Australians at War Film Archive

It was very pleasant. I was one of a family, I had

five brothers and three sisters and I’ve only got one sister still alive. She’s ninety-three and we were very fortunate, it was quite a happy family even though there was a large one. It was a struggle for Dad looking after nine kids all the time, but he built his own house at Mt Lawley. And went to Inglewood school until fourth standard,

and then I went to Highgate and then at Perth Boys’, [school]. And then at fourteen Dad said, “Oh, I’ve got a job for you. You can work at Barnett’s.” So at fourteen I finished my schooling and then

Barnett Brothers were a big hardware and glass merchants

at the time, and I started off as office boy there at twelve shillings and tuppence a week, finished up on five pounds a week. I was doing all their glass quoting and things like that, and then I went to Kalgoorlie, as assistant accountant at the Kalgoorlie Foundry. And then war came and

I was called up in the first National Service group to leave Kalgoorlie, but fortunately I had applied to the air force because I was keen to fly.

Usually Friday or Saturday nights we’d have a musical evening.

Mum used to play the piano and two brothers used to play the trumpet and young Allan, my younger brother, he became a champion, a state champion trumpeter for a couple of years. And we all used to sing and entertain ourselves that way, because there was no television in those days and

the radio had only just come out, in about 1924, I think it was. Anyway, it was mostly musical evenings and family get-togethers, and every weekend was the same. With nine, a family of nine, it was a lot of fun.

Nothing, I learnt the piano for about five years and all I can play is, ‘How I can wash my father’s shirt? How I can wash it clean?’ – one finger – but I didn’t keep going. Yes, young Allan did quite well with his cornets, and so did Les and Harold, the eldest brother.

Stan and I used to just fool around mostly.

Until my eldest brother bought a car and of course that got a great amount of use, as a matter of fact we borrowed it for our honeymoon. That was in 1942.

We didn’t realise that it was tough on Mum and Dad, but we had a lovely old home in Mt Lawley. It’s worth a fortune today and it’s a damn shame that they sold it but there you are. But it was a lot of fun, with nice neighbours, and it was a nice area.

School was not that far away, as a matter of fact they had a school reunion, for the fiftieth anniversary or seventy-fifth anniversary, and we’d just come back from the farm and Allan rang and said, “What time will I pick you up?” And I said, “What for?” and he said, “The anniversary dinner,” and I said, “Oh crikey, I haven’t even booked for it.”

And he said, “Well ring this number.” So I rang this number and the headmaster answered the phone and he said, “No, it’s been booked out for six weeks or more. No way you can get in now.” He said, “Anyway what’s your name?” and I said, “Ivan Peirce,” and he said, “You’re not Ivan Peirce from Bridgetown, are you?” and I said, “Yes,” and he said, “Look I’ll put you up at the main table with the VIPs [Very Important Persons],” and he made a separate

place for me up with the VIPs. And poor old Allan, who’d paid his setup about six weeks before, he was right down the back.

This chap, Mr Clark the headmaster, was John, my son’s, teacher in Bridgetown. This is going back forty years now and as soon as he heard it was me, he went out

of his way to get a spot for me.

Yes.

Yes, don’t record this one but…

You are, are you? We used to go down to what is now St Anne’s Hospital and swim in the summer time. There was a nice patch

of river there and we used to go into, Cocky Robinson’s it was then. He was a wealthy member of parliament and he had this eleven acre patch in Mt Lawley where St Anne’s Hospital is now, and we used to sneak under the fence and pinch ripe apricots or any nice fruit that was ripe at the time. And yes, there was a Chinaman’s garden on the opposite side

and one day the boys, the old Chinaman came in and parked his horse out the front and put a nose bag on and fed the horse some chaff, and the boys decided to take the horse out and put the cart through the gate and then harness it up again. The old horse kept chomping away and anyway the old Chinaman came out and he walked around this cart about four times to see how the horse could’ve got there.

He couldn’t work it out.

It was. And then they started a rowing club down there, at Mt Lawley, and for sport we used to go rowing and I bought a single scull and did a lot of sculling up and down the river,

which was very pleasant. It was a gorgeous spot, Mt Lawley there, right through to Bassendean.

It was the Swan River and the cement barges used to come, they were dredging the river to get their shells and to take it up to the cement works at Rivervale.

Yes, there were some quite good rowers. A couple of state rowers were teaching us how to row. Yes, it was quite a pleasant pastime.

Yes, they used to have the rowing events in Perth in those days.

Yes, they’re all at Canning Bridge now. They’ve shifted, in Perth itself from the Barrack Street jetty there used to be West Rowing Club, ANA Rowing Club [affiliated with Australian Natives’ Association], oh three or four rowing clubs were on that foreshore between Barrack Street or Victoria Avenue.

And I can remember an auntie owned a block of land that was from Adelaide Terrace. It went right through to the river – there were no streets in between in those days. But nowadays there’s two streets there and the Riverside Drive.

Yeah.

Yes, yes two brothers used to row. And then I went to Kalgoorlie and left my boat there and that was the last I saw of the rowing. But I did row in the air force. Up at Geraldton they had a rowing club up there and we went rowing there. As a matter of fact the chap who

was pilot, who taught Don Watson to fly, on Catalinas he was second dicky to Don, used to row with me in Geraldton.

No, I was called up by the militia. It was compulsory service in those days

and in the first intake, I was in Kalgoorlie at the time and we went down to Melville, and there they, nearly all of those chaps that were in the militia, went off with Colonel Lankatell, he was CO [Commanding Officer] of the battalion there and he went to Singapore and all of those chaps became POWs [Prisoners of War].

So I was very fortunate to miss out with the 2/4th Battalion, and my air force calling came up in the meantime.

Well the press used to give us a pretty good commentary of it and my elder brother, Stan, went off to the Middle East with 3 Squadron and we used to hear from him occasionally.

