Australians at War Film Archive

Start now? Right well I was born on the 21st of January 1942 actually in South Melbourne.

But we didn’t stay there long, I think there was one or two minor moves, and we settled up at a placed called Osbornes Flat which is outside Wodonga, Albury on the Victoria side. Yackandandah would be the nearest town as such. That was where my mother’s forbears actually settled and more or less founded the district.

I went to the local state school, one teacher school. Did eight years there, then went to boarding school Humford College, Kilmore, spent four years there. So I left home at thirteen virtually. Then I went back for a while, I everybody wanted me to be a teacher

because of my mother’s side of things, she was actually the best primary school teacher in her youth. I didn’t want to be a teacher, but somewhere along the line, last year of school, I passed the state public service exam. They used to take them, call them up in order more or less when they were in order. I got called back actually when I

was away waiting for this to happen, I worked with my grandfather and one of my aunts went down to Melbourne, she was a teacher a New South Wales teacher actually. And she found out they were desperately short of teachers in Victoria. She came back and I got pounded into applying and I was teaching six weeks later at Yarrawonga. So I did that for six weeks

and I got the call for public service so I went down to join. In the Titles Office, doing Titles Office. And actually that’s where I spent my whole working life, apart from about four and a half year’s interruption in the navy during the war. This first, war started shortly after I joined the public service and I thought one should join, but you had to get permission from your parents but that wasn’t forthcoming at that

stage. I didn’t want to join the army anyway, I thought if I was going to do anything I was going to be the navy. Eventually I was able to get my parents’ permission. And I volunteered for the navy sometime in 41 and I got called up later in the year, I think it was November I got called up. And went to Flinders Naval Depot for HMAS [His Majesty’s Australian Ship] service and did the initial training, seamanship training,

I joined as an ordinary seaman. So it was basic seamanship and very basic gunnery and torpedoes and a few things like that. And they wanted some submarine detectors, and at submarine detection school in Rushcutters Bay, Sydney, called HMAS Rushcutter. They had no living-in quarters there, so if you were there for that you had to live out, and I had never been to Sydney in my life and I thought

well this is a good chance to have a nice holiday in Sydney. So I volunteered to be a submarine detector and I got accepted. It was the first time I ever got into one of these what they called IQ [intelligence quotient] tests, aptitude tests or whatever they called them. I never knew what struck me, I got to the first question and I thought oh, what are they talking about? But I had enough presence of mind to think we’ll just forget that one and concentrate on the rest.

I probably got the rest of them pretty much right I suppose. Did a few other tests, and I went up to Sydney to do the submarine detection course for six weeks. It used to be three months course during peace time, but they condensed it down to six weeks for war. Mostly the ones that did it had done secondary education. There were very few that

could pass it in six weeks that hadn’t had secondary education. Some did admittedly but it would have been very hard work for them. But it was easy enough for most of us. As I say we weren’t interested in being submarine detectors, we were interested in having a holiday up there in Sydney. So then we got all broken up, anything with the navy is the same. You join individually,

you get put into a class of a certain number. I think the original class at Flinders was twenty, then those twenty they go to twenty different places, ships or locations. Well I didn’t quite finish the training at Flinders because I got selected for the anti-submarine course. I did finish off a bit of gunnery up in Sydney. I think there was eight of us in the anti-submarine class, eight different places,

between us you see, that’s going on all of the time in the navy. You never really made a lot of good friends, you got acquainted with people. But I am a bit different, I got to the ship and I stayed on the ship until just after the war, October, bit over three years later. There were two other original crew still on the ship when I left but other

most fellows were going every six to eighteen months, just a continual turnover. Not much at a time, just a few. I think they probably had the idea they’d pick certain people that would probably had a certain amount of experience and they would go onto a ship that was short of experience. I think that’s the way they did it.

Well when we went, things get a bit hazy now. Well we sailed out of Melbourne, we sailed out of Melbourne and went up to Sydney to pick up a few more crew and I think one or two other things. Then we went north and around Port Moresby, Milne Bay, Buna, Gona, Finschhafen, Lae.

I might have said that one, doing convoys actually.

Don’t think we actually went into Wewak, we were in the area but I don’t think we actually went in there.

No what we did a bit later, we did patrols and so on off the coast of New Britain.

We were supposed to sink an enemy submarine on one of those patrols with another ship, a sister ship. I suppose the next move was probably back to Sydney to do the coastal convoys where the Jap subs were off the east coast. We did that for quite a time, that was a rather

harrowing experience in the way in that it probably passes some of the roughest seas in that coast there, and little ship. If you had a convoy you’d be out on the wing of the convoy and the nearest ship would be two hundred yards away, and if you were just on the, well, I suppose you’d call it the lower deck, the stern there, you couldn’t see the nearest ship two hundred yards away, too much waves.

And we would keep going, most of the convoys I think we done at a speed of about eight knots. It was all geared to the speed of the lowest merchant ship.

Righto okay. Now we did that. Now what did we do next?

Went back north again. Back again, we got based in Thursday Island there at one stage and we were running supplies for the Allied troops there in Merauke, like the old Dutch part of New Guinea.

Take the supplies into the troops there.

We would always take one merchant ship up there, it was always the same ship. An old BHP [Broken Hill Proprietary Company] iron ship I think it was it was as slow as anything. It used to steam at five knots and we used to zig-zag in front of it, trawling for the swordfish, we’d get a few of those too. We would get

up to Merauke and we would anchor. We would not go up the river. A warship would never put itself when it can’t manoeuvre unless it was absolutely essential. The warship would go up and we would wait for it to come back and take it back to Thursday Island. Load up again and back again, I don’t know how many times we did it. Several times anyway.

Well I can’t remember the exact thing I probably did a bit more around New Guinea. Then we got, this is getting back in mid 1944, we got landed with the surveying, it might have been a bit earlier. There was a place called Scott Reef. We went around to Darwin,

and there is a place called Scott Reef, which is from Darwin we used to sail almost due west for four hundred and fifty miles, that would be sea miles. Just slightly south of due west. And that used to put us about a hundred and fifty miles south of Timor, and about ninety miles off where Australia sticks out of its [UNCLEAR]. And there is a reef there called Scott Reef and big horse shoe

reef. The idea at one stage was to make it an anchorage for the British Fleet. Because there was a plan at one stage for a double pronged attack on the Japanese. This was before the Americans started their island hopping. And we were surveying that. And our ship went down to

coastal western Australia somewhere, I don’t know where it was.

I was, we were sailing somewhere between Darwin and Thursday Island surveying. We were waiting in Darwin harbour in sort of anticipation of the war ending but it kept dragging on so they sent us to sea, we were still sort of

engaged in a survey, not that Scott Reef thing as such. But what we were doing was really surveying the reef between Darwin and Thursday Island and we did a lot of testing of the sea bed. See how deep it was and so on. And we’d just happened to be somewhere between Darwin and Thursday Island when it happened, we were going to Thursday Island.

Well we came back to, we finished up we just carried on to Thursday Island then we came back to Darwin, still surveying. And then we got into Darwin. Then we were part of the flotilla then that was sent to

Timor to accept the surrender of the Japanese in Timor. There were quite a number, they weren’t big ships but several corvettes, and an old survey ship, Moors Beach, that was the one in command. I think there was a Dutch mine sweeper. We weren’t mine sweeping the Dutch mine sweeper did that. And we went in there and

we didn’t go ashore. Actually we and some other corvettes, we were towing barges, landing barges. Hook to the shore so that the ships could have something to land on, and we only spent about two days there, and we and I think another ship we sent back to Darwin. I don’t know what for I can’t remember what for, but we were sent back to Darwin. Didn’t do much around there.

And then somewhere in October, probably the middle of October I got sent off the ship I suppose with the eventual view of being demobilised. Probably finished with anti-submarine operators and that sort of thing.

I was actually demobilised the 9th of March 1946.

But I left the ship in October 45. With the view of getting down to Rushcutters Depot, that’s where the anti-submarine people were, they had living quarters in by then though. That took some time to get there, I probably spent about three weeks in Darwin not doing much. See the navy was the local council in Darwin back in those days. I don’t know whether you knew that or not. Yeah after the

bombing and all of that, the navy took the town over. Even put more pipelines down for the water, that was vital for the ships of course but the town benefited. Any rate they were living in the houses there and that sort of thing, they were cleaning the streets and everything. But I spent, I think it was about three weeks there, and I was given the choice

getting down to I think it was Brisbane, either by sea or overland under the auspices of the army. So I chose to go by sea, some people were given air, but we were only given the two not the three. Well I chose sea. Well the sea voyage only went around to Cairns, and

we got off the ship at Cairns and we were given berths and all of that by the navy. And all the soldiers were on the same ship but they were sleeping up on the decks and everything, but we were looked after. Then at Cairns I still remember this, getting off at Cairns, and the navy was there to pick us up in a truck, poor old soldiers had to line up and had to march off for miles to where they were going.

Then we went into the depot in Cairns, don’t know how long we spent there, but then it was a troop train down to Brisbane. That probably took about four days or something, we didn’t exactly break any records.

Well that’s pretty simple I suppose, in as much as, as soon as I left the navy I went back to the job I had had. With the Titles Office and really spent the rest of my life there, fairly well.

Moving up fairly well, I did quite well actually. And retired, I didn’t actually retire but I did, I had a stroke at fifty-seven, I never worked after that. It sort of affected my voice and that. I have still got to think when I am talking to avoid slurring words and everything. So,

officially retired at sixty and I have been retired ever since, doing very little, enjoying it all.

There is not much of that, carry on.

Well my father was out at Camperdown, the western district of Victoria at a place called Weerite [?Noorat]. And he was one of six or seven children. And he was practically illiterate.

Smart enough sort of a fellow, he had the brains just no opportunity. My mother then she was a teacher and she finished up teaching in that area, that’s how they met. And shortly afterwards, I don’t know how long, I was born. A few years after, they got back to my

mother’s family’s district that I talked about before. But they were like pioneers of the area. Mongan was the name, M-O-N-G-A-N. And there is another one called Kingsington [?], there is a creek up there named after them, there’s a bridge up at Tawonga called Mongan Bridge, so I’ve got their names up there one way or another.

And at that stage we didn’t really have any property actually I think we were in a place owned by one of my mother’s brothers an uncle of mine. Eventually we bought, and they bought a bit more land, and there was. You might say it was mixed farming area, a few cows a few sheep whatever. And they did that, I think they sold out about 1956. In the meantime of

course I am not home I am in Melbourne. What else?

Well my father he was born in 1899 so he was only fifteen when it broke out. He eventually joined but he got kicked out again because he had had an accident when he was

quite young with fencing wire, it broke and came back and hit him in the eye and he was almost blind in his right eye. So that knocked him out of the army.

He was actually in, he somehow got in but they a few weeks later kicked him out again because of the eye. See he was a right-handed person, but to use the gun he would have to

use the left shoulder and that sort of thing. I still remember him driving a car at one stage and a calf ran right up beside the car beside him on his right hand side and I said what about that calf? And he hadn’t even seen it you see. He had that disability. So that’s why he wasn’t in the First World War. In the Second World War well they had their bit of land

and he also became the local shearer, not big shearing but he bought a two unit portable shearing machine plant machine and he used to take it around the local district shearing a few hundred here and fifty here and that sort of thing. Good money in it. But I suppose back in the Depression things were tough, he did a bit of rabbit trapping. That was good money actually rabbit trapping in the Depression.

Well he was never in it very much.

I think he might have been a bit disappointed. But the second one of course he was that much older and he had things to do. He was probably in his mid forties then. And then he realised he was better off doing what he was doing,

for the country I guess because he I don’t know whether you realised it or not but Australia was the most heavily mobilised nation in the world during the war. Did you know that?

Yeah it was the most heavily mobilised nation in the world.

No Australia was the most heavily mobilised. What was the adage, you need seven people at home to keep one person in the field? Well we must have been

doing it with about just under six, and doing a lot more, feeding the South Pacific and half of England. Amazing what they did you know. They built three thousand front line aeroplanes, built these sixty corvettes. It’s quite amazing what was done actually.

I wouldn’t put it that way but it was quite good yes. Nothing special one way or the other, Harmonious, that sort of thing yes.

Oh yes, because practically everybody was in around the place,

a couple of uncles and other various people around the district. Some of them were quite a mess. One bloke died with TB [tuberculosis] from the gas pulley, the gas from the Germans. Things like that. Some became alcoholics, that sort of thing. Of course we had them, there in the Titles Office as well. Well the whole public service because they just

these veterans the job even though they could hardly read or write, and then they had the priority to get promotion. Just about killed the public service, the way it was loaded.

Oh they weren’t treated too

well in many ways. Particularly alcoholics, they were just regarded as well that was their own fault. Those that had the actual injuries or the TB or something like that, well they were treated as well as we could in the days. The facilities weren’t available, or the knowledge wasn’t available to treat them as they do it now.

Well I suppose, probably nothing. Didn’t think too much about it, too young I think. Probably just part of life I suppose until I thought about it. Didn’t have any great influence on me one way or another.

Well Anzac Day back in those days in a little state school, well I suppose they were all state schools. You used to go on school at Anzac Day at the normal times and get a couple of hours lecture on the glory of the British Empire and Anzac and so on and then we were allowed to go home and have the rest of the day off. That’s when I lost that. I went home,

and it was a cold showery sort of a day and my father was sowing some crop. And I don’t know if you know the drill machinery they used to do it with, [UNCLEAR] this one was. And a big platform on the back that you could stand on. You used to stand on it really to give yourself enough height to lift the bags up and put the super phosphate and the seed into the two hoppers up on top.

Side by side hoppers along the whole thing. And underneath was the worm that worked that to measure the seed and the super phosphate down. And I am hanging on with this on the right hand standing on the thing at the back having a little fiddle and it got caught. So I lost the top of my left index finger. Didn’t hurt, I just pulled it out and said, “Dad!”

And Dad more or less panicked got rid of the horse and the next door neighbour had a T Model Ford and up to the local doctor in the T Model. I was going to say old, but the car wasn’t probably that old at the time. Give me a couple of weeks off school or a bit more. Actually it went poison after a while,

and the doctor would just say well bathe it in hot, boracic acid and hot water. Well that wasn’t going anywhere and there was a nurse in the district who said no you have got to do that with salt. A lot of salt and the water as hot as you can stand, and do it for half an hour. It seemed to me that I did it for a half an hour every thirty minutes. It fixed it, but the finger

smelt like corned beef at the end of it. I will never forget that.

No corned beef.

