made the war more real to me even though I was there seeing things happening around me all the time,

or knew that they were happening in the area, let’s put it that way. Then of course Robyn O’Dell’s, Tull O’Dell's son. Robyn and myself and others, Reg Johnson and people like that, Betty Brian and God knows who, had been in the youth show at 2GB, and Robyn and Colin Croft and I had gone up and tried to volunteer for Jim Gerald’s All In Fun Unit that were being put together, in early ’41 I think it was, or late ’40 I think it was,

to go with them to the Middle East and enlist in the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] and go with them as part of the entertainment unit, and he looked at the three of us. Robyn was compere of the youth show. Colin, of course, was a very recognised performer in it and so was I, and Colin really had probably the most versatility of the three of us. Robyn necessarily didn’t, nor I for that matter. I had a certain

versatility but nowhere near Colin’s. But Jim Gerald listened very patiently to us. The three of us went in together and he talked to us for about twenty minutes or more, and he said, “I know you all and I have watched you work,” which he hadn’t, of course, but he knew of us, and he said, “You are very admirable boys to volunteer to come with us to the Middle East,” he said, “but I have to disappoint you.”

He said, “You see, everyone that I take with me has to be able to do three or four things very well.” he said. “I don’t know how many we are going to take with us, but we all have to be very versatile. Now you are all very good but you are not versatile, not in the way that I want you to be, like the old vaudevillians are.” And so he went on and he turned us off very nicely and said, “Thank you very much.” and that was it. But he had a big unit, he and Jim Davison was the musical head there.

He had a big unit to go to the Middle East. I think there were about thirty, thirty-five, forty of them, and then they recruited about twenty or thirty dancers over there in Tel Aviv, Palestinian girls and all that kind of thing. It was amazing and he had an orchestra that could’ve played the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, you know, that was the type of orchestra he had, and they had a show which they called All In Fun, and they played it over there very successfully, in the Middle East and

in Tel Aviv and in those areas over there. And Jim came back and ultimately was Commanding Officer of the first Australian Army Entertainment Unit when it was gazetted. He was a very talented person. He was a bit autocratic and sometimes hard to get on with, you know, but we all took the piss out of him from time to time, Peter Finch and myself and a few of the others.

I was asked to play the lead in The Overlanders with Chips Rafferty and I tested with the girl and Harry Watts decided that I was the one that he wanted to play the juvenile in it, so they put in a request to the Department of Information and Arthur Calwell said, “Yes of course. You certainly may have him for the film, and we’d be very pleased about that.” But I still

had to get permission from my Commanding Officer who was Jimmy Davison. And so where the unit was at Pagewood at that particular time, which was late ’44 right at the turn of Christmas/New Year, up turns a British Major – can’t think of his name, very tall handsome fellow – to see Jim Davison and put [UNCLEAR] requests for my services for The Overlanders.

And apparently he walked into Davison’s office and said, “Jesus Christ, it’s you bloody Davison. Last time I saw you, you were black marketeering in bloody Alexandria, you bastard.” And they get into a cat fight and they are absolutely almost at each other’s throats, and finally Davison gets back into his chair and says, “Why did you come here?” And he said, “I want to get permission for Michael Pate to play in The Overlanders.

He said, “Piss off! He is more important to me than he is going to be to you. Now piss off!” I went straight back to New Guinea and I never got to play the film, which was a shame. I would have loved to have done it with Chips and with the Campbell girl. She was very, very nice in it. But that just so happened I didn’t get to do it with Chips – I later did a film with him – but that’s how it worked in those days with…funny things, and the Department of Information or whatever it was called in those days,

or… you know, used to do these little propaganda shorts. I was rung up by them when I got out on leave when I came back from Western Australia, and the fellow in the Department of Information said, “Would you do this commercial for us?” And I said, “What is it?” And he said, “Well it’s a soldier just down from New Guinea. Have you got ‘greens’ [jungle uniform]?” and I said, “Yes, we’ve been issued with ‘greens’, and full gear and rifle and all that kind of thing.”

