Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Victoria Park, a suburb of Perth. The early childhood I don’t really remember much about it. My life more or less started when we arrived in Broome in 1938. Spent eight years there. On my father’s death in 1946, I left school, I did 6 months high school

Couldn’t hack it. Mother got me a job as a clerk, 19 shillings and twopence a week which works out to be one dollar ninety five today. I didn’t like that very much so she said the postal service is what you got to do, a telegram boy. Didn’t care for that very much, so went working on sheep stations.

I served on Cadagi Cadagi for six months then out at Mullewa in Western Australia. Then I went up onto a bigger station out at Carnarvon and I worked there for two years. I came down to Perth. By this time my brother Bill was in the navy and serving in HMAS Karangi, a boom vessel.

Yes I have a brother and a sister.

He said, “Well what are you going to do with your life?” and I said, “I got do something. I’m thinking about joining BCOF, the British Commonwealth Occupation Force.” I went along to them and they said, “Yes we will take you, but come back when you’re two years older. We don’t take anyone under nineteen.” I was seventeen at the time. Went back to brother Bill for advice and he said the best thing to do is join the navy. I went down had an interview,

did a medical and the day after I turned seventeen and a half I was on a train to HMAS Cerberus in Victoria.

Four days. Oh sorry, training?

Oh, I thought you meant the train, the train in those days from Perth to Melbourne was four days, four days travelling. Six months. I had to do six months because I had to do six months based on –

I wasn’t properly in the navy until I was eighteen. That was December 1950. Then I joined Murchison. We’ll go into more details about that later.

Went on to Murchison as an ordinary seaman. Skipper had an influx. They were manning up to go to Korea. He said, “I don’t want to take all these ordinary seamen with me.” He sent five of us

to HMAS Culgoa. On the way to Korea, we were taken from Culgoa by a lighter I think it was out to Murchison at sea and proceeded on our way to Korea. Six weeks it took us to get there via Hong Kong and we were in training all the time

closing up at action stations. By the time we got to Korea we were closing up in action stations and having one in the breech of the guns ready to go to war. We served in Korea for nine months. Came back and I asked advice because throwing fifty pound

rounds wasn’t my idea of continuing my career in the navy. Someone suggested I do a TA’s [tradesman’s assistants] course down at Rushcutters Bay, so I applied and I got accepted. Once again, I didn’t like the idea of depth charges and torpedoes around so I did the control course. Not on weapons but on control.

When I completed that I went to HMAS Mildura in Western Australia, up and down the Western Australian coast doing national service training. Taking young fellows up and down training. We paid Mildura off, brought her over to Melbourne. Then I got a draft to HMAS Parkes, off Rockingham in Western Australia.

I served there until 1955, then I got a draft to HMAS Shoalhaven up to Darwin doing fisheries patrol. I think I was on Shoalhaven for eight months. Then I came home on leave and got a telegram to report to HMAS Quadrant. I thought that one is going to be a cushy one up around Sydney,

but you wouldn’t know it, back to Darwin fisheries patrol on HMAS Quadrant. I served on Quadrant for nine months. I went over to Malaya, the Malayan Emergency, then came back and they flew me home ready for discharge in December 1956.

The Murchison – we used to do bombardments up the coast but our main duties were we were picked along with other River-class frigates from the Royal Navy, Canadian navy and the New Zealand navy because we had a shallow draft and we charted the Han River Estuary and Murchison

and the other ships charted channels because the flow of the water. It was ironic really because coming from Broome the rise and fall of tides there is 32 feet. The rise and fall in the Han is 30 feet, so you could understand at high tide we could go but if you got caught up in the higher reaches of the estuary when the water went down you were sitting on a mud flat.

That was our main objective was to chart the estuary I think. The Americans wanted that to put in an amphibian invasion because the Han Estuary went all the way up to Seoul. That never eventuated. When the original peace talks started in 1951 at Kaesong

we bombarded shells round Kaesong to let them know that we were at hand. That was about 12 mile away. On the 27th September, the American Admiral Dwyer wanted to get a close-up of what we’d been doing up there. The North Koreans and Chinese

must have known he was on board because as we travelled up they ambushed us. Then we got out of that lot and back to our safe anchorage. They decided Murchison had done a pretty good job. We had done 60 days up there on and off, longest of any of the frigates and on the 30 September we took the captain of the New Zealand ship

who was going to take Murchison’s place. We had to take him up. Once again they ambushed a second time and clobbered us. Murchison’s main task was to chart the Han Estuary so that we could get closer to bombardment.

The most significant would be when we got under intensive fire. You got to remember everyday that we went up we were close to the north bank. Working parties going up were on the starboard side because if you were on the port side they would take a shot at you. They were pinging all the time. Coming back then you worked on the port side because starboard side was exposed.

The two days of September they were the – as I wrote to my mother – those mountings were open, they weren’t a turret. We were exposed. I wrote to my mother and said, “I wish I’d been a threepence so I could have rolled under the ready-use lockers.” It was a stupid statement because the ready-use lockers were loaded with 20 or 30 rounds of

four-inch ammunition. A direct hit on one of those and the old threepence would have been blown to bits like that. They were the two main. We had numerous bombardments. But they were the two days. That’s when I took up smoking.

Stress? I was giving my cigarettes away. And you can only write

so many letters to your mother. When you close up on action stations you were in the vicinity of the gun in case they needed you. You either wrote or smoked or tried to nap. I took up smoking.

37 years. Gave it up in 1988.

The stress of it. We didn’t have much time to – when you’re shelling a position – you haven’t got much time to think. You’re doing your job and it’s afterwards that it sets in. Then you heard stories about other fellows

getting wounded, near misses and all that. Reality sets in and you start to get a bit of a shake. But those two days were the main.

When I got out of the navy I did a rehabilitation course. I did butchering.

I became a butcher, I did that for five years. I realised there was bigger money to be made and we were paying off our home and car. I went rock mining. Three years of rock mining and then I went into coal mining. I developed an inner ear infection. They said underground’s

no place for that, so I went to work for a electrical motor manufacturer in Campbelltown. Marie was already working there. So we sold up and moved to Forster with the promise of a job. That fell through so I went labouring and I was 46

and I was a concrete labourer. Ripped the fat off me very nicely. From then I did a few renovations of units. Got to know the real estate agents. We set up a cleaning business then we went into unit maintenance. We’d supervise the repairs to units, landscaping of the ground and all that sort of thing.

I did that until I retired in my sixties in 1993.

We got married when I came back from Korea. I didn’t know Marie. I met Marie when I was at Rushcutters Bay. There was talk of getting drafted back onto a ship to go back to Korea. So we decided we better get married

quick smart if this was going to happen. But I didn’t. I went to Mildura and Marie went over to Western Australia with me and I only saw her three days every three week. I was at sea with these national serviceman and our son was born in Western Australia. We wanted more children but we only had the one. We came back in 1955.

Yes we have two grandchildren. The oldest, Kieran, is a lieutenant in the army. He’s a maintenance officer with the Black Hawk helicopters in Townsville. The younger, Stephen, he works in a shipping

cold storage place. He did a managerial course there. They’re both married. Kieran the oldest, the army fella, has two children so we have great grandchildren which is pretty good for 70.

Well I’m very proud of both the boys, but Kieran picks up his third pip this Christmas.

He’s grown up with it. Attended Anzac Days with me and he was very interested. He went to the War Memorial when he was at ADFA [Australian Defence Force Academy]. Did research on it. Whether I was telling fibs or not! He’s very aware, and Stephen is too. They’re very proud of Grandad I think.

Dad enlisted in the 28th Battalion. Suffered high casualties at Gallipoli. They called to build the 28th up again and so Dad joined the 28th Battalion but didn’t get to Gallipoli but served in Egypt and over on the Somme.

He got shot at Pozieres before they could get him out of the trench. The Germans bombarded the trench, Dad got blown up. A lump of shrapnel went underneath his left shoulder blade, cut out his left lung and buried him up to his neck. He was there for 3 days and they came –funny thing with First World War, they used to called a truce so they could go and get their wounded and dead.

Dad blinked his eyes and they dug him out. He lived the rest of his life with a piece of shrapnel next to his heart.

Badly. We used to laugh at him whenever a thunder storm came. He’d go and hide under the bed. We used to get a box over the ears from Mum. Of course we didn’t understand as small kids.

He lived a man’s life. He worked hard. He smoked and drank. He was a good Dad. Very hard to get near him. In those days they were. But a lovable man, but died too young, at 51. Shouldn’t have died. That’s him up there.

I think when I started to attend Anzac Days with him. He was president of the RSL [Returned and Services League] in Broome. He held that position about 5 years. They were all

First World War fellows. Reality set in and you’d go down there and hear the stories. You realise that war is not a laughing game and then prior to me leaving Broome, the Japanese

decided they were going to bomb there. They used to send over the little planes to photograph and that. My brother and I used to get our .22s out and take pot-shots at them. We knew they were they were Japanese by the big circle on the side. By 1942 I was going on 10, Mother and I were evacuated out of Broome.

We were coming down the west coast to Fremantle on the Koolinda, don’t know if she was a motor vessel or a steam ship but it was real big passenger boat. We picked up two lifeboats with the survivors of the Kormoran, which had just sunk the HMAS Sydney. That started to sink in too. That

war is war.

They were very polite, young fellows. They put them down in the cattle holds because the people from the Kimberleys would bring provisions up but then they had these big cattle holds and they take cattle back to Fremantle

for the abattoirs. They’d put these Germans down in there. We used to be up top looking down at them and throwing a piece of the fruit down at them. They were all friendly. There was a story going around that they’d been in the water for 24 hours. They reckon they’d been in the water for 3 days but they were all clean shaven, so they hadn’t been in the water that long at all.

There’s still a lot of controversy about the Sydney and the Kormoran. They’ll never know.

No we didn’t know. All we knew was that they were Germans. There was a couple of soldiers on board. I don’t know if they were billeted on the – I don’t know if there was a gun on the Koolinda. They might have put a small single-barrelled, four-inch gun on the Koolinda.

They realised that they were Germans by their uniforms for a start. The crew knew they were German. As us kids, they were just survivors in the lifeboats. I’ve got photos of them in their boats.

Fair haired. Clean some spoke some sort of English. That’s all I do remember.

Yes well I guess it’s fate I suppose.

That was in October, November and they lost Sydney and then the following March, Broome was bombed. By this time brother and sister had been evacuated.

Dad was still there because he being foreman of the public works he had to keep the jetty open for – wasn’t so much shipping except the navy – lots of flying boats were coming down from Java and points north. They would fuel at Broome. The Japanese annihilated a lot of them. You got to remember, the tide went out three miles there and their safe anchorage was out in deeper water.

To get out to their line boats while low tide was on they had to walk. I think they sank 16 flying boats. The Japanese came in, the Zeros came in and machine gunned them. Dad stayed there. At some stage I remember him coming down. We all went back in 1943 or 1944,

back to Broome for the last couple of years.

I don’t really know, Chris [interviewer]. I guess it must have taken a bit of a toll. I know one of the hardest things that faced Dad was when they had to round up the Japanese. Broome in those days and still is a pearling town. Population in the 1940s was

5250 whites. Rest were Japanese, Chinese, Kupangers, Javanese. When Darwin was bombed, Dad, because he only had a sergeant and two police constables there, and the RSL was the only army in the town so the police enlisted them to round up the Japanese.

One of our best friends was Japanese. I went to school with them all and played with them and all that. That was a very hard thing on Dad to have to arrest this man and his family and then send them south.

It was.

We wore shoes on Sunday to church and that was the only day we wore shoes. When brother turned nine he was given his first rifle. When I turned nine I was given my first rifle. It was all hand-line fishing. There was no nylon or that. It was all whiting line and we caught lots of fish. Brother Bill and I would take off for maybe that three days at a time.

It was a Huckleberry Finn existence. Rifle and a bag full of fishing line. We’d just disappear. We’d just go bush. We knew how to live off the bush. We’d catch fish. We’d shoot roos. Cook meat and all that sort of thing. It was a real laid back sort of a life. It was good. Got education. They closed the public school down during the war. We were educated by Catholic nuns.

Then at the latter part they opened the public school again and we went back to school there.

Bill? What can I say about brother Bill. Tall fellow. Quick tempered. I remember we were playing a game of tennis and

he said, “Get off, I’m going to play with somebody else.” Of course we all threw boomerangs in those days and I grabbed my boomerang and hit him right in the back of the neck with it. He didn’t say much. About three hours later he appears with the slug gun and shoots me in the leg. I’ve still got the scar. He dug it out with his pen knife.

We didn’t have Band-Aids or anything. We had to stop the bleeding from where he dug it out. Very quick tempered young fellow. I remember once he said to Dad – he was feeling his age, by this time he was about 15 – he said to Dad, “Do you have to slurp your soup like that?” Dad didn’t say anything. He just put his spoon down and

backhanded my brother straight over his chair like. My brother Bill says, “We’re shooting through, we’re going bush.” So we gathered all our things up and we went bush. We had this hut that we built out of scrap iron and that about two mile away. Early hours of the morning the door has burst in and there’s Dad.

Mum must have went to check on us or something. Dad’s standing there and he’s got this stock whip which I’d found out in the bush from one of our jaunts. So he stock whipped us all the way home. By this time we’re both bawling our eyes out. We’ve been whipped. So after we got locked in our rooms, brother Bill decided it was my fault, because I’d found the

stock whip, so he gave me a hell of a hiding too. So I copped it both ways. No we were good mates you know. We did lots of things together.

Big role. Big role. Especially when I joined the navy. Personal thing but I’d been working up

on stations. I didn’t wear underwear. I didn’t own a toothbrush. I’ve still got this piece of paper. I was thinking about it the other night. The night I got on the train at Perth he wrote this out: “Self love is not half as vile as self neglecting.” I’ve always looked at that and thought about it

and kept myself clean. He joined navy 1948. He was a leading seaman in three years. He was a petty officer in six years and he was a chief in nine. I looked up to brother Bill.

I don’t know, Chris.

Nothing really. We used to talk a lot about sex and things. He used to wise me up. No that’s about –

Everyday, like the same as with

the white boys. I played cricket and that with Aboriginals and they were black Aboriginals and the Japanese a couple of Chinese. We all mixed. It was a community thing. The only thing I didn’t like is – and it’s all changed now – is that if you’re walking down a footpath, they had to get off the footpath

and let the white walk on the footpath. Well, that was the culture of the day. But it doesn’t happen now. You’ve heard about Broome picture theatre is open air. Once a month we’d get sixpence to go to the pictures.

Threepence in, threepence to go and buy a big glass of pure lemon squash sweetened with lots of sugar and crushed ice. That was the highlight of the time. Dad grew his own peanuts. So we took a bag of peanuts with us. Then in the cooler months – if you’ve got cool months in Broome in the Kimberleys –

after the pictures, Dad would shout us a bowl of long soup in Chinatown. That was pretty good. Then when the army arrived there after Broome was bombed, they set up a picture theatre out in the bush. We used to walk a couple of mile out of town and take a box with us for a seat. We didn’t have folding chairs or anything. We used to take banana boxes with us, watch the pictures out there.

The many cultures didn’t worry us in many ways. In many ways we just accepted each other and that was it.

Not really. It’s so long ago.

Well through probably down the pub.

You got to remember Dad being foreman of public works, it was one of the prominent positions. They had to get his permission to travel on the train, the little toot-toot we had up there, and through community work around the town.

We had a washer woman and a cleaning girl, but a lot of them there was black trackers working for the police force. I guess others would have had positions of work in town. Not the layabouts. Yeah they were pretty good people.

In Broome?

Not like the Anzac Days here. They didn’t march. They just got together. Did a small service and more or less reminisce, have a few beers. That was it.

