Australians at War Film Archive

Yes. I was born in Ballarat, first of the seventh, 1935. That was only because I wanted to be beside my mother, who later left within the twelve months.

I went to live with my grandparents and my father. That was the introduction to the church. My father was a verger of a church, Church of England. And my grandparents brought me up.

I went to Bob Menzies School, in Humphries Street. After kindergarten, that was.

And I then went to a technical school. The day I turned fourteen I left, because I hated school, and went out and got a job and from then on I was never out of work. Had endless jobs.

Had a friend called Bernie Jones.

We worked on several jobs together, and one day we just got sick of everything. He said, “I’m going to join the army.” I said, “Well, if you’re going, I’m going.” And the day we joined, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, we were looking down on them at Flinders Street Railway station on their visit to Australia in ’54. 1954.

Yes. I went to a place called Kapooka which is a hell hole, and three months intensive training there. And from there to a place called Ingleburn, which is in NSW, advanced training, and further advancing into Enoggera in Queensland, where we were preparing to go to Korea. But the Korean War finished so we did the jungle warfare course at a place called Canungra,

which is a very intense training area for jungle warfare. And we found out we were heading for Malaya. And I think we headed there about the tenth of October, 1955. On a ship called the Georgic.

Yes. On arrival there we wondered what we’d struck. We had to unload the ship and we were sent to a place called Minden Barracks. Which is now a high security police training centre, and we spent a fair few weeks there prior to anything going on in the jungle, which was on the mainland.

Penang was called the Jewel of the East, which later became a good holiday centre. But there were known to be a few terrorists on Penang but all we did was a little bit of jungle warfare training there, and we were posted over onto the mainland, where we started a series of hit and run patrols. By that I mean, the terrorists, the communist terrorists, it was a hit and run engagement.

You never knew where it was coming from or how many, and we spent days and months not knowing when it was coming. And it didn’t come until a year later. We struck several incidents. Two or three I was involved in. But overall, after that, we’d go on leave back to Penang,

and we’d have a good time. And by that time I was enjoying, I never drank when I joined the services, but after that I started to find I was missing out on the high life, when we were on leave, so when we played we played. This was normally in Penang, and then back to the training, not training, back to Kedah, I think was one of our first depots, and a few other places.

Finally finishing up at a place called Kroh, which is on the Siamese border, which is now known as Thailand. This was where one of our major contacts was, a contact being a clash with the enemy, with the terrorists. But on many occasions we had a system over there that married men went home at weekends for leave.

So consequently the single men did the patrols, and at times there’d be four or five of us, that’s all you’d have out there if you struck anything big you were in real trouble. So there came to be a bit of a division between married and single men, because they had the high life of a weekend, we did all the work.

We came home on the New Australia in 1957.

And I’ve never seen anything greater as a sight than the Sydney Harbour Bridge. And there was about a hundred thousand people, which is wonderful, when you look back at Vietnam and find our there was hardly any. We were treated extremely well when we came back. The only time we weren’t treated well was by some of the older World War II veterans in the RSL [Returned and Services League],

which is one reason I’m not a member now.

Yes. I tried, there was no resettlement programs, to get you another job. I tried for the police force and a few others.

But I was too short, and I got a job on the trams in Ballarat. This is after I met my wife, of course, and I got the sack from the trams for having two jobs, and talking to a driver while the tram was in motion. And had nothing else to do, so I started a fruit and veggie round with my old truck.

I sold that out and went into real estate, which I enjoyed, but I wasn’t getting paid the commission, and at that time, a friend asked me if I’d like to come to AMP [Australian Mutual Provident Society]. It was the greatest move I ever made. The biggest money I ever made in my life, and I was there for thirty years, until I became fairly sick and had to retire.

But, had a colourful life.

Yes, well, starting back to my grandparents. My grandfather was a Cobb and Co driver

from Daylesford to Ballarat, and we hear tales of how he used to come in and drive the coach in with the horses, but the horses would drive him home because he had a nice habit of having a few grogs in those days, and he was too drunk to drive, so the horses drove him home. And he turned in his ways, and he got a job as a verger

at St Paul’s Church of England in Ballarat, which was where I was sent when my parents split up. At that point, I would have, the earliest memory is probably, I called my grandmother ‘Mum’. I didn’t know I had a mother, and didn’t find that out till I was about ten. And then I found out I had a sister. So that was a great occasion,

when I found out I could go and meet my sister, but I only ever saw my mother twice in my life. She’s since died. But my father died, but I was brought up with him, and we didn’t get on terribly well. But forced into the church life, I gradually got an intense dislike for going to church, so found other things to do,

and had friends, and we found other things to do. But apart from that, it was a, I think for somebody who didn’t have parents together, I think it was a great upbringing. It taught me a sense of good values. I had a great grandfather, a great grandmother, who were very kind and terrific to me.

Well, times were hard. It was war time, and my uncle, he lived at that home with us, he went overseas. He was one of the Rats of Tobruk. I found ways to make money. Or as kids, we had to make money. Selling scrap metal, or bones, bottles. Every few days we’d be down with a billy cart,

down to the bottle-ohs with something. On one occasion, they were pulling a police station down, and we were aware that there was lead in the roof. And when it was half way pulled down we got up in the roof, the second storey, and a few billy cart loads of lead was quite good money in those days. And on another funny occasion, they’d pulled down one of the church buildings,

and there was an Anglican cross. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one. It weighed about a quarter of a ton I suppose, with a great big circle in the middle. My grandfather came out and caught me with that on my billy cart, trying to take it down to the bottle-ohs to sell. Consequently, the billy cart broke in half, so I didn’t sell the cross. But other than that it was just like

any normal kid growing up. We were right next door to tennis courts, so I learnt tennis fairly early in my life.

No.

No. No, my grandfather was just a coach driver. That’s as far back as I can go there.

Yeah.

Oh, he was more like a father to me, when he came back from the war, than my own. I got on with him. He only died twelve months ago, so we were like brothers in the finish. A great man, a true gentleman.

One I looked up and admired and tried to set a few standards by the way he lived.

The Depression was over when I was a baby. It was 1935, so I don’t recall much before 1939, ’40. Times were tough, but they were also good. You found things to do.

Kids playing together. That was on all the time. Not like we’ve got today with kids with their eyes glued to the television set all day. It was rather good. I imagine the Depression made it very hard with money. But we got the after effects of that. We had to look for every couple of bob you could find.

Yeah.

I think the greatest memory I had was of the end of the war. I can remember seeing my uncle marching when he was on leave. And the letters that he sent home to my grandmother.

I think the best memory though is when we heard there was victory in Europe, everybody parading in the streets, but when victory was in Japan, in the Pacific, we heard all the train whistles going. And everybody just flew out of the schools. I took all our class over to the church steeple, and we went and rang the bell, we put a flag up,

and yelling and cheering, and then we went up the street, and Ballarat Street’s pretty wide, double lane, with a plantation up the centre, that was chock-a-block with people cheering, and so relieved that the war was over. That’s probably the greatest memory I had.

Well, we, when we went into a shop, every halfpenny or penny spare that we had, threepence, three pennies was worth a lot of money to us in those days. But every penny, you’d buy a Zero stamp and that was designed, it was an advertising campaign designed to shoot down a Zero,

Japanese plane, and as kids we were all taught that that was the way to go. I suppose it gave us an interest in the war ending, but that was at an early age.

Yes, I think so. I couldn’t stand being at home. I had to get out and do something.

Oh, we hated Hitler. We hated Tojo. We were taught to hate them. They were the leaders of the two countries who were fighting. And of course the headlines every day was everything to do with the war.

That was the main headline we had every day. But we learnt to respect those that had been there, and those that were over there.

Well, it was going to school, and you couldn’t wait for weekends. We’d go for car trips. I had friends who had an old Dodge ambulance, converted into a utility. It was a Dodge ambulance from the 1914 war. And I went on all the trips with them, we’d come down to places like Warrnambool and things like that, but it was always something to do. We’d have our meeting spot of a night.

We’d just go round and talk, near the fire brigade at Ballarat East. We’d watch, there was a hotel down the bottom of the hill, and of a Saturday particularly, we’d watch for the lovers to come from the hotel and go into what they called the East Ballarat Gardens. That was, if you like, our dung hill. We knew every stretch of it. And we’d go in and probably climb trees and watch the activities that went on.

One day I was up a tree and it started to get round ten o’clock at night, and I knew I’d get a smacked backside if I didn’t get home. So the lovers were down doing what you normally do, I jumped down out of the tree and said, “Sorry, what time is it? I’ve got to go,” and ran like hell. There’s some of the activities we got up to.

Another one we followed, and there was a big creek, which was converted into an air raid shelter for the Ballarat Girls’ School. It was adjacent to the gardens. And we knew this creek pretty well, so we crawled along and walked and went to where these lovers were in action, had a peep over the fence,

and next thing a beer bottle came flying and hit the fence right near us, so we didn’t stop running for about three miles up the other side of the creek. But they were just adventures as kids. You had to do something. We loved the firemen. We all got on well with them. They were permanent in those days. There was a few of them. And they’d take us for rides, and play billiards, and things like that.

Well, Humphrey Street was all right. I didn’t like school. I just wanted to get out and play, have fun. The Junior Technical School, I’d wagged school, usually once a week when we had a period called Electricity and Magnetism.

I’d wag school and go up to the tip shooting rats. And by that stage I was about twelve, thirteen, I think. As I said, by the time I reached age fourteen, I didn’t go back. Had a job to go to, so I went. But we had our nicknames for our teachers and things like that at school.

Even the ones I know now that I went to school with, still a memory of blokes like Mandrake we called one of them. And we respected our teacher, though, but one in particular we really admired, a fellow by the name of Joe Hanrahan. He’d been to the war in the air force, and come home, and by that time the war was over, of course.

And we all admired him, probably because of his war service.

Oh, we always, we always attended, my uncle was home then and we always attended the Anzac parades to watch him march and so forth,

but that’s been part of our life I suppose. Particularly after I joined Legacy about thirty years ago. You become a stronger part of the tradition. But it took a long while before recognition was given to any memorial for Malaya.

Or Borneo, and some of those, they, Vietnam was, you know the treatment they got when they come home. Well, we were treated differently, but it became a forgotten war. Malaya.

Empire?

Well, we had a strong allegiance to the Queen. We were brought up with that because the flag went up. We had to appear in front of the flag every Monday morning. Sing God Save the Queen. It was just part of life. We were brought up to respect royalty. Times have changed a lot.

Recently we had a vote in Legacy to get rid of the National Anthem and I was one of the main objectors. But I think, in, three years ago that was, I think it was, but I think I’d probably favour the Republic, if it was done the right way, now. But I’d still respect the Royals, they’re all human, after all. In our day, we only saw it as the Queen

and the princess and all those things, but I’m sure they all had their faults. Got you stumped for a question, have I?

No, I was never an avid reader. I read comics and things. I learnt more after I left school than what I did when I was at school. School taught me the basics of English and a few other things like that,

but I think I learnt more about life after I left school. How you had to survive and still have respect for people, people like elders and things like that. See, when would you ever see anybody get up and give a seat to a lady now? With anyone my age, it’s automatic. Those are little things that we were taught, they stay with you.

But I learnt much more after school than I did when I was at school.

Church of England, Well, it was very stern and morbid. I hated it. Because I think I was born with a sense of humour

and there’s no sense of humour in the church. It’s just dull and boring. I had the normal teachings of the religious world. As you grow older, though, you learn to question some of them. I’ll go onto something like that when I talk about my marriage and things like that later, where I question the church.

Yes. I started off in a, oh, a clothing manufacturing type thing. A place called Morley’s. I became the office boy there,

and learnt how to type a little bit and things like that. At age fifteen, I had an argument with my father. He was a night shift worker, and he only drank once a week, and it was that night I had an argument with him, so I nicked off to Melbourne to relatives, I got a job there in the Model Dairy

and that gave me a real source of income, and then, I called it an advancement, but I was taught to look after eighty odd horses. They were milk cart horses in those days, and came to love horses, that’s probably why I love a little bet now and again now. But eighty horses and, at age sixteen, I told lies and got my drivers licence,

because I’d go out with the semi drivers, and help them unload their truck on my off day. When I was off, I’d help them unload the truck if I could drive. So I went to driving school at sixteen, got my licence, went and told my father, he gave me a hell of a dressing down. Next thing a policeman arrived at work. I was working in the drycleaners then,

and he gave me a stern warning, like a kick up the pants, and they even refunded my five bob, as we called it in those days, to get a licence. There was nothing more said about it. But in hindsight, I look back now and think it’s the best thing that happened, because it would have marked me for life, having dropped my age by two,

increased my age by two years. So it did show he was fairly wise there. But then I went on the furniture van, and drove a furniture van for a while. That was hard work. I suppose I had about ten jobs before I joined the army. But always had a job to go into. Something, a different challenge, or a different adventure, if you like.

Which is what I looked on the army as. Just a new adventure.

Oh, yeah. All you had to do was go and ask. But you did work. If you can imagine one job. In a plaster works, they have a furnace that they put sand in. You have to keep the sand bucket, shovel into the furnace and you’re sweating all the time. Constant sweating.

You do that for eight hours in a day, it’s the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life. So then you think there’s something easier. That’s when I went onto the furniture van, which proved, that was an exciting job, the furniture removal. Then the dry cleaners, and that’s where Bernie and I decided to go in.

We played football together, and went almost everywhere together. We had like a little gang. Not like the gangs that you’ve got today. It’s the football side, Ballarat East, under sixteen we were, and then we went to under nineteens, but you have your divisions in that. And one day it came to a head.

One bloke was looked on as the leader of one division. I was looked on as the leader of the other. So it finally came to a crunch. We had a punch up, out the back of a kindergarten. So that was the end of our football days then, and we joined the army.

Ah, I tried to get in. That’s, I tried to join up at sixteen, seventeen. But of course I said can I go in as a cadet. Well, in those days you couldn’t. I didn’t have the education level, because I’d left school at fourteen. I tried to get there but they wouldn’t have me.

No, I didn’t know a lot about it. All I knew, well, in our younger days one thing I did forget. We went on rabbit drives. Now, a rabbit drive is where you put, you’ve got a plague of rabbits, you put a barbed wire, ah, a wire netting fence over about two hundred yards. And you drive the rabbits into it,

and somebody gets each end, and gradually you close them in. and you finish up with about two thousand, a thousand pair of rabbits. All in a pile. So we just, well, rabbits were our income, rabbit skins. The carcasses were taken into the freezers. Only some of them. The skins were used for the Korean War. Well, over in Korea it got terribly cold and icy.

And they must have been used in some way. Either, well the slouch hat is made out of rabbit skins, apparently. And the air force linings of the suits. Some nature of clothing that Korea had, there was a big demand for rabbit skins, and that’s where we got a few bob.

Oh, every week we’d try and go on those. There’s a plague at the time. They had to get rid of them. I would have only been ten or eleven then. Oh, I must have been a bit older. The Korean War started just after ’45, didn’t it, about 1946, or something.

Well, I must have been a bit older. I remember the men used to hop in. And if you know how to get rid of a rabbit, you hold him by the feet and the neck, pull his neck back and then push and throw him on the heap. I tried that once, held him by the legs, push his head down, threw him on the heap, and he got up and run away.

So I must have been reasonably young when I first did it.

No. That was the main one. That was the main source. That was a good income. I paid for my tonsillectomy out of that. I got a cheque for five pounds

and had to get my tonsils out, so I paid for that myself, out of that. The main thing was scrap metal and, in those days, bones. I think they used the bones for handles of knives and things like that. Anything we could sell, we’d sell.

Well, it was an adventure, I think. I just, I admired all the forces. You know, some of them, had friends that joined the navy and things like that, and it appeared to be a good life. I wasn’t going anywhere in the dry cleaning business and you look for a new adventure.

That’s about all. But I knew nothing about Malaya then. It wasn’t even mentioned. We were going in to go to Korea. And of course, when you do your recruit training, you think you’re going to finish up with some elite job, an easy job, or something like that, but on the documents you get, infantry. If you’re fit, you go to infantry.

And that’s it. And I didn’t have the education level, I suppose. When they do psychology exams, they give you an examination for your IQ test, I suppose. I don’t know what I came up, but I know I went to infantry.

No, only when I joined the army. There were a few World War II veterans in the army. Some were instructors, and some were officers and non-actives. Behind the desk jobs. That was all. Didn’t really. The only other ones were in the tennis club.

They joined the tennis club when they came back from active service, and played tennis with a few of them. That’s all.

No. Only towards the end he told us a few things.

Yes. Until twelve months or two years ago, we had a lot of talks on it, but a few things he didn’t tell me. He got MID mentioned in despatches.

From what I hear, from other sources, it should have been a Military Medal. He did. But I respected him greatly.

Oh, how he got lost. His platoon got lost, and half the platoon were captured, and I think, he got his half,

he got them back to safe ground. They were missing for about a week. They were listed as missing in action. And he got his group back.

Bill Tolliday. Very well known in Ballarat. Always known as a gentleman.

He started as a private, naturally, but he finished up as sergeant. And because of the alphabetical system, he was in longer than all his mates. Because they brought you back to Australia on the alphabetical system, so he was stuck over there for a bit longer. He had, I think he got malaria and a few other things while he was there,

which most of them did. He was in New Guinea as well. That’s where he got stuck for a few months after the war.

Did I look up to him?

Oh, yeah, tremendously. Yes, I went to him for advice when I was younger. He was a great friend.

I didn’t know much about his experiences, but I respected him, and perhaps deep down, that was a reason. I don’t know. But in those days, you did respect all of them that came back.

Yeah. Some of them went to, they hit the alcohol a lot.

But that’s no different to what any other war is. As you’ll learn later, that was my problem.

