Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Bairnsdale in East Gippsland.

Always tell people I was born in Olsen’s Hardware store which is not quite true. My Aunt had a private hospital and she was a return army nurse from First World War and I was born in her hospital but it was subsequently taken over by the Olsen’s Hardware and the site of the hospital was incorporated in that so we told people I was born in Olsen’s Hardware store and they never believe me.

Of course nor should they have. I was born there in 1921. My father was a qualified steam engineer, butter and cheese maker but had given that away when he married my mother and become, became a farmer. She had the family property and I grew up on a small dairy farm.

When I was a little boy we milked a whole total of twelve cows. And gradually the farm developed and we rented or acquired more land and eventually we were milking 73 dairy cows and I grew up on that, then of course the Depression came along.

we never went hungry during the Depression. Being, it was a bit of a family joke for many years even after the Depression, we can’t afford meat this weekend we’ll have to have poultry which meant we went out in the yard and caught a rooster and chopped its head off. We grew our own vegetables so on the farm we had milk and cream, butter and eggs and so we were never short of food

but I look back now, we were short of a lot of other things, but as a kid you weren’t aware of that and you weren’t aware of the sacrifices that parents were making. I never say myself ever as a brain but I won a scholarship to a boarding school. A very generous scholarship which I was able to go away to boarding school at virtually no cost

to my parents other than the cost of getting me there each year and we thought we’d been hit pretty hard by the Depression and so Dad decided to sell the farm. Well, in retrospect we know now that he had weathered the Depression. He was through it and could have held on

and in reality I would have loved to have gone on the land but that wasn’t to be. I took a job in the bank and they sold the farm and at that stage of the Depression employment relief job Bairnsdale had been sewered and the job of engineer in charge of the sewerage came up and with

Dad’s experience in various similar fields, not sewerage but he applied for the job which was very highly paid in those days. If you got a house and 5 pounds a week and that was an incredible wage really so that we thought at the time because as time went on it increased. I got an appointment

with the bank, in fact I got an appointment in four separate banks so I was in the enviable position of being able to choose which one I took and my first one, when I went to the old bank of Victoria, commercial banking company which is now part of NAB National Australia Bank and started working in a Hayfield and Dad went to the sewerage proposition

and that pretty much, my grandfather, well both my grandfathers had come to be to Bairnsdale and both their stories were quite interesting really. My paternal grandfather his father, my great grandfather, had been the choir master of

Worcester cathedral and a professional musician and had determined that his family would all become professional musicians, entertainers and what have you and the kids then apparently were not much different to what they are and three of the boys ran away to sea and signed up on ships, two of them

jumped ship in Melbourne. They were well, obviously well educated because they’d gone to Worcester college where their father was, as part of his role as choir master of the Cathedral, he was director of music at Worcester and one of their contemporaries at college had been Adam Lindsey Gordon who was an old, great poet, old schoolmate of their well two of them jumped ship

here in Melbourne and their story’s quite interesting too because they set off to make their way, they got separated. Strangely, they both started to make their way towards East Gippsland and one night somebody came in to the camp where my grandfather was spending the night and said that the previous night that they had been entertained by somebody with a fine tenor voice

who sang excerpts from a certain opera and this attracted my grandfather’s attention and that was how he found his brother. Back tracked to where the visitor and found his brother and then so they both made off to East Gippsland and settled there. My grandfather became a

store keeper and postmaster at Linderlo and his brother went in to the Real Estate business and his son and his grandsons carried that on. The other brother who ran away to sea, there’s an interesting little quirk to this story. Family legend said that

he’d been lost at sea but my father always said that wasn’t true because they’d had correspondence with him and he was somewhere in South Africa. Well, it was a long arm of coincidence and it’s a small world. Last year I had a major nose bleed,

bled for 3 days, finished up had to be taken to Bendigo for surgery but when I was in the emergency department here at the local hospital in Bort we had a Brand new doctor who’s just arrived from South Africa and I knew he came from a suburb of Johannesburg called Kempton Park which I knew very well and so here they are, place looked like a slaughter

house, towels saturated and blood and trying to be smart I said to him, probably hearing the knowledge he came from Kempton Park I said I’d rather be in Kempton Park than here. He said, oh, he said “I didn’t know there was a Kempton Park in Australia.” I said, “I’m not sure there is or not,” I said “But there is certainly one in Johannesburg,” and of course that got him interested and then he said, “You

know he said strange thing, my mother was a Holloway.” I didn’t think anymore about it. Now, subsequently we got to talking about it and turns out this is was the Branch from the other brother and so the family was brought together again here in Bort and when I was in Johannesburg last November

for a meeting Jacob who had asked me to take some Christmas gifts and what have you to Johannesburg for his family, I met up with them and they produced photographs or his mother produced photographs of her uncles and so on and when I got home I put them down beside some photographs that I had here and you could have interchanged and it’s quite definitely the same family. They don’t, hadn’t quiet know the history other than

vaguely where their great grandfather came from in England, but it’s got to be the same person, it was the same name and everything added up. That, that’s wandering off a bit.

Anyhow I started work in Hayfield and I’d been there about twelve months and because in those days you didn’t apply for transfers or anything. The bank told you, you were going, right up to managerial

level. I remember our teller, teller accountant at Hayfield, note, letter, came one day in the mail from Melbourne office telling him he’d just been appointed as manger at Swifts Creek and that was the first he knew about it. Not did it suit him to move to Swifts Creek or not but that was it. You went and one of these staff directions arrived one day to say I was being transferred to Warrigal where the Bank had just opened and, new Branch

and so I went down to Warrigal and on the first Sunday I was there I went to church in the morning and the parish priest invited me, because in those days we went to church twice a day. The parish priest invited me to come and have evening meal at the rectory and go to Evensong with them afterwards and I accepted and I went

back to the boarding house where I was staying and had my lunch. In the afternoon I went for a walk and out along the Yellonbank Road which probably doesn’t mean anything to you I passed two teenage girls, one with a long brown pigtail and the other with red hair pushing a baby in a pram and as they came level with me

I heard a “Excuse me, Sir.” First time I’d ever been addressed as Sir, whole seventeen years of age. “Could you tell us what’s in that waterhole over behind the gas works?” And being very naturally very polite I said. “No I’m afraid I couldn’t, I’m only a newcomer here,” and they said, “Water you silly fool,”

and off they went. When I arrived at the rectory for tea that night, I didn’t realise but there was quite a kerfuffle in the background. The girl with the red hair was the nursemaid, because rectories could afford nursemaids in those days. The girl with the red hair was the nurse maid of the rectory, the baby in the pram was the rector’s baby son and the girl with the brown pigtail was a

neighbour from over the road because they were dead scared that I’d dobbed them in. Well, the girl with the red hair later on got married and her husband became one of the commissioners of the State bank and at Evensong that night one of the Parishioners invited me to go home and meet his family and have supper and there was an even greater kerfuffle. The girl with the pigtail

was there and again she was terrified I’d tell her father. Well, that’s her there [indicates] I lost her. Fifty years to the day that I met her. I told her she picked me up. We buried her.

Sorry.

I just, sorry. Anyhow that was the beginning of a long relationship. Took a long time for us to get married, never any question we were going to. I was moved away from Warrigal to Avoca and then from Avoca up to Shepparton.

Then I joined the army and we’ll talk more about that later on. After the end of my army career I went in to theological training and of course in those days bishops were tyrants. First of all he had to approve the girl. I’d proposed in the meantime and he knew very well that if I had another leave in the army we would have got married but

he wouldn’t let us get married. He had a rule you couldn’t get married until you’d been ordained for five years. Well, I wouldn’t agree to that. I said no, that’s not on. I’ll seek ordination somewhere else but so the result of this was, we had an inordinately long engagement but we did get married in 1947 and I never had any regrets and that lasted for

forty years so it was ten years from the time we married, met until the time we got married and then we had forty years of married life and drew six children, good planning three of each and they’ve in turn, given me I think it’s eighteen grandchildren and

I’ve lost count of, I think it’s eight great grandchildren at the moment, currently and I think some more on the horizon somewhere. Rather curiously, my eldest great grandchild is sixteen and my youngest grandchild’s only, my youngest great grandchild is only twelve months old and my youngest grandchild’s only seven so if I don’t fall off my perch I’ve got a reasonably chance of becoming a

Great, Great Grandfather. So, there you are. That’s my family history.

Ivanhoe Grammar school.

Well, yes I guess I did. I’ll never boast about it but I do boast about, I got ten subjects in public examinations because in those days intermediate was the be all

and end all of everything. Very few people went on to the shop and you probably don’t even know what the shop was.

You went to the shop. That was the, there was only one university and you either went to the farm or the shop and the shop was the university and there wasn’t a tendency for people to get a degree in those days that there is now. If you were going to do

accountancy you didn’t go to university and do accountancy you went to a company like ICI which Ivanhoe Grammar had a very special relationship with and all their economic students and accountancy students would be accountants, all came from Ivanhoe Grammar school recommended by the staff there and then these companies trained them and a number of stockbrokers around Melbourne and

I’m sure other students had similar arrangements, number of stockbrokers around Melbourne had arrangements with Ivanhoe grammar, that boys were recommended from there and they took them and trained them and so there wasn’t a need then that there is today for a university degree. We were probably in a way better trained in those days. The same with my theological training.

These days of course you do at least a bachelor of Divinity degree probably a masters degree and so on well we couldn’t by law, none of the universities in Australia were permitted to confer a Divinity degree because this was a separation of church and state. Education had to be free and secular and secular meant just that and the

only way we could get a degree in Divinity was to go overseas or do a correspondence course from London which was a terribly, London university had a correspondence course but we couldn’t get a degree in Divinity so my simple licentia to theology was every bit as high if not a higher standard than a bachelor of

Divinity is today and I don’t say that in a boastful sense because I don’t think they’ve got to mess around with Hebrew and Greek and Latin like we had to do. They didn’t have to translate, they don’t have to translate the bible from the original language like we had to do but we didn’t finish up with a degree and that was pretty common. Others went, for example, to ICI and I use ICI because I think of people like

that, others went to ICI and took on jobs as laboratory assistants and so on and eventually we came outstanding industrial chemists and what have you and eventually with qualifications as the pattern changed.

Actually, from childhood. I was confirmed

at, in 1932 so that must have been the age of 11 and old Bishop Cranswick who was then Anglican bishop of Gippsland gave us a challenge which some of us may feel called to the priesthood and on that very moment, 1 November 1932 a Tuesday night at twenty minutes past eight at night I can tell you the exact time. I felt a

call, response to that challenge and there were a lot of necessitude’s. A number of times I turned my back on the church during that time but I kept coming back, coming back, coming back and it’s interesting that in later life in my own ministry I have regularly given that challenge to others and I’d

thought that it had been read on the wall to you know to no purpose in yet in recent years I’ve got a photograph sitting on the fridge out there of a young priest in this diocese who was an alter boy in Melbourne for me and I’d prepared him for confirmation and at a

synod several years ago he said, “I want a photograph with you, you’re the reason that I’m a priest,” well now I think he’ll be a bishop someday I really do think he’s bishop material. He said, “You challenged us when you prepared us for confirmation,” and he said “I knew then that someday I was going to be a priest.” The advocate of the diocese,

that’s our top legal man bailed me up recently at a function and he said, “Do you remember that study camp you lead at Stuart Mill?” and that’s a story worth exploring later on. “The study camp you lead at Stuart Mill,” I said “Well I’ve lead a number of them down there.” He said, “Well I was at one of them,” he said “And you gave us a challenge.” He said, “There were two of us, there was John Le Notte

and myself” and he said “We both felt the call you gave us. Well, John went on to become a priest but he said “I decided I could serve God better as a lawyer,” and he has done. He’s the advocate of the diocese today and so there are others and you look back on your ministry and you think you’ve been pretty ineffective.

Checking in at an airline counter, young fellow said to me “You don’t remember me do you?” I said, “Your face looks familiar but no I don’t remember you.” He said, “You taught us religious instruction in the Bon beach [?] High school. He said I’ve never forgotten the lessons you’ve given me.” That sort of thing keeps coming back to you, makes you think it’s been worthwhile but I’m boasting and I shouldn’t be.

I think, this is with hindsight. I think probably I realised there’s a cost. A lot of people don’t realise the cost there is and to giving your life in priesthood, in ministry

and you do realise there’s a cost and you don’t realise until you actually get in to it. Your family costs. I remember old Bishop Baker who was a principle of our theological college, delightful man, brilliant scholar but he spoke with an impediment which I won’t try to imitate, we always did. Matter of fact there was one story once when at the theological college. There was an upstairs part and a downstairs part

and Gil Lamble who’s now retired and living in East Gippsland somewhere, “Oh, Gilbert, I didn’t know whether I was upstairs or downstairs”. If you’ve heard Gil taking him off but old Bishop Baker said to us, “There’s a direct relationship between the effectiveness of a priest and his family. A good priest has bad children and

a bad priest has good children usually.” And that’s pretty true. I had this brought to my notice very forcibly when I was the vicar of Chelsea and my life was managed by a doctors, a book like a doctor’s appointment book divided up in to twenty minute segments for the day and I went in to my

study one night with all this string of people waiting to see me and I see Judith Holloway. Didn’t know there were any other Holloways in the parish and my second eldest daughter had made an appointment with my secretary because she needed to talk to me, what subjects she should take for leaving certificate and the only way she could get to talk to me

was to make an appointment to see me in my study. Well, that pulled me up with a hell of a shock and so from then on I regarded Tuesday night as sacrosanct and there really had to be a major disaster of some sort and that was the night for the family but here I was devoting myself, it was nothing for us to have a dozen kids. I was

a probation officer, have a dozen probationers waiting to see me of a night and there was a funny side of that too. We had a big German Shepherd dog who’d been trained as a police dog and retired and in a very round about way we hadn’t adopted him, he adopted us. He came and took up residence on our doorstep and refused to leave but somehow or other he could sense that these people were petty criminals well

some of them were serious criminals, couple of them hung for murder subsequently but one of these kids moved, “Grrrr” and yet he was the greatest slob of a dog you ever saw with the family but it was nothing to have a dozen of them, adults as well waiting to see me in the course of their probation. Here I was devoting myself to these people and neglecting my own family

and if it hadn’t been that I had a remarkable wife and old bishop Bakers edict that good priest and I like to think I was a good priest, that a good priest has a bad family wasn’t true in my case because of that very remarkable woman that had picked me up on the Yellanbank road and here she was backing me up and so that’s a bit of

advice I give to a lot of young priests. I think sadly the pendulum’s gone the other way and a lot of them are not devoting, perhaps that’s just an old man but I think there are some very good priests about but I think there are some who are too selfish these days and don’t give enough time to others.

In the First World War, yes very much. My father very proudly kept some white feathers he’d been sent. You know about white feathers? They were sent by, usually dried up all spinsters who didn’t know any better and it happened in the Second

World War but not to the same extent but it was decided that he was the youngest of the family, that he wouldn’t go to war. He had a brother who lost a leg in France, had another brother who won a Military Medal, Military Cross. He was a, you know an officer.

He had two brothers who didn’t join the services but they were expert with horses, in fact they were both quite successful, one a very successful trainer at Caulfield. They both trained at Caulfield, racehorses subsequently, but they were co-opted for what they called the remount department where horses were recruited

to be sent overseas with the Light Horse and so out of the five brothers, four of them were serving the army and it was arranged that one of them should remain at home and yet he got white feathers and people don’t always know the true story yes there was a military background.

Not a professional military background. I’ve explored the family tree. I’ve done a lot of work on the family tree and we go right back to the 1300s which is pretty exceptional and nowhere I’ve found anyone of any significance in the family line who has been a professional soldier. There were some who did military service in India from England and so on but not in the sense of being

career soldiers but yes there was involvement in the Second World War and of course the inevitable involvement in, in the First World War rather and the inevitable involvement in the Second [World] War.

Actually, I was fifteen and the second day at work was my sixteenth birthday and very quickly when the bank decided

I turned sixteen on my second day they sent me new employment papers to sign and I was very young and naïve and I didn’t realise that if I’d stayed at the bank until retirement it would have made a substantial difference to the amount of pension they had to pay me because I’d joined a year later, although it was only one day and technically it was a year so it had been shrewd even in those days.

Hard to define that. I taught Sunday school I was in the youth group, we had a TOC H Branch of TOC H, you don’t hear much about TOC H. It is still about.

Neville Talbot was a chaplain in the First World War, the British army and he established a house, a sort of rest and recreation centre,

Talbot House and the phonetic alphabet of those days, TOC was the letter for T and H was just H. And so T, H they called it TOC H and then well it made such an impression on the soldiers and they used it in the First World War they decided to carry the organisation in to peacetime and it spread all over the world and I think there are still TOC H in

Melbourne but it’s not the force it used to be but it was a young men’s group. I suppose in many ways Apex and Rotary and those sort of organisations, Rotaract have taken its place but I was involved in that and then as time went on I became a Sunday school superintendent. I became very involved and always was very involved in Scouts

and so wherever I went I was involved in the scout troupe, matter of fact I was looking through photographs for you last night I came across, well I saw, it was a wonderful experience going through these photographs because I looked at photographs I haven’t looked at for sixty years, seventy years and I found photographs taken in 1934 of the Scout camp and I couldn’t help but look at them and I can’t remember their

names but wondering what became of them all and I’m sure most of them are dead now and lots of them would have been killed during the war. I was involved in the Scout Jamboree at Frankston in 1934 for the Victorian Centenary. I was a King Scout, the equivalent of a Queen Scout these days. That’s got nothing to do with your sexual preferences. Then

later on I became, as time went on I became involved in the Church’s boys’ society which is now the Anglican Boys’ Society and I became National Leader Training Commissioner for the whole of Australia, responsible for the training of our leaders in each of the states and territories so I’ve always had a pretty close involvement.

Oh, the church was a, I was going to say an [(UNCLEAR)] but that’s not right. It was very much there but I don’t know if they were separate. How do you separate your various bits of your life?

I became a lay reader very early when I took my first service. I must have been about 17 which was incredibly young and when I went down to Warrigal well it was earlier than that. They were stuck for somebody to take a service at Cowal while I was at

Hayfield and so I went out and did an evening service out there. I don’t think the people knew how young I was and then when I went to Warrigal I assisted quite a bit there. Went up to Avoca became even more involved and so it went on but there was always a close involvement.

Oh, we were very aware. We knew all about Hitler, we knew about Mussolini, we knew about Abyssinia and the invasion of Abyssinia and the violation of rights. We didn’t have the instant communication with the media that we do today and events on the other side of the world were pretty remote. We had a

vague idea about prohibition in America. We knew what a speakeasy was thanks to the films. It didn’t really register very much with us. Nobody took much notice of America because Britain was the power in the world in those days. America was inclined to be odd bods. They probably, no I shouldn’t say that

but nobody took them very seriously you know. It could only happen in America was very much the attitude and it’s been interesting to see how since World War II they’ve pushed Britain aside, I’m not sure for the better. That’s getting in to politics and I don’t think we’re supposed to get in to politics here.

But I think Britain’s been pushed aside and

America’s taken over as the world power. I think there was more and I’m not just a monarchist through and, I am a monarchist I’ve yet to be convinced of a republic in this system is a better system than constitutional monarchy but I think

that Britain has always been more, whilst they were out for their own benefit, their colonialism was a bad thing. I don’t think it was good but there was always a more noble element than I believe there is, I believe America’s great interest in Iraq and so on, I think they were right to do what they did but I don’t really think they did it for Iraq. I think they did it for America. Whereas I think Britain probably did it because they

believed it’s the right thing to do for Iraq. They didn’t do it for any material benefit to Britain and I think colonialism has been a good thing. A lot of development wouldn’t have taken place if it hadn’t been for colonialism. But colonialism

existed for the benefit of the master country or whatever you want to call it but I think a lot of other benefits spun off from it. I think you, a lot of people these days who seem to think that we know everything today. I think every generation has thought that.

My generation thought it, although before and I sometimes wonder how on earth I managed to reach the age of eighty you know just, you look at the use by dates on food for example and the rules about handling food and what have you and what has to be thrown out and what can’t be used. Well, we all managed to survive to this good old age and I think we’ve probably on the food line, we’ve lost a lot of

physical resistance to germs and wogs

I think one of the things in retrospective fascinated me that famous speech Hitler made at the Reichstag. You know we all

listened to that on the radio. We didn’t have a clue what he was talking about but we listened to it because somehow even this distance away, I mean it was 28 days by ship, by a fast ship, you didn’t talk about flying then. Even this distance away we sensed that

here was a big problem and he was, opinion was divided. I had a cousin who went to Germany at the peak of Hitler’s rise and she came back absolutely, he was the saviour of Germany, he was going to do wonderful things for Germany and the rest of the world should be copying what he was doing there

and then of course there was the other side which was quite concerned and then with I was going to say Churchill, the one before Churchill, not Atlee, he was afterwards. The guy who went to the appeasement.

Chamberlain, Neville Chamberlain. I’m getting, Neville Chamberlain.