Not very much at all. Not very much at all. We got most of our about Dad from Mum. They didn’t talk about it. Even the Second World War fellows didn’t talk much. We did too. Strange. DVA [Department of Veterans’ Affairs] had a travelling thing and they had it at Newcastle

and invited us down and I met up with a fellow from Campbelltown, Merv. He said, “What are you doing here?” “Well I’m a Korean War vet [veteran].” He said, “I didn’t know that.” I said, “Well I didn’t know that,” and yet I’d worked with this man in Campbelltown and we didn’t know we were both Korean War vets. It’s only in the last few years that Korea vets have come out of their shell. I joined HMAS Murchison Association in 1984.

Prior to that I used to go to the marches but in Campbelltown but we didn’t talk much about anything.

The Australian government has done a lot for the Korea vets. I don’t know if they realise that the Vietnam vets

were getting their fair share of because they weren’t forgotten. They stuck up for their rights and jumped up and down and rightly so which they should. I think the Australian Government – the DVA – decided well what about these Korea vet fellows. We better start doing something

for them, which they had done. That memorial in Canberra, very impressive.

I’d seen her hold him while he’s crying.

Well he was crying. Didn’t know really why. Those guys were subject to gas, shellshock. When you think Murchison was away nine months. We were away serving in Korea nine months but we weren’t in actual contact, say 60 days we fired

just over 6000 rounds. When you read the account of the Somme and especially Pozieres 60,000 shells in one night. No wonder they came back shell shocked. Dad’s trauma of being buried in this trench. What would that do to a man’s mind? Just probably feeling your life ebbing away you know.

So Dad he didn’t talk about his experiences.

Mum? Softy. She was a Pom. Yes she came out from England in 1918 and she’d been married and lost her husband, and Dad and her got together.

They had three children. Dad would give us a bit of a whopping. We knew we could always go to Mum. Some funny times, as you say. Father, he belonged to the Buffaloes, an organisation well say like the Masonic Club and we had this shower room

which was a timber floor, corrugated iron which was all rusting out at the end because of the water. Dad wanted a shower to go to the Buffalo meeting. So he’s screaming out to brother Bill and I and we wouldn’t get out. Once again down came the door of the shower. In he charged. I tell you what comic movie. Trod on the cake of soap. Went straight out the end of the verandah on the slippery floors by the door. We shot through quick smart.

As I said Dad was a disciplinarian but we were still allowed to live a fairly free sort of a thing. Except for that one occasion of brother Bill back chatting Dad. We didn’t backchat.

Every Saturday night Dad played the harmonica and we were sat on the steps and had a sing-a-long. It was a happy existence. I don’t ever remember being sick. Came off my bike and smashed my front teeth. I remember that.

Well when Broome was bombed mother and I were living in back in Victoria Park, Raymond Street and that was when ARP [Air Raid Precautions] wardens rode up and down the streets on their bikes to make sure blackout was on. They dug pits in your backyard

put corrugated iron over it as shelters but I went to school. Perth was unaffected by the war. It was only mainly Darwin and Broome. Quite a few more towns in Australia were bombed than you realise. I say Broome they lost a recorded 70 odd people.

But they would have lost more than that because the Aboriginals we weren’t on a roll or anything. Aboriginals and itinerant people were in and out. We still had Afghan peddlers with their camels bringing pots and pans and things through. So how many of those were killed as well you know. But I think the biggest things were those seaplanes that got machine gunned.

Women and children. It was terrible. But that’s war.

In Perth itself? Well there were air raid shelters everywhere in Perth itself. Lots of Yanks. Typical I suppose of any city, navy, army, air force. Bods everywhere.

We weren’t stinted in anyway. The picture shows were still going on. Milk bars and all that was open. It was funny, when we went back to Broome, we saw butter for the first time in Broome. The army had tinned butter and we had ice boxes. You imagine when you put butter on your bread you just put a hole in the tin and

poured it on. You didn’t spread it. I think the army brought in – we had more victuals in Broome once the army got there.

Pretty good. Public school had a very strict headmaster, Mr Green.

There we are, I remember his name after all those years. So he must have been strict. He had the most famous eye with a duster. He could be working on the blackboard and you’d be talking. He could pick that duster up, spin on his heels and hit you every time with that duster. I remember one time he said, “Joyce what are you doing?” I said, “I’m not doing anything. I’m not doing anything,

sir.” “Come out here.” Six cuts across the hand. He said, “You must have been doing something to have a guilty conscience.” We had one boy there with a glass eye who used to take it out and put it on his ink well, and his eye would be looking at you.

I don’t think I even thought about it. You went to school. You learnt to read and write. Marie said a couple of times “I don’t believe you,” but I didn’t know my alphabet until I joined the navy. I knew there was A B C D E but I couldn’t recite the alphabet. The navy educated me. Gave me a

school certificate. My schooling was get out as soon as you can, and grab your fishing line and go fishing. You know.

I don’t think I had any, Chris. Life was just a bowl of cherries. We had such a freedom.

I guess kids in the city had freedom too. They’d go playing football. We didn’t play football. We played cricket. We swam. I remember making a surf board and that was only after the army got there but we used an old wooden ironing board as a surf board. Brother Bill and I, we made a raft out of two petrol

tanks. The Mosquito bombers had these aluminium petrol tanks. Once they used those up they’d ditch them and we found a couple of these out in the bush and we dragged them home and we made a beautiful raft out of those. We could go anywhere on that thing. No we just had an idyllic life, more or less.

14.

Mother put me into work for this clerical position. I was supposed to be trained as a clerk. But I didn’t last there very long. Say 19 [shillings] twopence a week I got. Then I went to – still around about 15, 14 and a half – I went into postal service as a telegram boy. Because I spent 2 years out bush

and I was 17 when I came down. I went bush when I was 15. The last station I was on, Middalya out at Carnarvon that was about a quarter of a million acres 32000 head of sheep. Big station it was. Very hard man there. He was of German descent and he dropped me three times while I was there.

First time I’d been out fixing windmills and he pulled up beside the homestead gate and said, “Put the ute away.” I didn’t know how to drive, did I? I knew there was a brake and I knew there was – and the shed was down there. I released the brake and turned the wheel and aimed straight for the shed. I thought that was the only brake. I didn’t know there was a foot brake and I went straight through the back of the shed.

That stopped the ute. He walked down, looked at the ute, looked at me, bang straight in the face and dropped me there fair and square. The second time he dropped me, we had to go out in the ute to kill a sheep. I was riding in the back and there was this emu running down the track in front of us. Well, emu beaks

were 5 shillings a beak. So I put this bullet straight down his spine and dropped him. Well the ute went straight over the top of him and knocked the sump out didn’t it. So I had to walk back to the station and tell him. He got the other truck to pull the ute back. We did all that. Let me work with him and all that then he dropped me again. Third time, he was teaching me to be a

windmill man. He said, “Do you know the working of a windmill?” The windmill goes round and round. The cog moves the shaft up and down. There’s a leather bucket as they call it like the inside of a bike pump. Sucks the water up and down. So and so needs a new bucket. By this time I could drive. I went out. And the idea

was that you let the rod come right up and there was a hole in that you put a bar through so that you could connect and change the bucket. I forgot to put the rod through didn’t I. Disconnected and the straight thing went down the well. Went back and told him. Bang. He was a good man. I went to work for him for 30 shillings and my keep. He gave me a rise a pound a week and didn’t tell me. Put it straight into a bank account for me.

So when I left there I had a nice little nest egg. I used to shoot on weekends. You got to realise in those days in the 1940s you were up at half past four, five o’clock. Breakfast, out. Two hours midday you tried to have a kip in the heat of the day and then you worked. You probably didn’t get your evening meal to half past six, seven. By the time you got the horses all rubbed down

and fed. So I used to shoot on a Sunday. I used to earn 30 pound a month with roo skins, emu beaks, dingo tails and ears. So I had a considerable amount of money by the time I left that station. Decided that I had to do something with my life.

Well I went to town once in two years. Twice I went to Carnarvon, 120 mile – we were a fair way from Carnarvon. And you just couldn’t say to the boss, “Well can I have the

ute to go into town?” It was pretty lonely. There was only another young fellow and myself. Station manager, the boss and his wife. The Aboriginal boys, stockman there. I decided something had to be done.

Well it taught me how to cook, how to sew, self reliance I guess, self discipline. But once again no hygiene. I was pretty scruffy by the time I. The guy Cookie used to cut our hair. You can imagine what that looked like. I’ve got a couple of photos in there I’ll dig out after. One when I first went out on the station and one when I left.

Taught me how to batch and look after myself. Put it that way.

We had no radio. I guess the boss had one in the house. The mail truck came once week with drums of petrol. At then at shearing time,

they’d bring a big crew of 30 odd in. We were fairly isolated. We made our own sports, our own fun.

Not very much. Not very much. Possibly because it didn’t really concern me. We were too busy doing what you had to do.

No we used to listen on Cookie’s radio. We used to listen to some of the songs on it and that. No we didn’t have a radio up where we had to bunk out. The outside world was pretty isolated.

I went down to my sister’s place at Northam. Mum was living with her by this time.

I went and stayed with her and as I say brother Bill was on HMAS Karangi in Fremantle. So I went down to visit him and that’s when we decided we had to come to pass. By this time my sister was married to an ex-army fellow, Second World War. Talking to Tom – that’s another thing, too,

when I come back from Korea you say that RSL Anzac Days with Dad. I went to an RSL Anzac Day at Northam with my brother-in-law Tom. That’s all that they did. They didn’t march. They just more or less had a short service and a case of beer. Even then that was 1949.

Anzac Day wasn’t actually recognised really. When it must have been 1994 I said to Marie, “We’ll go back to Broome, I’ll show you Broome.” I took over a small rosemary plant to plant in the grounds of the RSL.

I gave it to the vice president. He was there on this particular day. I said, “You might let it grow into a big bush and you can wear it on Anzac Day.” “Wear it on Anzac Day?” I said, “Yeah.” “No,” he said, “you cook with rosemary.” They don’t wear rosemary on Anzac Day in Broome. So they’re pretty laid back over there.

He was in searchlights in New Guinea. Bit of his experience up there. They were also attached to a group of Ghurkhas. He used to tell me about the Ghurkhas. If they drew their knife

they draw blood and all this sort of thing. He was pretty upset when I came back from Korea sporting two medals. Can I be rude? Will you cut it out?

He said, “Bloody marvellous mate. You’ve been up in Japan shagging the girls and we were fighting the buggers.”

Tom he wasn’t too well either when he got out of the army after Second World War. Man’s long since died.

From Tom. Talking to Tom. I was throwing around with him what I should do with my life. I think Dulcie, my sister, said, “Talk to Tom about the army.”

Dad was army. Why don’t you go army? Then when I went down BCOF was recruiting at that time. The Korean war didn’t break out until 25th June as you know. I must have gone either late 1949 or 1950 to recruiting office. They

were still doing changeover of BCOF personnel so they were after more people to join BCOF. 3rd Battalion that was in Japan but I don’t know what other battalions were back in Australia. But I was too young. They were –

It wasn’t. It was to join up and make something of my life. To get into the defence force. That was the main thing. Dad being army and Tom being army. It was to have a job. They were paying pretty good. When I joined

the navy I got three pound a week. Was about six dollars. To become someone, become part of something. You can only talk to so many sheep up on sheep stations. I often say my best mate up there was Ba-a-a-asil and his

sister Ba-a-a-arbara. She wasn’t really pretty.

As in which way Chris?

I don’t think that came into it. The army would have been a

job for me. As I say the camaraderie and belonging mainly. Belonging. I didn’t have much to do with mother and as I say at this time brother Bill he was – I hadn’t seen family for two years. The family didn’t really grab me that much by this time.

But as far as being patriotic that wasn’t the case with joining the army. I suppose I could have joined the postal service again but the I thought the army would be a good option. As it turned out the navy won me.

Brother tried to join. He wanted to go into officer training

soon as he left school. But he went into the postal service same as my sister. For some reason or other he was rejected. I don’t know what the reason was. He was highly educated. He was dux of his high school. Always got good marks. So when

he turned of age he couldn’t go in as officer so circumstances why he got out I don’t know. The navy was his life. He got out, took discharge. If he’d stayed in I think he would have made lieutenant. That’s as far as a lower deck man can go. He loved the navy and he rose up through the ranks pretty quick.

Yes. He served on HMAS Tobruk. The day after our second clash according to our first lieutenant he requested that I get transferred from Murchison to Tobruk and my answer to my first lieutenant was that Murchison was my ship and I intended to stay on

You got to realise I was still 18 at the time but Tobruk met us at the estuary and came back out and escorted us because we had these holes around our water line and she escorted us back to Kure. That night after we arrived in Kure, he decided he’d give me a run ashore

on him. So Tobruk was that side of the jetty and we were this side we went ashore all in our whites. He said, “We won’t go into town, we’ll go to the sword shop and cash up our money.” We’d get 1000 yen per pound on board. We went to sword shop in Kure you’d get 1250, you’d get another 250 yen. So we went to the sword shop

It was a shop sells samurai swords. They’d call it the sword shop and he had this little racket going. He’d take all the Australian money he could get, which was illegal, I think. So he said we won’t go into town – once we got our money. Mama-san has this nice little house up in the hills. No one goes up there.

Take some beer up with us. So we bought the beer and we got our trishaw. Up we go “Bill-san, Bill-san.” Brother Bill had been going there for quite a while so I found out. Couple of nice little girls there. So they cooked us up a meal and we drank our beer and we had our little fun. We were lying around.

Having a bit more cherry brandy and next minute Mama-san comes in from road screaming, waving her arms, “MP [military police] come, MP come!” Brother and I get dressed very quickly and out the back door. And he looks down and says there we are there. He said if we go down the road we’re going to run into the MPs. We go straight down there we head straight for the dockyard.

So down we go. Well we head through 3 sewer channels. They don’t have pipe sewers in Japan. It’s all sewer channels. Mud, sewer. We got to the dockyard and we stunk and we’re starting to sober up by this time. Inside the dockyard gates was this

bath girls place. They had this big hot steaming bath you could go and have a bath in. So we head into there. Yes Yes. Strip off. We were there an hour. Drank some more beer. The girls had laundered our whites, dried them ironed them. We went back on board looking like kings we did you know. Now what was I saying a first lieutenant said

on Shoalhaven. You went ashore – he agreed this particular party one night coming back – you went ashore looking like matadors and you’ve come back looking like stevedores.. So brother and I returned on board looking like matadors. It’s marvellous what they can do in Japan but laundry. They washed our clothes, dried them and ironed them. Yes so that was the

one episode with Bill. I never went ashore with him again.

Went into my bank. I used it some of it on first leave from Flinders. Also

I came back from Japan with a considerable amount of money too. But I told my sister she could use it in any way she liked. When I came back I didn’t have much left in the bank account. But I had all my pay in at and that. So the money I had out bush also Mum probably needed some money and that so that’s probably where the money went.

Two years.

She’s four years over me. My sister, she’s the oldest, then two years down is brother Bill and then myself. I’m 71 in December. I think Bill would have to be going on 74, no 73.

She’s 75. Yeah.

We came down from Broome in 1946. As I was saying to Robert [interviewer] before, he developed tropical ulcers and he came down to have an operation on them. But in those days they used practically straight chloroform in the

theatres with his war wounds and that. And with his heart. His heart must have distended. He used to get this lump of shrapnel used to rub on the heart. His heart would swell. He’d have to lie down and wait for his heart to go down. He was a hard working man. He died on the table. That was 1946, and he was 51.

Change? Well I wasn’t allowed to go to his funeral. I was 14. I wasn’t allowed to go to his funeral. But it made things difficult for mother. Because I don’t know if she got any war widows pension or anything. She should have. Like today he would have been on a full TPI [Totally and Permanently Incapacitated]

pension. But he wasn’t. I think he was on a shilling a week or something. Going by memory. My sister mentioned this to me. Mum took part-time work in a tea shop in Perth. By this time sister was married so she was ok.

Yeah well I went for this clerical work and then post office. Didn’t like that too much so I went bush.

Not so much. No No. I went bush because. 14 year old hanging around your mother’s neck

wasn’t good. She needed her freedom. She was still a relatively young woman. She was the same ages as Dad. She was only early 50s. Once again I had to go to work and the bush attracted me because I was reared in it. I learnt to ride.