I had done a lot of reading on it,

I don’t do much now but I did. I read a lot of stuff about it. One on the Boer War, a certain amount about the Punic Wars, even the Roman Wars.

Well I suppose not a lot in detail.

But as I remember it was sort of rebellion by the Boers against British rule. They were pretty good fighters too apparently. The British tried to put them down, which they did in the end, but it took a lot of effort to do it. Pretty brutal sort of a thing really, as brutal as any war. What I can get from the reading of it. But Banjo Patterson

went over as well to cover it, I have read some of his articles. In fact I have got a book in there, Banjo Patterson’s article on The Boer War.

Yes I knew one at least, he used to work with me in the Titles Office.

Well he was a gentleman really, a tall lean sort of a fellow.

Well just a gentleman that’s all I can say, he really was.

Not really. No you didn’t get much out of that at all. But I used to have, actually I had quite a few yarns with him at one time or another.

Oh not very much at all, no. In fact none of them said much. We had any number of Second World War veterans there but they didn’t say much. But on the same token there was a great thing, amongst the First World War veterans how they looked down on anyone who didn’t join up straight away.

Oh yes they were very, had that attitude.

Very pronounced.

Well I think it must go back to the great nationalism, the great pro-British attitude Australians had. Well even into this war the last war,

you know you had to do things for your King and Country. Didn’t matter whether it was right or wrong, you just did that sort of thing because the British Empire was such a great thing and you know saviour of the world and all of that sort of thing.

No.

my father did not talk much at all, he was not a conversationalist. He was a fairly acerbic sort of person that way.

Well I suppose I was at school,

primary school. And we knew things were tough because you would hear people talking about it. You would see swaggies coming around looking for a bit of food or some work or things like that. You would have the various people raising their sheep and or cattle along the roads. This is not necessarily because of a drought or anything, just to

use the grass that was available. I think there used to be a law in effect that they had to do three miles a day. That was legal, make them legal they had to do three miles a day. And you’d see them there with their wagons and horses and dogs, pretty tough life.

And you had people coming, well we weren’t on a great busy highway or anything like that but you get people wandering through looking for food. My father though being a very handy sort of a person always hod some sort of work. It wasn’t much money, not much money, but he always had some sort of a, he was never really unemployed. Other than as I mentioned before in the wintertime

he would go trapping rabbit. And he’d seal a few thousand skins at the end of the season, that was good money. You know, probably two or three times what they called the basic wage back in those days. So that sort of kept the pot boiling. And also being in the country and having a bit of land or the use of a bit of land we had the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s, we had the cows, we had a good vegetable garden, fruit trees,

with the ability that everybody used to have to preserve fruit and preserve eggs and that sort of thing. So there was no shortage of food, and there was enough clothes, that’s my family anyway. There was a few people in the district that weren’t so well off but that’s because they,

well getting back to a bit of alcohol and things like that you know. Up to a point their own fault. But things were tough for anybody, there was no doubt about that.

Yes I had a few trips to the city, but they were few.

No I didn’t see that, no. I would come down and see somebody, my mother had a friend meet her, had an aunt down there one of my fathers sisters, and we’d see her. Go on one of

the steamers down to this part of the world, paddle steamers for the day. No I can’t talk about the city and the Depression because I really didn’t see it.

No.

Well the sustenance workers, I’ll get the terms right. There were schemes afoot where people got employed to do things. One was the Great Ocean Road, that was done by what you would term the unemployed, or the normally unemployed.

Another thing up at our part of the world, well not exactly but fifty or sixty miles away the pine plantations were put in by people who were working for the dole or whatever you like to call it. Also in the, where I come from, was an old gold mining area, and there is still a lot of gold up there. It is not economical to look for it,

but in the Depression there was several people that would put up some sort of humpy on the crown land on the edge of the creeks and they would fossick for gold. And I think at this stage they might have been getting five shillings a week pension. I think that might have been the case. So they would get a little bit of gold, they could sell it, get a few pennyweights, and get a pound or two for it. Gold was

fixed price in those days, five pound an ounce. That’s how it was regulated, and it was world-wide five pound an ounce. And they you know just get in and, what they call claims. There was a lot of alluvial, it was all alluvial gold but a lot of it was got with sluicing, with water coming down

and they would get into these areas and just dig around and wash it out in pans and things like that. I remember I was a kid and I went down to the local creek, we had several of those, one of them had been dredged. Get a shovel full of sand and wash it out, there was always specks of gold there. It was just dust it was not worth anything, you couldn’t really retrieve it but it was there.

You can see the gold in the granite rocks. The granite rocks would have a stream of quartz going through it, only a little narrow thing. And you could see specks of gold in the quartz.

Actually the area was dredged, two of the creeks were dredged. They had stopped about the year I was born. But there was one more or less in its entirety about half a mile from my place,

and there was another one which was a wreck further up. When I say wreck I mean just parts scattered everywhere. We were warned not to play on this one complete, because there were certain traps to it. Of course we all had to have a look, kids do that. Any rate I think it was about 1932 some Melbourne crowd decided they would try and get some more gold further down one of the creeks,

so they refurbished the one that was almost entire, using whatever was left of the other one to make a complete. So they got it down, went down the creek further and they started dredging again, they were doing all right. When they started off they were getting about twenty ounces of gold, sorry thirty ounces

of gold a week. Which was all right. These results used to be published in the Melbourne papers, all gold used to be published in the papers. And we just seen it going down and down week by week. It got down to about twenty ounces and they closed it then because that wasn’t viable. It was still working I think, I had gone to the boarding school in 1935,

they probably started dredging it probably 1933, well it was still going when I went to boarding school but it finished after that. Actually I think my father cut wood for them for a while to feed the boilers. Steam dredge.

Yes.

Oh yes, the other thing you have got to remember too, up in the country where we were, there was no electricity too. So there was no electricity to pay for, you just used wood for heating. A bit of kerosene for lighting, sometimes petrol. So your wood was plentiful, so your heating never cost you anything.

Fuel never cost you a cent, that’s how you got away with it see? If you were in the city you would have had to pay the gas or electricity or buy the wood. See we never had to buy that sort of thing, it was just lying around. Help yourself to it. That was one of the big differences.

Well we had the use of land but we didn’t have the bigger piece at that stage. No he used to work with the local farms, building fences, carting in the hay, whatever. What do you call it? Farmers labourer type of thing. And that used to be, fence a lot of fencing. And that used to pay, back in those days it was eight shillings a day or nine shillings a day. There were two classes of work.

Six days a week, so that was forty-eight or fifty-four shillings a week. That was four to six dollars a week.

Well no, well actually two pound something a week, two pound eight shillings or two pound fourteen shillings.

And that was enough to buy the other bits and pieces that you needed, it didn’t give you riotous living by any means but you had the essentials. Trapped rabbits as I said before.

Well it was hard work, I didn’t actually I did a little bit just

five or six traps. Now I used to get up, now what did he do? He would set traps in the evening and get up very late, this is in the wintertime. And then get up very early in the morning, go around the traps, pick up the rabbits. Set them again and go around in the afternoon and get whatever was left, and set them again. They wouldn’t set them in quite the same place,

and that went on. And he had to carry the traps up in the hills, not flat country. And the traps would get, I forget how much in weighed. But on his own, he did it on his own. Other people might have two or three but he did it all on his own and he would manage about sixty traps, and you couldn’t carry sixty traps at one time

you’d have to carry a few at a time and go back and get some more. And walking in the hills, it was pretty hard work. And coming back late at night with them. He would have skun them by them. And we used to, peg the skins out was the expression. Fencing wire, the farmers, be all and end all of existence, eight gauge fencing wire.

And you cut the flanks off and you put it up in a bow. Probably about that big, about that wide in the bottom, and over the top. And you pull the rabbits from the narrow end down, and when you skun a rabbit you took the, as much skin off the back leg as you could, and then that became the tie, and you tied that around the bottom end of the

wire and you’d hang it up. The wire being steel it would push the, it was sort of a spring in a way, that would keep the skin stretched out, to leave them there until they were dry. Undercover, they weren’t out in the thing. Then when they were all dry you would put them in a sort of a bale and send them down to Melbourne to get a,

the people what were they called? Skin dealers. They used to deal with rabbits or sheepskin, cattle skin. Of course the rabbit skin was used for felt, fur felt. Of course everybody had a fur felt hat back in those days. So that’s why they were good money, a real market for them. They had to be top quality. You could sell lower quality stuff but it was hardly

worth your while doing it. And every now and again you might get rid of a few of the carcasses because every now and then somebody would come to what was called the rabbitoh, and they would buy the carcass to hawk them around the place, probably do it in the big towns. Because it was fairly big business

in places like Melbourne and Sydney. But we weren’t close enough, you couldn’t get your carcasses down to Melbourne. No refrigerated trucks or anything. And also what we used to do with a lot of the rabbits would be to boil them up and feed them to the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s. The fowls. We would cook them and them put the carcass out and the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s would pick the meat off the bones.

They loved it. Yeah so that was that. Of course that left a lot of bones lying around and you had to pick them up. The smaller backbone part of it, that would be a bit sharp on the bare feet. In the summer time we never wore any shoes. Some because they couldn’t, but it was a fashion, unless you had, well sometime unless you wore a blue blouse and were bare footed,

you weren’t in the scene at all. Yeah. What else?

Yeah that’s what I was saying then. Once in a while

somebody would come around that way and sometimes we would supply the rabbit to him. I think it used to be, I don’t know, sixpence a pair or something. Still you could buy a pack of cigarettes for sixpence too.

No, no. We weren’t, funny thing, there was no kangaroos in our area. They must have been driven out. There would have been there once, no kangaroos or emus. I had to wait a long time before I ever saw a kangaroo in the wilds. We had the wombats and things like the water rats, there was still some water rats around.

Snakes, millions of them. We had two creeks each side of where we lived, apart from the bigger one further down that I was talking about with the dredging. Well snakes everywhere, we used to have appropriate sticks everywhere around the place so if you saw a snake you could grab it to knock him on the, knock him out of existence.

Can’t do it today, protected species.

Well you looked after yourself, well kids, well many times, grab a pick, the dog, grab a bit of lunch and go up walk a mile or two over one mountain, over the next mountain, up there and get a rabbit or two and so on.

Didn’t have to go that far for rabbits, but go up there for other stuff, bush stuff. Absolute silence, pristine little stream up there that you could drink that water straight out of. Cool, coming straight out of the ground. Did that sort of thing. Sometimes you’d be off, your grandfather you’d go up with him, and he had a few acres up on one of the hills that was more or less clear

when I say more or less, that’s what I mean more or less. And Grandpa had all sorts of horses, anything from a pony up to a semi draught. And off we’d go, and as we went along he’d let out a whistle and all the neighbours dogs would join us so we’d get up there going after the rabbits. Don’t know how we ever stayed alive actually when you look back on what we used to do with the horses and so on. Sometimes no saddle.

Bareback.

Yeah.

Yes.

Oh, I don’t know that there

were many who were light horse in the area. I can’t recall any being a light horse, there were plenty of the ordinary infantry, but no light horsemen. No we wouldn’t have been, the real horsemen were on the big stations, see where we lived it was a small holding area, basically. There were a few who owned a few thousand acres

or so but that was big by our standards. Most of them only probably had oh let’s say two to five hundred acres. Whereas where the big, the great horsemen came from they had about things like a hundred thousand acres. A whole different lifestyle altogether.

See we had too many fences and all of that sort of thing. Where these people, where the light horsemen were from they would have been able to ride for miles without worrying about fences, might jump the logs or a few things like that. And they would have been wheeling the big mobs of cattle and things like that. Oh we had some good horsemen in the area, no doubt about that. One in particular was the rodeo champion of Australia. He could certainly ride a horse,

I saw him a few times. He was past his best when I saw him but oh he could ride. He could certainly stick on a horse.

Thirteen.

Kilmore.

Yeah, just a bit north of Melbourne. Thirty-five miles north of Melbourne.

Yes.

I only got taught history at the primary school. Secondary school never taught me any history.

They had a fairly limited curriculum. There, once in a while they would teach a bit of history. I think history and geography, somebody would come from another school a bit later in their life, and weren’t up in some of the subjects that were normally

taught, so they might have taught two or three a bit of history or geography I think. But I never did any history or geography at secondary school.

Well actually going from a one teacher school that had twelve students when I left, and going down to a boarding school which had numerous teachers, we were only a small

boarding school, about two hundred there. But going from twelve to two hundred was a, I quite looked forward to it, I thoroughly enjoyed it all. I felt a bit restricted up there where I was brought up from that point of view. I am not saying I had an unhappy childhood, I had a very happy childhood, really but from that point of view I felt a bit restricted.

I quite enjoyed it, whilst I was no good at sport or anything like that I could still take part in all of the activities of the place.

Well I suppose it was all pretty them and us sort of thing, depending on whether you were Protestant or Catholic.

No I am Catholic myself, my father was actually Protestant, but he did convert in the end to Catholicism. I never stuck much of it because the little district where I was brought up, it was the Irish district, it was the Catholic district.

The only church in there was the Catholic Church. I am talking about Osbornes Flat. Osbornes Flat was just a church and a school and the church hall, that’s it.

Well there was no such thing as the town. Now the next one down, Allans Flat it had a Church of England Church and a school and a hall. And the next one down,

Dagoor Flat I think it had a school. That was how that went.

Well I really can’t in as much as I was more or less constantly in a Catholic area that had very few. There was no great trouble in our particular area at all,

but there would have been in other areas. They’d have their fights and all of that sort of thing, but no we didn’t have any of that at all in our area.

Oh not much one way or another, we weren’t given any, well they weren’t denigrated let’s put it that way.

No just people that were a bit astray.

Yes.

Yes.

No I don’t know a great deal about it, I just read about it but it had no effect on me one way or the other. I wasn’t even born of course. I suppose it did cause a bit of strife between the two, I never thought of it. I know it did cause a lot of division, but I didn’t think it was as much on the religious side as on the freedom side of things.

Oh yes I suppose I think if, basically if you were a Catholic you were fairly religious back in those days. And a lot of the Protestants too were quite religious.

But what you call very religious. I think there used to be fanatics, she certainly wasn’t a fanatic. Those fanatics were worse than anybody for either side. They were the ones that caused the trouble.

Denominations yes.

I suppose they just pointed out what the differences, what was held to be true by one and what was held to be true by the other sort of thing. There wasn’t any great depth I wouldn’t think, I suppose it covered the major differences. No bigotry

about it as far as I can remember.

Oh yeah I can’t exactly quote instances but it certainly existed. There is no doubt about that but as far as I know it didn’t affect me greatly.

