Australians at War Film Archive

Well I had a rather unusual start. My parents were missionaries and they went to Samoa in 1923 and I was born on the 6th of January 1924. Dad was stationed at a Mission Station at

Satupa’itea on the Island of Savai’i, the main island, it’s the largest island but the main island was Upolu where Apia was situated that’s the capital of Western Samoa. When it was time for me to be born suddenly discovered that they had to get Mum over to Apia and she had to go in what they call a pow pow.

There was a storm coming down from the north and they had to paddle like mad for about 3½, 4 hours to get to the main island then they took her by, I think it was T model Ford down to Apia Hospital and I was born there. I spent the first month of my life with my mother in Government House which was Vailima which was Robert Louis Stevenson’s old home and my sister was born

while we were there, but my mother became very ill and we had to come back to Australia in 1926. From there I think Dad was posted to Narrandera and I started my schooling there although I couldn’t speak a word of English until I was 5 ‘cause my parents thought it was good if I spoke the local language which I

did and now I can’t remember a word of it. Yes we started in Narrandera and we went there in 1927. It was time of the Depression and then we moved in 1930 to Morpeth which was another tough call. I started in first class there and finished up when we left there I was in fifth class.

We had two floods while we were there and they were rather devastating but things were so bad that you know we relied on the local people a lot for vegetables and things like that because it happened that the circuit couldn’t even afford to pay Dad a stipend so we were on pretty flat rations. Now we spent

4 years in Morpeth and I think in about 19 end of ’33 beginning of ’34 I reckon I saw the last paddle steamer come up the river to Morpeth to the old Bothorn butter factory. When we went to Grafton Dad was posted there in 1934 and I finished fifth class in Grafton and went

through to what they call the Qualifying Certificate, the QC [Qualifying Certificate] in those days, and then went to went to Grafton High School. Always loved Grafton, it’s a great place. I learnt to swim there and I was pretty got pretty sick though and they finally had to send me away to school at Armidale and I spent about a year and a half in Armidale

and in the meantime Dad got transferred to Forbes and I followed them down there and when I got to Forbes I was a bit weedy. I was only 4 foot 8½ high and weighed about 5 stone 12, but in the next 2 years I grew 10 and 3¼ quarter inches, but schooling there was terrific we had a lovely time there and I finished up captain of the football

team and the cricket team and I made a lot of great mates. I have a photograph somewhere taken of the school just after war broke out. There’s very few of us left there, was quite a number killed at the war and I am just so lucky to be able to be here today to reiterate and talk about those

things. What happened after that?

When the war broke out I was at Forbes and my father decided to join the army. The church wanted him to go in as a chaplain and he said, “No, I had a commission from the First World War, I’d be much better off training men and

you find somebody else”. So he went in as an ordinary soldier and Mum was left in Forbes with 4 young children and she said, “Well I’m not going to stay around here”, so she went back to nursing and she went to Dubbo Base Hospital and Dad was in the army in Dubbo and so she said, “You’ve got to get a job”. So I finally had to leave school and I got a job in a bank, was the Bank

of Australasia in those days, and the 3 young kids went into boarding school. From there I was transferred to Bathurst, then went up to Moree and it was at Moree that I was I turned 18 and received my call up to the army and was back to the showground and we then went out to Bathurst and

we’d had our inoculations and ‘course we were going down like flies because it was in the middle of winter and we didn’t have any real warm clothing to wear. In those days a lot of us were still walking around in giggle suits with the result that a lot of us went down with pneumonia and I was one of them and at that time my father had been transferred to Bathurst, so he was in the same army camp and I went into hospital in the 104 AGH [Australian General Hospital]

there and I was there for some time. Then I went away to a convalescent camp, but it happened to be in the showground and it was while I was there that the Jap subs came into Sydney Harbour and that night they rushed us all out and gave us equipment, shoved us on trucks and they were going to going to race us down to the Harbour and someone must

have thought better of it because they stopped us, took all our equipment away and put us back into the convalescent depot. Then I finally got back to Bathurst and with the Australian 30th Infantry Training Battalion and went into training there and then I went away to a couple of schools, got a stripe, I was a lance corporal and in

early ’43, having turned 19, I was able to transfer to the AIF [Australian Imperial Forces] which I did and immediately I did that they sent me out to train at the Canungra Jungle Warfare School, which was a very tough school,

and I did 6 weeks there and I got through the course and then they called for volunteers to stay at Canungra and help train young fellas as they were coming through. I hadn’t had particularly good health up to that stage, so I decided well I I’ll give it a go and we were immediately made corporals.

I remember there were 4 of us that we knew one another very well, Danny Gleeson, Max Bartlett and Col Doolan and myself and we were great buddies there and we were in the one company there. We were training these young fellas as they came through and after a spell we were made acting sergeants

and there was a time there when we didn’t have any troops in. I don’t know for what reason, but Col and I decided to take a bit of a break so we went AWL [absent without leave] and we hitched a ride down to Southport and we met a couple of little girls down there. We had a good time. We went to a couple of dances

and we were away 3 days and I remember we had a couple of beers one day in the pub and I got up and on the counter of the pub and sang “White Christmas”. But the up shot of it was we got back to camp and the sergeant major was rushing around like a bee in a bottle and screaming blue murder, because we’d been away and he said, “You’re gone,

you got to go up before the beak”. Now the beak happened to be a lieutenant colonel from the First World War. A fellow by the name of Hopkin and he used to ride around on a horse and he only had one leg. Anyway we were marched in with an escort and turned right and saluted him and he said, “Good Morning sergeants. I believe you’ve had a

a little break away?” And said, “Yes sir”, very sheepishly. He said, “How many days was it gentlemen?” “3 sir”. “Ah you’re Sergeants aren’t you? We’ll take one stripe for every day you’re away. Walk out Privates”. Well, so that was the finish. You know we were made Privates and we suddenly said, “Well enough’s enough, and we got on a draft and went north and that’s when I joined the Battalion at Wondecla in the

Atherton Tablelands and that was in early 1944 and we went into training there and went through very vigorous training and

Yeh well after we’d done our full training,

which we as I say pretty rigorous and we thought we were going to the Philippines because we’d done a barge training landing on beaches with barges and amphibious landings and then in November we got on the Duntroon at Cairns and went to Aitape and we had to unload. We got into Aitape and then we took over from the 43rd

US Regiment, was actually off to the Philippines and we just went from there. We had to go up into the Torricelli Mountains. The 16th and 19th Brigade went down the coast and fought their way down the coast towards Wewak and we were given the job of going in the Torricelli Mountains and pushing ‘em back to the coast. Fairly arduous, we

were bused down as far as they could get us, then we marched down to the Harak River and then we had to do the a very very steep climb from the base of the from the Harak (Sp?) River right up to a place called Nialu and then a steeper climb up from Nialu to Tong and from Tong it was off to Yambes. There were a few incidents in between but

then we got to Yambes and the companies were spread out in different areas and we just fought our way through past Perimbal and Samasai (Sp?) and Musenhaur (Sp?) and places like that and we finally got relieved by the 2/7th Battalion but it wasn’t ‘til

very late in February. Now it took us 6 days to march back to the coast and then we had to march up the transport area and then they took us back to Aitape. We were out for a little while we had our break there and then we had to go in again, but at this by this time they’d built an air strip at Maprik, which they’d taken I think, it was the 2/6th Battalion took

that and they’d built an air strip there called Hayfield and this time they decided to fly us in. Now where it took us 6 days to walk out they flew us in 30 minutes and we landed at Maprik and then we went on from there and I can’t remember the name of all the places but they’re places like Yamal and

Emul and Rekakey (Sp?) all those places there and I think we finally were at a place called Kaboibus when the war finished and they said, “Quiet”, which we did, pulled our heads in very quietly until things were settled down and then

they started to move us out. Japanese were surrendering but a lot of ‘em were still up in the mountains so we came back came back to Wewak. Actually I flew out I flew out in a Hudson [medium] bomber full of Japanese rifles and we just got off the air strip and then we flew into Wewak and

they gradually disbanded the Battalion. ‘Course they brought in the points system and a lot of the fellas that had served a long time went home and when the Battalion was finally broken up, we were transferred to the 30th Battalion Militia Battalion and we stayed there for a while. In the meantime,

I’d been suffering from something for a long long time and finally they sent me to the 2/11th AGH [Australian General Hospital] at Aitape and they discovered that I had hook worm and they had to treat me there, which was rather drastic treatment and I got back to the 30th Battalion the day after the Shropshire had pulled out and I was supposed to be on it to go home and I said, “Well what do I do now?”

They said, “Well we don’t know, the Duntroon will be in tomorrow and it’s going to Rabaul. We suggest you get on that”. So that’s what I did and I went to Rabaul and I was there for some time. I think there was something like 150,000 Japanese prisoners there at the time and we had to guard them. Other instances that happened, but finally in March I

got on a small little steamer, the Vito, Norwegian boat and they put I think only 5,000 tonnes and they put 1,100 of us on it and we came back and the engines broke down in the Coral Sea and we were left there wallowing for a while and then they got us started again we finally got back to Sydney and pulled into Number 10 Woolloomooloo wharf, that doesn’t exist anymore.

I don’t know whether I should mention this, but coming through the heads at Sydney Harbour was a wonderful sight, but I just got a an absolute fit of anger and I picked my rifle up and threw it overboard and it’s still at the bottom of the heads there somewhere. I got into a lot of trouble over that, but anyway we got back and we were transferred to the LTD (?) at Marrickville and then given leave to come home and that’s what we did and

my mother met me there and we got on a tram and away we went and we got back to Bondi where she was staying yeh.

Yes I think the

my first worrying thing that happened to me was to do with this rifle you see, because they took all our equipment from us when we got to the LTD and I couldn’t give my rifle and they were putting me on a charge and I just told them I’d lost it and anyway I was called back there. I was to go before some tribunal or whatever it was and

I met a lieutenant that had come back from the Middle East and I told him the story and he said, “Leave it with me son”. So he applied for permission to act for me at the, I don’t whether it was a court martial or what it was, but anyway in he went and he just said, “I can vouch for this man”.

He said, “He has quite honestly lost his rifle, and as a matter of fact I think somebody stole it”. Anyway the upshot was I had to pay for the rifle. The rifle weighed 10 pound and it cost me 10 pound. Now that was 5 weeks pay in the army, which was a lot of money. I went home fairly devastated, but relieved that I hadn’t suffered anything worse than a very bad reprimand

and a fine, but then afterwards I did find it hard to settle down for a while.

We got married in April 1947 and we only knew one another for about 5 or 6 months, but I met my wife at a 21st birthday party that my sister took me to and she

was nursing at Sydney Hospital and she was going to do obstetrics, but we just decided that we wanted to get married. So we got married and I was suffering very badly with malaria. First wash she did was a whole heap of double sheets where I’d just sweated and sweated and nearly flooded her out of bed. Then we got transferred to a place called Peak Hill

and I met a fellow there in Peak Hill that I went to school with. He was in the same bank and he’d been in the air force with Number 10 Sunderland Squadron in England and he got married while we were there to a local girl and then he left and I finally just couldn’t settle down at all and I just suddenly threw my arms in the air one day and said

to my wife, “Well I’m getting out”, and at that stage we had our first baby and she didn’t put up too much objection. She said, “Well what are you going to do?” I said, “I don’t know, but I don’t want to be in the bank”. So I went back, we got back to Sydney from Peak Hill and so I left the Bank of Australasia and that was in 1949 and then I got immediately I got

ill again and I went to a doctor who happened to be Helen’s uncle and he went over me and he said, “Son, I don’t know what you think you’re going to do, but I think you’d better forget about it and just go back to what you know you can do”. So at that stage I made an application and joined the Rural Bank and from there

they transferred us to Dubbo and from Dubbo we were transferred to Parkes. That was in 1949 during the same year and I was in Parkes until 1952. Our second daughter had been born by then in Parkes, but I was getting so ill and having to go to down to the

113th AGH at Concord and leave my wife and 2 children behind and suddenly decided, “Well this is no good”, so I applied for a transfer to Sydney and explained what it was all about. Needed a home, so in the meantime my mother found a place at Northmead. Didn’t have any money, but we applied for a loan and we got it

and we moved into Northmead in 1952, early ’52 and from there on I just went through the bank from there.

Right yeh.

I have no memory at all of Samoa and ‘cause I think I was only about 2½ when we left there, but I know I was looked after. I’ve got photographs

of my mother and the fact I was looked after by native girls that were on the mission, I must have had a fairly idyllic life. I don’t know how my mother stood the trip across from Savai’i to Upolu, but they got there and

I was rather a large baby when I was born. I was about 9 pound, which is big these days, but I had a wonderful life on the island there at the mission station, unfortunately which no longer exists. They bulldozed it down in 1966 and was a beautiful old building and when Mum got ill we came back to Australia and we were on a ship

in a cyclone, which was another exciting thing for some people. But funnily enough the anthropologist Margaret Mead was on board that same ship and she looked after me during the voyage back to Sydney and ‘course in my young days apparently the boys would take me out in the pow pows and I’d have toys and I’d throw ‘em overboard and they’d dive over

and get them for me and bring ‘em back. While on the ship I got my toys and I was throwing them over the ship and calling out for the boys to dive. There was no one there to do it and anyway Margaret did a pretty good with us and ‘course my sister was a tiny baby at this stage and we finally got back to Sydney and Mum went into hospital and

when we were actually christened at Waverley Methodist Church I think it might have been in 1926 before we were transferred to Narrandera.

No I was only at Armidale for a year and a bit, but I have fond memories of Narrandera because it was the Depression and we were there and the Depression

hit them very badly and the drought as well and people were burning down their houses to get the insurance and they had quite a number of fires in Narrandera until the insurance companies said, “Enough’s enough”, and they said they wouldn’t pay up any more. My mother used to play the organ at church and she’d leave us

in the house and if the fire bell went the circuit steward used to go out and have a look and if the flames weren’t anywhere in our direction he’d come back and give her the all clear, but they must have been very scary times for my parents. I remember one night Garner’s store went up, big store went up there and it made a hell of a noise because all the shotgun cartridges

had got in amongst the fire and they were exploding all over the place. Dad used to drive a T model Ford around the circuit to places like Grong Grong and those places. Any hills around Narrandera were impossible for a T model Ford in those days, so what they used to do is turn ‘em backwards and reverse ‘em over the hill and then turn round and away they’d go again.

It was an exciting time I suppose, because my mother she was a remarkable woman. She was an excellent horse woman. She was an excellent rifle shot too and she started to play golf with her cousin and

the golf course wasn’t much in those days but she used to go out and play golf, but golf balls were a premium and the crows used to pinch them. So one day she said, “I’ve had enough of this”, so where you usually strapped your umbrella she strapped in a 22 rifle and she went out on the golf course and I don’t think the crows bothered them too much after that. But then

we got the call and Dad was transferred to Morpeth and we spent 4 years there. But during that period very severe diphtheria epidemic broke out and a lot of children in the town died, but my sister and I got diphtheria and were taken to hospital. Fortunately we survived without any real complication.

I went into first class at Morpeth and my teacher was a dear old lady by the name of Miss Bridekirk and we learnt to write on slates in those days and I progressed over the years. I went from first class to second class, third class, fourth class and I was in fifth class when we were transferred to Grafton. Funny thing about those days was that

a boy there by the name of Kingsley Elcon, he was the son of the Church of England Rector and he was the only one in the class that wore shoes. We all went bare foot in those days. ‘Cause we just couldn’t afford shoes and we our feet got very, very tough and we could walk on anything. My 2

younger siblings were born while we were in Morpeth and we used to have some wonderful times there. In those days it was funny you know, you cringe when you think about it now, but there was always a thing between the Protestants and the Catholics. You know you they used to call us conny whoppers and we used to call them oh, ‘Cathos’

and’ tykes’ and all the rest of it. But when we were at Narrandera, one of my father’s greatest friends was a fellow by the name of John O’Brien who wrote Around the Boree Log and he had a wonderful rapport with him. Anyway we left Morpeth in April ’34 and went to Grafton and Grafton was a beautiful city. As a matter of fact the bridge there was

opened the same year as the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932 with the train line underneath and the roadway over the top. I made some great mates there and as I say when I got sick I went away to Armidale for a year and a bit. I was put in a hostel, St John’s hostel, which was owned by the Church of England and went to Armidale High School and

must have been nearly 60 of us in the hostel there. I’ve got a photograph of them too, but there’s not many of them left, a number were killed at the war of course. Then when I came down to Forbes in early ’38, when Dad was transferred there I went on in the high school there and then what happened was that the war

broke out.

Yeh.

Well I don’t think I let it worry me too much, but it worried the hell out of my mother. I used to get ill and I’d crawl away in a corner somewhere and

she’d find out that I was missing you know, wouldn’t come in for lunch and then she’d go and look for me and find me and I don’t know, I think I had a bit of asthma at the time and I was a pretty weedy bloke, but I loved the outdoors and I used to go get up early of a morning and go out bird nesting and that sort of thing and

wouldn’t come home for breakfast and my mother had to ring up the headmaster and tell him to send me home to get changed and have some breakfast before I went to school. But it was a pretty happy time apart from the illnesses, but as I say, I wasn’t aware of it as much as my parents were, but I improved when I went to Armidale because

Grafton was a very, very humid climate and when I went to Armidale, which was a much cooler climate, I sort of picked up, although I didn’t grow very much.

Yes well

Dad was born in 1898 in Silverston. I believe there’s a big racetrack there now, but it was a beautiful tiny little village in those days on the edge of the Cotswolds. He went to school first of all in Silverstone and then later as he grew up, he went to school in Northampton and

he was one of the early boy scouts as was his sister Beryl, she was one of the early guides back in those days and he was very interested in the scouting movement. He finished school and he was in the cadets. There’s a big picture of their cadet corps there and his father was a baker

and I found out in later years the Clarke family lived in north Silverston for 300 years and his father was still living there when he died. Dad was in the Northants regiment and fought in the First World War in France and after the war he

decided to emigrate to Australia and he came out here when he was 22 in 1920 and he wanted to be several things. He wanted to go on the land, he wanted to be a teacher and funnily enough he came up to a place called Somerton which isn’t far from here

and he was staying with some people, an old lady, whose granddaughter goes to the same church as us, said to him, “Donald Clarke I think you should go into the ministry”, and he sort of got the call and he decided to go in the ministry and he trained down in Sydney and he met my mother and

they were married in 1923. He’s a very, very, very well read man. He had a wonderful general knowledge. He was very good with his hands too, he was a self taught carpenter and when they went to course the doctor had told Mum that she couldn’t have children. So by the time they got to

Samoa I was on the way, but he administered there. He started schools and all sorts of things and he started a nursing service there for young native women. They did a wonderful job there. They knew Aggie Grey the famous Aggie Grey of the South Sea. I believe a picture was made about

South Pacific I think it was and Aggie Grey was supposed to have been Bloody Mary, but she denied it, but they knew Aggie Grey very well. They travelled all over. Savai’i was very, very volcanic and they travelled all over that. When they came back to Australia, as I say he

he was very very astute sort of a man, but a very down to earth man too and as I said he made great friends with Father John O’Brien. He rebuilt practically every kitchen in every parsonage that we went into. Then as I say when the Second World War broke out, oh he became Scout Master at

Forbes when we were there and took us away on camps. And then as I say when the war broke out, he went in as an ordinary soldier.

Methodist Minister?

Well Dad was fairly occupied I’d say in the Ministry with his parishioners of course. I s’pose as a young fella I nearly had a free hand. I was never that close to my father. My younger brother was a lot closer to him than I was, but I admired what he’d done

in the First World War and I admired what he was doing in the Second World War. He had no sporting attributes at all. He didn’t like sport never played sport and I was the opposite. I was into everything and much to his disgust I did better at sport than I did at school and

that used to upset him a bit because as I say, he was a rather scholastic man and I wasn’t. I was no academic and I was quite happy to go along and do my own thing and to a large extent he was happy for me to do it. I admired him for going into the army as an ordinary soldier. He became

Adjutant of the 9th Pioneer Training Battalion at Dubbo and a funny thing while he was there. As Adjutant a fellow I knew in Forbes married a Forbes girl by the name of Louis Woods. His name was Bill Jolly and he was in the Pioneer Training Battalion and Dad officiated at their wedding in Dubbo.