I suppose I was being trained as a jackeroo. The boss wasn’t real happy when I said I was leaving. But I could do windmills. I could do fencing. Actually I was only talking to the old gentleman behind me, when I was doing this landscaping, I had to punch the holes down with a crow bar. We had a fencing team come through an they were short one man so the boss loaned me to them. I still got his pay, but

I earned for every post hole I put in I got sixpence. And we were making big money. We were making 7 shillings and sixpence per day, 75 cents a day we were making. There was three of us. I learnt how to do a straight line with a fence, shear, bit of mechanic, learnt how to slaughter sheep.

Handy, odd job man around the station.

Oh god yeah.

Well as I say brother Bill said that he knew this recruiting chief and he said don’t worry about a thing. I got there. He’d rung him up already.

He said, “Right oh Steve, we’ve got to put you through an exam here.” Sat me down at this table with this sheet. I just looked at it. He came round and stood behind me, put his arm over, filled everything in for me. All I had to do was sign the bottom. Then I went for a medical. Bit embarrassing. I’d never had a medical before. Bend over please. Cough and all that stuff. They said go home and wait.

So the day before I turned 17 and a half, I got a telegram. The day after I turned 17 and half I was on the train to Flinders. They were looking for recruits and they’d just introduced the 6 year. Brother Bill was a 12 year and they found they weren’t getting the in take they needed so they dropped it to a 6. That went on for 3 years and they introduced

a nine year. If you’d signed on after your 6 then you’d have to sign on for a further nine. I thought I was pretty well disciplined but Flinders was a different thing again to what I’d known. I didn’t like the needles too much. They gave you batch of needles. But they fixed me teeth up.

They gave me two false teeth in the front which made me pretty. I couldn’t hack the PT, the physical training. Got into lots of trouble with the PTI [Physical Training Instructor] there. He had the same punishment as the gunnery instructor down there, that you made a mistake then it was once around the bullring with a .303 extended above your head. And a .303 can get mighty heavy with your arms stretched

above your head but the time you go around once or twice. They ask you what branch you want to go into. Well brother Bill was a seaman. He was a quartermaster. So I said seaman. So straight away rowing boats, tying knots, gunnery. I was pretty good.

I’ve always been crooked in this, brother Bill earned his crossed rifles in those days if you got so many bullseyes on the range you got crossed rifles to wear on your sleeve and I missed one bull so I didn’t get my cross rifle. Brother Bill did me again you know. I tried to get up to his standard.

Went through the whole training at Flinders. Gas cylinders and all that sort of thing.

How did I take to it?

As I said previously I wasn’t used to, I didn’t know if I made a mistake some bloke would say right here’s a .303 extended above your head, and do two laps around the bull ring. I was used to discipline as I said before working with this man I made a mistake he came out and dropped me.

That sort of discipline I knew. Discipline was different in the navy. Later on another sort of discipline too. You make a mistake you’re docked pay or leave. I didn’t understand that would be discipline to me. I’ve been used to discipline, probably physical discipline.

The other mental type discipline was something I had to accept. I still moved into the service life. I liked it. Down at Flinders it was different. Old chiefs or even petty officers think they’re lieutenants

and they’ve got the authority to do to you as they want to do. They did then. I don’t know if they still do. If you were a naughty boy you got disciplined.

As I say I missed out on BCOF. Navy was second choice.

I could swim. I knew how to swim. So that was pretty good. If something happened you could swim. But as far as knowing a girl in each port. You got to remember I was pretty naïve as far as worldly things went. I could look after myself. I was pretty handy with my fist.

But far as worldly experiences go I had none. I didn’t even know a girl.

None. I don’t think I even lifted up a newspaper to read. Yet my son he wanted to join the navy quit a few years ago now and

at his examination he wasn’t worldwide read. He didn’t read newspapers. He didn’t know what was going on. They said well you can come back in six months after you get a better opinion of what’s going on in the world. We didn’t have to do that when I joined the navy. As I said the chief filled my form in. I signed it. Bang. You’re in. Education was no problem.

Who needs an education to tie some knots. Today it’s a vastly different thing with computerised machinery and that.

You learnt how to row. You learnt how to sail a whaler.

They had a small ship there that used to take us out over night I think it was. That just gave us an idea of what it would be like to be on board a ship. I can’t think what it was. As I say you didn’t have a right arm rate so you weren’t trained in any field. All you had to do was

was the thunder mental seamanship type duties. Scrub deck. Paint. You had to learn how to paint. If you paint you paint the side of a ship you never paint it up and down. You paint it lengthways because of the water. I wouldn’t have thought about that. It was just mainly seamanship.

I can’t remember. I guess some of it would have been told to us but I don’t remember received much tuition on that.

I was starting to enjoy it. I was starting to learn that you don’t make mistakes.

Learn how to do the things they tell you. Do the things they tell you. That was the main thing. How to obey an order. I think that’s the hardest thing you learn in recruit school.

Oh yeah you got greased or soft-soaped actually. Wasn’t greased, they soft-soaped you all over.

Using liquid detergent but very thick stuff they had in the navy. They’d strip you and do you all over with this detergent and go and take your clothes away. Then you had to get to a shower in the nuddy like you know. One guy we tied him up in his hammock. He was a heavy sleeper. We tied him up in his hammock, lashed him up in his hammock and took him out and put him in the trees. Poor bugger he didn’t know he was out there until he woke up.

One of the naughty things I used to do was – service always had a bulldog, a mascot. They had this particular filthy one down there in the 1950s. If someone took a little bit of a dislike to you they’d grab your hammock and throw it to the bulldog to mate with. That wasn’t very nice because you had to scrub everything wash everything out of your hammock.

That’s part and parcel of Cerberus. I can’t think of any other real initiation. You know for the love of me I can’t even remember what class I was in down there. There’s nothing on my records that tells me what class I was in.

They were all right. I didn’t have any problem with sea sickness until the South China Sea. I was always thought we got caught. We were coming back from Hong Kong. We’d been down there for some reason. And I always thought we got caught in Typhoon Ruth but it wasn’t Typhoon Ruth, it was another typhoon.

We were just north of Taiwan which was Formosa in those days and the skipper he aimed the ship to the centre of the typhoon. They tied the wheel. I spent three days in a hammock bin with a bucket. The only time I got out of that hammock bin was to empty a bucket. That was the first time I got sick.

But I was pretty good on sea legs. The second time I got sick was when we paid HMAS Mildura off. We come across the Great Australian Bight, to Melbourne from Fremantle and it was very nasty. I’d been in the navy four years by this time. So I used the bucket again. As an ordinary seaman one of your duties is to be bucket boy

and on the bridge of a ship or frigate in my case. You’ve got two duty officers. You’ve got two helmsmen which control the signal down to the engine room. You’ve got the helmsman. You’ve got two buckets either side of the wheel and you’ve got another bucket for the officers. When they get half full

it’s your job to take them and throw them over the side, place two fresh ones there – and you learn not to throw them into the wind. But I always topped the buckets up on the way down. That’s another real pleasant job to give a an ordinary seaman. Sea legs weren’t real good in that case.

Not that I know of. There’s pills now.

Main thing is to eat. It’s got something to do with balance, something in your ears.

Be on HMAS Murchison out of Sydney. They were still doing

training runs. And it wasn’t until they got their signal that they had to man fully compliment the ship that they stopped these training runs then.

No No. I went on Murchison first then I was posted to Culgoa. The understanding was that the skipper didn’t want too many ordinary seaman to go to war

so he drafted five of us to go to Culgoa. Then when Murchison steamed up the Queensland coast we joined Murchison back up there. So I short a short stay on Culgoa, three months I think.

Very cramped. I was

forward starboard mess, seaman’s mess. I lived out of a locker. These lockers were a seat. They went round a big long mess table. They had cushions on top but you lived out of that. What you did in the summer time, you put all your winter clothes in a big kit bag and were stored in the store

and all your summer clothes were in the locker. Change of season went the other way. Because the navy had a rule that the 1st June you went in the blues and the 1st December you went in the whites. You were lucky that way from 1st December to June you wore whites. June to December you wore blues.

No matter where the ship was.

That was what it was.

Be very hot. I remember going on leave back to Perth, five days on a steam train in whites. No showers. By the time I got there the whites were grey. They were grey like that from the soot coming in the carriage windows. Yeah that was their principle.

Four days from Perth to Melbourne. From Sydney to Perth.

I was pretty gung ho you know. Exciting. I think there was three recruits on that train.

Had to learn a bit of table manners in the dining room. I had to learn which knife and fork to use and all this sort of thing. Educational. It was real good fun because you come across the Nullarbor Plain. Nullarbor did a big arc and you could actually get off the train, walk across, talk to the aboriginals and

then board the train again as it came around this big arc. That was on my first leave home in December 1950. Was a troop train or service personnel. In 1951, that was the last troop train to go to Western Australia or defence personnel, navy, army, air force.

Of course it was all sit up. Five days of sitting up except for luggage rack up the top. You fought for that. You get up there you could have a sleep. All carriages, steam trains, a big compartment down one side and a corridor down the other.

It hadn’t started. Sorry it had started.

We all thought, our particular class that we would go to HMAS Australia, the cruiser. Because that’s where everybody went. And when we got our draft I lost five pound actually because I bet that we would be going to Australia. When the 12 of us got drafted to Murchison

oh we were good you know. At that time we didn’t know the good thing about it was we were going to a small ship not a big ship. Less discipline. We didn’t know the Murchison was going to be deployed to go to Korea. As I say we joined early 1951, wasn’t until May I think it was that she got the signal to start to get herself

together and she was only given a couple of weeks. They dragged ratings from every which way but loose. Only reading it recently that they only had a compliment of 67 and they had to build her up to 192, so all the ships around the port that had some hard cases on board. They got rid of them onto Murchison. They had some funny fellows on there.

I don’t think Chris. We all thought that the Aussie that finished off recruit school and that the Australia trained you to then go to other ships. That was what in principle was going on.

For some reason or other we didn’t go the Aussie. My daughter-in-law’s Dad joined at the same time as me and I never met the man until we all got out. He went to the Aussie. He went straight to the Aussie from Flinders. I went to Murchison.

My brother?

I think he was still on Karangi in Fremantle. Wasn’t until Tobruk came up to Korea that I knew he was on Tobruk.

I didn’t. Another one of those you were told you were going so you went.

No option about it. You don’t get a choice. Far as I can gather they do today. Like a typical example was the fellows in the Gulf. They would have their inoculation so they sent them home. You were drafted to a ship and you went with that ship went.

I guess it was just an acceptance again. We didn’t know what we were going to be in for. We knew there was two ships up there already, the Shiloh and the Matar.

In my time to leave, we were sailing, Warramunga had taken over from Shoalhaven. We relieved Matar. Korea’s at war and we were on our way to it.

Didn’t have a clue. Couldn’t have been part of Tasmania, as far as I knew.

I learnt more up there, why we were there. But prior to it, no, nothing. Once we got there I suppose inquisitiveness. Everybody I suppose possibly was talking about it. Then we found out north invaded south. First time in history for United Nations

to all come together and yeah so we just accepted the fact that we were there.

None. We weren’t allowed to write to our – we could write but it wasn’t sent until we got to Korea.

I was in Korea not Hong Kong not on the way out. I was in Korea before the mother got a letter to say I was up there. I don’t think the world knew what Korea was going to develop into so I suppose they were treating it like it could have been another Third World War. This is why all the secrecy of that era went on with the Korean War at the beginning.

Nothing. I’d heard that the Labor Party were communists as a kid. I had no idea. As I said I came down from a sheep station. I had no touch you might as well say with outside world or newspapers

radio or any of that. Naïve, a very naïve young man. You don’t believe half of this do you? How can this fella be so – ?

No. As I say I was transferred to Culgoa and as far as we were concerned we were stopping in Australia and we were just doing ordinary training off the Queensland coast

with Culgoa. Like just normal seaman duties like daily running doing runs on make-believe submarines, the frigates were submarine detection ship. No we got no leave. Out of the blue we were told to pack our bags and this lighter was going to take us over to the Murchison.

Oh yeah mainly. The Murchison crew even though they were a ratbag crew, they taught us a lot. They taught us how to look after ourselves, hygiene

You don’t use that word, you’re using it wrong. This is the proper way you say a word. Educated us, protected us in one sense. I was talking to someone the other day and they’d never heard of the term, a ‘mess mother’. I had two mess mothers. Jock Chalmers was the first one. He was a changeover Royal Navy man. Leading seaman.

A mess mother takes an ordinary seaman under their wing teaches them the proper things to do to keep you out of trouble and if you do get into trouble, they more or less they’re your advocate to calm things over with the person you did the wrong thing to. He was a good fellow. The second fellow Len Meekins. I met Len for the first time last year

when we had our full frigates reunion in Ballina. We’re having another one in Foster in two weeks time. Len Meekins was my second mess mother. They just taught you the proper things to do. Keep you out of trouble.

It’s strange that we recognised each other after 50 odd years. Which was good. Cause we’ve all changed. Yeah we sat down and had a good yarn about the things that we did. But if you were on shore and playing up a bit he’d just come over and quiet yourself down. You’ll finish up running with the Red Caps [British military police] or something.

Bit hard, with a big five foot kit bag over your shoulder and your blue dilly bag in the other hand. When you got there you knew you had to salute and you didn’t know if you could put your kit bag down and salute.

It’s a funny feeling jeez. “I’m going on this little ship now and I’m losing freedom again.” Joining the navy you lost a certain amount of freedom but then joining a ship you lose more freedom because you’re enclosed. I can’t think how many were in our mess. Probably 30.

Compartment wise I might be able to find out over lunch. I’ve got a book up the back. But we all slept in hammocks. The worst part with the lockers was as an ordinary seaman if you wanted something out of that locker and there was a leading seaman sitting on it or sleeping on it, you had to wait until he got off before you could get what you wanted out of that locker.

You learnt to treat these older guys with respect.

You’ve been listening to someone else haven’t you? They told us that if you want to make money in Japan, soap. You buy as much

Palmolive and Lifebuoy and Lux as you can and sell it ashore in Japan. So I did that, didn’t I. I had half my kit in my kit bag and I’d have to ask permission to go to storage hold and get some stuff out of my kit bag. I had my locker chocka-block – I should have put it in my kit bag – with soap and the first run ashore you could buy the soap that I had in my kit bag cheaper than what I paid for it.

So I had plenty of soap I was giving it away. Smelt nice. Locker smelt nice.

No not really. Not on that run anyway.

I didn’t have any. I didn’t have any

photographs. The only other thing I had was my writing compendium which as I say, I only had my mother to write to. I didn’t write that much to my mother either. Your wallet, watch. I didn’t have many personal effects really.

No we had

good crew on Murchison. Couple of other ships that sort of thing went on. Especially Shoalhaven. I lost a bit of money, officer [UNCLEAR] Shoalhaven. Murchison was good for that. You could go ashore, you could come back, you could empty your wallet, your money on the table and it would be there in the next morning. Good crew.

Didn’t. As I said, I lost five pounds. I was going to the Aussie.

Allan Ballard? No. As I say we didn’t get much briefing at all from Cerberus – Flinders. We didn’t know who we were going to or

Yeah. Came back from leave and you’re only in Flinders for another week and you’re drafted, this is where you’re going. There was no preparation at all. I suppose they thought the six months they trained you was preparation enough. As I said you had no right arm rate. Skipper made most of the

ordinary seaman gunnery rates. Loading numbers. My best man, little Tommy there, he was in the ammunition locker passing the rounds up through. Once we got on board then we were designated as seaman what our duties would be. But ordinary seaman the skipper used most of as gun crew.

The other fellows were trained. Like you had radar operators and sonar operators. On a four inch you’ve got a trainer and a layer they turning the handles like that, today it’s more hydraulic I guess. The layer goes up and down and the trainer goes right to left.

Then you’ve got two captains of the gun. On each bridge they stand there as that photograph shows you. Then you’ve got four loading numbers. I finished up being number one loading number. I just stayed at the breech and the others passed them to me. So you had four rounds at either side ready to go into that breech at one time.