What I know was that it was very difficult for a Catholic to get a job in a bank, the only one that would I think would use Catholics was the National I think. And heavy industry. See all the engineers, all the engineering businesses were all very Protestant with

their employees, the public service became very Catholic because it was one of the places where a Catholic could get a job because it was a competitive exam to get in and the Catholic Colleges trained their people to pass the exam.

Well concentrated on the subjects that you had to pass to get through

I suppose that’s what it was. They really coached, I suppose it’s the same as the state schools, all schools I think. We weren’t taught to think like you younger people are at school, we were more or less taught by rote compared to what you people are today. And so we could pass the exams.

The other things that Catholics did very well was the medical profession and the legal profession. They were the top, most of the top doctors and lawyers were Catholics then.

Oh I suppose you call it working class. Or a small farming class.

One brother.

He was younger, nearly four years younger than me.

No, no. No class consciousness.

Yes.

Oh I don’t know I suppose honesty and doing your best I suppose that’s all it was.

I would say by the standards of the day I had a good education. But in retrospect not compared with what younger people get today, I’m pretty sure that the younger people today are probably two or three years ahead of us at the same age as far as knowledge and

so on goes. And what's expected of them. We were not given much chance for initiative I think that would go,

Well everything was in sort of a fixed set of rules. And I am not talking religious ones now, this is the community at large I think.

You had to conform down a pretty narrow path and you were looked down upon if you deviated a bit. You would be try and brought back into line.

See young people today have got a lot more freedom to express themselves,

I feel that is the case. Younger people mightn’t think that, but I don’t know I am no longer young I suppose.

You didn’t choose anything back in those days. You just got any job you could get. That’s about the answer to that.

Because I think there was about a higher rate of unemployment then then there is now. In fact if you got a job in the public service it was better than winning Tatts, it was considered by the public at large. See they were permanent jobs, it doesn’t exist now that sort of thing, but it was a permanent job.

Well there was no offer as such. It was just that the public service, teaching and possibly one or two others held a competitive exam in conjunction with your finals of your last year. And those who were

applied for the jobs and sat the exam then waited on results to see who got the highest marks. And there were, well the year I sat for the public service they were calling for a hundred and thirty vacancies, twelve hundred sat, only, I don’t know how many passed, but probably nine

hundred or more. One thirty got the job, and if any of those one thirty knocked the job back they didn’t go back to number one thirty-one. If only one person of that one thirty accepted the job that’s all they took on that year.

That’s just the way it was, the rules and regulation of the day.

They wouldn’t go by, whatever the vacancies they called, the cut off mark was there for passing, they didn’t get anybody out back in those days.

1939.

Well just before yeah.

Well I suppose I was still at school most of the time. We didn’t have much in the way of radio in the school, we’d just see a bit of newspaper stuff from time to time. We weren’t terribly exposed to that, in my particular instance anyway. But we were aware of it, I know there

was one particular bloke in my class he was mad keen to join the air force, even before, 1935, 36, that was his whole life. And the parents wouldn’t let him. As soon as war broke out he managed to get in, he became a pilot, killed himself in the end testing the, he became a test pilot.

He became a test pilot, testing a plane.

Yeah it was accidental yeah. I am sorry to give the wrong impression there. No he didn’t commit suicide no. But those people who were testing the planes were more or less, it wouldn’t have suited me. Because they had to put the planes through and they didn’t have the computer

projections like they have got today. As a matter of interest I consider our old time sailors, navigators to be far more dangerous mission than the people that went to the moon. Once they left shore that was the end of, they were on their own. Going to the moon they were always in touch with the earth and they could do things by computers and help fix things up.

Pour old sailors they were there on their own. They had to find their own water, they had to find their own food. They had to look after themselves, they couldn’t even find longitude.

Newsreels? I didn’t mention it did I?

I might have said newspapers. Not newsreels, although there were newsreels because being in the country, pictures weren’t on every day you know. And certainly weren’t on at boarding school. You would see a few newsreels every now and then. I can still remember seeing one

newsreel with our old planes flying over Sydney and a fellow talking about how we were prepared for war and all of that sort of thing. The things were obsolete before they were built. Really, but you know. See we had nothing at the beginning of the war, not a thing. Apart from a couple of ships, we had some good warships.

Oh I wasn’t exposed to that because I was always at boarding school. We didn’t get much of that one way or another. No I can’t really talk about that. I don’t know. You know, you knew that there was negotiations were going on and Chamberlain was doing all of his things, ensuring peace in our time and all of that sort of thing.

But that was not all believed anyway, I know that much.

Oh well he was a dictator we certainly knew that. And he was out to dominate the world that was pretty obvious. And he had built up a very efficient war machine.

That’s about all I can say about it at that stage. Before the war actually started.

Oh no, there was plenty of warning it was going to happen because of the various markers that were put out. In the end they it was if they invade Poland I think it was, they would go in and try to help. Which they did, the whole trouble was that Britain had no proper equipment or no air force, practically no army and

they still had a fairly good navy although it was getting fairly obsolete too. Although it was still the best navy in the world, no argument about that. So they were doomed to failure right from the start.

Oh I don’t know I just sort of, part of life sort of thing. It was going to happen anyway it was just inevitable. I didn’t view it one way or the other I don’t think. It was there, it was known that if Britain went to war we would go to war.

No.

Yes I think the main thing was I was never ever a strong powerful sort of a person and I don’t think I could have ever lugged what the army, between their rifle and their kit sort of thing. I would have never kept up with them.

No, no. Never in any military organization before the war. But I suppose with marining and all of that sort of thing, I had a hankering to join the navy. That was always a dream you see and I put it into practice when I eventually got a chance in the war. Don’t know if I would recommend it as a particularly great career or not.

I don’t know. No I just didn’t, I suppose it just didn’t appeal as such. Be better than the army though just the same. From my point of view.

Probably just a childhood dream sort of thing, to be a sailor.

No I don’t think I can, it’s probably reading. Probably reading some of the World War I events on the sea battles and so on.

Possibly partly that and possibly partly I suppose the [Horatio] Hornblower novels and there was another one too. Another series of old sailing ship stuff too that I used to like. I liked reading about the Romans, getting their troops from one place to another and so on. Most of them were marched but they still had

a pretty fair navy in their day. Fascination I suppose with getting across water.

Oh not really, well because there was only twelve at the school when I left to start with and that was spread over a few miles.

There weren’t many neighbours fairly close, but the one on one side had two fields that was all, and the one on the other side, their children had gone. They were more or less older people. So there wasn’t much, I think that was one of the things why I was always happy to leave home, to broaden the experience a bit.

Only the one brother.

Oh there was four years between us, it was not a question of getting it was just too much age difference. See when I went to boarding school at thirteen he was only nine, there is not much relationship between nine and thirteen, well close relationship I should say. Or empathy or whatever I should call it.

Well I suppose a fair bit of reading. I mentioned earlier chasing the rabbits and all of that sort of thing. Always helping a bit around the place too.

Well no particular chores I suppose, you milk a cow once in a while or something like that. Dig the vegetable garden or

do the weeding, whatever needed to be done to keep the household of the era going, in the country that is.

Well she was a bit older than father, she was born in 1897, I think. She was the eldest daughter of a family of nine, five girls and four boys.

And they more or less founded the district, very early settlers in the district, and she became a primary school teacher. Actually she was quite a brilliant woman in many ways, back in those days, last year of secondary school she topped the state for German.

I have got a bit of the prize left here, she chose books with the money, I can’t remember whether it was money she got or not. But I have got the, she chose books anyway. And, of course back in those days when you were married, if you were a public servant or a teacher and a woman, you had to give up work. I don’t know whether you knew that or not, but they did. Department rules. Based on the

basic wage you see. The wage was supposed to keep the man wife and two children, and you couldn’t be having the man out of work. You had to keep the men in the work so the women had to give up. So in the end she was just a country housewife doing all sorts of things around the place with the cows, whatever needed to be done. She did not go out into the fields though like some women did.

She did not go out into the field to do that type of work, other than milking cows.

Oh well I suppose. Like I said before I am probably not a real sentimental person see? We got on well yes, I am not saying we didn’t. But I think it is just my own nature,

I was not really tied, I did not need them around, I did not have to get all the affection or try to get affection all that sort of thing.

Yeah. I suppose yeah.

But I have never been the type who got homesick, my brother would. If we went away to an aunt’s place or something he would be home in two days time, and I would be working out how I could have further time away. That was the difference between us in that respect. And I quite enjoyed boarding school. Wherever I was that was home as far as I was concerned.

Well there was a lot of the, as I say I read some Hornblowers, I think, adventure stories, travel stories. And then a bit later on I got onto a bit of detective stories. And then a bit later on a lot of archaeology stuff, former civilisations and things like that.

I never knew and I have never found out yet what I would have liked to have done.

Well I suppose I have always wanted to be someone important but I didn’t have enough drive or ambition to be that. No I

got, as I say I still don’t know what I would have liked to have done. I could have done a lot of things, could have qualified, not engineering. I am not quite the mathematical type. I could have done anything from law, accounting, commerce, even science. In fact I probably could have made it as a scientist.

Any rate whatever I didn’t do it didn’t affect my progress up what they call the corporate scale these days, the corporate ladder. And I did quite well. Just what I would have liked to have done, no idea.

Oh well

it’s what you do it is just part of your life, you are just taught the religion in almost a matter of fact way.

Yeah still do for that matter. Majority of it anyway.

No just another part of my life.

Oh I found a niche pretty much straight away and quiet enjoyed the whole thing.

Yeah majority, that will be always the case though won’t it?

No too slight for that. Too small for fighting. Discretion is a better part of valour.

At school? Whilst I was no good at it, there was always plenty at that school of football, cricket, handball, tennis. And in the wintertime

there was marbles too. In the wintertime there was always footballs to kick, like they were there. And we had a sports afternoon on Wednesdays and sports on the Saturday. There’d be cricket or tennis, and then there was handball at other times or the tennis championship. Not that I got into those but

then of course you had to raid the apple orchard didn’t you? There was no shortage of things to do in that regard because there was always a bat and ball around, available. So it was, I think most any thing, there was cricket practice and football practice.

I suppose you’re regimented but just the same we were happy enough to do it.

No that was one of the things that we missed out on the social skills. That was totally lacking and that was probably the big drawback of the school. In those days.

At school? No the whole thing was boys only, no interaction with the opposite sex. That was probably common in all secondary schools.

Oh you might see them. But there was no fraternisation. No meeting them as such.

You asked me this to incriminate myself didn’t you? Yes quite often actually.

Well we had to go and buy a cigarette or two didn’t we?

That’s about all, nothing dreadful. No damage to anybody or anything like that.

Oh I suppose it was when we were kids and they used to grow tobacco in the area. Used to get a leaf and roll it up as a cigar, stink like hell but. Yeah.

Oh not much at all, just to break the rules I think, not much at all.

No, not at all.

No.

Oh yes.

Oh they would be baked or stewed.

I did then but I don’t like them now. I did then, I quite liked a nice bit of rabbit.

Oh see well I was just turning seventeen, see I had a birthday in January and I left school just before I turned seventeen.

No that’s where I had about six months working around with my grandfather on the farm. Then I got that six weeks teaching, and then I went to the Titles Office.

See teaching back in those days was apprenticeship, I don’t know whether you realised that. You went out one year, the year started and you spent the next year teaching under supervision of course, you always had another teacher in the class. And then you went to teacher’s college for twelve months, and then you were a qualified teacher. So it was basically a three year apprenticeship. Up to three year apprenticeship,

but certainly more than two.

Never ever wanted to be a teacher, I just got conned into it by the teaching relations.

Oh well yes naturally.

You had to live in the world then didn’t you?

I suppose I might have done a bit of dancing, or sometimes might even play a sport. Whilst I didn’t play much because I am not good enough, but you’d go along with a particular football team or tennis or.

We were never pushed for anything to do, we were always able to make our own fun, one way or another.

Oh I don’t know, they are quite a bit of fun, quite enjoyable. If we got on all right we’d take one out every now and again. You

couldn’t afford do it it much, there was no money at all. See when I first started work, and I am talking about Melbourne now, I paid board. I got thirty-five shillings a week, of which a little bit went out on superannuation, I think twenty-five shillings went out on board, a certain amount went out on a

weekly train ticket, I got threepence left. Three cents left. So you didn’t get far on that kind of money did you?

Oh yes I suppose there was a certain amount of difficulty in a way. You weren’t sure how to,

I suppose how to really talk. Probably one of the worst features of the whole era. Not just my particular school, probably the whole situation throughout society, probably kept people segregated as much as they could. Admittedly in some of the other areas it wasn’t so strict as we,

well wasn’t so much strict, you were just kept in two different places, that’s about all it amounted to.

Girl? Not really no.

Oh probably well once a year, probably not much more than that because you only got to leave once a year anyway, and also the cost, time and the cost.

41.

Flinders Naval Depot.

Yes.

Oh there was no effect

at all as far as I was concerned I was down there to do the training.

Oh well that was obvious. I suppose it was a bit of a surprise, but as far as affecting me, I wouldn’t think. No real effect on me.

No not really. I wasn’t close to that. No didn’t affect me either.

A submarine detector?

Well that was out at Rushcutters depot, a certain amount of time in class doing the theory of it all and a certain amount of time on a simulator. It had the same sort of control as what is actually on a ship and they were able to simulate a submarine in the thing, and you were able to listen to the echoes that came back and interpret

whether they were, you had to do it on the pitch. The Doppler effect to tell whether the submarine was stationary, or more or less travelling with you at the same speed or going away from you or coming towards you.

Doppler effect is a, it causes a difference in the tone. An echo goes out and hits something,

let’s say it is a metallic object because that is what we are talking about, it comes back at a certain pitch. Now that pitch is either higher or lower than the tone you are sending out. If it is higher then you have got something that’s moving and is coming towards you, if it is a lower pitch then it is going away from you.

Yes. From an object. You can get it from a reef, you can get it from a whale. You wouldn’t get it from mines, mines were too small. But you could get it from a submarine, you could get it from a sunken ship for that matter, same sort of pitch as a submarine but with a certain amount of mucking around you could determine that that was a stationary object.

Not that submarines couldn’t stay stationary, but also most wrecks were charted anyway. The skipper would just have a look at the charts to see if it was a known wreck or not.

Yes had earphones on.

Yeah well you see that’s, actually we used this submarine detection stuff up north in formerly uncharted waters to keep the ship off the coral reefs. We would steer clear of any echoes we got which were obviously a reef.