And yes, when my call up came we went to Pierce for initial training and then Cunderdin for Tiger Moth [De Havilland Tiger Moth training aircraft] flying. That was initial training there and then Geraldton for

four months, yeah two months, yeah four months on Ansons [Avro Anson fighters].

Well living in Mt Lawley, the aerodrome was on in Moelands, a couple of miles away, and I can remember riding my pushbike over to Moelands Aerodrome to see Kingsford Smith [Charles Kingsford Smith pioneer long distance aviator]. I think it was about 1929 when he came in in on that Lockheed Altair [aircraft]

and to see that swooping round and land was really good. And flying, I thought, was a lot better than being a foot slogger and having to walk everywhere.

Yes. My younger brother he was on about 26 Course and he went off to [Port] Pirie and he was

Fairy Battles [L5683 Terrigal fighter/bomber] and he stayed on Fairy Battles for the rest of the war.

Fairey Battles were a single engine plane, very similar to the Hurricane [Hawker Hurricane fighter]. They used to tow targets that the people could shoot at and things like that. And I wasn’t too keen at being shot at, but Allan seemed to enjoy it,

so he stayed on that. Allan could play his trumpet quite well and he formed a band over at Port Pirie and they didn’t want to let him go.

South Australia, yeah.

It was a gunnery school, that was.

No, actually he went to South Australia, after I did. After I did my flying training. We got into the embarkation depot and I was posted overseas and the Japs [Japanese] came into the war while we were in embarkation depot and they cancelled all our postings and sent us back to Geraldton as a reconnaissance

squadron. We were flying Ansons up and down the coast, up as far as Port Hedland and looking for wreckage from the [His Majesty’s Australian Ship] Sydney. The Sydney was sunk about that time.

Well I had

applied to the air force before my call up came for the militia and the call up came for the air force while I was on leave from the militia, fortunately. And I started off at Pierce, for two months I think it was at Pierce and two months at Cunderdin flying Tiger Moths

and then four months at Geraldton on the Ansons and after we’d completed our training at Geraldton we were posted overseas.

All the technical and theory, maths and drill and all that sort of stuff.

Oh very, I didn’t want to be anything else, cause I didn’t fancy being out the back of an aeroplane and being shaken around trying to fire a gun.

It wasn’t easy

because, as I said earlier, I had to leave school at fourteen, so I had to go to night school to get my Junior [school certificate]. You had to have a Junior to get into the air force in those days and I was very fortunate. I had a university teacher, who was a friend of one of my brothers, and he taught me all the rudiments of trigonometry and the maths that I’d missed by leaving school early.

And I was able to get through, which was very fortunate. I didn’t want to be a foot slogger or a gunner.

No, there was no flying training at Pierce. It was all theory. Your maths, they were algebra and

navigation, they started to teach you the rudiments of navigation and there was no actually flying there at all, it was just theory.

Square bashing and armaments they used to teach you about. Armaments. And I remember one old fellow he used to drop his Hs. They used to call him bomb hooks.

Very pleasant really compared with how the army… We all lived in huts and there were some fabulous chaps on course. You’d go to sleep of a night-time listening to chaps telling you funny stories and, oh yes,

‘Chilly’ Day and John Baker, the two of them would vie with one another to tell a funny story. And every night, for twenty-eight nights, there were these fellows telling their funny stories.

Yes.

Uh?

Yes, yes, the discipline was fairly strict but

as long as you behaved yourself you didn’t get into trouble. One chap I remember, Chilly Day, used to talk a lot and he got kitchen fatigue on one particular occasion, and even after meals the drill sergeant would have you out there with your rifle doing your exercises. And one particular day

the drill section was right out in front of the hut, and Chilly had been away out on his fatigue, and he came back into the hut, and just at the psychological minute of him, he opened the door. Just as we all went, “Halt, who goes there?” with our rifles and Chilli said, “AC [Aircraftsman] Tooday reporting for duty, sergeant.” I can still recall that, sixty years ago.

Yes, three months I think it was.

I’ve no idea how they selected you, but I was selected to be a pilot fortunately. And I did the pilot’s course through Cunderdin and Geraldton.

The list came out at the end of your two months training and, “You were going there,” and, “You were going there,” and…

It was, yes, to know that you were in the pilot group. It was a real relief because I didn’t want to be a gunner for sure and my maths weren’t that good to be a navigator. You had to have fairly

good navigation skills to, or fairly good maths, to be a navigator. It was all theory and algebra and trigonometry and that sort of stuff. I was quite happy to be a pilot.

The whole group they went as they used to do a course

every two months, no, every month, that’s right. Half the course would be initial training and half would be advanced training at these places. And the initial training, I was very fortunate – I got a wonderful chap as an instructor, Wally Bowd, who came back to WA [Western Australia] as Chief of Department of Civil Aviation after the war.

And Wally was a most meticulous pilot and very good instructor, and then we passed through Cunderdin and went to Geraldton.

Well the initial training, still a bit of maths and navigation skill and things like that, and you actually went up in an aeroplane and

I think it took me about seven hours to go solo, which was about average. Some used to take up to about ten hours at the time, and some would go off much sooner, but fellows with a little bit of experience.

No, no your instructor would send you off solo and that was the real… I can remember getting up

in the air all by myself and you realise that as you came into land, you realise that, “Crikey the instructor’s not telling me what to do.”

It was a little bit scary whether you were going to make it without bending the aeroplane or not the first time round, but I made if quite safely and he sent me off again.

So yes, actually the first time by yourself, when you suddenly realise that you’re by yourself, is not panic, but it was quite a worry whether you’re going to get down without bending the aeroplane.

It’s probably one of the easiest planes to fly. They were a very docile machine

and you could get them back to about forty-five miles an hour before they dropped out of the air. But we didn’t realise just how safe they were at the time. Everything was new, yes.

I think they had about forty or fifty all together.

Yes, that was.

It was quite a big school cause they had, yes they had fifty pupils for the initial training and fifty for the advanced training at the same time. There was a hundred pupils, so they had to have a hundred aeroplanes, well not a hundred aeroplanes but half, so you’d fly in the morning and do your theory in the afternoon, things like that.