I think he did the right thing in retrospect we say it was wrong, appeasement doesn’t work and seldom does but he was a typical English gentleman and he believed everybody else was a gentleman and that was the world we lived in. Even in business if somebody gave you their word, if you were talking to somebody, these days you’re talking to somebody and you’ll say, “What is your name?”

when you’re on the telephone, you needn’t know who you’re talking to so you can cheat at home. Well, back in the 1930s that didn’t exist and so there was an awful sense of frustration. There was a lot of support for what Chamberlain did because most people believed at heart everybody was a gentleman even if he was a scoundrel like Hitler and you didn’t agree with him. If he gave his word he’d stick to it. Well, of

course he didn’t and war was inevitable and I can still remember the night war was declared. Nobody really believed it was going to happen and then Menzies comes on the radio. “It is my painful duty to inform you…” his famous words, and it was a painful duty to us. It was soon enough after the

First World War was to have recollections, even though I was born post war, I was old enough to realise that there had been hardship, even here in Australia and that war would bring hardship but there was very little dissent with what Menzies did.

I would say if you wanted to put a figure on it probably ninety eight per cent agreed with Australia going to war and supporting the old country, the mother country. It was still the mother country. We hadn’t had the influx of European and other migrants in to Australia. Migration was essentially

from the British Isles, probably any dissent at all came from the Irish element and I’ve got Irish ancestors too so I can say this, the Irish are notoriously pig-headed and notoriously against the government but even then if you looked through the enrolment lists of

any army unit you see the O’Flaherty’s and the O’Tooles and the Fitzpatricks and you name them they were there so there was an expression of dissent from the Irish element but the support for military action, I believe far outweighed that and I think there is a bit of a tendency for modern day historians to overplay what we

might call the Irish opposition. I think there was far more, I’m certain there was far more support than there was opposition from that element and I think if some adequate research was done you would also find there were probably equal opposition from the Scottish and English and Welsh and Cornish

elements of our community as well and if you bear in mind that those elements were very marked. If you were a Cornish man you were a Cornish man and you don’t tell a Welshman he’s English. You don’t tell a Scotsman he’s English and those people brought their traditions in to this country as well but they all saw Britain overall as their home country as the mother country and that came through to us. My father

who never went to England, always talked about going home because that was the mother country and so when war broke out that was a very significant element and so people flocked and flocked was the right word to support the mother country. I’ve forgotten the exact date. I think it was the 6th August but I would have been able to tell you precisely but when war

broke out, I know it was a Sunday night, well it was the 13th October when I first tried to enlist because I believed it was my duty to do so. Now my enlistment was rejected. I think the real reason was they had more volunteers than they knew how to cope with.

Well, I tried to join the Air Force as a wireless air gunner and they rejected me because I had in-growing toenails and to this day I can’t really see what difference in-growing toenails would have made to me being in an aeroplane and probably being hosed out of the wireless air gunner I didn’t know that at the time but I know now that that’s how wireless air gunners usually left by their aircraft by bits of them being

hosed out when they came home. That’s a cruel way of putting it but it’s realistic as well. I think they had short expectancy of life of anybody in the services and especially if you were a rear gunner. Well, anyhow they rejected me and I thought “Well to hell with them. If they don’t want me they won’t have me,” and so I went on being a bank clerk, working for soldiers’ welfare, the League of Soldiers’ Friends and the Australian’s Comfort

funds and all those sorts of things. We ran Saturday afternoon dances for kids and raised a couple of quid. All sorts of things we did to raise money to support the gallant troops. They got cantankerous and I said, “Well to hell with them.” They don’t want me with my in-growing toenails, because I resented that. I really did but at the same time I went and had surgery to fix my in-growing toenails so I guess I knew the time would come when I would

and so eventually I got called up for National service and I was signed. I was working in Shepparton in the bank at the time. I’d been sent up there for the fruit season. They used to have to put extra staff on at the banks for the fruit picking season and the canning season. The canaries as they were called. The people who came and worked in the cannery were always called canaries in

Shepparton. Most innovative name but because I was in Shepparton I was assigned to a unit which was technically based in Shepparton, the 59th Battalion part of the 15th Brigade. By the time I got my call up papers I’d actually been sent down to Wonthaggi and I was actually relieving, I was on relieving staff in the bank at that stage and I was doing the three month relief in Wonthaggi

while a young fellow down there did his military training. I been at Seymour, been three months at Seymour relieving somebody for their military training, all this after I’d actually signed my call up papers but hadn’t been called up. They had more troops than they knew how to handle at that stage.

Well, I’d signed my papers. It would have been

1940. Sometime in 1940 because I spent the Summer of 1940, 41 in Shepparton and the cannery season finished. And of course there were troops at Puckapunyal, all around Seymour, the big army encampments. I got sent down to Seymour.

It was an interesting experience in the bank and this is related to the army. Our bank had the army bank account and the pay in those, the hourly pay amounted to, I don’t think I’m breaching bank secrets with this. The army pay was to pay out, that was the money the soldiers, was somewhere in the vicinity between eighty and ninety thousand pounds in cash and they used to draw

this and of course then they’d go off to Melbourne. It wasn’t spent in Seymour. It was spent in Melbourne. So, by the next fortnightly pay we had to have another eighty or ninety thousand pounds in cash in small notes to give them and so every day I used to wander off down to the post office with a revolver in my pocket and stuff wads of notes in to my various pockets, no escort or anything and walk up the street with

anything up to five, ten thousand pounds in notes in my pockets and a gun in my hand which I barely would have known how to use if I’d been attacked and wouldn’t have been able to get it out anyhow but so much for security and brought it back and then I’m, the day before army paid day, the army used to mount an armed guard on the bank and draw everyone’s attention that there was a lot of a money in the bank. It had been there for a week but nobody bothered about it and then it

was actually one of my jobs. I actually handled the pay out to the army pay masters so I got to learn how to handle large sums of money and from there I went down to Wonthaggi and it was at Wonthaggi that I eventually got my notice to report and that must have been in about July

and it would have had to have been about July. I’m a bit hazy about how we got to Mount Martha. I’ve thought over this a lot. Somehow, I obviously had a, I remember going for a medical examination and I said to the doctor who did the medical examination in Wonthaggi and “Is there any difference between this medical exam and the ones for the army, the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] or the air force?”

“No”, he said, “Same medical exam.” I said “Good” and I said “Nothing wrong with my toes?” He said “No there’s nothing wrong with your toes.” I told him about the.. he said “Nonsense.” He said, “They didn’t want you,” and off I went armed with that bit of information but I was medically fit to join p but I’ve never been able to recall how I got from Wonthaggi to Mount Martha but not that that’s important. It must have been by train, everybody travelled by train. Whether we

reported somewhere in the city or at Caulfield or somewhere else, I can’t recall but anyhow we got to Mount Martha and the 39th Battalion was at Mount Martha and of course we had to fill in all sorts of forms and what we’d worked at as a civilian and the next thing I knew I was sent up to the pay corps. Fairly, obviously you see for a bank clerk,

sent up the AAPC, Australian Army Pay Corps, at Balcombe which was right next door to the Mount Martha camp. My son now has a house, looks out across where our camp was at Mount Martha and that was all vacant land. It’s now beautiful bushland with thousands of houses in it, very high priced but and so I had to learn how army pay was done. Then the unit was moved up to Rokeby

near Tallarook and while we were there I decided I wanted to join the AIF so the bank wouldn’t release me. Would you believe banking was a protected occupation, reserved occupation and the bank wouldn’t release me to serve in the army so I wasn’t going to be released for military service at this stage.

And then a routine order, you know what a routine order is? It’s the army’s orders came out that a new battalion was being raised, to be known as the 39th Battalion. Its members were to be, and a lot of people have forgotten this about our bit of history, the members would be required to sign a different oath of allegiance to that which they took when they joined

the militia, it was still the militia. And the oath which we took, I’m going in to the 39th Battalion, even a lot of our members have forgotten this. We undertook to serve wherever we would be sent. It was the identical oath of allegiance that the members of the AIF or the air force or the navy took and we could be sent, although we weren’t AIF, we could be sent anywhere in the world if army

headquarters decided. But we were told we were going to be doing garrison duty, not told where but it would be outside Australia and that’s why we were required to sign that document, that oath of allegiance. Now I realise now that the technicality of that was that while Papua, Papua New Guinea is now one country but it used to be two separate

countries. Papua was Australian, part of Australia as much as Victoria is but New Guinea really belonged to the League of Nations and was mandated to Australia to look after but it was technically a foreign country and so that was so we could be sent across in to New Guinea but it did give them the opportunity to send us wherever they wanted to

and it said that if, on this routine order, if there were not enough volunteers there would be detailing, conscripting of numbers in to this unit and I thought, “Ha, ha I know how I can beat the bank.” So, I asked to be paraded to our

commanding officer, can’t even remember his name, and explained to him that I would like to volunteer for the 39th Battalion but the bank wouldn’t release me, “Could he detail me?” “Certainly, I can detail you.” So, I think I was the only member of the 39th Battalion who wasn’t a volunteer if you could call that not being a

volunteer. I’d engineered it to be detailed but that’s how, and my idea was that as soon as I got in to the 39 Battalion on full time military service, I would then join the AIF. Well, off we went, we went down to Caulfield race course as we all did and then from there up to Darley, well

the army made some very serious mistakes. We were chocos. The militia of course were choco soldiers, they weren’t real soldiers and Darley was an AIF training camp. Now this in itself that we were sent to an AIF training camp to receive the same sort of training that they had indicated that the army had different intentions

for us to the people who were up at Rokeby and Mount Martha and what have you. We were sent to an entirely different training camp but differentiated. We were exactly the same as those people a hundred yards down the road but who were in the second whatever it was, but we were in the first 39th and they were in the 2/14th or something. The 2/14th had gone by that stage

and I mentioned the 2/14th because we have a very special relationship with them. We couldn’t go, we were the same age as them, but we weren’t allowed to go to the wet canteen. We weren’t allowed to drink alcohol on site. They were. And we weren’t. I think we won most of the fights because there were inevitable brawls.

The only thing that really happened was that when we went on leave and we fought the air force, we all fought together. The Blue Orchids, everybody in the air force were called the Blue Orchids. You had to protect them. They were very delicate. Air force slept between sheets, would you believe? Army didn’t get sheets. Oh, there was a lot of

bitterness and you know in retrospect a lot of bungling by higher ups. They were the same sort of people in yet they got all sorts of luxuries which the army didn’t get and so the militia and the AIF at Darley camp, whenever they got in to a fight with the Air Force were always united. The Navy helped us incidentally; we never fought, or seldom fought, if there ever was a fight with the Navy grog was

involved but and so we did our training and I decided that I would sign my papers for the AIF so I did with the idea of transferring out of the 39th, because by this stage we hadn’t developed any loyalties to it like later on and in to a AIF unit, walked down the road

and a memorandum came back that I could not transfer out of the 39th Battalion so I retained my V number and went off and did my job. Of course with my clerical experience and my pay corps. experience and what had you, when we got to Darley I

was very quickly singled out to become a clerk and I was made orderly room clerk for the machine gun company, E Company of the 39th Battalion and there’s been great debate in you know military journals in recent months but there was never any E Company in any of the Australian army infantry units and of course we were all

rebelled against that and said yes there was. There was an E Company, machine gun company in the 39th Battalion, which there was and they’ve had to retract that, even the National, the War Memorial have had to retract that and admit there was. And so we trained. I had trained. I’d been in the E Company, machine gun company in the 59th Battalion and we trained on Vickers guns, five

hundred rounds a minute and although you were the E Company clerk you weren’t exempted from that sort of training. You had to be a soldier as well. You didn’t sit down behind a desk while you were in action and that was understood but I had to help everybody, make their wills. When I’m admitted in to Heidelberg these days, well not so much these days because I’m up here but when I’m down there it always tickles my fancy that the

huge file like that they’ve got on me now, when you go to the number one volume, the cover is all written in my own handwriting. Not many people can say that but I wrote the medical files for everybody in that unit. I helped them write their wills because we all had to make a will before we left and those were the kinds of things and I had to do all the orders about promotions and absences and wrote leave passes

for people to go on, leave and so on. That was the work that the order room clerk did and you developed a very close relationship with the E Company Sergeant Major, with the Officer Commanding and his 2 IC.[Second In Command] You didn’t develop a terribly close relationship with the platoons, you did with some of their officers and NCO’s [Non- Commissioned Officers] who came in to the E Company orderly room but you dealt with

that little nucleus of administration and so in a sense I became a bit isolated from the rest of the unit and that wasn’t of my doing that was just a fact of administration, the way it happened. We did our training at Darly and it was a pretty

basic training but we did gas training and we had to you know take a gasporaters as we called them. Respirators is their official name, gas mask was their unofficial name and the army called them gasporaters and we had to go through a building which was filled with gas and wear our gas mask through it. We had to take it off, gas masks off at a certain time so we knew what it was like if we smelt it

and all that sort of and we did weapon training and we took part in an exercise, the battle of Corangamite and I’m sure somebody else has told you about the battle of Corangamite, where we spent a whole week out with an enemy arriving and they were also troops coming in. It was a full scale, thousands of soldiers involved. One bloke got stinko drunk down at

Cressy and went berserk in a Bren gun carrier and they had to arrest him and lock him up. Those were some of the sidelights but we had to live off the land and coming off a dairy farm that has some advantages. I used to go down at milking time, give the local farmer a hand and bring back a whole bucket of milk and a dozen eggs and we lived like

fighting cocks in that exercise and somebody was only laughing recently at one of our reunions. They didn’t know who it was and remember the guy who used to go and get the bucket of milk every morning and I said yeah I remember him. That was me but and the people were fantastic and of course they’d all been primed up that they weren’t to support the enemy because they had to live off the land as well and they nearly bloody… excuse my French,

they nearly starved because people wouldn’t give them anything and because for them it was an exercise too. There was a real fear that the country would be invaded and there was a small group of us. My would be wife used to come up and visit us at the camp. She used to come up on Sundays and on open days and

I’d go down and visit her whenever I could and the romance was carrying on all of this time but there was a small group of us. There was George Cops who was our company Sergeant Major, there was Ron Ellie and I’ve got his picture there. He was our CQ [Company Quartermaster] in a company called [(UNCLEAR)]. There was myself and oh two or three others. About six of us used to go in every Thursday night

to the Bridge hotel in Bacchus Marsh and have dinner in there and I suppose in a sense we used to live it up. We’d get away from army food and we’d have a nice posh meal. I can’t remember what it was but it was certainly you know a nice meal and drinks and what have you. It wasn’t a booze up session or anything like that. And we’d be back at

camp before our leave passes expired and we had a regular reservation every Thursday night for this. Well, it comes, of course the Japanese had come in to the war by 7th December 1941 and it was probably the third week in December, this little group of us went in to the pub for our meal and we had our meal and

when we asked the landlady for the bill, “Ah no,” she said, “Not tonight. This one’s on me.” “Oh, Christmas?” because it was the week before Christmas. “Oh, no,” she says, “This is the last time you’ll be here.” So much for army security. “What do you mean?” “Oh, you’ll be gone before you come in again.”

Well, on Christmas day we got orders to pack up. We had Christmas dinner and then we got orders to pack our gear. On Boxing Day we were all loaded on to trucks and taken in to the Bacchus Marsh station and put on a train.

Rumour had it we were going to Sydney but we could have been going to Timbuktu for all we knew. We headed down to Melbourne and we didn’t go through Melbourne but we went around, what I know now, is the Loop line to Broadmeadows. It was built for military reasons in the First World War, that line. It’s where the Narrowgoes line goes now. Up to Broadmeadows and started to head North so

when we went to Seymour and we were taken off the train at Seymour and there lined up on the platform we had tables of food and everything so we had lunch at Seymour. Well, we knew we weren’t being taken to Seymour and we were getting back on the train obviously. They wouldn’t be feeding us on the platform. We agreed then that either we were going to Barnagowa because you know they did have that habit of changing you around at different towns

or we were going to Sydney but the hot favourite was

We right?

So, we’re commenced. We’re on the way to Sydney and obviously if we’re going to Sydney, we’re not going to another camp. We’re going somewhere. We’re going to the garrison outside

of Australia which is what we’ve been told in the first place and we had a fair idea that it would probably be New Guinea but it might be Singapore. There was always that question. It could be Singapore because the Japanese were having a bit of success. Mind you this was Christmas, they hadn’t, Singapore hadn’t fallen yet and we thought we might be heading to Singapore. We got to Albury

and of course we all had to get off the train at Albury with all our gear or Wodonga, no Albury and we were fed again on the platform at Albury with these lines of tables and then we got in to the New South Wales train on the other side of the platform and we were quite convinced then of course we were off to Sydney and Sydney of course it was and we travelled all night

on the train and arrived in Sydney the next morning and the train went right down to Woolloomooloo and there was the biggest ship. I’ve got a picture for you later on, the biggest ship I had ever seen in my life sitting out in the middle of the harbour and of course she was the biggest ship that was ever built,

at that stage anyhow, the Queen Elizabeth. I think she’s still I think the QE 1 is still the biggest ship that’s ever been built. There she was sitting out in the middle of Sydney harbour. Big ship like that we’ve got to be going to Singapore. Anyhow, we got off the train and then we see, pulled in at the wharf and I’m confused about

this because we were definitely in the ship at the wharf but I’ve got pictures there of others being ferried out on Manly ferries to her so I think some of us must have been late at the wharf and then for some reason she stood off in to the harbour and others were brought aboard on Manly ferries and you know seventy years later, or not quite seventy but sixty five years later you get a bit hazy but I was only

thinking last night when I was looking through the photographs why were they taken by ferry? Unless we were picked up from Circular Quay now that might be the answer. We, the train might not have gone to Woolloomooloo. It may have gone down to Circular Quay, now that would be the answer. And we had to get on ferries and then go to Woolloomooloo and that might be right because the

Aquitania was definitely birthed when we got on the Aquitania from the wharf and that might be the explanation why there were ferries and I’ve forgotten that we went on a ferry and now it’s suddenly triggering. I do remember being on a ferry and I think we were probably picked up from Circular Quay. I don’t think there’s a railway line down to Woolloomooloo. That’s where this Aquitania was and we were put on board the Aquitania.

Would you believe she had all her civilian fitting in her still? Some were lucky enough to get cabins, mainly officers. We were put down in the hulls, below water level and for some reason, only the army would know, we were all compelled to strip off. Mind you we’d come from an army

camp. We’d been having medical inspections and everything else. We were all made to strip off. Have a shower using salt water and soap, special sort of salt water soap and then stand stark naked in line while the medical officer inspected us. Now he’s inspection consisted of walking along, looking at us and then telling us we could get dressed again. That was the medical examination. That happened

actually on board the Aquitania and I’ve always thought how ridiculous it was and we were allocated places, straw palliasses below, actually below the water line down where cargo and baggage was usually stowed. I managed to get, I never slept in it, I managed to get a bunk immediately under one of the

vents but because we were the machine gun company we were allocated to provide anti-aircraft defences up on the boat deck and as a privilege for that we were permitted to sleep up on the boat deck. So, I took my palliasse up there and that’s where I spent the voyage, up on the boat deck which up in the fresh air was much better than being below water line

and of course we were issued with meal tickets, meal had to be according to sittings and so on. And of course we were watching as other, we were a thousand and eighty one of us in the 39th Battalion. We had a regimental sergeant, new Regimental Sergeant Major. We never saw him in the entire because he’d been told in no uncertain terms that he’d go

overboard and he would have. Actually, he got troppo when we went to New Guinea and they had to send him back to Australia for medically unfit.

To put it in the vernacular, he was a bastard. We had one of our sergeants in our company and he still rejoices in the name. He still calls himself shark bait

but he was a good sergeant actually. He pulled us in to line and in retrospect he was okay but oh this Regimental Sergeant Major he was hopeless. He was a pig, absolute pig but he, he got, when one of the first bombs dropped he went troppo and he had to be returned to Australia and he put the act on so effectively I couldn’t believe it. When we came back after the whole New Guinea business and I went to the movies and of course there were

always newsreels at the movies and I took, met my wife I think and we went and saw a movie. It was a sort of exciting thing you did in those days and all of a sudden somebody’s running out they’re showing wartimes news things, someone’s running out of the theatre, “They’re going to get me, they’re going to get me,” and it was this nibs. I didn’t admit I knew him but that was a bloke, anyway, he never came out of his

cabin the whole time but anyhow we went to the side of the ship and watched all these other troops coming on because obviously the Aquitania is going to carry more than a thousand people and then trucks arrived with the most non-descript looking people that you would ever imagine in your life. Now if you’ve ever seen new recruits

come in, they don’t know how to wear the uniform, the uniform doesn’t fit them. It hasn’t got you know pulled in at the right places so it fits them and their hats pulled down that hasn’t been dinted in the right way and they haven’t got a puggaree on. You can always pick them. They’re civilians who are wearing army uniforms. They’ve not got any military bearing about them. I don’t think military bearing’s the be all and end all but you can tell a guy who’s had

military training and they’ve been taught to march and to keep in step and to stand upright and to pull his shoulders back and pull his belly in and you can see it but oh my god what have we got coming here? And so a whole battalion had turned out with these non-descripts. They had received their first call up papers, I think it was the day before

Christmas Eve. They had reported to the drill hall and told that they would be embarking on Boxing Day, day after Boxing Day, 27th, because we left Melbourne on Boxing Day, the 27th. They were allowed to go home and say goodbye to their families and then they had to report back to the drill hall on Boxing Day. They spent the night of the drill hall being issued with uniforms and

rifles

Well, they were boarding these poor fellows as I say, I don’t think I’d been called on paper, it’s a few days before. They were certainly not willing soldiers. They were the most unwilling soldiers I’ve ever seen in contrast. Now I should have mentioned that while we were at Darley and I think this is something that ought to be widely known

It has been said that we were conscripts as Militia men in the 39th Battalion, we were conscripts and it had been said that if there weren’t enough volunteers some would be detailed but our commanding officer, before we even left Darley, gave every person in the unit the opportunity of going

back to their original unit if they didn’t want to leave Australia and so, although some ultimately didn’t join the AIF and that was their folly for financial reasons, some didn’t join the AIF there was nobody sent to New Guinea who wasn’t agreeable to go. In that sense everybody was a volunteer because they’d

had the chance at Darley to back off if they didn’t want to go.