We didn’t go and inspect them or anything, we did that later on a bit with the surveying. But we didn’t use the anti-submarine gear for that we used something else. So that was one of the side effects of having anti-submarine gear on, you could keep your ship safer in a reefy area that you didn’t know where the reef were.

Well it was housed in a dome under the ship, and you could raise or lower the dome, and it had a crystal which when electrically agitated would send out the sound. And the sound would relay to us in our

earphones, and sound travels through water I think at about five thousand feet per second. Through the air is about eleven hundred, but about five thousand feet per second. So we used to send it out for three seconds. We used to work on three thousand yards, because a torpedo back in those

days was only accurate from about three thousand yards out. And also it worked on how long it takes to fire a torpedo out of a submarine. So we would send out an echo for three thousand yards, and then it would come back and it would come back and go out again. So

you got six seconds, I think it took a submarine eight seconds or something like that to do it. And the beam used to go out at an eight degree angle, eight degrees wide. But we used to sweep in five degree things, we used to always overlap three degrees. You would start say in the centre and you were given orders to sweep, the standard thing was sixty degrees each side of the ship.

so you are able to focus like that and back like that. You used to do it for an hour on and three hours off. Couldn’t concentrate on it for more than an hour, they reckoned. They were pretty right too. By the same token we never got much sleep either. We might only work six hours but

we always got less than three hours sleep at any given time.

Well take you a few minutes to get to bed, got to get up a few minutes beforehand don’t you?

Yes. There were four submarine detectors on our ship, and one well they called him a higher submarine detector, he was probably the mechanic that looked after the equipment. He

was trained to do the detection too but he had done an extra course on the mechanical side of it so that he could repair it if anything went wrong.

Yes.

Well then down to the ship, had to wait a month or two. Straight to that ship. I

Stayed on that ship then for the next three years plus.

That was the Echuca.

Well that was probably around the bay here when we ere doing some of the trials. Got sick of course.

Well it was built in Melbourne, that was before it was actually handed over, it would have had all of the civilians

like the builders on the ship too. It was pretty rough. Because the boats handle pretty rough, I suppose you are quite aware of that, and six or eight hundred tons, not much ship.

Well the submarine detection cabin where you worked, was up on the bridge. Up on the what do you call it? The, where are we? Just in there. Probably about –

Oh, oh, yeah.

It’s on the bridge, not more or less. Right in one corner of the bridge. So that’s where it was. And it was only a small thing, a steel thing.

It had an opening on your left or the port, so you could talk out to the people on the bridge, and a door behind you. And it was probably about that wide, that high, and about the same amount of depth sort of thing. About three foot six square.

A bit more perhaps, no not really. And it had a sort of a seat to sit on, you weren’t standing you were sitting and steering this thing around. And up on the tropics at night time, like there I had to have a light on because we had an iodised screen in front of us that tracked that,

with a stylus going in front of it, that was tracking the echo going out and the sound, and any echo that might come back and it had a scale that would tell you how far away it was.

Yes.

That’s right it did that yeah. So where you had lights in the night time,

you weren’t allowed lights so we used to, especially up in the tropics, they used to drape flags over us. You can imagine in the stinking hot tropical night where you have got not even a breath of air in the place. We used to be pouring with perspiration. Wasn’t the most pleasant job in the world, but I suppose that’s what I volunteered for

didn’t I? When I wanted a holiday in Sydney.

Oh testing the ship to see that everything was working. And that was more done by the civilians, not the navy as such. To make sure that the engines

would get up to their speed, whatever that was. Just that it worked that’s all.

Very little. Well we weren’t there to do it, the civilians were doing that, the builders.

I got seasick there. That was true. In fact I got seasick every time we went out for about the first three months. Except if I was able to be in bed, in the hammock having a sleep when we went to sea. If I had the sleep as I was going to sea, out to sea it didn’t matter what the ship did much I was quite all right.

Not really no, some people were dreadful. Some had to get kicked off the ship in the end. I have seen somebody that was literally green with seasickness, you have heard that expression, well it can happen. It’s not a bright green, it’s a sickly

grey yellow green. Ugly looking colour.

Oh I can’t quite remember, but it wasn’t long after though that we had, provision the ship. That’s right I forgot about that we had to provision the ship with all of the food and that on board

and you know other recruitments that go with putting a ship permanently to sea. That took a day or two I suppose. Well then we headed out through the heads and headed up to Sydney like I said earlier. Pick up a bit more stuff, couple more crew and off we went.

I think it might have been Cairns.

Well it certainly was Cairns, but I can’t remember, we did, we pulled into Coffs Harbour on the way because we found a barge loose in the sea and we picked it up and towed it in. But that was unscheduled sort of thing. Otherwise I can’t remember if we pulled into Townsville or not, we went to Townsville a few times but Cairns was

a more operational base from our point of view. For a while, then, I suppose it was most of the time we were up north. Not that we came back once a week, not even once a week, but if we come back for a bit of a break it was Cairns that we come back to. And we went up to Port Moresby as I said earlier, Milne Bay and around the tip.

Don’t think we got to Wewak as Serge [interviewer] mentioned, but a lot of the others. What were we talking about the – really? Lost the thread of it.

Well to some extent because I lived on the border of New South Wales didn’t I?

No, no I hadn’t been. I wouldn’t have been. Other than those hops across the border of course.

Oh I don’t know that it was any great, I suppose there was a certain amount of trepidation. But we were young and silly, and indestructible, what do you call it? Invincible. And all that sort of thing. Even though we didn’t have much of a ship as far as fighting qualities went.

We were never in doubt that we wouldn’t be

hurt or invaded. I remember coming back to Sydney after a while up there to realise just how fearsome the local population were. They were dreadful really.

Yeah.

Oh I suppose that might not be the word. But they were really worried and upset and fearful

that they were going to be knocked off sort of thing. But we didn’t have any, well I didn’t, I don’t think anybody else on the ship did either, have any worries about that. I suppose we were getting our supplies. We might have run out of bread once or twice or something like that, particularly when the flour went bad.

Oh we were well informed. Yes that was one thing the navy did, they kept you pretty well informed what was going on anywhere.

As I say I was down in the Flinders Naval Depot at that stage,

but I wasn’t having much contact with the civilian, no it hadn’t hit home then I don’t think that, to the population at large. It was only a bit later when Darwin got bombed and that kind of thing. And then the submarines came into Sydney, little submarines came into Sydney and Newcastle got shelled and things like that.

No. It was just a war, we were out there.

Glad I never joined the army. Particularly when you saw the mountains, up there in the jungle. Actually we never landed, we never went ashore. The only ones that went ashore

was those that had to get a few supplies. Because we were kept away as far as possible from getting malaria. Not getting mosquito bitten. And we were always saying that we hardly ever tied up at a wharf, we would drop anchor out of range of the mosquitoes. Sort of thing. Although we did tie up to a palm tree once, I think it was at Medang, there was nothing, it was too deep to drop an anchor.

I don’t know what the hell we had to wait there for, but we were there tied up to a palm tree.

Oh it was convoy, nearly always convoy. That was the big thing when we first went out there, running convoys from Port Moresby to Milne bay, Milne Bay to Lae and Buna and whatever else. Can’t remember the names now but around there.

No we saw the planes fly over. No as I said we had a fairly peaceful war. If you can call any war peaceful, we were in the areas but we were always in the area that was being ignored by the Japanese at the time. You know a day this way or a day that way, no we didn’t do too badly there.

Yeah. Our biggest fear or worry on a corvette was when you were looking for submarines, if one came to the surface, or if one came to the surface you were an inferior ship.

Because we, a Japanese submarine was a big submarine by world standards in those days. And they had a 5.9 inch gun, top speed of twenty-one knots. We had a four inch gun and a top speed of sixteen knots which meant that we could neither outgun or outrun them. So we were quite keen that they stayed below where we would have had the upper hand with depth charges.

Well you never know. Well you say you never know. Not on the surface no, and as I say allegedly we were supposed to have sunk one off the coast of New Britain sometime on one of the patrols. We weren’t convoying at that time. But when we came back to do one of the convoys off our east coast, we were one of the, quite lucky in a way in that every time, as an example,

a northbound convoy was attacked we were taking one south and vice versa. They certainly were attacking, I think we lost sixty odd ships from memory.

No, no.

Not really, bit fortunate in that regard. As I say I had a peaceful war.

Well when you are at sea in the height of the war you always had your anti-submarine gear going. But down off the east coast that was well charted, we weren’t worried about reefs there, it was only up around the, around New Guinea, Milne Bay, Lae all of those places. Around where

the charts as I say were either too old, or in some places there was no charts. So it was a question of going where there wasn’t an echo. If you got a metallic echo that was a different matter, you would be looking for the submarine then. But if you got, the duller stuff well it could have been anything, we just assumed they were coral reefs because there wouldn’t be much else

to do it. So we steered where there was no, we steered away from the echo, the dull echo. You get a more muffled type of tone. With the merchant ship following us, because a lot of the stuff we did up there was only us and one ship. And generally in most cases we would lead and the ship would follow us. At night time

we had a very muted purple light or mauve light on the stern of the ship, right over the stern. And the merchant ship could see that but it wouldn’t be visible from the air you know, from any great distance. The merchant ship was probably two hundred yards or something behind.

Well I suppose,

Port Moresby sometimes. Then once in a while we would go back to Cairns to get something probably done to the ship or something. But Milne Bay, we used to get supplies at Milne Bay sometimes, but we never landed at these places. We always anchored far enough away to avoid mosquitoes.

At a time? Well that depended, I think from memory we could spend two weeks at sea at economical speed and then we would run out of oil. But every now and again if we were on different things we would meet an oiler at sea and I think the longest we ever spent at sea was six weeks.

Oh, Port Moresby or back to Cairns I suppose. As I say it depended on what you were doing.

We would land at Cairns, but we never ever landed at New Guinea, apart from those who had to go ashore to organise supplies.

Oh very rarely, I think

mainly overnight leave. I think once, twice we got two or three days. I know I went to Innisfail once but there wasn’t much. See we called in at Townsville a couple of times too, had a few days there at one stage. And we wanted to go to somewhere. Charters Towers I think it was. A couple of us went up to the railway station and asked when was the next train to Charters Towers?

The railway bloke looked at us and said, “Which one do you want? Yesterday or today’s? Yesterday is not here yet.” So we didn’t go to Charters Towers.

I am blowed if I know. I have been there since. But it was just to get away from the, actually the particular Townsville was a dreadful place from our point of view during the war, because the whole thing was overrun by troops,

particularly the Americans. I am not talking about nationalities here I am just talking about the fact that there was, everything was swamped by both troops, all of our troops. Mainly Americans, a lot of Australian troops too. When you have got another hundred sailors coming in who didn’t know their way around like everybody else, well it was a bit of a dead loss.

Used to meet a few sailors yes, because sometimes we would be tied up beside them.

Well that’s where one lived when one was doing the anti-submarine course.

Yeah.

Well it was a bit of a dive in a way in as much as, we had to find rooms and they were pretty dreadful sorts of things. But still we were young and we were enjoying ourselves. We weren’t worried about accommodation as such.

Oh well it was still the home for the brothels and things like that. Pretty sleazy sort of a place, really.

Oh we would go to the pictures once in a while. Yes when I was doing the anti-submarine course, there was one bloke in the course I was fairly friendly with, he actually lived in Sydney

he was a Sydney person. That’s why he did the course. So I spent a bit of time in his company doing things around Sydney. You know what a normal tourist type of person would do. As much as you could do that in the time where things were fairly limited.

Oh well you’d get yourself across to Manly,

or you know, get yourself on the ferries. Wasn’t a great lot of stuff to do.

Not on your life.

One wanted to stay healthy didn’t one?

No rumours or stories, they were facts.

Byes, oh yes. That was done in the, even that was done at one stage at Flinders Naval Depot.

In what way?

Oh they gave us a bit of a lecture on the various venereal

diseases. And because we were getting involved in the Pacific they gave us pretty strict warning keep away up there because the diseases up there.

Well they mentioned the venereal diseases

in the tropics. Well you didn’t want to catch those because there was nothing known about them at this stage. So they didn’t really have treatment for them. They were probably somewhat different, or if not different they had different features. Pretty severe warnings about interacting there.

Oh yes quite a number used to.

Yes.

Yeah they got treatment. I am not talking about the tropics I mean we never went ashore there. But no, they got around Brisbane, Sydney, Townsville, Cairns, whatever it was. Actually those days, it

probably still is, Queensland brothels were licensed.

Oh I think Queensland was the only place where they were licensed.

I wouldn’t say that no. Violence is a fairly new thing in Australia as far as I can see. Of course there is always

something, right throughout history some is going to get violent. But no it wasn’t a general thing by any means.

Oh yes because, we were put into three watches.

In the normal, I am different because I am a submarine detector, but ships either ran on two watches or three watches, which meant they were more or less eight hours on and eight hours off. Well it must have, ships always went on four hours. Four hours on and four hours off and the dog watch to stagger the hours. If you went three watch you got four hours on and eight hour off.

We were in three watches, and of course you, if you had a watch that had the eight hours off yes you got some time to do that sort of stuff. Yes, because if you only had the four hours on and four hours off, well the four hours, by the time you ate and things like that you didn’t have, and do other things like do your washing and things like that, well you didn’t have so much time.

But the three shift watch was quite good.

Oh well I suppose a bit of reading, a bit of the card game gambling I suppose. Some used to play mah-jong. A lot of the handy people, they would make things, they would get sea

shells and decorate those. One bloke used to do with macramé. Have you heard of macramé? He used to do lots of stuff, like watch bands and, a watchband there like that, in the tropics at sea, would last about two weeks. Rot out. So we used to make these macramé things and thread them through.

He’d sell them, they’d make a bit of money out of it. At one stage even I and another person ran what you’d call the dhobiing business, that’s what you call the washing. You get a set scale of charges, all approved, nothing to have a flap about, so we did that for a while.

Yes oh yes. Everything had its price. Set price list out, approved by the skipper

and all of that sort of thing.

No the navy didn’t play two-up. But there was you know housie housies, what do they call it?

Bingo. Well that’s called Tombola too. Tombola. That was legal in the navy and was played

at times. And there was ten percent profit made went to the canteen fund, ship’s canteen fund.

Can’t remember. I had one I know, I had my twenty-first I was at Maryborough, I wasn’t at sea. When I say Maryborough, that’s Queensland Maryborough.

I suppose I must have.

There were no celebrations. No. Ever, like for that sort of thing no.