Some of them took to drinking. At that age, I didn’t go into hotels, so I don’t know but the ones I mixed with, they played tennis at St Paul’s. They were friends of my uncle. And I had a real commanding respect for them. That’s in between times, when I liked the outside life

and having fun. But just recalling them, I just had the ultimate respect.

1954 I joined.

Well, we were working at the dry cleaners and Bernie said one day, he said, “I’m going to join the army.” I said, “Well, if you’re going, I’m going.” Simple as that. We went everywhere together. We were good mates. Even until he died about three years ago, we were the best of mates. And when we joined up we became separated for a while,

because he was posted to another unit after recruit training, and then we met up in Brisbane, preparing to go to Malaya, and he was in a different platoon to what I was, so we didn’t get around together much while we were in Malaya. He was wounded and they sent him home, so I didn’t catch up with him until well into the ’60s.

Flinders Street, Melbourne, and that’s when I told you we saw the Queen and the Duke. We went through all the details of history and tests and things like that. Medical tests, and after that we went to Royal Park,

and that was, probably we stayed there three or four days waiting to get a train to Kapooka, which is up near Wagga. Strangely enough, I finished my army days as an instructor there. Even though it was a hell hole, it was closer to my wife-to-be.

Well, it was stinking hot in the summer, and it was muddy and wet and cold in the winter, and we lived in those igloo huts. They’re made of corrugated iron, so you don’t get much protection from the elements. And those elements are still there when you’re doing your training. So nothing stops. If you’re doing a nine mile march or something, you’re out in all the elements,

which is part of army training. But to get leave, they won’t let you on leave for the first month until you learn how to dress properly. Because I remember at Royal Park they gave me a uniform to put on, I hitchhiked to Ballarat, not knowing that I looked sloppy and I had the slouch hat on the wrong way.

Hence the reason for a month before you’re allowed, to show that you can dress as a soldier, because there are standards and guidelines.

Training was very rigid. I think it was more a lesson of hard discipline, and can you take it. If you can’t take it, you go over the hill. AWOL [AWL – Absent Without Leave], and you’re marked for life.

But we stayed there. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was hard at times, but they give you all these needles and things like that the first week you’re there, and on most occasions, you’re lined up for a parade the next morning, or that evening, and there’re soldiers dropping everywhere. You’ve had a cocktail of needles and some of their systems couldn’t handle it.

But we had, I didn’t drink in those days, and we had what we called an Everyman’s hut [Everyman’s Welfare Service]. Like the Salvation Army hut, and you could go there of an evening and have a cuppa and play billiards and things like that. Rather than go to a canteen. And that was a bit of an outlet. And then your first leave you get after the first month is really hard, because they do things like,

“Put your hand up anyone who’d like to go on hygiene.” Damn good medical term, this is something to do with medical. Put my hand up. Next thing I’m cleaning out toilets. That’s hygiene. So I never put my hand up again to volunteer for anything. That’s where it, I think you’ll find most soldiers learned that lesson early in life.

Some of the good, some of them like overgrown kids. You learn to respect some of them, and towards the end of the training I became a batman to one of them. So you do all his washing, you make his bed, shine his boots. And when I say shine, it’s spit and polish like we had to do to our own. That was an easy job.

Well, you look for lurks, to get the easy jobs. But, oh, we became, they teach you weaponry and all this sort of thing. On a limited basis. Just the basics of it. Marching and having seen it when I instructed there, it’s the same as when I went in. You go in, no knowledge,

and very baggy, and you come out, you’re more like a man. It used to be wonderful to see blokes march out, after having seen them come in and the way they come in. So discipline didn’t do any harm. It still sticks with you. And that’s what it’s all about. Discipline on the parade ground is no different to discipline amongst you when you’re at jungle warfare.

If you haven’t got a disciplined team around you, you’re at risk.

Oh, I think at that stage, it was the bodgie stage. They had weird hairdos which is probably no different to now, but it was more short haircuts and things,

and a chip on the shoulder, a lot of them. A little bit rugged. Some went over the hill. “Ackwilly’ we call that.

Ackwilly, it’s AWOL, Absent without leave, but we just nickname it ackwilly.

Oh, they’d get caught up with by the provosts [Military Police]. And some of them went to jail. In those days it was a serious offence,

but it was the only way they could find out if you could take the discipline. And it’s still to this day, you probably even see stories now about discipline. And some of the antics that go on in army, and all forces, bases.

We trained with a .303, which is all we had at that stage. And an Owen gun. And the Mills grenade. You’d have a few dummy goes with the Mills grenade, in how far you could throw it. It was like an overgrown baseball, and then you had the live throwing exercise. Well, in a later experience,

I’ll tell you about later, overseas, it can be a dangerous exercise, grenade throwing. But I’ll never forget what they’re filled with. It’s stuck with me all these years. They’re filled with explosives called amatol and baratol. That’s how much it was enforced into our minds. Because you live with them day and night. But the .303, it was all right.

I think more for drill purposes. When we got to Malaya we changed to an FN [Fabrique Nacional]. Which is semi automatic. We found a way to make it automatic, though, in ambushes. But that’s another story.

Before, yes, we did. That’s a live firing exercise. You’d crawl under, you’ve got to go across rivers and crawl under barbed wire.

If you put your bum up you’d get it shot off. It was starting to get fair dinkum then. And mountain climbing. Canungra is very mountainous. I did go back on two occasions after I got home. Once was to instruct and the other one was to do another course. But by the time I came home, they were fun and games to me. I’d had enough of it.

I didn’t want to play war games any more.

This is after I come home, yeah. Because you get some officers that were, a little bit, they were looking for power, and things like that, and they make you do cranky things like war games. That comes in later, though.

Yeah.

Ingleburn.

Enoggera.

Yeah.

Well, we did Canungra while we were at Enoggera.

And then we went to Malaya on the Georgic.

Well, everything changed once we went to Ingleburn, because the NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers], the corporals and the sergeants, although they had their discipline with us, you became more friendly with them. They accepted you as one of their team,

because we were becoming a team, even though we didn’t know it. We did everything together. Long marches. We marched up the Bulli Pass. If you’ve ever marched up there, you’ll know what it’s all about. By the time you get to the top you’re looking about two miles down to the sea. Direct. But there’s one or two died on that march. It was like a forced march.

Mmm.

Yeah. It was too much for them. Heart attacks or something. And weekend leave. On weekend leave, we always found something good to do. I think some of the corporals and a few of the other privates had women on the premises. A blind eye was turned to it. If you didn’t, you’d got to a dance, or the girls would come out to Ingleburn.

We played football. No one believes me, but I’ve got the record up there. We played army versus navy. Nineteen goals eight, that’s the good side of it. The bad side of it was that, the full-back who was on me, he’d only ever played rugby league. So consequently,

I got free kicks right, left and centre. They gave me a trophy. I don’t know where it is now. That was one highlight for myself. But we had a lot of fun. We took girls out to dances and things out there. We were all pretty human in those days, and fit.

About twelve months. I think it was about twelve months. We did all sorts of jobs there, and training. But not as intensified as Canungra.

2nd Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment was Enoggera. That was the first major unit. And that’s where I stayed until I came back from Malaya.

They were the first ones to go over.

Oh, that’d probably be nine or ten months, I think. We had a good time there. A better climate, and you’d go in, and that’s when I started to have a few beers,

because I realised I was missing out on the fun in Brisbane. They’d have weekend parties and things like that. I was left out. So I let myself in. We had rather good times there.

Not as disciplined as Kapooka.

We’d learnt our discipline, and it was just slightly advanced. More of the technical side of things. Map reading and things like that. I didn’t do much on radio. We had lessons on radio, and the phonetic alphabet, which was important in those days. And I learnt what the ionosphere was.

To this day I haven’t met anyone who knows.

It’s the ionic field that’s miles up into the sky. I think it’s past the ozone layer, or something. And that’s where you reflect your radio sounds from. They bounce from it. Nature provided that, not man.

Australian security?

We learnt more of that at Enoggera. When we knew we were going to Malaya. The rest of it was just told to us, mouth to mouth, by people who’d been to Korea or something like that. We might have had a few instructors from Korea, and we thought we were going to Korea at that point.

Oh, that’s when we learnt the Bren gun as well. I was destined to become a Bren gunner when I went over to Malaya.

Oh, yeah. The British had been there for a few years before us. I think they were involved just after the first planter was shot in the late forties.

The rubber plantation, that’s when the emergency began. They called it an emergency, but that was only for insurance purposes. So, we’ve been downgraded in a lot of ways, the Malayan veterans. Because Lloyds of London wouldn’t insure them if they used the word ‘war’. So that’s why it was never called the Malayan War, it was called the Malayan Emergency.

Because Britain had such financial interests in tin, rubber, and certain other things over there, that, well, they couldn’t afford to have it uninsured. So that’s why the planters were shot. I think the terrorists wanted their share of the takings. They knew there was immense wealth in it.

I didn’t find that out until, oh, well after. Ten or twelve years ago. I never ever realised that it was called an ‘emergency’ for that purpose. I was made aware of it by one of our senior officers who wrote a book on the subject.

Oh, we had a manual issued to us, which we had to read. We had several lectures on it. But there wasn’t many lectures that could be as practical as we wanted it, because no one had been there. All they had was study from books, from manuals,

and they tried to teach us some of the language, the simple stuff. Like the alphabet and things like that. Not the alphabet, counting one to ten, and so forth. We didn’t learn much of the language. We did learn how to approach a girl if we wanted to, though, in Malay. Which happened on the odd occasion.

Because let’s face it, you find a thousand blokes over there, they’re all pretty virile and fit. Never been fitter in my life than I was when I went there. So, it’s no time for virginity.

In Canungra. That was only a couple of weeks.

Oh, very intensive, yeah.

Well, it would be weaponry. See, we didn’t have the FN rifle at that time, so we had the Bren gun, the Owen gun, which proved to be worthless in Malaya. We gave that the slip because we needed shotguns.

So automatic shotguns became our best weapon over there. And the Bren gun, we learned how to put that down, well, I carried one and they’re rather heavy, if you work out how many magazines you have to carry, plus share them with the rest of your group. And we learned how to shorten that. We’d take parts off the Bren gun and make it a pretty deadly weapon that was a bit lighter.

Because you’d be carrying it up hills. And Canungra’s got some hills. You might go up ten paces and slip back twenty, if it’s raining. And you’ve got your weight of your Bren guns, you’ve got your pouches with your magazines in, and you’ve got your pack on your back, and the packs would probably be nearly as heavy as half a bag of cement. That’s probably the way to describe it.

So you had to be fit. That was the main thing. To make us fit and understand living in a jungle. But that didn’t prepare us, really, for what we actually had to do when we got there. We had to learn how to eliminate ponchos. You know a poncho is a sort of a rubber sheet that you can wear as a coat and use it as a small tent. We’d eliminate those,

and for bedding we’d usually use parachute silk. Just get a bit of parachute silk and wrap around, well, consequently, you could put it down into such a small piece of equipment. Actually, the terrorists taught us a thing or two. When we got their packs they only had very small packs, but they had everything imaginable. And every little bit had a tiny space.

They knew how to pack their packs because they hit and run. And when they’re running they’ve still got their pack on their back. So we learnt a lot from packs that we gathered.

The ship was a week late. The Georgic,

due to the fact that the French Foreign Legion had it before we did. And it was left a filthy hell hole. They travelled with their own brothel, and it took them a week to clean the ship out before we could go. On the way over you couldn’t associate yourself with any WRAACs [Women’s Royal Australian Army Corps] or anything like that. But meals were good. We had a concert on board, just before we got into Penang,

couple of days before that I was part of, and it was a beautiful voyage of sunbathing, boat drills. Other than that, it was like a pleasure cruise for us.

No, not really. Only exercises. One thing I forgot to mention, getting back Enoggera. Used to sing a bit, and to get an income, where there was a group of mates, there’d be three or four of us, we’d work out where all the talent quests were. So we’d go around and we’d win enough to get our grog for the night. We had free grog every night, everywhere we went.

And this was earned by just getting up and coming first, second or third in the talent quest. So there were ways of making money. And also, a game called Crown and Anchor. I used to run that a little bit, even up to the time I got out of Kapooka, when I’d finished instructing. That’s another story later. Pretty lucrative.

No. Not at first. No. I came back as a corporal, and I wanted to get close to Ballarat, and the nearest I could get was Kapooka. Which was about six or eight hours drive from Ballarat.

Yeah.

Penang. That was our leave centre, Penang.

That was the main behind the lines type thing. What they call a rear echelon. The forward echelon is the soldier up front.

About what?

Oh, we were issued with mosquito nets, a tablet called Paliadrin, we had to line up for every day to stop malaria. Which it did.

Under no circumstances would you go without that. And we were in this big two storey barracks. And we found out that there was an Indian char wallah we called him. He provided us with hot dogs, burgers, coffee, of a night time, this is after we’d finished tea, because we were hungry and we could go and have a beer there.

And he followed that, our company, all the way round. And his name was, we called him Hajibaba. That was his nickname. And one of the funny sides of Haji is we taught him some words of English that he didn’t know, one was ‘bastard’. Now we had an RSM [Regimental Sergeant Major] by the name of Wally Mills.

I hope Wally’s not watching this. He was rather bloated and we called him Mr Pear Shape. And we trained Hajibaba to say, “God bless Mr Pear Shape, you fat old bastard.” So one morning, we’re all on parade, the whole battalion was on parade, and a voice came out, he was the regimental sergeant major.

A voice came out from behind, “God Bless Mr Pear Shape, you fat old bastard.” Well, the whole battalion burst into laughter. I don’t think old Wally was too impressed. But the other thing we got was a boot boy, we’d call them. And he’d come and make our beds for us while we were in the leave centre, and polish our boots.

This was a luxury to us. We’d only have to pay him a small amount. We named him Shanka. Now, do you know what a shanka is? It’s a venereal sore. And he didn’t know. He loved his name of Shanka. But they’re the types of things that Australian troops have been renowned for for years. You know, good fun, and humorous things that happen.

Oh, beautiful.

Well, we had the Kiwis over there as well, and they were camped somewhere near us. We had a beautiful swimming camp at Minden Barracks. And we’d either, we’d get a cab in or we’d flag a truck down

and get a ride into town. And we’d have a whole day in there, and eat and drink and be merry, and if we were unlucky we’d get a trishaw home. We’d have to get this poor old bugger to pedal his trishaw. You know what a trishaw is? A rickshaw with wheels, with a bike seat and so forth. We’d get him to pedal us out.

I think it was about six or eight miles out to Minden. But we had some great times in there. But I learnt very early in the piece that if you went to church you’d meet some nice girls. I won’t elaborate on that any more.

Well, I can’t elaborate much more than that. I found, there were black areas you weren’t allowed to go to where the brothels were,

and there were some, if you were lucky you could meet a nice girl. But the best ones to meet were the ones that went to church. So I gave that a go. It was quite successful. I met a nice family and so forth. But the object was to have a lot of fun. Because we knew we were in for it when we went over, once we got passed onto the mainland.

Oh, we were told some of them wouldn’t like us, and possibly could be terrorists, or terrorist links that you’d be talking to. Or had to be careful of what you said in front of people. In all, they were happy, most of them a happy race, but one, we had one canteen,

I can’t think of the name of it now, but a two storey place where all the troops met, British and everyone. And at the time the student riots were on, and we were upstairs having a drink, and we looked over, there’s a riot on. They warned us not to go out. We weren’t to be involved in it. Nothing to do with Australia. We saw this bloke get his head chopped off. They just had a parang,

like they do, the parang, and just chopped his head off. That was our first sight of what was to come. Hadn’t seen anything like that before.

Yeah, they had those, but we always, I suppose the average bloke thought he was a little bit smarter than the medics.

We tried to avoid it, naturally, kept out of the, at one stage I was caught in a black area and they came out yelling, “MP! MP! MP!” So I ran out the back and hid behind a bush. I thought, “I’m safe out here.” Next thing I know this Pommy red cap, a meat head we called them. He sticks his head over the bush

and he says, “I can see you.” So I had to appear before the commander and he said, “What were you doing in the black area in this house that we’ve got marked?” I said, “Well, actually I was in there to get my mates dog tags. He left them there the day before.” He said, “Oh, yeah, that’s very convincing.” He said, “All right, seven days confined to barracks, and five pounds fine,

and I suggest you go to your mate and get the five pounds from him for retrieving his dog tags.” You know what dog tags are?

So that was another, it was full of incidents, but they were all fun, because we knew what was ahead of us, or we didn’t know what was ahead of us. We knew what to expect.

Oh, they weren’t all a hundred per cent.

One day there was a carnival on. They were enjoying a carnival, and Malays and, I don’t know what nationality they were, I think they were Malays, and because we were there, we’d had a couple of beers, they were there, and they started to come at us. There was only three of us. And the whole crowd were going to bear down on us.

And this big American negro came in and he got stuck right into the lot of them. He said, “Go on, get, you guys, get’, and we said, “Well, you better come too.” He said, “You go first’, and away we went. Well, we finished up we had a few beers with him, and he saved our lives really. But the Americans wouldn’t drink with the Negroes. The white Americans.

They were on, their ship was in.

What?

Oh, they were marines, I should imagine. This bloke was navy. He was a hell of a big fellow. And then there was another day. There was an American sitting in near a juke box and he kept playing the same song. Time and time again.

And this is a bar where you have a few beers. Anyway, my mate, Freddie Fitch, he just walked up and he said, “You play that song again’, he said, “and I’ll knock you arse over head.” This bloke stood up, he was nearly seven foot tall, and Freddie, quick thinking, just poked him in the chest, and he said, “Look, I’ll let you off this time, but don’t do it again.”

We since, we did become friends then, and had a few drinks together. But life was a laugh then. It was good in Penang.