It was all training up at Cunderdin and you’d just do take-offs and landings and get used to handling the aeroplane, and the extra things came when you got to Geraldton. You had to do navigation and things like that.

Oh very

basic, but we were quite pleased. They were ever so much better than the army and things were much more improved than the army rations. You lived in tents in the army, whereas you had huts up at Geraldton. Things were a lot better.

Yes, weekends, alternate weekends

you used to have off and we come to Perth by train. And there was one or two of the lads had motor cars, but I didn’t have enough money to have a motor car in those days. I think about two chaps off the course had them and all the rest had to go by train.

Yes, we used to get a couple of us together.

One chap used to come rowing with us. It was mainly when you came home, it was the family and my girlfriend, who became my fiancée and I married her. Once we

got together, it was all girlfriends of a weekend.

Yes, I had to get a pair of wings before Connie would agree to become engaged and marry me. No, she’s been gorgeous. I’ve been very happy.

I met her when she was sixteen and I was invited to a party by a sister-in-law and this lass used to live alongside my sister-in-law, Joy. And I was invited to this party and Connie was there. She was a sweet sixteen-year-old and

there was a game called ‘postman’s knock’. In those days you used to take a girl into the dining room and give here a kiss and that was that. Anyway, Con came in – she was very shy – and I said, “Okay, let’s get it over and done with,” and I gave her a peck and she went one way and I went the other.

I don’t know, it was a game they called it. It was a one they used to play in

those days. It was quite pleasant.

That was how I met her, yes. Not long before her mother had passed away and there was this sweet sixteen-year-old and she kept an eye on her younger sister who was seven years younger. And that’s

how I met her and became very impressed with her. But didn’t see much of her then until… She lived at Belford and then she came to Mt Lawley and lived there, and that’s when I joined the air force and met Con again. She lived in the same street as I did. That’s how we met up.

Yes.

Two months; eight weeks at Cunderdin.

Yes, apart from the flying it was all theory and you’d get about an hour a day flying and all the rest was study, drilling

still and theory, armaments and the whole work of theory, I’ve forgotten the subjects now. Navigation was a big thing that you had to learn too.

Yes well it’s completely different to what it is now. The theory of it

was map reading, how to pick out a railway line or a road or something. Australia’s not very easy to navigate. In those days there were not many roads and a few railway lines. If you could navigate on a railway line or where a railway line joined another one or things like that you could find your position quite easily, but if there was, some of our country was quite

barren and rivers and things like that you can find your way around, but we managed quite well. And up at Geraldton, we teamed up with a crew up there. Three pilots would go together and one would do the navigating and the other would

do the flying and the third one would listen on the radio.

Yeah.

Night flying was a special course and the instructors used to take you up. Of course they could do a lot of that in the daytime. They’d put you under what they called the hood,

and they’d cut out all the light around and you had to navigate, fly and navigate all at once, by yourself, because it’s all good training. At night-time you couldn’t see much at all.

The hood just covered the windows, the windscreen and the windows, and you just couldn’t see out. And of course

you just had to fly the aeroplane on the instruments. You couldn’t see anything other than the instruments to fly on.

Well you’d have a lookout. You’d be doing the actual flying and your lookout would be looking for other planes.

Oh no, no.

Very little

at Geraldton. The radio was not a great part of the course up there except when we crewed up later. Like after the training we went back to the embarkation depot and we were sent back to Geraldton as a reconnaissance squadron, and then we had a proper wireless air gunner who did the wireless and the air gun as well.

It was very similar. They still kept your theory subjects going, like your maths and your navigation and also armaments, and they were the main subjects that you used to take. And of course they used to have you on bombing

episodes up at Geraldton – how to do bombing raids.

You’d actually go up and do your low level bombing or high level bombing, depending on what was required. The high level you had a bomb sight up the front that you’d get your drift, if you’re drifting away from the target, and you’d fly straight into the, what you had to bomb.

They’d have a marker there. After every plane went over he’d go and do the marks and he’d radio back what the accuracy was.

Yeah.

It didn’t matter much.

Very few were scrubbed. Scrubbing was a terrible thing. If a chap was scrubbed the whole course would be really sad for him because until they got to that stage, pilots would go back to be either navigators or wireless air gunners, or they’d go back as a trainer instructor if they were pilots and that was quite monotonous compared with

the other flying on operations.

Inability to land correctly or inability to see or to judge the height so that you pulled your nose up so you didn’t hit the ground and do damage to your plane.

Yes, yes a great chap did,

very sad for Murray cause he was such a nice fellow. And he later went to Link trainer instructing. He really wanted to fly. Link trainer instructors were mostly scrub pilots.

They put you in a little box, put the lid on you and you fly this aeroplane

according to the instruments. It was a lot of instrument flying for flying at night and things like that.

It’s a box with all the instruments in it, just the same as in your aeroplane, and they could cut the motor on you and things like that and give you training before you got in the air as to how to counteract these

things that happened.

They put them on these Link trainers for somebody to, just for. They’d had pilot training so that was the jobs they gave them. They couldn’t fly aeroplanes but they could operate these Link trainers and things like that.

Yeah.

No, no. The box used to be attached to the middle of the floor. It’d go right round and things like that. If you did the wrong thing it would dive and that’s when the instructor can see that you’re in trouble.

Yes, everybody had to do a certain amount of it.

Well about double the size of this room, and the box would be I suppose about six foot wingspan. And you’d spin around on this particular base and do the various headings that you put the plane on. Your instruments were similar to an aeroplane and you had to fly it by the instruments.

Yes, the bombing. There was a bombing and gunnery course up there that you could do low flying. You were only allowed to low fly in this particular area. Low level bombing was a lot of fun, down close to the ground doing a hundred miles an hour, that was terrific

in those days. And you could come back and check the accuracy of your bombing and things like that. It was quite interesting to try and improve each one.