Oh yes a couple of minor ones. Can’t quite remember, I think somebody might have done something with a hatch, didn’t quite fall down on

but got jammed, I don’t know I can’t quite remember but I think there was some sort of an accident. Another time somebody fired a bullet out of a gun that was not supposed to be loaded, a machine gun. That ricocheted off the deck, but didn’t hurt anybody.

Basically very good I thought myself. But there was a time when we got a relieving skipper on board and he upset the apple cart. In fact I think he more or less went out in disgrace. Better not put that down too much.

I don’t know what happened.

But I know things weren’t very happy for a while there, I can’t quite remember what it was. I think it affected some people more than me somehow, I wasn’t too worried about it. But they were pretty good sort of skippers just the same.

I suppose a certain amount of solace and that sort of thing. But the navy had got the message, it didn’t last long.

Well as I said earlier there was no real mateship in the navy as such because you are kept moving so often. But it is literally, you are all in the same ship so you have got to look after one another, which you did.

We did that.

I suppose home, that’s about it,

yeah I think that’s about all it meant to me as such those days. Yeah.

I suppose just a big country, part of the British Empire I suppose.

Well never having been to Britain, I couldn’t compare that. Yes it would have to be different, but how I didn’t know at that stage.

Oh yes I am pretty sure of that.

I think the conception of distance and things like that. You know Britain is such a small place, they couldn’t imagine the distances and I don’t think we could imagine such a crampedness.

Basically speaking yeah.

Oh I am not a particularly flag waving person no. I just sailed and as I say home.

Oh not all the time. On and off, they would know a fair bit about it, but they wouldn’t have got a full

commentary like you are getting today sort of thing.

Not particularly I wouldn’t think, no.

In what way?

I have no idea. Wouldn’t been in awe, that wouldn’t be the right thing.

Well it didn’t start off as a just war, it didn’t finish as a just war. It was just one that had to be fought in the end. There is some wars never should be fought and others have got to be. I think this one had to be fought.

Oh probably didn’t have much of an opinion then, one way or the other. Just going along with it, you’re young, you’re not thinking in depth about anything.

Oh there is one particular chap, he is dead now, but yeah I got friendly with him. Now I have got a few others, see we meet, we have a biannual reunion up in Echuca on the odd years. And then in the even years

all corvette reunions are held in one of the capital cities. And one way or another, I am now quite friendly with a number of people who are still alive off the ship, some who were on the ship the same time as me, some were later. Even after war some of them. See the reunion consists of any crew that ever served on a particular ship. And I think that may have stayed in

Australian hands on and off, when I say on and off sometimes out of commission, sometimes it wasn’t. I think it was 1950 when it was given to New Zealand and used as a training ship for some time.

In what way?

I suppose the one that I was talking about, friends for a time. He first came on the ship, I remember him coming on, he was a very young, he was I think just seventeen. You could join the navy at seventeen, if you had got your parents’ permission. And he looked so, I had been on the ship for a while, I had been in the navy for a year or two then. And he looked so sort of, for a while I thought he’s a bloke that needs a bit of looking after.

I did that for a while and then he found his own feet. He didn’t stay on the ship a great deal of time and then he went off, I think he went to the Shropshire, he finished up getting injured on Shropshire. And, it shattered his life, there is no doubt about that, he had to get out of work about fifty or a bit after. And he died a couple of years ago, that was cancer. That wouldn’t have a great,

direct result of the war I wouldn’t think. I think it was cancer. But just the same he was a TPI [totally and permanently incapacitated pensioner], so he was regarded as pretty seriously wounded at the time.

Oh I suppose it was always in the back of your mind, but it certainly wasn’t paramount no. it wasn’t a

topical thought at all.

Ignored it I suppose. I didn’t, didn’t have a great effect on me one way or another as far as I know.

Not really.

Oh well I suppose that’s going on all

of the time isn’t it? Yeah. Part of your life.

What do you mean by difficult? Dangerous or hard work or?

Well I suppose any of the convoys were dangerous enough, potentially anyway. I suppose the one I didn’t like the most, I helped chisel coral away from an air force craft that ran itself aground. Air sea rescue craft. That was blooming hard work up in the tropics. Cold chisel from the coral.

An air sea rescue craft, yeah. Air force was speeding it through, it was the Great Barrier Reef, actually. Speeding it through the reef flat out with no skills for boat handling. Put it right up on a coral reef. Oh God.

Well we had to go down, we didn’t get it off, we didn’t have time.

We got called somewhere else and someone else came down. What we had to do, first of all we had to refloat it. First of all we tried to get a line out to it, to do that you float a heavy line out or a strong line out on a coir rope. That’s a type of grass that they wind into rope. It’s got no strength in it but it floats.

So you could tie a strong line to that and float it out. Well that kept breaking a couple of times, the coir would break and of course the other thing would sink. Eventually we got it there but we couldn’t get it off, it was too much stuck. It would have done too much damage. So we had to go out and try to start chewing it off. That’s where we left, that’s when we got called away to some other duty, wouldn’t know what other duty we went to

but we got called away. They probably wanted another type of ship down that couldn’t do what we were going to do.

Well they were pretty good warriors. They had a good navy and an air force. Just the whole armed forces was good. They were fanatical of course. Life didn’t mean anything,

didn’t appear to me to mean anything to them. Theirs or anybody else’s for that matter. But we didn’t think they were invincible at any stage, well I never. It was just a question of time before we got them back.

Oh whatever was going on. We were quite well informed, probably not in detail like a lot of people might have been. Like people in the well what do you call it? Not management, but whoever was running the war sort of thing, but no we probably knew much more than civilians knew.

Well the navy gave us more information, particularly the naval stuff. See any battles that went on we a few days later we knew the details of the battle. Even the lowest of us, we were just told.

Oh I don’t know about that.

quite I suppose an interruption, a different interruption to life, you know you had to re-adjust to all sorts of things. No, I wouldn’t say there was any great memories one way or the other.

I suppose some of the family events are probably stronger.

Well we had one boy that was quite sick, got a kidney thing and he nearly died. And two of them got run over by a, he and one other brother together got run over by a truck, that sort of thing. The one that was crook anyway, he was only minor. But the other son he lost all of his ankle

scrubbed off down there sort of thing.

Oh no not really. I think one dreams about all sorts of things at times, and it probably popped up once or twice. But not in any frightening or threatening or disturbing way.

No. I often have dreams of some sort, I can’t remember what they are of course.

Oh nothing in particular, they were just one other arms of the defence forces.

Oh not to a great extent. You would have a casual conversation in a pub or something but nothing special.

Oh yes some of those things were beautiful, no doubt about that. That’s, what they call the China Straits where Milne Bay and

Samarai Island, have you heard of those? Well that’s magnificent. Had to be a fine day, we sailed through it many times, and if it was a sunny day everybody that possibly could would be out having a look. Actually we used to train any eyepiece we could on the mainland. Telescopes, even the guns sometimes, through the sites. All the little,

the water coming down, you can’t see it with the naked eye but the water coming down, little cascades of water coming down the side of the mountain. And the other thing of the blue of the sea, I can quite describe the colour, but the magnificent colour of the sea, not necessarily, sometimes it would be blue and then go into green and all of that sort of thing. And the beautiful white sand, probably about a hundred yards of sand,

and then the grove of coconut palms just above the sea level. And then the sheer rise of the Owen Stanleys going up, oh it was magnificent. Yeah, and Samarai Island, and hundreds of other little islands on the other side, you wouldn’t really know that it wasn’t a solid land mass. They were just little miniatures of the mainland. They weren’t

tall or anything, they were just small islands. But quite magnificent. Because the Barrier Reef I think it was better than it is today. Its not that long since I have had a look at the Barrier Reef, and even the time before when I saw it I thought it’s not that colourful as it used to be. I don’t know if that is time or a younger brain thinking, I don’t know. But I am sure it’s not as good.

The fish are still there, you can still see the beautiful types of fish. But the coral is not so nice, although there is nothing worse than coral that hasn’t got any water on it. Dirty, filthy grey stuff. Not very kind to your hands or your feet, particularly when you have got to chip it away.

Well that’s what we were doing on that boat I was talking about.

Yeah but we were chipping at it before we got called away.

Oh purely hand, chisel and hammers. There was no powerful tools.

Yes once in a while we would go swimming. For example up at Merauke, the ship had gone in that we had been escorting, we were at anchor. Well we would

go swimming there sometimes. You’d have to do it at low tide of course. Even though you might have been way away from land, but still the tide was running. And they used to man the Oerlikon guns to – would frighten the sharks off if they saw them in the water. I think it wouldn’t have been effective because we had a few shots at sharks and you could see the bullets

exploding on them, it didn’t phase the sharks. Because the shark would be just a few inches under water, and of course the bullet just ricocheted off. You could do it if it was straight down, we are not much more that sea level, only a foot or two above the shark sort of thing. So I don’t think it would have been very effective.

Yeah.

With this particular ship we did yes because it was perfect trawling speed. In fact we even made it part of the lookout’s duty to give ‘ahoy!’ if the swordfish got on the caught. And then the sport began, we’d get the soakers out and turn the power on in the great big mine sweeping winch and haul it in. That’s

No. It was just, we were really searching for the submarines and keeping a lookout for any aircraft or anything like that. We had radar too at that stage. We were much better equipped in many ways than what some of the merchant ships were. Perhaps probably all of the merchant ships back in those days because the, I don’t think any merchant ship would have had radar.

Well you just missed them. That’s a funny thing, there was not much you could do about it of course some of the others might have done something, I didn’t. But it was amazing when you got back, particularly from one of those long periods at sea that I mentioned earlier. When you got back

even the sight of a woman was a real thrill actually. It’s amazing how you miss them when they are not around sort of thing.

When? That was after the war, back in 1949, I suppose.

Where? Well actually I probably first met her at a party at a mutual friend’s place.

But I had nothing to do with her then, I just remember her being there. And this particular friend then, we used to have balls in those days, and he said, “Oh look we are going to the ball.” he had a girlfriend then. He said, “We are going to the ball and she’s got a girlfriend and she’s got nobody to take her, what about it?” And I kept [UNCLEAR] because I had already been to two or three balls and I was getting a bit broke at that stage because I found them expensive, the balls. In the end

I sort of relaxed and said I’d take her. Sort of a blind date and that was that, carried on from there. First girl I met that I felt I could always be natural with, didn’t have to put on an act, I don’t know whether you understand that or not.

Just on

forty, when did she die? 1993, forty-three years, not quite forty-four in May. A few weeks short of forty-four.

Do you?

Oh sometimes, I forget where it was but it wasn’t

the YMCA. Every major city had a centre for entertainment of servicemen.

I can’t remember where we went to in Sydney but we went there sometimes, mainly a form of dance or something like that.

Oh yes well it was the girls I suppose that organised it, because they probably needed some male

company too. All the males were away and they were at home.

Some areas yes. Some areas they did in the end yes that’s true. You couldn’t do anything in Townsville, I think I mentioned that before. It was just overrun by troops. At that stage in the poor place

there was probably three or four times more servicemen than there was residents. It was a dreadful place for a small visiting ship to call in.

No Townsville.

No Sydney was all right. Big enough for, Melbourne and Sydney were big enough to cope with that.

I don’t know they would have thought it that back in those days. No the whole idea of it was to give the service personnel a place where they could go and have a bit of relaxation, with the opposite sex I suppose. And get a suppertime meal that was a bit different than you get in the forces.

Well, in general, I would say yes.

Oh I don’t know about that. It would have been different, different attitude to the whole thing.

Well that’s what I am not too sure about. I suppose we were a bit more shy of one another. And I suppose you wouldn’t have got around to

a bit of a cuddle for a little while if it was going to be on at all. The whole thing is much more casual these days. More open,

No I think there was a lot against the old ways, but probably a lot against the new ones. There is a happy medium but very

rarely would you find it anywhere. It’s either one way or the other I think. That’s my opinion any rate.

I suppose

the American troops would have represented a new experience for our ladies. They would have treated our ladies differently, I think that’s what it was more than the sexual side, I think it was just a new experience. And also the Americans weren’t suffering the rationing that we were suffering, not that ours were great by say German or British standards

but the Americans didn’t have any rationing, not even anything. They didn’t ration petrol in America. They could get these goods that weren’t available, if they were available to us at all you needed a coupon to get them. So that’s where the, the advantage they would have had, they could get things freely whereas we couldn’t.

Yeah it would have been the same if the British were out here in great force. They were different because they were from a different country. Certain different customs and things like that.

I suppose to a point in as much as the Americans had far more money to spend than we did. That

would have been part of it.

Oh we didn’t worry about it, I didn’t anyway. I had enough to get by, do what I wanted to do.

Well if I wanted to have a beer I could have a beer, if I wanted to go to a picture show I could go to a picture show. If I wanted to take a girl out or had one available I could take one out yeah. I wasn’t too worried about it.

Sydney? Just a big city.

Oh well, we weren’t really on the social scene. You’ve got to be a resident to be on the social scene.

Well I suppose when I first got there it was different to Melbourne, you know difference.

Well in the first place I hadn’t seen it before so that would make it different in the first place. It was the general layout of it. There is no layout to Sydney, whereas Melbourne was planned.

Sydney followed the bull tracks, just built the buildings where they could to start with. They’ve got a beautiful harbour, there is no doubt about that. The bridge is quite an outstanding piece of engineering.

Well I had six months. When I did the anti-submarine course I probably had four months there then. But then when we were doing the convoys off the east coast Sydney was the only point of call. If we were going up to Brisbane we would drop the ship off at Caloundra Head,

and it would go up the river with some other ship looking after it, or ships. And if we were coming down to Melbourne, we’d come down to Wilson’s Promontory, and then the convoy would be taken in by another ship just coming to Melbourne. That particular ship never left Melbourne you see. And they’d bring the convoy out and we’d take it back to Sydney or vice versa. We never went into

Brisbane or Melbourne. We went into Brisbane at a later time but I never went back to Melbourne. And I never got around to Adelaide or Perth in the navy.

Yeah.

Anti-Submarine Defence Investigative Council [Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee]. The Poles discovered this device sometime after the First World War, offered it to France and Britain. They accepted it and they started testing it, the French in the Mediterranean and the

British in the North Sea. Independently they weren’t jointly as far as I know. And because of the nature of the war in the Mediterranean it wasn’t particularly successful. But out in the North Sea where the British were testing it proved to be successful enough for them to adopt it. It was

the differences in the temperature of the water in the Mediterranean. Some parts were hot. Some parts were, quite a few degrees different and that could bounce the sound waves anywhere.

How did I decide to do it do you mean or what?