Well, in and out, for two years. We were there two years, so when we went on leave, that’s where we went. If we did a course, we went to Singapore and did a machine gun course. I was in a company they called Support Company.

They arrange specialist duties for you. Anti-tank platoon, which wasn’t needed over there. You’d do an explosives course, machine gun course. They put you through all your specialists, in certain areas. But in the end we just became an infantry for the term. We did the same as what everyone else did. That’s what we were trained to do anyway.

Beg pardon?

Well, only that incident where I told you about the finger.

What?

Yes.

I told you I didn’t.

Oooh.

Oh, right. We were trying to train some new arrivals,

and they were eventually going to relieve us from duty in Malaya, and showing them how to build a hootchie, which is a type of overnight little tent. To do that we had to use a parang, and cut the binds, and things like that, and I cut it and I cut my finger. There was blood spurting everywhere, and the medic came, and he offered to sew it up.

He took out a needle that was rusty, I said, “You can stick that up your arse.” I said, “Put a tourniquet on it and I’ll walk to the ambulance. Ring the ambulance.” Phone through, not phone, radio through for an ambulance. He said, “The nearest you can get is about three or four miles.” He said, “We’ll send an escort back with you.” I said, “No, I don’t need an escort. I’ll find my way.” So I got back and got the ambulance,

got a few stitches in and I had the rest of the week off while the others had to stay out in the scrub. But after that, I became friends with the, he was our medic, but it must have been his very initial stages of medicine, because it was a pretty rusty needle. So that was about the only training exercise we did.

The Australians who were married, some of them, the women got them in Brisbane, just to get the trip overseas. Because they had a servant, and they were in double storey villas, so they had everything going for them. When they got back from Malaya, a lot of them divorced. But it wasn’t a bad life for a married man,

to take his wife over there, and she’d have a two year trip.

Servants as well. Yeah.

Yeah. All paid for.

No, he was the verger of the Church of England church, and he was also the caretaker of the church and the hall.

It was in Ballarat, yeah.

St Paul’s Church of England. It’s on Bakery Hill which has mining connections from the Eureka Rebellion.

Well, I was forced into going, to Sunday school and then church, which I came to dislike. Too morbid. Not enough fun.

Oh, about fourteen.

How do you mean tolerated?

Oh, yeah, I think so. About that time my grandmother had died, and we were virtually living as bachelors. My grandfather, my father lived there, and I lived there. And I had an uncle who had lived there until he married. Somewhere about that time. So we didn’t have arguments on it.

I just lost interest in going to church. If there was a deb [debutante] ball on, or something like that. They’d usually, we’d have a St Paul’s deb ball, and I partnered someone in that each year.

On rations cards, or ration coupons. They were in the days when my grandmother was alive, and had sugar, butter, and tea coupons. And you couldn’t get anything like that unless you had those coupons. I wish I had a few books of them today, because they’d be worth a mint. But the other thing, shortage, would be chocolates. I remember my teachers at Humphrey Street.

I knew where to get chocolates. Like, Violet Crumble, and I was rewarded with some of my own if I got the teacher the chocolate. She couldn’t find a shop that had them. So there was a general shortage of everything. And we had the lights out. All the cars had to drive with their lights on, with the shade on the front. And all there was a peephole over each headlight.

They had gas producers, which is a coal burning thing to keep a car going. They ran on those. Petrol was short. In general everything was short, but people survived. That’s when we got into the stage of rabbiting, because you lived off the land a lot.

Yeah, everyone was pretty close.

Yes. There was a lot of needy people. You could see them come to school with no socks on. And pretty filthy condition. I was pretty fortunate in that way. I was always well fed, well clothed. Due to a good grandmother.

But you’d see the signs of the ones who were desperately poor. And during the time the war was on, we had the Yanks. The Americans were in Ballarat. There’d be a few thousand of them camped at Victoria Park. Well, that was another way that we got an income, is we went their messages for them, or we gave them shoe shines, down the street. They’d throw you money. They had plenty of money

and they didn’t know what to do with it. But that was another experience. The Yanks in Ballarat. And there were a lot of children conceived who would actually be the sons and daughters of the American troops. Some of them were lucky. They went to America and married their choice. Others weren’t so lucky. Because they were left with the kids to look after.

And that’d be probably in the late forties where that happened.

Beg pardon?

Oh, great. They’re a fun loving crowd and they’re terrific to talk to. They were always joking in the streets, and things like that. Ah, a great bunch of blokes. They’d always throw us lollies from their GMCs [General Motors Corporation vehicle] when they were passing us,

so naturally kids are no different from the kids that are overseas in the poor countries, where troops throw them lollies and things like that. But they were a great bunch of blokes. There were billeted in Ballarat a lot, and all over Victoria. But in Ballarat mainly they were billeted. People would take them in and they had a place to stay. That was prior to them going to the Pacific.

Never noticed it, but you’re probably right. I noticed, probably in the tennis, that I was learning at that age, in the younger age groups, that you’d find that it was nearly all women that played. There wasn’t so many mixed doubles, so I suppose there was a shortage

but I think you had to, anyone of the age group, you’d have to justify why you weren’t overseas fighting. They were all knowledgeable people and it appeared to me, and it still appears to me, that being in the police force or being a prominent footballer, you didn’t have to go overseas. You didn’t have to join the army.

So, there were quite a few excuses of people who didn’t go. Some of them very prominent identities. Particularly in the football field.

Beg pardon?

Yeah.

We had the Greeks arrive in our younger days, and they started up the fish and chip shops. And of course, everyone went fish and chip crazy and the Yanks started the craving for hamburgers. One in particular, in Ballarat, they called Ritzy Joe’s. Well, that was the Yanks’ favourite hangout because he had hamburgers and they were very good.

So they’re two types of food that I never knew existed until the Greeks gradually come in, and they’d sort of have a godfather who’d bring other ones in. Not in the terms of nastiness, the godfather. I mean in the terms that he’d finance them. They looked after each other. A very strong knit community.

Yeah. That’s about it. We didn’t have many Aborigines there. I grew up with some Aboriginal boys. We had a big orphanage there, and some of them have gone on to greater things. Boys that were in the orphanage that we played football with, and so forth, they became prominent people in Ballarat,

and the Aborigine kids were quite good. They were brought up to salute the flag and stand for the Queen, and everything, and there was no problem in those days. And they weren’t cruelly treated. We would have seen the evidence of that. But there was discipline there. But they were good blokes.

Newspapers and radio was all we had. And it’s on every day, every night. We’d be listening to radio at night. Newspapers every day, so I suppose, in hindsight, you realise that not everything that was on the newspapers or over the air, was true.

It was a selected version by someone of what actually happened. We know in our own case, there were some incidents that happened that weren’t reported, and some that never ever happened.

Did I know?

Did I know him?

Oh, yeah. We had regular letters. I think they were censored. But my grandmother used to always say, when he was missing in action, she’d always point to the evening star and say, “He’ll be all right. That’ll look after him.” She was right.

Oh, not greatly. No. It was always, as small kids we’d always consider ourselves pilots and things like that, the same as kids normally go through.

Yeah. I knew a fair few of those, because I joined the Air League at about eleven. Ten or eleven. So we learned to identify planes.

But we also learned to identify every car that existed. We’d sit up in the lawns in Victoria Street, just for something to do, and three of us would take it in turns to name each car that came past. Just a silly game we played, but we learnt every car that was on the road.

What sort of?

Well the Spitfire was the one that was advertised the most. That was glamorised. I think the Americans had some that probably would have beaten it, in the end. That was the one that was glamorised. The pilots and the Spitfires. Just towards the end of the war, I think it was a Liberator. We had an air strip there.

You can still see signs of it that the Yanks made and used. And we had this Liberator come over, or Super Fortress come over, and it was bigger than the school. It was so big and low, and rather frightening really. But it was the first experience of what war was really about.

In the Air League we learned to identify some planes. And we had an old bi plane down there. Similar to a Tiger Moth. I believe it was taken to pieces and put up on the tip. It’d be worth a fortune if it was there now. I know this only because I was recently asked to find the old identities of the Air League

to get photos in the new Air League building, and this brought a lot of us older ones together. Bring back a few memories of what we did in the Air League. But prior to that I was in the Cubs and the Air League looked more attractive. Strangely enough, I was frightened of heights.

You glamorise it to be that way, yeah. You think that one day you perhaps will. I think every boy goes through that stage. Either a pilot or an officer in the army or something.

At the Cubs, all you learnt was

tying knots, games that we played. We had a cart, a two wheeled dray that we used to pull around, and go and get bonfire fuel. All the bushes and branches. Every year we’d get that, and it was a contest to see who’d have the biggest bonfire. Well, living where I did,

we had a big paddock next door to us and we’d compete with Golden Point, which was to our south. They’d have one, and just compete who could have the biggest bonfire by who would collect the most. Something to do.

Wasn’t ninety per cent of it propaganda? In reflection.

Oh, well, buying these Zero stamps. In a sense that was propaganda? Australia obviously needed the money, but our pennies all went to it. Oh, millions of kids would be putting in pennies towards the war effort, but I suppose that’s propaganda.

To shoot down a Zero. We’ll never know…

It was like a postage stamp. And you had a book that you’d get with them. And you had to try and fill the book with penny Zeros. And when you’d filled that book, you’d virtually shot down a Zero. I think that’s how it was.

But we all spent money on that. It wasn’t always lollies.

Well, it’s a bit hard to think of it. We didn’t even know the word propaganda in those days. So you’d have to reflect and go on what you’d read, and learn of the things that did happen.

You know, Churchill was a mighty man, but one of them was, the propaganda was that he saved us all, I suppose, but he left Australian ships unattended. He made a few mistakes as well.

No, no. Never struck that. I think everyone had a positive attitude, that the war was going to end and we were going to win it. That’s what we thought of as a child. And all the songs that Vera Lynne sang, Till the Boys come Home and all of those sorts of things, well, they were inspiring as a child. Till the Lights come on Again.

Well, see, we had to have our lights out. We had wardens that went around. If you had a light on when there was a blackout, you were in real trouble. The same as the cars being covered up, the lights. Because there was a definite danger. We were led to believe that we could have had an air raid. Particularly when they bombed Darwin. That’s when it gets a bit frightening.

So I can feel for the people in Darwin. They probably went through more than I did.

I never remember any of them being fined. No.

Well, you could listen to radio. That’s about all we had in those days. I think there was Jack Davy and a few others were on. Bob Dyer show. Might have been earlier than that. First Light Fraser was a serial I used to listen to. And one of the bad men in it was Carlotto Von Lutarn. So First Light Fraser was a war time hero. But we listened to the radio.

I can’t hear you?

No. Can’t remember.

Only towards the end of it that I took any notice. Towards the end of the war. Well, then I was getting up around ten. So, took more notice up around those days than when it started. Because I was only in kindergarten when it started. But we had to, we had to dig air raid shelters. At school. We had them behind Humphrey Street school. As a matter of fact, they’re building over the site now.

They probably don’t realise they building over trenches that have been filled in, that were dug by kids. It’s amazing what they might find.

No, but I remember VP [Victory in the Pacific] day more than anything. That’s one of the most marvellous sights I’ve ever seen in my life. One of my jobs at the church was to ring the bell on the Sunday, or go up these rickety old ladders to the top and put the flag up. And that’s where I took the other school mates.

I took them up on VP day. And then we went up the street, and it was just full, completely full of people, happy and dancing around. No nastiness. Everyone was happy. And it wasn’t long after that we saw them all coming home.

What, in the street?

Oh, I remember one little Austin, Baby Austin, they called the Blowfly. Everyone picked that up. They all lifted it up and took it up into the middle nature strip, and put it in the garden bed. And just general dancing in the streets, and things like that. Everyone was happy. The bells were going, we had the bell going at the church prior to that. But it was a feeling I’ll never forget.

A little bit like seeing Sydney Harbour when you’re coming home.

No, I just remember that Uncle Bill was over there, and we prayed for him every day, and often saw my grandmother shed a tear or two.

But luckily she lived until after he come home. It wasn’t long after that she had a heart attack and died. But it was great to see them marching down near the Cenotaph in Melbourne. Thousands upon thousands, and everyone was cheering.

Yeah.

I saw him in the line up and I went over and grabbed his hand.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, he was always a strong, he never showed much emotion. He was always a strong character, very strong character, and a hell of a nice bloke. I learnt to respect him a lot.

About what?

Girls? How old would I be then? I was fifteen then. Are you saying was I still a virgin at fifteen? Yes.

Yeah. Enjoyed the company of girls.

Well, yes. We had to survive without a woman in the house, that’s all. Eventually there was only my grandfather and my father. And then my father got married again, and he went to Goulburn to live, so there was only my grandfather and I.

And he wasn’t rapt in me joining up, but when I did get home from Malaya, he was the first one, there was a church service on when I arrived home, hitchhiked, and he was the first one I went and saw.

What was what like?

Everyone had their jobs.

Mine was chopping wood. And doing the washing. You did it once a week then, in the copper. And you had to scrub it. That was my main job.

Did we live?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was never underfed. No, I had a good life.

Yeah.

No. I gave it a try once. Didn’t like it. Never tried since. Didn’t appeal to me.

He smoked a pipe. My father was a heavy smoker. He died of emphysema.

My Uncle Bill never smoked.

Well, he was one who is very nice to women, very well-mannered in front of women. Never swore in front of a woman. Never told any jokes, any blue jokes, in front of a woman. And, in general, kind to women. Until the day he died, he never changed.

Yeah. Ah, even now, I’d say the same, but times have changed, and I think one of the things that keeps me alive is my sense of humour, and there are times when I crack a joke, if I know the woman can take it, if she can crack the same type back, then I don’t consider that being ungentlemanly,

because I think you’re just fitting in with the times.

Yes.

In a clothing factory.

Making cement tiles. A clerk. And truck driver. Labourer in a milk bottling process plant. And looking after eighty odd horses, draught horses. That’s the job I think I liked the most,

although I was mad on trucks. And dry cleaning. I was a presser in a dry cleaners. It was just because it was work, it wasn’t because I liked it. That was one of the reasons I joined the army. I was bored to tears.

I’d go out with the drivers, and I’d offer to go out on my days off. If they’d give me a drive, I’d go and unload the truck for them.

And you didn’t have pallets in those days, all you had was a hook, and about three crates of milk, and you’d have to take them into the cooling chambers, so my uncle taught me to reverse a truck and park it, while he was doing, he worked on the dairies as well. And then I thought I better go for some driving lessons, so I told them I was eighteen,

and went through the process. Got my licence, which was annulled. My father went to the police, and as I said before, they gave me my money back and a swift warning.

Oh, I loved it. It gave me a sense of pride, once I’d been through Kapooka. Because you learnt, you really did set yourself to be immaculate, and if you went on parade, they looked for the best dressed soldier on parade, and he’s called the stick orderly.

He doesn’t do any guard duty that night. So you get away without guard duty, which is an all night job. And actually, the best stick orderly I ever saw was an Aborigine, by the name of Charlie Meaney. He was with us in Malaya and everywhere. He had a Military Medal. But he was an Aborigine, and one of the greatest fellows you’d ever meet.

But it was the likes of him that wanted you to be a stick orderly. Never did achieve it.

Yes, I was proud of it.

Oh, yes. And you teach each other. Spit and polish was a big thing, with your boots. And doing your bed of a morning. You’d have to bounce, they’d come around on inspection at Kapooka, and if a coin didn’t bounce on it, you’d do it again. He’d just strip it down and you’d do it again. And then, otherwise you had to fold all your sheets and blankets and pillow,

all had to be in one neat pile. He’d be, with what they call a pacing stick and measure the length. If it wasn’t the right length, throw it to pieces and you’d do it again. That had to be done in Kapooka. Some of the things took a bit of adjusting to. Like Long Johns. We weren’t over rapt in that. We usually bought our own underwear.

Well, Long John’s, John L Sullivan’s. The long underpants. You wouldn’t want to be caught in those in a situation.

We’re boring Sergio [Interviewer]. He’s gone to sleep.

Yeah. Mainly because we were in activities. A bit of boxing, a bit of wrestling, and quite a few other things. Everything was available in Kapooka, and Ingleburn.

For fun? Oh, perhaps a practical joke or two

if you were in camp. If you were out of camp, well, we’d usually go to the pictures or something like that. Or go on a trip. This is in the early days. I didn’t drink then.

What sort of?

Oh, a mate of mine, ‘Bron’ Irving his name was. He married Jenny Irving, she was Australian Squash Champion.

And he used to go to the canteen. He’d come home drunk. I hope he’s not listening. And I put a big framework up in front of his thing, with old clothing and blankets, everything like that, when he walked in he had to fall over it. And he reckoned he was going to murder me for that. He come screaming at me all through the night. I can’t think of the other ones.

There’s a few little things we used to do. One bloke had a horse and cart in Wagga one day, at the hotel. And we took the horse out of the cart. He had it tied to a railing, and we put the cart on one side of the railing, and put the horse back in the sulky, in the cart,

and harnessed it up again. Never did find out what happened when he went to drive it off, because the cart was on one side of the rail and the horse was on the other. Just little things. Like when we were kids, we’d drop a handbag down, and it’d be full of cow shit. Or something like that.

Or get one side of the road, put cotton on a door knocker, go to the other side of the road and pull the door knocker. And people would open it up, of course.

I was just going to come out fighting. I thought, I didn’t know whether it was ten rounds or not.

Yeah, they showed us the Bren gun, but we didn’t fire it there. I can’t remember firing it there. I’m not sure of that. No, we fired the Owen gun and the rifle.

Yeah. I got a sniper recognition.

Later on I’ll tell you about an ambush I went on, and how I achieved getting on it. Everyone wanted to go on it and we were on pretty good information. With the Bren gun we had to keep a can in the air. From about fifty feet, oh, about fifty or eighty feet, from the hip, and I happened to win that,

so I got on the ambush. Which was Okay. Anyway, that’s a later story.