And he said, “It’s just you eating a can of peaches and saying how grateful you are to the public for sending you up this wonderful stuff for you to eat.” Well we never saw any peaches like that ever up there, but here it is and it is a big tin of peaches, and so we get it set up – it’s just a log and some bushes and some dirt, and I had brought my webbing and my rifle and that kind of thing, that’s standing by there,

and I’ve got the tin of peaches in my hand and I say, “I can’t tell how much we…we really want to tell you how much we are grateful to you for this,” etcetera, and all the dialogue which is going on, and we were rehearsing it as the cameras were setting up, and I said, “How do you want this can opened, or do you just want it here and I’m just talking?” And he said, “Oh no, no, no, I want you to open it.” I said, “Have you got a tin opener of any kind?” In those days you used to jam it in and you’d go around the thing and that’s how they used to open the thing.

Nobody could find a tin opener of any kind at all to get into that can and open it up. So I said, “If you don’t mind I will show you how we do it,” because we’ve got no tin openers, so I said, “You put the can between your feet, and you take your bayonet and turn the can around and you’ve got four petals like that, right?”

Those bayonets were very sharp, and oh he thought that was fascinating. I must have opened about six cans for him. That was the idea of it, but he felt that I would somewhere reach into my pants and pull out a tin opener. I don’t know what he thought, but he was just unprepared. That was the way that we would open a can, or you would just jam a bayonet down into a tin of beans or whatever was there,

meat and vegetables, and you would put it into a pot with some water in it, or if you didn’t have that you would just put it on the coals of a fire and over a can of Sterno and it would heat the thing up, as long as you had a hole, you know, in the top of the can the steam would come out of the top of the can. And then you’d just put it between your boots and flicked it up and then you just flopped it out with a spoon. Anyway, there we have gone through the culinary expertise.

Yes I did the one performance with Gracie Fields. She came into Lae in about September I think it was – it may have been a little later but it was somewhere in that area, certainly after the war had finished – and we did a show in the Lae area. They had a standing stage there, and a big flat area. I think they estimated that there was about twenty thousand odd people in the audience that night. Like a rock concert, it really was.

But I think she played to an even bigger number of people, somewhere in Borneo. I think she had a few thousand more, either in Balikpapan or Labuan or somewhere in that area. She was delightful and her husband Monty Banks was delightful too. He was a good comedian. I’d sort of heard her sing but I had no idea because she used to play this rather

down to earth, unmade-up very sort of common kind of Lancashire girl in the movies and stuff. She was the most charming and the most wonderful, and I thought quite a beautiful woman. I mean in the book there have a look and you will see a photograph of her, she is like that, and she is talking to me, saying, “’ow am I going Mike?” and I said, “Beautiful. Keep on going luv.” Because we planned that we would support the show, so that

we would begin at around about seven o’clock, and do three quarters of an hour or maybe more if necessary or less if necessary, depending on whatever, ‘til it got really dark so that they’d enjoy seeing her on the stage, completely dark with no light around the area, and that’s what we did. We didn’t do our normal show, we did more of a musical show,

solo performers and singers and band numbers and stuff like that, that I just announced as they came on.

I’d just say, “And now the band will play so and so and so and so, ‘In the Mood’ or ‘Begin the Beguine’ or ‘Caravan’, all of those songs that were very popular during those days, and we’d play some Mantovani tangos and stuff of that nature. These were all the popular songs and things that people used to like to hear, the big bands

of Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller play. ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ was another favourite one. They featured brass. They featured a lot of trombone, they featured a lot of trumpets, they featured a lot of saxophones, alto tenor saxophones, and they had

a sound all of their own. They were great to dance to, you know, particularly popular dancing, one steps, fox trots and stuff like that which people liked to dance in those days. We didn’t go much in for rumbas or particularly for tangos. Occasionally just for fun we’d do a tango bracket of Mantevani and stuff like that, and you would have the violinist playing anything from Chopin to Massenet to Debussy

to Paganini, whatever you like. You’d have extraordinary demonstrations of violin playing by some of the boys who played violin. We’d then feature Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ and things like that, and these were pretty important numbers. The band would play a Sinatra selection and someone would sing

some of the Sinatra songs that he was singing at that particular time, at the beginning of his career. We had a good tenor, Don Bell was singing with us, and Ron Patton as I mentioned. Even George Pomeroy would sing a song occasionally. And so we always had someone who could sing a song, play an instrument, do a trumpet solo, play an accordion solo, drums – we had Les

Rollins on the drums and he was a very fine drummer, he really was. He was as good as you would find in any American band, Les. He was really very good, and many of the pianists that we had like Darcy Caffrey and Neville Chinnerworth and Wally Nash, people of that particular ilk in our unit, not only could they conduct the band and arrange all the music and all that kind of stuff, but they were also very fine accordionists and quite likely to be able to play other instruments as well.