Ansons up there.

It was a twin engine plane, that was for your twin engine experience,

and quite docile. You could land it at about fifty knots, which was reasonably safe, and I was very fortunate all my training that there were no prangs up there. And not long after I left there was one and there were four people killed and things like that. But I was very fortunate. I never saw any of those

while I was flying.

Not looking around as you were coming in to land. and one plane underneath the other and never saw each other as they joined up in the circuit. One went on top and chopped pieces out of the other one and yes, there was, I didn’t see it fortunately but

it would have been…

Yes, you got more flying and of course you used to fly a lot further. Around Cunderdin you only used to fly out to a satellite aerodrome to do take-offs and landings and at Geraldton they had cross-country trips

where you had to go about ninety miles in one direction and find a railway line and turn at that and come back in a triangular course. And it used to take sometimes an hour and a half to two hours and you could easily get lost, although nobody did. Up there it was… Western Australia weather was quite good. Navigation conditions were very good for

up there, and of course there was all the coast. If you flew out to sea then you had to go east to come back to Australia, and you should never have got lost up there.

Just we were very fortunate that our instructors were really good and they were able to impart the knowledge to you and give you confidence in yourself. And yes, I had… The chap I had in Geraldton had ten thousand hours, which was a colossal experience. The average pilot at that stage had two or three hundred hours,

but this chap had about ten thousand, John Miles, and he had three pupils for our course. ‘Rusty’ Darlend, who lives in Bunbury, Phil Oldfield, who died a couple of years ago and myself. We were particularly fortunate in having him because he

was so meticulous and so good and he was able to impart it to us quite well.

He’d been in the air force. He was a lot older than most instructors and he had been in the air force and when the war came they seconded him back. He’d been in civil flying as well.

And yes, he was particularly good.

Fifty. Each course was broken up into fifty pilots, fifty navigators and fifty gunners. The gunners went east to training over there, navigators went east too, to either Sale or Mt Gambier or Nhill.

After Pierce, after initial training you were broken up into pilots, navigators or gunners. One particular chap I remember, in 1941, he said, “The war will be over by Christmas. You blokes won’t see any action.” He was supposed to go off as a navigator. He said, “I’m not going

to take nine months to train, I’m going in as a gunner.” And he went off as gunner, and he was so good at gunnery that when he got to England they put him straight into Pathfinders and he did seventy-three trips as a Pathfinder. To survive seventy-three as a gunner it was remarkable. Finished up with the DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross] and the

DFM [Distinguished Flying Medal] and he came back as an alcoholic. He sobered up and he did two years medicine at Crawley, then went to Melbourne, did two more years there and the Korean war came and he volunteered for that. They wouldn’t take him in the army, in the air force, so he went into the army. And the Korean government

gave one gold chain and medallion to each nation, and the one to come to Australia went to this chap. Apparently they were out in the snow and the chap in front of him got shot and was bleeding. Every time his heart beat blood would go into the snow, and this chap raced forward and put a tourniquet on him and, as he finished this tourniquet and stood up, the same sniper got him and got him in the back of the neck. And

from then on he had no use in his right hand and he could only talk in a syllable at a time. It was a shame because the career that he had, four years as a doctor. And he came back to Australia and rehabilitated himself by doing pottery. And the pottery he sold and gave to

the Cheshire Homes in India.

Yes it is, and unfortunately he died about two years ago. He lived all by himself.

No, there were some very good fellows on the same course as me that…

Uh?

Yes, yes, I’ve seen, we used to get around quite a lot. Yes, there’s not too many of them left unfortunately. Most are dropping off the perch now that they’ve turned eighty on.

Everywhere.

One went to the Middle East with 3 Squadron. They were fighter planes. A couple went to the Middle East. Quite a few went to England and never came back unfortunately, and a few went onto Catalinas and instructors and yes, they went everywhere.

Nobody knows.

Airborne used to do that and you just went where you were told.

No, very little.

I came onto Catalinas after a year at Geraldton. We were all split up and sent to all sorts of places

cause we’d been sort of wasting our time at Geraldton, compared with fellows that were straight in on operations. And I was sent to Nhill flying training navigators around at night.

Well there’s no war effort up there. You were, I won’t say wasting time, we were doing training and

we were flying up to Carnarvon and Port Hedland and looking for debris from the Sydney. The Sydney had been sunk in that time and we went up and down the coast each day just to try and find some debris from it, so they were able to do something about it.

It was because the Sydney had come into Geraldton the night before she was sunk and went off

and nobody could understand that a German raider had got it. I can understand how it happened though. The commander of the Sydney was on a terrific bonus if they got a ship like the Kormoran and nobody realised that it had the armament that it did have.

And normally the Sydney could have taken that in tow and taken it into Geraldton or Carnarvon and it would have been… See, England at the time was losing half a million tons of shipping every month, and to get a nine thousand ton boat would have been a big bonus for them, but I can understand him getting into the position he got in, to

try and get this boat, but that got him unfortunately.

Well it should be because they’ve got all the equipment these days to find it. But the tides up and down our coast are fairly heavy, like they’re quite fast. They know the area where it was sunk or where they think it was sunk, as there is no

way of checking what these Kormoran survivors said, whether they were accurate. It’s very confusing because one ship from the Kormoran got into Carnarvon, one of the lifeboats, within about, came straight in from where it was sunk, where the Sydney was sunk and they took the same time as another lifeboat,

got right way up to Beagle Bay, and that was nine hundred miles up the coast and they both got to Western Australia on the same day. And whether this crew that… One theory is that the crew that came straight into Carnarvon made sure that there were no survivors from the Sydney. Whether it’s right or not – it’s all theory and

we’ll probably never know.

Yeah. One lifeboat got all the way up to Christmas Island and by that time the body on board was just a carcass – the birds had eaten it all. So they don’t know too much about it.

Yes, it just wasn’t successful at all. They found nothing, nothing at all.