We did, when we were playing football, as young blokes, we, you know, tried the occasional one, as young blokes would do, but I never ever enjoyed it. And I never started drinking till I went to Ingleburn.

And then it was only light. Perhaps to have a bit of fun at weekends, or something like that. But then when I went to Enoggera, it started to become more enjoyable, because we went places. We’d go to the races or we’d go in and meet a few in a hotel or something and have a bit of a party.

Well, it was mainly sport, weapon training and so forth. You had to get it off by heart, this taking a Bren gun to pieces in a certain time. I can’t remember the time but it would be something like

thirty five, forty seconds. You’d have to have the Bren gun completely dismantled and assembled. And if you’ve ever seen a Bren gun, there’s a fair few working parts. And this would have to be done, and we’d have a race for that. That’s weapon training. And cleaning your weapons in instilled on you. Safety. That was a major factor. Safety.

And I even got to the stage, when I was instructing, I’d push a bloke over if he ever pointed a rifle at me. And he’d go on his back. In those days, you’d get away with it as an instructor, but you wouldn’t now. That’s how important. You have to put into recruits, the safety aspect. Because, well, we had half ours killed by accident, in Malaya.

So the safety factor in civilian life, is equally as important as what it is in the army.

Oh, yeah. Take the weapon from them, throw it on the ground, and push them over. Or make them do a mile run with the weapon held high. Never ever point a weapon at anyone.

You always assume, because it happened, right in the middle of the scrub one night, it happened to us. We lost a bloke. So the cleaning of your weapon and looking after it and the safety, all those things were instilled in us.

I can’t remember the poundage, but it was, nobody wanted to carry it.

When I was promoted to lance corporal, there was a bloke by the name of Jacky Hewitt took it over. And he got sick of it once and he just threw it in the creek. And the magic words came out as ‘stick it’. So it was a heavy weapon, because you had to carry magazines that were loaded as well. And each member of the section that you had,

it might be a section of eight or nine, they had to carry one or two magazines as well. So, it was heavy if you were going up hill, and then if you got on a slippery hill, and you went back a few paces and up again, it was very heavy. You had to be fit.

No. You, if you’re the Bren gunner,

you’re the Bren gunner. You’re stuck with it. Because that’s your weapon. You’re responsible for how it looks, how it works. We had an incident of that, where one of the British weapons failed. Commander of this ambush we went on. One of their weapons failed. They were asked to answer why they didn’t get another terrorist. He said, “One of my guns failed.”

He said, “Well, my so and so guns didn’t fail.” And that was my Bren gun. It didn’t fail. It worked.

The terrorists?

The British had the same as us. They had FNs, shotguns, Bren guns. It was one of their Bren guns that jammed.

Yeah.

No, just outside of Liverpool.

Oh, yeah. Went in several of times. But once I remember going there. This is in the early stages of having a drink,

and probably had too many, because I got on the train on my own. And the guard came and told me, he said, “Aren’t you getting off at Liverpool?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well, you’ve been over the other side of Sydney twice.” I was asleep. I’d been back and forward. It’s probably fifty miles. But we had a lot of fun over there. Go and see a few sights in Sydney.

We never went for that. The only time I went for that was a talent quest. If there was a talent quest on, we’d go and have a go at that. And that’d pay for our grog usually.

Oh, well, just a spruiker, you know. Reasonably good.

A spruiker.

Oh, well, a speaker or a spruiker they referred to as a singer, or something.

Oh, reasonable. I won a few talent quests. Don’t ask me to do it now.

Well, if I had a couple beers before I went on I’d usually win it. Otherwise, you get, once you get up there it’s all right.

Oh, I doubt it. I’ve actually got a tape I did in Brisbane at one of those you just walk into and select. The only one I could find was I Still call Australia Home. So that’s going to be played at my funeral. We’ve kept, we’ve restored that one, and that was done twenty years ago

in the Gold Coast. It’s got all the back-up that he had, Peter Allen. But I used to love singing. It used to get you places where you normally wouldn’t get. I can assure you of that.

Oh, you’d be invited to parties and you wouldn’t pay for a grog or anything like that. Hotel. No, it was good.

Yeah.

Well, that’s when we really got into the, that was, we did a lot of drill. And Mr Pear Shape, Wally Mills, the RSM, he was in charge of us.

That was on quite often you had to be all spruced up and things. We went to the races a fair bit. We went into town a lot. You got a lot of time to yourselves, you know, to go into town and do things. And preparing for Malaya. You had to get all your great big steel cabin trunks, all had to be painted up, you’re issued with certain clothing.

But when we got to Malaya we didn’t use much of that clothing. Because there’s a special boot that they designed over there, something that could be used in the tropics. A canvas and rubber boot. But we prepared to go to Malaya.

What I just told you.

Go to the races, or if you had a chance to relax, we’d go to the races or go into town. Go to the Theatre Royal or something. Usually you’d see a bloke by the name of George Wallace. He was a comedian of the time, and having a sense of humour, I used to love going there. I’d go there every week.

But we’d always find something to do. We’d get to know a few people in Brisbane. They’d invite you to go there to a party, and we’d stay there and then go to the races. Go to a talent quest.

Yeah.

They were women specifically, a lot of them, who designed themselves for a trip to Malaya.

The only way to do that was to marry a bloke. So they’d get a bloke hook, line and sinker, say they were pregnant, or something like that, and marry them. This happened on quite a few occasions. When they come back, that was the end of it.

This is the one, I think, where I take the fifth amendment.

Of course I did.

Well, it’s too high up. It can’t eat grass.

Such as?

Yeah, yeah, one girl told me she was pregnant.

At that stage I think we were in a sort of a love position at the time. She said, “You can’t. I’ve got my monthly.” Anyway, I hope this is, I would like this one deleted for ten years.

Right.

Yes, we marched through the streets of Brisbane. There’s a photo over there of it, and there was a tremendous crowd there. But as Bernie and I didn’t have anyone to say goodbye to.

Everyone else is waving to relatives and things like that, and we thought, “Oh, well, this is it. We’re off.” They take you by boat out the river to the Georgic, and we called in at Thursday Island, to pick up a couple of Aboriginals. One of them later went on to win an award. But, oh, the parade was good. We were in dress uniforms then. I don’t think they have them now.

They were a black uniform with a cap, like an officer’s cap. The trousers had a red stripe down the side. It was called the dress uniform. In hindsight, probably a lot of bullshit. But we did have our send off.

Yeah. It was well advertised. It was going to Malaya. Yeah, there were a lot of people there. There were barriers up on the street. That was a thrill to march through. But it was an even bigger thrill to march through Sydney on the way home.

We played cards. We had deck drills. We had exercises to do. Sunbaking. Reading. Looked forward to a good meal at night, and things like that. It was quite good.

From memory, I think it was about nine or ten days. So it was quite good. There weren’t many women on board, because in those days, we didn’t have them really attached to us. They were more the rear echelon, you know, attached to the staff. I don’t know if we took any nurses over.

But we weren’t allowed to mix, of course, for obvious reasons.

Oh, we’d go to dinner and play cards afterwards, that’s all. Nothing much else to do on board ship.

On the concert on the way over and on the concert on the way back. An officer took control of it, and he said, “I want you in a barber shop quartet.”

I said, “With due respect, sir, if I don’t sing on my own, I don’t sing.” So I sang on my own.

Oh, I Believe, Ramona, and a thing that was in a movie, I had to do it in a falsetto voice just as a joke, it was I want to be Loved by You. That Boop Boopy Do song.

If I did it today, they’d think I was a horse’s hoof.

Beg pardon?

Yeah.

Well, we got out, we had to unload the ship first and then we went to Minden Barracks. It was formerly used as an officers’ headquarters by the Japanese. They were the last ones in it, prior to us. And issued with all the usual things. I mentioned before the tablets, the mosquito nets, and we met Hajibaba.

Beg pardon?

Which book?

No. Oh, that was a children’s book, wasn’t it?

No, I might have read it as a, It’s an adult book, is it?

Well, although we called him Hajibaba, he used to do that, but he’d cut our hair as well. So we nicknamed him Hajibarber.

But I think he was from India somewhere, but I don’t know where. But they must have had a contract to go around with the army and provide those services for us. Like Shanka.

Married quarters had servants. They had cleaning ladies and things like that. And child minding facilities.

They called them an Amah. I don’t know if that’s a Malayan term, or an English term for a Malayan term, but they were. All we had was a boot boy. And he’d make our beds and things when we were on leave. Do our washing. We got that done nearly everywhere we went. Even when we were over on the mainland and we weren’t out on patrol,

we’d usually get someone to wash our clothes if we could. But your uniform, your battle dress that you wear, gets wet every day nearly, so it doesn’t matter. It’s dry in about half an hour. So you get it washed while you’re walking. And we had these hats on. Hats Ridiculous, we called them. The bush hats. Have you ever seen those? Well, you’ll see them in the photo later.

Oh, just an ugly looking hat you put on your head, but they were practical. And then you had a sweat band. That was round your neck at all times, because that’s all you do is sweat. And in tropical countries like that, your bowel habits change as well, if I might add that.

Completely different. Whether it’s the water or what it is, I don’t know. But we had to put chemicals in the water before we could drink any water.

No. The two years I was there you, if I can use the term, you were loose. All the time. It’s just a, I don’t’ know.

Perhaps what you drink, or the medication that’s in your water. I don’t know. Everyone’s the same.

You had to be very careful of scorpions, if you took your footwear off or clothing off. Scorpions can give you a pretty nasty bite. Leeches. They were terrible in the jungle. We had silent signals, which we can go on to later, if you like. And that was a leech. (indicates beckoning index finger).

The forward scout would just, and they’d be everywhere, they’d be on every leaf that you pass, and they’d brush off on to you. The first part they go for is the, the greatest blood vessel they can find, so consequently you find them near your crotch a lot and things like that.

Well, you’d just avoid that branch. You’d move out a little way and avoid touching the branches. But when you got back off patrol, you’d either have to burn them off with a cigarette, or they’d drop off. If there was any on there, put salt on them. We had our ways. But you never pulled them. You’d get an ulcer if you pulled a leech off.

But they were a big nuisance. Ticks. We slept in bamboo one night. Myself and a corporal. We were just full of ticks. They were everywhere. We had to go for medical attention to get them out. We were just alive with ticks. So we learnt never to sleep in bamboo.

Never smelt it. What you’ve got to watch is if you pull them off, you leave the head inside. And can cause you serious ailments.

Hell of a long wait, before. You just keep moving around slowly, using all the knowledge you’ve got on how to move quietly. No on talks. It’s all signals. Unless you get to a stage where you’ve got a sentry out, and then you whisper. I suppose the

main thing that sticks in my mind is a couple killed on an ambush. They call it pipeline ambush. We were pretty lucky. We were the ones that were supposed to be on it, and they sent us on leave and put another platoon on it, and they were knocked about to billyo, so we were pretty lucky there,

but in the same area, the week before, not far from there, I had three mates with me. There was four of us, and we were out for patrol on our own, because the married men had gone back to Penang, and there’s this very, very strong cooking smell came up, and I ummed and aahed, what to do.

Would we go and have a go at it, or what to do. That’s the decision you have to make. And by the smell of that cooking, it was a lot of people. They said, “What are we going to do? Are we going to attack it? Creep up?” I said, “No, we’re pissing off, we’ll report it.” So we tiptoed back and went. But there must have been a mob there, it could have been the mob that hit the pipeline ambush,

we don’t know, but I did report it. And I said there was a strong cooking smell. It was far too strong for four blokes to have a go at. If you’re in charge, if you’re in charge of a few men, you’ve got to think of their life, as well as your own. I think we’d have been in real trouble.

Would I what?

Well, it’s obvious there would have been thirty or forty of them there. Now if we’d have been on that, there’s no way we could have got in on them. Unless we went up a track, and on that track there would have been, we found them on other occasions, there’d be an automatic weapon

pointed down that track, with a booby trap. They would have known we were coming. It’s very rare that you’d be able to ambush thirty or forty CTs, [Communist Terrorists] and to this day I think that they could have been connected with this ambush. So whether that information got through, I don’t know. But we were lucky. After that patrol, we were sent home on leave. Back to Penang.

But the other poor devils, they copped it. We were definitely down to do it, but not with four men.

I think there was two killed on that, and several wounded.

Well, the worst thing that gives you away is sound. Through the jungle it’s like an umbrella over you. Certain types of jungle where it’s all regrown again. And in some cases you can walk through, it’s like wide open spaces, because the sun’s not getting in to let the undergrowth come up.

Now if you make a noise in there, they can hear you for hundreds of yards away. Even if you crack a stick when you’re walking. So one of the things you had to learn was to put the left side of your shoe down, or the right, and then gradually put the sole on the ground. And that way you’re not cracking the stick. You know if it’s there. So silence was the big factor,

but you had to know what was going. If it was enemy, it was, naturally, the thumbs down. The forward scout would give you knowledge of that. But in one case, he was right, but it was another team of our own blokes. That happened a couple of times, where we run into someone from another company. In this case it was a British company.

Now, we could have all been shot. We could have shot each other. This happened so many times. And I think that goes back to map reading. Malaya, the map that we had is all done from the air. Now that doesn’t necessarily show you all the ground features of where you are.

So it would be impossible to map it. You’d have to go through every bit of the jungle to map it. We were working on maps that were from the air, so it’s easy to make a mistake, through some small pinnacle in the ground or something like that, that they couldn’t see from the air. And this happened a few times, and one of my best mates was killed in this way.

No.

I didn’t, not personally, our section didn’t. But one of our section, one of ours, as I said, was killed, Joe Wilson. He was a forward scout, and he come across another forward scout, and the forward scout shot him. He thought he was a terrorist. This is only about two months before we come home.

I can’t remember them all. I suppose there’s friend (Indicates index finger pointed upwards). That one would be, go up and see

the officer in charge, or the section commander. Something like that. (indicates repetitive meeting of thumb and middle finger and pointing). He wanted to see you, and have a whisper to you. I can’t remember all of them. But we lived by that for a long while.

Aah. But the forward scout, that was one of his jobs, to look out for anything like that. But we never ever struck any.

The only time we struck anything like that was when we came across, an Auster aircraft was in the air, three times he radios to tell us there was a CT camp. We couldn’t find them damn thing for two or three days. Anyway we found it, and it had a school and everything. You could see where they’d set a school up, but we had to go up one track to get to it, up this hill.

Had they still been there, our forward scout, and the first three or four would have been gone. Because that’s where they would have had their booby trap weapon heading towards us. But we slept in the school overnight. A couple of days we stayed there. Because there was no one there. We searched the area thoroughly. They’d gone. But they’re a pretty smart cookie, this CT. They travelled sometimes with their kids.

Or young blokes. And they’d be teaching them. And they taught them pretty well. They were a pretty crafty jungle worker. But the one fault they had was they had old weapons that had been buried, and a lot of them were rusty. They didn’t look after them, or they rusted out while they were buried. And one CT, one of the others got, his weapon, it wouldn’t have discharged anyway.

Couldn’t possibly have discharged. So they didn’t teach them too well that way. Might have been an isolated case, I don’t know.

I’d be behind the forward scout normally, and sometimes I’d be forward scout with the Bren gun.

But I had it down to such a stage. You’d flash eliminator. They’re terms you may not understand. I’d take that off and there’s a bipod. They had a bipod when you’d lean it on the ground or somewhere, when they had the desert. Well, we’d use them on the ground. Well, we’d throw the bipod out, and I had it down to a pretty fine weight. It was handy to carry.

But they were a very effective weapon. But the shotgun, strangely enough, I thought it was against the Geneva Convention. But they were widely used in Malaya. They were one of the most effective in an ambush.

Well, they just had that, I’m pretty sure years ago there was a clause in the Geneva Convention, that shotguns couldn’t be used.

Whether that’s an agreement they had, I don’t know, but we used them. The British used them. They were good. They were effective. But the Owen gun proved to be useless. Because its killing range is only about twenty five, thirty yards. Perhaps fifty yards, at the most. That’s all right, when you’re sort of, when you’re attacking.

You know, if you’re running at someone, attacking, and you’ve got Owen guns in your hands, that’s be Okay then, but in jungle if you hit a tree, they wouldn’t go far anyway. One of my mates, a forward scout, there’s a photo there as well, Jackie Hewitt, he was forward scout, and he got hit with a bullet and we thought he was dead,

but it hit his tobacco tin he had up here, and the bullet lodged in his tobacco tin. Didn’t go through. All he had was a bruise. He had his arm up here. He must have had his arm up somewhere, because it went through his arm, and lodged in his tobacco tin. But there again, he didn’t see this bloke coming until it was too late.

And that’s the reason, you’re going for days, and weeks and weeks, and months, and you don’t see anything. You become a bit nonchalant. And that’s fatal.

Oh, yeah. If you had an informer, my job was, I’d be behind the informer. And this, we’d be going at night time usually, but if we got attacked, he was the first one to get it, and he’d have got a burst in the back if he was doing the wrong thing by it.

But we didn’t do any good with him. He took us in in the night, had these little fluorescent patches on the back of our hats. And that’s the only way we could see. He led us in. But I was behind him, and the commanding officer was behind me. But I had the orders to give him the lot if he tried to get away, or anything.

Beg pardon?

He took us in, but they were gone. A good informer was, that’s when we had to practice keeping the tin in the air with a Bren gun, as we knew we had a good informer. This was really on, this one. We knew it was going to happen, but the Pommies got them.

All we did was crossfire behind to get anyone escaping. But that was good information.

Beg pardon?

Well, that was to practise. They had a competition between the Bren gunners of the platoon.

Yeah.