So there was a great versatility amongst the musicians particularly. They had a lot of difficulty maintaining a violin under those conditions up there. They had to look after it terribly well, and say, for instance, people playing clarinet, the reeds were very difficult to keep in good condition for that up there. Saxophone pads – you had to maintain and keep those and look after them terribly well. Even the piano – sometimes you would hit the piano keys

and the ivories would come off just from the heat and condensation. But we could maintain our own stuff up there, and most of the musicians could maintain their stuff themselves, but when we came down those instruments and everything else went into the specialists that were at Pagewood studios in those days, and they would just go thoroughly over all that stuff and it would come out brand new again.

It was very efficient. Later on other units went up there, as I said, the Musical Comedy Unit that Albert Chapelle commanded and it was very successful doing a number of shows, Maid of the Mountains and God knows what they didn’t do up there, and there was a Drama Unit that did French Without Tears and plays like that. Peter Finch put that unit together. He didn’t go with it. He got out of the army around about that time. It had Ronnie Faulkner,

and they were able to take up actual girls, not female impersonators. Alan White was in it. Alan White is now very successful and he’s been in England for many, many years. He’s an old friend of mine. I keep in good touch with him and he is always employed in England and in Europe doing films and particular things like that. Ronnie Faulkner left the business.

It’s I think a great credit to the people that they put together those twenty units.

Well we couldn’t take women into the battle areas. We couldn’t take women with us on active service. You could never have protected them. Someone would have got to them somewhere along the line. On the other hand with our female impersonators, they were very, very entrancing,

enchanting, enticing, and we had amongst them – and they were absolutely gorgeous, they were not necessarily any better female impersonators than some of the other boys, but they had a way about them that was wonderful themselves – they were gay. We never thought that they were gay, gay wasn’t a word that you used in those days.

No, I don’t think so at all.

There were certain people in the army who were homosexuals, no doubt about it, and some of these young female impersonators we had with us were really gorgeous looking chicks when they got made up and all of that. They were gay and so they attracted gay officers and there were a few times there, not with my unit, I’m speaking of other units, that I know for a fact that a few of the female impersonators went off with the officers, and had a

lovely evening, thank you very much. When we came back once from Tol Plantation which was the last active perimeter that we were on, entertaining, which was a pretty heavy deal up there, we found that the tide brought us down the coast ninety miles at a speed which we basically didn’t think we’d make

on this small landing craft that we were working on, that we were being carried on, and what we had done, we’d planned that we would go up there and stay for so many days and we would leave on such and such a day at such and such a time at night and we’d come down in the cool of the evening, and we would arrive, we thought, at about one or two o’clock in the morning at Jacquinot Bay.

We made better time than that by about two hours or more, so we got in at about eleven o’clock and we got off in the lagoon and we carried our officer ashore and put him safely down, and I walked up the line – we had a line of about five or six tents on a slope like that – and one of the

tents was ablaze with lights, like you had fourteen lanterns in there. It was quite a big tent we had. So I walked up and I just sort of snapped the tent flap aside and said, “What's going on in here?” behaving like a regimental sergeant major, thinking it’s a party going on. What is it? Who is it? We’d only left…well there was eight of us, we’d left thirteen, fourteen behind, so this was the tent where I knew there would be only one person left behind, because we didn’t take up

one our female impersonators, and the whole tent was packed with American sailors, plus our queen sitting at the end, and he was pissed out of his mind, and he was so enjoying this company of all these boys that were around him. He really was having fun, and the minute that I said, “Now what's going on here?” in that type of voice, out of fun – I didn’t care what they were doing there, it didn’t worry me one bit, and

I was really acting the goat, you know? Oh, they went out like quail underneath the flaps of the tent, and he’s left sitting up there on a butter box or an ammunition box on cushions, and he said, “What did you do? You have driven them all away.” He broke up you see, and I went to him and I said, “Oh Phil, for Christ sake, I’m so sorry mate. I didn’t mean to do that at all. I wouldn’t have done that for the world.

I didn’t want to bugger your evening up or anything like that,” and oh I quietened him down and I got him a cup of cocoa or something like that and he was ok again. He was the one that I did a dame double with him when Frank McGowen didn’t want to do any more female impersonations and Phil and I did this absolutely very funny, the two tarts in Kings Cross with the bags and the high heels and the red wigs and

the whole thing and it was great fun. “Oh” he said, “I do like working with you. Can we work again sometime?” like that you see, because I had written the whole thing, and it was quite a simple thing. It was a vamp and the melody and all that kind of thing, and I had written the lyrics. There were about six or eight verses and we pranced around and did the whole thing and it was very funny.