We knew we were leaving the shores of Australia at that stage.

None whatever. I think in our wild dreams we might have been going to Singapore and you know it was the city of the fleshpot sort of work.

We’d heard stories about our mates who were up in Singapore and being carted around in rickshaws and going in to Raffles and what have you and having drinks. It didn’t turn out like that for them at all but we weren’t to know that. New Guinea was always a pretty strong favourite. We were never, ever told until we were on board the ship where we were really going.

No, not one. Not one. They had the chance. Now, mind you there might have been I’m not going to do it if nobody else does. There might have been a bit of that and I’m not aware of that but not one person said I want to go back and I don’t believe there were in fact

any conscripts at all .I believe that, well I might have been a conscript because I asked to be. I don’t believe there was anybody who was actually sent there because they were told they had to go and when we were given the chance if we didn’t want to keep on with it nobody took that opportunity. But these fellows and the 53rd Battalion had no choice. They were

press ganged and put on board the Aquitania. And it was there they learned how to put a uniform on and when we got to, because we had a bit of excitement too. It was a big convoy. There was the Aquitania, there were a number of cargo ships as well and several navy ships escorting us.

Now the Aquitania was a very fast ship. She was known as the greyhound of the Atlantic and I believe she was capable of thirty knots which is very fast for a big ship, you know that’s speed boat. Well, we had a taste of what she was like because we were up on the, well we weren’t on the boat deck actually. I was down having

my meal at the time and the boat siren went off. Well, because we were on anti-aircraft protection we were exempt from boat drill because we were stationed on the boat deck. So, when the siren went off for boat drill, oh just another drill and we went on and we finished our meal and ambled upstairs to find that the convoy had dispersed. A submarine, an

enemy submarine had been detected and so the navy ships went off and dealt with that and the greyhound of the Atlantic put on full steam ahead and we had a taste of what her speed was like. Well, we never did see the submarine but the story was that the navy sank her and the convoy reformed and off we went on our tropical islands.

cruise, took us six days to get to New Guinea. Now the cargo ships were a bit slow but I think we went for a good cruise around and probably to show the Japanese Navy off a bit too because they were very active and they were well about. I mentioned earlier that I grew up in Bairnsdale. There was an aerodrome, still is an aerodrome at

Bairnsdale. It was established by the Air Force and unlike there were two at Sale, one was a training aerodrome at Sale and one was an operational one. The one at Bairnsdale was operational and they sunk a number of enemy submarines flying out of Bairnsdale so that’s how far South the enemy were that there were submarines being sunk in a regular basis in Bass Strait and so I think we went for a bit of a Cook’s

tour around the Pacific but it took us six days to get to Port Moresby and we landed in Port Moresby but of course by this time we’d been told where we were going and we landed in Port Moresby on the 4th of January. Because the Aquitania was so big, thirty two thousand tons I think she was. That’s off the top of my head. She couldn’t berth.

and so we were taken off by the navy boats. They actually went ashore, I went ashore on the Achilles, a New Zealand cruiser or destroyer. She was involved in the battle of the River Plate in South America and still had holes in her funnel that had been inflicted in that battle but she was one of our escorts. The Warramunga was another one but

I actually went ashore on Achilles, on the, yes the Achilles, a New Zealand boat. Because we were a militia battalion we weren’t allowed to have wet camp even on the ship and I remember. I always remember making a pun or smart remark, we were all lined up waiting to be transhipped to the

Destroyer I think it was to take us ashore and one of the ship’s officers came along with a great big jug of beer, fresh drawn beer and I said to him, “Are you an engineer?” He said, “Yes,” he said,” As a matter of fact I am.” I said, “Do you think you could engineer one of them for us?”

He said, “That’s a pretty smart comment, here take this and I’ll engineer one for me,” and so then we had this jug of beer and we just passed it around. I think we all got about a mouthful each but at least we had a mouthful of beer, mouthful of beer before we landed in New Guinea. So, we were taken ashore and put in army trucks and taken out to what we were told was the Seven Mile Post.

Well, army planning. They get minus fifty out of ten for that. Here was a battalion of a thousand and eighty one men dumped down on this bit of land, at that stage no tents, nothing.

We had a rifle. We had five rounds of ammunition. We had a ground sheet. We had a thousand men. We had army cooks with no facilities for cooking and one half inch tap for water. No latrines, no toilets. Nothing.

No mosquito nets. And so for the first night we lay down on our ground sheets, fortunately it didn’t rain. I was fascinated as I lay there on that first night I could hear an organ playing. These deep notes of an organ somewhere in the background.

Eventually, I realised that it was the hum of mosquitos. When we woke up next morning of course we’d all been well bitten by mosquitos. Well, oddly enough none of us at that stage or for some time afterwards developed Malaria but we were

sitting ducks for it. Well, next the army produced mosquito nets and a blanket each for us. I think we might have brought the blanket off the ship with us. I think we had an army blanket on the ship and we brought that with us so we might have had an army blanket as well and so we strung the mosquito nets up between trees and somehow they got some cooking facilities and the army cooks

set up in a very primitive kind of way of providing us with some food and we were put to work unloading the ship. Well, of course the ship had been wrongly laid and all the basic supplies of course had been put in first because they were the important things. If the Japanese had attacked us, where was all the ammunition? Right, very bottom of the ship and that’s a historical fact this is not just one soldier, ex-soldier talking. And the essential equipment because

it was important that had all been loaded first and the non-essential equipment had been put in on top of it. So, all non-essential equipment had to be unloaded before they could get to the essential equipment and eventually they found some tents and eventually some ammunition and other supplies and pots and pans and things for the cooks and army life was sort of

set up and still there was one half inch tap for a thousand men. Well, gradually plumbers put a few more taps in. But we’d been there about a fortnight and we all got the trots and that was when we discovered the dysentery compound at Murray barracks and any one who’s been there will tell you the same story that you just took no

notice. Somebody would be racing to make it to the loo and you just dropped your pants where you were and there was no real hygiene. It didn’t exist. In fact one monumental routine order came out to the troops and I can still remember the wording of it. And it’s crude but “When you shit, emulate a cat not a dog.”

The point being a cat buries its business and that was it. There was no-where for us to go. We just had to go and dig a little hole ourselves. So was it any wonder that dysentery swept through the whole area. Then we started to discover in our blankets, because mind you no sheets. No such thing as sheets and it was very hot and humid, we started to discover grey patches in our blankets.

And then we discovered that the grey patches were getting bigger and they were wriggling. Our body oils of course had come off in to the blankets and then they got fly blown and so we used to spend part of each day with our bayonets scraping the maggots out of our blankets. And all this sounds terrible I know but this is the muddling

that we had to cope with when we arrived and we, the 39th, we of course we joined up with the 49th who’d already been there for twelve months and they were expecting us to relieve them. They’d done their stint of duty as garrison troops. They were a Queensland unit and they expected to go back to Queensland. No such luck. They spent another fourteen months there because they couldn’t be

spared and they were season troops as well. Perhaps, and I’m not saying this critically, perhaps not as well trained militarily as we were but they knew more about the tropics than we did and so they were better equipped mentally and physically to cope with the tropics than we were but they’d had more than twelve months of arm discipline and so they were a good unit.

But they were there but this poor old 53rd [Battalion], they never really became a good unit. They were put in to battle but they were a total failure and the least said about that the better and they eventually became a war flavouring crew.

I think we didn’t win the war because of military

brilliance. We just won the war by sheer persistence from people who didn’t know that they weren’t supposed to win and that’s a bit cynical I know but I don’t believe that our military leadership back at base. I’m not talking about our immediate commanders, but I don’t think they had a clue what was going on. MacArthur who became supreme commander never set

foot in New Guinea. In yet he was saying what should be done in New Guinea. He issued orders at one stages of the Japanese advanced beyond Kokoda, that the “Kokoda Gap” in inverted commas was to be dynamited and that the trail was to be blocked. The Kokoda Gap was miles wide and there was no great

canyon that could be dynamited and the track blocked but that was one of the commands that he sent up. This was to be done. And he had no concept and it was interesting some, many years later, and I’ll tell you an interesting story about this. I was in Manila and I went across to Corregidor and you know MacArthur’s famous words when he left there: “I

shall return,” and the attitude was, “Over our dead bodies.” We never heard about that but they didn’t regard him highly in the Philippines either. Blamey had I think two visits to New Guinea and put his great big foot in his mouth every time he went there. He was not respected, not respected by the army at all. I’m talking about the

army, the troops. They were given wrong advice. If you read Peter Brune’s book, books you’ll find Brune is very critical of Blamey. Others are very critical of Blamey. He may have been brilliant in some fields but I don’t think you’ll many people in the 39th

Battalion or the 2/14th Battalion who think very highly of him at all. He cost us lives. No question. He and MacArthur between them cost us lives and the loss of lives I believe would have been much greater if on occasions commanders on the ground did not disobey direct orders and did what they thought was best

and that doesn’t get recorded in history. That’s just an old sergeant reminiscing.

Well, I think first of all, they didn’t expect, they expected us to move in to barracks. They expected to take the 49th back to Australia and we would move in where the 49th had been and then remember we left on Boxing Day. The Japanese only came in to the war on the 7th of December. That was only 19 days

before we left and I’m sure all the intentions to send us to New Guinea were in place before the Japanese came in to the war and the move, I believe, at that stage and I may be wrong but I’m fairly sure this is right was to take the 49th back on the ship that took us up and we would take their place. But then

the Japanese came in to the war and perhaps one of the right decisions that was made at the time, bad luck for the 49th but it was to keep them there and so there was no accommodation for us and I think that was probably the simple explanation of why there were no facilities for us and they’d sewn some tents and things in when they realised that we weren’t going to be able to move in and take over the quarters of the 49th

and they’d done the same of course with the 53rd and so there’d been no time. Have you tried to get a plumber to come and put a tap on for you recently? Well, you won’t get that done in 19 days. Here, these days. And so there hadn’t been time to put plumbing in, there hadn’t been time to build toilet facilities, to do latrines and what have you and so we were just dumped there and with

disastrous results to our health. I thought you were going to ask me why we were put out at 7 miles. That interest you?

Because there was a landing strip there. Now known as Jackson strip. The Jackson airport I think it rejoices in the name of now doesn’t it? And of course Jackson was an air force officer and an interesting one. I can tell you some stories about him too that are peculiarly relevant to the 39th

but were put there to defend the air strip. Subsequently, we were spread right round it but at that stage we were just put in one group, all on the Port Moresby side of the air strip and there was a bit of a joke about defending the air strip because the Japs were up in Malaya somewhere and perhaps the Philippines. I don’t know whether they’d reached the

Philippines, you know they were very remote. We were going to be isolated from the war, we were going to have a great time. We’d go in to the one and only pub in Port Moresby, with a bit of luck we might occasionally be admitted to the Settlers pub, Planters pub or whatever and we’d be like the troops of Singapore. We’d have a pretty good time eventually but then of course Nippon changed all that by dropping

bombs on Singapore and people forget that they dropped them on Singapore on the same day as they dropped them on Pearl Harbour. Did you know that? Almost simultaneously.

Brought?

If they did I never saw them. I’ve heard that legend. I never say any.

I never saw anybody go surfing. Some did take tennis rackets. Not many of our fellows but I believe there were some tennis rackets and what ultimately became of them. Most of us took cameras and we’ve got remarkable story about cameras with one of our members, Ron Halsall and if you’ve got him on your

list to interview then it needs to be done, I shouldn’t say this on camera, it needs to be done fairly soon for reasons I think you might understand, but Ron had his camera. Initially he did what most of us did, sent the film’s back home to get them processed and then of course the stop was put to that. So Ron kept on having his films sent up to him.

with, we used to get cakes sent up to us in tins, sewn up in calico and what have you and Ron used to get his films in that and processing chemicals and he’d process all his own films all throughout the war. On my computer I’ve got reproduced, quite preserved in our own archives a number of the pictures that Ron took during the war and so he preserved the historical records. He used to

develop his films and wash them in the river, found clean water and what have you and did all that but not all of us were able to do that. a), we didn’t have the materials and b), we didn’t have the skill but after the first bombs were dropped on Port Moresby Ron had enough nous to realize that lots of things were coming up in the wash and I’ll show you pictures of my 21st birthday party later on. They got washed up in the tide was the

term but of course there was terrible looting went on. The civilians just deserted the place and Ron went in and looted the chemist shop and took all the photographic material so that kept him going and he’ll deny he did it. But that kept him going for a while and then he got the stuff smuggled up to him. So, he was able to preserve a remarkable photographic record but we couldn’t all do that. Most of us took cameras.

and I was able to take a few photographs but not many because I couldn’t get the films back to be processed. We settled in and we lived a fairly good life. We were, as I said, spread around the - but we used to watch the Catalina flying boats go out and we used to watch our, two I think it was Lockheed

Hudson go out and our one Wirraway which was never built as a fighter plane but it was built as a training plane but it became a fighter plane because that was our one and only plane. We used to watch them go out and count them as they came back again and then the Americans of course arrived in Australia and took over Australia and took over our girls or most of them anyhow, not all of them

and we were promised that they were going to send fighter planes up, Kittyhawks. The Kittyhawks will be here tomorrow was the regular report. So, it didn’t take the troops long to name them Tomorrow Hawks. They never for a long, long time materialised.

But then one day our CO [Commanding Officer] came after he’d had a briefing at battalion headquarters. He said now this is authentic he said “The Kittyhawks will be arriving tomorrow. There will be four Kittyhawks leaving Townsville and they’ll arrive here at about two o clock tomorrow afternoon. They will come in following the usual procedures and land and then about two hours later the

rest of the squadron will arrive. That is definite.” Well, at that stage we were being strafed by the Japanese Zero fighters. There’s an old Japanese flying boat a Kawasaki used to come over and fly around at liberty because we couldn’t do anything about it and take photographs of us. Very cheeky. Was there most of the time and …

it had a monotonous drone to its engines and that was there all the time. We couldn’t do anything about that. Well, that was in the morning we were told that quite positively the Kittyhawks tomorrow and we took that with a grain of salt because we’d heard this sort of thing before and when the Japanese fighters used to come in, they used to come in over Port Moresby harbour, up over what was known as Morris Hill, do a

right hand turn and come down along the side of the airstrip where all the, whatever aircraft we had was dispersed with their guns blazing, strafing them. Well at about five minutes to two on the same afternoon that we were told the Kittyhawks were arriving next day there’s an ‘Aircraft Yellow’ goes up, that means an aircraft

attack impending, immediately followed by red alert. Means it’s on, and with that four aircraft come up over the top of Morris hill they do a right hand turn and they ride along and of course we’ve got Vickers guns set up as anti-craft. They fire five hundred rounds a minute and they are thirty two of these set up and so the thirty two Vickers guns

firing and a few Lewis guns to boot firing five hundred rounds a minute and suddenly we realised the aircraft we were shooting had Air Force rondels on them. We were shooting our own Kittyhawks. You don’t have time to look for identification so we very quickly stopped when we realised they didn’t have rising suns on them

and all four aircraft landed. Squadron leader Jackson, hence the name of the airport. He was leading. Wackett, wing commander Wackett’s son was in one of them and I’ve forgotten who the other two were. One of the aircraft had over two hundred holes in it and was completely

unserviceable. One of the aircraft, only because the pilot lent forward to see what the hell was going on when he put his head back there was no head rest there. It was not a very noble part of our history but we had very little relationship with 75 Squadron. We get on very well with them these days and the other two had a few holes, minor holes in them. They had

been told before they left Townsville that there were no anti-aircraft defences in Port Moresby and that’s what they got greeted with. Jackson’s comment was, “I’m glad there aren’t any defences here because what the hell would you have done if you did.” They’d barely got out of their aircraft and then the air raid warnings, sirens go again.

The old flying boats up there coming. So, two of the aircraft which of course were fully armed. They’re always fully armed take off and before the Kawasaki could even get a signal off they shot him down. Two hours later the rest of the squadron arrive, a day early mark you

and we didn’t shoot them up. I think they were a bit disappointed they didn’t get the same welcome because by the time the rest of the squadron arrived they were able to tell them that they’d been shot up and they’d shot a Japanese aircraft down in the meantime and then I think it was the next day the Japanese Zeros came in and the air watching people, we had them scattered all around the place,

and they advised us by radio and they’re worth interviewing. Trying to get the people who did the early air, they risked their lives to give us warning of approaching aircraft because there was no radar in those days and warned us there were Japanese Zeros coming in to strafe. Well, the fighters just took off and hid until they’d turned around and well I know they shot two of them down. They might have shot more down but one of the

interesting things of our attack on 75 Squadron was that we had been firing at the Japanese Zeros and of course in and they’re gone and we had no way of knowing whether we were hitting them or anything and they can be little doubt that with the concentrated fire power of the damage we did do to our own aircraft we were obviously doing the same sort of damage to them and inevitably, there ought to

have been some of them that didn’t get home and it gave us greater confidence in manning our anti-aircraft defences. There was an interesting side line to the Japanese strafing us. We took the first prisoner of war in the 39th Battalion, first Japanese prisoner of war. We had a platoon, I think it was 19 Platoon but it doesn’t matter which one

was camped down at Bootless bay which was five miles from the end of the Jackson air strip and this Japanese pilot bailed out of his Zero, parachuted in to the water, let his aircraft crash in to the sea. He claimed that he’d been hit and he had engine failure, because he was interrogated. Believe me he was interrogated

their first Japanese prisoner ever taken. Ever taken. Because it had been the reverse up to that moment but when divers went down and inspected the aircraft they could find no damage to it. They think he, the popular opinion was he just wanted out of the war and he probably was like a wool buyer that was, when we were fourteen months or so later when we were

coming back to Australia we had Japanese prisoners of war on the ship with us. I came back in the old Duntroon and it was a terribly rough voyage, only about thirty of us weren’t sea sick on the whole ship and I was sort of around boats ever since I was a kid. I’ve never had the experience of being seasick fortunately and I got talking to this guy who’d been a Japanese

wool buyer here in Australia before the war. “Oh,” he said, “I’m looking forward to being a prisoner of war.” He said, “We were told of course that if the Australians took us prisoner of war, we’d have our throats cut, we’d be tortured, terrible things would happen to us.” He said, “I lived in Australia too long”. He said, “I have a nice warm bed and three feeds a day. It’ll do me,” and that was his attitude but of course not all of them had that

same insight in to how they’d be treated. It was interesting, we took the first POW [Prisoner of War] and so we spent time. I remember Easter 1942, the bishop, Anglican bishop of New Guinea came and visited us and he celebrated the

holy communion for us on Easter day and in the middle of it the Japanese came over with their Zeros strafing us and old Bishop Strong never batted an eyelid and none of us were going to run to slit trenches. If he was going to stand there and go on with his service we’d stay with him. I’ve never forgotten that. He later on became the Archbishop of Brisbane, then retired and came to live in Bendigo until he, until he

died. But that was an interesting experience.

We eventually developed air superiority. It took a while as bombers started to come in. Bombing was a regular thing, right up until

well in to July possibly August but I’m hazy about this you know you’ll have to check records to get this accurate so I’m doing this off the top of my head. We were getting up to a hundred bomber raids, you know, that’s a big raid in a big country like New Guinea, hundred bomber raids and London will regard it as quite big raids. So, we were getting a hundred

bomber raids. They weren’t doing a lot of damage. At that stage they weren’t doing a lot of damage even to morale. We used to stand out and watch them and we’d learnt to determine where they’d, you could see the bombs fall out and you’d get a pretty good idea where they were going to land anyhow and if they were going to land somewhere near you, you went for cover because you had a

minute, two minutes perhaps before they hit the ground so you had plenty of time to get in to a slit trench and get undercover and really in retrospect they didn’t do a lot of damage. Sometimes they did quite critical damage. I’ve got a picture there of the bombing of the MV Macdhui. I had these tropical ulcers on my leg

and a lot of us had them because we, you know, the army didn’t equip us for the tropics. They did give us tropical gear in the end but we went to New Guinea with khaki, serge, khaki serge with putties you know these either little serge gaiters we buttoned up or putties we wrapped around like bandages and the grass seeds in New Guinea

loved these. They’d wind in to them and eventually wind in to your flesh as well and the next thing you knew because of the tropical condition they were infected and all of us I think, almost all of us anyhow at some time or another had tropical ulcers but mine were very badly and on both legs they were eating down on to the bone.