Oh there was no pressure really. You just had to do your job and if you found something you were very fortunate. But if you didn’t, you didn’t.

There was nothing said. You’d come back and give them a report and that was it.

Oh, about six months they were going up and down to Carnarvon and Port Hedland, almost every day.

Yes, they covered everything that may have floated in, but you had to look at the coast all the way.

From all accounts that I’ve heard I would say it was somewhere between Port Gregory and

Carnarvon, about a hundred and fifty miles. It would be in that area because people on shore saw gunfire and flashes of a night-time and that’s when the battle was on, just on dusk. And they were able to pinpoint about where it was. I know it’s quite a mystery, the Sydney.

Oh yes, yes. Actually we did sea patrols and one occasion we picked up an American ship and three submarines.

They were coming down from the Philippines, a supply ship and the subs [submarines]. We flew around this American ship and signalled the challenge. I don’t know how we would have got on. We didn’t get to close fortunately, because you could see all these guns following us around. At that stage we still had the red centre in

the aircraft roundels that were on the aeroplane – they hadn’t taken those out – and we looked as though we were Japanese, with the red centre. That was how they used to have their little red sun on the aeroplanes. The Americans could have quite easily mistaken us, but we didn’t get too close to them, fortunately.

You could see just the outline of the water. As long as they’re above the water, it’s just like a boat cause they’re just making the wake and you can follow them. But the ship was quite a big ship, the USS [United States’ Ship] Holland, and that was quite large. And we

just flew around these and the American signalled back, “USS Holland and submarines,” and my navigator reported signalled back, “Okay bud,” and we went back and reported that we got to Geraldton. That was about all there was to do in those days. Not that we could have done anything at all, because we did have a .303 [Vickers] machine gun mounted at the front and another one in the turret

at the back.

Oh yes, they were. .303 machine guns with about five hundred rounds of .303 [calibre] ammunition.

Not really, it was just a home from home really. It was virtually peacetime up there.

Occasionally we’d get a ship in, such as the Sydney came in the night before that was sunk, and the Sydney boys used to really enjoy the beer in the mess.

I was posted overseas, at least I was, yes I was posted overseas originally. That was scrubbed, we went back to

Geraldton and then went to Nhill and we went over by train to Nhill.

In Victoria. Just across the border between Bordertown and Melbourne. It’s in the Wimmera district, not far from the Grampian Mountains.

We were sent there from Geraldton to fly navigators around at night and so that’s why when I there I did an astro-navigation course. And not long after, Qantas requested any pilots that had done astro-nav

for a loan of us for this Indian Ocean crossing.

You had a sextant and you’d look at a star. You’d get three stars in a triangle and you’d plot it and mark your map where this star was and then you’d… It was quite an involved system of

sighting the height of the star. And you had an almanac that would tell you where it was and what it should be and you plot your mark on the map. And you do the three and you’d be in the middle of these three lines, where they joined. That was where you should have been at that time.

It was. Logarithms and tables,

and you used to have to know your stars as well. You could get a planet and a bright star and you’d have to go for the bright ones cause they were easy to see. And you had to learn the stars in the sky, like the Southern Cross, and Sirius was a nice bright star, and the various planets, and you had to have charts for all those.

To navigate it was quite a big job but anyway.

Yes, you had to learn the lot because, actually the northern hemisphere’s a lot easier to navigate because they’ve got what they call a Pole star. It’s a star right over the [North] Pole.

And you’ve only got to take your measurement with your sextant from that, and that gave you your latitude. So you had one line there that you were spot on, it was quite good. But we didn’t have a Pole star down our Pole, but we had the Southern Cross, which was a bright star and the sun, you could get the sun and the moon

and you could get them and get one of your lines from those. But the three stars was the best way, get the three lines and you were in the middle of that triangle.

A lot of the

stars are the same. You can see them if you’re north or south, and of course once you get across the equator, if you knew where this Pole star was, this was a big help because it gave you your latitude straight away.

Not nowadays. Everything’s just – touch a button, it tells you where you are. Yes it’s so much easier if you’ve got a little box

about so big and just press it and it tells you within about sixty feet of where you are.

Yes, yes,

That’s the theory. And to do it the hard way.

There’d be a few, but very few.

Qantas had done so much for the air force on Catalinas [flying boats] that the government ordered twenty Catalinas, and Qantas delivered the first eighteen. The Americans didn’t want pilots of a foreign nation to come over to get these

aeroplanes. The Americans had to fly them out if we wanted them and they didn’t have enough Americans to fly the Pacific Ocean, because there was very little navigation assistance out there, so Qantas were given the job of delivering these first eighteen. And from then on, once Singapore fell and there was no air route through

to England again, and the only way you get to England was via America, which is about 30 days in those days, even by flying. It would take you thirty days. So Qantas thought out this theory of crossing the Indian Ocean from Australia to Ceylon and bypassing all those islands up there after they fell to the

Japs and that’s what happened. They got these five Catalinas from England and the RAF [Royal Air Force] flew three of them out. And they took Qantas crews back and then Qantas kept the run going after that.

Yes, there’s so much more to flying out of the water than there is on a nice smooth bitumen runway. There’s a lot more to flying a boat than there was. Even the Sunderlands were quite difficult to get out of the water, but once you get them in the air, they’re the same. Virtually, you’re in the air and

you just navigate where you want to go.

They would be thrown out of the water if you got a swell that was coming in one direction and a wave coming in another. It was quite rough. There

was some amazing things down with Catalinas. Of course, this Indian Ocean crossing, they were able to put enough fuel in them to go for thirty four hours without refuelling, which in those days was colossal. The planes coming from the eastern states used to do about six hours, it was their maximum, and they’d have to go down and refuel. To get

over thirty hours without refuelling was quite an achievement, but that was the only way that we could get through to Ceylon. And then they flew off up to India and British Overseas Airways met the planes in India and took them on to UK [United Kingdom].