I was very slim and I looked just great. I had a black wig on and he had a red wig on. We had a lot of fun and we made fun for ourselves and I think that it probably was our duty as entertainers basically to not only appear to have fun but to have fun. I think it was a very good thing that they saw we were coming to make them laugh, and that

we ourselves were jolly people, tough and we could get the work done and we’d go anywhere to get it done, all of that which they could see quite clearly, because I’m quite sure that on first contact there were any number of the troops that we entertained who thought, who is this band of poofters who are going to entertain us? I’m quite sure there were a lot of guys who thought, hey wait a minute. But there was no mistaking our, let’s say the majority of us, our masculinity,

and, of course, there was none of that and we would never have dreamed of them passing any remarks about our female impersonators or anything like that, because all of the boys without exception, well Phil was probably the exception and he was such a delightful person, but the others were absolutely square. They’d been pressed into service as female impersonators.

Of the, I don’t know how many, I would say forty totally right throughout all of the units were probably female impersonators in one degree or another. I don’t think that more than oh, three or four or five would have been gay and they were great fun. When I was writing the book I had such fun talking to a few of the guys, and I said to one of them, I said, “You know, up there” and I mentioned the place, “you were really a bloody naughty item weren't you?”

And I said, “Who did you get off with that night?” And he said, “Oh he was so gorgeous,” and it was good fun, because when you can talk to people like that, I mean there shouldn’t be any…everybody has their own bag. Everybody should do what they want to do and be what they want to be, and I think that we did very well up there during that period of time, to keep any rascal from an ordinary unit in line, and

at the same time to look after our own which I think is very important. One of the things you see with female impersonators and we found it up there, and I think that’s why Frankie McGowan quit wanting to do it. He became so used to thinking himself into being a female that he was beginning to get a little worried. I don’t know whether that was true or not but I had a suspicion that it was, and I know that we had one female impersonator before, that…

yes, and actually he transferred to another unit, but I’m quite sure that he began to like being a female impersonator, and it may have been changing his gender tendency, you know what I mean? Actually one day I caught him putting on make-up during the middle of the day. Not caught him, I don’t mean that, I just happened to walk in and he was going…doing the eyebrows and everything, and I thought, oh come on, because there was no need for him to be doing that, but I think he was…

you know, you do, you get into an isolation I guess when you are away from home, and a lot of the boys did get that. That’s why they went troppo and that’s why they went a little bit off the…you know, because you can get desperately alone there in that particular…in the army at any time and whatever army you are in and I think if you can stay with the collective that’s good. If you stay with the action of the collective that’s even better.

But if you find that you are a bit of a loner I think it becomes a bit of a strain on people and I think they lose their…I don’t what it is, they lose their identity, just that little bit in that loneliness. You can kind of see it in the faces of some of the combat soldiers that you’ve seen of recent months in the Iraq War, in the faces of some of those boys.

Yeah. It’s a kind of a look that you think they’ve seen a lot happen, and when you see death like that it is pretty shaking up and it gets to you, the smell of death and things like that. Those kind of things are very disturbing. I mean little things can be disturbing. When we were up on Tol Plantation I was always the one that wanted to go off with the bomber pilots and do the photographic thing. I’d take off and go off with other units, and during the war I did that several times as a matter of fact.

But on one occasion, and we were only up there for a week or so a little bit longer than that, maybe eight or nine days, up in the Tol Plantation area, and I bumped into an Intelligence guy that I knew and I asked him and he fitted me in on what was the capacity of the Japanese and I said, “What are they sending out on patrol?” and he said, “Oh well, they’re sending out a battalion,” and I said, “You’re joking?” and he said, “No.”

And I said, “How big is the battalion?” and I was thinking eight hundred. He said, “They’re down to about three hundred a battalion.” and I said, “A patrol of three hundred bloody Japanese. What are they doing? Do they want to fight?” And he said, “No they don’t want to fight. They’re just putting on a show.” I said, “That’s very strange, very bloody strange altogether.” and we talked about other things and he said, “I’ve got a strange one at the moment.