Well they called for volunteers, and as I told you earlier I volunteered to get a holiday in Sydney I didn’t volunteer to become a submarine detector strictly. And having volunteered they put us through, oh I suppose you would call it an aptitude test and an IQ test. I had never heard or seen them before.

Well quite a lot of us were put into a thing, had questions fired at us, it was a multi answer thing there, you had to do a tick or something. Other things I can’t remember. One thing I remember is having to read a clock in a mirror quickly. I can still half remember the first question that I didn’t even attempt to answer

and it goes something like this. There were four ships I think, I think that was it. One ship has got three masts, one’s got two and one’s got something else, you know. What’s the answer. And I can’t remember what you were supposed to do, but I just didn’t know what to expect you see? And that sort of left me flat-footed, but I had enough presence of mind to say well so that’s what it is all

about, forget that question. Wait for the next question and be ready for it. So I did that. Passed it. I can’t remember what everything was. Certainly there was that and there was another type of aptitude or IQ test but I can’t remember, I think it might have been testing your mental arithmetic thing as much as anything. Which would have been no trouble

to me, mental arithmetic sort of things.

Oh only for the

anti-submarine things and the detection of a reef as I mentioned earlier. It didn’t aid the ship in any other way. It’s just,

Well we got credit for sinking one. There were other things where you might have had one, you might not you don’t know.

Well we were on patrol with another ship. I think the other ship might have got the echo first. I wasn’t on the machine at the time. For me I forget where I was on

the ship at the time. I would have been at an action station, I can’t remember which particular one. Probably somewhere to supply guns with ammunition or something. They tried to keep us away from an actual gun as far as possible because of the effect it might have on your ears. So you got the echo on the machine, and

then you go toward it. And the echo merges with the thing at about two hundred yards so you’re really blind for about two hundred yards. So you more or less continue on the same path, and when you think you have done two hundred yards you spread out a pattern of depth charges. And a depth charge exploding under water doesn’t have to be very close to a

submarine to be pretty damaging. So I forget what we put over, probably five or six at a time, and then the other ship would have been removed back to have another run, they would do the same and then we would be back again.

You are sort of circling yeah. But keeping out of one another’s way.

And then eventually oil come up and things like that, and we got credit for doing it. As I say we never wanted to see one on the surface.

They were far more powerful than us.

Their gun and their speed.

Yeah they were about two thousand tons, we were about seven or eight hundred. They had a six inch gun, we had a four inch gun.

They had twenty-one knots available, we had sixteen. So you weren’t exactly at an advantage were you?

Oh the Japanese ones, yeah they were. They probably had the biggest submarines in the world at that time. Very powerful the Japanese submarines. So I think even the, well the Germans finished up with a few big ones.

But the Japanese always had, right through the Second World War had very massive submarines.

Yeah that’s what I was saying yeah.

Well that’s about all you can do. Not much else you can do, not much more to it.

Going on with the patrol.

Only the oil, we didn’t see any debris.

No our equipment wasn’t sensitive enough to do that those days. Might be these days but it wasn’t then.

No.

Well just that a metallic object is down there to be really precise. But still there is no known wrecks in the area and you get a metallic thing, it has got to be a submarine doesn’t it?

You don’t.

No. Exactly the same. Well we never used it, but you could communicate with the submarine with sonar with Morse code. That’s if the submarine had their stuff switched on too.

Yeah. With the sonar gear, you could communicate. Well, in theory we learnt Morse code, well that’s the theory of it, but I never really learnt it. It was slow, you couldn’t do it like the telegraphists could do it. But we were supposed to do four words a minute, but you wouldn’t need it much,

maybe a few letters or numbers or something for a code. You would have been told what to punch into the thing. We never did that, but in theory it was possible.

Yeah you could detect those all right,

but then they had a different tone. You see they weren’t metallic. A different pitch I should say, no tone. Not sharp, well it was a muffled tone to say a sharp tone.

The tone of a reef would be muffled too.

If you hit metal would be ‘ping ping’, but if you hit a whale it wound be ‘ping pung’ sort of thing. Deader much deader. This is where you had to have good hearing, you had to be able to tell he difference in pitches and the difference in tones. See the pitch would tell you whether it was in a stationary place and whether it was coming towards you. And the tone would tell you whether it was metallic or non metallic.

Yes there would have been. Not that we actually did, but it would have been done more than once.

No, I think one of the, a couple of times

one of our sister ships went out, one of the sister escorts went out and I think they attacked whales. But we didn’t get involved and I think by the time we would have got involved they would have woken up it was a whale you see. We were there, but we weren’t in the attack as it were, we hadn’t got into the attack.

What we used to do at times, we were allowed to put a depth charge over once in a while for practice purposes, and once in a while you might finish up with an out of date job. And so you’d wait until you got a school of fish on the anti-submarine gear and drop the charge on the school of fish and we had a feed of fish.

Oh we did it quite number of times.

Put the nets overboard and pick the fish up, that was the whole purpose of it. But they were either practice depth charges or out of date and we had to get rid of it.

Actually we did it once in the Coral Sea and got the fish all right and they all floated bout ten feet under the surface and we didn’t get any of them. You could see them there thousands of them, we got one I think. For some reason they didn’t float. There must have been something in the sea, an extra fresh spot or something.

Not enough salt or something, they didn’t float up anyway.

I can’t remember no idea.

Actually the depth charge itself was a pretty safe piece of equipment. It wouldn’t go off on its own, you needed a primer in it to set it off. That was another, depth charges I suppose you have seen pictures of them? They have got a hollow through the centre and a tube through the centre. And you whack a what you call a primer through the centre.

And the primer had a little hole in it, and the depth charge sinks at ten foot a second, and you could regulate how far, by that hole you could regulate how far it sank before it got enough water in to explode the primer. And the primer would then explode the depth charge. And thirty feet was about the shallowest you could afford to set a depth charge

off otherwise you’d blow yourself up. Even so, setting one off at thirty feet, three seconds, going at sixteen knots. When it goes up boy it makes the ship buckle all right. Of course we’re on the surface, we haven’t got the surround pressure on us, that’s what a submarine has got. See there is enough, I have

forgotten all of the distances, but even something twenty feet away, miss by twenty feet would be, I think twenty feet would be very damaging for a submarine, well in those days anyway.

Well I don’t know whether I can answer you that question. But what it is, you probably know yourself you can’t compress water so,

you see well air it will go all over, but water it is really going to stay there. All you are going to do is get more pressure without the expansion going on, or the compression. That’s a question you will have to ask a person more technical than me, but there is quite a difference between exploding something under water and in the air.

The heavily travelled shipping lanes during the war, British in particular, they would let a depth charge off every now and again, even if there was no submarine. Because by doing it a submarine could feel that a depth charge was going off some miles away. It was sort of a war of nerves, in other words the enemy

submarines knew that there was Allied warships in the area. So they would become a bit more circumspect.

Yeah.

Just the feeling of it. The submarine would react, get a thump or a bump or a something. Probably sends off a minor tsunami under water.

The water moves.

The British Navies, Canadian Navy and all of that, all submarines they were for volunteers. They were all checked before hand, like psychologically. The Germans didn’t do that.

Oh well tried to test them to see if they could bear up in the confined space without daylight and so on for a long period. That type of thing. See once you’re under the sea there, the submarine is full of machinery, there is not much room to move around.

Even the big ones. I don’t know what they were, might have fifty, sixty people all living in a space not much bigger than this. Takes a bit of getting used to. It was bad enough on our ship if we were out for more than about two weeks, you could feel the build up.

Oh well I suppose we all got a bit tense after two weeks. Two weeks seemed to be all right, once you got past that, what started out as something small when you first left port as just a joke, the same thing three weeks later might have been a fight, that sort of thing.

I don’t know how to explain it, but that’s how it seemed to be. And somehow if you managed to get some mail while you were out, might be another ship that came form somewhere else and they knew you were going to meet so they’d bring the mail out. That’d relieve the tension for a little while.

Yeah well, I don’t know how to put it. I suppose it’s more tenseness, I don’t know how to put that one. But there certainly was a change in attitude between the people.

You might be still good mates underneath it all, but little things become big things.

I can’t.

No I can’t except as I say that somebody might say something once early on and that be all right and saying the same thing three weeks later might lead to a fight.

No I was too light for getting into fights. I was probably less than nine stone, I wasn’t going to get in a fight with any twelve stoners. Not that they were fat, they were more powerful than me. One of the reasons I joined the navy as I said earlier, I didn’t want to lug things around. It just wasn’t on.

Oh I think probably the longer we were out to sea the less we had to say really. Probably also getting more tired the whole time you were out too because of lack of sleep and things like that, particularly if you had to get called to action stations a few times.

Because no matter who you are you are awake during that.

A lot of rot I think about what pub is better than another and things like that. Not much in depth as a rule.

Probably what girl you might have who is your current girlfriend and how you are getting on with her and that sort of thing. But I didn’t have many girlfriends in those days, so I wasn’t quite in that conversation.

Apart from one bloke who was a complete idiot. They were all right, they had a job to do and so did we, we got on all right.

I think I said earlier one temporary skipper was a dead loss too, but no the others were quite good.

Plain incompetence.

Well just didn’t know the job. Once a bloke came up and said to somebody who was chipping away at a depth charge getting a bit of rust off it, and said oh you shouldn’t be doing that could blow you’re bloody hand off if it goes up. Three hundred pounds of TNT blowing your hand off? And of course as I say a depth charge was quite safe it didn’t have a primer in it anyway. Another time

it looked like having an aircraft attack and so silly fellow comes around, ‘Arm all of the depth charges’. That was one thing you didn’t do, you unarmed all of the depth charges, that’s taking the primers out because if you got sunk yourself you didn’t want to blow yourself up with your own depth charges. That sort of thing. Bloody idiot.

Well he sailed on the ship for a long time, nobody

I suppose they had nobody else on the ship that had the merit I suppose. He was known by his fellow officers, well once again you are in the same ship so you have got to stay with one another. But,

No I can’t describe it. Also you have got to remember that we were all young at the time, and when you are young you will put up with a lot more things, and also that the standards of the day, the ordinary living conditions of the day were not near the living conditions you’re living under now. The conditions your age was brought up in, so you really can’t compare

what we felt with what you think you might feel under the same conditions. Because you’re coming from so much higher conditions down to that standard you’ll feel it. But we weren’t doing, we weren’t losing much really. A lot of people were still used to two of us sleeping in double beds, three in the beds back in those days.

Wouldn’t think of it these days. At last we had our own hammocks, so we weren’t exactly sharing the sleeping space. We were pretty close together but, no I think that answer is unanswerable.

Yep.

The officers were all in bunks, but we were in hammocks. The hammock is gone these days from the navy now, but it was probably the most comfortable way to sleep in a ship, in the hammock. The hammock slung up between two hooks and rings. The ship rolls and the hammock just stays there and the ship goes around it. And when the ship is pitching you just feel a bit of stretch in the hammock.

But you are not going to get thrown out of it or anything like that.

No, no. Absolutely not. Safest place on the ship is a hammock.

The ship rolls, you get rolled out, don’t you?

Oh well officers were expected to sleep in bunks. Class distinction.

Oh well it’s like any armed force. Officers have got a different standard to the men, that’s all there is to it.

Oh well nothing particular. One way or the other.

Well you have got to remember that you volunteered

for these things, you let yourself in for it so you have got to make the best of it don’t you? You can’t go whinging about things you let yourself in for.

I suppose the main thing early on, the officers get in the Australian Navy could have a glass of beer or glass of liquor, but

the sailors couldn’t. But later on they did give us a small ration. But, something like that, well they got their food served a bit more, they had stewards to wait on them. We just got it ourselves. What's new about that anyway?

I did a while ago,

They were generally found out pretty early. I doubt we carried anybody any length of time with that. I think they were found out pretty quickly and then of course they were taken off the ship, put in the hospital. They were either cured or something else happened it was all generally gonorrhoea, I don’t think I knew anybody with syphilis.

That was a much worse thing of course and pretty difficult to handle back in those days. I think gonorrhoea, remember the thalidomide [penicillin], that first antibiotic? That more or less took care of gonorrhoea I think.

Yes to some extent at times, yes.

We didn’t take it very religiously because as I say we were practically never let off the ship in the tropics, and we practically always anchored outside mosquito distance. But we were taking it on and off, it wasn’t policed very carefully so we weren’t very worried about it.

It turned you yellow, used to turn you yellow.

Quinine became unavailable because the Japanese overran all of the places where the quinine trees grew. And there was an operation involving Australians I believe that was smuggled ashore to pinch seeds to grow them

I know it was successful but I don’t know how long it would take to grow a tree to the size to produce. Here I don’t know if the trees were ever available to treat anybody during the war. But no, quinine became practically unavailable, that’s why the Atebrin came in. Don’t know what Atebrin contained, never found that out.

A lot of people used to think it was a good, what do you call it? Abortion bringer onner.

yes.

No, it was a good thing to bring on abortion. Well they used to think that, whether it was or not I don’t know. But I know some people used to save their Atebrin to take home to their pregnant girlfriends. I don’t know whether it worked.

Didn’t find that out.

Never heard of that one?

I think we lost one that way ourselves.

Well we were at Wilson’s Promontory we had delivered a convoy, I think it went down to Melbourne, we didn’t have one to bring back apparently, we were on our own.

And the seas weren’t all that rough and he was the stern lookout and when he was to be relieved he wasn’t there and we never found him. But he was a lovely chap really, but he had had gonorroea and he was engaged and in fact when we got back to Sydney he was going to get married. But apparently even though he was considered cured, he still had a

discharge or something that was apparently harmless, but apparently it worried him. So we presume he just went over the stern, there was no proof of it and that would never be put down in the records of course.

Oh lost over board I imagine. I didn’t have to fill out the records, that was the skipper’s job.

Not particularly.

Just a bit of a swell. Not these, not the gale stuff when you are really battling no. There was no reason to be washed overboard, let’s put it that way.

What?

Well you can’t prove it, but that’s the assumption by the blokes that knew him. I knew him fairly well. But yeah apparently it was playing on his mind, he was a fairly decent sort of a chap. Bit worried about fronting the girlfriend with a bit of a drip.

I have no idea. I just knew he had it, I got no idea where he got it. It was probably in Australia just the same but we didn’t really visit ports outside of Australia.

Well as I say we didn’t go ashore there.

Must be in Australia but just when and where I don’t know. For

all I know he could have had it since before he came on the ship. You know still he still had this sort of discharge. I really can’t answer the question. It was a presumption of the whole crew that he probably did commit suicide because there was no reason for him to just go overboard in the

circumstances in which we were sailing.