Had been trained as a gunnery loading number but not as a trainer or a layer or anything.

Your green book, as I call it, shows when you joined

what gunnery you done at Flinders. There’s a piece of paper on that. What medical you received. No that’s about all we had.

Inoculation for smallpox.

That’s one bit of advice they do give you. Because in the old days they scratch the skin and put the powder into you and if you don’t move – keep moving your arm. Your glands swell up underneath. Few of our fellows they had to go to bed because they didn’t move their arm around like you know. Plenty of needles. That’s about all.

No. In the navy you have about three or four that you get to know real well. The others you say gidday to. You mess mates one you’re

on a ship when you go ashore you wouldn’t think of mixing with stokers or signalmen. Or even the after port mess of seamen. You wouldn’t even think about mixing with those because your mess was the ones that you with daily, hourly. From Flinders I didn’t take any.

Gordon Robbins I suppose Gordon would have been the closest one. He joined with me and he went to Murchison with me.

Yes. He was on starboard with us.

Not in names. There was Tex Wright, another Western Australian. I think too

somewhere along the line the states stayed together for some silly reason. Tex Wright was a good mate of mine. We used to go to shore together. Little Tommy Rawnsley from Wollongong. He just lives around the corner from me now. There was Tom, Gordon Robbins, myself, my two mess mothers Glen and Jock.

Be about half a dozen of us. Different rates again. Tom was an ammunition passer upper. General duties. Even though I was a loading number you still had to do your lookout. You still had to do so many hours on the helms to certify to be a helmsman. I think it was thirty hours you got to do

Steering the ship. Taking the orders on how to steer a ship. Duties such as chipping out rust and painting and treating and painting and, you’ve still got those duties to do apart from being a gunnery rater.

Was over the side, painting ship side. I hated ship side

because I couldn’t climb a rope. I had weak ankles and to climb a rope so many times I slipped straight off the plank and into the water. But they always had a boat in the water but how many paintbrushes I got docked for I don’t know. If you lost a paintbrush they took it out of your pay. Strange.

Close up I could climb a rope but you get down the side, 15 feet it’s a bit hard to climb a rope back up if you’ve got weak ankles.

I suppose Murchison we did three times.

Mainly in harbour. Coming back when returning to Australia

we were coming down the Queensland coast, and the skipper says “Well we’ve got to look pretty spick and span coming back into Sydney. I could either anchor and lose time or I said I’ll reduce speed and we’ll do it underway.” Everyone said well we’ll do it underway, didn’t we, so we counting on everyone hanging over the side painting ship side underway.

Paint ship side you always had two marksmen with a .303 for sharks in case anyone did fall in like number one used to slip and they always had a boat there to pick you up. There’s always these little slips.

Yeah me. Cause I couldn’t climb the rope.

Oh no no no. Not underway.

I think I did the first four feet. Then I got back off the plank and went somewhere else. Someone else talk over the go further down to the water line. So they returned pretty tiddly. By this time we had custom officers on. They were running all over the ship like a pack of rats.

When I joined her?

As I say we were doing daily running. We were still learning to be a seaman.

As I say it must have been about May when they got notification that Murchison had to be brought up to full compliment to go up there. So we knew and the five of us. We were disappointed that we were being drafted off to Culgoa.

We thought the skipper was a bit of a you-know, but when you looked at it he didn’t want to take a load of ordinary seaman. He was a Second World War man. I think this was his first command as a two and a half lieutenant commander.

He just didn’t want the responsibility. He had to train us in some field. We were straight out of Flinders. We had no training except gunnery. So that’s probably why he put us on the guns. There were the 40 mm Bofors gun. They had the

captain of their gun then they had a loading number then they had to someone to pass the clips up to him. So that would have been an ordinary seaman’s job again. Very simple but necessary you know. Once again exposed. We finished up with five Bofors we had on board. They finished up being all riddled with splinter rounds and

inoperable because they cut the hydraulic lines. So our five Bofors had become useless after the second day.

I wasn’t on the Bofors but that’s all he’d be trained for the other guys would have been able seaman, leading seaman, that had been in the navy for quite a while. They were training with drogues

It’s a target towed behind a plane. They’d be training on that going north. We were training on drogues as well, with the four inch. As I say the ordinary seaman all he would have been doing would be picking up a clip handing it to the loading number and one clip finished he’d drop one in

and he had another at his disposal straight away.

Well we’d already done a preliminary training at Flinders but we didn’t know that we had to do it so quick and so precise. Both guns have got to be loaded at the same time. Both barrels, they call them guns.

Left gun and right gun. I was loading number one left gun. Both barrels have got to be loaded at the same time. Because they’re electronically fired. You’ve only got one layer and you’ve got one trainer. So both barrels go where they can’t go independent you know what I mean. Being trained

day in day out. Night shoots over and over and over again until you become a precision team. To fire, step in, load another. Fire, step in, load another. I had a bad experience by doing a bombardment on our way back to the Han and they found a target. Gun fired, I stepped in and to put mine in the breech but the breech

hadn’t fired. It was a misfire. The stuff fired electronically – they call it what they palm off. They can fire the breech manually. It’s a long lever and they just hit that and that fires. I stepped in to load and my breech was still closed and hadn’t fired. In that split second I had a HE [High Explosive]. If it exploded –

and the captain of the gun was ready to palm off. If I’d stayed where I was the breech would have recoiled, hit the end of my round and everything would have gone. All this in millionths of a second. By this time we’d been trained and trained for weeks and weeks and weeks. I threw myself back cradling this 50 pound round on my chest. Captain of the gun fired. I’m lying there.

Number two stepped over me. Took my position. Number three grabbed the round off my chest so I could get out. So left gun finished up with three loading numbers because I went to the pack. I just started to shake. They finished shooting their target and I went up to Guns Warrant Officer Smith and I said, “I want to be taken off.”

He said, “I don’t know about that, Steve. We’ve got to go to the skipper.” So he carts me up, “Strip off your gear, get your cap on.” So up before the skipper I went. Guns put the request into him. Allan Ballard said, “No no no. Man’s got to straight back on that gun. That’s his position. That’s what he’s been trained for. I’m not going to lose a loading number.”

So whether they found another target or just did a shoot I don’t know. But I was straight back down geared up again. Best thing that ever happened. Because if he had taken me off I don’t know what would have happened.

Started to shake, realising the consequences of what could have happened if the captain of the gun had fired and hit this round that I had – it fires, if you look at that photograph –

you’ll see the cylinders coming out. Those two first loading numbers step straight in behind that bridge and put their rounds in. So it had fired I just supposed that my gun had fired. So I was standing directly behind with this four in round to poke it in and there was nothing to poke it in to. So if that had been fired and if I’d hit the end of it I would have blown the whole bloody crew up. As I say I just went to the pack.

Shaken. Probably wet myself I don’t know. Yeah that was a bad experience I had there.

Well in some cases on

Murchison we didn’t need a layer and a trainer because we had a conning which this Jock Chalmers – he was an experienced Royal Navy rating in gunnery – and they could hook onto a target with radar and train the gun electronically so the layer and the trainer were only there if we went to

manual control. They were there at all times waiting if something happened. Just say if the conning got knocked out. They had a layer and trainer there to take over the gun manually. So the gun was still operable. The layer he would get a call – going in the manual operation – he would get a call from a spotter up one

one they called it one twos, hundred yards range. You either go up one, or two. Down one, down two. Trainer was the same and they had this double handed wheel. So he could train left or right. Not in port or starboard but he’d get an order left one right one to get on target

from this spotter. Because you’d fire a round and he would see where that round landed. Then they would take their points from where that explosion was, how far from the targets. The gun had to go a little bit left. You’ve to remember this too with precision firing because the ship’s under way. It’s all right if you’re at anchor. So yeah so you’ve got this layer and this trainer. Directly behind them is the

two captains of the gun, the left and right gun. They’re there to make this gun fire. As I say if this gun doesn’t fire electronically then it’s palmed off mechanically. Then you have your four loading numbers each side. Normally in training I would load. I would

go round to the left. Next fellow would step in. He’d go round to the left. I’d pick up another round and so on. They found that it was better, more precision to keep one loading number there. And he loaded the fellow behind him threw it in the arms, you loaded, threw another round in the arms. You do a big shoot, fifty pound rounds get a bit heavy after a while.

They found that was good precision instead of one man going round and round in circles. We’d become a pretty good precision team. Ex gun on the second day that day they ambushed us there. What happened was we went up as far as we could and we were into unchartered waters

so the skipper dropped starboard anchor. We spun with the tide. That meant a gun up in the bow couldn’t bear so we were out of the shoot. Ex gun came round on the stern with the tide and she had all the targets. They knocked out 21 rounds a minute from each barrel. That was 42 rounds per minute went into the target.

And the only ones to beat us was the HMS Amethyst up the river in 1946 when she got ambushed up there. They knocked out 22 rounds. With all the working, all the training.

No not in training. You got to remember that you’re not going to expend too many rounds.

Lot of the times we went in and didn’t fire. So we had to catch that, go round next one step up. They might have said right now, we’re going to do a shoot. But a lot of the time you didn’t fire a round. There was just up load, unload, up load, unload.

These are complete round. Like a .303 bullet.

A compete round. They are a four inch. Once you go to 4.5s are a full round. Once you go 4.7 then you have your bullet, your shell. Then you have a charge behind that. But with four inch and 4.5, they were a complete round. That’s why they weigh so heavy. Like 50, 50 pound each. You’ve got a canvas mitt on your hand because as you step in

you rest the point on the open bridge and you push that in with this mitt – bit faster than that – and then as you go in the bridge closes and knocks your hand up and out. The way it worked is pretty good. You can’t get caught in that. Because that part that comes up is sliding on metal and there’s no gaps.

No you’re not going to lose any fingers.

No. The only rounds that are armed were the aerial ones. They had a cone at the top and you twisted those with for the height that you were firing at.

So that if they estimated a plane was going to be flying at say 3000 feet they’d set that at 3000 feet. It was a pretty dicey way of doing it. But then it would explode at that. The star shells they were already set I think.

Star shell is a the same only it explodes at a certain height. It’s got a little propeller in it and that

winds down and detonates the charge. Out comes the little parachute with a phosphorous lamp. Lights up the whole area that you’re looking at a shoot for.

Well you’ve got high explosives and you’ve got armour piercing. This is what saved us in Korea. That the tanks and their guns fired all armour piercing. There was only one that happened to explode in our boiler room.

If they’d been using all high explosives they’d have blown us out of the bloody water. But they used anti-tank missiles which probably their tanks and guns were provided with. So the rounds that hit us kept going. They didn’t explode inside.

That’s about it. You’ve got high explosives. You’ve got the armour piercing.

Star shell and the aircraft one I’m trying to think of the name of it. The one with the cone on top. We didn’t fly many of those. They were only done in practice. You’d see the bomb go up. When we were flying with the drogue, we’d use those because the plane would be told to fly at a certain height and then we’d fly at the drogue.

No. We weren’t equipped with it.

Well we didn’t have ear plugs. We didn’t have ear muffs. You’re standing there waiting to step in to put another round in and bang off it goes

They tell me the noise is louder in front of the barrel than behind because that’s where the charge comes out. Fairly loud bang. I got tinnitus don’t know if I got it from that. I go to bed every night with crickets in my head.

Well you don’t see it coming out of the barrel because you’re at the back of the gun. And you’re not allowed any light so you do it all in moonlight. Think there might have been a little blue light inside. Might have been for the trainer and the layers. So they can see their calibrations

when they’re laying or training. So I think they had a little blue light over their calibrations. But we had no light at all.

Well moonlight.

No other light around you can see a lot at night time.

There’d be muzzle flashes in front of the gun yeah.

No.

No no, we’re open. We’ve only got a – the gun is mounted –it’s got an armour piercing cover in the front which the layer and the trainer has two slips to look out of. It’s mounted from the breech back is all open. The gun itself is mounted on a turntable. Gears all the way round underneath so that

when it’s turned either by the trainer or by the con, it turns around on a circle. We’re standing on that platform until we just go with the back of the gun.

When we’re doing a shoot?

No, no, no. You got to remember when we went up this channel it was all over in possibly 15 minutes.

You’d train for an hour then go and do some more

menial seamanship type things and then all of a sudden it would be action stations again so you had to drop what you were doing, get your gear and close up at your gun position as soon as you could.

I shouldn’t imagine it would. But we were never in that

position. Most of the west coast was fairly calm.

I don’t know about that. Being just a loading number I don’t know the intricate details.

Fire. The word fire. So you know that it’s going to fire and you don’t stand

behind the bridge. Every time the gun’s fired the word fire is yelled. And you just load another one sit back fire. How many times that’s said. Only one captain says it. Both captains wouldn’t.

Well we had anti-flash gear

which is like a balaclava only made of fleecy. You had anti-flash gloves. Once again, fleecy. The balaclava came right down. You opened your short and tucked it all in. Most time you’re doing a shoot in work clothes. Number eights. Shirt and jean type with boots.

Then in winter time you wear this huge overcoat duffle coat. That restricts you a little bit. But you learn to move with this big duffle coat. Typical example the statue of the green war memorial.

He’s decked out in the duffle.

You can but they reckon it’s not advisable. You can get burned. But most of the time we should have had it and we did get it. I think we picked it up in Hong Kong. Or we might have got it at

Manus Island on the way up.

Yeah, yeah.

Well we didn’t have it.

I don’t know. But there’s a photo there to show you that we didn’t have it.

You didn’t think. You’re there to do the job. You were told to do the job. We didn’t really know any different. In the winter time mother sent me up a balaclava and you’d wear the balaclava with your anti-flash gear but it wasn’t a real good thing because every time you breathed out you got a block of ice across your mouth like you know. Then you’d have to crumple all that up and try not to breath out cause your

hot breath would hit the cold and froze up on you.

Same ship only prettier. The Culgoa was always spick and span. I always nicknamed it the pretty ship. The pretty one. I don’t know who the captain was.

As I say when you go to a new ship you’re in a vacuum – at least I was – I suppose, trying to learn everything. Trying to do your job as best you can, to be trained as a seaman. Culgoa exactly the same. There was four that served there. There was

Shoalhaven which was up there first. Then there was Murchison. Then the Culgoa went up and the Condamine. Each one of those did two tours of duty. I was told a river class frigate and then I bought a book they said it was an a bay class frigate. Now they’ve been described by an historian –- ex-navy man Vince – that they are a modified

River-class frigate. Extra armour, plating, extra Bofors guns on. As I say we had five Bofors. Normal was three Bofors, two aside and one astern. We were a modified River-class frigate.

She was doing daily running out of Brisbane.

Oh well it was disappointing. There was no one you could go to and say I want to go back to Murchison. You just went about what you were told to do.

I think most of the frigates were happy ships because of the size of the compliment. They were all around about

190, 192, 197. All around about the 190 mark. Yeah she’d be a reasonably happy ship.

Being reared right on the ocean. I liked the sea. Dad always taught us to respect the sea.

But I didn’t like night time. Night time steaming through the tropics always had a magnetic effect on me. It seemed to draw you to the water. I didn’t like lookout very much. I had this thing that it was drawing me to it. Whether that means anything in later life I don’t know.

Very strong. Very strong. Because the ocean can be so beautiful and it can be so nasty too. Cruel sea. That’s why Marie and I would never have a house with an ocean view because you know a storm. Like the other this wind storm would whip up. The ocean can be calm one day

and the next day –

Oh yeah, yeah. But it doesn’t affect me know. Standing on a cliff up at Forster there on a cliff looking at the water. It’s not the same. I think we were so close to the water on board a ship. You’ve got such vast expanses of it around you. I don’t know. I never discussed it

with anybody else. Whether they experienced the same thing.

I don’t know. It would sort of mesmerise you – to me – you know. Me in my case

No. If I had been carried away I probably would have jumped in. No, no actual moments of actually wanting to join it.

Out at sea. You knew that if you saw seagulls you were getting close to land. Porpoises and dolphins. Sun fish. Flying fish when sailing through tropics. They used to land on the deck. Fly out of the water. Gannets would fly out of the waves of your bow wave..