So as Adjutant of the Battalion he performed a marriage ceremony and when he was transferred to Bathurst he was made a Captain and he was OC [Officer Commanding] of the company and

as I say it was while I was there that I got ill with pneumonia and he sort of rescued me, because I said, “Well I’m pretty sick”. So I went and found him and he got his fellow out of the RAP [Regimental Aid Post] to take my temperature and they whipped me off to hospital and it was at a time when a lot of the boys were dying from pneumonia and it and it was just about the time when they brought in

what they called the sulphur tablets, the ‘M & B’ tablets, and they put us on those. Some of the fellas didn’t make it and fortunately for me we had some wonderful sisters there, including Helen’s sister, which I didn’t know about and they pulled us through. But Dad went from

there in 1943 when the war started to turn our way, the church came back to him and said, “Look we’re really short of chaplains. We’d like you to take a position in the air force”. So he got his release from the army and joined the Air Force and was made a chaplain in the air force and

it was while I was at Wondecla, he was at Townsville and he came up to Wondecla one day to meet me and we had some time together there. Then he we had a rather unique situation, because my mother had joined the American Red Cross and was sent to Noumea as a housemother I suppose

and Dad got a call to do a stint in Port Moresby and it turned out that 3 of us were overseas at the one time. But after the war he came back and he did some university courses and sociology and social science that sort of thing. He

did a couple of stints in parishes around Sydney and then he finally went to Singleton. I think Singleton was the last place they were at and they did a wonderful job there and I think they rebuilt the Elizabeth Gates

home that was there. They retired from there and came down to Terrigal, but he was a rather innovative man. I’m trying to think of some of the other things he did.

Yeh.

Yeh.

Yeh.

Well it all started in Narrandera of course, the whole country turned to sand, and fences were being covered up and that’s when you saw the big men cry. Yanco Weir

had been completed. Griffith was still a little tiny town of a few shacks and not too many buildings there then. It was a little town, but it’s not nowhere near the town it is today. They had started irrigation, but I think they had some pretty tough times there during the Depression. As I said, people were burning down their houses. One

particular case is the Methodist church ladies used to do the lunches at the local show every year and they had a big marquee and they used to store it in the shed behind the church and one day somebody came in and set the shed on fire as a decoy so that they could set another one across the across the town. And of course the fire engine’s there putting out

the fire in the shed behind the church and the other one went up. ‘Course it had well and truly gone by the time they got there, but it burnt their marquee and it destroyed their income that they used to get from the church, because they couldn’t afford another one and where the Depression sort of struck and the insurance companies

woke up to the fact that they used to go to these houses after they’d been burnt down, but there was no furniture in them and what they used to do is clean out all the furniture and all household goods before they set it alight. So this is what prompted the insurance companies to sort of close up, say, “Enough’s enough”. We had a another funny incident while we were there,

involved my mother. She was going to learn to drive and they put her in this car to sort of have a lesson or 2, and in those days the policemen used to ride around on pushbikes. And I don’t know what happened, but she couldn’t control the car and she ran into the policeman on the pushbike and knocked him over without too much damage, but

she never bothered after that. She could ride a horse, but she wouldn’t drive a car and then we went to Morpeth as I say and things were pretty bad there. We used to have our harvest festivals and I can remember big one they always used to have out at a place called Black Hill and we used to drive out there in our old 1927 Chev [Chrevrolet] and they

always put on a concert as well and they had some wonderful concerts and some very, very talented people came out of that area. But then they used to auction all the goods off afterwards, and we couldn’t afford to buy anything of course, but the funny thing was when we’d go out to drive home the back of the car was full of boxes of vegetables and fruit and all that

sort of thing. So they were wonderful people. They were very, very kindly people and they knew what our situation was and it wasn’t good. The parsonage is still there at Forbes, it’s a lovely old building. And my sister one night disappeared, we couldn’t find her,

just about tea time. There was a hell of a commotion and we had to go out looking for her and somebody said they’d seen her go down towards the river, and ‘course they were dreadful. We came back home and found her curled up in front of the fire. She’d been under her bed up in upstairs, for what reason I don’t know, and by the time we got back home she was in the house. That was a big relief. But

I remember Mum, in those days the green grocer used to call and the butcher used to come around and the baker used to come around and Mum didn’t order top grade meat, but it had to be good. The butcher boy knew not to bring up rubbish otherwise it went back. But we lived on grammar pie,

everybody made grammar pies in those days and they grew them everywhere, and you put sugar and sultana and acidic acid with ‘em and they were very good, we loved them. And they even got to the stage where we got a cow and the car is in one end of the shed and the bales were in the other end of the shed and

Dad used to share this cow with a family by the name of Couston and we’d get our milk and he grew a big paddock full of sackalene [processed feed] to feed ‘em on and he then they discovered the cow had TB [tuberculosis] and they had to take it away and destroy it of course. He also kept bees and

this particular day he was due to go out and talk to some ladies out at one of the circuits, I don’t know whether Duckenfield or somewhere like that, about elephantiasis (encephalitis ?) in Samoa, which was a dreadful disease the limbs used to swell up caused by some mite over there. And he was robbing these bees

this day and the for some stupid reason they got mad and they bit him all over and he had to go out and do this talk and by the time he got there he’d swollen up all over the place he was a great example of elephantiasis and he had to give this lecture, but they’re the sort of things that happened there. He kept a box in his study that we found hard to open. I s’pose I shouldn’t

say this, but one early morning we got down there my sister and I and we levered the lid open and found this big shiny black thing in there, which happened to be Dad’s army revolver, a big heavy 45 revolver and we found a few bullets in a box and we pulled it out, found out how to put the bullets in and I said, “Well

how do we fire this?” And we went up the back and I sat in the middle of the lane and got this thing in front of me and I said to my sister, “Now put your hands over my ears so I won’t hear the noise”. Finally after a lot of trouble we

pulled the trigger and it went off. Where the bullet went I don’t know. We got such a fright we flew back down into the house, but at that stage the baker arrived and here I am at the front at the back door waving this revolver around. Well he just took off up the yard, there was bread going everywhere and he tore around to Couston’s and told them what was going on. But

next day the police sergeant came down and had a long talk to Dad. ‘Course we’d put the revolver back by this stage and he wasn’t very impressed at all, so I don’t know what happened to it after that, we didn’t see it again. But yeh, Morpeth was tough. As I say parishioners didn’t have any money, so Dad sent a letter around saying that no

collection would be taken, but they just put a collection plate in the vestibule as people went out and anybody who could afford something put it in. We lived on the smell of an oil rag and when we went to Grafton I still didn’t wear shoes, not until I went to high school and then it was compulsory. You couldn’t go to high school unless you wore shoes, but the Depression was still on then and

people were getting married. I can remember Dad using Mum’s wedding ring to marry couples because they couldn’t afford a wedding ring. It was just a symbol, they’d put it on, they’d get married, take it off and give it back to Mum and away they went so I s’pose people just can’t understand just how tough it was in those days. It was the era of Bradman of course and

we used to go down and watch the cricket at Fisher Park. Everybody rode a bike in Grafton and at lunch time all the shops shut, everybody went home to lunch then came back again. Yeh there were quite a lot of instances there. One with old Bill O’Reilly the cricketer and remember him smashing a ball out of the ground, it went right across

the road. The doors of the Presbyterian Church were open and it went down the aisle of the Presbyterian Church and finished up near the pulpit, but they they’re just some of the things that I remember about the place. We had no floods while I was at Grafton, but they’ve had a lot since. And Armidale, I s’pose I got very homesick at Armidale, although I

tried to fit in pretty well and you had to with the number of boys that were there and it’s sad but I’ve only met a couple of them since and well, 1937’s a long time ago. Then at Forbes I was in the Scouts

and we had a scout master who dropped out and Dad took over and built us up from there, but I enjoyed Forbes ‘cause we used to go away to different schools to play football and cricket and that sort of thing and tennis.

I feel I had a fairly easy time of

it, although I knew things were tough. We realised it because of the clothes we were wearing and the fact that we couldn’t afford shoes. The fact that Mum was making underpants for my father out of old flour bags

with Fielder’s Flour across the seat and she was sewing patches on our pants like you wouldn’t believe and you wore only had about 2 shorts. One came off and it was hand washed very carefully and you put it back on again.

Morpeth was one of those places where it was derelict when we were there, and yet it was a wonderful place because it was our largest inland port at one stage and institutions like Arnott’s biscuits, Washington Soul Simms Metal all started in Morpeth and they had the big warehouses there. Campbell’s had the big

warehouses there or Bond Stores they used to call them in those days. Petrol was 1 and 10 a gallon, which was a lot of money in those days and it was all fed into your car by reticulation. They used to pump it up into a bowser, then put the hose in your tank and just pull the lever and away it went and it filled up by reticulation used to run down. No electric pumps in those days and away

you’d go. But I used to go around with Dad and Mum to different church services. Sometimes I didn’t go of course and sometimes Mum didn’t go, but we used to go to places like Duckenfield, Miller’s Forest, Black Hill, Thornton, Taro, Beresfield, used to go to all those places. Dad had all those places to cover

and so I s’pose you learnt it the hard way and I have memories of course of how tough it was, but I don’t know that it ever had any lasting effect on me at all. I s’pose it was because I just didn’t want it to have any effect on me, I just didn’t let it worry me that much.

I think I threw my energies into sport more than anything else and with your mates of course that sort of took care of all those, well stopped you worrying anyway.

Well football and cricket were the 2 that were predominant

with me and I was very chuffed to have been made Captain of the football teams at Forbes High School and also to become Captain of the cricket team eventually. I did play football in the army and I’ve got a photograph out there of 3 of us with the army logo on

and we played at Bathurst. But I played against a young fellow by the name of Clem Kennedy that played for Newtown and he’s their halfback and he just chopped us to pieces, he was a terrific footballer. But then I played when we were up in the Islands after the war finished. I

got into an army cricket team and actually I played against Don Tallin’s (Sp?) brother. Don Tallin was one of Australia’s great wicket keepers. I got to play against him and they were all achievements that I was very happy. And when I came back home, of course getting married and having a family that sort of curtailed it all pretty well, then I

took up golf. Golf’s my great love now, but I didn’t take it up ‘til I was 40. But oh no we’ve had a pretty good life.

Really nothing and it happens in a lot of cases like that that they

they just sort of put it behind them, which most of our fellas did too and I discovered that when we were writing our history, that it’s like extracting teeth getting any information out of them. But we finally did, I’ve got a watch in there that Dad brought from a farmer in France. It’s a lovely old thing, tells the phases of the moon and everything else,

you know one of those with multi facets on it. No, I didn’t actually ask him and I don’t think he ever offered to tell me, except that they used to be billeted in farm houses and they were more relieved than excited when the war finished, but that was

the depth of my knowledge about his war history. I knew more about him in the Second World War than I did about the first.

Well yeh it was a bit disturbing because all these young fellows were joining up. They used to train on places like Spooner Oval and those places and they were all itching to get away, because they were still pretty nationalistic in those days, as a nation,

wanted to help the mother country. I mean things have changed now of course, but it didn’t affect me so much as a 15 year old, except to watch with envy, as they’d started an air training base at Parkes and the Wirraways and the Avro Ansons used to fly over and you’d look up and wish you were in one of those.

To the young fellas my age it didn’t have any great effect, but for the families it did. I know families that lived next door to us and just across the road where the husbands and sons went away either into the air force or the army and next thing you’d get the message that they’d been killed and that was in 1940.

Most of ‘em were killed in training accidents at that stage, not so much in actual combat, because we at that stage hadn’t got into it. It was only later that we really got involved. I remember a service they held in the church when a fellow by the name of Jim Sunder-Clarke went away

with the 8th Division. Never heard of him again and it was a wonderful service and everybody was delighted to farewell him. I knew the parents were very upset about it.

No. Well the actually the air training school was at Parkes which was 20 miles away, but the Avro Ansons used to come over and land at the Forbes airport and ‘course

we as young fellas we just ran everywhere in those days and we used to walk and run out to the airport and watch the Avro Ansons landing and taking off and you know it was a very exciting time and we used to love it and they were cumbersome old things, but we thought they were the bee’s knees and of course they were in those days and

you’d see these young fellas. I s’pose if anybody saw ‘em today you’d reckon they were still school boys but they were grown up men to us and these young fellas flying the instructors and there were a few accidents. I remember a fellow I went to school with, he was in the air force at Parkes and

he flew over with a mate on a training run in a Wirraway [light trainer], don’t know whether they were showing off or not, but he wanted to let his Mum know he was there and he banked over Spooner Oval and lost control and went in and that was the end of him, Heck Williams. But all in all we didn’t hear much about it.

All we saw were the planes in the sky mainly and I was still only 15 at the time. Things changed started to change fairly rapidly from then of course because with all the younger fellas gone from the town they were finding it difficult to find people for jobs but

they just had to carry on and of course by the time casualties were coming in we’d left Forbes. I boarded in Forbes after Mum left and I was with the Bank of Australasia as I said and then early next

year in 1941 I got transferred to Bathurst.

Yes well Dad decided to join the army and the circuit was left without a minister and when he joined the army I’d started in fourth year in high school,

I’ll go back. Yeh when Dad joined the army I was in fourth year at high school. The circuit

was left without ministers and what they had to do was bring in relieving ministers just to take up the slack and you know you’d have one there for a few weeks and one for another few weeks and the rest of it. Mum had to feed them and do their washing. Well it didn’t take her long to get disenchanted with the idea of doing that, so she just said to me, “You’ve got to leave school and get a job”.

I went for a couple of tests. I passed them very well to get into the Commonwealth Bank and they said, “Yes you’re qualifications are good, but we’ll have to put you on a waiting list”, and Mum said, “No I can’t wait that long, we’ll go and try somebody else”. So they tried the Bank of Australasia and they finally took me on, but they were a tough mob, they were really tough.

So my mother said, “Well I’m going to go back to nursing”, and she got a job at Dubbo Base Hospital. The kids, the younger ones went in boarding school. I boarded with Mrs Williams the mother of this fellow that got killed in the plane crash and then

my schooling was finished. I just had to knuckle down and do the best I could with what I had. I used to knock around with the boys still and we used do a lot of swimming and then come the winter, well about May 1941,

I was transferred to Bathurst and I was there for a little while, only a very short period as a matter of fact, and then they decided to send me to Moree of all places, which seemed to be the end of the earth in those days and I was transferred there and I was in a boarding house. There was 12 of us in the boarding house, 6 boys and 6 girls and

a lot of us were banking. I’d never drunk in my life, but once I got to Moree amongst this mob I certainly had a couple of sherbets with dire effects. But one of my great mates was a fellow by the name of Bob Bailey who was in the Commercial Bank Company of Sydney and Bob was just a bit older than

me. His father was a Brigadier in the 8th Division and his father finally died, he went down as a result of the torpedoing of a prisoner of war ship that was going from Singapore to Japan and

Bob went into the army. He got called up a bit before me and he became a lieutenant because you could see he was officer material right from the start and had a great personality. I met him at Canungra, he came through doing a course. I was still a an instructor in those days

and we had a good chat and spent a little time together and then he went off and he was posted with the 2/3rd Battalion which went to Wewak, went in that Aitape Wewak campaign and it was while I was there after we’d come out for a spell after our first engagement that I’d learned he’d been killed.

And that upset me a lot because I really looked up to Bob, he was a great bloke and I enjoyed his company. Don’t know what happened to the other people that were in the boarding house. One stayed on, a Glad Tickle, she finished up head of Reed’s Store or something like that in Moree, but she was older than us, quite a bit older than us, but

you know they were tough times. We used to go and build big air raid shelters in the school grounds for the kids. That time at that stage they’d started the Brisbane Line. They didn’t know B from a boof. The country was in a mess, you’ve got no idea and we joined Bob and I joined the VDC [Volunteer Defence Corps] up there, made up mainly of First World War men.

And we used to go out with on training trips with these fellas, with French Martini rifles that you couldn’t fire anyway, because we didn’t have any ammunition, but it was a lot of fun. One of the chaps out of the bank, a fellow by the name of Harris, he had a car

with a charcoal burner on it, ‘cause petrol was so short they used to have to put these charcoal burners on to create their own gas to run the car and in those days we used to buy quart bottles of beer. They’d fill ‘em up out of the taps, put corks in ‘em, or put crown seals on them and we’d get in this car and drive out to the Gwydir River

and spend the day out there swimming and pinching fish out of traps. And we used to cook the fish and eat the fish and drink the beer and I s’pose we thought we were having a great time, but yeh they were wonderful memories, but sad in a way when you think that so many of these fellas are gone now.

In my day, in the early days, the bank manager was held in very very high esteem. They were on a par with the doctor, the chemist, the solicitor and the bank manager. They were very, very highly regarded in the town where they were and

they they did good too. I mean the whole point was banking was totally different in those days. Everything worked at a smoother pace. Every customer that came into the bank was entitled to sit down and talk to you and you did that, you sat down and talked to them. There wasn’t a lot of high pressure lending

going on in those days that goes on today, but yeh they were highly esteemed men.

Bank staff themselves, you were very highly regarded if you were working in a bank, although you did the very menial jobs. I mean I remember when I started I used to have to go in every morning make sure that the managers

had a new set of blotting paper and new nibs in his pen and that the ink wells were filled. If there was a fire to be lit you went and chopped the wood and you lit the fire. You couldn’t believe how antiquated it was in those days. For instance, every bit of correspondence that went out of our branch was written in what we call

puce ink, it was a copying ink and they were copied into books full of rice paper, had a different book for each different sort of phase of the work you did in the bank. Now my job was to copy that stuff. Now how you did that was in a copying press and that consisted of these books

that you used to open up, you put an oil skin underneath, you’d put the letter on the oil skin, you’d put the rice paper down very carefully, then you got damp blotting paper, which you had a supply of that you had squeezed out, it was in a dish and you put a sheet of this damp blotting paper over the rice paper, an oil sheet over that, close the book very carefully

and put it in this very, very heavy what we call letter press that we used to screw down, and you just had to screw it down right because if you screwed it too tight it would smudge and wo betide you if you did that. So every bit of correspondence that went out of the branch had to be copied and there was no typewriter, we had no typewriter, no adding machine, so everything was done by hand and every

2 years we used to get a new set of ledgers and we used to have to head all the ledgers up again and work out what each customer’s gonna use in the next 2 years.

Yes that’s right.

It’s amazing, but most town had a lot of banks. I think in Forbes there were at least 6 or 7

and we used to interact with them quite well. ‘Course we used to run exchanges twice a day. Whatever cheques you got in that belonged to another bank you’d write ‘em up in this book, an exchange book for each bank and then you went off to the exchanges and you handed over the cheques

and they had to write ‘em down and add ‘em up and they had to agree with you, and that’s how you exchanged your cheques in those days and in the afternoon it was only your own cheques that you were sending out in the remittances, and so it was a quieter and more genteel type of life in those days. I mean in Forbes for instance they had the Rural Bank

the ES & A, the Bank of Australasia, The Union Bank of Australia, The Commonwealth Bank, Commercial Banking Company of Sydney and the Commercial Bank of Australia. There was 7 banks in the 1 town, but now they’ve closed them all.

Yeh.

No, there was no bank robberies in those days, they were unknown,

which I learnt to my disaster after when I was bank manager myself. I was robbed 4 times, but in those days no one ever thought of robbery. As a matter of fact, nobody thought of robbery of anything because we didn’t even lock up our houses, that was the wonderful part about it in those days, everybody trusted everybody.

The only money that was lost out of the bank were by the young fellas that got ‘emselves into trouble gambling and they used to try and tickle the peter and cover it up for a little while, but once they were caught they were gone.

Yes.

That’s a funny thing. I started on

1 pound one a week and Mum was still at home at the time. Before she left, the first thing I did with my 1 pound I went down and brought myself a chromatic harmonica and I took it home and it took all my wages and Mum took one look at me, she said, “You take that back”, so

I didn’t want to but I had to take it back. And she said, “You’re going to need all that hard earned cash. Time will be when you’ll be able to buy one, but you can’t afford one now”. So that was the silly thing I did to start with, but there wasn’t much left. I mean I had to pay my Mum something because she

had to provide food, but that didn’t last for long because then I started to board with this lady Mrs Williams who had other bankers boarding with her and I had to pay her 10 shillings a week and if you didn’t wash your own clothes it was another couple of bob, but out of that you had to find your own entertainment,

although it was cheap because for instance you could go out for 1 and sixpence. It used to cost you ninepence to get into the picture show. It used to cost you sixpence for a packet of ten ‘Capstan’ and threepence to buy a pie at intermission so that was fairly cheap but even so it didn’t take long to go through a quid

or 2 dollars as it was called in those days.