There’s a cave out there and there are three Japanese inside of it and I can't talk them into coming out of the cave.” He spoke fluent Japanese, and I said, “Jesus mate, next time you’re out there can I come up?” He said, “I’m going out there tomorrow. You want to come?” So this is in the morning, first up in the morning, about seven, seven-thirty, and we go out and it was about five or six miles back towards where the Japanese would be,

there where they were in front of Rabaul, so we go out there and there is this kind of hillside, and it’s pretty rocky and he goes across and we sort of kneel down alongside this…where it looks like a big slab of rock has come down over this opening, and I said, “Is this it?” and he said “Yeah.” So he calls out in Japanese,

and no answer, so he calls out again, and no answer, and he thinks…he looked at me as if well maybe they are dead or something, and then he called out again and there was this faint answer, and he talked to them and he tried to persuade them again and no they wouldn’t come out, they thought they would be mutilated. At this same spot virtually just down towards the sea they had mutilated the original Australian soldiers that were captured there, and put them to trees

and tied them to coconut palms and used them for bayonet practice. You could see the marks on the coconut trees of the bayonets. So they thought being captured we would do the same to them. So that was that day and the next day or so I came back to Jacquinot Bay, and I bumped into him in Lae and I said, “How did you go with those Japanese?” And he said, “Oh I went out the next day and as I was talking to them they blew themselves up.”

Boom. They killed themselves inside the cave. So when you have experiences like that it can be very upsetting. Another friend of mine was put into a wrong beach and he was commanding, he was a sergeant commanding a landing, a circling movement against the Japanese apparently and he was told to land on this beach, and he landed on the beach or his coxswain landed on the beach and

down went the ramp and he was herding his men forward and he was right there with a Japanese machine gun and a better part of a third or more of his men were killed right there on the spot. By the time he got the front ramp up again and the coxswain had backed off the thing and he tried to get in contact with Blamey’s Headquarters to get a special LC [Landing Craft] personnel, like a landing craft for soldiers

that had a refrigerator on it with plasma and he couldn’t make the contact and they just said, “Oh no, don’t bother sending it out, it’s no use.” And of course he went to pieces and they put him in hospital, and they thought that they had cured him.

And he was at the AGH [Australian General Hospital] in Lae and one night he foolishly accepted a drink off an orderly which was oil of peppermint which has a very high alcoholic content, with some soft drink or cordial over it, and he drank that and it just sent him right off the planet, and he tore off screen doors and busted people and did the whole thing. They finally tamed him, put him in a straitjacket and sent him home.

And that was just the strain he was under. He felt it was his fault. It wasn’t his fault at all. He did what he was ordered to do and unfortunately they got the wrong beach and he got the men off. Well he only got about half a dozen off. The rest were all dead in the water. He couldn’t get the plasma for them. He blamed himself for their deaths. It could be very upsetting for men like that. It happens. It could have happened to any of us. Not to me. I’m too old for the next one.

Well, fortunately it didn’t take me long to sort of settle back and I was helped by that by a very simple thing. First of all I wasn’t very well, and I had to take care of myself and not push myself to any extremes, and so I just relaxed and my first wife’s parents had a farm, a poultry farm and I went out and I worked on that,

and then after a few weeks or so I contacted people that I knew in the radio world and I thought, I wonder if anyone remembers me? It had been quite some time, although I had occasionally done an odd job when I came down on leave, [UNCLEAR] theatre or something like that, and Harry Dearth and people like that were very nice to try and find something for us to give us a little extra money, you know, which was nice. I thought well now maybe they don’t even remember me, for what work I did or otherwise, and

yet they did and I got parts offered to me. I was twenty-six years of age and I got parts offered of sixteen and seventeen year olds to play, and I played them and screened them and they were all fine and everyone thought they were great, but they were such a strain for a person of twenty-six to play a sixteen-year-old. I mean I thought it was just nonsense.

Well I think probably most people felt that the six, six and a half years or whatever it was that they had served – and we all served different terms – probably it would have been nice

if they hadn’t had their careers or studies or whatever it was interrupted, but I think you had to take the view that it was something that, as we said before I think at the beginning of these discussions, that it was a responsibility, it was an obligation, it was a duty, and that you had to accept it out of pride and out of respect for the

people who expected that of you in that particular way, without forcing any of their opinions or desires on you. So if you accepted that and you said, “Well now what is the other good side of that?” Well the other good side of that for me was that I had been quite willing to be in the Infantry but when I was transferred and was doing some entertaining, and I caught up and got into the rhythm of that and learned something else and how to entertain in that particular way, I felt that that

was just absolutely marvellous that I had had the opportunity to learn how to do that, and it stood me in very good stead since because I understand that side of the business. I understand comedy, I understand humour and I understand timing and all of those kind of things. I can't do the things I used to do now but I did them, then, particularly well. I was considered the best straight man in the business after the war, and the best

aid, the best sidekick to a comic best compere that you could ever run across, very cute, very funny and all that kind of thing, and I was very highly respected for that. I gradually got some radio work but it was, with a rare exception, not very good parts. They were little parts, unimportant parts, and so I finally thought, well now, if I keep on doing this… I was going to go nowhere.