Oh, no. I just meant that I was selected to go on that ambush, where we had an informer. Everyone wanted to go, because we knew it was good info. Because if they want you to keep a tin in the air and practice and say well, all the, the one who wins goes on the ambush, you know damn well you’re not going for nothing. And the information was right. We only got one of them, but there must have been

ten or twelve that got away. That’s when the gun failed, the British gun. They went through the British ambush. We were on the other entry to the village, and we were told that we had to fire behind, we knew where they were. Fire behind. If there was an outburst, we’d fire behind. In hindsight, that’s a bit dangerous.

The British. There’s a photo of him there.

How much?

Well, you couldn’t communicate much, except whisper.

Tell you how bad it was. We were going across and I had this Tassie Alford in front of me and we were going across this rickety bridge. Next thing, he’s not in front of me. I said, (whispers) “Where are you, Tas.” “I’m down here.” And he’d gone through a hole in the bridge. His whole leg was bleeding and haemorrhaging.

There were spikes in the bridge. So no one had told him there was a hole there. No one had found it. It is a bit, it’s not a good thing, going in at night, but you have to go in at night. Another time, I think we left about eleven o’clock at night, and we had to be in there before daylight. So we marched for about four hours. Through rubber plantations and things,

just on a compass. So it was sort of a moonlight night, though. We were quite Okay. But that was the importance of surprise. Because if you went in of a daytime, the rubber tappers would see you. And of course, the CTs would find out from them. Once they knew you were in the area, they were gone.

The other one was an ambush. We were on one side of a kampong, which is a village. And we were in charge of these villages.

They call them black areas. There’s black and white areas. A black area is where there’re terrorists negotiating with the farmers. And the white areas have been cleared. There’s usually no terrorists in it. This is a black area on the result of information we received. That’s the time I had the Bren gun and we were instructed to fire.

There was a little, like a very deep gutter in front of us, and we were lying on top of it. And waiting for them to come out. They had about three escape routes, but they didn’t know they were being watched. And they didn’t know they’d been dobbed in. It was, this was on the information. So we were instructed, if there was a contact over towards the British area, they were only a few hundred yards away, that we would fire behind them. Which seemed a ridiculous idea.

There was fire. We fired behind them. The result was one terrorist. And basically there wasn’t much more involved except that one with the smell, with the cooking smell, and we suspected the other terrorists. And I didn’t see a great deal of action, in the word action itself.

Two years.

Search, and we had to try and find the terrorists. But we didn’t know where they were. Unless we had information we couldn’t find them. We had to clear the areas, get rid of the terrorists and make them into white areas. Now one of our jobs,

they’ve got them all wired in, these kampongs, or little villages, one of our jobs is to be on duty when they come out the gate, and take their human remains, if you care, a shit can, take them out to their gardens. So we had to delve through these cans, to see if they were giving rice to the terrorists.

They’d wrap all the rice up, they’d wrap food up, and send it out to the terrorists. That’s the only way the terrorists would get their rice and food. So you can imagine, if you’ve just gone into one of these areas, and you’ve had a big night the night before, you’re delving through these cans of human excreta, will we call it. And you’ve got to do this guard duty every morning,

just to check all these. Quite often we found bundles of rice and things like that. It wasn’t a pleasant job, but it was to try and clean the area up. Which eventually happened. Most of the terrorists eventually went up over the Siamese border over into Thailand. That’s where Chin Ping went to. He was the leader. But one little story that came out of it is,

at one stage I had this corporal in charge, Laurie Tilbrook. He’s dead now, it won’t matter. And we had a British planter there. They’d plant the rubber trees and manage the plantation. And he came out at a fast pace in his sports car and we pulled him up and told him to slow down and check, so as he could be checked. We didn’t know who he was.

Twice he did this to us. He drove straight through and didn’t stop. So the next time he went through, Laurie fired, he grabbed the Bren gun and fired a burst over his head. He came to a stop then. He never ever did it again. But they got a bit cocky, these British planters. Some of them were good. But the ones we struck had a life of their own.

But, subject to quite a few of them being killed in the early days.

The British planters were the ones they sent out there to manage the rubber estates.

They didn’t have much to do with us at all, they were private citizens, employed by the British millionaires who owned the plantation.

But they had, they seemed to think they owned the place, and when the army came in, they should have realised we were there to try and protect them too. But in a black area, we had to stop everyone and search everyone. Including planters. So this rubber tapping is a strange thing. It’s, there’s a few events involved with that.

Do you want me to continue?

We had latrines. You know what a latrine is?

Officers had two set aside. We had about five or six. Thunderboxes we called them. With a little bit of nylon or canvas around them. The officers, they only had two. Now every week, we’d have to put petrol down and burn them.

And the fellow one day, he was on the job of burning them out. He burnt ours out okay. And he threw the gasoline down the officers’ toilet, and didn’t have any matches left. So he went back to borrow some matches and in the meantime, Major John Godwin, he’s gone now so I can mention his name, he went up and sat on the thunderbox,

lit a cigarette, and dropped the match. Well, there was a hell of a boom. It just exploded. Well, he was severely burned around all his private parts. The message to that with us was, while we laughed at the time, it probably wasn’t so funny, but we had to sit there and let the women rubber tappers,

they come round and tap the tree. Have you seen that? They cut a little notch around. So the liquid will flow into their buckets. Now, we’d be on the thunderbox, five or six of us, and subject to the women just walking straight past you while you’re on there. The officers didn’t have that problem. But that’s, although it sounds a funny exercise, it wasn’t funny to John Godwin.

Oh, he was severely burnt around the genitals.

No, it wasn’t a prank. He didn’t play a prank. There was an enquiry into how it happened, and he genuinely, he run out of matches and he just went to get some matches. And unfortunately, the fumes were still there and away it went.

The other thing in the rubber plantations we had to do, a psychiatrist told me that this is one of my problems, caused through this. We had to lie in a hole in a rubber plantation. And one of our mates would put branches over us. Then the next one would go on, and we’d sort of dig a hole,

put branches over him, there’d be six or seven of us right along the plantation, waiting for terrorists. Now the feeling you get is pretty fearful. You’re there, you’ve got your weapon alongside you, but you’ve got all these branches under you, alive with mosquitoes. The rubber tappers walk past, they could see you there. It was futile exercise. They could see us there.

If there were any terrorists, they’d only have to give them the nod. And we were gone. But when you’re in this trench you suddenly realise that. And it told on me for years after. Being closed in by these branches, and you just feel like you’re in a cage.

Oh, I was out Yambuk one day, and someone had a picture on a wall. It looked like a cage or branches or something like that,

and I looked at that and started to get really panicky. Like a panic attack. And at this point I was just about to get medical assistance. And I mentioned it to this psychiatrist, and he drew it out actually, and he said, “Well, that’s an offshoot of what happened in Malaya.”

So, that’s rubber plantations to me.

No.

Never saw one.

We only did that twice. But it didn’t work because the rubber tappers put us, it was obvious it was futile because the rubber tappers were there, they’d come round every day and they’d see you there.

Because we couldn’t hide ourselves that much. And the boots we wore had a pattern on them. It was pretty obvious the terrorists would pick that up.

A pattern, a rubber pattern. It was a rubber soled boot. And a canvas side and it came up to about here. But, no, that was a bit futile, we tried all these things. It’s . . . .

Yes.

Yes, well, it’s obvious to us now, how you’d tell, but at that time we didn’t realise it. He’d see, you could sweep it away, but somewhere along the line he’d see your tracks.

Yes, in some cases we’d sweep them away. The last man would sweep them away. But the tracks, if you go back a bit further, are still there.

The terrorists would know you were there, even by broken twigs. They were very good in the jungle.

The terrorists? Hit and run. If they saw us, of if they planned to get us, they would hit and run, but we were never placed in that position really. Some of the other groups, some of the other Australians did.

And the British had a lot killed in ambushes and things like that, but that was mainly before we got there, when these heavy ambushes were on. They killed all these rubber planters, the plantation managers.

No. No, I don’t think so. No, that was before the fifties. Before the fifties.

Yeah, that was the start. That’s what brought the British into it, but again they were frightened of calling it a war.

Well, they had their paths. There was one main path all the way down Malaya. It was known only to them. We could never ever get information to tell us which it was. But they had a set way,

they could go from Thailand all the way down to Singapore. And you wouldn’t know which way they went. But then they had communication with the black areas. That’s where they’d get their food and all this sort of thing. They were pretty well organised. Better than we thought they were.

There was a mixture of races in the CT. They’re Indian, everything.

Yeah, had Indians. I didn’t see one, but there were. There was a mixture of them.

Oh, they were predominantly Malays. Some of them didn’t like the Chinese. They were Chinese and Malays really.

Yeah. Mainly Chinese and Malays.

But they were very, they were very good at not being found.

Yes.

Well, no doubt they’d be in the cities. But the only way you could have any suspicion of anyone, there’s so many people, it’s hard to pick them. But in the villages we could give one to the police for questioning.

You see, the police were really in charge. We were only assisting them. The Malayan police were the ones in charge, and we had get orders from them. If I killed a terrorist, I’d be on a charge for an enquiry. As to who it was, and why did I do it. It wasn’t as simple as straight warfare. There was an enquiry into every terrorist that was killed.

Which one?

Yes.

Oh, it made us pretty close. We each swore to secrecy, that it would never come up while the other one was alive.

Beg pardon?

Yeah, I think it made us closer because we always had that bond that none of us could talk. That’s why I can’t give names, or where. That was, that was probably only the major time I really shot anyone.

The spread. It spread better.

And you can get five shots away pretty quick. But I only had one shot at this woman.

An Owen gun has only got, I forget how many bullets in it now. But it’s only got a limited number of bullets. And the killing range would only be that of a shotgun anyway. A shotgun would kill at fifty yards or more.

The Owen gun just wasn’t suitable, and yet the Diggers used it in World War II because they had nothing else. But it’s used mainly in ambushes, where you’re up close. And you get a good spread of pellets. It was BB pellets. Which are a pretty big pellet. Not the type you’d normally put at a duck or anything like that.

Grenades, two inch mortar, Bren gun, shotgun and FNs.

I think it was a Canadian design weapon. It had a magazine on, which was semi-automatic.

But we found by pulling a pin out you could make it automatic. It worked better and would go longer distances than an Owen gun.

That’s the little gun.

Oh, no, the FN is the one with the magazine underneath. It’s about that long. It looks more like a .303 with a long magazine.

But it’s got another handle on it. You’re quizzing my memory here. It’s a long while ago. It’s forty five years ago. But it wasn’t a bad weapon. I don’t know if they still use it.

Yeah. Endless. Endless.

Well, they’d put you out in the bush for a month. See, sometimes, a few times we got dropped by helicopter. The other times you had to walk in. As I mentioned before, one night we walked for about four hours. And the captain in charge of the platoon, he would have been well in, I think he would have been in his forties. Wasn’t a young man. And he made us match him. We were only young men.

I don’t think so. He wouldn’t have been far off it though. Yeah, he could have been World War II. But real nice fellow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Be very careful, because you never knew who you were talking to, and watch out for one with a white face.

Well, if he’s been in the jungle a long while, he doesn’t get any sun on him. They were the ones that you’d be suspicious of.

Get him questioned by the police.

Because we didn’t have as much control. We couldn’t just say, you know, jail him. We had no facility to jail him. Our job was to find them and hand them over to the police. If it ever got that stage.

Every day we were in, yeah, when we were in the jungle. Sometimes you mesmerise things.

The leaves that are just moving about, you might think it’s a terrorist about two hundred yards away. Now at one stage we nearly called in an air strike, but it turned out to be a fair few leaves, just going in the breeze, just before nightfall. Now we were going to call in an air strike on that. It was available to us if we found a big band of CTs, which,

when we were on that four man patrol, I considered that, but I didn’t have the authority. And I didn’t have a radio. So I couldn’t call in an air strike.

Yeah, I would have. But I’d also been a bit doubtful, because, I’ll get back to this map reading. It’s very hard to make sure you’re right. You have to be doubly sure of your co ordinates where you are. Because the air maps. They’re taken from the air,

they’re not from the ground. So when we were looking for that terrorist camp, our co ordinates couldn’t quite match where the pilot said it was. He was telling us from the air, and it took us a couple of days to find it, but you could call in an air strike, but you’d want to be very sure of yourself.

No.

No, we were going to but the forward scout saw it ahead, just on nightfall,

which, your mind can play tricks with you. We thought there was a whole nest of CTs there.

No.

No. When you went to town you had to be very careful. We were friendly to them. We were taught to be ambassadors to them.

Treat them kindly, and the kids and all that. But deep down, you had to be on guard a bit. Particularly after the incident in this fair ground, with the American. But it was just a case of, never seemed to happen. You wondered when it was going to happen. We got a bit nonchalant on a few occasions. We used to take a book out to read, in an ambush.

They’d tell us where the suspected terrorist was, we’d set up our ambush position, we’d put one bloke to watch. The rest of us would sit back and read novels. Now that was a no-no, but that’s how we got, because we didn’t believe, we thought, “Oh, it’s never going to happen.” And then it did happen. And I wasn’t involved.

I was involved getting one of our wounded off the helicopter, but one of our men found a CT post, a big group of them, and he, he was seen, so he threw a grenade in, fired a burst, and next minute the whole mob were onto the platoon that found them. Had two killed and one wounded out of that.

And they brought the CT back in, wrapped in a sheet, so we had to get him off and get him identified, go through all that procedure with the police. It was like going into, it was a court room we had to go into. So they had a very strong involvement.

I think they were all old World War II weapons,

and they buried them after World War II.

Anything. They had all sorts of weapons. Japanese. They had British weapons. I didn’t see too many of them. Ones I saw were rusty as hell, and you know, you wouldn’t want to go into battle with them.

Never saw any. If they planned an ambush, they had weapons that were working. If they planned it. They only did the one, I think, while we were over there, and that was the pipeline ambush. And all their weapons were working then. I wasn’t on it. As I said, I was on leave.

Oh, yeah. I think they killed two of our blokes and wounded a couple.

But if they’d planned it, they’d have good weapons.

Well, if you’re born in a city or the country, even the country here, you’re not aware of some of the things that go on in the jungle. For a start, it’s stinking hot.

You’ve got snakes, particularly around bamboo areas. You’ve got leeches. There’s even elephants over there, believe it or not. We had a guide with us, and we were going up a muddy hill, and there was a broken branch with these big tracks there, and we said,

God, there’s something big here, and we went up the next one, and the branch wasn’t broken, but the tracks were both sides of the branch that wasn’t broken. So, it was an elephant. But it’ll tell you how sure-footed an elephant is. He can get over a big branch and not break it. But we never saw any tigers or elephants. But they were there,

there’s photos of them there. Getting water was a problem. You had to make sure you got water. We’d go down into a valley and dig a hole and it’d be full of water next day. But then you’d have to put your tablets in it, because monkeys urinating out in the jungle, or anything urinating in the jungle, would give you cholera. So we had to be very careful there.

Oh, yeah. Plenty. They’re up in the, you can hear them all the time. Orang-utans and stuff like that.

If you’re not careful, they can give you away.

Well, they might go mad if you’re there. If you’re walking through, they’d be the first ones to see you. And they go mad. Now, does the terrorist know it’s us,

or does he think it’s an animal. They’re things we never ever found out, because anything that gives your position away, would mean the terrorists had gone. You’d never see them again. They’d be miles away before you got anywhere near them. Because most of them travel in groups of three or four, some in twos.

But they had their destination and they were indoctrinated into communism, and very strong communist element in it. I can’t say whether that’s wrong or not. Perhaps they were looking for a share of the profits that were there. In a lot of ways, I don’t think we should have been there really.

I really don’t think we should have been there.

Well, what did we prove? We might have made some black areas white, but in the meantime we lost twenty nine blokes.

Yeah.

Well, the British were already there, and they had several regiments. They had the Ghurkhas. I suppose it was, I think it was in the Menzies era, or something like that.

He probably had, I’m assuming he probably had a lot of interest in tin and mining and rubber. Most politicians have got investments in things. You know what it’s like.

Towards the end we did.

Yeah. I think a lot did. There were a lot of dedicated, we were all dedicated, to a point. But we got sick of all this going through, and nothing happening.

If we’d have seen someone, and you know, it had to be a stoush. Okay. Well then you would have achieved something. But when you’re just endlessly walking and being careful and things like that.

Oh, it’s rather frightening when incidents happen. There was one bloke cleaning his rifle. We were just getting ready to go to bed. And bed was out in the jungle, of course. We were miles and miles away from our base camp. And all of a sudden, there’s a shot. And we immediately, we had tins strung out, you’d put a tin with a couple of stones in it, away out on your perimeter. And if any of those moved, or made a noise,

you know the CT has hit it, or an animal’s hit it. But we heard this shot, so everyone went to the alert in the armed position. It turned out it was our, one of our own, had been shot by his best mate. He just said to his mate, his mate was going with his sister, this Carl Jay was going with the sister.

This other bloke that shot him was going with his sister. And Carl said to this other bloke, he said, “Oh, I just got a letter from so and so. You better read it.” And he was cleaning his weapon, and he closed the breech and pulled the trigger, which you do, providing the magazine’s not on there. But the magazine was on there, and it was loaded, and he got gut shot. So what do we do then? We had to get him back to base camp.

We didn’t have the radio, so we had to get two runners. So we got two blokes who could run and they ran miles to go and get an ambulance, and we would go through the jungle with Carl, get him to the border of the jungle near the rubber plantation, and hopefully get him on the ambulance. Well, we had to make up a stretcher out of trees,

and nylon cloth. I think we had parachute stuff or something. Because he was haemorrhaging badly. I think he’d been gut shot. We took it in turns then. We all moved out. And took him down there, but he was dead when we got there. That’s a rather frightening one.