I think for the most part the younger fellas were just letting it go over their heads. We knew that there was something there, that it was important to us but we still used to go out and play our cricket on a Saturday.

We’d play football and that sort of thing and it really wasn’t sinking in. Anybody that had people overseas yes, they thought about it a lot. I think what really hit me, when it really came home to me, I had a great mate at Bathurst he was a good tennis player. I couldn’t play tennis very well, but suddenly he got called up

and I think he was in the 36th Militia Battalion, I’m not quite sure and they had a send off for him at home and we went there and all the parents were crying and friends were very glum and then we went down to the train to see them off and the train pulled into Bathurst and the train was full of men going off to the war and Trevor Harris

got on this train. I never saw him again, but that’s when it came home to me because I said, “Gee there’s something wrong here”, because the parents were visibly upset about it all and then what brought it home to me I suppose a bit more was when I went to Moree and learnt about Bob Bailey’s father,

although he didn’t know about that until a bit later. I knew his father was in a prisoner of war camp. That’s all we knew at that stage and Bob was a bit worried about it, but life still went on. I s’pose what woke us up to the fact was when we got our call up and we were put into uniform.

I don’t know when they brought in conscription. They must have brought it in reasonably early, because they didn’t call you up until you were 18. Now I turned 18

just after they bombed Pearl Harbour and I received my call up and went down to Sydney to the Showground, but that was the system. As soon as you turned 18 you got a notice to say that you were required to report with 1 cut lunch and a small suitcase to whatever the place you were going to

and mine was happened to be the Sydney Showground.

No it wasn’t a surprise to me because I’d wanted to get in the air force. I’d had a thing about aeroplanes after seeing these planes at Forbes and I went to the bank and asked them for leave to apply to join the air force. I was still

17 at the time and they came back very smartly and said, “Right if you want to join the air force you resign”, and I thought this was a bit unfair. And I didn’t know what my future was, so I didn’t pursue that and it was just before I turned 18 anyway and then suddenly I got my call up and

the bank couldn’t do anything about it because it was official. So I was still employed and they wrote me a letter and said, “Yes we realise that you’ve been called up in the army and we have agreed to make up your pay, the difference between what you get in the army and what you’re getting in the bank”. That was a very smart move, because I

got more in the army than what I got in the bank, so they didn’t have to make anything up. But you didn’t accrue any leave or anything like that. When I joined the bank I was on 3 years probation, this is the type of people they were in those days, they were really tough. And the funny thing was, after 4½ years after I came back and went back to the bank they made me do another 6 months probation before they

put me on the permanent staff. But no the call up didn’t affect me, I was very happy to get it.

Well I was getting away from a job that I didn’t like and I knew I was going in to the army

with a lot of fellas about my age, serving my country, at that stage hadn’t sunk in at all. I was just a bit of an adventurer. I was going to do something different and at that stage I’d had a gut full of the bank anyway and I was hoping that when I came back I wouldn’t have to go back into it, but it turned out different of course.

What happened was that when things got tough after Singapore fell I realised then that we were under threat. The King didn’t come into it so much as country and I

just got this strong belief that I did not want anybody else taking over my country and I s’pose a lot of us felt the same way.

I suppose what we thought was, “Hooray, at last they’ve conned the Americans into coming into the war”, and we knew at that stage we needed ‘em. But they were, what you call it Pacific,

America didn’t want to get involved at all. They were quite happy to supply goods and things at an enormous cost of course to England and the allies, but they didn’t want to get involved at all. I firmly believe to this day that both Roosevelt and Churchill knew that Pearl Harbour was going to be bombed

and Roosevelt was astute enough to know that if that happened America would have to enter the war, because he was a great mate of Churchill.

Oh well of course that was the start of it. As soon as they bombed Pearl Harbour, they just started to come straight down the Malay Peninsula into Singapore and

the Australians just didn’t have a chance and they bombed Pearl Harbour on the 7th of December. Singapore fell on the 19th of February, so there was hardly any time between that and the Japanese really taking over. They were all set to go.

But it did come out of the blue, but I if I can digress for a bit without being too presumptuous, I think one of the most maligned men in this in this country was General Gordon Bennett. He was a remarkable man and they gave him nothing to fight

with. He originally went to Malaya with 1 brigade. There was one at Alice Springs and the other one was at Darwin, oh no one was at Alice Springs the other one was split up, the 2/40th was at Kupang, the 2/21st was at Ambon and the 2/22nd was at Rabaul, and they all got massacred, and the other brigade was in Alice Springs and it wasn’t ‘til things got really serious that

the powers that be decided to move the other brigade up there, but he didn’t have a chance that man and I blame Blamey for a lot of it.

No I didn’t

know anything about it at the time. It’s not until you read his record in the First World War that you realise what a wonderful man he was. Blamey and he were at loggerheads from day 1 right from their early days and I think that Blamey just white anted whenever he got the chance.

I think we were still trying to get over inoculations and wondering what it was all about at that stage and

we were in Bathurst, in freezing cold, didn’t have proper uniforms. No wonder a number of us went down, but I s’pose we were just there to say, “Yes sir, no sir, 3 bags full sir”. Whatever they told us to do, we did and we trained and trained away and I think we were more self centred with what was happening around us than anything else at that stage.

Yeh, it was all due to the inoculations and vaccinations of course and we started to run temperatures and things like that and as I said the weather was cold and I originally went to hospital with flu, but I was only in there a week and a doctor came round

one day and said, “How are you feeling?” I said, “Not too bad sir”, and he said, “Right. You can go back to your unit”. So I got my gear and I walked back to my unit in the rain and I just got worse and worse as the day went on. I got to ask somebody about this, and no good going to the RAP, they’d just give you a couple of Aspirin and tell you to go to bed for 24 hours.

So fortunately my father was in Bathurst camp at that stage, so towards evening I got on a bus that was going into town and I dropped off at the Pioneer Training Battalion where he was and looked him up and I said, “Dad, I’m pretty crook”, and he said, “Yeh you look it too”. So he got the Corporal in from the RAP and he took my temperature. He said, “This man’s very

ill, got to get him to hospital”. So they called an ambulance and put me in the ambulance and took me to hospital and they discovered that I had pneumonia very badly and I was bit touch and go for a quite a number of days. I think the fact that they had the M & B tablets, these are the new sulphur wonder drugs that they’d brought in.

They were feeding me those and they were very hard to keep down and you know you’d bring ‘em up, they’d have to give you another lot. But there was wonderful sisters there, which included my wife’s sister that I didn’t know and I don’t know whether I ever saw her, but there was a Sister Searle there and she really came round and used to gee me up every day. She said, “Keep going Clarkey, keep going”, and as I say they put me on oxygen

and I s’pose after about 10 days I came good, but I’d lost a lot of weight. I got on the scales and I weighed 6 stone 10 and I thought I was going to be discharged from the army, but they sent me away to a convalescent camp.

In the 104 AGH, it was a hospital in the camp yeh.

Only a couple of weeks, yeh was only a couple of weeks. Of course we were out training and marching, you had temperatures and that sort of thing and you’d come home and you’d have a shower, and the water wasn’t that hot either, but you just if you didn’t have the constitution, you just got worse and worse

and they lost 12 fellas in that hospital with pneumonia, which was quite a lot.

I thought it was a bit of fun, you know we’re all doing something different, another sort of sport we were playing really because

nothing had become very serious, as far as training, apart from learning to slope arms and march and right turn and right wheel and all the rest of it. So as I say, it was ’til a bit of fun for us all, but it wasn’t ‘til later that it became serious when they used to put us through the assault courses and that sort of thing.

I thought it was pretty good. I mean

the Australian soldier had been a larrikin during the whole of any war that’s been fought, if they got the chance they kicked over the traces. But if somebody was strong enough and said, “Hey, do this, do that”, you did it. But I quite enjoyed the discipline, as a matter of fact I really did. I think it helped mould my character a bit.

Well it was your sergeants. A lot of them and corporals and a lot of them were fellas that belonged to the Sydney University Regiment and they came in as instructors and some of them were very very nice blokes. Some of them you wouldn’t have said, “Good day” to, but some of them were terrific blokes and they understood what you were going through.

I think they had the knack of saying, “Hey this is got to be done, let’s do it”, and we used to buckle under and do it, and we thought, “Well it’s there, it’s all part of the deal”, and so we did it.

Yeh there a very wide mixture of fellas . You know there was , and the fellas there were out and out no gooders, they were real villains. There were other fellas that were came off stations, jackaroos and things like that. And there were also a lot of

my type who were clerks and shop assistants, whatever and I thought generally they were a pretty good bunch of blokes and we enjoyed one and other’s company. We were learning the pitfalls of spending sixpence to buy a pint of beer and gettin’ drunk and all rolling down the hill from the canteen

together, but all in all it was it was it was a great time.

Yes there were yeh there were I’ve still got them. 1 or 2 of them are dead now that I know of, but there’s still 2 or 3 that I still know, don’t see them

much, but I know they’re still there.

I suppose it just happened. You might be alongside somebody doing some sort of exercise get to talk to ‘em and you sort of built up a rapport. I mean to say, you found common ground somewhere and

I think it was very easy. Some blokes you just didn’t want to have anything to do with. I remember we had a wind-up gramophone in one of our huts and my mother had given me a record a 75 of Glenn Miller playing “In the Mood”. Well we flogged that to death

until there was practically no record left and then one night we came home and somebody had pinched the record, so that was the end of “In the Mood”, but we used to play that to death, the boys used to love it and you’d wind this gramophone up and if it started to run down you’d wind it up again, but that’s how we got our music in those days.

I suppose the enormity of it all, seeing thousands upon thousands of men all gathered into one place and each one being a separate entity and

if you were infantry you were all trained the same way. If you were in the tanks you were trained a different way. If you were a pioneer you were trained a different way, but they were very big groups of men there and then you suddenly realised that you weren’t the only pebble on the beach. There were other camps all over Australia doing exactly the same thing, so they tied up a hell of a lot of men. When you think about it there was over

600,000 people went through the services in the Second World War.

I took to it like a duck to water, I absolutely loved it. Enjoyed my rifle, I really loved it and I turned out I was a pretty good shot too, but the whole facet of throwing grenades, you know doing all that,

bayonet practise, the whole bit, it was just great, I just enjoyed every bit of it. I didn’t have any hang ups about it at all. S’pose I would have if there’d been an angry man at the other end of it at that stage.

It is.

With what weight I had I wasn’t, but we used to get stuck into it. You know you

used try and outdo one another. That’s that was what competition was about. We all competed against one another and yeh it was it was it was it was good. Funny thing is, in the campaign that I went through we never used a bayonet, it was all sub machine guns, ‘cause that’s how far we’d progressed in those days.

I think it was based on the First World War initially yeh, but as the armoury got better, so the training differed. While I was at Bathurst I got selected to go to a junior leader’s course at Balgownie. I went to that and went through that and later on I was sent down to Bonegilla to a small arms course. Now that’s

where the I was woken up to the fact that the change in the weaponry style. The basic weapon was still the .303 [.303 calibre Lee Enfield rifle], we were now coming into the Owen [sub machine gun] gun age. By the way the Owen gun in the Second World War was the greatest piece of weaponry that was ever manufactured.

I had the pleasure, I don’t know whether a pleasure or not, but I had the distinction when I went to the small arms school at Bonegilla to fire the 26th Owen gun that came off the production line, and in those days they had wooden handles, wooden butts. In the finish they just made them out of iron but you could do anything with them. It was simplistic because there was no locking piece on it like there was

on the Thomson submachine gun that used to jam like mad. And the Bren [light machine gun] gun was another great weapon, but the Owen gun you could throw it. It could be it could be left in mud, which would happen up in the islands, get all the gunk in the world in it and you just put it pick it up and pull the trigger and it would fire. This was its great advantage and we used them to death

in that last campaign.

I was there in May, I would have been there for about 2, at the outside 3 weeks,

‘cause I had to try and build my strength up again before I went back to camp. And I think I said before while I was in the convalescent camp down at the showground, the Jap subs came in and I don’t know what they were going to do with us, but they hauled out all this equipment rifles and everything and jumped us on these trucks and

we were going to rush us down to the Harbour and I don’t know where somebody got their sense from, but somebody woke up to the fact that we wouldn’t have been any bloody good anyway. So they hauled us all off the trucks and took all our equipment away. We had our equipment, we had to sort it out, because we took our rifles with us wherever you went, you took your whole gear. So I was there and very

soon after that I went straight back to army, back to the 30th Training Battalion at Bathurst.

Very little. We just could hear that there was a lot of thumping and banging going on, but it wasn’t until next day that we found out exactly what went on that night and so it really didn’t affect us that night.

No, we just had the officers come ‘round hauling us out of bed and that’s the only inkling we had and we were still half asleep when they were issuing us equipment and they wouldn’t tell us anything and then the trucks came in and they just put us on, but we didn’t have a clue.

Not a great deal. My grandparents lived at Pennant Hills and I used to get a bit of leave. When I got a leave I used to get on the train and go out to Pennant Hills and stay with them for a few nights. At that stage

I’m not sure where my Mum was, I think she was still in Dubbo at that stage, but I used to stay with my grandparents and my grandfather, he died when he was I think 83. He used to ride in a horse and sulky, he still had a horse and sulky

and I remember when I was a child of 6 he used to harness up that horse and sulky and drive from Pennant Hills, out along Pennant Hills Road to Thompson’s Corner, where Dame Mary Gilmore Park is now and we used to sit up there and watch the Harbour Bridge being built. So my memory goes back a long way to that but he always drove this horse and sulky all around the place and there were no bitumen roads in those days but I’d visit my sister.

My sister was training at the War Memorial Hospital at Waverley, so I used to go and visit her. Now where was I? My brother was in Wolaroi College at Orange, so he was too far away. Oh yes, I didn’t get to visit him, I got to visit him afterwards, but

I didn’t see much of Sydney at all.

They certainly did yeh. The sinking of the Kuttabul had a big effect on everything. There was of lot of silly things happened that night, ‘cause I suppose nobody knew what was going on, except the Chicago. It very smartly

got up steam and got out to sea. The funny thing about that night was that my wife’s cousin was coming back to Sydney Hospital on a Manly ferry just an hour or two before that happened. You probably remember they had a big boom gate right across the Harbour in those

days and they used to open the boom to let the Manly ferry come through and she thinks to this day that those subs followed that Manly ferry through the boom gate that night and that’s how they got in the harbour. One of ‘em misjudged it and got caught up in the mesh of the boom gate, but there was 3 came in, but they only ever got two.

It did intensify, they went into manoeuvres across country. We were firing live ammunition, all that sort of thing out on areas of course where we couldn’t do any damage. We were learning to throw live grenades

and as I said before, very heavy bayonet practise and that sort of thing and we got into a pretty good peak condition. Then they took us on some very, very long route marches right from Bathurst right out to Yetholme and then over the mountains at the back, which was a steep climb, so we were getting pretty

fit then and then gradually drafts were going out and they left and then those of us that turned 19 immediately were able to join the AIF, which we did and immediately after that we were put on draft and away we went.

I suppose, look there’s a lot been said about this, but I think a lot of it was tongue in cheek. Simply because I s’pose the only animosity that fellas in the AIF had against fellas in the Militia were the fellas that had been old enough to join the AIF and didn’t, but for the younger fellas that had no option, no animosity at all,

and this was born out later on when the influx of New South Wales and Queensland boys went into the 2/5th, but we went on draft. I don’t know what happened to the 30th after that. Probably they were the influx of the younger fellas came in and we as we got to that age we went out.

Yes you were given the option.

Nothing wrong with it, I think it sort of was just prestige you know, “I’m now with the big boys”, and yeh I was very happy to join the AIF. I thought it was, you know a step up,

and then of course we got on draft and they sent us up to Canungra, and boy that was a school and a half.

Well when we got there you went into Brisbane by train, then they put you on a little train out to Beenleigh, then you got on a little puffing Billy that took us out

to Canungra and then you had to march from Canungra over the hill into the camp. When we got there it was all tents. Apart from the orderly rooms, there were no buildings whatsoever, and the fleas drove us mad. We slept on straw palliasses. The training from day one was intensive,

they really put you through the hoops. You did simulated attacks through jungle country, that sort of thing and then they had the live firing ranges and you know one where they had constructed it, you went through with your rifle like this and suddenly

they used to pop up targets in front of you and you had to shoot and you had to be quick, otherwise you were gone and that was the type of thing they did. Heavy route marches. For washing every morning we were marched down to the river. That’s where we washed and shaved in the river and the water was cold as charity too, and you swam in cold water too.

So it toughened you up and you did your own washing and that was in 4 gallon kerosene tins on an open fire. So you did it the tough way and then at the end of the course you had to do a 6 day hike, which took you up through the Lamington Plateau towards O’Reilly’s Guest House

and they used to taunt us with that, because if you don’t make this and come out you’ve got to do the course again. So you’d have fellas crawling on their hands and knees to get through the 6 day hike, just so they could get out of the place, because by that time you’d really had enough of it, and I reckon in some cases they were over trained.

Well I think the living conditions to start with, because you’re in dirt, fleas, you had to figure out your own toiletry conditions and all that sort of thing. You did river crossings at night on suspension bridges, you know that sort of thing. We were diving for 1

American that fell off one night and drowned there. We finally got him a few hours later, but it was too late. But I think they just they knew that things were going to be tough in New Guinea and they just wanted to get you through so that you would have prelim training for what you were going to face once you got up there.

As I said, this American, they were coming back from a night manoeuvre and ‘course they were in full equipment and you had to go across a suspension bridge, but although they had 2 tight ropes at the top, they only had 1 rope at the bottom and you used to have to slide across, and I don’t know why there weren’t more killed. That night he just lost his grip and went down, and with his full equipment couldn’t

get it off and of course he drowned and we spent hours diving for him, but they finally got him with a grappling hook. There were casualties there because it was a live firing range in a lot of cases and some blokes were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Others had accidents falling down cliffs and this sort of thing.

I don’t know whether there were any suicides there or not, but I can imagine there could have been, but there there were there were quite a number of casualties.

Not a great deal, I think we were still young fellas in those days and just the rub of the penny you know, just something that’s happened and you just get on with it. Didn’t have any effect on us at all, sort of psychologically or mentally,

was just another thing that happened.

None, no we kept away from them and they kept away from us. ‘Course in those days we didn’t like them, we didn’t like them at all, and you know they were over paid, over sexed and over here, you know that sort of thing and they

lived the life of Reilly. They had their own canteens and everything and we were eating out in the open and that was another thing, and I believe Canungra’s a different place today. I believe the whole thing is barracks and everything now, but in those days it was just tough hard work.

I think we just called ‘em “Yanks”, we

just didn’t want to know them, that was the big thing and we were very happy with our own company anyway, we were all on a par. We were all on our 6 bob a day and we knew none of us were better than the other and so we enjoyed each other’s company and if somebody wanted a loan you gave ‘em a loan and they paid you back on pay day and that was it .

No the New Guinea campaign was really started in ’42.

In Canungra, yeh oh wait yes it was. I was in Canungra in ’43,

yeh early ’43 yeh. Yes well it was just about the start of the Wau/Salamaua campaign.

I really don’t know. I’ve got a feeling that some of them may have been Middle East men, but see

the majority of them at that stage were fellas that had been through the course and decided to stay there as instructors as we decided to do.

No we only did NCO [Non Commissioned Officer] courses. The only ones I did were at Balgownie and

also Bungoa but apart from that no.

No no.