I better go and have a chat with all the producers. So I went in one day and I went around and I did spend a day and a half doing it, but I went and I made appointments to see the producers of radio, and I said to them, one by one as I got to talk to them, “I have been away for a while and I am ten years older, well I am not I am eight years older, well six years older,” and I said, “I simply must have better parts to do

than these parts that I am being offered. I thank you very much for them. I’m grateful. It’s very nice that you can think of me in this way but if I don’t have better parts I’m never going to get anywhere in this business. I must think of doing something else, and I don’t want to think of doing anything else. I enjoy doing it, this business.” Oh a few of them were offended. A few of them said, “Oh yes” and “Hmmm”, and the others said, “Oh really? Hmmm.” I didn’t know what they thought, right?

For about a month or six weeks I didn’t get any calls at all, and then gradually I got calls to star. I was playing the lead in the series, I was playing the lead in the Playhouse, getting all the good parts, and that was fine. And then, that was in 1946. In 1947, I had taken a punt in 1946 not to do a tour of the Tivoli. I was offered twenty-six weeks at the Tivoli. I was offered to understudy

Cyril Richard and Madge, his wife, in a Coward season. I didn’t do that. I waited to test for a film, ‘Sons of Matthew’ and I tested for that because I felt I was right for the part, and I got the part. That was the part really that created a career for me in films.

I think probably what the war did was that it cleared a lot of peoples’ minds. It certainly cleared mine. It made me more decisive in what I was thinking. It made me more able to judge my own capacity. I didn’t daydream. I didn’t have vain kind of thoughts about, you know, imaginative thoughts about this or that or the next thing.

I was very practical, very down to earth, very like seeing it as it was. And so, therefore I could go in and talk to those men like that, and what I was saying to them was, “If you don’t think you want to give me other parts, well then that’s it.”

I think anybody that had been in the army and anyone that was like we were in New Guinea or wherever, had to, if they took advantage of it, gain from it and be a much more interesting, qualified, experienced and

understanding person from having served like that. I mean there is no question about it in my mind. I have no regrets at all about serving, none at all. I didn’t feel that it was a waste of time, ever, never. I didn’t ever feel that it was a waste of time. And people said, “Well it was a long time” and I said, “Yeah, it was a long time”, but what would I have been doing in the mean time if we hadn’t been at war?

Would I have managed to get more ability and more experience and able to handle myself better and do things or…No, opportunities come along and they come along as you make them or you think about them or they happen because other people make them happen, and that’s been my entire life. I’ve been led from one thing to another, my life, and I am very happy in that regard because with the important things that have happened to me in life have happened for the best, they have not happened for the worst.

Like going to America, my first film there and my present wife was working and so I met her, and that has been a very big thing for me in my life.

No, that was the first Hungarian wife. No it didn’t. Well we didn’t get divorced until 1951. It was just that she’d had a very unpleasant time in Vienna, and

she simply didn’t want to travel any more. She wanted to settle down and be secure. For her an actor’s life – and for her parents – that was a silly life. If I’d have been a lawyer or a doctor they would have thought that was marvellous. That was an established settled way of life, but an actor or a writer or someone like that, that was precarious. And I don’t know that she felt the same way, but I think that she was bourgeois enough, essentially and deeply bourgeois, that

she felt that she didn’t want to take any more risks of making her future precarious. I don’t know. Anyway leave it at that. I was very lucky in what happened to me after that, you see.

No, no, I didn’t at all. I had some problems healthwise after the war, but that was what I had accumulated from the war, dysentery and things like that. I had to contend with those, and there was haemorrhaging and that was not easy. But no I didn’t have a restlessness. I just a feeling that I had to be decisive about what I wanted to do in life, and if I did that then I would be honest with myself, and so I hoped that other people would understand how I felt. And then when I came to do Sons of Matthew,

it was a part hand-made for me. I mean it was a very good part and I played it I think extremely well.