That was accidental death.

It’s a thing that should never have happened. But it was his best mate. Now that bloke was a nervous wreck, but they left him in Malaya, and just before we come home, he was on guard duty with me at a place called Kroh. And I was the guard commander in charge of the security of the camp, and someone said, “There’s a noise outside the perimeter. Better go and investigate it.”

So I took him with me and two others, I said, “Load your weapons’, and away we went, and we found this bloke coming back drunk. He’d been into Kroh, this little village, been in and got drunk, and crawling back through the grass. And this bloke that had gut-shot his mate, he had him all ready to shoot again. Well, that destroyed him. They had to send him back to Australia.

Eh?

Yeah, it was an Aussie, trying to sneak back into camp, he’d gone out ackwilly. To get a few grogs. So that destroyed him, and he was a nervous wreck. They sent him back to Australia. He would have been discharged. But that’s twice it could have happened.

On nerves?

Oh, that wasn’t so bad. I think, you try to forget about a lot of stuff, and you don’t talk about it. It’s only recently I’ve started talking about it, but I was out here at Yambuk one day. I was going well. Successful in business, and out here at Yambuk one day, and we hear there’s a semi in a prang out here.

Out the other side of Yambuk. A cattle truck it was. So we went out, and a woman was beheaded and the baby was killed. The other daughter was alive. And that just brought back memories, you know. It totally knocked me in a bit, you know. To see someone beheaded in an accident like that. She went in under this semi. Went to sleep.

That was the start of the nervous problem. So I think it reactivated these problems. You know, getting buried under branches and the constant, you know, walking and seeing nothing.

Yeah, I feel a lot better now. That’s why I’m sitting here today, because I think I owe it to the blokes who didn’t come home.

And I think I owe it to my family. One day they might perhaps understand. Because it turned me into an alcoholic, of course.

Well, it started in Malaya. We started drinking in New South, and Queensland. And then we had an issue by Lord Nuffield,

of tobacco and cigarettes, and two bottles of beer a day. So in the end I was swapping my cigarettes, I didn’t smoke. I swapped them for the bottles of beer. And when we weren’t in the jungle, well, we hopped into the beer. We saved up the beer, and jumped into that. And then, oh, gradually, gradually got into alcoholism after that, really.

There wouldn’t be many days go by that I wouldn’t have something to drink. But it was mainly beer. But then in the end I finished up on wine and brandy. And it separated Jan and I, from when I was at Yambuk early in the house. We sold that. And even now we get on well together, but we can’t live together all the time, so I live down here a bit.

I go up there to look after her if she’s crook. I get all my medical done up in Ballarat. But, I think that’s where it’s come out. The alcoholism. You search for a way out.

I started drinking.

No, in Ingleburn, that‘s when I started drinking, but not heavy. Not every day.

No, this is

Yeah, Penang.

Oh, that wouldn’t be any more than a week. Someone else would take the company down there, or a platoon or two. And they’d do the search and destroy, but there wasn’t much destroying. More search than anything.

Over there?

Very hard on some of them.

Beg pardon.

Well, some of them were engaged to be married and things like that. I wasn’t. But if you’re engaged to be married, two years is a long while to be away from your girl. I know I was mucking around with one when I left, and when I came back after two years, she wrote nearly every day to me,

but it only took two days, and we just weren’t compatible. You just realise you’re two different people, and that’s a week after that I met my current wife.

Well, some would head for the black areas, or semi-black areas.

That means the brothels, or course. Some would get to know some of them. Officers had a better chance of dating than we did. Because they’d be entertained at lavish parties and things like that. Some of the younger officers. As I told you, I went to church, met a few. Other than that,

there’s not much you can do about it.

No. No, one was, quite a few of them were Malay. One was the matron of a Singapore hospital. She was pretty young for a matron, but at that time, who’s fussy.

It was all right.

Malay women?

Oh, they were pretty good. The one I met and liked a lot was only a young girl, her mother was very protective of her. Her father was gone,

and she had a good job, she was well educated. And she took me home. And I used to sit out the back and listen, with her mother and herself. There’s no sex or anything like that. Just sit out and listen to their national radio. It’s a sort of internal radio. It’s like we’d have. Would you have anything in Sri Lanka like that?

It was just a radio station. Only went to the one town, or city. It only went to houses in Penang. You’d plug into it. I don’t know what they called it. But we’d sit and talk for ages. But she wouldn’t let her daughter out of her sight. But she was very pretty. She was Eurasian.

Well, Eurasian. Some of them are the most beautiful women in the world.

No. Civilian.

Yeah.

Oh, I don’t think so. I don’t know for sure. But I don’t think so. They were very hard to meet.

Well, they were usually beautiful women, and usually with good jobs. High income families or something like that. Very protected. Because we had no way of really meeting them. Well, you don’t pick up nice girls in a bar. Some of the ones we had good times with were British girls. Some of them were wives of British servicemen.

In hotels. In bars. The hotels or something like that.

The which?

Yeah, well, they were more like our little cafes.

Oh, no. You’d get a beautiful Chinese meal, but you could sit there and laugh and sing and everything.

I can’t think of the name of, but they were all, oh, they loved the Australian servicemen, because we spent money. Every time we came to town, we had money. It’s the same with the British, I suppose.

Oh, they were all right, yeah, all right.

Well, one night stand. Or one day stand.

You’d have to book a motel or something like that. A hotel. No, it was all right. We went to Singapore at one stage and did a machine gun course. Had a fair bit of spare time there. Kuala Lumpur, we did a guard of honour for the Duke of Edinburgh when he visited, and there was only, I think ten of us, and we formed a little arc

on the corner of one street of where he was driving. And we had ten days to prepare for it, the training. All we had to do was stand there. And the officer in charge of us was a motor mechanic. He was in motor mechanics or something. And he just said, “Have you all got money?” Each day he would say to us, in the morning, “Have you got enough money to go to town?” And if anyone didn’t have enough money, he’d say, “Here, pay me back when we get back to camp.”

He’d only get us up and do about five minutes drill, and that was it. But we saw the Duke of Edinburgh and then we went back to Penang.

Oh, liked it. Penang was good. Have you been there?

It’s got a rail, I think, no, that’s Hong Kong.

It’s got some sort of swimming pool up the top of a hill. I hired a car and drove around the island. One day we had a relay race around the island. And I wasn’t that keen on running. None of us were. We were due to come home fairly soon. Each man did about a mile. The mile we had to do was round the back. And we were competing with other platoons. And we got round the back and there was only,

oh, perhaps five six hundred yards to go. Perhaps a little bit more. And there was a hotel on the right. So we went over and had a few beers. Didn’t have any money, so we hocked our watches. We put the watches in. Had a few beers. Went back. I said, “Now, let’s walk to the corner, and then run like hell.” So, we walked to the corner,

and we could see the finishing line, and we ran like hell. We were complimented on the way we finished the race. Because no one had much timing on it. It’s just one of the things you do over there. You don’t want to run around an island. So we had a bit of fun while we did it.

Well, I suppose that’s their own private way, I don’t know. I suppose they’d dispense with it through the sheets, one way or the other. Sort of a hand held job, to be crude.

Oh. That had happened on occasions, but very rare. Because if you went to a village, a lot of the villages had pigs and things running around underneath the kampongs, underneath the houses, and pretty low standard, very poor style of living in some of the villages. So really, you’re looking for trouble.

Some did. Yeah.

Well, we knew one bloke who got a leave pass to go into town to the bank to get money out. And he got a taxi to take him down to this kampong. I don’t know if it was black or white, but he was the one, he said this bloke appeared to bring his wife or his sister out. She was fairly old but he said, “That’ll do me.”

He didn’t want much money for it. But he said there was pigs running everywhere, and kids running everywhere. He said it was filthy. He said, “I was bloody urgent.” So that was one man’s story. What you didn’t ask me was the rations that we had in the jungle.

We had British rations. And one of the main meals we had was a Mars bar.

That was a main meal.

Yeah, they had a type of Mars bar. I think it was Mars. I think it was then. It was we were a long way away from a patrol, we’d be at a base camp, we’d cook up,

we had this Indian fellow with us, and he’d cook us up a beautiful curry. And we made sure he was with us as often, I can’t think of his name now. But I think he was a medical orderly. And he’d cook us a wonderful meal with that, rather than eat the Pommy rations. Because each one was designed to give you energy, whatever you had.

If you were in base camp.

Only base camp. If you were away out it was fairly dangerous, because if we could smell cooking smells, they could. So you may as well forget about, they’d either hit you or they’d run away. One of the two. So we were a bit limited what we could do out in the jungle.

Yes.

I don’t know a great deal about it, but they got their independence. And Chin Ping we were told, moved into the, over the Siamese border over to Thailand.

Most of them went up this path that they had, wherever it was. Most of them did start moving out and into Thailand. Because they could see the writing on the wall. It was just about finished. So, when we left, it wasn’t over, because it was only a month before we come over, that we had the fatality. The ambush.

But, after we left, I think it was just about finished. That was the last major ambush.

Oh, partly adventure, and, the good times outweighed the bad times. It was a good experience, and I think I’m a lot better for it in a lot of ways.

Getting a bit nervy is probably one of my main problems, and alcohol doesn’t solve that, I know, but it sent me right down. At the moment I only drink light ale, and perhaps an occasional wine. But at one stage, ten, twelve years ago, I was in intensive care with it. But the treatment. If it hadn’t been, actually, from Veterans Affairs point of view,

if it hadn’t been for all the assistance I had from them, I wouldn’t be here today. They have been marvellous.

That what? Bored?

Yeah, you’re inclined to. Not relax so much, as you get a bit careless.

By reading novels in an ambush. And leaving one or two men to look, and then they’d come back and read the books, and we’d go forward and watch for the terrorists, which never came.

Oh, that’d last three or four, perhaps five days.

Yeah.

Oh, probably a couple of hours.

Well, you start to get tired, you start to get tired and you start to see things. It’s time to change over with someone else then.

I wouldn’t call it hallucinate. Yeah, your eyes play tricks on you sometimes.

You know you see more out of the corner of your eyes than you do out the front? If someone moved over there now, I’d see them quicker than I probably would than if they’d come in that door. So, anything that moves out the corner of your eye, you notice it very quickly.

Unexplained things? I can’t recall any incident that I’d call strange. There was rather some odd things. You see some wonderful scenery. You might be going through the jungle and come to a clearing

and find some little old mill there, or something. Rubber tapper’s shack, where they report to, and get their rubber things together. No, there’s nothing I can think of.

Nothing odd. Well, one of the MP [Military Police] sergeants got drunk one night in Penang, He was on his motorbike, went off the side of the cliff.

We didn’t know whether to shout hurray, or feel sorry. But when I went back to Kapooka, when I went as an instructor, I was to meet him again. In strange circumstances.

Oh, we sorted them out and had them shifted if they were frightened, or they weren’t coping, or things like that. Or if they couldn’t work in as a team, and get them shifted pretty quickly.

Pardon?

I didn’t strike many, really. We struck, oh, no, different subject I suppose.

In one of the training exercises, we had to drop, one of us would drop a hand grenade. To teach the others what to do when a hand grenade dropped. And we had it all rigged up. It was a smoke grenade. The smoke would come out of it, as it does before it explodes. And I dropped it, and of course, you dive for the ground. Someone yells out, “Hand grenade.”

And I dived for the ground, but before I got there, this new second lieutenant that arrived a week earlier, he beat me to the ground. He was under me. So he was as scared as hell. We were all scared in a sense. But I knew it was a dummy grenade. He didn’t know it was a dummy grenade. And he went for the ground, and he finished up under me. Just a training exercise.

Where they what?

That’s two things we didn’t strike much. Homosexuals and suicide. No disrespect to anyone who’s either, but I don’t know of a suicide in Malaya. I don’t think there was any. There could have been with another company or something. But we were fairly protective,

and we backed each other up pretty strongly. If we went into town there was no one would come near us with any thoughts of violence. Because we stuck together as a group. I don’t think there was any suicides.

No. No, I thought it was, it had its frightening moments and things like that. I wanted to get home. Once it was home, I lost interest in the army. The quicker I got out the better. Had all sorts of things offered to me, and I just wanted to go home and get married. I didn’t want my wife to be an army wife. I’d seen too much of what happened in Malaya.

Beg pardon?

Well, a lot of them played up, and a lot of them, as I said, were from Brisbane and all they married for was the trip over. And army living is not good for a woman.

Too much shifting around and the hours involved and that. Depends on what sort of job you’ve got in the army.

But there’s quite a few of them played up.

Oh, about six weeks.

Oh, it was marvellous, until the ambush. That knocked them around.

I think it was about a month before we came home.

Yeah. Two killed, one wounded. We had a tracker with us too. He was wounded. A Dyak (UNCLEAR). Sarawak Ranger. But, no, we were shifted over to Butterworth in the final weeks. That’s on the mainland. That’s the air force base.

And we even got boats to take us over in little boats. Paddle us over to the movies and things like that. We had a good time knowing we were going home.

Relief? Oh, yeah.

Well, we missed Australia, because this is, it’s one of the greatest countries in the world. Pity some people didn’t realise it.

It’s not till you’re away for a while and see how some people live, that you realise it. We’ve got a lot of faults. We had the concert on the way home. It didn’t take as long to get home as it did to go, because it’s down hill. That’s a joke.

Well, we had one Dutch interpreter. He tried to learn their language. He learnt the Malay language, and they could speak a little bit of Malay, I think. That’s the only way we could converse with them.

They had one among them who could usually speak a bit of Pidgin English. But they were good soldiers. It was good to have them with us. They had tracker dogs. Used them a couple of times. There was one group that hit a terrorist one night, and they found him about five miles away with all his stomach hanging out.

He’d got about five miles away from the ambush. All his stomach hanging out. The tracker dog found him.

Well, which, countries, you mean?

New Zealand. Well, Nepal, I suppose. The Ghurkhas. The Scotch Fusiliers. British regiment.

They were probably one of the best drilled soldiers in the world. There’s quite a few British battalions over there. But we didn’t see much of them.

We didn’t see a great deal of them. We ran into one lot on patrol one day. Confronting each other. Both forward scouts. They’d been in the bush a hell of a long while,

but they had this bloke, he was like a mercenary. I think he was a mercenary that was leading them. But we ran straight into, we were lucky we didn’t shoot each other. That’s about all, I think, that were there. And the Malay soldiers, not soldiers, the police. They had a hell of a lot of authority over there.

Oh. Mad as snakes. We found one full one night. We went into this beautiful big place with a chandelier. And he jumped from the second floor onto the chandelier, and swung on that till it dropped. Drunk. They’d do anything for a bet. But we got on well with them.

Oh, very much so. But they take, they’re a little bit like us. They take life not too seriously. They’re pretty good soldiers. But not as well disciplined, I don’t think, as the British. Neither were we. The British are, oh,

I didn’t like the British officers and so forth, that I come across. I never ever liked. I struck a corporal, when I was instructing, I struck one at Kapooka. And he was the champion boxer, and I was instructing and he was instructing. They called him the Red Rooster. They hated him. He had red hair, he was about five eleven.

And we had a one pipper, second lieutenant, was the pay master. We were doing the pay and we started talking about boxing and wrestling and I said, “Oh, you weren’t much of a boxer were you?” He said, “I got the British Army Championship.” I said, “You wouldn’t last two rounds with a karate expert.” I said, “Unarmed combat would put you on your back.”

He said, and he started to go in the gills. His gills and I knew he was angry. He was always angry. And I said, “Go on. Try it.” I said, “You grab me from behind.” And he, in front of all these Diggers and all, waiting for their pay, he grabbed me from behind, and I put my foot behind his foot, a simple manoeuvre, just pushed him with my elbow and he went arse over head.

Well, he got up. He was going to kill me. Because he could have, quite easily. He was a good boxer, and I was nothing. But just the spur of the moment, a bit of fun. We all hated the sight of him. The Red Rooster. But all the diggers, it was all around the army camp the next day. But quite a few things went on at recruit training.

Different to when I went through the first time.

One bloke got his wife to write a letter telling him, in Australia, telling him that she was leaving him. And would no longer be available and all this.

And he got a free trip home to Australia by plane. Spent three weeks. The commanding officer saw fit to let him come home for three weeks, and get his marriage together. It was all planned. He was in our platoon.

Yeah. We all knew about it, but no one said much. No doubt there was things that went on.

Even in the gambling, you know. We had the Crown and Anchor. We used to play that, and get a few bob out of it. On the New Australia, on the way home, there was one bloke cheated at cards. And he nearly went overboard. They were going to throw him overboard, because there was a lot of money riding on the stakes.

Probably in Australia.

Well, I don’t know of it happening in Malaya. I never saw it happen.

I’d heard of it, but I never saw it.

Well, the blokes in the canteen, we did hear, that the bloke in the canteen was robbing the place blind, but that was, I can’t remember where that was. Anyway, it caught up with him, because the canteen caught fire, and they had bars on the window, and he was burnt to death. We could hear the yelling and screaming,

but he couldn’t get out, because of the bars. But, no, I didn’t hear of much corruption. The only corruption, if you could call it that, I met up with this Sergeant Burke, and I was running the Crown and Anchor at the recruit training camp. On pay nights. And that was pretty lucrative. And the orderly officer had done his rounds.

And they were trying to find out where this dice game was, and I went to this Sergeant Burke, or he approached me. He said, “Look, I don’t want to catch you’, he said, “but what about you slip me a few bob’, he said, “and I’ll take the orderly officer everywhere but where you are.” So we went to a different company lines each pay night, and he’d have the orderly officer on his rounds, and he wouldn’t come anywhere near the dice game.