Oh I suppose it was happy enough as far as anybody in confined circumstances and tough living can go.

it was a happy enough ship. I don’t know why, I suppose the skipper, apart from the short-term skipper was all right. And apart form the idiot the officers were all right. So you just got along. Apart from the odd time the food was acceptable, you wouldn’t call it good food because you couldn’t get that sort of thing.

Apart from the, when we lost all of flour because it went mouldy, we couldn’t have bread this was a long time. We ate everything that looked like bread, all of the biscuits and everything even out of the lifeboats. It’s amazing how you miss something like a staple when you haven’t got it. After that the flour always seemed to come in the tins. Before that it was in those calico bags.

Always remember those things calico bags. They brought it up after that, could have been our ship that promoted this, sealed four-gallon tins in those days.

Well we carried some yes. Actually bully beef is not bad food, it is only a question of how to

handle it a bit. No bully beef is first class meat, it’s salty of course. No well we could carry enough fresh food for about two weeks. If we couldn’t get provisions after two weeks we were on the tins and preserved stuff. Which of course happened quite often for some time.

We had a refrigerator on board, could carry say about two weeks of fresh food. And then if you are out, depending on supplies form New Guinea, you could get some meat but you probably couldn’t get fresh vegetables. Even though you went into Milne Bay and Moresby you wouldn’t necessarily get fresh vegetables.

So you’d get this potato, I forget what they call it, some sort of dried potato, that was pretty terrible stuff, probably better these days but it was terrible stuff in those days. I remember we got, we got some sausages off a South African ship, a supply ship one day. And they must have had something in the skin, because they started to cook

was cooking them, and we couldn’t eat them. And the cook, he was a good cook, he skun them all, and once he skun them all quite edible. The skin was, it had the flavour in it. Anything else about, oh I think we got some, in South Africa we got some tinned fruit, dreadful stuff.

Tinned fruit off the South African ship.

Dreadful stuff. Because our tinned fruit have always been quite good. But I could never come back to eating tinned pears again.

I don’t know. Well those days everything tinned, if you ate enough of it, it all got the same. Somehow they put the sameness of flavour

into the fruit. But I don’t think this happens now because they are probably treating the interior of the tin to stop this happening. So that’s, yeah tinned pears are out as far as I am concerned. Still are sixty years later.

Oh yeah, well, yeah. Not really, we were on our way to New Guinea to do that. We didn’t really do any convoy work north of Brisbane, not Australian convoy work. We did it up around New Guinea.

But not between Cairns and Thursday Island, not even between Brisbane and Thursday Island.

Oh yes we had quite a spell there at one stage yes.

Well there was nothing much there. It was more or less a place we stopped to get more oil and more stores. We went ashore once or twice

go to an open air picture show or something like that. But there wasn’t much to do there. And quite a lot of the Island was a native reserve you weren’t allowed onto that anyway. You had to have an invitation from the natives to do that. I suppose the oddest thing about Thursday Island is the way the tide flows. It’s a fast tide, rises about I think,

could rise up around eight feet, but you can’t tell which way it is going to come in and which way it was going to go out. Just unpredictable. The port is really only a spot of sea between several islands. You have got, I forget the names, you have got Thursday Island, Friday Island, I think, Sunday Island. There is another one that is not a day of the

week, I forget the name of it now. There are other islands there too. And you have go this up to a point protected bit of area of water. Oh there is a wharf there on Thursday Island itself. But there is not a harbour in the strict sense of the word. And the tide comes in and out at the right times, what is it? I think it’s eight hours or four hours or whatever the tides are.

But you never know if it will come in this way or go out that way. Or come out that way, unpredictable. And it runs at eight knots, so there were a lot of fishing boats up there and that sort of thing, they couldn’t even come in against the tide.

OI have no idea. On and off.

You might spend a couple of days there at the most, and then you’d be away for a week.

Yes well it is.

Well I don’t know if it is an archipelago. We use that to take supplies up to Merauke. And then later on when we were doing the surveying between Thursday Island and Darwin,

we’d sail from Thursday Island into Darwin and back. Back and forth. That was, would have been in 1945, late 1944 I suppose.

Wouldn’t have been any defences hardly, too small. You could only put a gun on it.

No, no real defences there. They would have had a few anti-aircraft guns I suppose. But they would have had no defences no equipment. Thursday Island those days was just a little settlement. I don’t know what its main purpose would have been. I don’t know if there was pearling there or not I can’t remember.

None. Probably weren’t any there then, they were probably all evacuated. No, if we went ashore it was only up to see the movies or anything like that. There was nothing to go ashore for.

Oh, the natives were there.

Yeah, they were lovely people.

Well we didn’t have much, the only interaction we had really was one time, they were in the Arafura Sea, place called Wendell Island, that’s there in the Torres Strait, yeah. And I was sent ashore to read the rise and fall of tides of that area. And there were two native families living on it with their two native families,

husband and wife, and I think one might have had three children, one might have had four children. And I think the men were brothers. I think the men were the brothers not the wives sisters. And they were what they used to call the free natives. They had two classes

up there really, all under the Queensland Government. And the ones that weren’t free had to do and go wherever the Queensland Government designated. And the ones that were free could stay and do what they like, they were literally free. But during the war wherever possible they herded all of these natives onto one or two islands, to make it easier to defend.

At least that was the theory, and supplies, keep supplies up to them. But on this particular island, these two families, they were free ones, they chose not to go. And we got ashore to read the thing and they were living in a house each, corrugated iron, would have been hot things. We never got into one. But we were sent ashore with some tents and things like that.

But there was an old palm shelter, palm house sort of thing just made out of palm leaves and things like that. It was in disrepair but the natives told us oh we’ll fix that up for you. So they got some new palm leaves and just re-roofed and sided it, and whatever so we could have a bit more space under the shelter.

Beautiful and cool because the way it’s built all of the air gets through, waterproof. Not that we had any rain at the time. They spoke good English and the adults could obviously read because they wanted to find out if we had anything to

read so the ship would come back to us every day or so and we had signalling equipment so we could keep in touch with them and we signalled across any reading materials on the ship? They were excited to get the stuff no doubt about it. And these kids, most beautifully behaved children, beautifully behaved, about eighteen months up to about four or five or something, seven of them.

They’d come around the camp where we were, we mightn’t be there, but they would sit there they wouldn’t go inside, they wouldn’t touch a thing. And we would get some lollies from the ship, the ship would send some lollies over for them and they would gratefully accept them and they wouldn’t eat them until they went home and got permission to eat them. You’d see them later on going

around, jaws going like mad on the lollies. But they were just so polite, the disciplined, beautiful really, magnificent. These natives would come past some time in the day, you want some fish for the night? Oh yeah. About two minutes later they would be back with enough fish for, they’d spear them. They didn’t take us with them they would just go out and get them and come back. One time they came in, you want some turtle eggs?

And we said we’ll give it a go. So we had some turtles eggs.

Oh they ware a bit stronger, from what I remember, bit stronger than the other eggs. But the biggest problem we found was trying to get at them. They are a soft shell you know you can squeeze them, but trying to open that shell. It’s more a skin than a shell. I don’t know whether the natives had a way of doing it but we certainly didn’t. It was a great battle

to get the egg out so you could cook it, out of the covering. Quite round, not quite an egg shape, more of a billiard ball. Probably not quite as big as a billiard ball. Probably near a golf ball, bit bigger than a golf ball if I remember rightly. And they had WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s on the island,

but they had gone wild. And in the middle was a dense jungle and all of the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s were in there and you couldn’t get near them. And you could hear them you know, cackling away and the roosters crowing and all of that sort of thing.

No, no. Victoria back in those days, the only Aboriginals I think in Victoria were probably down around

Lake Tyers, down Gippsland way. There was certainly none in our part of the world.

Oh they were driven out I suppose. As I say there were no kangaroos there when I was a kid, and there would have been earlier. No kangaroos, no emus.

Well I suppose Yackandandah would have been the town that you went to. That was for us about four or five miles away.

Yeah. But once the car took over, Albury Wodonga became the real commercial centre. Yackandandah sort of died. It’s a heritage town now, the whole town.

No.

I doubt there was even one in it. There weren’t many in the army for that matter either.

Nothing because Darwin had been wrecked by the Japanese before we got there, Couldn’t do anything in Darwin. Although we spent a bit of time there, and every now and again we’d get in and the army would take a group of us inland a bit further to some of those springs that were there, just to give a few of us a break away from the ship. But there was nothing to do in Darwin. Actually Darwin

was run by the navy during the war, the navy was the council and everything. They even brought a extra pipeline, not so much for Darwin but to get more water for ships. Darwin had no water as such, but there is quite a bit of water, oh I can’t remember how far, fifty or a hundred miles out. Spring type of water.

Well back in those days when I was there, I have been back since once it’s a brand new Darwin. Well it was just a wreck when I was there. After the great rise and fall of tides, about twenty-eight, twenty-four feet. And all the mud flats.

Further down the coast there is a rise and fall of four feet higher. Twenty-eight to thirty-two feet.

It is. Measured that, I was on shore measuring that once too. Don’t know exactly where it was we were never told exactly. Somewhere where the Prince Regent River runs out, and not far from Pilbara, because we knew there was iron there, all of the rocks were rusty.

You could see that.

Well the buildings were just all wrecked, and the ships still in the harbour that were flattened, you could see the hulls of it there. Oh they made a, you have got to remember it was only a shanty town then, it wasn’t a great metropolis.

I don’t know what the population would have been then, but probably only a few thousand. But it was just basically weatherboard stuff and so, it was just a frontier town.

Oh not really no. No point, nothing in there when we were there.

Ruined houses. You didn’t have an electric train system to take you anywhere or anything like that.

Oh well I never, I didn’t I never spent time like that in Darwin, like the army and the air force that were based there did.

But I imagine it would have been boring. See we would only be there for a few days at the most, and that was only to get more oil supplies. We weren’t there for, you might say living. We had to look after ourselves on our little ship. Administering, tied up to the wharf

with a rise and fall like that, you’re forever changing your lines, either stopping it tipping you over, or getting you close to the wharf, up and down.

No, at the wharf, the wharf was far enough out that you would always be afloat.

But with the rise and fall, you have got your lines out to the wharf, as the ship changed position in height we had to either take in or slacken the ropes. This had to be going on day and night. We didn’t tie up very often there, we generally anchored out off shore.

Yeah in the harbour, but not, out quite a bit yeah. A mile or two I suppose.

Well we didn’t conduct anything except to get the ship to the mouth of the river and the ship went up the river unloaded. We

would wait outside. That’s where we might have done a bit of swimming or something like that. Probably take twenty-four, thirty-six hours to wait there. Because we would wait a fair way off shore too in the end, we might have taken the ship more or less to the mouth but we’d always come back because I think I mentioned before a ship had always got to have room to manoeuvre if possible. You don’t tie yourself up

where you can’t manoeuvre, that’s wartime stuff. See, quite often you were in an area where you might have to drop anchor for some reason or another, well then you’d put, I forget what the expression is, but you put something on the anchor so that all you had to do was

just one tap of the hammer and you left the anchor behind. There was a buoy on it, you’d come back and pick it up later. In other words you go out and defence in seconds if you had to. We did that a couple of times too, come back and pick the blooming thing back up again.

Who? The which?

We didn’t go in, we didn’t see anybody in there.

No not a thing. Because the actual settlers they were some miles up the river and we never went into the river.

You don’t do that in war time.

Nope.

Apparently, nobody came near us no. But the Dutch up there, and I saw some of those because we used to ferry contingents of troops at times. We had to ferry Dutch troops, and they were the Javanese, well they were called Javanese, Indonesians these days. But the Dutch officers, and the way the Dutch officers treated those troops was shocking. And the same with the British

would have done the same, the Germans would have done the same, the French would have done the same. They all colonial powers did it in their so-called colonies.

On the ship.

Our ship.

Sometimes yes.

When they were told to come on board.

Oh I don’t remember it could have been anywhere.

No not Darwin, some of the islands somewhere. I can’t remember, we did it a number of times. I think even one time we might have got troops off another ship. But they were small contingents, we couldn’t carry many anyway. Probably going off for some particular duties.

Various places, I can’t remember where you’d drop them off. Sometimes it might be on another ship again.

Or it might be some beachhead somewhere, drop them ashore.

Well a beach, wherever they had to get to. Probably wasn’t decently populated.

Yeah something like that. Yes some island somewhere.

Well actually the only Dutch on it was the officers, and they stayed with the officers,

so I didn’t have anything to do with them except see how they acted towards their Javanese troops. And the Javanese troops of course probably couldn’t speak English anyway. So there was no interaction .We looked after them as much as we could, made sure they had enough to eat or anything like that. But we didn’t have any real conversation

with them or anything like that because you couldn’t. We couldn’t speak Indonesian, they couldn’t speak English. Simple as that.

Absolutely appalling.

Well I saw on officer at one stage, I don’t know what caused

any action but the officer just put the butt of his rifle up like that. Another one, boot up the bum and all of that sort of thing.

As far as we could see no apparent reason. It’s still not, whether there is a reason or not that’s no way to treat anybody.

They didn’t, that was the sad part of it I suppose,

just the way they were treated. That’s the way all colonial powers treated them things. I can still see it when we came back after the war. A lot of the Dutch from the Indonesian areas came down on my boat to Australia, you could see the arrogance in them. You get the Dutch come out from Holland, beautiful people. You can see the odd British type

that came out from India, terrible. Nothing wrong with the ordinary Englishmen. But those that were brought up in the actual colonies, the arrogance in them. It’s no wonder empires fall.

No I don’t think so, just standard treatment.

Just held the Dutch officers in contempt that’s all. But we had nothing much to do with them as such you see. Not the crew, our officers might have, but then I suppose that was their way, they wouldn’t have interfered as such.

Oh well you don’t do that on little ships anyway. There is no point in doing anything like that. And generally speaking, we wouldn’t have had any time anyway. We would have only had them on board for twenty-four hours or something like that. Because we were not equipped really to house an extra

forty or fifty people on board for more than a day or so. Didn’t have the sleeping quarters, wouldn’t have had the food either.

Yes.

Well very little actually. Well I knew very little. I just knew it was Dutch controlled territory at that stage until the Japanese got there and the only thing we ever had to do with it was Merauke River, that was it. That was just inside the,

like it was the east side of New Guinea, more or less in the centre of the New Guinea islands. We never had anything to do with that until after then end of the war when we went around to Timor to take the surrender of the Japs there.