Yes, you had to learn a little bit

of sea, what to do with the waves and how to land on them. It was a nice. Perth is a wonderful place with all the nice smooth water we have here, but you could get waves up to eleven or twelve feet, which are quite frightening to land a twenty ton aeroplane and to hit the swell at

the strong altitude. You’ll bounce quite a way.

Yes, the sea bounces you out, you hit it at sixty miles an hour. There’s a lot of strength in the sea and the big flat boat would, well I’ve seen them bounce about ten feet and that’s quite a bounce. A runway, you wouldn’t want to be bouncing ten feet on a runway

either, but they’re all nice and smooth, all the way. But coming in to land and you hit one of these swells, it can be quite frightening.

It’s quite a big plane. It’s over a hundred foot wingspan and on the water you’re getting bounced around a little bit. But in our Perth water it was mostly

smooth. It was quite good but you’d occasionally get it when you were so overloaded. See they used to be six thousand pound overloaded, over what the manufacturers recommended. And that was quite a thing to take off with all that extra weight.

With fuel, full of petrol. They had their twelve hundred gallon tanks and then they six one hundred gallon tanks inside as well, and it was a lot of weight. That extra weight was mostly fuel. And then they’d fill them up with mail. A lot of mail went that way. They had a special letter. They used to photograph the letter then redevelop it in England.

They could carry about twenty thousand letters in a roll of about four inches round. Then they’d develop it in England and you’d get your air letter.

Yes, it was a different type of flying all together. You used to have to pull your stick right back

and then get your nose up over the waves, sort of thing, and then keep planing along until you got your air speed and then you’d pull it out. If you were on a strip, you’d just keep your stick back until you got airborne. With the Cat [Catalina] you had to get it up. Some of those photos of the Catalina on the water, you see them, they’re about five feet, they’re five feet of a

boat under the water. Well you’ve got to get that up and planing before you can get off the water.

Landing is the easier because you can stall them in. You just have to come along and get close to the water and just bring your nose up until you stall, and if you’ve timed it right, you just drop in, but if

you don’t time it right and you hit on the side of a swell, you bounce up and it’s very frightening. But if you time it right you just drop in quite well. But taking off you get rough conditions that bounce you out before you’re airborne and you hit down again and…

Yes, there was quite a few did that in various places. There’s one particular

story of a squadron leader took a seven hundredweight fire fighting pump out to an American Liberty ship that was sinking because their pumps couldn’t get the water out. They had a crack in the side of the hull and the water was coming in too fast, so they were requested to take this fire fighting pump out. And this chap,

Squadron Leader Coventry, landed and they were able to get the fire fighting pump and put it in their ship and help their bilge pumps to get the water out. But as he was taking off, he bounced and he was killed. But fortunately the rest of the crew got off and they got back with this ship that they’d saved. They got into

[Port] Moresby that way.

On the Indian Ocean, the very first trip, we had four pilots, no navigator, an engineer and a radio operator. But the radio operator, he wasn’t allowed to do anything. Once we got airborne

he would just say he was airborne and all he used to do was to listen. Listen for any instructions that came back from either end. But the normal crew on the Indian Ocean was three pilots, navigator, radio and engineer.

They needed

to relieve the navigator and the engineer, and the radio chap and pilots could do that, as well as doing their flying bit as well. You needed two pilots for taking off, but the third pilot he was sort of… He would be doing all the other jobs as well.

One to work the throttles and the other to work the controls. As soon as you give it full bore you’ve got to tighten up a nut to hold the throttle on full, and then as you get off, airborne, you throttle off a little bit, the other pilot has got to fly it and the other changes

the throttles of the propellers.

We didn’t know very much about it until we got to Perth. It was so secret they wouldn’t even tell us. They just said, “You’re going into operational areas. You’ve got to volunteer for it and you’ll be going into operational areas.” Well at that time

there’d been two years of war and we hadn’t seen an operational area, so we agreed to it and there we were.

All the group of us that joined Qantas at the time.

Yes and there was only one other Western Aussie and all the rest were eastern staters.

No, they were separate. They all came in different groups, at different times. I was on the very first trip and then they started to build up from there. There was one trip a fortnight to three a fortnight, and that was when they really build up then.

Flying over to Western Australia and you’re staying in the Esplanade Hotel and so that was that. And you got here and Qantas picked you up at the airport and had a couple of days’ training on the Catalinas and then you found out where you were going that day. You weren’t even allowed to tell your family,

so they said. It was just so secret.

Yeah, that’s all I had in Cats. I’d done some training in Sydney on the Sunderlands. They had a Sunderland in Sydney and I did some training there. I went up to Moresby and Townsville and places like that for about two months and

doing circuits in and out of Rose Bay and then over to WA.

Oh yes, that was really top priority the secrecy of it. And I think that was the success of it too, because the Japs, they only

found them on Cocos [Islands] once and that was the only time they were found on the Indian Ocean.

Just flying Catalinas and that was all there was to it. When we got to Perth we found out it was going to Ceylon. We had to get a passport because we were civilians

and you needed a passport. If you were in the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] you didn’t need a passport, but as civilians you did. So we got our passports and away we went.

No, we still had our air force uniforms, but with Qantas rank and Qantas wings.

Mmh.

To give our air force number and rank and nothing more.

Cause by the time you got there you were quite tired after,

I think it was just on thirty hours. And we landed on an RAF base and we stayed in the Gaul Face Hotel, at Gaul. Quite a nice hotel with servants everywhere and then we had about three days there.

Yes, it was. Yes, I’d never seen so many people in such a short space. Yes it was teeming with people. But it was amazing that at that base they didn’t even know where we’d been or where we’d come from, just a flying boat used to land and tie up to a buoy. The only chap on the station that knew anything about it

was the CO and the operations director. It was even so secret that after, a few years ago, I had a chap came out from Canada and he’d heard of me and the Indian Ocean, I don’t know where from, and he rang and said he’s on the [HMS] Queen Elizabeth and he’d like to have a chat. So I went down,

picked him up and took him round. And he was a Catalina chap and I showed him all the Catalina features around Crawley and the Air Force Museum. And he said he went down to Cocos with his, he was second pilot on a RAF plane, and he said the only one to go ashore was the skipper, and he never said

anything to them. They just landed and then flew back to Ceylon and he didn’t know that Qantas, they used to land in the same aerodrome. We used to drink in the same mess as them. He didn’t even know that we were flying to Australia.