Well, one day I got caught. They said, “You haven’t done a guard duty, corporal, in all the time you’ve been here. You’re on guard duty this weekend.” It was pay weekend. So I said to Burkey, “What are we going to do?” I said, “I’m on guard duty. Where am I going to run the dice game?” He said, “Well, try the guard room.” So we run the dice game in the guard room and he never brought the orderly officer near it.

And it was strange that all the soldiers, all the Diggers, were at the front gate to play Crown and Anchor, in the sacred place, the guard room. So, if there was corruption, I was probably involved in it, by slinging the RP [Regimental Police] sergeant a few bob.

Well, the officers. What, corruption?

No, I never found any of them corrupt. I found a few of them that were frightened. In Malaya I had one that cried his eyes out. I said, “What’s wrong?” He said, “We’re lost.” I said, “We’re not lost, with due respect, sir.” Anyway, he was crying. He couldn’t work it out. He said, “I don’t know where we are.” Well, we’d taught all of our section and platoon to read maps. So we found out where we were

and got him on the right track. But he never come on another patrol again. He was just over from Portsea. He’d been a one pipper from Portsea. And I think in the end they were sending them over for us to train. For future visits, when they come back. I think that’s all we were doing in the end, was training them. Had some good officers, but we had some that were pretty weak.

Discipline is teamwork over there. I’d refer to discipline more in a unit, like Kapooka or Ingleburn, or somewhere where you have to salute an officer, and things like that. That goes out the door. It’s more teamwork and your mates.

And it really, you’re sleeping in the bush with your officer. He’s an officer, but he becomes your friend as well, your mate. You know, after a month out the bush, he’ll come down and have a beer with you in the canteen.

Overseas, yes.

Because the married men were taken back to the leave centre to be with their wives.

There wives were in units in Malaya, in Penang.

And they’d take truck loads of the married men back, and the single men would have to go out on patrol. That’s why there were only four or five of us.

Very odd. It did cause a bit of a split between married men and single. After all we were taking the responsibility and we should have had a sergeant there. I’d be there as a lance corporal,

and in charge of four or five blokes, or something like that. You should have a sergeant in charge of ten or twelve or something like that.

Well, it just caused a little bit of friction. You know you’d have a, like the Australian does, have a shot at them. Give them a slight dig now and again.

Oh, they’d probably tell you to get stuffed and all this sort of thing. It was all right. Harmless fun.

Was it under strength?

No, we were never under strength.

Well, only when married men went home on leave. Then you’d find some with tropical diseases and things like that.

Tinea was bad. Tinea, and, oh, you get a lot of rashes between the legs and things like that. That was one of the worst.

Yeah, heat rash, and a tropical rash. You could be allergic to some of the vines, the trees, anything. And the heat. Because not everyone was a bronzed Anzac. They weren’t all surf lifesavers, if you know what I mean. The image. Fair some of them, some wore glasses. Some, we had one, I think he was Indian.

But he had warts all over his body. And oh, they were terrible things. Someone referred to it as they used to sleep with pigs. The disease that they got. I don’t know if that’s true. But we called him Sabu. Now, Sabu was a movie star that appeared in quite a few films in the forties.

But we called him Sabu. Well, quite a few times he couldn’t quite make it. I think the irritation on his warts, and all this sort of thing.

Yeah. He was in the Australian army.

Well that that was the RP sergeant, the regimental police sergeant – Sergeant Burke. He got inebriated one night at Minden Barracks which’s got a circular roundabout up to the top of the – there’s a lookout tower up there, or a radio identification tower or something. And he got drunk on his motorcycle and went straight over the cliff.

He was only badly bruised apparently, he was all right because I met him later, in Kapooka.

Yeah. And he drove his motorcycle over the cliff. Apparently fairly badly injured but he recovered. And I went on and met him and he was one of

my stooges at Kapooka which I’ve already explained to you.

Very rare. We did when there was nothing else. I wasn’t good at and I never ever played it much. I played cards a lot. We were on a

machine gun course in Malaya and we played a game called Slippery Sam and as you know, if you don’t know, that’s a deadly game if you’ve got a large pile of money in on the turn of a card. And it was on the turn of a card I was going to be up for three hundred pound. If you go back to 1956-57, that was a lot of money

and luckily the man before me bought a card which had put me out. But it had turned out I’d won the pile in the middle which was several hundred pound so I would’ve had to have matched it had I not won it and that would have meant sending home for money to Australia.

Oh yeah.

And some very good gamblers. Professionals, I’d say.

Yeah. That went on on occasion. It was more for something to do because we didn’t have much to do with our money other than go into town in Penang or somewhere but when we did, we had a bit of a splash.

I think the fitness…it made us as fit as hell – Canungra – climbing the hills. The bullets whistling over your head when you’re crawling, well we never had the need for that anyway.

But it’s probably part of the game that you have to learn to be able to virtually walk on your old bugger. And there’ll all a part of the game of a soldier. If you can’t do it you’re in trouble if you need to do it.

Probably about half of it.

I think it was designed to make us fit. Because we didn’t know a lot about the jungle. There was no-one there that had been there. We were the first ones to go but when we came back, there was a different story. We could impart some our knowledge on the ones that were going over.

Yeah. Quite often found bags of rice, wrapped up. I don’t think plastic was invented then. I think - I’m not sure what it was, it was either plastic or some other rubber

or something with bands around it. It was all watertight. But they were immediately arrested. The civilian police took over from there, we didn’t have to do anything. We had to find them.

Well they were taking it out to bury it.

They didn’t give it to the CT’s – they had a planning spot where they’d take it. Well, we couldn’t find that, we didn’t have a chance to. They’re not going to bury something when we’re standing around. So that’s how we made them white areas was to try and eliminate the food. Well if a CT’s got no food, he’s got to go somewhere else. That’s what moved them on.

Oh yeah. They were frightened of them though. It was fear. They ruled by fear – because they could do some very nasty things to civilians.

Yeah. As I said before, the white face is a dead giveaway. If you saw

any – usually males, but there were females too, a white face was always suspicious. They’re out in the sun all day doing their fields or some of them are rubber tapping.

Oh Weeks. Weeks. Months. They lived in little villages some of them. We found one with several huts made out of bamboo and disguised and one of them we think was a school where they educated either their kids or the younger members of the movement.

They no doubt had their training programs like we did. I learned that you never underestimate the terrorist.

Oh yeah. Really good. We’ll never know.

But they ruled by fear.

No. No, they’d never tell you because the villages, we’d probably look after some, we didn’t search the village, we were only outside the gate. If anyone found that, it would be the police because they were entitled to go in.

Black and white areas, that was the main thing. We were on leave one day, and we were in a black area and we had to get driven through a black area to get to the bus to take us to Ipoh. And before we got on the bus we had to put our weapons in the police armoury and then we went to Ipoh and had a real big day out.

It was fantastic. We came back. We picked up our weapons and we had to walk about six, seven miles. There’s no way that anyone’s going to drive us out there in the black area. So we got our weapons, put them over the shoulder and I think we sang songs all the way out - we couldn’t give a damn we were in that position. We were walking through a black area with our weapons just dangling over and careless as hell, drunk as hell.

But that’s one of the silly things you do.

Yeah and it’s a reason to get drunk. Once you’re back at lines and things like that. But we should never ever have walked through a black area, singing and all the things you do when you’re stupid. One of our blokes, we only went for a drink,

but one of them went to a brothel and he got onto this young girl and when we finally got him back to camp, he woke up the next day, and we asked him how he went, and he told us and all this and he reached for a bottle of Dettol and he rubbed it all around his entire genitals, raw Dettol. And it wasn’t long before he started to sweat

and look a little bit painful. Well within three to four days, his skin had all dried out. He pulled off a complete set of genital that was burned skin. So he was frightened he’d got venereal disease or something like that and he thought that’d cure it.

I doubt it.

We didn’t really. The only time we came in contact with them is

when we, if we’d taken over from a camp or, from the village or if we had to go to an enquiry on the death of a CT or something like that. We didn’t mix very well. We didn’t go near each other very much.

Oh they would line that up with our CO,

our commanding officer. We wouldn’t know anything about that until an exercise like keeping a tin in the air. That’s (clock chimes). That’s the only time that we would know something was on because it had to be kept in strict secrecy because it couldn’t be let out.

For a start the informer’s life’d be in trouble and so would our own troops.

I don’t know if he was with us, this one. But it was the British that got the terrorist on that night. We didn’t get the terrorist. Now he must have told them where to go, which route they took out because they didn’t come out our way.

They came out straight into the British ambush.

That was the night exercise. There was a night and day exercise that we had with the informer and he came with us then. But that was to no avail. Whether they woke up to it or not or heard us, we don’t know.

Only the informers because they were too frightened. If they were seen, they were gone, they were dead. Our main trackers were the Ibans, they were the main ones that we used and

they could tell if there was a terrorist in front of us, they could tell. Might only be a snapped twig or something but they’d know someone’d passed that way.

Sarawak Ranges. Borneo. A real Borneo indigenous group.

They were great blokes. They wanted us to go back and visit them in their long houses, as they called them, where their women were and all that. They were tattooed all over, that was their hobby and symbols of them being warriors. But I think they’d be pretty ruthless if you had to fight them. One on the ambush, on that last ambush,

when we had two killed and one wounded, he was sitting under a log crying his eyes out. I wasn’t on that ambush but I’m led to believe that’s what happened.

We had a Dutchman who could speak Malay and he learned a little bit of their dialect then I think.

A couple of them could speak a little bit of Pidgin English or Malay or something. I never had a conversation with them.

There was a monstrous

meal being cooked somewhere – the smell was so great. So that meant to four blokes, that meant there was a lot more men in that area than we could handle. So we decided, or I decided, we would go back and just report where they were.

Well they got living quarters. They got lovely, fairly new units, two storey units,

in Penang and free to come and go as they wanted. Certainly we were too but we just felt that it shouldn’t have been our responsibility. But the army I think were frightened that broken marriages were the things they didn’t want. And for someone to be away from his wife for a month - things like that, problems arise. So they got as much leave as the army would give them,

but it had to be spent with their wife.

Very unusual. You’ve got to remember that this was the first expedition of Australian troops that went there. So it was trial and error for a lot of it. Whether that continued when the other battalion went, I don’t know.

No.

Well you see, the cost of sending one man to Perth or somewhere in Australia there, (UNCLEAR) the cost of a marriage breakup is more than it would have been to fly them there.

Well it would cost them money to ship her back, she’d have to be flown home. And probably they’d fly them both home if they had a marriage split. It’s pretty complicated. You see, they called it an emergency,

not a war so under the rules of an emergency, they probably had to do those sorts of things. If it was wartime, the women wouldn’t have been there if it was declared war. For financial reasons and political, it was. Bearing in mind a lot of these things that I’m telling you today are my own opinion – from what I know to be the truth,

as I’ve heard it and seen it.

You don’t always get it from books or newspapers either.

Well, there will always be a percentage of accidents through misjudgement. There are accidents here every day of the year. One particular accident,

he was in a scout car and it ran off the road, the turret fell off and it virtually took his head off. Now that’s an accident that could happen anywhere - for some reason it went off the road, it wasn’t shot at. The other ones were patrols running into each other and then you’ve got the case of an accidental shooting that night with Carl Jay –

his mate accidentally shooting him. Just a freak accident that happened - perhaps a bit of carelessness involved. With the patrol meeting patrol, I think a lot of it’s to do with the map reading and that can go - that’s not only the corporals, the sergeants, the officers, it can go even higher than that who’s at fault. Because sometimes those maps are not always

accurate because they’re taken from the air.

I think in the two years we were there, there were nineteen killed and I think there was twelve/thirteen that were accidental

and of course it might’ve been a sickness or two that killed a couple of them, I don’t know.

Drunkenness? Not to my knowledge. Unless it was hangovers or something. You usually didn’t go out into the jungle with a hangover because you’re sensible enough to know that it’s going to be hard work. Just walking is hard work

and then it’ll rain and you’re soaked to billy-o and then you dry out and then you might have to go through a small river and you’re holding your gun up here and the water’s up to here so you don’t want a hangover in those situations. They were allowed to take, the officer in charge was allowed to take, a bottle of rum out and issue each man with a tiny little

bit in his mug. But at that stage, we weren’t interested in that, we let some of the older blokes have that.

Well Carl Jay’s had a big effect on us. We tried as hard as hell to get him back in time to save him.

You feel really depressed that you, perhaps if you’d been a little bit faster. Because we were going up and down muddy slopes, we’d slide down one, we’d try and get – don’t forget he’s on a stretcher, a make-up stretcher, and then we’d be half-way up the other one and suddenly one bloke would slip and so we’d all go back down again and this wouldn’t have helped Carl,

not when you’re gutshot. And I’d say he died of haemorrhage and travelling but he was dead when we got him to the outside of the jungle, to the rubber plantation. But the other two blokes did a good job. They ran all the way. It was miles to get help.

We were all saddened by them because we had to attend their funerals. None of the relatives’d be present. We just - arms in reverse and we’d have to march behind the coffin and that was another one

that was gone. Particularly if it’s your best mates. Two of the blokes that were killed in that ambush were playing cards - two days prior to it we played cards nearly all day. So we were pretty good mates and when you lose someone that’s close to you, it makes you realise how hard – it’s not just an emergency it’s a war – because

the people they left behind. I remember Joe Wilson, he was accidentally shot, he was an old mate. He was an Englishman. He was a champion soccer player and before we came over, he insured himself double. He got a gigantic policy, in those days, from an insurance company. The only reason they issued it was because it was an emergency, it wasn’t a war. So at least his wife got something out of it. But that was a sad one.

Ben Hallard and Jack Potts were the other two that were killed and Tommy Hogg was wounded and the medic went to Ben Hallard, he said, “Don’t worry’, he said, “I’m all right. Go and see Tommy, he’s been hit.’ By the time they got back to Benny, he was dead.

So they’re the sad things that come out of – real good blokes, you know.

No I don’t think I got a kill after that. Because, it was only that ambush. The only two other incidents was the ambush where I was a Bren gunner and I wouldn’t know – I don’t think I killed anyone and the only other shots fired really were when Carl Jay was

accidentally killed so it wasn’t a real, there’s nothing much to talk of, of what I actually did over there. I was just part of a team that went there, and what we did, we just had to put up with what was going on. Glad to get home.

When we returned home, we went to Enoggera. And our commanding officer there was a fellow by the name of Rene Jesus La Mercier who I describe as a bit neurotic. He wanted to play war games.

He’d been to Korea and an incident in Korea didn’t make a platoon of fellows very happy – I won’t elaborate on that. But he used to want these war games and one of them, he’d put each of us into sections. I had my section and he’d take us out, near Enoggera, about twenty-five miles from

Enoggera out to the bush and drop us off. We were blind folded to go out and we had to make our own way home. I didn’t like this Jesus Rene La Mercier because he was, he was looking for – his father had been a World War I hero or something, I don’t know and he had to live up the reputation. He’s gone now, anyway.

They took us out and we took the blindfolds off, dropped us out in the forest - pretty thickly, densely tree covered. And I had four blokes. There was five of us - I had four, and we had to get back to Enoggera, twenty-five miles away we were told, that’s all we were told. No maps, nothing.

So - I got back at - I got him for this one. I said look, I think the best thing we can do is go up the hill until we find a bush track and see what happens, see if anything comes along. And we went up and an hour later, a Forestry Commission utility came past and we flagged him down, told him we were on an army exercise and we had to get back to Enoggera

and he said, “Well I can drop you off at the pub this side of Enoggera.’ I said, “That’ll do.’ So he said, “Get in under and I’ll pull the ute cover down.” So there we were on the back of a ute with the cover over us. We got dropped off at the pub. One of the married blokes I had with me, he rang his wife. He said, come and pick us up. So she came and picked us up and we went in and

we all went out on the town in Brisbane for the night and we got absolutely - inebriated. We got up early the next morning – five o’clock, shaved, showered and put our gear back on and got her to drop us off about half a mile from Enoggera. So we marched through the fence,

went up and reported into Rene Jesus La Mercier and we recorded our time. We weren’t the fastest then - there was a faster one than us. Anyway we got the prize of a weekend’s leave because we were the only ones that came in shaven. He said, now one of the first things a soldier does is never appear unshaven. So we got the

prize for that, a weekend’s leave and we’d been on the grog. But he caught up with me. Someone must have told him because he put me on weekend duty cleaning weapons. All brand new weapons out of the case with grease on them. Put me in charge of a detail for the weekend. That was my punishment so he got me on that one and his motto was, ‘Do Something About It’.

And we had another war game then. We had to march through every town down the NSW border. Truck’d take us down, drop us off, we’d march through the town and camp the night out in the bush and all this sort of the thing well we did that one Okay and then he wanted another one. So we got into Liverpool and got on the grog and

we were late getting back. The trucks had gone. So I said to the blokes, God, what are we gunna do? I had a step-mother and father living in Goulburn. And when we came back, when we went back to camp, the RP sergeant said, well, you can stay - you’ve got to remain in the barracks. He said, you can’t move out, you’ll be charged – absent without leave for two hours or whatever it was.

Because we were under the bridge grogging on at Liverpool while they were moving. Anyway I went before him and he said, you’ve been charged for being AWOL with your group and he said, where were you? I said, I was down - I took the boys down to the parents’ place at Goulburn and I said, we couldn’t get a ride

back. I said, we had to hitchhike back and we found it very difficult. I said, we did what you always say and you believe in is that you Do Something About It, so we hitchhiked and we got back here but we were two hours late getting back. And I knew I had him. He believed me because I used his phrase:

“Do Something About It.” So that was Rene Jesus La Mercier. Then I got shifted to Kapooka.

Well the first thing we saw was the coat hanger of course and everybody’s on deck to watch that.

And some were told they’d be left behind. They weren’t allowed to march through Sydney. There were quite a few threats to officers and things like that. If I don’t march in there – look out, you know. There were quite a few threats. We knew them well enough for that. Anyway, we marched there and there were thousands and thousands.