They’d land on the deck. Fish maybe twelve inches long. So there was a lot of those and sun fish. Whales. Didn’t see too many sharks. But birds. Albatross, they used to come gliding over. As I say you knew when you the gulls in the air you were close to land.

Not any ship that I’ve served on

No. I hear there shouldn’t be any women on submarines and things like that. But I’ve never heard of any superstitions no. We didn’t have a cat. We didn’t have a mascot or anything. All we had was cockroaches.

No. You have these rat guards on your oars when you tie up. Two types one faces in. One faces out. One’s to stop the rats from coming from the dock on board. And ones for stopping the rats from the board to the dock. No cockroaches about the only thing. We used to have them painted port side red and starboard green.

Used to have races with them. We used to count them. If any strayed over the other side we used to set up a ransom of a cake of soap to get them back. Silly things.

We used to hold them down and paint their backs with green – well ours was green – paint. The other side was red. So one strayed over the other side there was a

bounty of him to get him back. If you didn’t want him he went over the side. They were the only vermin I suppose you’d call it that we had on board.

No. Not on any ship.

Except for one fellow in ships in reserve that stopped me from getting becoming a leading seaman. He was an officer.

No.

They were metal and they were round and they clip on to the ropes that moor a vessel. Lot of cases they only used the one to stop rats from – they’ve got an angle on them so that the animal goes out on the rope but gets into the cone

but he can’t climb up the inside the inside of the cone to get over the top. So the rat from the dock can’t get on board and the rat from the ship can’t get onto the dock. You ever seen them?

No.

Manus Island. Manus Island was an air force base. We went ashore there to stretch our legs. To get on land and have a walk around and we had a meal at the mess. Because the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] do everything right. They had tablecloths, knives and forks

and plates and cups and saucers. Whereas we just had a bare timber mess table, I think it was stainless steel. With a big impression for your meat and another for your vegetables, for your dessert, and a knife and fork and a mug.

We didn’t go in for fancy cloths on board. You don’t have the laundry facilities for a start.

Well just normal food. Exactly the same as what we would have had just with table clothes and napkin and that sort of thing.

Jungle. Manus is part of New Guinea. Big clearing there. Quonset huts, they call them. And they’ve got an airfield there.

Well pretty good. It was pretty scenic. We travelled between up between Bali and Indonesia.

And of course we’d all heard about Bloody Mary in South Pacific so we wanted to go ashore in Bali. As the skipper said it was French-owned in those days. They had to have consular permission for a ship to land there. So the next port of call was Hong Kong. For a bush boy

Hong Kong was something with all the sampans and the dun boats, as they call them and trading boats in the harbour. Hong Kong though you’ve got to anchor out. Lots of the Asian ports you’ve got to have a mooring that you get alongside. Going ashore it’s all liberty boat. Nine times out of ten you’re caught in a squall.

You’re soaked but ten minutes later you’re dry again because of the heat. Yes Hong Kong was very impressive.

Well I don’t really know how to describe it.

They had a few

Happy Valley where the airport is and the planes used to line up along the main street and land straight there. But I don’t think they had many tall skyscrapers like they do now. Korea I think the highest one there was 27 stories or something. But the impressive thing about Hong Kong was Mount Victoria.

We went up there in the lift and this huge building that was the admiralty of the Royal Navy had during the war. That’s very impressive up there.

Not really much at all. There was a

passageway either side of the boiler room. That ran from the quarterdeck forward. This was internal. I was in starboard forward mess. There was a ladder going up to the galley.

Mess cooks to the galley as they would say. A couple of you would go and get the big urn of whatever you made tea or coffee and bring that down. It was a junior ratings task. And then everyone used to go up with a tin tray and get their own food. From there that was main access generally down to the quarterdeck. On the

quarterdeck you had depth charge tracks either side. Upon on the next deck was x-gun. Behind that was a Bofors. Either side was another Bofors. Either side two a side. You had your motor cutter and your whaler which was a sailing or

rowing craft on the other. You’re going forward now around the bridge. Two way gun in. In front of a gun was an hedgehog mounting. That was an anti-submarine weapon.

It’s situated at the front. It was a shield protecting the hedgehog crew from a gun blast and that I think is a bank of sixteen. They look like little bombs – about a 25 pound bomb – and they sit on a pipe and the idea of a hedgehog is that as you

detect a submarine you can fire a pattern over the bough of the ship. The ship then passes a depth to set on this hedgehog charges. You can pass over the submarine and then the hedgehog explodes in your wake. At the same you can drop a couple of depth charges on the same target so it’s a double whammy weapon.

You had your hedgehog in the front and your depth charges at the back.

Yes. Yes.

Just in front of a gun yeah.

From there on was the bow, the pointy end and the two anchor chains there.

The anchor part in foul weather used to take protection in this hedgehog shield I suppose you would call it. Either side of the bridge superstructure was platform for the ledge man. In our case all of the sounding taken up the Han Estuary was done by a lead

line. That’s about all. Go back to the quarterdeck there was storage locker down there. Underneath our mess was the ammunition locker. Everything was stored and there was the writer’s compartment, stores big refrigerator.

Yeah the writer he looks after your pay and writes up records and that sort of thing. He also was right beside the stores so that when stores were issued the invoice would get done and all that sort of thing.

Flattish. The stern you’ve got depth charge racks either side.

Either in the wheelhouse if we were at sea or out on the lookout platforms. Or cleaning ship. You did a lot of cleaning ship.

Either side of the bridge. You reported straight into the bridge. The night that we were rammed by a South Korean fishing vessel

I was started lookout. Of course we were travelling with no lights and of course they were travelling with no lights. I thought I saw something. I reported it in. Because of the night they were so close. Next minute they rammed us. Not purposefully. Just forward of the bridge. She was wooden.

Had a crew of seven. We got three. The others all died of hypothermia It was winter time. The skipper came on. The skipper survived the other two died from hypothermia. Even though they were only in the water for a few minutes. It’s a tragic but a humorous little story that I’m about to tell.

The painter on board. He got the task of sewing these bodies up in canvas. As the tradition goes the last stitch is through the nostril. They reckon it goes back to the – if the needle passes through the person’s nostril and the person’s not really dead then it wakes them up quick smart. So the last stitch goes through the nostril. And the man whose doing the stitching is provided with a bottle of

rum. By the time he’d sewn two up, he was quite tiddly. Then he had to put weights on their feet. The weights were supposed to be sewn in this canvas shroud. So Jack said

“I forgotten to put them in.” So whoever he got his direction from they said, “Well we’ll use a couple of practice hedgehogs as the weights so tie them to the feet.” So it was all prepared and they carried a mess table up to the upper deck and they put this soft soap on the mess table, laid the first bloke on it. And the

Korean captain’s there standing and we’re all standing at attention. They played the pipe. They lifted the end of the mess table up for the body to slide over the side. But what Jack had done is he’d tied the rope to the hedgehog, then tied it to the feet with about six foot length of rope in between. The hedgehog went

over the side first took up the slack and stood this body up and it walk down like this before it slid over the side. Tragic but the humorous side to it. There was a lot of giggling. Well the look the skipper gave us. It was such a funny bloody sight to see. This body jerked into an upright position and walked the plank as we called it. So Jack was directed

very hurriedly to shorten the rope on the next corpse that went over the side. That was just one of the humorous – tragic but humorous – things that happened on board.

By this time the officer of the watch he would have these binoculars to look

as well. And possibly whoever else was on the inside to look this object. But by this time, because of the speed we were travelling and the speed they were travelling, it was such a dark night, winter’s night, they were onto us before we could take any evasive action.

Was just more or less a thud. Because they were wooden against us. There was no scraping or screeching of metals or anything.

Automatically a net went over the side, a scrambling net was thrown over the side. It’s in place all the time. The bosun’s mate jumped in the water in his pyjamas and he got the bods [UNCLEAR]. By this time too there’s another couple of ratings down the scrambling net to pull

up anybody that was there. He should have got hypothermia himself. He didn’t get any decoration for it because he was rescuing a civilian I suppose. If it had been another navy person or something he would have gotten a deco out of it. Man they reckon he was bloody stupid and I reckon so too. He saved three lives but two were too far gone.

Well I think that question is beyond an ordinary able seaman like myself.

Well that would have just come out of instinct for the ratings. When this happened the noise would have

penetrated the messes. Bods probably thought it can’t be an iceberg this time because we weren’t in the estuary. They would have come rushing to the upper deck, saw what went on. An automatic thing, throw the scrambling net over the side. As far as a standard procedure I couldn’t comment on it.

Anything.

In the case of this vessel. If it hadn’t been such a murky night I might have seen it earlier, I might have reported it earlier, they could have taken evasive action on it. Could have been anything. Could have been a North Korean vessel. Yeah at all times you’ve got a port and starboard lookout.

In a hammock.

Well they had rails. Each rows of rails had little dips in them and were set about two foot apart. You’ve got a hammock bin and your hammock is lashed. That’s another thing you learn at Cerberus in recruit school. How to lash your hammock properly. It’s got seven lashings on it. The same as your bells [bell-bottomed trousers],

your trousers had. That’s got to be lashed properly and stowed in the hammock bin. In that hammock when you put it up for the night it’s got a stretcher either end, to stretch the hammock out reasonably flat. You’ve got a mattress in there and a blanket. You don’t need much more than one blanket because it’s made of canvas and when you lieutenant in

the sides curl up around you. Like a cocoon type thing. When you get wakey wakey of a morning, the leading seaman would always have a flat board with him and if you were a bit tardy in getting out you’d get a slap on the back through the hammock which didn’t hurt you because you had a mattress between you and the thing. But that would be your wakey-wakey call of a morning.

They were good sleeping in a hammock.

Oh it’s lovely. You get a sway. Going into a trough’s not real good. Because you’re going lengthways you’re hammock starts to get a jerking movement front and back. Once at sea when the ship’s rolling you’ve got a nice movement and you’re only

say two foot apart from the next hammock so you’re bumping into those and they steady each other. It’s very nice hammock sleeping.

No no. You’d be on different watches. You might be

eight to midnight. So you come off watch at midnight. You would stay until eight the next morning to go back on. But you wouldn’t sleep in until eight. You got to get up have a wash and get your breakfast. Be ready for the next day’s work. Then the watch from midnight to four. Then you’ve got to watch from four to eight. Now the midnight to eight wouldn’t come on until midday

to do general duties unless its action stations or something like that. You’re rotating.

There are set times but anybody on the night watch they get fed.

The whaler? Either side you had a motor cutter with an in board motor on it. Lengths I can’t tell you at the moment. And the whaler then was on the other side. Pointed both ends.

That manned by five oars. Three on one side. Two on the other. Or by sail and a tiller.

The motor cutter was used extensively for doing our mapping of the Han River. In harbour it would be used to take the skipper or any officer or anybody requiring to go from ship to ship or ship to shore or whatever.

The whaler was only in there as a life boat. Ours wasn’t much good because they’d riddled that with numerous rounds. We got a new one when we got there to Hong Kong.

Only Carley rafts. They’re a flat rough made of cork I guess and covered in canvas with hand ropes on either side.

You can fit probably four on the Carley raft. The others got to stay in the water and just hang on.

Well in abandon ship drill you had different stations to go to. Different parts of the ship. You couldn’t all congregate at one point. There’d be different stations I think they called them

One lot would go to the motor carley and one lot would go to the whaler. And then the others would fall behind the life jacket lockers, Carley raft positions.

Their quarters were underneath the bridge. The skipper was by himself. The curly one

I think the first lieutenant and the navigator and as they came down in rank, they had a wardroom type mess for eating but they also had separate little cabins in the vicinity of each other. The skipper had his own private captain-type of thing.

In exceptional cases you might have wanted to leave. As we were discussing at morning tea, the growing of the beard. That had to go through protocol. Until you got up to the jimmy, I think, the first lieutenant

made the last decision on that. But you had to go through the marshal at arms through to your divisional officer.

Anybody wanting to grow a beard especially too in colder climates. It would be an asset, keep your face a bit warm.

You’d put in a request to the marshal at arms, it went to the division officer and up to the first lieutenant. He would say, “Yes, you have three months from this time. In three months time you report back. It will be my decision as to whether we allow you to keep your beard or not.” Same procedure again if you wanted to shave it off.

In my case. We were all doing it. In my case I requested. “Yes, report back in three months.” I reported back in three months and the first lieutenant took one look at me and he told the marshal at arms to take me to the bow for a shave, so the wind would blow my bum fluff off. So I didn’t grow a beard.

Lot of our recruits were eighteen They were still going in up to the age of 26 so some of the recruits ordinary seaman were adult men. The youngest on board was 18, a fellow by the name of Clements. The oldest was 42.

The captain was 37. Skipper had his birthday while we were away up the Han. So the oldest was 42 and the youngest 18. Out of 192 men the average I suppose would be 30. Round about.

Good. Good. Always remember one recruit, ordinary seaman,

he got a bit stroppy. Didn’t like being told to this and to do that. So he was taken up to the foc’s’le one of the older hands. He did as he was told after about half an hour. Coming out of sick bay. Old fellow put him in the sick bay. You learn to respect them

because they’ve got the knowledge. I gave my old grandson the same advice when he went into the Defence Force Academy. That even when you become a lieutenant, listen. Listen to the men that you’ve got under you because they’ve had the experience and you’ve got to learn. The things they already know.

No. I don’t remember. My nickname on board Murchison was ‘Conchy’, short for conscientious. Because I was trying to get up to brother Bill’s standards. Trying to learn everything quick so my nickname was Conchy. No, you weren’t called ‘dickhead’, or anything like that.

Best man was nicknamed ‘Tubby’. He was always a little fat fellow. Then there was ‘Knocker’ White, ‘Dusty’ Rhodes. Wilson always had a nickname. Can’t remember what it was. No I’ve forgotten a lot of them.

Oh no. You had your dhobiing as they called it – your washing and your ironing. You had to keep your shoes clean. Shoes took a lot of priority cause you always used to have your shoes shone to go ashore like. And your work boots too. And your

sandshoes had to be Blancoed. But your washing and ironing. They had recreation like tombola. They played tombola.

It’s a type of lottery game. They spin the wheel and it costs you so much to buy numbers and – there’s that.

There was a small PT class that started up. Guys used to do a bit of PT to keep themselves fit and that sort of thing. Fishing if you’re anchored. Didn’t do much good in Korea. Bloody things were frozen. Yeah there was always something to do. So you got to remember at sea you’ve only got a bucket of water.

One bucket, two gallon that was distilled water. That’s was your body wash, clean your teeth and do your laundry in. If you wanted another wash then you used salt water showers. Most of us did. We had a salt water shower and then we rinsed off with the

distilled water. You’d already done the washing of your clothes in that so then you rinsed off with your soapy water and padded yourself dry.

It wasn’t actually. You were allowed one bucket. I think you had to go to the boiler room for that. So whoever was on watch.

Say the forward starboard seaman’s mess they would go and get their bucket of water each. And then after you’d finish you’d leave the bucket and then someone else would grab that and go and get their issue. We did a little bit better. We got a laundry party off in Hong Kong. Two Chinaman or Chinese ladies I’m not sure. But they’d do your washing for a small price.

Yeah they were set up in the small shower room.

They weren’t in uniform. Used to talk a lot in Chinese. You couldn’t understand a word they said.

These were Hong Kong Chinese.

There was none. Cause we didn’t have it. I developed an abscess on a tooth in Korea and the doctor wouldn’t touch it so they got in touch with the Belfast which was the Royal Navy cruiser

and they sent me down on an American destroyer to the Belfast which took two days and I was met in the middle of the night – the Yanks sent me over by boat to this gang plank that was down and I was met by this bloody great big Red Cap, military police and marine and he escorted me through all the passageways and aisles through to

the sick bay which is a hospital and the dentist was waiting for me. He ploughed one needle into me. I passed out and he extracted the tooth. He told me he’d given me another couple of needles. I came to with a lump of cotton wool in my mouth and a big Red Cap still waiting there. So he escorted me down the gang plank again and there was another boat waiting for me, a Royal Navy frigate I went to go back to Murchison.