It was. So secretive. And I think that was the success of it. The Japs were so busy,

they’d listen to every bit of radio that was around and they never picked them going across the Indian Ocean.

Well at the time aeroplanes weren’t doing much more than six to eight hours, and to keep one going for thirty hours was quite an achievement. And I suppose the main thing was that it was radio

silence. There was no radio used across the Indian Ocean at all, to keep the Japanese in the dark. They didn’t know it was going during the war, otherwise they’d have done something to stop it. But the main aim was to get VIPs across and keep the

air route open, which it did achieve.

Oh, I’ve forgotten them mostly now. Sir Charles Gardner, we bought him on one occasion, and Lady Summerskill was the only lady to do the trip, and she was the British Minister for Productivity or Manufacturing or something.

We bought her on one occasion. There was one chap, a VC [Victoria Cross] and Bar; he certainly had a string of decorations. He was a submarine boy, had a girlfriend in Perth. He used to sneak a trip across, every now and then. Yes, oh a few admirals and that

sort of thing – all top brass. There was, on one occasion we had a squadron leader and he was about the lowest rank to get across.

We had a single adjustable aircraft

seat and on one occasion I remember we had an American lieutenant on board and he had his bag of diplomatic mail strapped – the American’s used to strap their diplomatic mail to them, and if you wanted their diplomatic bag you had to chop their arm off. Anyway this poor fellow, we ran into a cyclone and we didn’t have time

to tell him that we were running into a cyclone. We were into it before we realised it. This was going up here out of Perth, we were about five or six hours out and the sea was all cream and we realised that there was something brewing. And it was starting to get a bit rough and we worked it out that it was a cyclone that we were in. The sea was that rough that

it was all white and cream, and the navigator had worked it out that we were doing two hundred and thirty knots, which was a colossal speed for a Catalina that was only doing a hundred and five. And so John Shields was the Skipper, an ex-RAF, an RAAF, but attached to the RAF, and he’d done

quite a few trips on Catalinas as well as Sunderlands. And he realised what we should do and we had to turn to port, very sharply, ninety degrees, to get out of the influence of this cyclone. And it was about five hours before we got right out of it. The cyclone itself was that strong the poor old Cat at a hundred and five knots, it only did about

fifteen miles an hour on its first hour because of the strong headwinds, and the second hour we managed to get it up to around about ninety and then on the, I suppose a good five hours before we got right out of the strong wind from that cyclone. I felt sorry for the American, all he could see – he had a little window about ten

by nine – and all he could see was the wind and the float flipping up and down all the time. We were going up with our nose down and down with our nose up and it was quite a rough hour by the time we got out of the real influence of the, must have almost been in the eye of this cyclone.

The skipper just showed confidence. And I was in the flying seat at the time and he was in the right seat. And our second officer, he was pushing the controls, or pulling them, whatever was needed. And he was there talking to us as if everything was just going normal. But it was the first cyclone that I’d been in and you’re a little

bit apprehensive all the time. But when they got it to Ceylon and they went over the aircraft, the only thing they found was one frayed wire on the elevators. Only one frayed. Everything else on the aeroplane was still in one piece. But I had heard of aeroplanes breaking up in cyclones. And the skipper’s theory was as long as you

stayed low, under about four thousand feet, you got a chance. But once you got over four thousand you got into the real turbulence of the clouds and it could be a problem.

We went over at about fifteen hundred feet and we came back at twelve to fourteen thousand.

No oxygen, because the cabin was stripped of everything, even the first couple of trips they never even had a hot plate to warm up your coffee and things like that. One thermos of coffee had to last you all the way to Ceylon, and it was quite cold by the time you had breakfast the next day.

No,

one big four gallon thermos. I’ve never seen such a big thermos as this one.

We used to fly over at the fifteen hundred because of the prevailing south-easterly wind, and then you’d fly back at about twelve to fourteen because you’d get a better wind current up there than you would…

It was a headwind coming back if you stayed down low.

Yes, we used to have the three passenger mostly on the way back. There were more people wanting to come to Australia than there were wanting to go over to UK at the time, and we mostly used to carry three back with us.

We all had spare flying suits for the passengers, but we never had gloves for them. There was no heating facilities in the old Cat [Catalina]. Everything was taken out, even all the insulation. There was no insulation around the outside. If you touched a bit of metal, you’d stick to it so you’d have to wear silk gloves while you

were flying it.

Well it was stripped of everything that wasn’t necessary. Had all the radio there as normal, but nothing else was there that wasn’t absolutely necessary.

You could see the ribs of the aeroplane going backwards and forwards and then the stringers going across. That’s about all you could see. We have got the illustrations of them. It was all metal. The stringers go from one end of the aircraft to the other and it was all very well

riveted together.

There were five separate compartments with a bulkhead door on each compartment, so if you got holed you could close that door and keep the water in that one compartment.

The pilots

would sit in the seats at the front. The off duty pilot, he would walk around. You couldn’t walk around for about three hours after you took off because of the crucial loading of the Cat. It was quite tail heavy, so with all the fuel we had on board, until we’d used up a couple of hundred gallons,

people used to have to stay in their various situations. The passengers were able to walk around after about three hours. They could walk out to the back end of the blister and have a look out. The blister was a big plastic cover, and you could look out there. That was your way of getting in and out of a Cat was through these blisters.

The crew would be doing their particular job. You’d put up a roster as soon as you got airborne. You’d do two hours navigation or two hours on the radio. The pilots used to do all the relieving. The navigator, the radio or the engineer, they used to do their particular job and one of the pilots would relieve them

for their two hours off. And in their two hours off all they would do was sit out the back in the blister and look at the sea or read a book. That was about all you could do out there with nothing to see other than the sea.