Yeah, it’s a fantastic feeling when you see a crowd as big as what’s in Sydney, that are cheering, yelling and screaming. A marvellous feeling to know that you get a tremendous relief that you’re home,

and you’re home safely, but at the same time you think about the blokes that didn’t come home. That’s one of the reasons I joined Legacy thirty years ago.

Oh, I think about a hundred thousand they described it as.

I can’t think. In the main street of Sydney. I can’t think what street. I’m not familiar with Sydney much.

But it was a thrill to do it. All the papers were headlined with it afterwards.

Yeah. Everything. It was terrific. Probably the only moment of glory we had.

Before we went overseas?

Afterwards. Yeah, went to Canungra and did one session. I got a tropical disease there and I had to go to hospital. And the other time I just assisted with instructing, with just some of the ideas.

You know, little things like how you get water in a valley and things like that. Some of the things that enable you to survive in the jungle.

Well, I was only there two days when I got a tropical rash the first time. I was in hospital for a week. Second time was about four days. It was just a quick exercise to show

a little bit about jungle warfare. We were only part of it. I didn’t have to climb the mountains. Because believe me, they’re big. Have you ever been to Canungra? Well, there’s a pub right next to it. (Interruption)

From there I was posted to Kapooka. Bought an old bomb, and we drove down there, two of us. And that was an experience for me, because I had to do what the NCOs did to me, to new blokes. And that’s where I saw them coming in, you know, oh, you wouldn’t believe some of the ways they came in.

Some of them came in with a dose of the crabs. That’s mobile dandruff. And they had to be sprayed. All their clothing, and bedding and everything. The beauty was to see them march out. But we got a system going there again. You’re a bit disillusioned after you’ve been to Malaya. It’s not as exciting to be an instructor or anything,

but we had a system where I’d do the morning training session, and the ones who didn’t like counter lunches or a drink, they’d do the afternoon ones. So that’s the way we had that going, and I had the dice game going of a pay night, anyway one day, I’m there and the RP came, and a different RP

to this Sergeant Burke, who was the one I was paying. He came to me. He said, “I’ve got to take you into town today.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Oh, they want to interview you in at the Criminal Investigation Branch.” Some Digger had complained he’d lost all his money, his pay money, which is fair enough, so I went to this Bumper Farrell, his name was. I appeared before him.

And he finished up being the top underworld detective in Sydney. So to give you an idea what he’s like, you don’t talk back to him. Anyway, he said, “I believe you’re running a dice game out at Kapooka.” “Oh, God.” I said, “We run a dice game, only Crown and Anchor. That’s only amongst perhaps a couple of Diggers and NCOs and all that. That’s all it is, a bit of a fun game.” He said, “Look, I know it’s going on. We’ve had a complaint’,

He said, “Burke’s the one I want. I know you’re not the bloke. I know you organise it.” He said, “But I know Burkey’s the one that owns the game.” Well, I was paying Burkey off. They were after him. They got the message it was him. And I said, “Look, if you feel that way, I’ll burn the dice.” He said, “Well, if you do you’re a bigger fool than I thought you were.”

He said, “All I want is Burkey.” I said, “Oh’, I said, “I don’t think he’s got much to do with it.” I said, “We just have a friendly game.” Anyway, he let us off, but he gave me a hell of a fright. But we still held that last one, before I marched out of there, we still held that game in the guardroom.

Oh, God, yeah. I paid a car off with the money. I was putting money down my socks. So’s it doesn’t look big in front of them. If you set your board to six spaces on a Crown and Anchor board, you’ve got dice with six sides on it, Crown, anchor, hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades. If you set that board even, if you have the correct amount of money on each one, you can’t lose.

See, if they get three, you pay them three to one. That’s the most they get. If they put ten, if they put five pound down, three to one, they get twenty dollars back. But if I’ve got six, I’ve got thirty on there. The most I’ll pay back is twenty. So you can’t lose on it. They all knew that. I played it. I learned to play it with those. I was mad enough to play it, but anyway,

Burkey got the blame. But it was, we had one incident there at Kapooka, where some criminals wanted to break into the armoury. And we were called to a sudden alert, and we were down there. We didn’t get them, we missed them. But someone apparently gave the word that they were going to break in and get explosives and things like that.

But other than that, we just trained the, it was good to see. I think I had three or four intakes while I was there. And it’s a wonderful feeling to see them come in as drack sacks, and see them march out as men.

Oh, another terminology in the army.

I don’t know. But it means very untidy and dishevelled.

Yeah, oh, no widgies. We didn’t have any women. There was no women in the army then. Well, there were was, but they were a separate unit. They were the WAACs [Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps]. You know what a WAAC is, don’t you? Well, a WAAAF is Women’s [Auxiliary] Australian Air Force,

a WAAC is Women’s Australian Army Corps, and what do you think a WOK would be?

It’s a fing you fwow at a wabbit.

Almost the two years. Wouldn’t be quite two years. It’d be over eighteen months. But I’d come to Ballarat, that’s about a six or seven hour drive every fortnight. And see my wife-to-be.

When I came home, I went to,

I saw this girl, a penfriend, or the one I’d known earlier, and I went round and we had a get-together. Then the next night she was missing and her brother told me she’d been out with another friend, a boyfriend. And I felt a sigh of relief. It was all off. I said, “When she comes home just tell her I won’t be back.”

I told her anyway, myself. I went down to this hamburger cart and this bloke tapped me on the shoulder. And he said, “You’re Jack Tolliday, aren’t you?” He said, “I was on the boat with you. I saw you sing at the concert on the way home.” He said, “I’m having a twenty first tomorrow night. Would you like to come?” I said, “Yeah. Of course I will.” And that was just about a lifetime friendship with him. And that’s where I met Jan.

Beg pardon?

Twenty two. Still a virgin with my tongue in my cheek.

No.

Well, the grandson of a verger. He’s the one who hands you your book when you go into a church, and things like that. Yeah, I suppose you could call it a colourful life, without any, yeah, the only problem was drinking. That’s the only thing that destroyed my life.

Well, I became an alcoholic, and my liver was totally out of order. I didn’t have a drink for five years, and got over it. But I was within hours of death when Jan got me to the hospital. That’s when I told you about the horse. I got her to put a bet on a horse for me. Did I tell you about that?

Well, I was in intensive care and she was there with me, and I had needles poking into me everywhere in me getting the fluid, and I said, “Look, Danzero’s going tomorrow in Brisbane in a big race. Would you put fifty on for me?” She said, “I’ve never put a bet on in my life.” “You’ll find a way.” The doctor looked over at her and he said, “I don’t believe this.” Here I’m nearly dead, and I still won the fifty dollars on Danzero.

How old? That’s only twelve years ago.

Yeah. Yes, it did. It was a daily occurrence.

Several times I gave it away, but each time I’d come back.

When I was in Malaya?

Well, when we were in the leave premises, or on the base, yes, we were, but not when we were in the jungle or anywhere like that. Once you were off the base camp and the jungle,

and all that, well, yeah, we were. But in town, we played tennis and swam and things like that. Didn’t take our full time, or I wouldn’t be here now.

Yeah, I think Carl Jay’s death took more out of me than anything, and that other business I told you about. That took a hell of a lot.

Because the thought is, you can’t tell anyone. You’ve got to bottle it up. There’s no one you can tell. At that stage, I wouldn’t even have trusted a priest. Because there was, I wouldn’t call it a tragedy in that sense. But it was a stupid thing that shouldn’t have happened. Okay, she should have been dead, but what he did, he shouldn’t have done.

We, it’s because we lost this other one, that we came back a bit early and caught him. Which is, I hope this is not going to underage children, this interview.

Yeah. Several. But we couldn’t argue in front of anyone much.

Or they’d say, “What in the bloody hell are you arguing about?”

Oh, nightmares. Yeah, used to. I think I had more nightmares about this enclosed space under the trees. And things like that.

You know, anyone who’s sort of seen a lot of blood and shot someone, and you see this accident out here, it sort of brings it back pretty vividly. Makes you, you get very severe panic attacks, but through a good doctor and specialists, all that, I’ve been able to control that.

I think it’s a locked in feeling or something. I was frightened when I was under there. I felt I shouldn’t have been frightened.

But I thought it was so damned silly. I didn’t think we had a hope in hell. I thought it was a crazy idea. Even told the Second Lieutenant what I thought. Particularly when we got back. I just said, “This is crazy, you’re putting our lives at risk. The terrorists would know we’re there.” They didn’t do it again.

Oh, one exercise in Sydney. We had a live firing exercise at a point near Sydney, and I went for something, I can’t remember, I went to get something and I went outside the perimeter

and walked straight up the eyes of a machine gun. And it was a firing exercise, and I realised that, that really made me panic. I’d done a stupid thing. I’d walked right into it. It started firing, but it just, it missed me. I was walking straight at it. But that was just an exercise the army had on, trying to train people in live firing exercises.

It teaches you safety rules. That was a big mistake. I should have known better. It was pitch black, dark. It’s still no excuse. That’s the only other time I’ve been frightened.

No, not really. Gunshots used to frighten me a little bit. After a long period. When I first went down here and we had fox shoots every week. The first few times I was a little bit, you know, I wasn’t worried about me. I was worried about the safety precautions of the bloke next door to me.

And one of them did let a shot go. And I said, “What in the bloody hell are you shooting now for? They haven’t started yet, the drivers.” He said, “Oh, I was just seeing which was on safety, and which wasn’t.” I said, “You’ve bloody well found out now, haven’t you.” And he was a prominent businessman in Melbourne. He used to come up. So we didn’t invite him on the fox shoots any more. But that’s the only other time I was a bit nervy.

Not a great deal. I’ve never told them about that incident. I’d like that respected if you could. You mentioned a ten-year embargo, or something like that. Because I really won’t know if those other two are dead.

They could put it together and work out who it was, I don’t know.

Mmm. Particularly my brother. He’s my brother by my stepmother. And he’s quite often asked me. But there’s not much point in complicating things.

Well, they ask me quite often but all I say, the good times outweighed the bad times. That’s my standard answer. And believe me, we had some good times.

From war?

I think by observation,

you can’t win a war unless you’ve got people on the ground. Because these new wars and things like that. Well, take Vietnam. They didn’t win it, admittedly, but they had more chance of winning, knowing what was going on down on the ground, than what the Yanks did, just blasting it away. They, well, they certainly had a lot wounded and killed,

but I think you’ve really, you’ve got to be down on the ground and know what’s going on. There’ll always be a war. Every five years. History tells us that. But there’s no future in wars. They’re caused by politics, or money, greed. They’re the main causes. Who wins?

It helped me a lot to, well, I suppose character building or something like that. And a care for other people. I do care a lot about other people and their feelings, but you realise you’re not here forever.

You’re not here for a long time, make it a good time. If Australia was attacked, yes, certainly, warfare like as in World War II. But for us to go visiting other countries and interfering. Even this Iraqi thing and all that. It’s got its rights and wrongs, but we shouldn’t be there.

Yeah, well, when I first joined Legacy, it was mainly doctors and solicitors. And very dedicated men to the Legacy cause, which is looking after the families of those that didn’t return. And this appealed to me.

I’d been in the RSL and had a bad experience. I went to the Ballarat RSL and had a very good mate of mine who married a Japanese girl. She was a lovely girl. They had a family. And I invited them into the RSL to watch the Caulfield Cup and just have a couple of drinks. And there was a few World War II fellows sitting at the bar.

We were in the lounge area, and the manager come over and asked us to leave. I said, “Why?” And I said, “These are my guests.” He said, “Well, I’ve been instructed that the guests are no longer welcome.” I said, “Well, if that’s the case, I won’t be welcome either.” I’ve never joined the RSL. I’ve been in RSLs. But I’ve never ever joined since.

It was the two World War blokes that couldn’t stand the sight of Japanese. They didn’t bother to ask what she did or who she was. But then when Legacy came up, you had to pass a very stringent test to get into Legacy in those days. Because you are looking after widows and their families,

and I think it was the best move I ever made. They’re a very dedicated group of people. And it’s probably the proudest badge I’ve ever worn.

Beg pardon?

Oh, we look after the widows and kids and make sure they’re okay.

Give them small Christmas gifts. Get the kids educated. There’s still quite a few about. There’s one got up at Ballarat, on the opening of Legacy Week and thanked us and gave a speech about how she’d been put through uni by Legacy. Well, it’s good to hear that back, but you don’t hear Legatees bragging about it.

And we try to make money through the badge sales. Sometimes we might have had inheritances and things like that. We don’t get anything, government assistance. So I was in charge of fund raising, the badges and so forth, for about five years. We built that up fairly nicely, but now the charitable dollar is very competitive. It’s pretty hard.

You’ve got to work out new ideas, and the Vietnam boys are coming in now with a few new ideas, so we’re letting them take over a lot of these jobs. But a wonderful organisation. The widows regularly ring me up. They just want someone to talk to. They need a house painted. They need a loan or something. We give them interest-free loans.

What we’ve got to watch there of course, if they’re near death’s door, we give an interest-free loan and the kids get the advantage of it. So, all these things are analysed. But if you look into it, you’ll find there’s some pretty good people you know that are Legatees. They don’t go around bragging about it. Just quiet achievers.

Yeah. Well, I got the same treatment, but not as bad. I got snubbed when I joined the RSL because I’d been to Malaya, and of course, to them, that’s not a war. That’s nothing.

I’m only a young smartie, coming into the RSL to reap benefits and things like that, which was totally untrue. All I wanted was a place to go and talk to blokes who had similar experiences, really, or talk to them, you know, had something in common. But there was only a couple. Two or three that were like that. But I never went back. I go to the RSL, but I’ll never be a member again.

They had the same problem, only worse than me.

To me? Oh, I get along all right with them. I don’t have any problem, because I talk with them a lot, and joke with them a lot. Because they went through far worse than what I did.

But you’ve got to remember, it was all wars. Vietnam, Malaya, all of them. There’s only between five and ten per cent actually see an angry shot fired. (Interruption) Well, there’s only a very low percentage that ever see on the front line,

and even less that see an angry shot. Because you’re backed up by all your rear echelons, and things like that. Your canteens are a group of their own, and you’ve got all your commanders, the shiny bums. All those sort of people, which we have to have. But then you’ve got bureaucrats.

You’ve probably seen in the news lately. The bureaucrats virtually control all the commanders in chief of the army and so forth. So it’s, war’s not a good thing, but it’s very, not many people actually see it. Same as Vietnam. Hell of a lot of blokes probably never even heard a shot.

Because you’ve got to have your cooks. You’ve got to have your service corps, which is your food providers, your clothing providers.

Yeah, but a lot of them, they’re there, they’re in the area. They’re subject to, perhaps, an air raid or anything like that.

I wish to God we’d have had the type of weapons that you see on film. It’s just never-ending magazines that they install in weapons. And most of the situations in a lot of the war films are just ridiculous.

But kids react to it and they think that’s how it all happens, but some of them are getting more realistic. One of the good ones, strangely enough Graham Kennedy starred in it. It was more fair dinkum than anything I’ve seen. Like, a bit like Malaya, Vietnam. It was The Odd Angry Shot. Now that was quite good. That reminded me, someone who organised the script,

backgrounds, and all these sort of things. He would have had to experience something like that. That’s only my observation.

They what?

Mmm. Graham Kennedy played a good part in that, really. I enjoyed that one.

Oh, particularly when you’re marching in Sydney, yeah. Anything like that was, you felt a very big sense of pride.

And hopefully, it’s carried on. We’d all like to hope there’s no more wars, but that won’t happen.

Yes. I do go along, but in Ballarat in particular, I can still get panic attacks when I walk down a road. Particularly one going down, for some reason or another I just get panic attacks.

So I either don’t go, or I might just be a bystander. Very rarely wear ribbons, medals. Medals to me are, I don’t know, they’re just, some blokes would wear them to church on Sundays, I think. And some blokes have got more medals and ribbons that have never been overseas.

And never seen an angry shot. Because there are good conduct ribbons and all these things. And there’s probably a lot of blokes that have got medals and ribbons that are highly illegal. But just to go to the place and flout medals doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t really wear them.

I don’t know what it is. I feel as if I’m going to fall over. It’s all connected with the nerves, I think. I did have a nervous problem. It was one of the things I was treated for. It seems to be bitumen roads and things. Sometimes I’m all right, but when, ceremoniously, if I have to march, it seems to make a difference to me. I just get that panic.

I was doing that one day in Stuart Street in Ballarat, and I had to walk out of the march. I was frightened I was going to go over. But Anzac Day still, it’s a good day to remember. I think they should teach it more in schools, though. School kids don’t know enough about it.

No, I’ve spoken at an Anzac ceremony. I’ve spoken to two of those. Just as a guest speaker, to talk about wars and things. Wars are an atrocious thing.

Oh, not about myself. Just about the way wars start. Who’s responsible for them. And what happens to the grieving people afterwards, and the bravery and so forth that exists. You know, really, when it boils down, there wouldn’t be one in ten,

or one in a hundred, that isn’t scared to buggery, out of fronting up and going to a war. There are times when you’re frightened to death. And I defy anyone that’s been through it to say they weren’t frightened. There’d have to be something wrong with you if you weren’t.

Ah. Oh, there probably are a couple of things, but I don’t feel I should say anything about them.

I prefer not to say anything about them, on camera.

I think I gave you a hint in the car.

Oh, the days and weekends we had out. The days in Penang. A couple of times in Singapore. But mainly Penang. We got to know it pretty well,

and we had some really good times. Even with the Kiwis.

Even with the Kiwis, yeah.

Thanks, Colin [Interviewer]. Thanks, Sergie. I hope everything was there for you. I hope you got some meat out of the sandwich.