Well I arrived at Canungra actually as a lance corporal and we were put through the same training stint and we came through it pretty well and

when those of us that volunteered to stay there as instructors, because I really quite got to like the deal a bit and I thought, “Well if I can help somebody else I don’t mind giving it a go for a while”. So immediately we elected to become instructors they gave us another stripe. So

we became corporals and we’d put through a couple of courses at that stage and I was as fit there as I’ve ever been in my life, oh God I was fit. I was 9 stone ringing wet, but oh God I was fit. Then they upped the ante and said, “Right you’ve done a great job up to date” and

we were just acting, but they gave us the extra stripe, acting sergeant see, and we enjoyed that because we used to get a big kick out of bringing the kids off the train, you see they’d arrive on the train at Canungra. We’d line them up and march ‘em over the hill, but the local Canungra cemetery was on the left hand side and as they marched up the hill

with their heads bowed and struggling with their equipment say, “Look over to the left boys”, and they’d look over. We’d say, “They’re the blokes that didn’t make it”, and they used to shiver in their boots. We’d get them into camp and away we’d go and put ‘em through the course and I can remember some of them the same as me. I mean I suppose we struggled ourselves

to get through the course, but we started this 6 day bivouac that we had to go out on and there was a little fellow there by the name of Snowy Worthington. He had it, we were going up over Beaumont and he says, “Clarkey I can’t make it”. No he didn’t call me Clarkey, he says, “Corp I can’t make it”. I said, “What’s wrong Snow?” He said, “I’ve had it”, I said, “Right,

can you carry your pack?” He said, “Just about”. I said, “Well give me the end of your rifle and you hang onto the other end”, and we did that, and I pulled him up over the hill and he was alright after that. But they would have done anything to get out of that course, but it was a tough training stint, but then the disaster struck of course.

Well we were given a platoon each to instruct and we used to have to take them out for weapon training, show them how to strip and reassemble their automatic weapons, which were the Bren guns. We didn’t have armed guns there funnily

enough, but the Bren gun and and the rifle. They used to have to be able to strip it down, clean it and reassemble it very quickly. Then they’d have to go through the firing range and also we used to have a target range as well and used to put them through that, and any of them that

came out badly we used to have to go and instruct them and show them where they were going wrong and put ‘em back on the range again. Then we had the firing range where they had to go through the live ammo and we were firing Brens in front of ‘em like that, and they had to keep advancing and you know they were hearing the cracks going past them and it was a bit unnerving, but it was just a fact of life, they had to put up with it,

and so it was intensive in that respect. We had them crossing rivers in their gear. We did all that sort of thing. We had men on hand so that if anybody got into trouble we’d grab ‘em and I s’pose we’d put ‘em in sections and teach ‘em how to advance through the jungle, so it just went on like that, day after day after day until they got proficient

at it, and then when the course was finished they just got on the draft and went.

We didn’t have them then in Canungra. They had ‘em up in New Guinea.

Well not having been in New Guinea before,

I don’t know that I noticed a lot, except that we got an inkling that jungle fighting was a lot different to what they thought it was initially and they so it was filtering down to us. We used to have to make these fellas proficient in going out on

raids or patrols and show them how to be leading forward scouts, show them how to signal. If they wanted people to get down or come on, that sort of thing and so we could see the changes coming there because the experience was filtering back from New Guinea as to what had been going on up there,

especially on the Kokoda Trail.

Yes well they were only basic things. Some of the them were very clever and they’d just move the thumb like that to show that there was a pillbox over there.

You know they just push the thumb over there at the pillbox over there and

what they used to do then, he’d wave some of us down and then wave another crew across and we used to go around the back and protect the pillbox from behind, but our tracks weren’t very wide of course. See you didn’t have a lot and of course with the thickness of the jungle they could jump you any time, which they did in a lot of cases.

We lost a hell of a lot of forward scouts, we did.

To a certain extent yeh. The point is that once you got to New Guinea it was a whole new ball game, but I s’pose your basic training did help you,

but once you got to New Guinea as I say it was a whole new ball game. The terrain was different, the weather was different. Get a hell of a lot more rain in New Guinea than you got at Canungra. The surrounding jungle was more humid, was a more equitable climate at Canungra, but then you had the benefit

of the blokes that had had the experience and they’re the fellas you followed. And as I say some of the kids came out of Canungra were over trained and they were putting into practise in New Guinea things that were weren’t applicable to the type of campaign that you were fighting.

They became very fit and once they got there I think they had the attitude that we just carry on from where we stopped in our training and I s’pose they thought that

the Canungra conditions had laid down the basis for their job in New Guinea. I suppose it’s a wrong expression, but I think they had the attitude that they knew it all you see and that’s probably more

better description, but they had to go back and follow the men that had really had the experience and been through the tough times.

Same as the men. We slept on palliasses with the fleas and actually as an instructor I shared a shared a tent with some of the men in my platoon,

which I think was about was 6 of us to a tent. But I’ll give ‘em their due, they all respected us ‘cause I s’pose we were that fit we could do a lot more than they could do, and they knew that and what we told ‘em they did, and I think that they learnt the hard way when

they found out just how much they had to use their own ingenuity.

We got 1 lot of leave while we were there. Four of us, there was Maxi Bartlett, Danny Gleeson, Col Doolan and myself.

We were given 3 days leave to Southport and we went down in the back of a truck and we found this boarding house in Southport, a Mrs Sharpe, she had 3 daughters and she took us in because she needed the money and we stayed there for about 3 days and we used to go across the bridge at Surfer’s Paradise, just a little wooden bridge in those

days to the surfing beach and surf over there. Went to a dance or 2, really had a good time. There was no hanky panky there, you know we were pretty well behaved fellas and it was a great 3 days, it was good and I think this was what wetted Colin and mine’s appetite later on. We went back,

all those fellas went on draft the same as I did and I don’t know what happened to ‘em, never heard of them again. They were all split up amongst other units, but it was a good little break and that’s when we had a few beers and one way and or another. And there was a hotel in Southport I think, I’m not sure now, I’m trying to recollect,

think that’s when I got up on the counter and sang, “White Christmas” after I’d had a few beers in the hotel at Southport, but yeh we went back and another draft of kids came in and away we went again, and suddenly for some reason there was a lull in the proceedings. We didn’t have anybody in the camp, the whole camp had been cleaned out and we were left, just us instructors and

Col and I looked at one another one day and we said, “Boy, gees this is getting a bit boring. You think anybody would notice?” He said, “No”, so we got our gear, went across country to the road that went down to Southport. We flagged down a truck and I said, “Where are you going?” And he said, “Oh I’m going to Southport”,

we said, “That’ll do us”. So over Beaumont we went and right down to Southport and Col and I had 3 great days down there and I met a little girl down there girl by the name of Betty Hindle I think her name was, and we went to a dance together. That was good and then I met up with Col

a day or so later. I said, “I think we’d better get back mate”, and he said, “Well it’s going pretty good isn’t it? I said, “Yeh, 1 more day”. So we had the extra day and then we got a lift back on another truck that went back to Canungra and I forget the sergeant major’s name, but oh God was he in a turmoil when we got back. “Where the bloody hell have you been he said?”

We told him, he said, “Well you’re gone. Hoppy knows about it. You’ve got to go up on a charge”. “Mm, ok, right”. But it’d been a good three days and that’s when it happened. We went up on this charge and as I said old Hoppy was a First World War man. He used to ride around on a horse. He lost one leg in the First World War, but he was a lieutenant colonel I think. He was

there and we got marched in with the escort into the orderly room, went into his room where he was sitting and he just took one look at us, he said, “Right turn”, it was and took our hats off and he said, “Good morning sergeants”. “Good morning sir”. He said, “I believe you’ve had a little holiday?”

“Yes sir”. “How many days was it? Where’d you go?” “Southport”. “For how many days?” “3 days sir”. “Hmm”, he said, “I see you’re both sergeants. Now wouldn’t it be fair if we took 1 stripe for each day you were away? March out privates”. And that’s that happened to us. So as soon as we got out I said to Col,

“That’s it mate, let’s get out of here”, so we both applied to get on a draft and away we went.

It was very, very dead, a very quiet little village it was. Now all that land from Southport down to Burleigh Heads, there wasn’t a thing on it. There was swamp

behind it and you could have brought any of it for 10 pound an acre. Just imagine what it’d cost today, that’s all the whole of the Gold Coast, but Southport was a very quiet little village, probably had 2 or 3 hotels. Must have been a hell of a lot of their men away at the war. A lot of the women were holding the fort

there. All the bars were serviced by women, I don’t know where the fellas came from, but there was a hell of a lot of army blokes used to turn up at the dances. But I had a very soft spot for Betty Hindle. I didn’t marry her though, anyway that’s

that.

Yes it did, yes, just for knowing her.

Didn’t see any, no. There could have been but they weren’t where we were.

No, there was as I say a lull there and when we

when we got the boot and lost our stripes, Col and I just decided, “That’s it, we’re out”. So we went straight over to the orderly room to the Sergeant Major and said, “Put us in a draft Serge”, and so we got the paperwork together and away we went and when Max Bartlett and Danny Gleeson heard about it they said, “We’re comin’ too”. So they just threw their stripes in

and they applied for the draft. So the whole 4 of us left together on the 1 draft and we went up from Canungra right up to Brisbane and we caught this train that didn’t go up the normal railway line close to the coast. It went inland and a big draft

I think went inland simply because they didn’t want people to know about the troop movement. We came in the back way, and we came into Cairns. It was a bugger of a trip I tell you, because it took us about 3 days, but funnily enough the women were wonderful. Every stop we had

out in the bush, they took us inland after we left Rockhampton that’s right. Every station we came to out in the bush the women were there with cups of tea and cake and everything. They were terrific, but a funny thing happened when we were going through Rockhampton. Of course the train line runs down the street of Rockhampton and

we were just going through at a very slow pace before we crossed the Fitzroy River, and there was a fella driving along in a truck, had all these fruit and vegetables on the back and what was happening the boys were jumping off the train grabbing the fruit and veges by the case off the back of his truck and loading them on the train, and he didn’t even know and by the time we waved good bye and went over the Fitzroy River

his truck was virtually empty. So we had a good feed of fruit for the rest of the time ‘til we got further up north and what we did the 4 of us, we decided we’d like somebody to write to us. So we got 1 of our water bottles and got it out and we all

wrote our names and addresses on pieces of paper and shoved them in the water bottle, sealed her up and as we went over the Fitzroy River we threw it out of the train over the bridge into the water and suddenly what happened was that I got this letter from this girl and the story was that her father was a fisherman

and apparently we put the date on it and he picked it up about a month and a half afterwards, out of the water. I don’t know whether the other boys got letters or not, but I know this girl wrote to me. I wrote back to her and I think that was the end of it, but then we went up to Cairns. Got into Cairns and then they put us on this train, which they split into 3 and took it up the climb to Kuranda,

up past the Barren Falls, which really had water in it in those days. It used to come down in a torrent from the Barren River and then was a bit of a blur after that, but we just stayed straight out and we were inducted into the 2/5th Battalion.

Yeh.

Not a thing absolutely nothing. I just knew that there were 9 battalions in the 6th Division and they’d fought in the Middle East. I knew there’d been a debacle in Greece, but apart from that I didn’t know anything.

Well we were thrown right in at the deep end and I was just amazed at the way we were accepted. We were very warmly accepted. You couldn’t help it, but some of them were a bit

superior because they’d been through a hell of a lot and you couldn’t blame ‘em. But really, all in all we came in, we were given good treatment and we were just treated as one of the boys and we soon woke up to that when the train got in and ‘course it rained practically every day up there and they had to dig the tents in. They used to have to put grains all around the tents to take the water

away and everything, but we had a pipe band. Course the 2/5th Battalion was a was Melbourne’s own regiment and they hold a pride of place down there still and the sad part was that they had so many different commanding officers,

which I thought was sad, because they really didn’t get to know their troops properly.

Don’t know they had much in the way of

mentor, but one character that stands out for me was a fella by the name of Les Bull-Allen, who was a stretcher bearer. He was an amazing man. He was very strong, not that tall, but a very strong man and he had a

a great reputation of going in under fire and bringing men out, rescuing men and when they were up in Wau/Salamaua. They had part of a regiment, 162nd Regiment of the Americans came in towards the death, they were in

the attack on Mount Tambu and Bull was one of these fellas, didn’t matter what the situation was, if somebody was hurt he’d go and get ‘em. And there were I think somewhere in the vicinity of 12 American got either shot or knocked over unconscious with bomb blast,

and he went in and carried ‘em all out and for that they awarded him the Military Medal, which I think was worth a VC [Victoria Cross], because he’d done it before, but the Americans were impressed with him. They gave him the American Silver Star, but you wouldn’t want to meet Bull with two beers in him.

He was a maniac, but when he was sober he was the quietest and loveliest man on earth, he was a terrific bloke. Yeh I think I had a great regard for Norbert Flynn, who was Lieutenant, came from the 2/3rd Battalion.

McFarland.

Well I think he led a charmed life to start with. I mean he would just go straight in. He’d have

shells flying all around him, but I think he just had a fixation that somebody was wounded and they needed attention and he would go straight to the spot. Sometimes he had to get down and crawl, but once he got them he’d just shove ‘em over his shoulder and lift ‘em up and carry ‘em out and he was very successful in the job that he did as stretcher bearer.

Wasn’t the first time he’d done it. He did it again, he’d done it overseas in the Syrian campaign and he was just one of those unbelievable men that seemed to live a charmed life.

Well it had a great effect on us from the morale point of view, because you knew if you were in a shooting match and he was around, that if you did receive an injury you could bet

your life that he and whoever he dragged along with him would come along and get you out. He stands out as the real hero of the Battalion really, and yet he wasn’t in actual fighting mode, because as a stretcher bearer he didn’t carry any arms. He just

went in and got you.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes he’s a lieutenant by the name of Cyril Miles,

he was in charge of 9 Platoon in A Company. He won a Military Cross in the Wau/Salamaua campaign and he was just a wonderful leader of men. A slow talking man, he’s still alive. Matter of fact I met him the other day. Not in the greatest of health I’m afraid, but he was

a remarkable leader of men. He would take patrols to places that nobody else had taken them. He’s responsible for the surrender of the greatest number of Japanese in the south west Pacific war in that area. Yes I think 37 of them surrendered to him and

this is when he’d taken a patrol out by direction out to a village where they said there’s a lot of lot of Japanese. I think the natives had told him that, but everything he did with a quiet assurance and his men loved that, well I mean they got a lot of confidence from it and they followed him and I thought he was a great bloke myself too, and he did help me too.

‘Cause I used to get a bit edgy at times and I think we all did, we were all scared to death.

Yeh, you get a bit frightened I s’pose the word is. It didn’t matter, I think anybody that was up the front end and didn’t feel fear, I don’t think he was there.

You did get the exception, but sometimes you wonder where their brains were.

Well you didn’t hear a lot,

unless they were drunk. We used to have a canteen you know, of course they used to bring in beer and 1 night a week we used to get our ‘Lady Blameys’ and pay our shilling and get it filled up and you’d just walk round in a circle ‘til you came up again and you’d chat to the fellas . I think they dwelt on the funnier side of things more than anything else, but I did learn what a

debacle Greece was from them in the early days. They should never have gone over for starters, but the stories they mainly told you were the sad stories of the fellas that were killed, great mates that they’d lost, fellas that had done a lot and we even had some First World War men in the battalion

initially, but no they didn’t try to push anything down your throat. They knew you were going to learn the hard way soon enough and that’s exactly what did. The thing that made me sad was the fact that some of those fellas that had gone right through were killed in the last campaign. ‘Course they’d become leaders most

of them.

Yeh in Wondecla.

Yes well the whole of the 6th Division was camped in Wondecla. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd Battalions made up the 16th Brigade and the 5th, 6th and 7th made up

the 18th Brigade and the 4th, 8th and 11th Battalions made up the 19th Brigade and that was our division. We were camped in a bush setting and we were on top of the Atherton Tablelands, which always gets a fair bit of rain and it rained there

quite a bit of the time. We trained hard and we did a lot of field work, but towards the end when we thought we were going to the Philippines. They put us through amphibious training and they took us down to on trucks

took us down to Trinity Beach and we lined up there and the Americans brought in their landing barges. They were motorised and very sleek and they brought ‘em in, got their flaps straight on the sand and we marched on, didn’t even get wet most times and away we went up the coast, the whole Battalion. Well the whole Brigade actually went up there and

we got up to what they call Amber Beach at Port Douglas and they just lined up in an attacking wave and they came right in, didn’t get right into the beach this time. We were in about 4 feet of water when we jumped off the landing flaps when they’d let them down and we tore off soaking wet up onto the beach. Now

I don’t know whether you’ve ever heard of the boys anti tank rifle? We used to call it an Elephant gun but it weighed a ton, it was a rifle that shot half inch shell and it had one hell of a kick on it and it weighed a lot and a fella on our barge by the name of Ray Hill, he had this to look after and he tore off and jumped into the water, he just disappeared under the water under the weight of this and

fortunately somebody saw it and we had to go back and drag him out and drag the rifle out and pull it up on the boot beach and he wasn’t any good from there on, but the rifle just started to turn to rust as soon as it started to dry out, it oxidised straight away. But I still don’t know to this day why we took it with us, but anyway what happened we had our exercise, we landed, we held our fort in practise as it was

and next day they sent Australian barges to take us off. Now they were flat bottomed things, they hit the beach, they turned sideways, they slewed all over the place, they did everything but turn over. It took us ages to get off and just as well we weren’t being chased by the enemy, otherwise we would have been history. But finally

after a lot of hassle we piled onto these barges and they got away, but being flat bottomed going back to Trinity Beach they just came up on the wave and just let go and just went, “Bang”, and this went on for the whole time back to Trinity Beach, “Bang”, and we’re all seasick, we were covered in salt water, all our weapons started to rust and we didn’t care whether we lived or died at that stage. But finally we got back to

Trinity and of course the Brigade Major called it a great success. But anyway it was another exercise so we thought for sure we’re off to the Philippines. So we went back to camp and everybody went on final leave and I’d been

crook from time to time, I’d been in hospital at Canungra and I kept getting sick and I didn’t know what it was, but anyway they put me in the 104 CCS [Casualty Clearing Station]which was in Wondecla or Herberton and everybody went on final leave and when I came out they sent me to a convalescent depot and that was at Lake Boreen.

It’s a big extinct volcano, beautiful lake and wonderful facilities there and I had a lovely time there and I finally came back to the Battalion and I came back with a fella by the name of Joe Kirby, a chap from Queensland who was in Don Company. And we got back to the battalion lines

and it was deserted, there was hardly anybody there, only a few assorted troops and Joe had been injured in a parade ground accident when an attempt to blow up a stump had gone wrong and he got a bit of steel in his eye and he said to me, “Clarkey, I’d love to get home”, and I said, “Jesus so would I Joe. But you’ll be right though, as soon as the boys come back you’ll go”. But it never happened.

Well I found out later I had had an attack of bronchitis and I think it was just a repercussion from the pneumonia that I’d had earlier on probably, but we were there and Joe showed me a picture of his family. He had

a lovely wife and 4 beautiful children and when the Battalion came back they just put us in more intensive training. Joe never ever got home, he was killed up in New Guinea and I think that was one of the great injustices that I ever came across. A man with 4 children not to be allowed to go home and see his family before he went away. He

never ever saw them again, Joe wasn’t that tall but he was a nice bloke I enjoyed his company, he was a great fella.

I didn’t get any final leave. What happened, the mob came back, we all went into intensive training and they put us through a thing called the Johnson River Stunt. Now,

Yeh.

Oh yeh, it’s still there today. It’s not a convalescent home, it’s now a resort. There were 2 extinct volcanoes full of water. One was Lake Eacham, one was Lake Boreen and they were out towards Yungaburra somewhere and

I can’t tell you the exact position but this lake was a very, very deep lake because it went right down the crater and it was a wonderful place for swimming and it was a wonderful place to recuperate and they had this convalescent depot there and they gave you good meals, the food was lovely and you just relaxed and you didn’t have to do anything. You just relaxed in the sun until you got your strength back. Now I

s’pose I was there a couple of weeks. And if you go there today it’s now very up-market, very commercialised, but they take you around the lake in a in a boat and there are pythons there sunning themselves, ducks, there were fish and the whole bit. It’s a lovely place to stay and I enjoyed

my time there, but Joe wasn’t there. He came back from Rocky Creek, they had a big hospital at Rocky Creek, so he came back from there he and that’s where we met up, back at the Battalion.

Yes well our only hope was that if we were going to the Philippines we would have been on Yankee landing barges and not Australian ones. They were absolutely dreadful they were and I don’t know how they kept them in operation because

they should have all been scrapped the whole lot of them, but the Americans were good.