And so a battalion medical officer said to me, “I think we’ll have to send you back to Australia,” he said, “They’re going to have to operate on them,” he said and, “I won’t be surprised if they amputate your left leg.” “Oh, great.” He said, “But I have to have another opinion, another medical opinion before I can order you back to Australia. I’ll arrange for that to be done.”

So, the Macdhui which was a Burns Philp trading vessel and used to bring cargo and what have you in to us. She was in Port Moresby unloading and I’d actually been loaded on to a truck to go in to Port Moresby to help unload her and a message came that I had to go for this medical examination so I was taken off the truck and somebody else put in my place.

Townsville so I was actually in hospital when the troops went up to Kokoda. You ready? You going?

Well, I was actually on this truck ready to go in to, unload the Macdhui and Don our dispatcher came in with a message that I had to go to the main dressing station at

Lamana Trollmoll [probably means Ladava Advanced Dressing Station] for this second medical exam so I was taken off the truck and somebody else was put on it and off I went to my medical exam well the boys went in an unloaded the Macdhui and the Japs came over the harbour, put a bomb straight down the funnel, went right down in to the hull before it exploded and the guy who took my place on the truck was

killed. So, that was the point where I decided I wasn’t meant to be killed and if I could jump ahead a bit, quite a bit because I might as well tell the second story about when I wasn’t killed, well there was three cases. The second one when I reckoned I wasn’t meant to be killed, they used to come across at night and bomb us too and send night bombers across

and it was quite a spectacle. The searchlights would get out, well, initially they just had to roam around with the search lights and hope that they would pick them up. But then they got radar and of course they didn’t turn the search lights on until they knew the radar had picked up where they were and I’ll never forget the first night. The, they used the radar and the searchlight. They turned the searchlights and there were these six Japanese bombers flying quite low in perfect

formation in the lights and Ack Ack the decimated them. They weren’t on top all the time. But on another occasion I was out at 17 Mile. My military service had changed considerably at this stage. I was no longer thE Company clerk but I’m jumping ahead because relevant to

escaping being killed, was one of these night raids and we were sleeping in tents of course at that stage and under mosquito nets and in the all together because it was quite hot and humid and it was quite safe to be in the all together, but I must tell you a funny story about that too, and so I don’t know why. All being smart and anything. “Oh, I can’t stand

here naked and look at this, wouldn’t be decent. I’ve got to be dressed.” So I put a tin hat on and I don’t know what happened to it but I think it got thrown out accidentally and all of a sudden it was like a sledge hammer hitting my tin hat and here was a bit of Ack Ack shrapnel that had come down and hit me on the head. I kept it for years and only

recently I asked somebody where it was, nobody knows where it is. It’s disappeared. I suspect it’s somebody who didn’t know what it was, it was just a bit of old iron and threw it out but I should have been killed then but I wasn’t and there was another occasion at the same site but that wasn’t a near death one. Might have been the same night. It was the next morning. They were bombing the area where we were.

The next morning we were taken off to the rifle ranges for rifle practice. When we came back the bomb disposal squad was digging a five pounder up about twenty five yards from where I’d slept the night. An unexploded bomb. What you don’t know doesn’t hurt you. No, anyhow I went in to, went to have this medical examination

and the old doctor there said, “Oh I think I can cure them. I don’t think we need to send you back to Australia. I think we can cure them,” and they’d been crushing up sulphanilamide tablets, making them in to powder and sprinkling them on the wound and he said, “We won’t do any of this new-fangled stuff.” He said, “It had to be made,” he said, “Because

I’m just going to use old fashioned hot foments” and he did and he had them almost cleaned up and then the Coral sea battle took place and of course there were injuries on the Coral sea battle, despite what you hear on the blurb and they were brought back to Port Moresby and of course the hospital beds were needed and so I was

sent up to the convalescent depot at Koitaki which was about up above Rouna Falls. You’ve been up, you know Rouna Falls and up Koitaki up beyond that. Lovely place, the army had established a convalescent depot and the young doctor there. “Oh,” he said, “Foments,” he said, “They’re old fashioned. We’ll use sulphanilamide on them.” Well, to this day I’m allergic to sulphanilamide

because we didn’t know about allergies to it then. If I go in to hospital and they give me sulphanilamide I come out in festering blisters all over today. Well, it was only a matter of about two weeks when I had to go back to the hospital again and this was at the stage when the 39th went up to Kokoda and my company was one of the companies that went up so I would have gone with them.

I came back to the hospital, stayed there and he didn’t let me go up to Koitaki until they were completely healed the second time. When I got up there I was astounded to find our old company commander was in charge of the convalescent depot by this stage. Wonderful old soldier, Indian army

Punabarjo [?] you know. How he ever got in to the army in the Second World War I’ll never know. He must have been certainly well in his fifties yes he must have been well in his fifties and of course when they started to get some semblance of common sense you see we went away with two

fellows with only one arm each. One fellow only had one eye. We were supposed to be a garrison, it didn’t matter. Our postal sergeant only had one arm and he went right up in to the forward areas but they were getting some semblance of common sense and these old blokes except Sam Temple who lied about his age and somewhere alone the line talking to 39 people, Sam Templeton is a name that will come up. Captain

Templeton and he lied about his age he told them he was twenty something. Everybody knew he was fifty five or fifty six except the army. He was 27 I think in the army but old John, Farmer John we called him because he used to come out in early morning parade wearing gum boots and I was, although we were in convalescence, we had to do guard duty and everything else the same as any other army unit

and I was corporal of the guard and I got a message that I had to report to the orderly room. “Oh, what’s one of my idiots done?” You know, somebody’s done something wrong as corporal of the guards. That’s where the buck stops. “Oh, what have they done wrong?” So, I went down to the orderly room spring to attention and salute the commanding officer, “Sit down Peter.”

Well, as soon as he said that, of course see I’d been his clerk. I was telling you before about the little administrative group well he was our officer of commanding our company so I had a good relationship with him. So, soon as he said, “Sit down Peter,” I knew I wasn’t in any kind of trouble and he said “Do you trust me?” That’s a funny question for a major to ask a corporal and

I said, “Yes of course I do,” and I do I think anybody in our company would have gone to hell and back with him if he’d wanted them to. That was the kind of loyalty he engendered. I said “Yes,” he said, “I’m not sending you back to the machine gun company.” Well, by this stage we’d developed a pretty good spirit, a good esprit de corps. I suppose is the correct term and I

started to protest. He said, “You said you trusted me and if you trust me you won’t question me,” and this is an Indian army officer coming at me. “Yes, sir.” He said, “You’re going to brigade headquarters.” “Yes, sir. You’ll understand why eventually. Dismissed.”

And off I went. What the heck was that all about? Well, what I discovered that what he was doing and he had a number of his company at the convalescent depot. He knew that the machine gun company was going to be taken out of the battalion as soon as they came back from the Owen Stanleys. They were going to be taken out of the 39th Battalion, eventually, actually they became a labouring battalion

and anyway you can get out of the unit was to other companies in the battalion or to brigade headquarters and brigade had a vacancy for a clerk so that’s where he was sending me. So I left the 39th Battalion at that stage and was attached to brigade headquarters. When I got down there I found I was to become what was called the senior supply clerk.

And that was the clerk to the senior supply officer. He rejoiced in the wonderful name of Diddums. That was his real name. Captain Diddums. Lovely bloke really, came from Queensland but I didn’t realise and this had ramifications later on but that I was actually being transferred right out of the brigade to a ASC, Army

Service Corps., army supply company and then from there and then from there seconded back to brigade headquarters. I’d still stay with the 30th Brigade but I was actually transferred to a unit, nothing to do with them and that’s how I came to be sent up to the 17th Mile when I was telling you about standing out and getting hid in the head. Tommy Grigg who’d been one of our platoon commanders had been sent up there to take command of this big supply depot and I went up there to learn

supply from him. Spent a time up there and then came back brigade headquarters and the job was basically coordinating supply, rations, petrol, ordinance everything for the whole brigade. It was a very interesting job and it was decided that I would be sent with the forward area to go up and join the troops at Isurava, that’s when I started to get in to the Owen Stanleys.

We got out just past McDonald’s Corner. If you’ve done the trek you’d know McDonald’s Corner and it became obvious I couldn’t walk any further. My tropical ulcers had flared up again and they have done ever since. They still do. I’ve just had treatment for them in hospital and so I got sent back again so that was as far as I got up the Kokoda track at that point.

I never actually made contact with the enemy on that scene but I did get up a bit past McDonald’s Corner and saw enough of it to be satisfied if I could say. I realise now that it wasn’t really tough going at that point but it had been tough enough so I got sent back to Dem then got treated and stayed at brigade quarters. Well, eventually they,

the 2/14th came in and relieved the boys at Isurava, fought the battle at Isurava with them, well actually they relieved them and then the 39th went back in to action again as you probably know to help them out and then eventually they came out to stay out and sent back to be reinforced and reshaped and everything else and then in

late November we were flown across to Popondetta to take part in the campaign again. It was interesting that flight

Yeah, what have we missed?

I’m jumping I know.

I’m a butterfly.

Well, we were at Seven Mile and we were in various positions. We were on the Moresby side as I said initially then they spread us all around it. Then for some reason I never quite understood why, I think it was Don company, one of the companies was moved down to Bootless inlet and part of our unit, part of our company was moved sort of half way between the end of the air strip and Bootless and I finished up down there.

Whether they thought the Japanese might come in through Bootless or something, God knows why. But we basically stayed there until, and it was actually from that place between Bootless and the air strip that’s where I was sent to Bomana, to the main dressing station. Interesting little story about Bootless. I was saying to you before we even

started this that I became quite fluent in Motu, because it was part of it, later on, part of my supply was we had about two thousand native carriers under our direct command and it became somewhat necessary to be able to communicate with them and I found I had a gift for learning their language. I wasn’t much good at pidgin. I never could understand pidgin but I did manage to pick up Motu but

Captain Merritt who later Major Merritt and features the mad major and he was mad, mad as a Rattlesnake but a good soldier. He features very much in the history of Kokoda. I went with him down to Bootless inlet and I can still see the picture now of these towering palm trees

and underneath them was a woman at a table with her petrol or kerosene iron you know like a blow lamp thing keeping the iron hot, ironing at this table and Bill Merritt goes up to her and in the most atrocious pidgin English I’ve ever heard, even I who couldn’t master it, knew it was dreadful pidgin English, asked her if

she knew where Billy Smith or whatever his name was, a native boy, where he could be found. He was the head man or something and I could see this wry smile on her face and with a very markedly upper class English accent, “Oh I’m afraid I couldn’t give you the answer to that question. You see I’m only a newcomer to these parts and I’m

not acquainted with where various people live but if you proceed in the direction in which you are facing you will find somebody there who will be able to tell you.” I never heard Bill try to talk to anyone in pidgin again after that. And that was one of the lessons you learnt very early in the piece that the influence of the missions was that they, most of them spoke very good English and you didn’t need pidgin. And I think it’s a tragedy that

when it became Papua New Guinea the government of the day decreed that pidgin would be the official language and so they lost their beautiful Motuan language, they also English. But they had, it was a beautiful language Motu and they’ve lost that too. That’s just me reminiscing. Now where do we go?

Well, I think we were going up to support to what became Isurava battle Our troops were falling back and so there were some of being sent up, only a handful. It was only a handful yeah, there weren’t any, see AIF troops hadn’t arrived.

The 53rd couldn’t be trusted. They’d already been put in to battle and dropped the guns and ran. The 49th were battle weary. There was only a handful of us and I told you at no one stage was there more than about a hundred and twenty men facing the Japanese until the battle of Isurava and we were being sent up as a back up for them. I think we weren’t told you just

dominoes you know or draughts or something on a chess board. There’s a mixture of metaphors isn’t it? You just did as you were told but it’s always been my assumption we were being sent up to back them up at Isurava or wherever it was and it’s convenient to say Isurava because that’s where the stand was but wherever it was we were being sent even it we were only ten or twenty people which we were. They were more

more people, more hands, more guns and some of them got there. One of them at least didn’t get there much to his disgust although in retrospect I’m a bit pleased I didn’t get there because I mightn’t be here talking to you today and I get sent back but then my turn came later on.

No, the 53rd had been pulled out by that stage. It was only

the 39th.

Making our way up to back up the 39th. We didn’t know but coming behind us was the 2/14th that was the 7th Division and these were the troops that were going to defend the Brisbane Line and all of a sudden the government had to send them up and of course there was no planning for that either. We didn’t deserve to win the war. There wasn’t much planning in it. We

muddled through.

Oh, I think we were told to pick our rifles and essential things and get in the truck.

I don’t think we were told where we were going. We didn’t expect to be. We were in the army. There was a great saying in the army and I can’t repeat it here on tape but “They can do, do a certain thing to you but they can’t make you love the baby,” and I think you know what the certain thing was and that was true. We’d been in the army long enough. We were, I guess we were disciplined enough and if we were told

to get our rifles and our packs to get in the truck and go whether it was in to look at the wharf or in to go somewhere, you did it. So, I’ve got no recollections of anything unusual. We just got in the truck and were taken up as far as we go and they say now you walk. We went as far as we could on the truck, can’t even remember where that was. Wasn’t much past Koitaki, was up in the rubber plantation

somewhere and then we got out and started to walk. Now bear in mind that if it was only perhaps a fortnight after I’d come out of hospital for the treatment for these things so the healing we know now was pretty tenuous and of course it with what I know has happened since with them. They can still flare up all these years later.

not surprising, they flared up again and it became evident that I wasn’t going to be able to walk anywhere. I hobbled back to where I could get on to a vehicle.

At the time I thought it was a hell of a long way. I don’t know, could have been 5 miles, 10 miles, 20. I don’t know.

It was several days. Perhaps we weren’t far from Isurava. I don’t know. We climbed some pretty steep hills. I could use some better adjectives than that. We slid a lot in mud. We got filthy. We got covered in leeches. You name it.

Not really. We had, I think we

had a couple of porters with us but mainly we carried our own gear and the others went on and I got sent back. I think somebody must have, I can’t remember but somebody must have come back with me. Can’t remember.

Oh, yes.

Oh, yes. We knew they were far superior numbers. That had been conveyed to us quiet clearly. Quite apart from Tokyo Rose. You heard about Tokyo Rose I’m sure and she kept telling us regularly on the radio that there were tens of thousands of them because she didn’t know how many of us there were either. She kept telling us for every thousand of you there’s five thousand of us. Well, we knew there wasn’t a thousand of

the… of us. But she was quite interesting because she used to tell us the rumours. They had their spies among us. Tokyo Rose used to broadcast every night and she used to tell us rumours that were going around and one night she said there’s a rumour going around that there’s a fleet of ships, convoy of ships sailing in to Port Moresby bringing in reinforcements. I’ve got bad news

for you boys. Our Air Force has been out looking for them and they can’t find them. It’s just another rumour and she was wrong. Two days later the convoy came in but it also taught us to keep our mouths shut and she knew the rumours that were going around. So, there were their spies there and the information Tokyo Rose

had was pretty accurate and a lot of it was propaganda. We used to try to listen to her. She was better entertainment that the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] Shouldn’t, the ABC wouldn’t appreciate that and we were very dependent on the ABC. The seven o clock news you never missed if you could get anyway near a radio. I don’t know how we got, they must have had some way of re-transmitting it or whether it came on radio Australia or

not but we could hear the seven o clock news. It was always prefaced with Advance Australia Fair in those days. Not the majestic fanfare they use now but, but we often found out where we were from the news. We’d be somewhere and we wouldn’t have a clue where we were on the map. Then Damien Parer or someone would report that

we were fighting at such and such a place. It said we were fighting at such, oh, that’s us. We’d find out on the ABC news, so much for security but I suppose the Japanese knew we were there too.

Maps? What were they? There were no ordinance maps. Saw an ordinance map when we were training at Darly but we were, I

don’t think there was an ordinance map for New Guinea, don’t think one had ever been drawn in those days. I don’t think a white man had ever walked the track. Natives had. I think the 39th was the first white people to ever walk across the track. Burt Hinesall might have done it. I don’t know but he would have been the only one. But it had never been

walked. It wasn’t in the sense that it was a track that people took. Became a track. Was a track the natives took to go between villages and I’ve got a vague idea that Burt Hinesall actually did it, knew you could get through but the general belief by the army boffins was that it was impenetrable. The

attack was going to be from the sea. Like Singapore the guns were pointing out to sea. They were. That’s where the invasion was and of course that was the big mistake the Japanese made. If they had invaded Port Moresby from the sea they’d own Australia today but they got defeated in the Coral Sea

and so decided to come overland. But if they’d sneaked some convoys in, put a diversion convoy in to divert the navy and then put the real convoy in to come to Port Moresby they’d have controlled Australia today. That was their big mistake but they came over the mountains and the same as we found because we only had a handful of troops at Kokoda and we didn’t have the supply

lines to support them. I believe that the hundred or so people we had at Kokoda would have held Kokoda if they’d had adequate supply lines behind them. I think most of our people would say that same thing. And then the Japanese faced the same, do you know Japanese commander brought a white horse with him that he was going to ride to Port Moresby. They were as foolish

as we were you see

Oh, had bicycles too. We had bicycles. Don’t let’s laugh at them too much. They gave us bicycles in Port Moresby. But we laughed at them. I was telling you about when we embarked to fly across to Popondetta and we’d talked earlier about the 53rd Battalion getting in the Aquitania not even knowing how to put the uniforms

on. As we were boarding the DC-3 to go across to Popondetta we were handed Bren guns. Not all of us but the ones who had previously had used Lewis guns which were actually Boer War weapons. They had been used in the Second World War but not very much. They were Boer War weapons and that’s what we’d been equipped with. The

Lewis guns were withdrawn as they were boarding the aircraft to go to Popondetta and they were given Bren guns and on the aircraft they were told how to use them and we won the war.

No, I didn’t actually. They just kept me in Murray barracks and the RAP [Regimental Aid Post] dressed them. I told them that foments should fix them up. I prescribed the treatment and they fomented them and I just worked at brigade headquarters and just went on with my job. You couldn’t spare men to go off sick if it could be avoided. You know the

war was pretty fair dinkum at that stage. You know we’ve missed an important part of my life story. Quite early in the piece and we’ve jumped it. But I must tell you about my 21st birthday. See I was born on the 19th February. You know what happened on the 19th February don’t you? Apart from me being born.

Darwin was bombed and so was Port Moresby, real big daylight raid. We’d had night raids but the first big daylight raid in Port Moresby was on the 19th February. Well, we’d built a huge dug out. Bill Merritt insisted we had this dug out for a company head quarters

where if we were under attack we would, we could go in to this dug out and that was our nerve centre and what have you for defending Seven Mile. He was probably right. A lot of man power went in to it and there was a tent right beside. They’ve got pictures of it here. But we were wondering how we could celebrate my 21st birthday and then they had this raid

on Port Moresby so Bill Merritt was the original scavenger so he took the E Company utility truck, one ton truck, with a couple of fellows in to Port Moresby and he acquired a truck load of liquor. Pub had been deserted. The civilians had all gone bush. Burns Philp had just

walked out of their store and the troops, you know, immoral, illegal and everything else. Unethical. But the troops just descended on it. Stories of people drinking pots of Crème de Menthe and you know just about killing themselves and Bill went in and got all the drinks for my 21st birthday party and I’ve got a photograph there. Next day was sitting out up above

the dug out actually with all, with the empties lined or some of the empties lined up in front of us. But it was a 21st birthday party, well it’s not remembered. I think that’s the only way you can put it and it must have been a whale of a party because nothing as commonplace as beer. It was whisky and gin and vodka and Brandy and Crème de Menthe and

you name it. All the top shelf stuff and we were drinking it like water. That was my, when I’d, because I was one of the old blokes. I was the ripe old age of 21. Most of them were just 18. They hadn’t even had their 19th birthday when I turned 21. Some of our officers were younger than I was.

People tend to forget that. And I look at you know, as the editor of our newsletter these days and our members die. I see the date of their birth and oh, golly he was a lieutenant and he was only 19. He was a captain and he was 20.

And today I reckon they’re only kids. These were the people that fought the war. I’m wandering again. We haven’t got to Popondetta. We can do Popondetta this afternoon.

Oh,

yes. No, yes and no. Some of them were idiots. In the main all the officers we had, even the officers we had at Darly were good officers.

They had been recruited from people who had seen, the first officers in the 39th, were recruited from people who had seen active service in the First World War and had gained their commissions in the First World War. Remember it was only twenty years after the war so they were still, by my standards today at least. I’m banging the microphone. Comparatively,

young men but they were much older than the army allowed to go in to action but they were seasoned soldiers, they had stayed with the militia as it was called, the reserved forces as we’d call them today, had kept touch with the army and I

believe that the officers we had in Darley were good officers. I’ve never really thought about this but as I sit here at the moment, reflecting on it I think they probably shaped the battalion more than we ever gave them credit for. Then they, when we went to New Guinea and it became obvious that this was

fair dinkum. This wasn’t just a garrison battalion and for physical reasons some of these officers had to be replaced. Youth was on the side of the other ranks but not the officers and so they had to be replaced by younger people. Some of them who came in were immature. No names

no pack drill but I can think of one who I thought, when he first came to us, in fact I told him he was a boy Boy Lieutenant I nearly got myself in to serious trouble over it. But that was and still is my opinion of him at that time but he won a military cross and

when we got in to action his men would have gone anywhere with him. He’s dead now, only quite recently but he turned in to a damn fine soldier and so I guess in a sense it was youthful exuberance and a little bit of authority makes me an important person and he

was only young. He was under 20. Much younger than I was. I think he might have been 19 at the time because he’s dead now and he was considerably younger than I so I was 21 at the time so he must have been 18, 19 at the time and really with all due respects an 18,19 year old doesn’t have a 30 year old head on his shoulders but

under the pressure of battle he became

Now we start.