No. Neither no. Any great acts of heroism or desertion no.

No, I don’t know much about it I suppose. It would be dreadful; thing to have to admit to it wouldn’t it? But no I don’t know anything about it. You’d have to see it in action to sort of make any comment on it wouldn’t you?

Oh yes.

Not our crew but I have seen people who were really gone off a bit because of the combat thing. A couple of British ones in particular I remember.

No not the crew.

Well I think it might be back in Rushcutters depot.

Well I can’t remember exactly but I saw them and they were a bit of a mess.

Well one in particular I should talk about a bit here, absolutely aggressive to anything that was American. Absolutely was you know punch happy. He was only a small fellow too I don’t think he would have lasted too long in a fight. But he was really aggressive and so anti-American. But I think he had seen a

tremendous amount of action in the British Navy. But I have seen one or two others, well I can’t quite describe, they were just affected. Not aggressive though.

Well I don’t know. His theory was that the American Fleet only appear in films, they didn’t go to war.

That was his theory.

I wouldn’t know about that either. You couldn’t miss him in the small depot that Rushcutters was, yes.

Never heard of it.

No.

Troppo. Used to see a few of those, that’d be the army, saw one or two in the army that way. Not actually in

the field as it were because I didn’t meet the army that way. But you’d meet them every now and again and see them acting a bit irrationally, or what appeared to be not normal.

I don’t know exactly how to put that one. They’d do certain actions or do something with something. You know what the hell are they doing that for? That sort of thing.

Then see them do something else. It is sort of a means of occupying themselves or distracting themselves by doing something but not a rational sort of a thing. In the circumstances for what they were.

Well certainly the old ones were there is no doubt about that. And the more modern one does it for old time’s sake. That’s my personal feeling.

I know there were a couple of times where we didn’t sail on Friday the 13th, we’d wait until a minute after midnight to go. But they’re, all seemed to be stupid to me.

I don think there were too many people superstitious about it. It has become a bit of a tradition I think. But that’s my opinion, I wouldn‘t know about that. But I can understand the old sailors being like that. With lack of knowledge, longer times at sea to imagine things. I mean it is amazing what you can see in a wave if

you are looking at it, it is the same as watching a fire burn. You know the flames, you can make all sorts of pictures out of it. Well you can do the same with the way the waves move. A lot of time they are not regular, they do all sorts of things to their shape and so on. And also things where there is fog and that sort of thing. Lifting and the

different densities of fog, that can give you some pretty rare sort of pictures.

Oh well I haven’t got enough imagination but you can see, you can probably make, and this is where the sea maid idea came from, people who haven’t seen a lady for a long time, they see some sort of a shape in a wave or around rocks or something like that, and they think oh there is a lady out there.

And then it just grows on them.

Yeah a mermaid or a sea maid or whatever you like to call it. I can imagine that happening, and in the swirls of fog and that type of thing.

Well I don’t know that we had any particularly strange sightings.

No I can’t put any.

No I never saw any sea creatures other than the fish that happened to swim around. No I have got no recollection of anything like that sort of thing.

Well yeah I suppose, when you get shadows on the sea you are not too sure what it is at times. Like on a sunny day and you have got a few clouds they put a shadow sometimes on the sea, and sometimes you wonder what that might be. Until you realise it is just a shadow.

Got out of it as much as possible. How did I deal with it? Well depending on where you were on the ship you just hung on. Especially if the ship was rolling and it was quite windy, you just hung onto anything you could hang on to. But as far as weird

noises or anything, I never heard anything to disturb me one way or the other. Not the werewolves or anything like that. Oh no I think I am a bit too practical for that sort of thing. No imagination.

No I don’t think I noticed anybody,

No I don’t think so. No I can’t recall any

of that sort of thing going on.

Oh yeah a lot of flying fish up in the Arafura Sea, they’d land on the decks. Even up on the upper decks sometimes.

It’s a jump I think, they don’t fly, it’s a jump. I forget, I have read how they do it but I forget. They certainly get up all right. Then there is all the sea snakes up there too. We steered clear of those because, we knew they were all toxic, but nobody knew how toxic. And I don’t think there would have been any anti-venom anyway to counteract them.

Well make sure you didn’t go in the water when they were there.

Yellow and black. Not very long, about that long. About that thick I suppose.

On the top.

In the Arafura Sea. There were probably

other places too, but that’s where I saw them.

No I saw them all over the sea. Anywhere. Hundreds of them.

We just sailed through them. We didn’t

have to defend ourselves from them because they weren’t on board, I mean we had us and the ship between them. And as far as I know they don’t climb up the sides of ships or anything like that.

Ys. They just seemed to be going about their own business. Just lazily swimming away,

what a sea snake does.

Not many, no you don’t get very much bird life, you have got to be pretty close to land to get much bird life. I forget how far out we saw a magpie once, not very far. Of course a few miles out you get sea birds.

Gulls, and those, well we used to call the shit hawks I think. Well they were the type of bird if you threw anything overboard and they’d see, they were real scavengers. They were shit hawks because they would eat anything.

Well they’d eat anything. I don’t know about that though because we never threw that out. When I say we didn’t, we

it just went straight into the sea from the ship, yeah. The dolphins used to be a bit of an amusement at times. They’d escort you for miles, hours sometimes.

Well they’d just join you in the ship, they’d be diving under you, and they’d be swimming in front of you,

jumping out of the water. Actually if you were on the anti-submarine gear while they were there they used to make a whistle through the machine. I think that was their quick movement through the water. They were a menace when we were really fair dinkum looking for submarines, and they happened to be there.

All that whistling, all of the time. Oh it was pretty ear piercing sort of stuff.

Most annoying.

I don’t think so, I don’t think so. I wouldn’t know you would have to ask the modern scientist about that. They would have been too small to give us an echo. A school of them might have.

I wouldn’t have thought so.

But as I say I have got no, I can’t,

Yeah having a game. They do that with any ship pretty much. Well they can be pretty fast. I remember seeing them up in Cairns, in the estuary where we were first. And that was a Catalina flying boat base during the war, and the Cats are pretty slow sea planes. As they take off you see a dolphin swimming

in front of the thing as the thing was screaming down the water to try to take off. I don’t know how fast they would be going but they could move all right. We didn’t see many whales. Used to get them but you didn’t see

great pods of them as far as I can recall.

No I never saw any no. I think they would stick around there, where do they live? They live around reefs and that don’t they? I think they would stick to that. I saw a turtle or

two once or twice.

Yeah well.

Yeah well when we were surveying there at one stage we were anchored for a bit of time. And we weren’t a properly equipped survey ship, so our boats were away but a lot of the crew weren’t working at the time, they were just on the ship. They used to throw

lines over from time to time to catch fish. And then they’d bring a shark up every now and again, and a lot of people used to take the jaw out of the shark, the bigger ones. But what you could do, you could take, open the shark up and take the liver out and throw the liver back in the sea. And within thirty seconds you couldn’t see the sea for sharks. All the whites coming into swoop on the sharks liver thousand of them would come in.

The sea was a mass of white with the flash of the sharks thrashing in the water. You mightn’t have seen too many sharks, they were down a bit lower, but just the way they disturbed the water looking for that little bit of shark’s liver. That was that, yes.

It was the smell I think. So if you want to catch a shark use a bit of shark’s liver. First thing, you have got to catch the first shark don’t you?

Not really. We were about to once or twice but the enemy sort of moved on, that was aircraft.

Not against, apart from the odd submarine sort of thing. Where there might have been a false attack, we used the depth charges from time to time but not much else no. For some reason we ran out of Oerlikon ammunition one time I can’t remember why we did that, because we had to get some American stuff on board and just hope we didn’t have to use it.

Because the American stuff was pretty faulty, and Oerlikon gun ammunition is explosive. If one round jams in the barrel, and the barrel gets hot, it will blow itself up on the gun and the crew as well. They were pretty powerful things the Oerlikon guns.

Well I don’t know that it had any long-term effect. I know that sometimes afterwards, you know the old wind up alarm clocks? If one of those went off I would jump about two feet in the air because it is more or less the same tone as the action stations siren.

Bell, not a siren a bell. But I suppose I was fairly unsettled for about four year afterwards. That’s about all but I don’t think anything long-term effects, not that I know of anyway. An interruption to life, that’s about what it was.

Oh no I don’t think so. No. It was one of those things one sort of dreamed about but I don’t think I would have put it into action as a career.

No.

No I suppose back in those days I didn’t have, had less political feeling than I have got now.

Oh I suppose when you start to realise there are various issues on the table regarding the welfare of the nation. But I don’t know just when that was.

Probably more domestic issues, because well I suppose we had never had a foreign policy. It was either Britain’s, now it is America’s. We haven’t done much in the way of foreign policy.

One of the tragedies of the country I think.

I suppose for me it was just one of those wars a real long way away. I had no real involvement in it. My eldest son just about

reached the call-up age, I think he had reached the call-up age with the Vietnam War about the time that they decided to pull out I think. I can’t remember, he might have even missed the draft, I can’t remember now. But that was probably a bit more aware of that one because of that reason. But the Korean War for me that was just a sideshow a long way away.

It could have been a lot worse than it finished up being. Actually it had never finished up has it? That’s the problem with the Korean War.

Three hundred and thirty? Where in Korea?

I thought it might have been more. I think it was only about three hundred and thirty in the Vietnam one wasn’t it?

I would have thought it would have been more in the Korean War, there was a lot more soldiers there I thought.

And what Korea would have only been about seven or eight thousand was it?

I think the navy had a fair presence up there, our navy.

That’s relatively speaking of course because we have never had a big navy.

Well I suppose that about the first time I began to take much notice of

politics. I didn’t have, well see we didn’t have a vote until twenty-one I think back in those days. But the servicemen had a vote, the servicemen over eighteen I think had a vote. But any voting I did at the time was more or less proxy sort of thing. We weren’t in the country I mean we weren’t following the arguments one way or the other.

But I think Chifley was one of the few Prime Ministers that probably had Australia at heart, as opposed to personal gain. Could have been, Curtin probably did too, the other one would probably be John Gorton.

No real impressions of that, when was that 1940 something?

No I got no real impressions. Because I wasn’t of voting age.

Well as I told you earlier to you privately, I think he was only interested in Menzies and Britain. And he was the bloke as far as I can

recall who stopped research in Australia and said we’ll buy it from overseas. I don’t think he was, Australia prospered at that stage in spite of Menzies not because of Menzies. Wouldn’t have mattered at that stage everybody was prospering.

Oh heavens yes.

That’s all he was interested in. And Menzies, of course. He even shipped all of his promising politicians to other jobs so they couldn’t upset him and when he got up they had no one to take over. No competent person, no really competent person. Holt took over but,

Holt was just another politician.

That’s my opinion anyway.

Oh I suppose yeah up to a point, but I don’t think it’s anyway particular conflict that we’ve had since the Second World War that we should have been involved in. I think it’s out of our back yard. The Timor thing was probably a different matter,

but that’s not really a conflict in the strict sense of the word is it?

No.

Well who wants a head of state that is twenty thousand miles away? Twelve is it? The world itself is not much more than twenty thousand. Half a world away.

With no interest in the country at all. But then I don’t know, not greatly in favour of getting an American style of republic where you have got to go through the hoo-ha they go through to get a president. That’s a real shambles that, it’s only

money gets that. But I would like to see a republic but I think I would be quite happy myself to see, how to elect him certainly not the way that was being put up at the referendum, and certainly not by the Prime Minister. I don’t know what would be the best way, but you don’t

want to make it a real, a political campaign. I think possibly the idea of putting up two or three candidates and getting a joint sitting of parliament to vote for one. Don’t think I want the people themselves, the whole population putting a vote to it.

That’s only making politics out of it I think. Its one of those things that will take a lot of ironing out.

Well you were trained to. In state schools, our school didn’t necessarily do it, but you lined up in front of the flag every Monday morning recited the oath of allegiance. And then we sang God Save the King, but

none of us learnt how to sing.

I think I was beginning to waver then. I mean this idea of going to fight for King and country has got whiskers on it. You fight for your country, you are not fighting for the King though.

That’s only a bit of a figurehead up there that has got a privileged lifestyle at the expense of the public. Doing nothing in particular. The only thing about that monarchy, well the British monarchy is that it is not really political. That’s the only thing going for it I think.

But they’re nobody sort of thing as far as expressions or interest in government or how the country should be run, they have got no say in it.

Oh that was a bit of a, brought shame to the country I thought, really.

It was, once again the arrogance of the ruling race in the world which happened to be the white people at the moment. Probably about fifty years time it will be the yellow people. America won’t last much longer I wouldn’t think. What did it take, about forty years for the British Empire to disappear? Height of its power in 1900

at the depths by 1950, nothing left.

Yeah. Same, well America is not an empire in the same sense of the word, but they’ll be overtaken by, well you wouldn’t know at this stage. China? India? Well if India got their act together,

because they have got the education, well, technical power. You would agree with that wouldn’t you?

Yeah. They’re main trouble is probably the religious divisions preventing them from acting cohesively enough. I think China has got a long way to go to get the organization, the infrastructure.

Well yes they would have been, but I am certainly apolitical. But think the current war which in theory just finished, there is a

some ulterior motives there. Nothing to, well getting rid of Saddam Hussein, there is no doubt about that, but you didn’t need to do it by war. It was pretty clear that he was a beaten man anyway. He certainly still had the Iraqis still under slavery I suppose if you call it that. But I don’t think he posed any real great threat.

Get more threat probably from Iran or North Korea.

Oh that’s another, probably as a theory it is perfect but nothing in the world is perfect. Also, any

theory, religion or anything depends on how men handle it. When I say men I mean mankind handles it. And those that are in Communism at the moment, they’re all dictators. They’re anything but Communists. I don’t think that Communism can be very practical, but that’s the utopia thing. Everything belongs to everybody and we share.

But that doesn’t work out in life.

Yeah.

Well I think that’s probably one of the things that Menzies did all right, getting his hands on Petrov and having an enquiry. But I think his attitude, the way he went around trying to ban the

Communist Party and other things without ever having coming to the High Court. I think he was wrong in those went the wrong way about the thing. That’s my opinion.

Oh no not particularly, I am pleased to say that I am happy to have assisted the project.

Because I realise what it is for, and accepted because I know it is going to be used for research purposes and things like that. I mean I could have quite easily said no, but I thought no, this is why I am here. I am not the type of person who looks for this type of thing, for publicity.

No I think you got it all.

No nothing, well not unimportant, but nothing important enough in my mind to think about or to talk about.

to think of to talk about.