The Australian one coming home? Well when they had to put out anchor in the finish to try and get ‘em to stay square with the beach,

we were able to scramble on. We got wet again of course, but we managed to scramble on each landing barge they put a full company of men, which would be about 100 men, maybe a few more and then what they had to do then was back out off the beach

and turn round into the swell and away we’d go, but it was no picnic. I mean I know the fellas on the barges did their best, but they just weren’t up to it when it came to warfare was concerned, and we were absolutely stonkered by the time we got back to Trinity Beach because we’d

spent this whole day and night on Amber Beach on very short rations. ‘Cause we carried our own hard rations with us, making attacks and retreats and all the rest of it. So we were pretty exhausted by the time the landing barges came in. Anyway, as I say it took us ages to get on them and when we finally got on, we got this dreadful ride back to Trinity Beach, because they were completely

flat on the bottom and if you had a swell running they just lifted up on the wave like that and as it passed underneath the whole barge just went, “Plonk”, like that down in the gully until you rose on the next one. That’s how it went on the whole time.

Was just a great big cavern, you know like a swimming pool

it was, but it was all metal and we didn’t hold on anything, we just laid down and let the water come over us and everything, because we were too sick to do anything else. We didn’t have a lot of zeal to do a lot by that time. Anyway we finally got back, the barges got us back. I’ve got to say that they

finally got us back but you wouldn’t want to do it for an encore, let me put it that way.

It took us ages to get our gear cleaned again and our rifles get all the rust out of our rifles.

Yeh

well that was devised I think our 2IC [Second In Command] had a lot to do with it. The whole rationale behind it was for us to be just called on at a moment’s notice. We were to be issued with basic rations, go out in platoons out into the jungle where it was rainforest country, which was just jungle

country. We had to go out there, find our way through the jungle, spend a week out there and the rationale was for us to come back fully equipped and in as good condition as we set off. Great in practise, in theory, but practise was a little bit different. We started off and we got through

part of the first day and it was a nice fine day for a change. And as an aside I think he was a very lucky man, he probably never ever came back to the Battalion, one of our fellas got a call of nature and he didn’t have any paper with him and he made the mistake of pulling a leaf off a Queensland stinging tree, used it as toilet paper,

they carried him out in agony and I don’t think he came back to the Battalion because just to brush yourself on one of those is unbelievable, the pain that it gives you, but we didn’t see him again. But anyway as it went on we went out into this rainforest country all round the Johnson River. It’s in that Yungaburra Mitta Mitta area

up there and we had an ex air force bloke leading us and he was one of these you know, straight ahead no matter what and we got out there, we got absolutely lost, didn’t know where we were. We mulled around in this rainforest for days on end and we were in there for about 4 or 5 days I think, one way and another. We’d eaten all our rations. We were

as hungry as hell. We were as wet as you could believe and we just wanted something to eat and anyway you wouldn’t believe one of the blokes saw a carpet snake, which was a big one and he shot it. He said, “I’ve heard of people eating these”. I said, “Oh no”. Anyway we cut it up into

pieces, got a fire going and cooked it and we ate it and didn’t taste too bad either. Anyway we finally came out of it, and oh God we were a bedraggled lookin’ bunch when we got back to battalion, we were in a mess. But as an exercise I suppose it taught us that we had to have our wits about us, otherwise you could get

really lost in that country and not be found again. I don’t know how we came out. We staggered out on a road somewhere and finally got back to camp, but that was the last stunt we did. And next thing they did was break camp, everything was broken and we got on the trucks and we went down to Redlynch at Cairns and we were

in the staging camp there. We heard that the Duntroon was in, she was a lovely vessel too. Was only about 10,500 tonnes, but it was a beautiful ship and we were to get on it and then we got a message back at the staging camp that the ship wouldn’t be able to sail and we said, “Why?” The

wharfies wouldn’t load our ammunition unless they paid them danger money. So there was a larrikin sergeant in our company, a fellow by the name of Larry McColl and he says, “Righto fellas, volunteers?” So he went up and commandeered the truck, came back and loaded us on it and away we went down to the wharf. And

the wharfies were sitting on their backsides there doing nothing and Larry says, “I believe you’re having a bit of trouble loading our ship?” They said, “No we’re not going to load it”. He said, “Why?” Said, “We’ve got to have danger money for that”. He said, “Where where’s the danger? It’s ammunition”. So Larry came back to us, he said, “Right we may have to load this ourselves, but by God

they’re going to know that we’re loading it ourselves”. So we surrounded ‘em, grabbed 3 of them, the rest tore off at a 100 miles an hour and we threw the 3 of them in the water. Next thing some of us had to jump in and pull 2 of ‘em out because they couldn’t swim. But they wouldn’t load the ship, so we finished up loading it ourselves and that

that’s not the first reference I’ve had to the way the fleet labour was treated. They were like a fifth con, they were dreadful during the war. It happened in reverse in the 2/3rd when they came into Port Phillip, they wouldn’t unload the ammunition off the ship and the 2/3rd couldn’t go on leave until they unloaded the ship so

they got a few I think, they got two of ‘em and tarred and feathered ‘em, I think they covered ‘em in treacle and broke open pillows off the ship and put ‘em all over ‘em and then they unloaded the ship themselves. Then word got back to the railway boys and they weren’t going to drive the train to take ‘em to Sydney because they’d treated their fellow mates so badly. So second said, “No worries we’ve got fellas here

that can drive a train, we’ll drive it ourselves”. So in the finish they relented and the Battalion got on board and they took ‘em back to Sydney. But that’s the sort of thing that happened and one other case that I heard of which was shocking was at the time of the Kokoda Trail, the Australian General Transport who ran the had the AASC, that’s the Army

Australian Army Service Corp, which supplied our troops with rations and things like that and equipment and munitions, they were desperately in need of trucks at Port Moresby. Well the trucks got to Port Moresby alright, they loaded ‘em on and sent ‘em up to Port Moresby. When they got there they found that all the batteries had been pilfered and all the maintenance gear had been

pilfered out of them, so they were useless, they couldn’t do a thing with ‘em and the wharf labourers back in Port Kembla had taken all the stuff. This is the sort of thing that they had to put up with and I mean I just can’t imagine people being like that, not when you’re fighting to save their skin. But that was only 3 instances that happened and I know there were many more.

But anyway, we got through, finally loaded our Duntroon and we got on board and away we went.

I don’t know what the psyche was with

them at all. It was funny thing because I think they were probably controlled by their shop stewards or whatever they were. They were smart blokes, they knew they had the country by the short and curlys and they knew they could wield a lot of power so

they were in it to make a buck. They knew that if they put enough pressure on, they’d get more pay. But I just can’t understand their attitude, when they knew that it was it was imperative that they get everything to

the men in the forces or in the front line because we were fighting a battle to save the country. Now I don’t know whether they were deadbeats or fellas, there’s a lot of communists among them and they didn’t support the war effort at all

and I think this is where a lot of the problem lay, because of their communist leadings no matter what, they didn’t care what happened, but they just weren’t going to help us win the war. Some of them were different, some of them were very good, but you get you got these odd batches in different places where they reeked havoc and even

it happened up in Aitape Drome, the Beaufort 100 Squadron. Well a whole a whole shipment of bombs came up to them, but there were no fuses. I don’t know the truth about that or whether

they’d been sabotaged or not, but they got this whole shipment of bombs and they couldn’t use them because there were no fuses. This is the sort of thing that happened. Whether that was another sabotage or not I don’t know, but this is the sort of thing that happened and it left a nasty taste in the mouth. We got a big kick out of it, because we’d sort of subjugated them and

when we were at Cairns we’d overpowered them and let ‘em run away like scared rabbits, but we got a bit of kudos out of that.

No, I never had any brief for the stevedores. I think they’ve gone close to ruining this country a number of times, and I think that their I think their power now has diminished

a lot because of recent times. We were getting a much faster turnaround in ships than what we were getting before and I think that they know that the game’s up with them and they’ve got to tow the line a bit more. I think there’s not the communist element there that used to be there say in Sharkey’s day

and I got a feeling that some of them might be taking a bit more pride in their work now too, but they’re the same as us, they’ve got a job to do, they should do it.

Yes yeh we did. Well Duntroon’s a beautiful ship. It was it was a 10,500 twin screw motor vessel, and funnily enough it was black and red, our battalion colours, and they put 1,600 of us on it. That’s would have been 2 battalions and

we sailed out of Cairns and we were on the water for 3 days and we arrived off Aitape and we were out in Aitape Harbour. Now to get into shore we had to scramble down landing nets into barges and then go onshore there. Then they loaded us in a truck and took us to our camp that had been set up for us by the 16th Brigade,

which was good. They got there before us and we settled in and we took over from the 43rd United States Regiment who’d been sitting in a perimeter for months upon months upon months, and didn’t want any contact with the Japanese anyway and didn’t get it, but everywhere they

went they had it made. They had their cool rooms and everything set up. It was quite different to what ours were. Anyway we took over from them and we were then given the job of helping to load their stuff to take out on their ships to the Philippines and they had a hell of a lot of equipment there that they weren’t taking with them, and an approach was made by Division

Headquarters to leave their equipment so we could use it. Things like bulldozers and things like that and Jeeps and heavy trucks, all that sort of thing that we could have made very good use of. ‘Ducks’, you know the amphibious ducks. No couldn’t have one of ‘em. You know they loaded them all on barges, took ‘em out to the middle of the harbour, Aitape Harbour, and just drove ‘em off into

the water. There’s a car park like you wouldn’t believe on the bottom of Aitape Harbour now, but I just can’t understand their thinking. It was just a rotten waste and stuff, especially the bulldozers. We could have made wonderful use of ‘em. Anyway that’s how it happened so

next thing we knew we were off and we had to go.

Yes well they were sort of living in luxury of course, but we were in the usual tents and it was on the sand, though it wasn’t far from the beach but there was swamp right behind us

and they had the happy knack of coming over, they used to spray the swamps to keep the mosquitos down, but they had the happy knack of coming over and spraying it just as we were having sitting down to dinner and of course you get DDT [Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane] all over your food but we ate it just the same, but it did have an effect. It did help keep the mosquitos down but not withstanding that,

we were in an area where your nepheline mosquito was very bad, and it was that bad that instead of takin’ 1 Atebrin a day, we were taking 2 a day and it was a bit embarrassing, but we used to have to be supervised. We were all lined up and an officer’d go along, you’d put the 2 Atebrin in your mouth and you had to take a drink of water and then open your mouth to see they’d know you’d swallowed it. I don’t think the officers liked it very much either,

it was it was a very bad type of mosquito.

I think just the humidity was the main thing. You sweated all the time, but

while you were on the coast it wasn’t bad at all, except for as I said the mosquitos and the humidity, that was the worse part of it.

“Where have you brought me?” Oh no you seemed to settle in and get into the swing of things fairly easily. We

did two things. We helped load the 43rd Division and get ‘em out of the road and pinched a bit of their stuff at the same time, but then we used to go out to Aitape Aerodrome and fold supply parachutes so that the bombers could drop the foodstuffs by parachute with the stuff that

was likely to break and that was an experience, folding those and getting ‘em ready, and it was nice to meet these others fellas in the air force out there too, from 100 Squadron.

Don’t ask me now. It was an exercise though, and you had to fold it in folds, then fold it over and over and over and it

was actually on a little 3 ply base and it went into a little packet with a cord hanging out, so it you could see how they it operated. It was quite effective way to drop stuff.

Excellent,

they helped us out no end and they were very appreciative that we were there, because we had to stop the Japs getting in behind and attacking the aerodrome too you see, but no, we had a wonderful rapport with them. They were terrific people.

No we were glad to see them go. I s’pose a lot of it was envy because I mean to say, it

wasn’t war for them. They were just sitting up there and eating their heads off on the best of food and all cold storage and all that sort of stuff and we were on pretty hard rations.

Well they had cool rooms, they used to fly their fresh meat in. They had desserts and ice creams

and all that sort of thing. They had much better accommodation than we had. Some of them were bell tents, but they also had the duck boards too, so that you weren’t lying on sand. We had the collapsible stretchers and you had to put those up and you had to try and put your mosquito

nets up too, but the Americans again had the whole of their tents with mesh around them to protect them from the mosquito, but we had to hang up our own each night and then they used to send around a mosquito picket and ‘cause most of the blokes used to lie in bed with nothing on because it was so muggy and humid and if you were

caught with your backside against the mosquito net you got a whack by the picket, which was very disconcerting. But that’s the way they handled it.

They had to go around and inspect and make sure everybody was lying with their mosquito net up first thing, and secondly they were lying on their stretchers away from the net so that the mosquito couldn’t bite ‘em through the net.

Some of them nearly got punched at different times.

I know we pinched some beautiful jackets from them and the only trouble was they were size 40

and they were too big for me and so I had to give mine away. Some of the boys were able to scrounge foodstuffs and that sort of stuff, mainly canned stuff, but I s’pose it was all fair game. We were doing them a service by loading their stuff and the boys wanted something back.

Well meat and vegetables was

a canned one, but we used to live mainly on the bully beef and what we called the “dog biscuit”, which made by Bocof’s . They made biscuits and they were very nutritious. They had a lot of vitamins in them and you could make a sort of a porridge out of them, because our dixies were very heavy and big and long sided,

if you put 4 biscuits in and covered it with water, left it overnight, in the morning it was overflowing. That’s how much they expanded and that’s how they kept up with us too, or kept us going too was the fact that the biscuit, if you ate it dry it expanded and it filled your stomach. But we lived on bully beef ad nauseum you know, but

we never ever got any fresh meat yeh.

No, the Americans always had theirs flown in. There was no fresh food there for you to supplement your diet with at all.

Well once we got into action these were picked patrols.

Some of ‘em went out to Dreikikir and those places just to make sure the place was clear. I wasn’t involved in those. It wasn’t ‘til we got further up that I was involved, but the whole exercise was for the 17th Brigade to go inland over the Torricelli Mountains and push the Japanese back towards the coast where the 16th and 19th Brigade were,

and that was our task. We had all the hill climbing to do and it was tough.

Only what we’d been taught through army instruction. That they were fairly ruthless, that they were fanatics, they would let you walk on top of them before they fired at you, which was a bit

disconcerting, didn’t give us any great joy, so we just had to be very careful going in. We didn’t know didn’t know a lot about their psyche at all, apart from that the fact that they were pretty committed and would fight right to the death.

Yeh they weren’t invincible

at all. They had built up this aura of invincibility I s’pose, but they I think the Kokoda Trail taught ‘em a lesson. The Wau/Salamaua campaign really showed them up and I think they lost some of their confidence, because they just thought they couldn’t be beaten.

And of course when we went in, and I mean we lost some good men I know, but we killed a lot of ‘em.

Oh yes.

Well yeh there was an opinion and I agree with it, to a great extent that it really wasn’t necessary

for us to go in there anyway. Because with the by-passing and the attack back on the Philippines they would have been isolated to a certain extent anyway and they would have just had to have given up themselves in the end, but the hierarchy being what it was just decided that we had to go in and get ‘em out,

which I think was a bit short sighted anyway.

Not really no, I s’pose we’re a funny lot of creatures really. They sent us there and they told us what to do and we went out and did it and you didn’t seem to question a lot like you would today,

but they said, “Well they’re there, go get ‘em”, so that’s what we did.

Very soon after we got there. We got there towards the end of November and we’d started to move out

early December, so we wouldn’t have been there for more than a week or 2 before we went, and away we went.

We weren’t given any orders we just were just told, “Get on the truck”, and away we went. We knew we had to follow the coast down ‘til we hit the Harak River

and then make our way inland from there. Because the 2/7th Commando Squadron was patrolling the Tong area and they wanted us to go up through Nialu and Tong and meet up with the 2/7th there and well that’s what happened to us. We got on these trucks and we went down to the Harak River

and we camped there and s’pose you could call it a funny incident. A young bloke by the name of Krist and myself were walking along the beach, stretching our legs a bit, and we came across this stake stuck in the sand with a Japanese skull on it, and some smart boy had written right across the top, “Don’t let this happen to you, use Spruco Sheen”. And Spruco

Sheen was a hair dressing in those days. You wouldn’t hear of it today, but it was a hair dressing and Kristy was very chuckled about this, he thought it was funny. Anyway we camped there overnight and next day we took off, oh what a climb that was.

Not very often. You’d come

across body parts or skulls or something like that at different times, but the most part you just walked away from it, but this just was one instance where it was I s’pose a rather subtle way of saying, “Well we’ve got you boy”.

Not that we saw there no, because the 2 other brigades were down further. We’d come in behind them.

Well we didn’t see a lot of it until we got up into the mountains, and we used to call for air strikes up there and that’s when they came into their own then. They used to

keep in touch by a radio telephone and it worked pretty well.

Yeh.

Well they just

split up and each company went in a designated area to establish a base and A Company’s object was to climb up to Tong, make a base there and then go on from there. And then

they were designated to go somewhere and B Company was designated, C Company and we all sort of congregated at Yambes and then moved out from there. I don’t know the specific side of it.

No Yambes was up in the mountain.

Well the mountains in New Guinea come right down

to the sea. So from the time you leave the beach you are climbing, and they rise very steeply and I thought the climb from Harak River to Nialu was tough, but oh boy the one from Nialu to Tong was horrendous, and they tried to make it easier. The engineers went on before

us and they were putting in what we call “corduroy”. It was saplings about yay big, and they were pegging them in to hold them in as steps. Now that didn’t go all the way, sometimes there was nothing and you just had to slip and slide and get up there the best way you could, but I s’pose we were pretty fit and we were competing against one another see to who was the strongest and we just kept

going and we got there. We over nighted at Nialu, then we went on to Tong next day and while we were at Tong that’s where I left the Platoon because I got dysentery and they put me into the advanced dressing station there to treat me for dysentery

and while the rest of the mob went on I was there for some days.

Well we’re carrying a full pack. We had to cut it down. We carried half a 2 man tent, we carried half a blanket,

we carried our stretcher cover, a spare pair of socks, a spare shirt and half a towel and probably half a cake of soap and a toothbrush if you were lucky. And to stop the sweat coming through, I’d got one of these little pieces of 3 ply from Tagi aerodrome and I shoved it down the back of my

pack so that the sweat wouldn’t come through and wet everything. And on one side I had a little quib board, I pushed it down there on one side and I forget whether it was something else down the other, but it made it pretty square. Then on top of that you had your rifle and all and your ammunition. Now your ammunition were in your pouches in front of you, and

I know what I put down the other side, I used to put a couple of spare tins of bully beef down that side, but you carried your hard rations with you as well your biscuits and I s’pose it wasn’t that heavy then, but by gee it got heavy towards the end of the climb, yeh.

Well I was carrying a rifle. Some of the boys were carrying Bren guns which were pretty heavy, although they are only a light machine gun and the others had Owen guns, but the majority of us had rifles. They weighed 10 pounds, so that added to the weight. Then you carried about 50 rounds of ammunition and some of that was carried in

bandoleers around your neck. And 50 rounds of ammunition weighs up a bit too, so by the time you were you were packed up you were fully loaded and fully heavy.

Just your slouch hat, they did away with the tin hats.

Well not in my career, it happened in the early campaigns

in New Guinea and the reason for that was that when they went through the jungle if you hit your tin hat on something it made a hell of a noise and ‘course the Japs were alerted straight away, so I think it was in ’42 they did away with the tin hats and just stuck to the slouch hat or the beret.

Yeh.

No I’d never had it before and I’ve never had it since, but I don’t know how I picked it up, whether it was some bad water I drunk down on the coast or not, but it left me with terrific stomach pains and

‘course naturally the excreta was in pretty bad state and I was always sitting on a latrine or something like that, but the rest at Tong was good. It took me took me a little while to get over it, but I once I got over it still left me fairly weak of course, but I they told me I was well enough to

get back to the to the rest of the mob.

Very quickly I think, but when we got to Tong of course we had our pioneer platoon and they put down latrines straight away. So although they were out in the open, at least you could sit on something to relieve yourself,

but otherwise you just did the best you could.

Not a lot, except that they said to be very careful. If necessary, boil your water, and this is very hard to do sometimes, but mainly when you got up in the mountains though the water was pretty clean and

naturally the doc used to tell us to make sure every time we went to the toilet to make sure we washed our hands, well if we could, and again that we wasn’t always able to do, but no, they just taught us the basic hygiene things, but not a lot.

It’s a little flat plateau and it was originally a village there, but I think they’d cleared most of the huts off it and it was just a flat plateau with a pretty good field to fire. Japanese didn’t worry us there. We had one sad case where

a young fellow who was a batman to Norbert Flynn of 7 Platoon, I think it just got to him and he committed suicide while we were there, which was rather sad. He was a young sensitive bloke, very sensitive young fellow. He shouldn’t have been in the army, but anyway. Anyway they moved on, they went from Tong to Yambes

and you never measured anything by miles up there. It was all by time and it was about a 3½, 4 hour walk to Yambes from Tong.