By this time I was smoking but the Royal Navy had a rum issue and even though I was only in transit I was entitled to a rum issue. Well I traded my rum for tins of smokes. A 50 tin, not Capstan, ‘Captain’ as they were called in those days. So I went back on board with 100 cigarettes

with my rum issue you know. But Murchison – Christmas 1951 we were in Hong Kong and we got two bottles of beer a head. And I got an extra one because I turned 19 on the 27th December two days later. So I finished up with three bottles.

I guess Anzac Day must have been. Armistice Day would have been. All those are observed at all times you know. They’d be the main ones.

Well just clear lower deck or gather in the duty officer or

the skipper wasn’t on the bridge he’d give it a bit of a talk and all that. I remember another time we cleared when the king died. That was another occasion. So they were about the only formal ones unless the skipper wanted to give us a talk about something or other. It’s possible that he told us about one of the battles that the army might have fought.

just to fill us in on what was going on onshore.

Well we didn’t do any. But they reckoned that going the way that we went they reckon you don’t cross the equator in the tradition of crossing the equator. I don’t understand it but

I don’t remember doing any crossing the equator or dressing up as mermaids and King Neptune and all that stuff. I don’t remember that happening either going or coming back.

Oh I’ve just seen pictures of it and read about it that

you get a couple of bods dress up as mermaids with cotton wool and hairdos and then you have King Neptune and you got his trident. All this sort of stuff and they initiate some bloke and I’ve never experienced it. Yeah.

Ah yeah we would have all known about it. We weren’t treated to any specials. He probably had an extra tot of rum or something cause the officers’ mess had alcohol and the lower deck didn’t have any alcohol. Except for the stuff that was brought on board. This particular fellow

Jack did the sewing up of the bodies. He often appeared a little bit tiddly and they couldn’t work out they searched everything that was around him. But the cunning bugger he’d get these bottles on board somehow and we had damage control hoses about four inches in diameter and in the end there was a big wooden plug which you see on the photos our shell holes we use those to plug the holes up

and what he did he’d tie all his bottles up with string around the neck and poke them down these damage control hoses so when he wanted a drink he’d just pull one out, untie it, put his string back in, plug in and away you go.

Well on the way home actually. The customs discovered his little cache cause they go through every nook and cranny looking for stuff. “Yeah look what I found.”

Not a lot of string.

We got leave. We’d go up the Han River for three weeks and then we’d have to come back to Kure. And get fresh meat and bread and ammunition because we were fired about

an average on 80 to 100 rounds a day going up and coming back. Always had to keep some in reserve in case we found something. There was always a truck or a tank or something that exposes itself. And so then we’d be in Kure for about four days while and so they gave the opportunity for every watch to have a night ashore so um

about every three weeks we got leave. Couple of times we went to Sasebo, which was the American port, and same thing happened there. We got leave there. It’s about every three weeks we were out.

Coming to – ?

From Sydney to – ?

Manus Island to Hong Kong straight to Kure.

We got leave in Hong Kong.

Yes we all piled, commandeered these rickshaws and let them take them to have a look around the place you know. We were down in Hong Kong about three times. When we first went up then we had to go back. We had to replace our barrels,

our four inch barrels. We had to go down to Hong Kong and then Christmas. We had Christmas there. But that mainly I had a bit of a roll in with me mates. They wanted a tattoo. They were going to take me up the stairs to the tattooist and I wasn’t going to be tattooed. So I put them three down the stairs cause we were all pretty tiddly.

I come home a ‘clean skin’. I’m still a clean skin. No tattoos.

Oh I think it’s – a lot of the guys do. Lots of places on their bodies too. I think it’s just a thing like today with the earrings. You know that the young fellows are going through. But I’m glad I didn’t. Once you’ve got it you’ve got it there forever.

She was a good sea ship. Mainly made for the tropics. They were – all the frigates were made for tropical running. Not for cold weather or in bad sea

mainly made for around the islands and that. No she performed all right. Head on she’d dive down a little bit and take some water over the bridge and that. But no she sailed well.

What in rough weather?

Oh when it was zig zagging. Wouldn’t really hear it see 19 knots was the max for the frigates so we weren’t travelling at any great speed so they don’t heel over really. They get put back in their tracks. We used to be in trouble up in Korea. If we got a call

for a down pilot every ship would try to get to that pilot first because the Americans paid a reward of a 25- pound tin of ice cream. We didn’t have ice cream but one of our main rivals was the Canadian destroyer HMCS Cayuga? Which operated in our vicinity. But Cayuga would pick up the same signal.

She’d come churning past us. Here we’re going flat chat at 19 knots. She’d come past doing 32. So we’d get caught up in a bow wave, we’d finish up doing 15. We’d go backwards though like. No frigates didn’t heel over much in doing manoeuvres. No.

Oh yes we picked up one. We got one American pilot.

We got ourselves a tin of ice cream which was good fun.

No. No. That was after.

I don’t think fear came into it really. We knew we would never be engaged in a naval battle. Ship to ship because the North Korean didn’t have any ships of any sizes. They only had small patrol boats. So we knew that we wouldn’t be engaged in that. There was no fear of big gun battleship to ship. I don’t think anything

Yeah. Down the bilges. Yeah you don’t feel any rocking or anything down there. It’s nice and quiet.

No none of that came into it. Even today going on a ship I wouldn’t even worry about it.

Yeah.

I am claustrophobic but I was only ever in one position to feel that. Was when I went down I had to go down to the rag locker on the stern and someone decided to drop the hatch on top of me. That was a bit scary for me being claustrophobic.

But um that was only a prank mind. I don’t think you really think about these things really. Well I didn’t anyway. Not to my knowledge or remembrance today.

Well you closed up for action stations, dropped everything that you were doing,

grabbed your gear and got up to your gun as fast as you could. And when you’re considering you’re not supposed to run on board a ship, we did a lot of running. We moved pretty quick. I think three minutes we could close up and were around in the breech. When you know that you’re going to be close to

the north shore where you’re likely to have to be – you’d be deployed in a job near your mounting. Put it that way. But if you’re travelling back to Japan then your job you knew that you wouldn’t be – one gun crew could close up if they saw a tank or anything moving on the shore so you’d go about

your business of either lookout or

Close up action stations. That’s what they call it. To close up I don’t know where the expression comes from but you close up action stations you’ve got your gun crew, you’ve got people deployed in damage control. Even those if there’s no likelihood of say being

torpedoed or anything like that, you still close up into damage control positions and action stations.

It’s just a pipe over the loud speaker. We didn’t have a bell or anything like that. Just the bosun would put a call on his bosun pipe, over the PA [Public Address system] and we’d go all over the ship.

Oh just like a shrill you know. You knew there wasn’t a call. There was just a shrill. Trying to think what they call him the leading signalman. Yeoman. He could put that over or the helmsman anybody in well most of knew how to use a pipe but they’d use those fellas to do that.

Well other bods would do that because all we were in a hurry for was to get to our gun positions. Yeah they’d close hatched and seal off the ship even though there was no likelihood of

Well going up I’d say we would have an hour on

two hours off. One hour on. You might do a practice just get back to where you were supposed to be working and they’d call you back again to see how quick you could respond to that as I say you practice, practice, practice and we became a pretty good precision machine by the time we were up there.

Part of your

job I suppose. Get there as quick as you can. You knew it was practice so you didn’t stroll around and have a smoke or anything.

The Murchison was built in Queensland by a fellow called Deacon ship building. The four were. The four River-class frigates were built up there.

No wasn’t equipped at all. Matter of fact in one of the accounts I got here, an officer from the Royal Navy ships visited us in winter and he was appalled at the conditions we lived in in winter up there. One of the best things for

for cold was brown paper. We used buy brown paper. The Royal Navy fellows put us onto it and we’d cut it into strips and wrap it round your arms and then you’d pull your jumper over that. That would keep your arms warm and you’d do the same with your legs. Wrap your chest up and pull your jumper down over that. Brown paper keeps you warm.

I don’t think so because in June when it broke out the Bataan and Shoalhaven were up there but they were already in that region. I don’t know if they’d experienced cold before. And they hadn’t been up around the northern part of Korea but Murchison definitely was not

equipped for the cold that we encountered. We had to draw supplied that the Americans gave us. Quite a few woolly vests and things like that. Then we got issued duffle coats for the crew on the upper decks and um no it’s – for a fellow that came down from Broome in 1946 I went to stay with

my father’s sister and they had a property out of Perth. And she said to me one particular morning “Will you go up and make sure the ducks – cause they had acreage – have plenty of water and food?” I went up there and I wondered why the ducks were pecking at the water trough and weren’t getting anything. It was ice. I’d never seen ice like that before. I thought ice was man made in blocks and that. So cold, up there was cold.

The superstructure of the Murchison – I guess it was other ships as well – but the paint the contraction of the steel and the paint would come away in sheets like plastic. It would just fall of and you would leave the primer paint on the steel. The exhaust water from the boiler room at anchorage

that would come out of the side of the ship and arc down and that would freeze. They’d have to send over a party, a couple of stokers with a crow bar to belt up the exhaust to clear the ice so that the exhaust water could get out. Cold, very cold.

Froze. We had no heaters. See we had fans to bring in the cool air for the tropics but we had no heaters. The electricians they improvised for the guns so that the grease in the breech didn’t freeze. They’d cut down shell casings, put elements in, drilled out where the charge fired from, put the leads out there, they would slide them into the breech,

close the breech manually and then put the radiators. They made radiators for the breech of the four inch guns to keep them working. Yes like everybody I don’t know how the army fared. They had to sleep out on the ground with their rifle underneath their clothes to keep that warm so it could be used. But we had our fair share of cold as well you know.

I’d never seen icebergs until I went up the Han. The first time one hit the side of the ship I wondered what was going on. I didn’t know if it was a mine or what. Just a big clunk. Great iceberg, not a great big iceberg, size of a ute I suppose a car sedan come down and belt the side of the ship. Yeah that was we were going up to

check on the hedgehog position another ordinary seaman and myself and the temptation was too great. We made a couple of snowballs and we put them up onto the bridge and then hid behind the shelter. And we waited there for ten minutes or so we thought we’ll be right now, we’ll just sneak back down the side but the bridge had been making snowballs too and there’s four of them up there. I don’t know which officer was on the watch but we got belted by these four

bodies up on the bridge with snowballs. Good fun.

Yeah, very woody. The west coast – I don’t know about the east coast we never got on the east coast. Tobruk

controlled the east coast quite a bit. Lots of little dotted islands along the coastline. We’d have to steam about three mile off. We couldn’t get much closer than three mile. The lookouts were searching the shore all the time for any

movement of the North Koreans because the Chinese had just come, but they were mainly North Koreans that we were fighting first. Our first encounter our first patrol up the coast we got a tank on a truck. There were two tanks, a truck and a few foot soldiers

and um they opened fire on us first the two tanks so we closed and up we got one tank and one truck and the other tank he got over the rise out of the way so that was our first kill.

Pretty good. There we are we’re finally doing something. All our practice in the six weeks it took us to get up there:

“This is it like. This is the real thing.” Then we kept on patrolling. We didn’t see any more on that patrol. So we didn’t go up the Han straight away.

I couldn’t see anything because a gun loading number is not allowed to look around the thing. He’s got his job to do. Make sure there’s a round in the breech at all times.

Later on. After the shoot we were told. At that time all we were doing was poking rounds into the breech to fire at them. This tank and truck.

Yeah we knew that. We knew that we’d been fired on because that’s when they closed up for action stations. What it was I had no idea.

So we just got to our positions and started firing. And I don’t know if we were hooked up to radar or we were on manual control. I can’t remember that actual shoot which way it was done. But yeah that was our first encounter. And so we didn’t have any more on that patrol. I remember doing another bombardment of

troops in trucks. We knocked out a couple more trucks on that one.

Up on the west coast again.

No that was south.

It was still the 38th Parallel. The others North and South dividing.

Oh yeah because once you went north it was all communist country

down the south was a mixture. See there I’m only going on what I’ve read but the north was pushed down right down to Pusan, then the Americans and the United Nations pushed them back over the 38th Parallel. Then the United Nations got pushed back down again south of Seoul but on the west coast

was mainly held by the North Koreans. This is why MacArthur so we were told wanted to survey the Han Estuary so he could put in his landing barges up the Han into Seoul and control the capital of South Korea that way, even though there were North Koreans still south of him.

Not long about three weeks I suppose. The record shows that it took 40 hours for the Murchison to travel 30 miles. That was so slow because of the sand banks no charts.

It all had to be done by lead line, by sounding. We couldn’t use our sonar because of the shallow water. The sonar on the frigates was retractable, could come down and out. They used that as an echo sounder even though it was for detecting submarines. When the first attempt to go up the Han they used an American destroyer which had a fixed sonar buoy underneath it and they nearly wiped that

off, nearly flooded the whole ship out. But we went aground at one stage. The skipper backed us off luckily. The tide must have been coming in but that’s how long it took you to travel the 30 miles took 40 hours. So you’re doing a mile an hour you know. But once there were these little channels and that were charted then they knew where to go

and the fork they used was a deeper water anchorage. It’s where the two channels came like that and washed it out. So the ships could anchor there two at a time.

That was up the Han Estuary fork and then there was a channel went to the north west and the other channel to go to Seoul where we got ambushed, that would be

travelling north east. So they were the two main channels back to the fork and then you had to channel back out to the sea.

I could have been lookout. I could have been closed up in action stations. I don’t really know. I can’t remember.

Yes.

Well you didn’t fly at all times but when we were going up this main channel to the Kaesong as soon as you’re fired on that’s when the battle ensign the chief yeoman on the bridge he looked after that.

I guess there would have been either that or there was a chief. He might have known and as soon as you fired on and we were about to engage an enemy then the battle ensign goes up?

Well we only saw it afterwards as I say.

When you’re closed up in action stations you don’t have much time to look around and say oh that’s that and you’re too busy wondering what is going to happen and what is going on. Yeah.

Only that we were being fired on.

We were given the order to load and next minute we were bang, bang, bang and away. We didn’t even know we’d been hit.

Yeah well they talk about it at night.

It was on more of the eastern side of the peninsula. It wasn’t until the second push that they started to come back into Seoul and they blew the bridge over the Han. The Americans blew the only bridge they had over the Han River. They blew that up but we knew there were battles going on. Especially when the Americans invaded Inchon?

Those rocket barges are magnificent things. The amount of fire power they use. You’d see them being fired. We weren’t actually in Inchon? Ourselves.

Oh huge to think that this rocket barges they look like they’ve got a cylinder and they turn and fire a barrage at a

terrific fire power. And then they had their bigger ships standing off shore as well. They pounded it and they landed in Inchon and they took it. MacArthur wasn’t very popular with Eisenhower, wasn’t he the president? But the South Korean people, they adored MacArthur.

We stood off shore because there was more fire power than us. We could put in more fire power than what we could.

Just still doing our patrol.

Well to make sure there was no enemy movement down the west coast.

See we mightn’t see the movement. We’d get a report from spotters on shore there was no movement so then we put in a barrage for what we were told was there.

The only – as I say when you’re closed up it’s fairly impossible. The only time I ever saw enemy activity was when we dropped anchor and

turned and we couldn’t bare our gun because of the turn. We looked around the mounting and we see these silly buggers with revolvers in there hands firing at us. They thought they were going to hit us with everything which they did. With revolver, rifle, machine gun, bazookas, mortars, cannon, tank. They hit us with everything they had.

I’d say every Bofors was put out of action. Our whaler was riddled with holes. They holed us seven times down the water line. A round went into the conning where they were controlling the guns from. It passed through there and so that’s the only time I ever saw

the enemy was when we turned on the pick both times and we were able to look around the mounting.

Yeah we’d been up charting and bombarding from our position on the Han Estuary and on the 27th September we flew in

American Admiral Dwyer and he wanted to inspect what was going on on the north bank of the Han Estuary so we proceeded up

Helicopter.