Regimental Sergeant Major.

Oh, I think it would be, he was wrapped up in red tape. The law wasn’t something to be understood. The law was something to be obeyed. Full stop and it

there was no room for interpretation. There was no room for leniency except as it suited him. I discovered that. Our Company Sergeant Major, he’s still with us. He’s Vice President of our battalion association now but he and I, for some reason or another, there was something we wanted to go to Melbourne for and we knew there was a truck going down

and back within a reasonable time and giving us time to do whatever it was we wanted to do. So, we arranged a ride on it. That could be done. That was no problem. That was being organised all the time. We didn’t have leave passes and technically we were going AWL [Absent Without Leave]. Now we’ve got the American term for that it’s AWOL now but it was AWL in our day. That was the Australian term and we got in the truck very secretively,

made sure we weren’t seen getting in the back, in the canopy over the tray and we were sitting there waiting, making sure that the back flaps were down and no-one would see us and all of a sudden somebody else climbed in and guess who? None other than our Regimental Sergeant Major in the flesh and George and I both thought we’d been copped and he said “You know this is forbidden you’re going

out of bounds,” and we thought, “Oh yeah. We’ve copped it.” He said, “You’re lucky I want to go to Melbourne too.” And that was the last we heard about it. But he wasn’t above breaking the rules himself and he was caught out in that sort of way so many times and the guys knew about it and he’d see a soldier with a button undone and his jacket or something and he’d put him on a charge sheet. All sorts of petty things that soldiers would

I know that’s a Regimental Sergeant Major’s job but he carried it too far. I don’t believe that he would have been thrown overboard. I don’t think any of our fellows were vicious enough for that. Mark Matuska who we called shark bait and he knew we called him shark bait. He walked around quite openly and he didn’t go overboard and I don’t think this other fellow would have

but anyhow as soon as the bombs started to fall he put on a troppo act and got invalided home so that was the end of him and we got somebody reasonable in his place.

Yes, I’m not really sure what troppo is. It’s a term we used. We had people who obviously went

quite barmy. There were some American troops who, of course New Guinea was dry. There were no wet canteen, oh the officers had liquor in their mess but not the ordinary common garden variety soldiers. We weren’t allowed any liquor at all. There’s a story about that too but some of the Americans attacked

a pile of torpedoes which have alcohol in their war head. Now I’m not quite sure what purpose the alcohol in a war head serves but I know it served the usual purpose when these fellows drained it out. I believe it made the torpedoes unserviceable as well so it was obviously vital. But they drained the alcohol out of the torpedoes and drank them. Of course it was industrial alcohol

and they were loosely described as ‘going troppo’ but they nearly killed themselves and it effected them mentally and so I guess they were troppo but not from the tropics unless it was the lack of alcohol in the tropics or their lack of legal alcohol and everybody made jungle juice. Now I’m sure you know what jungle juice is but that was home brew,

Moonshine, whatever you want to call it and some of that was pretty potent. It was hit and miss and I’ve no idea what the alcohol content of it was but there were people who went quite barmy from that. We were very fortunate that we had a warrant officer in our group who had been a brewer at the Boolander brewery

and he used to supervise our home brew and he wouldn’t make it until, and at this stage I was in ASC as I mentioned earlier, he wouldn’t make it until he had all the correct ingredients and he made it in barrels and there’s an interesting story about those barrels as well. He made it in barrels and it brewed and we weren’t allowed to drink

it until he said it was ready to drink and we ran an illegal wet canteen and troops used to come from all over the place and the powers at be knew we had it there and didn’t worry too much about it. I think probably in the view that the grog they were getting there was better than the Moonshine that they were making themselves by sticking a few grapes in the bottle, bit of yeast and letting it brew. The barrels that we used were interesting because when we went to New Guinea

we were still on the rum issue. Troops were given large drinks of rum before they went in to action, Dutch courage or intoxication so they didn’t realise what they were doing probably. Well, then rum was taken off the issue and they had all these hogs heads, fifty four gallon barrels of rum

and we had them in store and the orders came that the bungs had to be taken out and allowed to run out on the ground well the bungs were taken out, the strange thing, there were all sorts of pannikins and things on the ground were run out and eventually all the rum was let out. But we noticed that there was one barrel

that was quite different to any of the others and as we had control of them we eyed this barrel off and we decided that it wasn’t going to be emptied. When nobody was around we would investigate what it was and if it was rum, alright we’d dispose of it but we didn’t think it was rum.

Well, we suddenly found ourselves in the proud possession of fifty four gallons of guess what? Whisky. And we were a very popular place for a very long time. People would come around at night, even the officers of the Mess kept their quota of it because that kept them quiet and the Sergeants’ Mess. That kept them quiet and mind you fifty four gallons of whisky didn’t go terribly far among a lot of people but it lasted a

few nights. But there was another story as well. The officers Mess were allowed to have alcohol and that used to be shipped up by the canteens for them. Now, it was all, all of the cargo coming was code marked. Some had a shamrock on it, some had a diamond on it depending on

whether it was to go to ACS or to canteens. Well, one of the camps, while I was with supply one of the camps I was in, we all had lovely bunks. They were about oh two foot six off the ground and about two foot six wide and about

seven foot six long and each of them was made up of three crates which were two foot six inch cubes and over that we had a blanket draped and mostly we had a palliasse of some kind and then a mosquito net over that and then we slept on top of that, no blankets over us. But we slept on top of that at night.

tucked the mosquito net in to the palliasse underneath us and there we were. Well, the canteen’s people got a little concerned that their manifests for beer didn’t agree with what was supposed to have been shipped, with what arrived in their store for the officers’ Messes.

So, the field security people, and they’re the police who ping pong the military police, they were set about investigating because I must say there was great suspicions the military police were the shortage of liquor and far be it from me to say that they never took it. But they came out to the camp where we had all these nice bunks, seven foot six long and

I don’t know how serious they were but I remember one of these guys actually sitting on my bunk and we can’t find any contraband liquor here. I think they must be making a mistake in their book keeping and off he went. Well, in actual fact he was sitting on twelve dozen bottles of beer and that’s what each of these crates were. They were forty eight bottles of beer

and we concealed them with a bit of blanket, not a very clever way of concealment but somebody said once if you want to hide something you do it in full view and that’s what we did. All we did was we covered up the diamond for the, and they thought these, of course we had plenty of cases too about that size that stuff came up to us in and they never looked for the diamonds on our bunks. They thought they were just boxes we’d, I’m never, I was never

quite sure whether they had a fair idea where it was but they never did prove that the military police were taking it but they never did find what became of it but that was a little aside.

Oh, we were able to get it because we had working parties at unloading the ships and the stuff would be in the holds. It wasn’t in containers or anything. There was no such thing in those days and you just sorted out the

diamonds and the shamrocks and if a diamond happened to get where a shamrock should be or vice versa though mind you they knocked off our stuff too and sold it in the canteen as well so it was tit for tat. We had to watch them all the time because you go along to the canteen and you’d find tins of SPC fruit on sale which you knew damn well wasn’t being sent to the canteen so it could only have come from one

place and that was out of ASC supplies. So they were knocking off our stuff as well so we were only getting even. That’s my excuse anyhow and I’m sticking to it.

Australian Army, in England of course it’s just ASC, Army Service Corps. Here it’s the Australian Army Service Corps. Or the RASC in England. Royal

Army Service Corps. and they’re the army’s grocers a bit more than that because ultimately they supply petrol as well.

Yes, yes I was with the brigade but I was senior supply clerk for the brigade and I went to Popondetta and I was doing that assisting captain Diddums. I’ve mentioned his name before.

He should have been killed up there. You didn’t sleep on the ground there. For one thing it was too wet. You tried to get hold of a bag or a blanket or something and a couple of sticks through it and in to some forks. Even if you were only that far off the ground it was too wet and you were liable to have creepy crawlies to get in to bed with you too. It was alive with snakes. You just didn’t worry about snakes. You just took no notice of them. I don’t know, didn’t ever hear of anyone ever getting bitten. It was

amazing there wasn’t but I woke up one morning to hear Captain Diddums calling for help and he’d made a little lean two over his bunk and we all did that to keep the rain off us and a tree had fallen over through the night and pinned him, come through his shelter and fallen right across and across his chest but the way it had fallen it had him pinned in his bunk but hadn’t done any

bodily damage to him. A bit more and it would have crushed him to death but that was up at Soputa. That’s a bit further on from Popondetta between Sanananda and Buna, Sanananda and Gona or Gaw- na which is its correct pronunciation. The native people don’t call it Gona. They call it Gaw-na.

Motu, yes .

The odd words. Odd words. We were almost ‘Talbotter,’ said ‘Talbotter ‘that reminded me of something in Murray barracks. We used to have a native boy, because they were all boys and this fellow was probably in his thirties but he used to come around and collect our laundry every

day. Talk about a batman. The officers had batman. We all had batman in Murray barracks. Tourro was this guy’s name and he used to come and collect our washing in the morning, leave it on the end of our bunk and come back at night and bring it back to us. “What do we owe you?” “Two bob Talbotter, two bob Talbotter.” So, he got to be called Two Bob Talbotter in

the end but then of course two bob was a lot of money. It was, the ordinary private was on five shillings a day, corporal was on 10 shillings I think or 9 shillings, 10 shilling I think. The sergeant was on 10 and sixpence. The Star sergeant was on 11 shillings and a lieutenant got 15 shillings a day. That was big, big, big money.

So, two bob out of, and most of us only got a shilling a day and we had the rest of it paid it in to our bank account bank home because we had nothing to spend it on anyhow so two bob for your washing was a fair bit of money to pay and so we suddenly hit on the bright idea there’d be 4 bunks in the one tent. We’d put all the washing on the one bed and Tourro would bring it back at night. How much Tourro.

“Two bob Talbotter.” So, we’d saved 6 bob for the day and I think he did alright too. I think he was making a lot of money out of the troops and he never complained. I think he must have realised we were putting it. There was another story with a native boy and this was right away up at Sanananda in we were, it was yards those days meters these days, hundred and fifty

meters from the very front. Well, that was a bit messy the front line. Whatever the front line was. I had a depot, food depot there. Mainly rice and by curiosity this guy’s name was Tourro too. It must have been a fairly common name had was lunch break

and he was on. I can still see this fellow sitting there on a heap of bags, I mean a stack of bags of rice. Probably rice we’d captured from the Japanese at that stage and I said, “You’re looking very thoughtful Tourro.” I, some of them were pretty well educated you know, “I was just thinking Talbotter”

“Oh, yeah”. “War is stupid.” “Oh, yeah I guess it is.” “Why do you think it’s stupid?” He says, “Australia boy…” and this actually, this fellow was a New Britain boy so he spoke pidgin. “Australia boy, he come, he land at Port Moresby.

Japan boy he come, he land at Burma. Australia boy walk up in to the mountains. Japan boy he walk up in to the mountains. Japan boy and Australia boy fight. Japan boy drives Australia boy back, beat the Australia boy. Then

Australia boy beat Japan boy. He will drive him in to the sea. What will you do then? You will sit down and talk. Why not talk first? War’s stupid.” That’s from an ignorant native. I’ve never forgotten that. It was, made an tremendous impression on me. That here in the middle

of it all this native boy who had been disposed from his home country. He’d been brought to New Guinea from New Britain by the Japanese, was forced, because they went backwards and forwards. We didn’t know who were our boys and their boys, I’ll tell you about Christmas dinner at Soputa , and they went backwards and forwards between the lines. We didn’t know which were which. We had no way whatever of telling.

You couldn’t put hot iron Brands on them to Brand them as ours and theirs and some managed to escape. The Japanese didn’t keep their native boys very well. When they first came they were welcomed as saviours. Except the Orakeva tribe who always welcomed them. That was interesting story with the Orakevas. They had asked for a missionary to be sent to them

and the Bishop didn’t have enough funds to send a missionary to them, to finance it and they never forgave the white man for not sending them missionaries and they were our enemies right through the war. That was an interesting story that. It was they who betrayed the New Guinea martyrs who were slaughtered and killed by the Japanese, the nurses and missionaries who were beheaded by them. It was Orakevas who lead the Japanese to them. They

were the only tribe but initially the Japanese were welcomed. The planters had given them a pretty rough time you know. When we went to Port Moresby if you were walking along the footpath and there was a native boy on the footpath he had to get down and stand in the gutter while you walked past, while the European walked past him. Well, it wasn’t long before the troops this wasn’t right and so if we were walking along and we saw a Planter doing that we used to make the Planter get down in the gutter and let the native boy walk past and they didn’t like us very much for that

but they didn’t prove the saviours that native people thought they would be and they were treated very brutally. Women were raped. We went in to a village. I didn’t personally see it but some of our people did, where every woman in the village had been raped and then her breasts had been cut off and left bleed to death and that was done by the Japanese and so they lost

the loyalty that they initially had from the native people and whenever they had the opportunity to defect they came across to us, the majority. But they kept pretty tight reign on them. But I’m going to tell you about the story of Christmas day of Soputa. We decided, because we were on hard rations, bully beef, canned meat and vegetable. Have you ever

have army M and V [Meat and Vegetables] Don’t. Oh! It was a ghastly concoction. It was a meat stew with vegetable. Well, I don’t know what they did to it. Had a tinny taste that I’ve never tasted before or since. You couldn’t do things with it. We used to take it out of the tin when we had the means and mix it up with dried potato, not like Deb [instant mashed potato] it was flaked, dried potato, mix it up and then fry it and make rissoles out of it and you can do that sort of thing

with it. That made it half edible. But we decided we would have fresh meat for Christmas dinner. So we got one of the native boys and we gave him a rifle and three rounds of ammunition and told him to go shoot a pig and bring it back to us. There were plenty of wild pigs around that had been in the villages and of course there’d been one loose from the villages with the war going hither and thither. So after a

while, and of course he had to bring back the spent cartridges as well because we kept a strict check on the cartridges. So he brought his rifle back and two spent cartridges and one unused and one pig. So we kicked him in the backside because he missed the first time but next day, Christmas day we discovered that they also had roast pork for Christmas dinner. He wasn’t stupid. But we had no fresh vegetables. We had

some dehydrated vegetables but our cook had a native boy helping him in the kitchen and this native boy in the kitchen, the kitchen boy he didn’t say anything but he just disappeared quietly and later in the day he arrived back with a great big bag of fresh vegetables. Now there was only one place in the world he could have got them. He’d infiltrated though, because as the Japanese fell back they destroyed all the native gardens and everything so we couldn’t

get them and we’d done the same thing falling back to Isurava. You know when the war was going the other way and there was only one way he could have got fresh fruit and vegetables. He’d infiltrated right through the lines to behind the Japanese lines and gone to a village behind the lines, collected the vegetables and brought them back to us. So, we had fresh vegetables for Christmas dinner. Mind you we all got diarrhoea too because we weren’t used to rich food but

it was worth it.

Oh, yes we were talking about loading the Bren guns weren’t we?

We’ve jumped ahead haven’t we?

Well, of course flying across the mountains wasn’t a new experience to me. That’s something else I’ve not

told you about. You’ve heard about the biscuit bombers and these were the DC-3s with no doors on them and no seats or anything in and supplies were loaded in and then they flew over where the troops were and they were pushed out. Some of them were destroyed as they hit the ground because they weren’t parachuted. Only thing that was likely to explode was, had a parachute on it. And that was great when they sent because when you were on the receiving end where the parachute

came down that meant you had silk sheets for your bed. Because the parachutes didn’t go back so a great prize was to grab one of these small parachutes and you used it for your bed but it, the Air Force flew the planes but the army pushed the stuff out. We didn’t have any parachutes so if we fell out, we went out too. And we didn’t have seat belts or anything to hold us in. So, it wasn’t my first

flight. I’d been across the Owen Stanleys or part of the Owen Stanleys a number of times in an aircraft pushing stuff out.

When you see, you saw trees.

You couldn’t see a thing, you couldn’t. On the ground you couldn’t see them. There was no hope of seeing them from the air. No the, the canopies across the top. It was, we, we

there were just places where there were clearings natural clearings and by communication we knew which clearings we had to go to or the pilot did we hoped and because everybody stayed out of the road while ere throwing the stuff out in case they got hit and I guess a percentage of that went to the Japanese as well. Later on , this is because this is relevant later

on when I was up at Popondetta or Soputa we’d load up a train of native carriers with say bags of rice and food and what have you going down to Gona. We always put extra on because we knew the last four or five would be relieved of their loads. The Japanese would come out of the jungle and take their loads from them and take rice or whatever it was

they were carrying. We knew we were feeding the Japanese. There was nothing we could do about it and I guess some of the stuff we pushed out of the aircraft went to the Japanese as well. I’m sure some of it went to the native villages but they deserved it. Now when we, well for most of our people it was the first time they’d ever set foot in an aeroplane because you know there wasn’t air travel back in the 1940s like there is now. We

were standing on the tarmac waiting to go and some of the fellows had Lewis guns which I mentioned earlier were really Boer War weapons but they had served in the Second World War. We were Vickers’ machine gunners which were a different story altogether. They were very sort of, water cooled weapons that created a problem when we were using them for anti craft when we couldn’t have a condenser can beside us.

That was another story. Some of our fellows got scalded with that because the water used to get up to boiling point in the water jackets but the ones in the four infantry companies where they had the Lewis guns as we were about to board these aircraft to take us to Popondetta somebody came along handing out Bren guns. First time our fellows had ever seen a Bren gun and on board the air craft flying to Popondetta to go in to action

they were told how to use them. Brilliant planning on the Australian army’s part. We had previously seen the Sten gun and the Allen gun and we had a few Thompson submachine guns so we did have those. They were more modern weapons. The Sten gun and the Owen gun were remarkable weapons. I read recently of an Owen gun that was dug up after all

this time. It had been in mud and slush and was dug up and they washed it and it still fired. It was almost impossible to stop it. It was an Australian invention. It was so simple that you couldn’t get a stoppage. The Vickers gun on the other hand you see it had four position stoppages and about six variations for each position and when you first went on to a Vickers gun you spent hours learning how to

dismantle and attend to the various stoppage. Your firing lock, which was a very complex piece of equipment. You had to be able to undo that, to pull it to bits blindfolded and put it together again and it wasn’t really, it certainly wasn’t a good weapon for New Guinea. It was a deadly weapon and I guess that was why they took the machine gun company out of the infantry battalion and gave them more Bren guns but

in its day and for its purpose for entrenched warfare and fixed warfare it was a brilliant weapon, very noisy weapon.

Well, you see you need a range, for a Vickers gun you need a range of fire. Well, that was very limited by the trees. See you could be standing as far away as that

wall which is what? Ten feet? And you wouldn’t be seen because the trees and the underground were too dense. If you heard a movement there you took a shot at it. It might be a bird. Might be a Magani, a wallaby some of Motus coming back to me you see, probably would if I had to use it again. That slipped out involuntary. I wasn’t trying to be smart when I said Magani but

that’s what they were. But you heard a noise there, you fired. Likewise if they heard a noise, the moment you pull your trigger you move. Didn’t pull your trigger you squeezed it. Well, you don’t pull the trigger you move your rifle, move your barrel. If you pull it, you squeeze it so you don’t move your barrel and loose your sight. See I was trained. It was, certainly for the job we did

on the Seven Mile drome providing the anti aircraft even when we shot up 75 squadron it proved how effective it was. One of the problems we had there that I mentioned a moment ago, it was a water cooled weapon so you had to have a condenser can. You had a have a hose. You had to have a supply of water. Well, there wasn’t much trouble getting water in New Guinea but when you had it on a swivel with a 360 degree swivel.

there was no way you could have it attached to a condenser can. So you filled it up with water and hoped for best and the boiling water came out of the hose and if you weren’t very careful it went all over your legs so there was more than one gunner was scalded I can assure you. So much so most of them didn’t put any water in because it was only short bursts anyhow. It wasn’t prolonged firing. We say it fires 500 rounds a minute. They might get

five or ten seconds of firing because the aircraft went past.

Oh, yes, we, everyone took their turn.

I have no idea. I have no idea. You never knew you see. I said it wasn’t until they came down and the holes were counted we even knew whether we were hitting them or not. I might have done

I don’t know. Some of the young ones, you know, somebody said to me how many people did you kill? I don’t think I killed any. Another thing, a lot of people are surprised. A lot of soldiers went right through the war and never fired a shot in anger but they had a task to do and they were all part of the team.

but they may not have fired their weapon once, other than practice shooting, training. But that didn’t mean they didn’t do a valuable job in the war.

Well, there is a thousand people in a battalion.

There’s over three thousand in a brigade. Now that is about four times the size of this town, population of this town. That’s a brigade. Now a division you multiply that by three because I went on to division later on. We haven’t got to my stint in division. Imagine what’s

involved in making sure that everybody in a place four times the size of this place have all the necessities of life for everyday. You know think what the necessities of life are. The medical corps. Have to have whatever drugs and medicines and dressings they needs. Somebody had to get them to them.