None.

Well it was covered up in the history simply because they didn’t want to hurt anybody still alive,

but I would say everybody associated with that lad now would be dead. But it was just an incident and they just formed a burial party, buried him like any other fella that was shot or anything like that, and gave him all the respect that he was due to and just went on. I don’t think you could afford to let your emotions get to you so much

up there, and when you’re in that sort of situation. They when they went off to Yambes and I followed a few days later. And I was just walking out of the perimeter at Tong, and well I’d asked them before, “How do I get to Yambes?” They said, “Just follow the sig [signal] wire”. See we

had a signal cable running all the way through from Yambes to Tong to Yambes. They just followed the signal wire. So I was walking out of the perimeter and the fellow quartermaster he saw me going. He said, “Where are you off to?” I said, “I’m going to Yambes”. He said, “Oh you’re just the boy I want. They need another Bren gun up there and ammo”. And I said, “What?” And he said, “Yeh”. He said, “There’s the Bren gun and there’s a 100

rounds of ammo, you better take that with you too you see”. I said, “I can’t carry that”. He says, “You’ll have to, they need it. We’ve got nobody else going up”. So away I went and it didn’t take me long to run out of steam and I just pulled up for a rest and a tiny little native boy probably 12, 11 or 12 came along the track and

said, “You going up here master?” I said, “Yes”, he said, “What place you go?” I said, “Yambes”. “Me go too”, he said. So I said, “Well if you’re going to Yambes, what’s your name?” He said, “Haile Selassie”, and I said, “Oh God how’d he get that name?” Turned out he’d been down on the coast and the Americans had christened him Haile Selassie. So I said “Righto Haile,

you take this gun”, and I gave him the Bren gun and I said, “You can take some of this ammunition too”. So I gave him a bandoleer of ammunition and said, “Now you lead the way and away we went”. And we were travelling for about, oh I suppose about an hour and we came to a little few little huts and I was very sick by this time. I felt

ruddy awful and he was carrying a little machete with him as well and he said, “You no go along up here master”. I said, “Why?” He said, “You sick fella”, and I said, “Yeh I am a bit”. He said, “Me fix you”, and he climbed up a coconut tree and cut down some green coconuts

and chopped ‘em open and he gave them to me to drink. And it’s just like a fizzy drink, the juice out of a green coconut and it was good and I enjoyed that and I said to him in the finish, I’ve forgotten the pidgin I used in those days, I said, “I’ll follow you. You go ahead and I’ll come after”, and he said, “Yes master”, and

away he went. And I must have been a little bit delirious at that stage, because just outside the village as I went through I came in came to a fork in the track, and not thinking I took what I thought was the best track and it happened to be the right hand fork and I’d been walking down there for about, oh I s’pose 15 minutes, and I got the

fright of my life. A police boy stepped out of the kunai grass in front of me, and he didn’t say a word, he just put his fingers to his lips like that and I nearly fell over and he got hold of me and he ushered me into the kunai grass in about 20 feet, didn’t say a word, he just said, “Quiet”, and around the bend about 2 minutes later came this patrol of 12

Japanese and they went up the track, and they’d have been gone I suppose about 20 minutes and I just stayed and he must have known what was going on because he kept me quiet and about 20, 25 minutes later they came back, went back down the track and he signalled to me and he took me up back up the track

to where the fork was and pointed out the sig wire that I was supposed to be following. But what had happened, they’d gone up there, cut the sig wire and stood around for a while for an ambush, they’d hung around for a little bit thinking there might have been an ambush, got sick of it and left and came back again so I couldn’t do anything about it.

But Yambes and Tong would have known, because they wouldn’t be able to get any communication through, so he walked with me a while along the track and away I went and I just followed the right track then followed the sig wire and in the meantime what had happened is they’d got the message at Tong that something was up and they’d sent out a patrol from Tong and found the sig wire cut. And this was about

an hour after I’d left and they repaired that and I staggered along and I finally got to Yambes and Hailie Selassie had been there before me and brought in the Bren gun and the ammunition, but I landed there about 2 hours after he did and I’m just lying in the tent

and they put me in the RAP and somebody was writing a letter home. He said, “What’s the date?” He said, “6th of January”, and I thought, “My God it’s my birthday”. And anyway everything finished up OK there and A Company had gone off to Musenhaur,

and they said, “Well it’s no good you joining the company again. We’ll put you in the mortars”. So that’s what happened to me, I was put in the mortar platoon.

I didn’t see ‘em at all, but he saw them and he put up his hands like that 12. But

I heard them go past because we were about 20 feet off the track and he was very smart, he just waited for ‘em to come back. But if he hadn’t have been there I would have walked into them in another 2 or 3 minutes.

Very good, they were wonderful and the native police boys were terrific men, wonderful yeh we had a

wonderful rapport with them.

Well mostly they were in the New Guinea Infantry Battalion, but the odd one was seconded and sent out as a guide or something like that where they knew that there was a concentration of Japanese and they could lead us in.

So I was at Yambes then and I that’s where I left the Company and joined the mortars see.

Well they had native carriers for carrying in stores and things like that, but once we’d gone to Yambes they were either

free dropping ‘em or dropping ‘em by parachute. So there wasn’t a great call for them, but when we went into a village and cleared a village, the natives appeared from nowhere and they’d get the merries to work and they’d chop down all the long grass and clear everything so that we had a good field to fire and we made use of ‘em that way.

Yeh well they had been native villages, but I think the Japanese had made a mess of ‘em and so most of the huts were knocked down and they were just 2 complete plateaus. There were some native huts there, but Yambes was excellent for dropping. We had a good dropping zone which was a God send and

funny thing was that some little while after I’d been at Yambes, we got the message through that one of the boys from A Company had been killed, and he was the first one killed up there. His name was Noel Riles, and funny thing I met his sister for the first time the other day and we had a reunion up here, the Battalion. And his

sister lives at Wiley Point and she was invited to come to the reunion, but Noel was knocked over and he’d taken the place of Snowy Arnold. Snowy Arnold was Norbert Flynn’s batman and when Snowy died, Noel Riles took his place and became Flynn’s batman and he got knocked over too, so Flynn lost 2 batmen within a couple of weeks

But they sent a message through to Yambes, they rang Yambes up and said, “Well we want to bury Rilesey but we haven’t got a bible”, and they said, “Righto we’ll get one over to you”. And so seeing I’d been in A Company they said, “Clarkey here’s a bible, take it over to Musenhaur”. I said, “Musenhaur, how the hell do I get to Musenhaur?” He said, “Go down to the creek, pick up the sig wire and just

follow it along and it’ll take you right there”. It did too. I got down to the creek and away I went and I got up to I got up to Musenhaur.

Righto yes we’d been in Yambes for a few days and we got word that Noel Riles out of A Company had been killed and they wanted to bury him, but they didn’t have a bible

and Noel happened to be Norbert Flynn’s second batman. He’d already lost Snowy Arnold and Noel Riles had taken his place and he was Norbert’s second batman and he got he got killed at Musenhaur. So they wanted to bury him and they asked for the bible. So I’d been in A Company up to that

stage and they said, “Well Clarkey take this and take it over to Musenhaur”. I said, “How the hell do I get to Musenhaur?” And he said, “Well go down the track to the creek and you’ll find the sig wire down there and just follow that along”, and ok sure enough the sig wire’s there and I followed it along, and I got to Musenhaur, and we held the service, and I stood around and had a chat to the boys for a while.

And they said to me, “When are you coming back?” I said, “I’m not. They’ve taken me out of the company and put me in the mortars”. Anyway I had a bit of a bit of a yarn and I said, “Well I’d better be getting back”, and one of the sergeants there, Sergeant Larry McColl I think it was, he said, “Well we’d better ring up and let ‘em know that you are on your way”. So they get on the blower, can’t get through,

there’s nothing, the line’s dead. I said, “My God what do I do now?” They said, “Well you really can’t stay here, you’d better start and make your way back. We hope that the problem’s solved before you get there, and we’ll let ‘em know you’re on the way”, so away I went. I must have drawn the crows a couple of times. Away I went and followed the sig wire

back and I’m out about, I s’pose 45 minutes back to Yambes and I come around a bend and here’s the Sig Platoon from Yambes out mending the sig wire. After I’d passed, the Japs had come in and this lot of sig wire on my way to Musenhaur, and how the hell they didn’t stay there and ambush us I don’t know, but

I think it was just more nuisance than anything else. But oh God I was glad to see them, so they repaired the break and they just got straight onto A Company and said, “Right Clarkey’s arrived, we’ll take him back to Yambes with us”, which they did. And from there on I was put in a mortar section and my number 1 was a fellow by the name of

Nicholson. We used to call him Sawdust Nicholson. He was a nice bloke, terrific bloke and so what happened from then on we were attached to company’s to do the mortar work.

I don’t know, I think on reflection I was just silly enough to say, “Hey I’m going back to A Company to have a chat to the boys and pay respects to Noel”, and I didn’t think about it much. Because although there’d been a steady track between Musenhaur and Yambes,

I thought it’s just par for the course. And I wasn’t worried at all, and as I say I got through to Musenhaur without any problems at all. But I’m just so glad that I wasn’t in the wrong spot at the wrong time coming back, and the boys had been able to get out and fix the problem and that the Japs had gone, because they

they were a funny lot. I don’t know, sometimes they would stay there and other times they stayed there and opened up as soon as you came within cooey [hearing distance], but on those 2 occasions that I’ve mentioned, didn’t come near me. I was fortunate.

Yeh that’s when I got the fright, when I saw the boys mending the sig line

and they told me the Japs had been in and cut it. That’s when I got scared, but it all turned out OK and we got back to Yambes, settled down and then we moved on from there and funnily enough our mortar detachment finished up being attached to A Company as they moved on, and

we went through and we got out to a place near Samasai. Now young fella out of 8th Platoon, Tommy Rutherford got shot through the eye at Samasai. The bullet had gone in and gone down through his body and they brought him in, he was still alive and talking and they carried him back, but he didn’t survive. Was sad,

and then 8 Platoon sent in a message to A Company, they were running short of ammo so Sawdust and I volunteered to take ammo out to them. So they loaded us up with all these bandoleers and away we went. Nicho had an Owen gun and I had my rifle and it took us about an hour to get there. We got out there with all this ammo. They were

glad to see us, but by the time we got there darkness was closing in and Nicho said, “Well I s’pose we’d better get back”, and Lieutenant Stewart who was in charge of 8 Platoon, he said, “Too late now boys. You’ll have to stay here the night. We’ve got a couple of weapon pits with only one bloke in them and you can share those”, so that’s what we did. We stayed overnight with 8 Platoon,

didn’t have much trouble with the Japanese that night. They started to open up next morning and Stewart said to us, “Yeh well you’d better go get out while the going’s good”. So we toddled off and we’re tearing back down the track to A Company, which was about an hour’s walk away. That was A Company headquarters and

I was leading and I suddenly just fell flat on my face. I got the shock of me life. A great big cassowary came out of the bush and went across the path, thought it was a Japanese. You know what an enormous bird they are, it just tore out of the scrub and across the path and

I think that frightened me more than anything else. Anyway I picked myself up and I said, “It’s your turn to lead Nicho”, so we got back to A Company ok, and it wasn’t long after that when we got to Balif that it was time to be relieved and the 2/7th was coming in to relieve us.

Well the point I s’pose it was funny, because a couple of blokes in this mortar platoon got sick and they had to send ‘em back to the coast and they were running short of blokes and they reckoned A Company could do without 1 bloke.

So they shoved me in as a replacement for one of the fellas that had gone back, and didn’t take me long to pick up because I was just number 3 on the mortar. I used prepare the ammunition for the number 2 to shove it down the barrel, but they were very effective those 3 inch mortars, they were excellent.

Only trouble was carrying them, they were heavy. Used to have to break them ‘em up into bits, base plate and the tripod and the barrel and just hook ‘em up. Sometimes we were able to get natives to carry us, but a lot of the time we had to carry them ourselves and while we were with A Company, Don Company was going into a place called Emul

and they asked the mortar platoon to go out and lay smoke bombs on Emul they wanted to bomb it, the local bombers were going to come in and bomb it for us before Don Company went in. So we went out there and we got on a ridge and we knew where Emul was and we lined it up and we put down a bucket of smoke bombs, hit it right on target

and soon after with radio telephone communication, the Beauforts [medium bomber]came in and bombed it. They did an excellent job, but then a tragedy occurred there. Was a little bit of cloud about and 2 planes came in at an angle through the cloud and one chopped the tail clean off the other and it went straight down. The other one was badly damaged. We knew it wouldn’t get back to Tagi

and it limped back as far as it could and crashed near Yambes. And out of the whole 2 plane loads there was only 1 survivor and we had to send out a patrol later on to bring the bodies of the air men back, but it was a sickening thing to see happen and you couldn’t do a thing about it. You just sat there and watched it happen, but it sticks in my mind today because I can still see that plane

coming through the cloud and hitting the other one and it should never have happened.

Yeh we were right there, you could see it coming. You knew what was going to happen and you just had to sit there with your mouth open. You knew you couldn’t do a thing about it and they were lovely blokes all those fellas in 100 Squadron, terrific fellas. Yeh so that’s what happened and just after that we

got to Balif and they decided we had to come out, but 2/7th was going to come in and take over from us and they were delayed, and so we were delayed going out. But once we started to move out we’d got so far inland it took us 6 days to walk out.

Yeh well I didn’t have any action with A Company. It was with Mortar Platoon and we had to get up pretty close too and work by phone and they were dependent on us very heavily to lay very accurate mirages,

so we had our share of excitement. But we were very closely attached to the infantry companies. They had a section attached to each company and that’s how I saw out the war and we got in the thick of things a few times, but

the Company were able to beat them off.

I don’t know whether it happened then or later on I’m just trying to think now. Yes there was there was an incident with

A Company. I can’t even think of the place they were in now, and the Japs attacked them and they poured a lot of rounds into the company lines and they had to fight ‘em off, which they did successfully. But we had to keep our heads down. Actually we had to abandon

the mortars and get into weapon pits and use our rifles ourselves to help in the counter attack and we beat off the attack anyway, but there were other incidents. I just can’t recall more but there was another one when we didn’t stay with the one company all the time.

We were with C Company and the Japs came in and made very heavy attack on us, and they had to send fighting patrols out round the back to try and beat ‘em off from the rear, and in the meantime they just made sort of banzai charges and

again we couldn’t fire any mortar rounds ‘cause they were too close so we just had to act as infantry ourselves with our rifles and Owen guns. Sadly the only 1 killed in that one was a fellow by the name of Samson, and he was the Company cook and think he’d just gone out to light the fires in the morning to cook a meal and the Japs opened up

and he copped it. But anyway we got out of that scrape, but they made about 3 or 4 attacks and Len Cameron was very excellent, he was he was the company commander. We beat ‘em off and we got out of that, and that was just before we came out.

Well

if you’re in close contact there’s no point in using your mortar, because you’re popping it straight up and straight down you see. So if our role was to mortar a village or a strong point before a company attack went in, that’s what we used to do. Now that distance could be anything from 3 to 500 yards and

and that’s what we used to do and the mortars were very effective ‘cause they had a daisy cutter action. Once they hit the ground they just spread right out like that. So they were effective up to 1900 yards the 3 inch mortar, so you had that range that you wanted to fire. But once the Japs attacked a position

and you were in the perimeter, you just had to forget about the mortars and just become an infantryman and this is what we did a couple of times, but there’s it’s all part of the experience I s’pose.

I did one,

that’s the only one I can remember and we went out afterwards and he happened to be a warrant officer and I’ve still got his sword. He didn’t have much use for it after that and I brought his sword back home with me, but he was in front of the position, he was leading the charge in, but he was a little short bloke and I got him with my rifle.

But in a lot of cases you never knew whether you shot anybody or not. It’s 10 to 1 that it was guess work whether you killed anybody, but I knew I got this one.

Well I s’pose you didn’t react

at all. Except you knew they were going to kill you, or you were going to kill them and there was no real emotion about it at all. You just got your weapon and you just let drive and as long as there was a fire power going out from all this, the artillery, that you had all your machine guns

and your rifle you knew that you were going to keep ‘em at bay. Anyway, the attacks faulted and they just disappeared. But killed a lot of ‘em, must have got 30 or 40 of them at that time and they just called off the attack and went and by that time we’d made it to Balif and then they decided that the 2/7th should come in and take over from us.

So we packed up our gear and started back from the back to the coast, but my God it was a long trip back and we got back to our camp and all our comforts fund and Christmas parcels were there waiting for us, and our beer ration. And you know you kid yourself,

you think you’re going to have a real ball when you get all this stuff, and all the beer, you’re going to have a big party, but don’t realise that you’ve been in there for so long that your stomach’s shrunk and the fruit cake made you sick, and you used to get drunk on 1 bottle of beer. So it was a cheap party when you came out, but anyway we settled down to life there for a while.

But that was February and we had a bit of a break and went back in June and we took over from the 2/7th in June. Now what had happened in the meantime, a fellow by the name of Hay, an engineer with the 2/6th Battalion found an area at

at Maprik which they’d occupied, which was suitable for a landing strip. So he got all the natives from everywhere he could and cleared the whole area and laid down these big long pieces of steel mesh right along the runway, and made a landing strip out of it. So when we flew back in, when we went back in to relieve the 2/7th, we went out to Tagi Aerodrome and they flew us in and they put us

in these bombers, the DC3’s [Douglas transport plane]and flew us back in there. Whereas it had taken us 6 days to walk out, it took us about 35 minutes to fly back in. And we all piled into these planes and ‘course when they used them as supply aircraft they took all the side doors off and there was a great big gaping hole in the fuselage where they used to kick the supplies

out. And we piled on and as luck would have it there was a fellow by the name of Hutchison, and Jenson, and myself. We got a seat because the seats ran round the fuselage like that. There were no cross seats and we sat down and we’re sitting right opposite this great door and we’re waiting for them to shut the door, so they didn’t and

a fellow came round and he said, “Are you comfortable?” We said, “Yeh except for this great big hole here”, he said, “Oh no that’s no trouble at all. You’ll be alright”, and in these planes were little Perspex windows all the way along, and in the middle there was a little hole with sponge rubber around it. We said to him, “What’s this for?” He said, “Well if by any chance you’re attacked by an aircraft, you put your rifle through there and you shoot at it”. Oh God,

I thought it was the joke of the week. Anyway we took off and we flew into Maprik, but as we got to Maprik drome the DC3 banked like this and suddenly we’re looking down at the jungle like this through an open door. Well there was Hutchie and Jenson and myself, we just got our fists and we shoved them through those holes in the panes of glass there in

the Perspex and we were hanging onto the outside of the aircraft like crazy. But actually it turned out it was right, because as the plane slewed round the centrifical force threw you out towards the side of the aircraft, not that way, but I tell you what it wasn’t a nice experience. Anyway we got in there and we took over from the 2/7th.

Yeh.

Yes and it’s not nice, but they did resort to cannibalism.

And we actually found Japanese with human flesh in their packs and we know that they got one of our fellas. And that was the thing we worried about most, that if we were wounded or knocked over that they would get us before the Japanese did.

They did some dreadful things and it’s hard to reconcile Japan then with what it is today, and I’d say that the ordinary Japanese child is quite a very nice person, but what makes me sad is that they won’t own up to the atrocities.

Yeh.

Yeh well the first thing we found, I didn’t see it myself personally, but the boys attacked a village the other side of Maprik and when they went in there they killed a number of Japanese. And

they were just going through their packs for maps and information and that sort of thing and one of the boys opened a pack and found human flesh in one of the packs. And the other fellow, I won’t mention his name, but he only been with the Battalion a very short time, and we’d laid down the mortar barrage and they went onto this Kunai slope to take it, that’s with

C Company, and he got killed. Matter of fact there was 4 of ‘em killed and quite a number wounded and they got back and then we laid down another mortar barrage and they went in next day and they took the place. And we found this fellow with part of his buttock cut off, which wasn’t nice,

not something you want to dwell on.

Yeh it was part of the war.