Oh yeah they’d been flying over. They were small helicopters. Nothing like they’ve got today.

Well once we’d arrived in Korea, I’d never seen a helicopter before possibly on newsreel I might have seen it in Melbourne but uh. One in actual fact I’ve never seen a helicopter before.

Yes.

Oh yeah they came down in a belt and that on a wire and he came down.

and as I say the reason they put him on board was to go up with us and just see what the situation was on the north bank and it seems as though they must have had our code. They knew he was on board because as soon as we got within range they opened fire on us.

We couldn’t turn because there was no place to turn so the captain had to keep going until he got to broader water where he dropped his starboard anchor, turned with the tide because the idea was to go up with the incoming tide so you had water when you came back.

Oh yes very clever.

Yes yes, he was good seaman.

As I say, the rise and fall of the Han Estuary was 30 feet so if we’d gone up on a low tide we wouldn’t have been able to get back because all the water had gone out. And I saw this for a fact when I was up here two years ago when I was up in Korea from the outpost overlooking the Han Estuary there. The flats were just mud. But anyway we proceeded up that they opened fire with everything they had at the time.

So we gave them a bit of a clobbering.

Putting another round in the breech.

I couldn’t tell you at that time. We probably weren’t up to that standard because it was a scattered movement on the thing. They weren’t all in one heap like you know.

But I suppose we were probably poking out our 15 rounds a minute. Anyway so the skipper went up and he turned on the anchor and then we proceeded down well then we were firing from the starboard side going up with the firing and um then we gave them a bit more coming out and then we waited for

Well I didn’t hear much of that but I do remember hearing some going over the top of us. They’d make a whooshing type sound as they go over your head. They tell me sometimes that a round, it all depends on what distance is fired. It finishes up end-for-ending. It goes turns like that. I don’t know if that’s a fact or not. I’m not an expert on that

We could hear them whooshing over the side. You could hear the pings of bullets on the bridge because the bridge was directly behind you. And to my knowledge Korea was the first time splinter rounds had been used by rifle and machine gun. Before that they were a solid bullet that splinter round when it hit, it just splintered everywhere

into maybe 50 pieces. They tell me the theory of that is warfare evolved not to kill but to wound and tie up people treating the wounded so that while people were treating the wounded they couldn’t be fighting. They tell me that’s the theory of the splinter rounds. The more people you can wound the more people

that you’re not fighting because they’re trying to treat the wounded. Yeah so anyway we turned around and came back with a bit more rounds and the admiral was very impressed, inspected the damage. There was talk about awarding the Murchison a Purple Heart because it got wounded.

We finished over the two days five wounded we didn’t have any one killed.

Only for about ten, fifteen minutes going up turning, once we got back to the fork they couldn’t reach us.

We went up the second time. We had to go up twice. We took the admiral up the first time

and because our time was terminating we the second day we took up the captain of the New Zealand frigate that was going to relieve us. That was the order we got to show him where he would be going and so on and um so as I say they must have had our code because they brought in heavier stuff. They brought in tanks and covered them with

hay. They just looked like a hay-rick. They’d put cannon into the empty buildings that we’d fired at before and so yeah they clobbered us again. We thought there was no movement, we’d frightened the billy-oh out of them the first day and there was people just walking around like farmers but as soon as we got within range they dropped everything they had and

opened fire on us again.

500 yards and it’s something I’ve never been able to work out. Murchison was 307 foot long so if you look at that as 100 yards, 3 foot 100 yards and we were only five boat lengths from the bank. We were a big target. When you look at it that way.

When I went back to Korea and they were showing us where we went and I think the reality came back to me just how close we were to the north bank. It frightened you when you think if they’d used the right round of ammunition she’d still be a rusting hull sitting on a mud flat up there. Instead of using the armour piercing weapons,

they’d use HE, they would have blown us out of the water.

You’re still focussing but they tell me I say you’re still closed up for a while and reality is setting in but they reckon that the general consensus on board was, “Turn round, let’s go back and give them some more.”

But when you’ve got seven holes in the side of your ship and you don’t know whether you’re going to strike rough weather going back to Japan it would be a little bit silly wouldn’t it you know? But um that was our two days of action. Of eye to eye, eyeball to eyeball. The others were bombardments of tanks and that along the coast.

Well as I say the only time we could get a glimpse was when we turned on the anchor and I saw one bloke shot and that’s how close it was, I could see the blood on him. But uh you think well this is what we’re doing and soon as we turn we had to get back and start loading again

So we only had a glimpse I suppose of a minute. Cause the skipper turned with his screws as well as the anchor to make the turn and get back out of it. No he’s a marvellous seaman. The Murchison was awarded the Duke of Gloucester Cup after our action up there for superb seamanship and steadfastness under fire. So him and the navigator were awarded the DSC [Distinguished Service Cross]

for their performance. So we’d still be up there maybe if we’d had another captain, I don’t know. Alan Ballard was and is as far as I’m concerned a good sailor and he knew what he was up to.

No. No. Because of the sand banks. We just had to get to – which the skipper must have or his navigator Jim Kelly must have known. See we’d been up there before. We’d been right up there bombarding Kaesong where the peace talks were and they’d never fired on us before. But we feel that because we had this admiral on board it would have been a nice old scout to take and possibly leave the Murchison sitting up in the water as well.

That’s why they brought in the heavy guns on us. As I say going up you’d have to work on the starboard side while they shot rifles at the port side and then coming back on the other side. But they must have definitely known that we were taking this admiral up and then also that we were coming back up on the 29th to take the New Zealand skipper up.

Seems like it. Yeah. At one stage there we had a

Loose lips, yeah. We had the suspicion that they must have broken the code to know that this admiral was on and also this New Zealand captain. At one stage we had a South Korean army lieutenant on board. We had him on a couple of weeks. He came up the Han Estuary with us,

he wanted to see what was going on to report back and um he was very impressed with what we were doing and anyway took him back to Japan and oh a few weeks later someone said something to one of the officers. It hadn’t been made known. He said, “Are we going to get one of these South Koreans back?” And this officer said, “I don’t think so. They shot him. He was a North Korean.”

So he’d been taking good details of what Murchison and the other ships were doing up there too. So uh –

Probably about August or something like that.

No. No. No. We took him back

to Japan and he must have tried to get back to wherever he came from and um they got him for false papers or something like that. But he’d passed through the administration earlier to board with us.

Well the first one was a signalman and he was hit in the arm and they often wonder why because he was so skinny

They reckon that if he turned sideways the old expression he wouldn’t have cast a shadow. But um he just must have been in the wrong position and he was taken off put into hospital and then the Americans took him over to America and they did a big propaganda parade through the streets over there with this wounded Australian soldier and also other wounded people

the Korean conflict you know. The other four couldn’t name names. Too long ago.

I possibly did but I didn’t know any of them today. Battling now when I go to our reunions. I get the photos out of them and “Is that you?” cause we’ve all changed so much.

Gordon Robins

or Tex Wright. Closest yeah.

Yeah they both were. Gordon Wright he – Gordon Robins sorry – he was the fellow that went over to pick up another round and a bullet dented his tin hat and so if he’d still been standing with a round in his arms

it would have possibly have got the round or hit him in the chest.

No. No. He was on ex-gun mounting I think.

Well just that he bent over to pick up a round. The other incident on ex mounting was that he got a loading number

standing there that was four inch round cradled in his arms and a bullet hits the round the casing and all the cordite starts to spill out all over the deck. So his first reaction what would you do? He threw it straight over the side not realising that the cordite couldn’t explode. It needed a detonation to explode to send the round out.

They would have loved to have kept that. That would have made a nice museum piece so but that was two cases of loading numbers being close to death. The mountings are open. They’re not turrets like the destroyers there which would have been nice and cosy.

No only that one. Stepped in to load and the

round was still in the breech. Was the only one that I knew of with me anyway.

Yeah.

We went back to Kure. They put us in the dry dock there. There’s photos there of Murchison in dry dock and we had shore leave

that come and go and they put some patches over us and sent us back up again.

Oh hard to remember now. I don’t think any of the accounts say how long we were in dry dock. Only a couple of weeks because steam tubes had to be replaced and patched up. They had to get a new

whaler. They had to get the Bofors going again because five Bofors were knocked out with these splinter rounds from the hydraulics. All the hydraulics had to be repaired and get the Bofors back in action. It would have been a couple of weeks.

Well it’s been done from the North side by the look of it. You can see the Chinese getting clobbered but the little bit of inaccuracy which we don’t want to criticise the man who did the painting. He’s just put the ship – can I look at it? He’s just put the ship too far up. In reality it could have been

round about where he’s got the brown muddy water there. Because say 500 yards

Well the from the shore it very realistically they’re showing the mortars and the Chinese but the ship itself is too far out

it would have been only 500, 500 yards from the shore line but going by the painting. I’m not criticising the painter in any way but it shows us a good mile, mile and half away and we could never ever get that distance.

Well it brings back the reality

of what we were doing. As I say I could only look around the side as we turn to see the north bank but when you see a painting like that and it must have been fairly life-like because in total we’re credited I think with 97 North Korean and Chinese dead. That’s the official tally.

So we were going by the group of Chinese there that I tell you that was fairly accurate.

Yeah the helmsman who was a chief. The lookouts

Another for instance the skipper regretted but even the heat of the moment I suppose, he had two leadsman one on the port wing and one on the right wing still sounding and as these two bods they didn’t falter, they were taking the soundings, repeating, sending it up to the bridge and the captain you know

in his report, the captain realized he ordered them in straight away. But these two guys come out unscathed and they would have been a sitting target. But yeah even those fellows wouldn’t have seen much until they came back in because they were busy doing their job. Then you’ve got the others such as loading numbers sending numbers up to us. They wouldn’t have seen anything because they were in the bowels

of the ship. The anchor party which was right up in the bow of the ship. They possibly after before and after swinging on the anchor, they would have a good view of what was going on. But then again if you’ve got things pinging all around you, who wants to stick his head out. Yeah there would have been quite a few

of us would have seen.

Yeah how lucky we were I think. That’s the main thing. Bloody heroes and all this sort of stuff. Just go ashore and get drunk. We’re lucky we got back. We should be still up there. Yeah the action carried on for quite a while and still now when we have our reunions

someone might say something – they haven’t seen each other for 50 odd years – they would bring up the subject and they’d get into it. Yeah it was our moment of glory. It wasn’t very long. But a lot of battles aren’t very long but um.

I think the second time when we took the New Zealander up I think they thought well we’re really going to get into this lot. This is why ex mounting was able to put out such a rapid amount of fire. But they tell me that the chief boatsman’s mate he was standing on a ready use locker like a cheer squad urging them on. And here was this man – he was a big man –

he’s standing right up in the open and he’s yelling at them – go, go, go. That would egg them on to get this rain of fire which I wouldn’t have liked to have been on the receiving end of it – 42 rounds a minute coming into your position. It’s pretty rapid. So yeah. I think everybody thought that second day they’re not going to do this to us and we’re going to get stuck right into them.

So yeah.

I think first time though but as I say on the second time, we’ve had it pretty easy

they’d been shooting at us but we had bigger guns than them doing the bombardments so we were pretty safe where we were. Just then the first time that they ambushed us we weren’t actually prepared for it. We just thought it was going to be a stroll up the channel because we’d been up there previous. They’d only used

rifle fire and that at us. Then when they gave us a bit of a clobbering. So the second time yeah everybody was gung ho and all ready to go.

Not that I know of. I don’t know if I had that killer instinct in me to

get on I think and just I don’t think I thought about that they might hit us with anything a bit bigger. They could have all been something bigger um they tell me in the first lieutenants report and I think the navigator mentioned it also that as we were leaving our anchorage that they had bought in a six inch and they flew around us, but we were steaming out

by the time they once again they must have but the other stuff was three inch, three and a half inch, 90mm which still makes a good hole in the side of the ship.

We all had a good look at it once we got back to Kure. The I wasn’t in the damage-control party that went over the side in the motor cutter

and knock the plugs in. That was done by not myself another ordinary seaman. It was done by ABs [Able Seamen] but uh yeah we must have come back in looking with corks stuck in our side cause they were a tapered plug.

I had no animosity towards them. I guess it’s like all war, you’re sent there to do a job and they’re sent there to do their job. Both sides have the belief. I don’t know how I would have been in infantry if I had to face to face with a North Korean or a Chinaman. I don’t know how I could have handled that but I guess I would have been trained a bit differently

in the army to handle that sort of situation. See we bombarded as I say quite a bit from the fork and one little incident that disgusted me was this particular officer. There’s the corpses that came down with the tide. He used them as practice with his .38 service revolver. That would have reviled me

until a senior ratings explained that it’s better to sink them and let the body go to the bottom than let it blow up cause they all were swollen but the time they got down to us, the bloated bodies. There’s not only humans but there were cows and different animals floating down with wreckage you know. At the time I thought it was pretty

vile thing to do. But as I say in a young mind you don’t look at the practical side sometimes.

Oh it wouldn’t be everyday. But every now and again they’d come down to you. They’d be land locked for a while. They probably swept up onto the

flat and then when the tide came back in they’d wash into the channel and then they’d come down. So it wasn’t everyday. Mightn’t have been every week but it was a few occasions that we did see that.

Gave me a feeling did we do it? Did we kill these people? Did the

army or the air force? Did the air force blow up a house near the river or did the army shoot them as they were trying to get across in the boat or did we do it with our bombardment? It wasn’t pretty. You think about it a bit.

I think I shouldn’t have gone back to Korea in one sense because when we went out to the outpost overlooking the Han Estuary everything came back. You could see exactly where we anchored. You could see the channel where we went up. You could see the opening of the it’s not the Kaesong River, or was it the Kaesong? Similar to the name Kaesong,

where that opened up and that’s where we went past to find deeper water. So that must have been why it was deeper water there. There was this other river flowing in and washed a little bay thing out. And the reality of all these mud flat and then you could see just the channel where we must have gone up. It brought a lot of things back home to me that we could still, Murchison could still be sitting out there

on a mud flat. Yeah.

That a lot of it is for too young to go there. I think the army has a better principle that you’ve got to be 19 before you can go into the army. Because by the time you do your rookie training and that

you’re heading on towards 20. We did it at 18. We’d done all this and then I turned 19. For an immature mind like I must have had cause everything was wonderful to me. I’m in a foreign country Japan, Hong Kong, I’m fighting in Korea. It does

make you wonder if I should have been there at that age. It happened.

Yeah a little Chinaman.

Well our motor cutter was charting sounding more of these channel and they would fire rifles at us everyday. But this little fellow beside us he was going to have a go at the motor cutter. So he fired a few

rounds and motor cutter got on the radio to us and one of our Bofors crews put a couple of 40mm rounds round him. He instantly dropped his gun and put his hands up in the air. So they kept him under sights cause the motor cutter was armed as well so they went ashore and got him and brought him back on board. And we kept him for a couple of days and transferred him to

another ship to go down to Kure for interrogation. He was I don’t think probably just as young as I was. Wouldn’t have had any information on him of importance but they still would have interrogated him.

Oh. I guess I must have thought that it was a good thing

as I say we were told to look out for if we could get a prisoner. That seemed to be the main thing right through the army as well as navy to try and get somebody so that they could get maybe a code or information off them or something. Yeah they locked him up in the paint store I think.

I don’t really know where they locked him because that would have been a dangerous place to put a man wouldn’t it in the paint locker but anyway we kept him for a couple of days.

No that wasn’t the captain. It was an officer.

He was doing the right thing. It was me that took offence to it. As it was explained to me it was better to sink the bodies and let them rot underneath you know.

Back in Kure in Japan?

That was the time I went ashore with Bill. No twice I went ashore with Bill. I went to day trips. Some of the fellows they went up to Tokyo, saw Tokyo, but I wasn’t interested in Tokyo.