The drivers of whatever vehicles you’ve got have to have petrol and oil and spare part. Somebody has to get them to them. They have to eat, you know, their hundredth of an ounce of pepper a day and. Laugh but that was the ration. Every man got a hundredth of an ounce of pepper each day. That’s one that stuck in my mind. Three ounces of sugar, three ounces of butter,

and so on and that all had to be allocated and it was an ASC job. Ordinance department was separate but somebody had to get the ordinances to the ordinance section, guess who got it to them? We provided the transport for them to get it. So transport was part of our responsibility as well. So, the ASC

whilst in itself it wasn’t a fighting unit was very essential. I don’t feel any guilt at all about moving from an infantry battalion in to the supply sections. I know that if it hadn’t been for the work that we did a), they would have starved, b) they would have had no ammunition and c), they would have been annihilated.

and so the work we were doing was quite important.

Once we had control of the Popondetta airstrip some of it could be flown in but transport

aircraft weren’t that plentiful. Some of it was air dropped and we had a dropping strip right beside our depot at Soputa. Once we had control of the airstrip Popondetta we were able to fly jeeps in and that was all and we had

transport. That meant we could bring some supplies down from Popondetta because there was only a limited number of jeeps available and fuel of course had to be flown in for them as well so that was another strain on the air transport. So, a lot of the stuff was air dropped even after we had control of the airstrip. By this stage it was a pretty big

force and of course the glory boys always got first preference.

The glory, but don’t you know who the glory boys were? They won the war. Haven’t you ever been to a Hollywood movie, says he sarcastically and cynically. But they always got preference. If there was a question of whose supplies were going to be airlifted in to Popondetta it wasn’t Australian

believe me. It was American and the powers that be made quite sure it was an American war. They didn’t do much about winning it in New Guinea. They might have done later on by sheer force of numbers but you won’t get anybody in the 39th Battalion at least who’ll say much complimentary about American soldiers in New Guinea and I won’t go in to that but it’s a very bitter sore with us.

98 killed and a 168 wounded in 20 minutes because of the Yanks and we’ve never quite forgiven them for that because they ran away because somebody was shooting at them.

Well, it was a tactical move

It was the 7th of December 1942, you know what that is of course? The first anniversary of the Japs coming in to the war and we were hell bent on avenging them on the 7th of December and so plan of action was that the road

from Soputa to Sanananda would be straddled with companies from the 39th Battalion and others but basically the 39th Battalion because battalion membership got a bit blurred at this stage of the campaign if you were able bodies and you had a rifle in your hand you got put in and your brigade commander might be somebody else’s commander for that day whoever was

about. It was all a bit blurred. But basically it was the 39th and there was a regiment of American conscripts, now technically we were conscripts although I reject that. But they weren’t really there because they wanted to be these Yanks and they were on the extreme right flank and the arrangement was

that thE Company on the right hand side of the Soputa-Sanananda road would push down to a certain point and the Americans would come in from the left flank and consolidate the area which had been cleared of the Japanese up the level of the road and the Americans would occupy that and then, and of course this is all timed, and there is no radio communication like we would have today with walkie

talkies and so on. At a given time the other part of the 39th would move down the left hand side of the road, expecting supporting fire from the American troops on the right hand side of the road. Well, our fellows went through down to the point where they were supposed to do and left the Yanks to come in and mop up. The Japanese, of course, on the other side of the road started to fire at them so

what did they do? “They’re shooting at us. They’re shooting at us.” That’s what they said and goodbye. And so what do you think the Japanese did? They just walked across the road and when our fellows went down the left hand side of the road expecting supporting fire what did they get? Concentrated Japanese fire and we

finished up with what later became to be known as Huggins perimeter cut off completely surrounded by Japanese and they held out there. They managed to capture Japanese ammunition, weapons and so on. The conditions were atrocious. The Japanese were in a diabolical state at that stage.

They had dead in their dugouts in various states of decomposition. There were reports and I don’t know how valid they were. There were reports of cannibalism of them being so short of food they were eating flesh off dead bodies. I don’t know whether that was true or not. Eventually, several weeks

later when we were able to get our troops through to Huggins permitter as it was called. I will never, I still have difficulty talking about it. The sight of dead bodies and decayed bodies and exploded bodies where they’d just thrown bodies out of the dug outs and what have you because there was nothing else they could do about it. They couldn’t bury them.

It was a sight which was beyond absolutely beyond comprehension and I think that was one of the reasons why it’s only been in the four or five years that I’ve even felt inclined to talk about it, talk about the war at all. That just so fed me up with the whole thing

that I think from that moment I wanted it over and done with as quickly as I could and to get out of this filthy thing. It was a sight that I couldn’t even begin to describe. That American regiment was withdrawn from action and they

were replaced by regular, what we’d call regular army troops and our fellows would have gone anywhere with them. They were well disciplined. Worked on sheer weight of numbers and oh! They were hopelessly over equipped. It was a Bower bird’s paradise to watch them coming in to action and they were gradually throwing things away. Things they would never need but they were hopelessly

over equipped with their tins of lollies and all sorts of things. We thought it was marvellous. We hadn’t tasted a sweet for 12 months and they had lollies in their rations every day. The first instant soup I ever saw the Yanks brought in. They had little cubes that made chicken broth. We used to have chicken broth every day we used to get them from them.

But the regulars, the permanent soldiers, the professionals soldiers effortlessly would have gone anywhere with them but our first experience of fighting beside American troops was an utter disaster. Utter disaster. But that’s the way it is. You were asking me you know what sort of work

a company clerk did. I guess he was a jack of all trades. As I heard right back at Darley, even made their wills, write up their medical histories. All their medical reports of course were important in theory the would go in to the files which would determine what sort of post war care, repatriation would be able to give us.

In actual fact their records were destroyed, not deliberately or through any fault of ours but all those records had to be preserved. Any soldiers who were on charge of any sort. The charge sheets all had to be recorded, promotions and demotions occasionally had to be recorded and that was the clerk’s responsibility to do that.

As I look back a clerk had a lot of responsibility but first and foremost he had all these things to do. Sometimes if he was unfortunate enough to be a touch typist and there was a court martial on he got caught for typing the evidence as it was given

and this one only got caught for that once and after that I couldn’t use a typewriter.

I said I couldn’t use a, I never admitted to being able to use a typewriter after being caught once. “Can you type?” “No, no, no I do it one finger.” I could touch type but I’d learnt my lesson. I never admitted to it again. Oh, sit for a week listening to the same evidence over and over again and typing it

as it’s given, not for this chicken thanks very much and people were court martialled sometimes frivolously an officer got too pompous. The one I sat in on was a case of pomposity. No, the fellow shouldn’t have said it but he told an officer he said just because he two pips on your shoulder you’re a jumped up bastard and think your Jesus Christ

well he got court martialled for that and he was right because that’s exactly the kind of fellow he was. He wasn’t wrong and you know you sometimes you get paraded. When I was up at Soputa containers of any kind were very difficult to come by. They often had to come from Port Moresby and so when we were issuing tea and sugar and salt and all those sort of things. We’d it

in sand bags and we’d put, say drop sugar in to the bag, tie a knot around it, string around it and then we might put tea in it and tie a string and then put salt or something in it you know so it was only small quantities. You might get three or four commodities in the one sandbag instead of using four sandbags we’d use one. We could always find somebody, even if it was natives

vines. We could always find something to tie a knot with because they were quite flexible. Very good in fact and we had a young lieutenant. His father was a Bishop God help him. I got to know the father very well later on but he was a school teacher and he came to see me, he said that, and Bill Porter who was later chief commissioner of police. His

name wasn’t Bill at all. It was like me. He was Soern Havealott Watson Craig Porter but never called anything else but Bill and he was our brigade commander and this lieutenant was his puppy dog. You know, go gopher and he came down to see me, “Would we please issue the brigade commander’s rations in separate bags.” That he didn’t like having dried tea leaves in his sugar. It wasn’t right that the brigadier got dried tea

leaves in his sugar and I said, “The brigadier can take his chances the same as everybody else. There’s a war on don’t you know?” And he snorted at me and he said, “It’s well said that the army’s run by bank clerks.” And I said “Well as a matter of fact Sir, you have the saying wrong. The saying is that the army is run by bank clerks and school

teachers,” which he was. Next thing I knew I was paraded to the brigade commander for insubordination. I’d met Bill Porter in the nude originally.

He’d been then assigned to our brigade as our brigade commander. He came from the 2/31st Battalion and served in the Western desert in North Africa, very

good military record and just near my tent at Murray barracks there was a shower which came with screens around it. Nobody ever seemed to use it so instead of walking 3 or 4 hundred yards to the normal showers I used to go there and have my shower every morning because it was right beside my tent. So, on this morning I’m having a shower, some other bloke comes in with a towel wraps around him and he

starts to have a shower. I’d never seen him before but that didn’t mean anything. People were coming and going all the time at brigade headquarters and something came up and I said something about a new brigade commander. He said, “Yes takes over today,” he says this other fellow. I said “Yes, I said I wonder what he’ll be like”. Oh, he says, “I think he might be all right. I’ve met him.” Nothing

more was said. I finished my shower and went off and had breakfast and sitting at my little table and there were actually permanent building at Murray barracks, not tents. And later in the day the brigade major brought the new brigade commander to meet all his staff and he’s taking him around and I’m nearly having a fit. And before he could introduce us Bill put it, “Oh we’ve met already, in the

raw.” So, he was quite a human person. So, I get paraded to him over this business about the rations in the sandbags, not so much over that but that’s what had triggered it and he said “Oh corporal,” this little upstart started to introduce, he said “We don’t need introductions.”

“This corporal’s been on my staff for a long time. I know who he is. Well, corporal what’s your side of the story?” I said, “Well I said Mr Moyes, I wasn’t going to mention his name, I did. I told this fellow that there was a war on, didn’t he know?” He said, “Yes I’ve heard there’s a war on.”

“What caused you to say that?” I said, “Well he told me that I had to issue your rations in separate sandbags because it wasn’t right that the brigade commander got dried tea leaves in his sugar and I reminded him that there was a war on. I said so I might as well finish the story while I’m telling you. I said he then told me that the bank, that the army was run by bank clerks and I told him it was wrong, that it was run by bank clerks and school teachers.”

He said Mr Moyes would you leave us for a minute or two? So, I thought, “Oh god what’s going to happen now?” He said, “You know corporal there are sometimes we all think the same thing but we’re not allowed to say them. You can come back Mr Moyes. Case dismissed,” and that was that and I don’t know whether Moyes, you know Johnny Moyes the cricketer? It was his nephew.

But he actually turned, after he had the rough edges, well the smooth edges roughened up a bit I think it was a bit with them it turned out he was all right. But he’d just arrived and just got his pips and full of his own importance but I won that one. I didn’t always win but I won that one.

Probably were but I think I deliberately

forgot about them occasions when I lost. I’m sure there were occasions when I lost. They don’t stick in your memory but I never finished up on a charge sheet. Some of the things I did, I should have done. But I think the fact was that when I said them I was telling the truth anyhow, unsavoury as it might have been

but I’m sure there were occasions when I lost the battle but it’s the victories you remember.

Well, we occupied our time either being soldiers or sleeping. It was fairly simple.

It wasn’t an eight hour day you know. You got up at sunrise more or less and you went to bed at sunset. There wasn’t any socialising. Occasionally, occasionally in New Guinea we were able to go to the movies. Occasionally there would be a concert party. That was one of the things Bill Porter did when he arrived. He set up a brigade concert

party and some of them became quite talented entertainers but it was all improvised and that was pretty important for morale and when he took over morale was pretty low. We’d been getting a hell of a pasting from the Japanese with bombing and we hadn’t had the aerial support. We didn’t have aerial supremacy at that stage which we subsequently did. We were getting the backside beaten off us, up on the

Owen Stanleys and so morale wasn’t terribly good and he did a lot to improve morale. He was treated badly himself in the end. Somebody else was given command of his brigade and got all the honours for the success. He wasn’t

punished for anything but the kudos that should have been his went to somebody else who, the general feeling was, didn’t deserve it but I guess them’s the breaks. We had some remarkable doctors. I want to tell you about our chaplain before I go because his story must be told.

That’s important. But we had some quite incredible doctors but while I was at Soputa I developed my first really bad dose of malaria and we had doctors at that stage who we described as three year wonders. They didn’t do their full five years medical course.

They did three years leaving out the bits that was thought they wouldn’t need in the army like midwifery and things like that. They found they did need midwifery because we had female nurses but that was another story and you know human nature is human nature but they learnt that part of their profession the hard way or from doctors who did know. But we were, I got this

very bad dose of malaria up at Soputa and I was taken to the Advance Dressing Station, the ADS which was serving as a field hospital and one of these 3 wonders arrived, just fresh out of university, December this is, about Christmas Eve. Might have been towards New Year’s Eve. After, it was after Christmas, getting towards New Year’s Eve

and he comes around and he says, “You’ve got malaria.” Well, I didn’t need him to tell me. We all knew what malaria was like. I said, “Yes.” He said, “Where were you when the mosquito bit you?” Well, can you imagine the raspberry. I told you about our first night there and I could hear this organ playing and the organ kept playing the whole time we were in New Guinea and he had the audacity to ask me where I was when the mosquito bit me. Well, he got an awful lot of raspberries

let met tell you. But I want to tell you about our chaplain. We had a chaplain and I don’t know what became of him. We lost him. He was moved away and the unit didn’t have a chaplain at all. We had two or three members who used to take church services for us on a Sunday and the commanding officer would take a, Sunday church parade occasionally.

And then one day a quite remarkable thing happened. There was a Roman Catholic missionary on Roussel Island down in the Dontacasto [(UNCLEAR)]. It was a Sacred Heart missionary and the Japanese invaded so I don’t know whether you ever saw the old calendar that the old National Mutual Insurance people used to put out with the

map of the world on it. Well, that’s exactly what it was. A map of the world. A bit bigger than A4 size side on and with a little dinghy thing with a bit of a sail on it and a pocket compass and a couple of oars and this map to navigate by. He set off to sail to Australia

with supplies and everything in the boat. Well, he didn’t make it to Australia but he eventually got blown in to Port Moresby harbour where he was given the choice of returning to Australia or serving in the army as a Chaplain.

Now he’s supposed to ask his superior before he did anything but he didn’t. He told his superior that he’d joined the army and he was assigned to our unit as our Chaplain. Well, I told you earlier about how the natives used to have to stand in the gutter as one of the Planters went by well it was Nobby Earl who first

suggested to us that it would be more fun to make the Planters stand in the gutter so he was instrumental in the change of attitude there. He was the nearest man to God that I’ve ever met. He was worshipped and that’s the only word I can think of by every single person

in the 39th Battalion. I had started my theological training at that stage but interrupted it well, although I was still in the bank technically I’d started by correspondence in the theological training but I told the Bishop I thought there was a job still to be done and he agree with me. He’d been a Chaplain in the First World War and so whenever Nobby came to say mass in our unit, in our company

I used to go and one day he said to me, Peter you never take communion and I said, “I don’t belong to your church. He said I’m the Chaplain of the 39th Battalion not the Chaplain of the Catholics. If you’re in the habit of taking communion you will take communion with me.” And I did

and he heard my confession from time to time. I developed a wonderful relationship with him. He was un-shootable. On many occasions he stood out in full view of the Japanese wearing his stole burying people. He was never hit although they fired at him regularly.

He went everywhere wherever there were troops Nobby was there. He talked to us like a Dutch Uncle, called a spade a bloody salad if it had to be, if he thought that’s what we needed and probably that man did more for the morale of the battalion

than anybody else. After the war he went back to Roussel Island until his health became such that his superior brought him back to the mother house in Randwick, Sydney and that’s where he died. That was while I was Chaplain at the airport so it was pre 1984. We

took two planes from Melbourne. We didn’t charter them. We just filled them to go up to his funeral in Sydney, you know and that was a big adventure even in the 1980s, people to do that. When we, I just went as a mourner. We got there. I

was told that the provincial, the head of the order wanted to see me. So, because I’d been ordained by then, he took me in and he said “I understand you had a special relationship.” Everybody called him Nobby, Norbitt was his name so everybody called him Nobby. He said, “I understand you had a special relationship with Nobby.” I said, “Well no more than anybody else.” He said

“I would be honoured if you would agree to join us at the altar.” I thought that just meant to take you know a seat up in the sanctuary. When it came to the great prayer of thanksgiving and the consecration of the host and all the other priests present gathered around the altar, I stayed where I was. And I thought that was a tribute Not to

me because it was what he would have wanted. He was a wonderful man and he’s an essential part of history. Somewhere I’ve got a photograph. I don’t think I’ve got a copy of it there. The Age interviewed us, Age newspaper. He came down to Melbourne for a reunion

and the Age newspaper interviewed us and ran a quarter page. That’s a big article in the Age. It was a broadsheet, a quarter page article about him and I got my first gig there as we met and talked. We haven’t talked yet about me leaving, about the battalion being struck from the battle order and we should spend some time on that I think because

that’s an essential part of the story.

Mm, what do you want to know next?

Oh, we’re throwing out long, that’s because I just meander.

Oh, everybody, everybody. The, people still talk about him. He’s been dead of 20 years, more than 20 and he’s still an essential part of the history of the unit and I would be surprised if anyone for the 39th you interview doesn’t at some stage or another mention Nobby Earl. His

influence was right through. He refused to hide from the Japanese. He would stand out in the open and bury somebody. National Mutual map mightn’t be much for navigating by but at least it got him to us and his native people in Roussel loved him too. That was obvious and he loved them.

He didn’t have anything, well vows of poverty anyhow is religious but he always said he had everything, had lovely people, lovely island, lovely garden. What more does any man want he said. I noticed his toes were always threadbare. But who

needs clothes? I had that argument with my daughter. She insisted on dressing me up.

Oh, I’ve never met an atheist. Some day I might. I’ve met lots of people who say they’re atheists but they won’t do anything on Friday the 13th. They won’t walk under a ladder, they’re upset if they break a mirror.

The moment they do any of these things they’re saying they believe in some power beyond themselves. What they’re really saying is they don’t understand God and how he’s expressed, how God’s expressed. We’re all involved with religion. We can’t separate from it. Even these people who are terrorists have got a, a warped idea of what religion is. You’ve got me philosophising now not remembering.

But religion is important. Even if you want to condemn it, it’s important and if religion isn’t important why do people spend so much time condemning it? You know that’s a pretty shallow sort of argument I know but it’s one worthy of consideration.

The word religion itself comes from the Latin word ligio to Itie, ‘I bond’ and it essentially means relationship. Now whether that relationship is with God or one another we’re gregarious people by nature. We can’t live without one another and so we’ve got to

build relationships. We’ve got to have bonds between us and so religion is an important part of our life. I think you better get in to another topic or otherwise I’ll get too deep and too profound.

I never found an atheists in a fox hole. Many people have said that.

I never did see anyone say during the war, or hear anyone say, there is no God. They had people who had never would never darken a church door, openly say prayers. I saw them openly ask Nobby Earl to pray for them, to give them his blessing. “Father we’re going in to action, will you pray for us?” and people who would have denied they had any religion

and when you’re up against those sort of realities I think it brings it to the realities of real religion. There’s a lot of pseudo religion about even in the church, probably more so in the church than anywhere. I shouldn’t say that. I get shot for saying it in the pulpit but it’s true but when you’re faced up against the reality. You know it’s like the story

of the atheist who said “Thank God I don’t believe in God,” and you can’t live without it and I don’t know who it was said there’s no atheist in fox holes but it’s true. I never found one. As the editor of our battalion newsletter, I get people who every once in a while get moved to send me in a report

of some incident that happened to them during the war and some of them were pretty terrible and you know with every one of those there comes a religious theme. One of them sent the article in to me, ‘The Night I Walked With God’ and admits until that night he didn’t really think about God. But he said somebody

was walking with him and protecting him and he was aware of it and for 40, 50 more years he’d kept that to himself. Now, whether it was because I was a parson and the editor of the newssheet and he felt he could talk about it, but we published that. I thought it was worth publishing because

a lot of stuff sent to me I don’t think is worth publishing and that brought a whole flood of people who said yes I had similar experiences. I had similar experiences. Now, perhaps in some part that answers your question.

Any soldier who says, or ex-soldier who says he was never frightened is a liar.

I don’t know of any soldier who, at some time or another, wasn’t faced with the most horrendous fear and the brave man is not, man or woman, brave person I suppose we’ve got to be politically correct these days is not the person who was not afraid. That person’s an idiot.