Yeh I’ve read articles in newspapers where it happened in other parts too in New Guinea. And well I s’pose they were running out of supplies themselves and they used to raid native gardens and that sort of thing.

I don’t know if they killed any natives and ate ‘em. I wouldn’t know, but I know they got this particular fellow that I know and but it’s sad, because we were getting towards the end of the war and we were seeing some of our best men knocked over, which was sad.

It’s taken a hell of a long time to die down and I don’t know whether it’s a matter of trust or whether you ever learn to trust again, because I’d hate to think that they’d become a

decisive world like power again. I don’t think they will, but I’d hate those sort of things to happen again. Not that I think that they would, because I think if there is another war it’d be a different kind of conflict altogether, but I’ve spoken to Japanese and they’re very nice people. The fact that they won’t

won’t teach in their schools what actually happened is a sad reflection on their mentality and I think they can’t get over the fact that they lost, that’s the big thing for them. So we got to Maprik and we had a fellow in our

battalion, a fellow by the name of Donnelly, we used to call him The Stump. He was a tall, big, well boned bloke about 6 foot 4. And The Stump had control, he had number 13 or 14 Platoon I think, and he pulled off some terrific, unbelievable feats in the first time we went up. I mean

they’d attacked a village and chased the Japanese out and one Jap was running away flat out and Stump chased after him and tried to give him a burst with his Owen gun, but he’d emptied his Owen gun so he just caught up with him and wrapped his Owen gun around his skull. He was a big strong bloke, used to be a footballer too. But once we got back to Maprik,

he’d learnt just before we flew in that his brother, who was in the 2/7th Battalion, a sergeant, he’d been killed and Stump was like a caged lion. He couldn’t get out there quick enough, and fortunately I think the Catholic Padre come through and they had a service just before this patrol went out, and Stump was leading this patrol

and I described it in the book, because it was very dramatic. They went down to take this Noel down the way to our next point and they were down about 400 yards and suddenly, “Whoomp”, everything opened up, all hell broke loose and I could hear the fire from both sides.

You could distinguish Japanese fire from Australian fire.

It just a different type of staccato from the from the weapons, mainly machine guns and I s’pose 10 minutes later there was a young fella came streaming back up the track and tears pouring down his face yelling, “They got The Stump,

they got The Stump”, and Len Cameron who was the company commander, he was a wonderful man, was the first time I’d ever seen him loose his composure. He tore off down the track calling for us to follow and bring ropes and all the rest of it and by that time the rest of the patrol were coming back up the track and they convinced him there wasn’t any point in him going down. So

we lost The Stump and there was a couple of other blokes killed with him. I don’t know whether I mentioned it, but there were three Greens in the Battalion and they all got wounded on the same day, and that was the day one of ‘em was this Carter Green who did the artwork for our book, and he was he was wounded and

a little fellow out of the 1 Section got one through the lobe of his ear, but it was a real debacle and sadly we never ever found Stump’s body. We called for an air strike straight away and blew the place to bits and the Japanese just disappeared after that, but that was sad and this sort of thing happened all the way along you know, fellas that seemed invincible

just going down. Then we went on and there was a couple of other skirmishes we had, several skirmishes, I can’t remember ‘em all. But I know we got to one place and Harry Lagray was in our section of mortars and I’d been on

on stand 2 picket and he was to relieve me at midnight. And very meticulous bloke Harry, he never let you down and he came down and relieved me right on the dot of midnight and I went back to my 2 man tent and I’d just crawled in

and about 3 minutes after I got in there, “Boom”, enormous explosion and Harry came tearing through my tent right over the top of me and I just hold him down. The Japanese had thrown a bomb in on him and he was just full of holes and he was bleeding like you wouldn’t believe, but he survived. 3 or 4 of us had to get him

and carry him over to the RAP, which what they call a Regimental Aid Post, and got him in there and we got lamps going and started to treat him and dress his wounds as much as they could and the bloke in the RAP looked round and grabbed hold of me. He said, “Now what can I do for you?” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Look at you”,

and I had blood all over me and it was all Harry’s. And where he’d jumped on top of me and I’d had to hold him down because otherwise he’d have kept going and they’d gone out the other side of the perimeter. So anyway they patched him up and next day I had to take the patrol across to the advanced dressing

station with Harry, take him over there and they got the natives in to carry the stretcher. And we also went over to get some supplies as well and that’s the last I saw him ‘til after the war. But you only had to be late 3 minutes and it could have been me, so I was very fortunate. But anyway that was quite towards the end of the war and

sadly when I went down again they wouldn’t let me go back to the Company ‘cause I collapsed when I went over there and was later discovered I had hookworm. But they couldn’t pin it down at that stage and they put me to bed for a couple of days. And then

the war was getting towards the close, so they put me over near headquarters somewhere and I was sitting on the top of a mountain one night and we had this earthquake and it was a funny feeling you know, just a tremor, like that, and didn’t last long. But the next morning they told me they’d dropped the atom bomb,

so everything couple of days later was kaput. Everything had to stop and so we just battened down the hatches then and just as they withdrew us back to Maprik, the war was finished. So and we had to hang on there for a few days while things quietened down and try and convince the Japanese.

This was the fact, they’d gone, it was all over and they dropped leaflets and everything to them. I’ve got a copy of one out there, but what happened was we just stayed there and then they gave us the order to move out so we gradually made our way back to Maprik and some of the fellas had already flown out in DC3’s,

and this day they’d got a whole heap of Japanese rifles and they’d thrown ‘em on this Lockheed Hudson bomber to fly them back to Maprik and the pilot said to me, “Would you like a lift son?” I said, “Yeh if you’re going”. He said, “We’re going alright, so jump on”. So I got on this

thing and it was so loaded down it just got up off the strip. He came in and landed down at Wewak and Cape Moam

Yeh right.

Yeh there’s one, he’s President of the Victorian

branch of the Association, fellow by the name of Ivor White, we used to call him White Eye. He was a real character. He joined the Battalion, I think he went to Greece with them and through Syria, but he was a great runner

and also great at backing horses. I think he had more losses than wins all up, but he was he just one of the those fellas that was just a joy to be with. He was funny in I s’pose a reserved sort of a way, but he used to

do some funny things. He’d just go AWL at the drop of a hat. And I think in the Wau/Salamaua show he spent most of his time in Bo. I think he got back right towards the end of the show, but he was with us right through the Aitape/Wewak campaign. But he’s a fella that’s enjoyed his life, a great drinker.

We just couldn’t imagine how he drank so much you know, but always kept his marbles for some reason and he was just one of the fellas . I’m just trying to think, it’s a bit hard in a way just to pick ‘em out.

It was great. You

you know there wasn’t anything that somebody wouldn’t do for you. Great little bloke that I knew and I thought he was a terrific little fella by the name of Bluey Larson. He was out on patrol one day and a Japanese bullet hit a branch

just in front of him, turned over and went into his skull backwards. But it didn’t go in too far and they took him to hospital and operated on him and he came out quite OK. I went and visited him and we had a good old laugh about it. Towards the end of the war he was out on another patrol and, “Bang”, he got one this time straight through the same spot and

that was the end of Bluey. Yeh, great little bloke. But we were all great mates. Oh we used to fight like cat and dog amongst one another, but it was all nothing you know. You get a few beers in you, you’d go at one another like Kilkenny cats. But next day you’re buddies again, you can’t remember what happened. But Larry McColl was another

character. He was a real big, raw boned sergeant in A Company and he used to get up to all sorts of mischief. But he lead the charge when we went down and threw those wharfies in the drink and there was no ifs and buts about him. He wanted something, he just went and got it like he commandeered this truck. I don’t know how he got it to this day, but he just commandeered it and away we went. But you find those blokes

they’re spread out amongst them the Battalion.

Well it used to upset some fellas a lot more than it did others. For instance, Joe Kirby’s death really knocked the stuffing out of me and

I know I was angry. I was upset and angry to think that that fella never got a chance to go home and see his wife and kids before we went away and there was no excuse for that, no excuse whatsoever. But some fellas took it badly, some fellas just let it pass over their head.

I mentioned him earlier on. Joe was

was injured in a parade ground accident about the time that I was in hospital with bronchitis and I went away to a convalescent depot at Lake Boreen and we both came back to the Battalion at the same time. He came back from Rocky Creek and I came back from Lake Boreen and the camp was empty and were only a few odd bods around

and everybody had gone on final leave. So we said, “Well what about us?” And they said, “Well don’t worry, as soon as the boys come back from leave, we’ll send you off”. And Joe had showed me this photograph of his 4 young children, beautiful kids and his wife lovely wife and he said to me, “Clarkey I wish I could get home”. I said, “Alright Joe. When the boys come back we’re off, we’re going home”.

And they came back and they shoved us in an intensive training and he never got home. And he and a young bloke by the name of Snowy Sherwell, they were both in D Company, got blown up one night by a Japanese bomb. Joe was killed outright and Snowy died of wounds next day, but that was one of my saddest moments.

I just couldn’t believe. I sort of just collapsed a bit and the whole point is that the companies were spread so far apart I couldn’t even get over there to attend his funeral, well it wasn’t a funeral, just burial and so you know, I s’pose you just got to learn to live with it, but there’s some injustices

in this world that should never happen.

I don’t know. I went away and cried, I really cried, but I mean you couldn’t do much because you just had to get up and get on with it.

But I had a good howl, I really did have a good howl and I thought, “What the hell are we here for?” But next thing, “Boong”, somebody else gets knocked over and it doesn’t affect you at all, because you didn’t know them personally. But to have one of your mates

knocked over, yeh well it does affect you, but we did operate as a pretty closely knit group. We had to because we all depended on one another and when you got into a stoush you knew that your mate would be lying there beside you and he’d be shootin’ as hard as you were to stop yourself from being overrun.

Well there was a padre attached to the battalion. There was also a doctor. Mike Busby, he was a great bloke too or you could talk to your platoon commander, but you just didn’t feel that you wanted to do it. I think the last thing I wanted to do

was talk to a chaplain, even though my father was one. That’s the last thing I wanted to do, but he used to come ‘round and hold services and he’d do the burials too. Sometimes he couldn’t get there and you just had to bury anybody who was killed just where they were,

and I was very upset at Jack Brooker’s death too, he was an original. He got knocked over in Yamil and he got shot through the neck and he just had time to yell out to the boys to get out and then, “Boom”, and we went in and got him next day and brought him out and buried him where we were in our perimeter.

Did give it a bit of a knock, yeh it did. I suppose I had a certain amount of faith anyway to start with. I don’t think it was as strong as the faith that

my sisters had or, I don’t know about my brother, or my mother and father, but I you know you tend to question things when that sort of thing happened. It did sort of affect it quite a bit as a matter of fact. I don’t count myself as a religious zealot

or anything like that, but I do believe in a greater being and I do still attend my church, but there’s always a niggling doubt left in your mind when someone close to you goes like that. I know of other people where it didn’t affect them at all.

Well you know during the war Australia was an absolutely great country and after the war it was too. I was never cut out to be a banker and yet I stayed in banking for 44 years. You get into a catch 22 situation. See

I got married, we got a family, you’ve got to support ‘em. You’re falling over with malaria and getting sick with other things and you just haven’t got the energy to take on something else, so you’ve got to stick with what you’re doing no matter how much it irks you. I had to change my attitude and I had to learn to like what I was doing, although I was never cut out for it

and I did become a manager and I did serve quite a number of branches as a manager. What was the other question you asked me?

Well when we realised that we were in danger of being overrun,

nothing would have stopped us from going, any of us any of those young fellas . Yeh there was a lot of larrikins amongst us, but the point is that you get that attitude, “I’m damned if I’m going to let anybody else take over”. We enjoyed this country, was a great country. Just after the war was a wonderful country and I think

think where the whole psyche of the regard for the country changed was in the 60’s when all this free love and hippy element started and I think they were probably some of the baby boomers who are now reaping the rewards of their follies and

I think respect for the wiser and elder population just disappeared. Any young person thought they knew better, and we could still teach ‘em a thing or two.

Yeh.

Yeh.

Yeh.

Well I think you mean in hospitals and things?

Well it’s amazing when you’re sick or wounded

like that, people go out of their way to help you. I remember my experience in the 104 AGH at Bathurst when I had the pneumonia. Sister Searle, she was a busy girl, she could have just left me and said, “You know blow it, I’ve got too much to do”, but that woman came ‘round every day and encouraged me to hang on and it was her that saved my life. So say Helen’s sister was in the hospital

at the same time, but I didn’t know her, she was nursing in another part. Then after 104 I think I had a couple of trips to hospital when I was at Canungra,

mainly with upper respiratory infection, but I was strong then and ‘course I came through that alright, but I found even the male orderlies were pretty good they were very good. I don’t think they would have let you down for any

any reason at all. Even when I went to the advanced dressing station up in New Guinea, when I’d taken Harry over, I walked out and I was making my way out to go back to the Company and one of the doctors saw me and he said, “Hey son come over here”,

and he took a look at me and he looked in my eyes and opened my mouth and said, “You’re not going anywhere, you’re too crook”. So they put me in hospital for a couple of days. I didn’t know it at the time and they didn’t know at the time, but I had hookworm and so when they let me out of hospital they wouldn’t let me go back to the Company. They just put me in one of the back near headquarters somewhere and

then when I came out I went into a hospital at Wewak again. The 104 CCS was there and that’s where Helen’s sister was, a theatre nurse, funny thing that. And from there they sent me up to the 2/11th AGH at Aitape and that’s when they discovered I had hookworm and they treated me up there and they were excellent, I found them excellent. Funny thing was I

discharged by a doctor, a fellow by the name of Eric Davis, who was a member of the same golf club as I was after the war at Chatswood. And he was a tiny little fella, but he was a funny little bloke, a good little doctor and that’s about it as far as my hospitalisation was concerned there overseas.

It’s amazing. The Americans could have run rings around the Australians as far as theory was concerned, but if the whole hospital set up wasn’t there for them to work in they were gone, they didn’t know what to do. The Australian

nurses and doctors, they just set up hospitals on dirt floors, they were amazing. They boiled up their instruments in 4 gallon kerosene tins. They used to lay their bandages out in the sun to dry. They did all these sort of things and when it came to practicalities the Australians left them for dead, and this is what I found all the way along the line. They were dedicated people.

You’ve only got to read the war diaries of Weary Dunlop just to realise what great people the Australian medicos were.

Yeh.

Pretty basic, pretty rough. It was only corn sacks over a couple of poles and with

with V shaped stumps set in the ground and you just lay on those. You needed a blanket at night because it got cool up there and you just had to be ready to jump out. Most of the time I just had a shirt on and no pants, because I had to take off for latrines fairly often. They gave me

self Aguidine tablets and that seemed to settle it down and I got out of it alright. But that same ADS was used for wounded as well when they started to come back, so there no Ritz Hotel about it. It was just basic shelter and comfort but whoever

was in charge did their best for you.

Yes.

Well I didn’t know, it existed until I read about it, but they had a radio telephone. They used to do it by radio telephone.

The ordinary mobile field wireless was no good, it was hopeless, but they had a system of radio telephone. They would just call the air force base and say, “We need a strike on map reference so and so, and we will lay down mortar smoke as your target”.

And this is what we did and they would call ‘em in and then would give ‘em the go ahead to attack and our fellas ’d be waiting down the bottom for the attack to finish and then they’d go in straight after the attack, so it worked pretty well.

Yeh, not so much with us. I don’t know why the blasted Yanks call it friendly fire anyway. You’re just shot by one of your own blokes and it never happened in the Aitape/Wewak campaign, not to my knowledge anyway. I think it could have possibly happened in the Wau/Salamaua campaign on 1 or 2 occasions, but

in the Aitape/Wewak campaign, no. We were pretty savvy fellas . We knew how to use our weapons and where to point ‘em.

Not to my knowledge and I

I’m pretty sure there wasn’t. The smoke that we put down was very accurate. The other thing is that we knew where they were going to bomb and we kept far enough out of the way, but close enough to allow them to come in and either bomb or strafe before we sent any of our fellas in and we never got one casualty

from the bombing or the strafing of the air force.

Well it all depends where you were. In a lot of cases we were on one ridge and they were bombing the other ridge and yeh you could get a good view then, but if you were down in the valley there was no hope. We saw several of them and they

they did an excellent job. Every time we called for an air strike they were there, and we used to watch it quite often and you’d know when our fellas had gone in and taken the place, because as soon as they’d captured the place they’d put up a light to say they’d taken the place

and it helped a lot that way from the Battalion Headquarters point of view when they were planning their next move.

Well we had none not between companies. It was all done with sig wire and telephone and as I say they

they did have up there at some time these field wirelesses, but they were hopeless. If you got down in a valley you couldn’t connect with anybody and ‘course a lot of moisture got in too and ruined the batteries, but the radio telephone link was strictly between the ground force and the air force.

I think it shook us all up in the mortar section, because Harry was a nice bloke and

I think we were all nervy at that stage of the war. We were all pretty jumpy. I would never say I was the calmest bloke on God’s earth at any stage and I was always scared. There weren’t very many moments when I wasn’t scared, not when we were in action.

But Harry’s injury brought it home to me loud and clear. That just how close it could have been for me to have been in his place and as I said, he was a pretty punctual bloke and he took over from me right on the dot of midnight. I’d been gone 3 minutes and, “Bang” he copped it.

Yeh there were yes. There were several cases up there where their nerves just shattered completely. They had to take ‘em back to the coast put ‘em in sort of isolation and try and treat them, get ‘em home as soon as possible.

I mean every bloke’s temperament’s different. There for the grace of God go I, it could have been me, but it didn’t and I think you built up some sort of reserve within you. Say well if your mate can carry on, you can carry on, and this is this is the way we attacked it a lot of the time.

Yeh, “troppo”, that’s used everywhere. But yeh some of ‘em did go stark raving mad, yeh not too many but some did.

Not to much in our battalion, but I saw it out of other battalions and I wasn’t there to

see the instances of course, but we just got told about it and I did see evidence of it when I was in the 2/11th AGH with hookworm, that’s where I saw these fellows. They just had to isolate them completely and whether they recovered afterwards I don’t know, but some of them I wouldn’t imagine.

But we for the number of troops that were up there the instance was very low, very low indeed. I think the Australian soldier in those days was made of pretty stern stuff and I think just

the camaraderie had a lot to do with it. You knew you had backup whenever you wanted it. They never left you out there on your own.

Mostly they tried to hide it, but I saw it on a number of occasions.

Again for the number of fellas that I was associated with it wasn’t great, but I saw it happen. Your emotions are a funny thing. You just don’t know how they’re going to affect you. Some blokes would just swear and go on and stamp their feet or yell or something like that. Some other fellas would just go away quietly and have a good weep. It all depends how close

they were to the incident involved I s’pose. As I said, Joe Kirby really affected me because of the injustice of it all.

Yeh.

The earthquake had nothing to do with it of course, but yeh it was just a feeling of utter relief to know that the whole shootin’ match was over and that hopefully we could go home soon. Pretty soon after that when we got back to the coast they

started to call for volunteers for the British Commonwealth Occupation Force and I was going to go in that, but then I had second thoughts. I thought no I’ll go home.

I don’t know that we took it all in.

‘Cause you must imagine we were still up in the Torricelli Mountains when it happened and I think it was years later when we saw depiction of it on television on the screen that we suddenly realised what a massive weapon it was. But at that stage you knew that they’d dropped the bomb, that it ended the war which was

enough for us.

No I don’t think we ever celebrated. I think it was just a feeling of utter relief. There was no celebration. We just ducked our heads as low as we could and kept out of the way until we knew it was safe to put ‘em up again and when we got back to the

coast the battalion was assembled at Lake Wong. First thing we went for was our beer ration and whatever we could get hold of. I think we just toasted the fact that it was all over and we were still alive, but there was no real celebration. One thing that happened was

we were deprived of food, this is not generally known. I think a fellow by the name of Ford was the Minister for Army in those days and he got an earful from the hierarchy about it, but they’d just forgotten to send us any food. The supplies just ran out. There were tins of

meat and vegetable around, but that tasted so awful it. But after the war there were no supplies from Australia and we were taking vitamin tablets and I think it was very hard to eat. We just didn’t like it, but it only lasted a week. But we were living on scraps and vitamin tablets and suddenly somebody woke up, so they got aircraft flying into Wewak with supplies on board and it wasn’t a very nice way to treat your troops

after they’d laid it on the line.