They wanted to ride on the train trip up there. It’s not the bullet train that they’ve got but a couple of us went up to Hiroshima where the first atomic bomb was dropped and even then there was a lot of beggars in the street with maimed arms and legs gone and begging. To go into this building they used

as they sighted the bomb on it was amazing that that wasn’t totally destroyed that was just all the glass and that was blown out of it. The framework was left in its state to see that. Lot of curio shops there selling bits and pieces. I remember we were browsing round one of these

shops and one of the sailors says, “I wonder how much this bloody thing cost?” This lovely little sales girl behind the counter turned around and said, “Would you please refrain from using abusive language in this establishment?” Well, this poor little sailor he slunk out with his tail between his legs. To hear such perfect lovely English to come from a Japanese girl. That’s always stuck in my mind.

But the countryside is so different to what we know. It’s probably all changed now. I was amazed when I went back to Korea because I’d never set foot on Korean soil. Some of the other fellows did in Inchon. I’d never stepped foot and there’s not a house as we know it in all the countryside where we went. There’s all these high rise

establishments, apartments I should say and the ones that work the land. They work every inch of the land. And the ones that work the land. They work every inch of the land. They’re just shanties. There’s no homes like we know it. Japan was very similar although back in 1951, 1952 there was still some of the old thatched roof homes in Japan that hadn’t been affected by

the war so where South Korea is practically annihilated they’re rebuilding their affairs. I guess that’s the difference because the invasion force of Japan went in the bottom part of it so all the middle wasn’t bombed or anything. Very pretty place Japan.

Well I think at the time I didn’t realize the amount of Allied lives the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. But I thought it was pretty brutal at the time. But in later life as I grew up and I spoke to different men that had been there. I realized that it was essential.

Because there would have been a lot Australians born or wouldn’t have been born because their fathers would have remained there because they all would have been killed. It was an essential part of the war even though women and children were killed. It seemed to be part of war. I don’t know how many women and children we killed with our bombing. Bombardments over hill. We were given a target villages and that

but we never saw that except for the bodies coming down the river.

Reconnaissance reported it in so we’re told. Whether they were infiltrated with South Koreans as well or whether they might have found reports

of particular. In this case the Han Estuary battle, North Korea or China recorded that there were so many killed there with the truck and tanks. Then we would know how many were in the tanks. Say a crew of five for arguments sake. With a truck there’d be two drivers and possibly half a dozen soldiers from the back so you could calculate it that way.

Yeah we recorded quite a few things up there. But I think we were the only ship who recorded a battle with a Russian tank and won. They were big tanks. I can’t think what they were called. They carried four inch.

This particular tank and truck that we knocked out. They call it the only recorded event of a tank and a ship having a gun battle. The old Murchy she’s got a few little ticks on her.

Oh we’d walk the streets. We’d pick their dried food that was hanging on the wires hanging out and we’d do the same in Hong Kong. Wasn’t too bad. But we’d circulate around. Get a tri-shaw and travel out in the country. Try to make conversation with some of the locals but

most of the time was spent in beer halls. In shops doing shopping. So with the average population we didn’t really come in conversation or into contact, put it that way. A lot of them were still getting around in national dress in 1951 which was very nice to see.

A typical beer hall in occupied Japan. Most of them were dark. There was no drinking out of on the street like tables and that. You went down – most of them you walked down some steps to get into them for what reason I don’t know. And it made them worse when the redcaps came down to check out. They always looked bigger when they stopped at

the top of these steps you know. But the beer was very nice. A drop called Kirin. Good drop of beer. Occasionally we drank San Miguel. That was San Miguel in Hong Kong. I never came to sake very much but I used to like the Akadama. That was very nice. Girls were always very friendly.

Toilets were a eye opener because they were all open toilets and they were all mixed. You’d be standing there minding your own business and next thing a girl would come and stand beside you and lift her skirt and she be doing her business and talking to you. Probably sizing you up. Yeah and the food was always good.

Half the time you didn’t know what you ordered. I came back very overweight as my photo shows. Yeah I enjoyed their food and their wine. The girls were very hospitable.

Well the Yanks didn’t like the Royal Navy and they mixed us up with the Royal Navy. Up till then after a few run-ins they issued us with Australian flashes to put up on our shoulder. Up to that time we never wore it. But because at that time we had the same uniform, they thought that we were Poms, Limeys as they called them.

So we used to get picked on. Calling us Limey Bear. That would get our hackles up. One bloke would throw a punch and it becomes a free-for-all. I got done over in Sasebo? By two Yanks. I’d saved for a pair of Packard shoes, top line shoes lovely and soft leather.

and these two Yanks must have thought I was a Limey Bear so they decided they were going to pick on me and they did me like a dinner. Got me down kicked practically unconscious, cracked my ribs and pinched me shoes. That’s was the worst part of that. I didn’t mind being in sick bay for a couple of days. I did regret that because I got docked pay because I was unable to work.

Pinching a man’s shoes like that. I thought that was pretty awful. There was another instance at Sasebo. The Americans had this habit, no matter where they set up a port, they always had a big warehouse and they had written on the roof and this was done in Sasebo: “Through these portals are the best

god damn fighting men in the world.” So we’d been to Sasebo a couple of times and this particular trip we were due to leave the next morning. We were about to up anchor and there’s two patrol boats coming out with their sirens blasting. So we stopped and it turns out that this adage had been

struck out and ‘Bullshit’ written on top of it. So the American said, “You’re not leaving the port until we found our who did it!” So after a couple of hours and clearing lower deck and questioning every man and boy on board the skipper realized that he wasn’t going to find out. So we made humble apologies to the Americans and

they let us go. But we never went back. We were never asked for an anchorage in Sasebo again. Since then I found out who did it. It wasn’t me.

I don’t think it’s a rivalry. I think what it is it’s dates right back to their War of Independence when they wanted their independence and the British

they had to fight the British and possibly again the Second World War, but yeah they’ve got a dislike for the Tommy and the Royal Navy sailors. I don’t know if the air force are there with them, but we – if a Pom was in a fight then I’d help him.

Oh they weren’t too bad. One thing that we didn’t like was that they upped the prices all the time. You’d go into a shop to buy something and just say it was 100 yen and it was the only item on the shelf. Before you’d even open your mouth to buy it, they’d buy it for 200 yen.

Cause they had more money than us. One little dislike. The buggers couldn’t drink. We’d go ashore in Sasebo? To the PX [Postal Exchange – American canteen unit] club and we’d buy a case for two of us. They’d walk up and buy six bottles between them. Well that was only our primer, our tasties before we went ashore. You know. Yeah they couldn’t drink.

They thought they could. Well I found the Americans pretty good, anyhow.Got some big buggers amongst them. Especially the coloured fellows. Some big fellows there. You’d say “Yes sir” to them. Yeah must be even close are we?

Just we didn’t go back up the estuary. They I can’t think of the name of this New Zealand frigate but the HMS Morecombe Bay was still there and that was a Pommy one and a Canadian one. But no one ever went up that alley again so I’m told.

And then the peace talks they went from Kaesong to Panmunjom. It was too far away to bombard with four inch so there’s was so reason to try and get up as high as we could up there. Things were kept changing. They were getting closer to coming to an agreement for a ceasefire.

When the peace talks were on at Kaesong, yeah. Every hour you just have to place a few rounds in the perimeter of where the peace talks were. We were the most forward not only Murchison but the other frigates. We were the most forward position to just let them know that they were within range because the army were further south. Yeah.

That I couldn’t tell you.

No. No. Peace talks didn’t come through until – we left in 1952. And the peace talks went culminated

on the 27th July when the signing was in 1953. So the peace talks went on for a while and they fell out over started up again and. So it went on for another 12 months or so after we left. I think went Murchison went back in the second two of those, they abandoned the Han Estuary as a viable site for a landing.

Very good. So we painted ship before we arrived in Sydney

had customs on we were all looking forward to leave and we had a good welcome. A lot of people to welcome us back into Sydney. My sister-in-law, my brother’s wife, Maureen, she came down and greeted me so I had somebody. The rest of the family were in Western Australia so I had somebody to meet me.

We were only in Sydney for two or three days and then we all went on leave.

No, they didn’t know. I went home to my sister’s place on leave. My brother-in-law wanted to know how come I got two medals. I’d been away from Australia for nine months.

Another instance of ignorance of the Korean War was when my brother met me in Perth and we went to a hotel and I was asked to leave because I was under-aged, you had to be 21 in Perth in Western Australia. Went to another hotel. He sat me at a table went over and got a couple of beers and brought them back

and next minute the publicans standing by my elbow and he said, “How old are you?” I said, “19.” He said, “Well you better get out.” Well the brother was getting stuck into him well and truly saying what we’d been doing and he had no idea about the Korean War whatsoever.

Can’t have a beer. It puts you out a bit you know. Sydney was different. You could have a beer in

Sydney, but Western Australia still had these archaic laws that you had to be 21 before you could have a drink. At any rate we finally went out of town a little bit. We found a publican who’d let me stay so we were right. But people were ignorant of the Korean War. I have heard tell other people chaps come up to them and say, “Where’d you get those medals from? You get them out of a Kellogg’s Cornflakes box or something?”

They didn’t realise that Korean War these were Second World War fellows. That the Korean War had produced and what it did produce.

Bit put out. At one stage I stopped wearing my ribbons on my uniform and I got pulled over the coals for that when I went to Shipton Reserve with HMAS Parkes in Western Australia

I was lined up for Liberty men and the duty officer said to me “Where’s your ribbons?” I said, “Well I don’t wear them. And he said, “Well you’ve got to wear them. They were issued to you by the government.” So I had to put them back on again. People didn’t know what they actually meant. It took the Australian government a long time to give us an Australian medal. Who’s fault that was I don’t know because

the two medals that we were given were imperial medals. The United Nations medal and the Korean War medal but it’s only in the last four years that they’ve given us the Australian active service medal and the Australian Service Medal. They’d given us clasps to put on there for Korea and Malaya. Yeah people

I think even politicians. We did have a couple of politicians who were World War II people. John Gorton was one. He realized that Australia had sent 17,000 men to Korea but the others I don’t know whether they appreciated it or not. Yes it did in some cases make me a bit angry to think you’d been up there fighting in a war

and you weren’t appreciated.

The Malayan Emergency. I joined HMAS Quadrant in November 1955 and served on her until October 1956 and in that time the Malayan

Emergency had blown up to an extent that there was the Australia army were into it with these guerrilla insurgents but quite a few ships from the Australian navy in the Malayan ways, the Malayan peninsula. The Quadrant’s main role was in blockade duties to try and stop

arms and food being brought down from Indonesia to feed the rebels in the jungles there. So we did 26 days there but one little unknown fact in 1955 I was serving HMAS Shoalhaven doing fishery patrol out of Darwin and

East Timor was even threatened back then because Shoalhaven went to Dili the capital of East Timor and we evacuated the Australian embassy staff out of Timor. Little unknown fact, that they were expecting trouble way back in 1955 was East Timor. The Indonesians were thinking about East Timor back in then. So we took them

back to Darwin.

Sukarno was before Suharto. Yes there’d be Sukarno yes.

Yes across the bows or this little bows as they were trying to smuggle these arms

and provisions down to the rebels in the jungle.

They were so in close that we couldn’t fire it up. Once you fire the rounds across the bow of a boat they don’t want to go any further they turn around and go back. We did have to do similar things to the illegal fishing boats out of the international waters around Darwin.

There was a 12-mile limit then I don’t know what it is now. But any illegal fishing boats found inside the 12 mile limit we had to get them out. Some of us wouldn’t heed our warning so we had to fire across our bows also. That stopped them. So that was my role in 1956 on Quadrant in the Malayan emergency.

Oh well by this time we knew more about Malayan emergency than what we did going to Korea because it was more widespread media coverage of a bigger thing in the five years of the outbreak of the Korean War. Yeah so we knew actually what was going on. And as I say a lot of people realize that Timor

was being eyed by Indonesia way back in 1955.

Yes I went ashore. Every house had a pig. They have a pig like we have a dog.

Yes. The very impressive – the Catholic cathedral was absolutely lovely. And also still then in 1955 the

wreckage of the first voyager I don’t know if she was torpedoed or bombed but they ran the HMAS Voyager ashore in Dili Harbour and the wreckage still there with the – something to see.

Something to do with the World War II and a couple of the officers pointed out the jungle terrain where the Australian guerrilla force

fought the Japanese in during the World War II. Very, very thick, not tall jungle but very thick low jungle.

Discharge. I was asked was I going to sign on. I said no. “Would I sign on active reserve?” I said, “Yes for three years.” But in that three years they paid me a lump sum I was never called to serve in the active reserve. I was in reserve. I felt

I would have liked to have stayed on. The circumstances of having a young wife, a young baby. I weighed my options and decided that getting out was better than staying in.

Yeah in a sense. Navy or government looked after me. They put me through a rehabilitation course in butchering. I

became a butcher. So I wasn’t out on a limb. I had employment which was quite good. I was entitled to war service. So we bought a war service home in 1957.

Even before I finished my butchering course I thought I’d like to go back in. I had trouble mixing with people. I suppose being tied up with a boat load of men and then coming back into a civilian street and you had to find conversation with ladies and other older type people. I did find it very difficult.

But these things must happen

Feelings of

fright I guess. As I say when we were up there we weren’t given much opportunity to see what we were firing or where we were but when it’s pointed out to you where we actually were. To think that we were actually that close five ship lengths distance from the bank and we were getting clobbered.

It did bring back that “How did we get out?” And it must have been through only sheer tenacity of our captain and navigator that got us out but yeah it made me think that we were lucky that we got out.

Not so much dreams. I think more since we went back. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone back. But since I’ve come back I get these thoughts of serving in Korea. Proud that I did. Also you get a frightened feeling that maybe circumstances would have been different I wouldn’t have been here

We would have been still up there.

To death yeah. At the time it wasn’t there because. It has sunk in since I went back. Maybe that’s what my palpitations are.

But as I say I was proud to serve in Murchison. I was proud to serve the captain. He was a very good skipper. Good seaman and wonderful bloke to go with it.

When we went back

and I asked us the statistics from the ambassador Tony Healy and he supplied that North Korea had a full army of one and a half million and a reserve only of four million. South Korea only had a full army of 65,000 with a reserve of one million. You can understand why every check point ten kilometres from Seoul

is still armed. It’s got tanks situated. They’ve got gun mountings, every pillar on a bridge has a sand-bagged machinegun nest. They live on their wits from the fear of being invaded again.

I don’t think so. No. I think the futility of the couple of millions of civilians that got killed. I think that must have been terrible for South Korea but I think it was a United Nations first involvement in a World War. You’ve got the classes of

whole world came into it with 21 nations involved. 22 including South Korea but it gave us a feeling that we’d overcome the bad guy and we’d liberated South Korea. And it is liberated when you look at the magnificent cities that they’ve got there now. Yes. I don’t think there’s any despair that

it was a useless effort. I know we lost 339 say 341 killed but Australia would always do that and go to the underdog and help. They have done since we became a colony. So that’s a proud thing to have been part of it.

Well because they always go tot he aid of the underdog. I’ve lived that principle anyway. If I saw even today three guys to one I’d go and help the one guy then work out later on who’s at wrong but I don’t believe in three to one. So Australians have that

in them to help the underdog.

I still think Australia should have been involved in the Vietnam War and why I say that is I had some

good mates in permanent army who served in Vietnam. One wounded very badly and carry scars for the rest of his life but it was a shame that we had to use conscripts. But I believe in conscription. My belief in conscription is that we should have a conscripted army

in Australia to defend Australia not to fight outside Australia. We have a permanent army for that. If the permanent army wish to go and volunteer and fight overseas then yes but a conscripted army we should have in this country to defend this country and we need defending because we can’t rely on America or England as we did in the World War II. I’m not a warmonger

but as I said we should have a type of national guard to protect our country and I know quite a few people who do agree with me on that.

Well I’d say that people of my age that served in these conflicts such as Korea and Vietnam, the Persian Gulf. We

did it with pride. We did it to free and give other countries what we’ve got so don’t look down on us that we did go and kill people. They say there is a better way of doing of settling these things but I don’t think there is. You’re going to always have a war but and if in

somebody was look at this in 50 years’ time or even in ten years time all I can do is ask them to think of us and be proud of us for what we did.