The brave person is the one who sees the danger but recognises what has to be done and goes in and does it and I guess because by instinct, because of my intentions in life, I had a relationship with people where they would open up and talk to me. I don’t always talk. I also

listen sometimes. You mightn’t think so today. I don’t think I ever saw anyone, met anyone who didn’t say sometimes they were dead scared but that doesn’t stop you doing what has to be done. Sometimes it’s a question of self-preservation and I think the

army worked on a false premise with the rum issue. I think they mightn’t have quite so many disasters in the past if they hadn’t had it because there is no evidence since the rum issue was withdrawn that there any fewer acts of bravery or any poorer soldiers. If anything I think they’re better. And so the rum issue

may not have been the benefit that it was thought it would be. I don’t really think it achieved much and I think it may have resulted, this is my opinion, that it may have resulted in sloppy action instead of well trained, disciplined action but don’t say that

they didn’t have any fear. We had terrible fears. Every time I got in an aircraft to push those tins of bully beef or whatever it was, our biscuits out. I was terrified because we weren’t roped in. We could have gone with them too. And I was dead scared. And it had to be done. Somebody had to do it. I was

probably more scared there than I was in the ground and they were taking pot shots at me but and I think most soldiers would probably tell you a story something similar to that. Bachelors might tell you they were never scared but if they tell you the truth they will. Because as I said at the outset of this segment that any (UNLCEAR) was an idiot. You

You have to assess the danger. Of course a soldier assesses the danger and says how can I minimise the effect. How can I best do that job? And you almost, when we were in the train we thought going to Singapore at that stage, we talked

about the possibility that

I’m going to blow my nose having said that.

In the same way I always do I guess. I believe it’s not faith unless you live it.

and I don’t, we’ve having terrible trouble with these microphones aren’t we? I don’t believe faith should be worn on your cuff. I don’t believe in standing up on a soapbox on a street corner and telling the world what my faith is. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do it if I thought it was, some good reason for doing it.

but I believe that to practise faith really you just go about your ordinary life, the way you think you want to live, the way it should be lived and you don’t do something special to practise your faith. You don’t say “Today I’m going to do X, Y, Z.” You just say “I’m going to get up and do what’s got to be done,” and

I guess I sometimes go all through the day without specifically thinking about God or what I believe in but that doesn’t mean that my faith is any less.

Oh, yes. Sometimes the, there’s a lovely prayer in a collection of prayers I’ve got. It’s

entitled The Prayer of a Bretton Fisherman. ‘Dear God, to see you so big and my boat so small, have mercy on me,’ and there are a lot of what we call Arrow prayers. You know quite often we might just say ‘God help me’ and really that’s an ardent prayer. I don’t believe prayers have to be long winded and go on for three quarters of an hour.

The most effective prayer sometimes could be four or five words. I guess a judge sentencing someone to be executed says the most significant prayer that, that person’s ever, ever going to have said over them. ‘May the Lord have mercy on your soul,’ pretty short prayer. It’s a pretty potent when you’ve just been sentenced to death.

When?

Oh, I guess that’s happened to me many times in life. Long after the army when I first came here to board as the Parish priest in 1957

I remember this very clearly. I’d been here a whole week when I developed encephalitis and I was a pretty sick boy and I remember at one stage crawling out of bed so I could kneel beside my bed and say, “Lord, have mercy on me because I was terrified of what was going to happen to me,” and I guess there’s been that sort of situation.

many times in my life. There have been times when I’ve deliberately prayed for somebody, when somebody’s been, when my wife was ill and dying of cancer. My little granddaughter who died at 14 months of AIDS [Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome] after 43 operations. I prayed pretty desperately for her at times.

I guess with my wife I prayed for her to live and to get better but I think in the end I prayed for her to die because I couldn’t, didn’t want her to go on the way she was. So, your prayers take various forms but I don’t think you get up in the morning and say “I’m going to live my faith this way”. If your faith’s got any meaning to

you at all you just go on being yourself. Otherwise it’s a pretty shallow faith. You’re window dressing. Putting on a show. Hope that doesn’t upset you.

I know all the so called experts tell us we should set a particular time aside each time for prayer. There have been times in my life when I’ve been able to do that but even at this stage of my life I find it very difficult to do. But I get up in the morning with the best of intentions

of what my program’s going to be for the day but it never seems to work out. Somebody arrives on my doorstep and wants something done or needs some information or something and my plans go out the window and so you tailor your day, you tailor your life to the immediate needs around you and especially as all the clergy have, well at least I hope all the clergy have, got a life that is dedicated to serving God’s people.

Well, I was directly involved in all of them but in different ways.

You’re talking about Buna, Gona, Sanananda.

Well, my role there again was supply because at this stage I’d moved away from infantry. I still had very close links with them because I

knew all the fellows and I still see that as my unit. I’d been to a couple of ASC reunions but I still see myself as a member of the 39th Battalion after all this time and that’s the unit I identify with and I was sort of, it was an aberration. I was put away to do something else which they dependent on, which somebody had to do and I had no problems with that but if we hadn’t done the job we did

they couldn’t have done the job they did. I remember on some of the publicity, the early stages of the war, there was an advertising campaign which said how many ground staff it needed to keep an air force, airman be it engineer or whatever in the air and I think it was one to fourteen. I think for every person in an aeroplane there were fourteen on the

ground and the point was that everybody wanted to be air crew. Nobody wanted to be ground staff and they were stressing the importance of the ground staff and I guess in a sense that was equally true in the armies. Everybody wanting to be a fighting soldier if they were going in to the army, to be in the artillery shooting the big guns or washed in to the mortar

platoon sending mortars across in the infantry, firing the rifles. But if they didn’t have the support troops behind them they were useless and as I said earlier in the interview I believe that’s why we had to fall back to Isurava because we didn’t have the supply lines to support us. We did build them up by that stage the Japanese supply lines were too

extended and we were able to drive them back and we had the resources coming in from Australia and America and having been critical of America, make no mistake, we were very dependent on American resources. I believe we just put them to better use than the Americans did themselves and probably that’s because we’re more resourceful people. I have lots of American friends so don’t, don’t get me wrong. But the American

resources, we wouldn’t have did what we did without them. There must be no mistake about that.

Well, material resources, ships, aircraft. The Kittyhawks and Tomahawks, although that first squadron was being flown by Australians they were American aircraft brought in by Americans for us to use.

Apart from the few Lockheed Hudson bombers we had and the Catalina flying boats we had when we went to New Guinea, the first bombers, real bombers we had, the Hudson B-52s and then the Flying Fortresses and what were the other things? Liberators that the Americans brought in. The P-47s, was? P-42s, P-47s whatever they were. The

twin, twin fuselage large things. They were all American aircraft. We weren’t producing them. We had, we were producing the Beaufighter and the Beaufort bomber, both very effective aircraft but the resources, the Liberty ships. The Americans were building a ship at day. They called them Liberty ships. They were pretty flimsy sort of things and if they got hit by a torpedo they’d break in two and

they were designed for some, a fair number of them to be lost at sea but they were built cheaply so it wasn’t such a big financial loss. Kaiser Corporation built many of them and they enabled the needs of war to be shipped across the seas and that was America, and that was before the Americans came in to the war. They were providing the Liberty ships and lease lend they called it,

more lend than lease I think but the American resources were tremendously important to us.

Trading? We did no trading at all. It was all supplied to us from Australia. We might have done a bit of bartering occasionally. We would

take some tins of bully beef and buy bananas or pawpaws or what have you from the native villages but that was unofficial. The army tried growing fresh fruit and vegetables in New Guinea wasn’t terribly successful because they grew so rapidly that they were bitter and you couldn’t eat them.

Tomatoes were somewhat more successful and that saved have to bring them in from Australia and from other places but fresh fruit and vegetables. I remember on one occasion a bag of onions arrived in our kitchen. Now they were the first vegetables we had seen for longer than I like to think and we ate them like apples. I just shudder to think at the moment peeling an onion and eating it in your

hands but we were so desperate for whatever the vitamins were that were in those onions, we ate them like apples. But most of our vegetables, onions were dried, potatoes were dehydrated and God help us, it’s not Deb or whatever we get these days. They weren’t mashed and then blow-dried. They were flakes and I think air-dried

probably and they were abominable and dried eggs, well if you got a cook who knew how to use them but they were all right but most cooks took dried eggs and mixed them up with a bit of water and warmed them up and gave them to you as scrambled eggs and that was awful but if they reconstituted to them with a thickness that they would be if they were whipped up like ordinary scrambled eggs they were quite acceptable. Often we were

fortunate. The cook we had had been a cook at Lenin’s hotel in Brisbane and he really produced some wonderful meals. Well, people would come in and see the meals that this fellow had cooked for us and they immediately accused us of keeping food for ourselves we never gave anybody else. But if anything we got poorer food than they did because the rule was, food went out to the fighting troops first and we took what was

left but if we had a cook who knew how to use them that was our good fortune and that’s very often what happened. It was like the story that the officers’ Mess got the best food, the best meat and then the sergeants got the next best and the men’s Mess got the next best and of course that was a fallacy because the people who dolled that meat out were in the men’s Mess, believe me the best meat went to the men’s Mess

but usually the officers had the best cook and the sergeants had the second best cook and so on and so ours wasn’t as well prepared as theirs was but it was better quality produce very often. That sounds a contradiction to what I said but I’m talking about within what we got. But it all depended on the cook. My wife was a chef and she said the quality of the food doesn’t

really matter it’s what you do with it. You know I always reckoned she cook turn a posh meal out of plain water if she wanted to. When we bought our first house we had four children at that stage and they gave her four and eight pence ha’penny to keep house for the rest of the week until I got some money. And for a week she

fed us on four and eight pence ha’penny and we never went hungry mind you we had a bit in the larder as well. But she always managed, said you could manage if you knew how to use it.

They were fantastic really. You heard about Fuzzy

Wuzzy angels I’m sure if you’ve talked to people in New Guinea they’ve talked about the Fuzzy Wuzzy angels and once we’d won them over, won them back again and I mentioned that earlier, they were very much on our side. They had been mistreated. Their women, their children had been mistreated by the Japanese and they were very much, apart from the one tribe, the Orikivas, they were very much on our side and they were very much for us.

Stretchers of course they weren’t the sort of stretchers we see in ambulances and what have you these days. They were two gum tree saplings, because there are gum trees, you’ve been there you know there were eucalypts up there. Couple of the eucalypt saplings and a blanket or potato bag of something slung between them or a couple and that made the stretcher and with a boy on each corner, native

boy or sometimes only two on each end with a rod on each shoulder the wounded were transported and that had an interesting aspect too because our troops had to be carried and they were gentle and when they stopped for a rest they would put you down very gently and make sure it was on a smooth bit of ground. I was never carried in one of their stretchers but I saw what was done and

they were absolutely wonderful but when they were transporting wounded Japanese prisoners and I’ve actually seen this happen. It was time for them to stop for a rest, they just stood out and let the stretcher go and that was the love they had for the Japs at that stage. The whole stretcher just fell, four feet or whatever it was, from their shoulders to the ground and the poor bloke who was on the stretcher, he hit the ground as hard as the stretcher did

and no matter what we told them they still did it. They didn’t really like the Japanese at the end of the war but they would wipe faces, wipe dribble, wipe noses. They were the gentlest, most wonderful people. I believe that in part reflected their missionary training.

Most of them, the ones we came in contact with, not so much up in the Western Highland but most of the ones we had contact with, had contact with missionaries and had a very strong religious belief of their own. They were very essentially Christian, might be different stage of Christianity. The ones were dealing with were either basically Roman Catholic or Anglican because

they had a, a comity they called it between the various churches where everybody but the Seven Day Adventist and they weren’t there in big numbers in those days they’ve been in bigger numbers since, observed it. So, this area was looked after by the Anglicans, this area was looked after by the Roman Catholics and so on and so if somebody moved from an Anglican area to a Catholic area, say he was

transferred. He didn’t go in to the Catholic area and become an Anglican in a sea of Catholics and that comity worked very well and they all had a common theme of brotherly love and I believe that was reflected and even the Orikivas who were so hostile to us, they recognised the benefits that the missions brought. That they brought schools, they brought hospitals, they brought healthcare,

and because the Bishop didn’t have the funds to give them the mission that’s where their enmity was generated from. But they recognised the benefits of missions. You get an awful lot of twaddle, talk by people who don’t know what, anything about it and say they would have been better left alone but they didn’t and since we’re intending to leave them alone they seem to have got themselves in a terrible mess, you know corruption that’s evident these days.

but that might have happened anyhow as they went on and became better educated.

Well, we, we had two thousand carriers or porters and whilst I wasn’t personally responsible for the maintenance of discipline and ordering of them, inevitably you,

because I had a responsible position, inevitably you finished up dealing with the native leaders. They had their own leaders as well and saying, “I want 50 boys to go to Gona or I want 50 boys to go Dobodura” or wherever and they would bring them to you and you would supervise their loading and so on and so to that degree there was management but I wasn’t peculiar in that. There were

lots of us in the same sort of situation and then of course as the tide turned and we became the victors whilst it strictly wasn’t a role of ASC, the salvage section was a quite separate section but somehow or other they seemed to use our lines to bring in all the stuff that they’d salvaged from the battle field. A lot of it was Japanese stuff

as well as our own and that gave us another worry too because there were land mines and all sorts of things being brought in. So we had to exercise some degree of supervision over that although that, strictly speaking, wasn’t one of our responsibilities.

I think a lot of it’s still rotting in the jungle.

Well, we left it in a heap. I don’t know what became of it after that. We were withdrawn from the scene there. There weren’t many of us left. We’d been decimated, we’d been wounded, we’d had people sick and the order came one day. Oh, it must have been

February/March and we were to move to Dobodura and we had a fair idea what that meant because there was a landing strip at Dobodura and we went across there and we camped for a night and it sheltered, and it rained. Oh, I’ll never forget that night. It rained and it rained and then it rained some more and it wasn’t drizzle it was tropical downpour and all each of us had, we’d been told to leave our blankets

such as they were. We had half a blanket each. We’d been told to leave them behind and so that made it quite sure in our minds we were flying back to Moresby. But we each had a ground sheet and that was the only shelter we had from the elements. I’ll never forget that night and then next day we got in the aircraft and flew back to Moresby and we weren’t long in Moresby until we were told to

collect our gear and get on a truck and we were taken down to the wharf and we were put on the Duntroon and brought home to Australia and it was all, that part of it was all over very quickly. So, what happened after that? I can’t talk from experience. So, we left these heaps of stuff there. I think some of it the natives took, some of it is still in the jungle. People who have gone back on pilgrimages are still discovering

stuff there. Somebody found a propeller off a Japanese Zero on one of the recent trips, somewhere in the jungle and there’s probably still lots of it in the jungle.

Well, at that stage we were mopping up. There were still pockets of Japanese, you wouldn’t believe the war was over for them and so the mopping up squads were going through trying to round up these Japanese and take them prisoner which they did. I believe years afterwards they still found some who didn’t know the war was over, who’d managed to survive in the New Guinea jungle

and live off the land and who were looking for their main force to be reunited and that I believe was some years after the war finished and because of the very nature of the jungle you couldn’t say well, there’s a mob over there and it is even conceivable that some of them stayed and married in to native tribes

because there has been over many centuries an intermingling of Asiatic and Malay Melanesian races and some of the natives had quite Asian looking features and you know you would know from information you had that there’d been generations in the one

area where there had to be Asian blood back somewhere and it’s even quite conceivable that some of them, Japanese soldiers and well, look at Buckley, you know the one eyed old man of Melbourne who stayed with the native tribes, one of the early convicts at Sorrento and when they were through the settlement he’d run away from, absconded from the prison camp

and when Batman came, Faulkner they found this wild man with the native tribes, Buckley. That happened here and I’m sure it happened in New Guinea too.

I never left them, never left in the sense that were always together. That was the way old John Barrow

moved me to brigade headquarters, so we’d be together. We were a fighting entity but I’ve just moved a little bit up the scale and in the command scene, not that I was one of the commanders but I was doing clerical work but at a technically higher level that was all. But I never lost touch with the 39th. I kept meeting up with them and seeing my old mates and everything.

Well, we were brought back to Australia, taken up on to the Atherton tablelands, Blamey was still going on about how the rabbits had run. See you might gather we don’t think much of Blamey and we don’t. He was to review the troops and we’d been re-equipped and re-everything’d

and we reckoned it was time we got some home leave. We’d been in New Guinea for 14 or 15 months and we’d been at Darly for a time before that, before we went away and we’d had final leave oh sometime in early November I think it was so we reckoned it was time we got some home leave and there was no talk about home leave the talk was

that we were going to be re-equipped, re-armed and sent back in to the battle again. And so the word was passed around that Blamey was going to review us at the Wondalga racecourse and that if he didn’t tell us we were getting some home leave when we were ordered to march past we would all sit down. I think we were fairly disciplined soldiers at that stage. I don’t think we would have sat

down but I always feel in my own mind Blamey knew the decision that had been made and instead of telling us we were the rabbits that ran he told us what a wonderful job we did and what a credit we were to the Australian army blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and he went on and on and on and on and on and eventually he said

“So I think it is only fair that you should be given 28 days recreational leave,” and then we all marched past him and saluted him but I didn’t get any. I’m not sure whether it was then, yes I think it was then that I developed Scrub typhus now scrub typhus is a terrible disease, which hit the troops on the Atherton tablelands.

It had been some of it in New Guinea where we felt the worst effects of it and in fact later on, 1972 when we were on long service leave I took my wife up on to the Atherton tablelands and showed her where all the camps had been and so on and then took her out to the Atherton cemetery and showed her the military cemetery there and I said it’s only good luck that I wasn’t there because there was no cure for scrub typhus just

tender loving care and I was in hospital and I heard while I was there. I came through. I was one of the lucky ones. I got over it. I give the credit of that to a nurse who abused me in the most bullacky imagine you could ever imagine because I wouldn’t eat the meal she brought me and I got so cranky with her I said “Well that’s the way you feel, give it to me and I’ll eat it,” and I know that was my turning

point. That’s when I started to get better. That’s what she wanted me to do. But while I was in hospital the order for the disbandment of the 30th Brigade, now at that stage considered of, 53rd had been taken right away from us so were no longer in the brigade. That consisted of the 39th, the 49th who’d been in New Guinea for 14 months longer than we had and the 3/22nd

now that was a curious battalion. The 22nd Battalion, AIF 2/22nd Battalion served in New Britain and they were decimated by the Japanese but some of them escaped to New Guinea

from Rabaul and of course the grateful army didn’t send them back home to Australia. They kept them there in Port Moresby and so they became the nucleus of a very, very small 22nd Battalion in exile as it were and then the 3rd Battalion, Australian Military Forces which was a militia battalion like us.

They needed reinforcing and so army decided to amalgamate these two battalions and call them the 3/22nd well now it kept the name of the 3rd Battalion which was militia but they were the only AIF battalion in the war which became a 3/22nd, 3rd something and so they were a curious one and they formed the other battalion in our

brigade. So at that stage there was the 39th, the 49th and the 3/22nd and the order came out that the brigade, the 30th Brigade was to be struck from the battle order and the troops dispersed. Most of our troops, most of the 39th members went either to the 2/14th or mainly to the

2/2nd Battalion in the 6th Division. They’d fought with the 2/14th which was 7th Division and they were up at Ravenshoe by this stage some were sent up there but the majority were sent to the 2/2nd which was 6th Division. Brigade headquarters staff was scattered far and wide. The staff captain at brigade was

promoted to major and sent to Divisional Headquarters where he did the same job as he’d been doing at 30th Brigade but as a major at six two headquarters. Brigadier Porter was given command of another brigade within the 6th Division, back where he’d started originally. No, he’d started in the 7th Division and so the brigade was

split up mainly among the various brigade headquarters in 6th Division but this chicken was in hospital and I hadn’t had my home leave and I heard about all this going on and couldn’t help wondering all the time what was going to happen to me when I came out of hospital. I came out of hospital and went to convalescent depot. Lake Beecham, no Lake Bareen was the convalescent depot I went to.

Then from there I came back to the main convalescent depot at Rocky Creek to be returned to my unit and I expected to be sent to Six div lines and assigned to a unit and assigned to a unit somewhere in Six div and they said, “Oh you’ve got to go back to New Guinea.” I said, “I haven’t had any home leave yet.” Oh, that’s bad luck. Now what I hadn’t realised

that when I was sent to brigade headquarters I was technically referred to the ASC and then from there seconded back. I wasn’t aware of this until this point, seconded back to brigade headquarters but I was a member of the Army Service Corps. and so and no way did I want to go back to New Guinea at that stage. I didn’t mind

going back but I wanted to go home for 28 days first. Everybody else had had it. Why shouldn’t I? And I knew once I got back to New Guinea that was the end of any home leave. So, I suddenly had a brain wave and I said to the little man there I said, “I can’t go back to New Guinea without my Kitten, without my rifle can I?” He said, “No, haven’t you got it?” I said, “You know as well as I do we’re not allowed to bring rifles in to hospital.

It’s a breech of the Geneva Convention. I had to leave that behind when I was being admitted to hospital. I’ll have to go back to the sixty lines at Wondalga to pick them up.” “Well,” he said, yes that’s right, “Well he said I’ll give you a movement order back to Wondalga to pick up your kit and then you go to Redlynch down at Cairns for transit back to New Guinea.” I said, “Okay”.

Well, as soon as I got back to Wondalga I conned the driver of the truck I was in to take me up to six div headquarters, ask for directions to Bill Towns office. Now Bill had been our staff captain and my table was there and his was there in the one room at Murray barracks and we both worked for the same bank in civvies.