Yeh well yeh a few of ‘em came out, some of them came out to surrender and in a lot of cases we just sent ‘em back to their line, “Stay there until

you get further instructions”. I was at I was present at the surrender at Cape Wong when they flew Adashi in and don’t know where they picked him up. I think they might have picked him up at Maprik and flew him in and they made him walk nearly the whole length of the runway and they surrounded him with

6 of the biggest men I’ve ever seen to make him look small. He was small in the first place, but they made him look smaller and I was there. He handed over his sword to Red Robbie and then he just got back got on his plane and flew out again. But we saw a lot of the Japanese when we finally went to Rabaul and a story about that too. Was all tied up with this hookworm business.

Well a red and blue leaflet striped and it said in essence that the war had ceased and they were to cease operation and surrender.

I’ve got copy of one out there somewhere. I’ll show you, but lot of them wouldn’t take any notice of it because they didn’t want to know that the war was finished. But eventually they got the message. But they were pretty straight forward in what they were saying.

Yeh well I came out of hospital with hookworm and at that stage the Battalion had been disbanded which was a sad time for us all. All the long serving men had gone home and they were gradually going out on drafts according to points that they had. They had this points system in and

I came back from Aitape to Wewak to the 30th Battalion and I went over to the orderly room and the orderly clerk said, “Clarkey you missed the boat”. I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “You were supposed to go out yesterday, the Shropshire left yesterday and you were supposed to be on it”. I said, “God. Well what do I do

now?” He said, “I don’t know, but the Duntroon will be in tomorrow heading for Lae and then Rabaul. I suggest you get on that because you won’t get home from here if you don’t”. So that’s what I did. When the Duntroon came in I got on it and we went down to Lae, took on water and then went across to Rabaul and I landed there and with all these other fellas

and we were put into garrison battalions over there to guard the Japanese. There was about 150,000 Japanese on Rabaul in prisoner of war camps, more or less looking after themselves and we used to have to go out to these compounds and just make sure that they behaved themselves and they were

delousing a big ammunition dump.

Yes we left Lae and just took us overnight and we got to Rabaul and we unloaded there and went into garrison battalions and our job was just to look after these Japanese until they were sent back home.

I think they were going through them, picking out the war criminals at the same time and on one occasion we were out at a compound looking after them right near this ocean or the water and they were delousing a big ammunition dump and they were carting it out to sea and dumping it and this night somehow it caught fire.

And it just went on all night, just torpedo heads everything and the explosions were horrendous. I’ve got photos in there that were taken next day where we lost everything. Tents burnt, all our equipment burnt, I lost my diaries everything and I was angry about that, but

it all came over the top of us and some of the explosions were horrific. I took shelter in a tunnel with some of the fellas at one stage and one explosion was so horrendous it sucked us out of the tunnel and drew us back in again and we must have moved anything up to 6 feet in the air, and

anyway it was just a mess next morning when they when the whole thing had died down. The funny part was that I only had a pair of pants on and a belt and one bloke only had a towel, because he got caught in the shower. And they came out from Rabaul from the head headquarters and the first thing they issued us with was a rifle before they gave us any clothes. Anyway

what happened then, I was there for a while and then we came home and we got on this little ship Norwegian ship called the Vito.

I think we were just there to see that they behaved ‘emselves really. We didn’t go into the compound. They were independent, they look after themselves. They grew

their own vegetables. I don’t know where they got their supplies from, but I guess the army supplied them with basic needs and we were just there as a sort of garrison to make sure they stayed within the compound, there was no breakout there was nothing of that nature.

No, made no attempt to talk to ‘em at all myself personally.

Whether anybody else did or not. There was a lot of Chinese in Rabaul that were badly treated by the Japanese and they’d started to come back out, come to life again. And matter of fact I brought a stopwatch from one of them, I’ve still got it, funny thing is it still goes. But the time came and

they said, “Right you’re off home”, you see and we got on this little boat called the Vito. I think they put 1,100 of us on it and it was only 5,500 tonnes.

When did I go over there? I think I was only there about a month

and it was only because I’d missed the Shropshire. I mean it was just a stop over sort of thing and it was so primitive that they strapped army field kitchens to the railings of the boat and used to feed us from there and the weather got a bit rough and they couldn’t cook.

Our main diet was cold baked beans and I couldn’t face a cold baked bean for years after that. And anyway we sailed in through the harbour and as I said we came in through the heads, I just got this absolute fit of anger and threw my rifle overboard and that was the start of my troubles.

I think the memory of Joe Kirby and the futility of it all. The fact that so many good men had really died for nothing and it was just instantaneous, it just came up in my throat like that and I couldn’t control it and I still remember the number of the rifle, it’s C9867

and it went to the bottom of the heads there. And I got to the LTD and I was handing in my equipment and they said, “Where’s your rifle soldier?” And I didn’t know what to say and I thought, “God I’m sorry sir but I’ve misplaced it, I can’t find it”. He said, “I’m afraid you’re in trouble boy. You’re up on a charge”.

He said, “Well what you can do, we’ll allow you to go home now”, and of course I didn’t know it but Mum was waiting outside the LTD. She had a sixth sense or something and, “You can go home now, but we want to see you in three days”, so that I did. I went home and Mum and my younger brother were standing outside the LTD waiting for me and we got on a tram and went caught a train

back from Marrickville, back to Central and then got a tram out to Bondi Beach where Mum had a flat and I spent 3 days there and all I wanted to do was sit in a bath of hot water and eat tomato sandwiches. So it was a bit hard getting to know one another again too after being separated for so long

and my brother had grown up a bit since I last saw him. So anyway 3 days later I went back to the LTD and marched in and they were ready to charge me and all the rest of it and it just so happened that I was looking a bit down and I was outside waiting to go in and this lieutenant from the Middle East, he had an Africa Star on, walked past me. He said, “You got a problem soldier?” And I said, “Yes sir”,

he said, “Well you better come and tell me about it”. I said, “Well I’ll tell you off the record. I got so angry when I was coming through the heads, I threw my rifle overboard and now they want to charge me because I can’t produce it. I’ve told ‘em I’ve lost it”. So he said, “Mind enough, you got anybody acting for you?” I said “No”. He said, “Do you mind if I step in as your advocate?” And I said,

“No that’s fine”. So in we went and he had all his ribbons on and after the charge was read this fella said, “May I say something?” To the tribunal or whatever it is or the chairman and they said, “That’s alright”. He said, “I can vouch for this man. I know him and

I don’t think he lost his rifle. I think somebody stole it while his back was turned. I don’t think after all he’s been through you should proceed with the charge”. And they mumbled and jumbled about it and anyway they decided to dismiss the charge, but I had to pay for the rifle. It weighed 10 pound and it cost me

10 pound and that was 5 weeks wages, 5 weeks army pay. I went out and I shook this bloke’s hand and I said, “I don’t know who you are”. He said, “My name’s Jackson. I’m not going to tell you where I live because we’ll probably never meet again, but it was just a pleasure to do it for you”. So anyway it turned out he was a solicitor.

So anyway I was then free to go on leave again, which I did and then I had to wait for my discharge which didn’t happen ‘til July and in the meantime I was attached to a the 2/3rd Austport detachment, where they used to go ‘round to different store houses and do inventories on all the stuff that was there and that was the greatest shambles of all time too. But

I got discharged in July and where were we then? I think I was still at Bondi Beach and I decided I’d better go after my leave was up. I got my discharge as I said and I decided I’d better go back to work. So I went and saw the inspector in Sydney office in Martin Place

and he said, “Oh welcome back Clarke. We’ll send you out to Kogarah”. So I had to travel all the way from Bondi Beach to Kogarah every day and I used to have to do what they call the “call over” with the manager each morning and this day I went in and I was as sick as a dog. I had a real good dose of malaria and there were a couple of other returned men that come back, some from the air force, some from the army and

they were on the staff and they said, “I think we should send him home Mr Northcote”, and he said “Well ok son, you’d better go home and get a doctor’s certificate and report back as soon as you can”. Well the last thing I remember was the train pulling out of Redfern Station and what actually happened was I walked off the train, as it hadn’t stopped nearly. Walked off the train as it was coming

into Central and I went down between the carriages and the platform, and I didn’t suffer any injuries, it just ripped my pants of my suit, which I’d paid 6 pound 10 for and God knows how many coupons the week before. And they picked me up and ‘course a lot of people thought I was drunk, but the stationmaster knew, they took me over and laid

me on a seat and I passed out cold and I suddenly smelt this smell and it brought me too and it was the smell of kerosene, a very strong smell of kerosene and I woke up and I was covered with a blanket. The stationmaster had brought a blanket that covered his table

out of his office. They had a stationmaster on each platform in those days and put it over me but what had happened is they’d been working with kerosene lamps all during the war and the kerosene had impregnated the blanket and the smell woke me up. And when I woke up there was 2 ambulance blokes standing over me and they took me down on a stretcher and put me in an ambulance and took me to Sydney Hospital and

I just lay in Sydney Hospital for the rest of the day. And then about 3 o’clock in the afternoon an army ambulance came and took me up to the what was called then the 101 AGH at Hearne Bay which is now Revesby I believe and put me in there with a whole heap of POWs and boy gee were they having some battles. They had beri beri, they had everything. Gee I felt sorry for them,

but they were bright dispositions, they were very happy. But I had this bad attack of malaria and they were just trying out a new drug at that stage I think called Paludrene, so they put me on that and told me that I was not to move. I had to have a sponge bath every morning. I was not to get out of bed, to use a pan if I needed and

my family were frantic, they were looking for me. They didn’t know where I was for 2 days and suddenly I said to the sister when I was feeling a little bit better, because I was wonky for a couple of days. I said, “For God’s sake, will you ring my family for me”, and I gave her the telephone number and I mean they hadn’t asked me before, but I suppose I wasn’t making any sense anyway. I was pretty delirious and so she rang up my mother,

told her where I was and I said, “Well you’d better ring the bank and tell them where I am”. So they did that and I was in there for 3 weeks under this treatment and I finally came out.

I think things had changed so much. I mean they were only wee nippers when I’d left to go away, when I’d gone into the army and I hardly saw anything of them when I was in the army, and then they’d suddenly grown up into grown people,

except for my brother who was 14, but he he’d grown up a lot. I mean he’d gone from about 9 to 14 in next to no time and it was just I had to get used to it again. ‘Cause they seemed to be a whole new group of people. Anyway it didn’t last long. We we got back together

Yeh, I had functional dyspepsia, I had rhinitis very badly and I had tinnitus which I’ve still got. I had 2 gammy

knees and also malaria. And in those days you couldn’t get a pension for malaria, because it was treated as a self inflicted wound. Now that was utterly ridiculous. They eventually changed that, but I had recurrent bronchitis. I used to get a lot of that and the funny thing every

time I went down with malaria I got bronchitis, which made it a little bit difficult for recovery. But I finally came good, then I went to this birthday party with my sister and I met Helen. My sister actually dragged her down from upstairs to meet me and we met and we just danced

away after that, but it was a funny thing. I had to get used to wearing shoes after being in army boots and every time I lifted my foot it’d lift about 6 inches, but anyway that was great and we got on famously. But soon after that we got pretty serious with one another and

decided, “Well, we’ll get married”, and my father officiated at the wedding. We were married in Wesley Chapel in Castlereagh Street, before they pulled it all down and rebuilt it in 3rd of April in ’47, and it rained like mad that day, and

they were going to have the reception outside, but finished up having it inside at Helen’s mother’s place in Neutral Bay. And then afterwards, as an aside there, one of my great mates who’s dead now, Harry Ryan was my best man, and Harry was a good Catholic and he had to get a special dispensation from the Priest to be able to enter a Methodist Church. This is how

stupid everything was in those days, and his sisters also had to get a dispensation to come to the wedding and 2 of them were keen on me and one of them wanted to marry me and I married this other girl you see. Funnily enough we were living at St Peters at the time. And of course when we were up in the islands

we came out the first time and there was a fella in the machine gun section up there called Don Evans and he used to do tattoos. So I got a skin full one day and I went down to Don and I said, “I want to be tattooed”, and so he said, “You’re sure?” So away he went and he said, “What do you want?” And I said, “I want a swallow

with a little leaf in its mouth”, and he said, “Righto”, and was a little sort of a leaf with a blank in it and he said, “What do you want put in there?” I said, “Betty”. “No Clarkey, don’t put Betty in there”. “I want Betty in there”. So what happened was he did what I wanted, but then I came home and

met the joy of my life and her name wasn’t Betty. So what had actually happened in the meantime though, a piece of shrapnel had knocked the head off the bird up in New Guinea. So I went to a bloke with a diathermy needle and got Betty erased, but we were booked to go to

the Ritz at Yamba and the blasted bank cancelled my holidays, because it was balance time. That’s the sort of people they were. So we had to rush around all over the place and we got accommodation down at the Hotel Cronulla, which no longer exists now and we went down there and had the Easter weekend in Cronulla. That was our honeymoon and I had to go back

to work, and Helen got a lift back to Sydney with one of the politicians that was there, and no sooner I got back to work and I went down with malaria again.

I would have had the best part of 20, 25 attacks.

Yeh, I seemed to be getting it regularly, every 1 or 2 months for a while, then it started to ease down. I finally got it out of my system in the late 60’s, but it certainly kept me thin.

I did years later. I hauled off and knocked my wife out in bed, was just a reaction. I had a nightmare of some sort where I was being attacked, but I just could not settle down after we came home.

I was on edge, it took me years to get over it and that’s probably one of the reasons why I left the old Bank of Australasia. Because I used to fight with the Manager and I just didn’t like people telling me to do anything. I just had an abhorrence after coming out of the army, of

discipline I think. And I didn’t like people ordering me around and yes this did affect me for quite a number of years, but it seems to have absolved itself now, but Helen’s been wonderful. She nursed me through it, all my illnesses and she’s come up trumps and actually she’s got me this far and I’m probably healthier

now than I’ve been for a long time.

Yeh.

Yeh.

Well Mum was in Noumea, she was the first one to go. She went I think in about

August ’44 and ‘course Dad was still in Australia at Townsville at that stage and I was up on the Atherton Tablelands. And what happened was that after we sailed and went to New Guinea, Mum wrote me a letter from Noumea

and she said, “Have you received any news from your father? Because he’s doing a stint in Port Moresby”. And that’s when I realised that the whole 3 of us were overseas together at the one time and it was it was a little bit unique and something that I’ve kept in the family archives, but

no I’ve had a good life.

Well she was in a lot of things. My mother was nursing at Dubbo Hospital and she went to Prince Henry Hospital out on the coast, then she joined NAAFI [Navy, Army, Air Force Institute],

that was the English canteen service I think and they had big canteens all round Sydney. She served in that for a while. She was a great organiser and the Americans approached her because they’d heard of her and asked her would she like to take the job as a house mother for all these nurses in Noumea.

So she thought about it and she decided she was at a loose end and I was away and her kids were ensconced in boarding school. So she said, “Yeh I’ll do that”, and they flew her out of Rose Bay in a Catalina and she froze all the way. She said it was a dreadful trip and she said, “Fancy flying from Rose Bay all the way to Noumea in a Catalina”, but she was a remarkable woman. She did so many

things and I just admired her. She was a great love of my life because she was just a wonderful woman. And yeh, she flew to Noumea and she used to write to me at Wondecla and then I wrote to her and said, “We’re moving. I can’t

tell you where”, and next thing I get letters from her. So somehow when she addressed it to me in the 2/5th Battalion, I mean the army base Post Office used to pick it up and knew where to send it you see, and I used to write home letters to her. In a lot of cases they’d put on

the top of the letter OASNSA, and Mum was a bit confused as to what this meant and I had to explain to her it meant On Active Service No Stamps Available. And we used to get through a lot of letters like that, because just nowhere could we buy a stamp, and we wanted to write home.

And you used to put it through the censor and they’d chop out what they wanted to chop out. Though she got most of the letters without too much cut out of them, but yeh so that was it. And then after the war she was in charge of a big hostel at Cackston Park with WD and HA Wills and she did a lot of things yeh.

Yeh

it takes a little bit of thinking about I s’pose. There are a couple of times when one of the proud moments was to see Len Cameron get a bar to his Military Cross. He was a great soldier. I think another

another good feeling was when we were all lined up and this Japanese General had to hand over his sword at the surrender at Cape Wong and I just thought to myself, “Well you’ll never do this to us again”. I think the fact that we

defeated the Japanese was a proud moment for me. But there were some and I was very proud of a lot of the fellas in the Battalion. They were all great blokes and I take my hat off to those that went through every campaign, which I think is a remarkable achievement,

and there were quite a number of those too. Just as an aside, I’m talking about the promiscuity of today’s young people. When we were going up the track to Nialu, just talking to the fellas before we left, I realised that a lot of us were still virgins. We’d never had

any, apart from our mothers, we never had any close contact with women to the extent of sexual intercourse or anything like that. And Christie the fellow that was with me when we found the skull, we were going up the track and he suddenly turned around to me. He said, “Clarkey I’ve never been with a girl. I hope I don’t get killed before I do”. So

that happened to a lot of us. We were pretty forthright fellas in those days, even some of the villains, but they were a great bunch of kids and, well kids then, not so much now. And I’m just sad that so many of them are gone, which I know is going to happen to me. But

one thing’s for certain, you’ll never get out of this world alive.

Yeh.

Well I was in the bush in the bank practically from

the time I came back from the army. I just had that stint in Kogarah and then I went out to Peak Hill. I spent practically all my life in the bush in branches in the bank and finally in 1968 we were going broke, because we had 3 kids in boarding school and I just demanded of the bank that they bring me back to Sydney,

which they did. And from that time on I got interested in the Battalion and I went to one of their meetings and all they had was a little notebook with a few names scribbled in it and I said, “Well there’s got to be a lot more fellas around”. They said, “Alright you can take on the job of secretary”.

So that was in the late 60’s and so I took it on and I fossicked around. I wrote letters, I rang phone numbers and I found a lot of fellas and they knew other fellas and finally we got a nominal roll together of fellas that found out where they were. We had a big association at one stage and I even got to the stage where I knew the name of every

fella, and I knew the name of his wife and I knew the company he was in and it worked out very successfully that way, and we were still a wild bunch in those days. We used to get into trouble and get kicked out of places, but gradually we sort of calmed down a bit and then in 1982 we had a committee meeting and somebody said,

“Well why don’t we celebrate the Battle of Mount Tambu, and have it on the nearest Sunday to the actual event?” Which was in August and so right, I got together and I put together a newsletter and I sent it out to everybody that was on our list and we said we were going to hold it in the Combined Services Club in

where was it? Barrack Street is it? And, “Would they come along on a certain day? It was going to cost ‘em so much”. The response was fantastic. We got people from everywhere and they put us in a smallish type of room, but we filled the room to overflowing and it was a wonderful day and I said, “Well this is such a success, we’ll do it again next year, but we’ve got to find

another venue”. So one of the fellas there belonged to Moore Park Golf Club and he went and had a word word to them and they said, “Yeh, by all means. We’ll give you a room here to hold your reunion in”. So from that day on we held the Battle of Mount Tambu Reunion at Moore Park Golf Club, and its been a success ever since. Well then over the years the numbers have dropped off, because there’ve been so many deaths.

But the widows and the children are coming along, and it’s the young ones that we need now to take over and carry on the tradition where we’ve left off.

I think it’s important to remember, not so much the event, but the fact that we were a closely knit unit.

And we need those get togethers to be able to renew relationships each time. And that’s been going on now from ’82, we’ve just had one back in August.

OK.

I was very disillusioned at first. I suppose the result of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts

I still have a certain amount of faith in the young people do a good job. Let’s face it, I’m not asking young people today to remember what the war was all about. I think , it was bloody awful, but it’s wonderful to go on Anzac Day and see the young people there.

They’re just there to say thank you for keeping their country free and that’s the way I’d like to see it kept. I’d like to see it kept free. Yeh, it affected me for a while, but now I’m very proud to be able to be part of an association of fellas that were able to keep the country out of anybody’s hands.

I’d just like to say that I think this is one of the great history books written about the military, written by a fella by the name of Sid Tregeller-Smith. All the art work was done by a fella out of the Battalion, all the maps were drawn up by one of the fellas out of the Battalion.

Sid gave me the job of putting together the NSW and Queensland section of it and we launched it in 1989. It was a great success and it went so successful that training command have reprinted it and I take pleasure in knowing that I was able to give it its title.

Thank you Kathy.