War is always a very dreadful thing. I mean it depends how you participate in a war. There are some people who go to a war and because of what they are doing they can quite enjoy it, I would say. Don’t be an infantryman

and ask, “Can I enjoy the war?” I mean, that’s too much hands on. I mean, you’re totally there. Don’t ask an artillery man behind a gun, “Is it fun?” It isn’t fun. A seaman, anybody who is likely to encounter really active service is a person much to be admired but also it’s an occupation much to be avoided I think.

I wouldn’t have minded what I had to do in the war. I would have tried my best to do it well, but I just felt that you know, that you have got to accept what happens to you. It is not easy. Sometimes you think, why did this happen? Why didn’t that happen? People naturally feel that way. I never felt that way at all. I always felt that things were happening and going and moving, you know, progressing, and I had to be wise enough to take advantage of them, and work hard enough to take advantage of them.

No. Never. No. My war experience on the whole was of being at a war without being involved in any great deal of active service or personal combat, and so therefore I didn’t have anything that I would have regaled my family with, and if I had’ve been involved

all the time in actual combat I still wouldn’t have told them one word about it. They couldn’t understand it. I mean they shouldn’t be told about it. That would be my idea.

Exactly so. Exactly so, because it’s a terrible thing. If you have to you have to kill people and you have to maim people, and really it’s a terrible thing for someone like that.

Well it never solves anything, that’s for sure. That’s the one thing. It never solves

anything. There is never a winner and there is never a loser. It’s more likely to be several losers than any winners in a war. There’s all kinds of wars of course and they change and they will change and they keep changing. Future wars will be something that will be, I believe, more devastating in their final results unless they are properly governed by the nations that are involved in world government.

If they don’t do that then there will be a terrible holocaust. There are too many mad people in this world and too many dangerous people in this world that you really have to control, and the weapons now are so deadly and so all-embracing. I mean when you’ve got nuclear arms and all of that you can wipe out people at the touch of a button.

Before that you had to raise armies and put armies in the field and have them slaughtered like they were on the Somme and slaughtered in front of Stalingrad and things like that. When you talk to people – we once had an acquaintance with General Moshe Dayan, and he and I got talking one day and he said, “Yes things have changed haven’t they? The ratio of hits in a tank in World War II would probably be one decent hit in twenty-five shots.” And

he said, “In the Australian wars that we have been fighting the ratio got down to ten, and today it is down to two and soon it will be down to one,” and he said, “That’s the science and technology of advancing arms.” And so it is very true. I mean the arms now are much more powerful than they ever were.

They will finally, I believe, destroy this world. That’s a sad thought. I won't be here to see it but I wish good luck to all those who will be.

Well I think that the Australian army today would be, generally speaking, quite a pleasant occupation. I think that the armed forces today are…they pay better, their conditions are better, all those many things to it.

But then, you see, you must remember that Australia was not prepared for World War II and to put together the amount of people that we put in the field – there were some nine hundred thousand odd people, out of a population of about six million, who served, men and women, but of those nine hundred thousand only about two hundred and fifty thousand of us actually

saw active service, and of those two hundred and fifty thousand that saw active service, I would say only fifty thousand at the most were deeply involved in any of the battles that were fought in the Middle East or in Syria or in Greece and Crete, and then in New Guinea. So the brunt of a great deal of the worst of the war was born by those few men from those particular battalions and commando units and all those kind of things,

who primarily did all the fighting. They were the ones in the field all the time, backed up by artillery units, backed up by other units of course, but those men in the field on the ground in the infantry I consider were the ones that were the ones who should be thought most highly of, and the seamen on ships and the people who flew planes and things like that, actively, were the ones that should have been given the greatest honours out of World War Two. They did the work

that many of us were not asked to do. I think that’s important.

Well I think they have got to do a most important thing in life, and that is to participate in it. I think that they have to think their way through what the human race is and what the human race faces, and they’ve got to find their own philosophy for dealing with that and then pursue it, and there is an active period of time when you can do it particularly when you’re younger, and I think where you have more energy and where you can get involved with more things. When you get to my age you say, “Well all I

can say is what I am saying. I haven’t got the energy to be involved as physically as I might have been, so therefore, listen to what I say and really give some thought to how you can talk people into honouring the human race rather than destroying it.” That’s the most important thing I think.