So, I went in and you know he greeted me and he says “What can I do for you?” I said, “They’re sending me back to New Guinea.” He said, “Like hell they are.” So I told him the story. I showed him the movement order and he threw it in the waste paper basket immediately. He got on the phone and he said, “You go and report to Colonel Nelson at 6 Divvy headquarters

ASC. Take your kit and go down there. You’ll be staying down there”. I said, “What about my movement order?” He said, “I’ll deal with that,” and I never head anymore about it. I don’t know what he did about that and so I went down and Colonel Nelson said “I believe you’ve been senior supply clerk for the brigade?” I said “Yes.” He said, “You think you can do the same job for division?” I said, “What’s the difference?” He said, “Just three times as

big, that’s all,” and you know I’m nothing if not confident of my own abilities so I said, “Yeah I think I can do that.” He said, “Well I’ve got a problem.” He said, “I’ve got an officer who’s the senior supply officer but,” he said, “he was landed on me, he was sent back from New Guinea because they didn’t want him up there,” told me his name. I knew him actually. “Oh, my God. He

said you’re a corporal at the moment,” he said, “I’ll promote you to acting staff Sergeant as soon as I get this fellow sent back to Melbourne where he belongs,” he said, “I’ll send you to officer school and if you can do the job you can have his job with the commission.” He said, “I’ll put you on probation for a month.” Well, I think within the first two days I was doing the job because it was really

no different. It was only a question of quantity. It was exactly as I’d been doing all along and it was at that stage that I got a letter from the Bishop asking me to apply for a discharge because they were having trouble filling all the parishes, so many of the clergy had joined the services. I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about the idea but I knew I’d spent a total of 39 weeks of

the previous year in hospital and I couldn’t really see, I’d been writing operation orders for the next move up in to New Guinea. I wasn’t actually writing but I was typing I had to admit to being a typist again by this stage and I knew what was planned and I couldn’t really see myself with my medical history getting involved in that so I wrote and told the Bishop

yes he could apply for my discharge, well next thing

Rations, it was rations scales and what have you. You were asking about the sort of work I did in supply. When I was at Div not quite to the same degree at brigade because division made these decisions which were then passed on to brigade which we had to administer but at Div headquarters

we had a ration scale for per head, for every soldier in the army and you got you know a hundredth of an ounce of pepper of fiftieth of an ounce of salt, three ounces of butter, two and a half ounces of sugar, so on every day. Had to have twelve ounces of meat if it was on the bone or off the bone or sixteen ounces of meat if it was on the bone and there were other items that could

substitute for meat as protein such as baked beans and that was a wonderful weapon. I won’t tell you about how we used baked beans as a weapon on one occasion and so the job that we had was basically to look at the available supplies we had at hand and say what would be issued to the army cooks every day.

Now I think probably there were basic menus given to army cooks but I don’t think many of them took much notice of them and they would, like most housewives, have a look at what they had on their shelves and say, “Well today we’ll have so and so” and that was fine as long as they used their rations and every once in a while we would get in a vehicle and go around

and have a look at the army kitchens and if we found that they had a hundred tins of butter on the shelf well we’d put eighty of them in the truck and go because that also ran the risk of black market but there was butter rationing, butter was in tins it wasn’t in packs. Butter was a very marketable commodity on the black market because civilians I think got half an ounce of butter a week or some ridiculous ration

like that and the army got two and a half or three ounces a day and so there was a great black market in tinned butter. That was one of the things we used to look at and lots of other things that were in short supply and that was part of our job at Div to go around to cook houses and have a look and see what was being stock piled and it might be that, the cook might say

“Well I’m going to do so and so and I’ve been saving up until I had enough ingredients,” well okay, if he could justify why he had that stockpile it would be left alone but if he was stockpiling it and we just thought that it was going to the black market and there was a black market. At one stage I was running a petrol depot, this was while I was at Div headquarters and that was again one of the duties we had to do. And when I

took, relieved while the fellow went off. I think he went to a training school or something and I was relieving him and the very first day a civilian truck pulled and asked to be filled up. I said “Well where’s your permit?” because there were some civilian vehicles which were entitled to get petrol from us. “Oh,” he said, “No permit. You fill me up and I give you the money and no questions asked.” Well, not this bunny because I didn’t know he, whiff of him

and I’d been inclined to sell it to him. He could have been somebody out to catch me. He could have been Military Police. No way. I wanted to know more about him than that but there was a great racket going on in selling petrol because petrol was rationed too. The average household had got two gallons of petrol a month and so if they could get black market petrol from the army that was very valuable so that was one of the things we had to watch. And we had to watch and

see what we had in our overall stocks, in our food depots and whether we might have to substitute something else. Well, various foods were classed as proteins and when we were in New Guinea when we never saw fresh meat. We got beans, baked beans and all that sort of thing as a meat substitute and the army ration

chart said that baked beans could be used as a substitute for meat. Well, on one occasion the army provosts that’s the army military police did something unforgivable. They booked one of our army service corps. drivers for speeding. Well, our drivers were regarded as untouchable. Well, he never did face charges

because after a week of having baked beans 21 times a week, three times a day for seven days in lieu of meat they decided to drop the charges against our driver and suddenly we found we had enough meat to let them have meat and there wasn’t a thing they could do about it because baked beans was a legitimate substitute for meat and so that’s how we pulled the provosts in to line. You know we had a bit of power as well you see.

Sometimes we smuggles stuff out too. I frequently, we used to go in to Herberton and there was a lady in Herberton, can’t even remember what her surname was but she was a wonderful lady and quite humble, wealth and it was nothing for her to have 20, 25 soldiers sit down for tea on Sunday night.

So, occasionally there’d be a tin of butter slipped in our pocket or something like that suppose it came from the supply and we’d take it in and give it to her and I felt quite shameless about that because she was feeding, really feeding army troops anyhow but she was always tremendously grateful for that and so those were the other sides of it as well. It wasn’t just black market that army goods went off. There was sometimes quite legitimate reasons and somehow we knew

it was going off and we didn’t see it because we felt it was justified.

Oh, yes. Endemic.

It all had to be carried or went hungry until they could get through. Quite often the native

would show the boys things that could be, they never starved, the natives didn’t. They knew what roots could be eaten and what berries could be eaten. The main thing was you didn’t eat anything brightly coloured. I remember that. If it was brightly coloured it was usually dangerous but oh yes there were frequently times we had problems getting supplies through and

we couldn’t always air drop because cloud cover and that sort of thing. Or there wasn’t a clear space and they were dropping it in to the tops of trees so we couldn’t always air drop and there was a limit to how much they could carry and the whole situation was very fluid. After I came back on to the tablelands I was sent to a

training school for jungle supplies and remember I’d just spent months up in the New Guinea jungle doing supply work and I got absolutely fed up with this young fellow who was lecturing us about how it should be done and should do this and should do that and in the end I couldn’t contain myself any longer. I said, “That won’t work.” And he said, “And of course you would know all about it wouldn’t you,” in a very superior way and I said “Well do know a little bit about it.” He said, “What do you

know about it?” I said, “Well I’ve just spent six months doing jungle supply.” “Well, how would you do it?” And I told him. He said, “Does that work?” I said, “Yes it does work very well but the way you’re telling us to do it won’t work,” and there was a bit of a pause. The poor fellow, I felt sorry for him afterwards but we did have that and you’ve got that always. You’ve got the experts who’ve got the book learning but they didn’t have the experience at that stage. Later on there were people, not myself

because I came out of the army but they were people who came back who had the experience. It was quite difference to supply in the desert or anywhere else in the world. It was a different war we were fighting. Old officers who’d served in the trenches in the first world war had no concept and after I came back and I went to Swan hill after I was discharged and the first Anzac Day after I was

discharged I was invited to be the guest speaker at the Anzac Day commemoration but the old diggers in the Summer Hill Branch of the RSL [Returned and Services League] vetoed it because this young fellow wouldn’t know what it was like to fight a real war. Now you talk to some of the Vietnam veterans, my mob were guilty of that with them too. Each war is different and what worked in

Libya even in the Second World War was different to what worked in the trenches in France or on the heights of Gallipoli and what worked in New Guinea was different to anything before that as well and so it had to be developed on the field but you had the so called experts who were training them who’d not had that experience. Later on they did have that experience but some of us had to put

up with people who didn’t know telling us how to do it and because I’d come in, sort of hadn’t been trained as ASC I was seen as a candidate to do a supply training course. Forgetting the fact I’d been doing it anyhow in actuality without having done any prior training and there were a lot of us like that. We’re running out aren’t we? I’ve got a theory and I want to expound this

one about the 39th well the 30th Brigade as a whole being struck from the battle order and I believe that it’s important that, you didn’t have your microphone you naughty girl. I hope they were picking you up. We’re having terrible trouble with microphones today aren’t we and that’s recorded for posterity. In two hundred years down the track somebody’s going to watch this tape and say “What a terrible interviewer she was.”

No, that’s being rude. You’ve been a very good and very careful, caring interviewer. I believe that we were sent to New Guinea, not initially, we were sent there as a, or formed to become a Garrison troop and an out post and then suddenly it became a unit that had to defend it. But I believe that we were thrown in to battle as a sacrifice to the Japanese. The government of the day with the connivance of the army

authorities, defence authorities drew a line in Australia from Brisbane across to the West coast and said we will defend everything South of that line and the Japanese can have what’s above it. I don’t really believe the Japanese had been taken in to consultation about that and I can’t see them ever having stopped. I think what they wanted was down here anyhow and we, they were prepared to sacrifice us and we were a mob of

chokos and militia people who were up there and they brought these crack AIF troops back from the Middle East, the lost the 8th Division but the rest, the 6th, the 7th and the 9th were brought back from the Middle East to defend the Brisbane line and that’s where they were going to put their crack troops but then all of a sudden this mob of unknowns up in New Guinea did the unthinkable

and did what the British army and the American marines in the Philippines and so on had not been able to do. They stopped the Japanese advance to the great embarrassment of all these bigwigs in Australia and all their battle plans and everything had to be revamped. The 7th Division had to suddenly be rushed up to New Guinea and the 2/14th came in and they couldn’t believe that they were coming in to relieve militia

troops and I think the greatest and strongest supporters we have in the world are the members of the 2/14th battalion who came in to relieve us and when they got in to trouble, I wasn’t with them at that time, so I can speak dispassionately about it. When they got in to trouble, our boys who were being taken out and brought back to Port Moresby to be rested and reinforced went back in again to fight with them, to help them. And that’s what

turned the tide of Isurava and that was unthinkable and so they were worried about history. Here were these crack AIF troops, the Australian Imperial force the expeditionary force they’d raised and it took a mob of chocos [chocolate soldiers - militia] to stop the Japs. Chocolate soldiers and so we’ll get rid of them. We’ll wipe them out of history

and so we were struck from the battle order and no reference was ever made to us again and it’s only since people like Peter Brune and others like him and Peter Brune told me this himself. He said I had no idea of the role of the 39th Battalion until, as a historian, he’s at Adelaide university. I decided to investigate the Kokoda campaign. He said it had all been suppressed and he’s come

out and told the story and now of course we’re the flavour of the month as it were but I believe we were struck from the battle order. We have decided officially as an association. There are some who want to get Freedom of Information to find out the papers, you know the records of cabinet discussions of why. As an association we have decided we don’t want to pursue it. We think it’s nice to have a mystique still but somebody is going to, we’ve got one fellow in particular

in Brisbane who’s insisting on pursuing it whether as an individual he’ll get it I don’t know but as an association we said let there be a mystique about it anyhow. Let’s leave it the way it is and we’ve all got our own theories. That’s my theory for what it’s worth but I think it might be fairly near the truth of it. We’re an embarrassment and so they got rid of us. The interesting thing is, that, as I say, we were all volunteers. Most of us had

joined the AIF and I told you before about how I tried to join the AIF at Darley and this is a good point to finish up on and when we were allowed to join the AIF, I signed papers again and we all wrote our numbers back and I couldn’t understand why my VX number was so much smaller than everybody else’s when they came back. It didn’t worry me. I thought that must have been a vacant number they had somewhere and in the luck of the draw I got it but when I got discharged I found that my enlistment

in the AIF had been from the date I signed up at Darley and tried to transfer out and so actually I was the first member of the AIF in the 39th Battalion and that didn’t fuss me very much until I started to get all my deferred pay and sustenance pay and all the things that you get paid when you’re discharged and I found that the higher payments came from the date I signed my AIF papers in Darley, whereas all the others got them from the time they signed them in New Guinea

so I had six or eight months on them at the higher rate but it wasn’t done for that reason it was just a side benefit and I think you’ve heard enough from this old blather mouth.

Well, the battle order is the list of units, army units or air force units or whatever but in our case

the list of army units that are recognised as part of the army at a given time. That’s the battle order and in 1943 Canberra struck the 30th Brigade from the battle order. It didn’t exist any more. Just full stop. It stopped existing and was never again mentioned in records. The troops were dispersed

and that was the end of it, end of story. It didn’t exist in history and it’s only because people like Peter Brune and others like him have probed in to it and have found out what happened and have insisted on the true story being told and now we’re something of heroes. Something we knew we were all along.

Only the three.

The three in the 30th Brigade. No others.

It’s, you know, inexplicable really. If we had blotted our copybooks, if we’d dropped our guns and run. If we had suffered some major defeat and been the cause of the Japanese coming in to Australia fair enough but none of

those things. And that’s not the Japs coming. Oh, there was a time when we pricked up our ears when we heard an aircraft engine believe me and especially if it was going, because they had that awful drone.

No, no this was in New Guinea when they had aerial supremacy and they could go wherever they wanted to. We couldn’t

stop them. We always said their engines were saying for you, for you, for you, for you and they had that throb. A most peculiar throb.

That was a pretty traumatic process I realise now.

I found it, I didn’t think I found it difficult but other people did. I had been in the position of some authority. See, the army’s a funny thing. Although I was only an acting staff sergeant I was substantive Corporal but an acting Staff Sergeant, I was in the position where I could tell Colonels to go and get lost and

they would come in and make a request and I’d say, “No, that’s not on,” and rank had nothing to do with it and I came back in to civilian life and I was a very, very small fish in a very big pond and I realise now I didn’t then, others did,

it was years later I found it in one of my parishes. They’d nicknamed me Captain Bounce because I used to tell them what to do and that became difficult but I got over that, I think, I hope. My kids would say I haven’t. They’d say I bullied them right through their life.

I think I adjusted fairly well. We didn’t have any traumas once we got married and had a family and that marriage oh, lasted forty years would have lasted longer.

I had my ups and down in civilian life but overall there’s been more ups and downs and I’ve been very fortunate. I have been to, I haven’t been to South America but I’ve been to every other continent and most of them a number of times. I can talk, without boasting, quite fluently about most countries and most places where people go

and people say well where are you going to next or where did you go to last? And I, even today, I have anything two to three trips overseas trips a year. Not holidays but sometimes they’re a holiday but and so I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve had experience which in one way or another is being tapped and used by other people and serving other people

and I’ve found it’s been a very fulfilling life. I must say, and you were talking about religion before, and I think this has got a religious theme. Of all the downs I’ve ever had and there have been times when I have been really been, being kicked in the teeth but everyone of those experiences I subsequently found there has been a reason

for it and somebody has come in to my life that because of that experience, I was able to help and so one of the lessons, important lessons I’ve learnt in life that nothing is without value. That every experience you have is of value and can be used to help somebody

and so I’m going out the other end now. Told the doctor the other day I’d passed my use by date and in the next breath told him I wanted to live to 96 because that’s the age my father lived to but I don’t think I’ll be following his example. Four days before he died he was up a ladder putting spouting on a building for me. I don’t think I’d be able to do that. I’d fall off the ladder because one of the things that’s happened to me is I’ve lost my sense of balance but there are other things that I’m sure he

couldn’t do that I can do so it’s compensated. I can use a computer pretty well.

Yes, most people first thing you say when you’ve been an airport chaplain is the next question is, what does an airport chaplain and my next answer to that was always I don’t know. I never did know from one day

to the next when I went to work in the morning, what I’d be doing. Melbourne airport which by world standards is a pretty small one. It only has eleven thousand people work there. When you think places like Heathrow have fifty thousand or Frankfurt have a workforce of seventy thousand, Melbourne’s pretty small. But you get any community of eleven thousand people and you’re minister to those eleven thousand and

they’ve got families back at home as well. They’ve got wives and they’ve got children and because of the very nature of an airport it also becomes their social life as well because they’re working with peculiar shifts and the people they associate with and so all their social life’s bound up with the airport as well in most cases and so it makes it a pretty big parish. It’s not eleven thousand it’s probably nearer fifty thousand that one way or another you’re ministering

to and you’ve got the whole range of society in that group and you’re called on to minister to them, to counsel them, to kick in the backside occasionally, to talk to them when someone’s committing suicide. I had ten suicides, or attempted suicides. Actual, land attempted suicides in nine weeks at one stage. I was almost ready to do it myself at the

end of that.

Stress. It’s very stressful work. In those days air traffic controllers used to work 11 hours straight without a lunch break. They took their meal at their console. Firies, very highly trained fire, airport fire staff, very highly trained to do a job they never strike a blow of anger in.

When was the last time you saw an aircraft on fire here in Australia? But you’ve got to have the fire people there and they’re trained for this. At long, long last they’ve accepted one of my recommendations and they now seconde them to the Metropolitan fire service so they do actually fight some fires occasionally. That was one of my major achievements I felt

and so there was a very high level of stress. If an aircraft was involved in an incident it’s not that pilot who’s in the hot seat it’s the air traffic controller who allowed it to happen. Pilot’s in the hot seat too make no mistake about it but the air traffic controller’s ultimately responsible. Just as if you die in the operating table it’s not the surgeon who holds, takes the blame, it’s the anaesthetist and

there’s the myth that the pilot of the airplane sleeps with the air hostess when they’re over-nighting in Cairns and in fact they’ve seen so much of each other and don’t want to see each other. The last people in the world who want to sleep with each other are the, I believe there is probably a lower degree of promiscuity among flight crews than any other section of the community but that’s not the myth that’s popular and so that

creates family stress and so it goes on and on and on. There’s no limit. And I was suddenly thrust in to the position at Melbourne, I’m not only was the first airport chaplain in Australia, I was the first one in the Southern hemisphere and there was nobody I could ring up and say “How do I do this?” Because there was nobody around the corner I could talk to. If I was in Paris, I could ring up Brussels. It’s only a couple of hundred miles down the road

or whatever and so in my first year I got invited to a conference in Malta and I looked at that and looked at what it would cost, there were no funds for me to go and I couldn’t afford it and so I put it in to my too hard basket and somehow or another one of the Ansett duty managers well, I do know how he found out about it, because I told him about it over lunch, just telling him how much I’d like to go and the next thing I knew I got a telephone

call to say that Qantas and Atelia were providing me with a free ticket to go to it, to pack my bags and when I came back the Qantas manager wanted a report on it and I gave it to him and then from then to the day I retired they made sure that I went to everyone of the conferences and they’ve helped me to go to a number since. For my sins, for one reason or another, I was elected as president of the world body

after some years. When I retired, when I retired as president they messed around with the constitution at the last meeting I’d chaired and I said to them, look I don’t know what you’re trying to do but the only thing you’re going to achieve is you’re going to make me a life member and they all looked a bit sheepish and I felt I’d dropped a lead balloon or something and they said well that’s exactly what we’re trying to do but we didn’t want to tell you so I had to shut up. And so they made me a

life member and then they put me on to this, coopted me on the executive board and that’s where I still am and then ten years ago they gave me the task of maintaining the directory which was a printed thing in those days. The list of airport Chapels and Chaplains and how you could contact them and then I got the idea of putting it on the internet and now we’ve got an internet website of 200 or probably more now but 229 files the last time we counted them and

over a thousand links to various other sites and so I maintained that and then on the 22nd of next month we’re hosting our international conference here in Melbourne which, Mary’s been elected as junior Vice President in case I fell off my perch, usually the host Chaplain or host is the junior Vice President for that year but I was a bit worried I might fall off my perch before then so I got them to elect Mary so she could carry on if I couldn’t

and so between us we’re organising the conference in Melbourne. But if you’re travelling most major airports have one chaplain, some have 5, 7 chaplains and they’re administering, not only to the people who work there but of course not here in Australia but you got to a place like Frankfurt for example, they’ve got five thousand illegal immigrants in detention in the airport and so the chaplain has a ministry to them.

We never did. Well, that’s not true. We didn’t, there is a prayer room, a quiet room, a meditation room call it what you like, chapel at Melbourne airport but as a matter of policy we never conducted services there on the basis that Melbourne in the end of the line. It’s not a transit airport where people are spending hours at a time in it waiting for another flight and so we believed anyone arriving in Melbourne had the ability to go to a local

church if they wanted to. The people who worked at the airport could go to a local church because they only work eight hour shifts in the main anyhow. So, we never set up deliberate worship but I did have special services and when we had the Mount Erebus disaster occurred, you know, Air New Zealand, the plane that crashed in the Antarctic, we had memorial service there for those people who were well known at Melbourne airport. The current chaplain after September 11

had a memorial service for the United pilots who were lost because they were well known in Melbourne and so people wanted to do something for them. They’ve been special services like that. I married lots of people. I buried lots of them. I christened their children but we didn’t have services at the airport but in overseas airports where you got people spending perhaps a day, two days in transit, yes they had regular daily services.

I did in actual fact. I actually married one couple in an aeroplane.

Well, they were both cabin attendants, that’s how they met in the first place and they were driving past Essendon airport and saw the Goony bird there. Old DC-3, which is available for charter and they thought, why not? And so sorry that’s the first…