Yes, yes, Qantas never supplied reading material

for them, they had to supply their own. There was no extra weight put on board. The food was really basic, sort of a picnic basket. Until they put the hotplate back in it was just cold chicken and salads. Once they realised that they could stand about a five kilogram weight of an electric hotplate

and they went back in, it was quite an improvement. You could put on a tin of baked beans or spaghetti and warm it up. It was quite an improvement on going all that way, especially coming back in the cold. Used to get up to about minus sixteen outside temperature.

Oh very little. It was virtually the same.

Each one would go and get, when it was his mealtime he’d go up and pick a leg of chicken or something and chomp it away. There was no plates or anything on board. There was much

improvement when we got Liberators. We managed to put a steward on board the Libs [Liberators]. Of course we had fifteen passengers on the Liberator and one steward used to managed the lot. It was quite an improvement on not having to get your own and they even had warm dishes on the Lib.

Yes, at times we did, but sometimes it was nice to have a general to deliver you a cup of coffee, or somebody like that. But most times it was just the other crew. If you were up the front and after you’d been there about two hours he’d say, “You want a cup of coffee?” and away they’d go and get you a cup of coffee.

Oh yes, it was quite a novelty for lots of them. Some of them were really pleasant, others would just sleep all the way, but some were very nice people. Some of the English generals would come up and have a chat to you up the front while you were doing your stretch.

They were quite interesting people most of them.

Oh the sixty years back, Julian [interviewer], is a long time.

No, no, we were… Cause after twenty hours in the air you used to get a bit weary and you were doing your best to stay awake.

You could lay down, Julian, but with two twelve hundred horsepower engines roaring, if you did sleep, you’d wake up with a hell of a start to suddenly get this noise in your ears.

Oh yes, yes, they were noisy planes the old Cat, cause there’s no insulation there to

quieten the noise. It was quite noisy.

Mostly with a note or talk to each other. We used to keep the radio down to an absolute minimum. Wouldn’t wear headphones once you got off the water and

yes, it was just mainly by talking or writing a note. Sometimes you could hardly hear what was being said, with the noise of the motors.

Yes, yes.

None really. I’d never been on a long flight before and my wife was over east. She happened

to come with me. We went to Sydney and Brisbane before we came back to Perth and travel for wives was prohibited so we managed to… Con had a bit of influence on the railways and she managed to get over to Nhill in Victoria with me and then came to Sydney and up to Brisbane, and then back to Sydney. And she eventually got on

a train back to Perth, and that was how she travelled. But we were able to fly. Qantas flew us on ANA’s [Australian National Airlines] planes between Sydney and Perth.

Well the

main ones on the Indian Ocean run we did go into Cocos [Cocos Islands]. We were requested to put a couple of meteorologists on Cocos. The Americans had a lot of trouble. They’d taken them twice and couldn’t find Cocos and they got back to Exmouth Gulf and had to be towed in. They ran out of petrol

and did a dead-stick landing out to sea and had to be towed into Exmouth. So these meteorologists were given to Qantas, and Qantas thought, “Well, instead of trying to find a little island like Ceylon if we get lost out there, we’ll take them to Ceylon first up and then it will be a lot easier to find Australia if we get lost on the way home.” So we did it that way and we landed

within two minutes of our estimated time of arrival at Cocos and we were able to put them there. I’ve got photos of the actual trip and the people that we met at Cocos. And as a matter of fact, the chap that was put there, Julian Hay, lives up at Greenwood and he talks to us every now and again. And he

happened to be in Cocos at the time that the Japs came over on a reconnaissance flight and found a Catalina there. The Catalina was asked to go in to pick up a sick naval chap, which was on the island, and he had appendicitis and nobody, they only had ordinary kitchen knives and forks to take this blokes appendix out so they thought they’d better send him

off to Ceylon. Captain Tapp landed to pick him up and take him to Ceylon, and the Japs came over and they dropped a bomb from about three thousand feet and missed the Cat, fortunately. They were able to take off and got this chap to Ceylon and whip his appendix out there.

No, the Americans didn’t know what we were doing. We used to go round there in the early stages and get fuel from them and we weren’t able to tell them where we were going. And one of the chaps who was refuelling it one day said, “Hell, what are you guys doing with all this fuel?” and one of the boys said, “Oh we’re flogging it on the black market.” “Okay,” and he filled it up to the two thousand gallons.

Oh yeah, they were impressed to get there, they certainly were.

Beautiful. It was in between a couple of islands and it wasn’t really rough at all. It was quite good.

I think there were about thirty people there. A military platoon of about fifty people altogether. And we were able to stay in Mr Clunies-Ross’ house, which was quite nice. All we did was, we got there about seven o’clock in the morning and had breakfast and we

lay down for the rest of the, or until about three o’clock, and then we took off about three o’clock to come back to Australia. It was an absolute paradise, Cocos in those days. Beautiful crystal-clear water and lovely fish and all the rest of it, yes.

In

Ceylon it was just a nice quiet lake on the edge of the, I’ve forgotten the name of the place now, but it was a lake that the sea used to come in, it was a saltwater lake. And they had an airstrip there as well. It was quite a big area, but we needed every bit of it

for taking off with a full load. See we were five to six thousand pound overloaded, and early in the morning used to have to send a launch out in front to stir the water up cause the water was so calm and wouldn’t lift the Cat off. And it was nothing to have to go up another creek at the end of the lake to gain height, to get over the coconut palms at either end of it.

Yes, yes, especially you weren’t supposed to have these motors flat out for more than two minutes, and sometimes you’d be about two and a half to three minutes with them roaring their heads off to get high enough to get above the coconut palms.

The experts realised that the all-up weight of a Cat started off at about twenty-six thousand and they gradually built it up to thirty thousand, and then Qantas managed to get them off with thirty-six thousand all-up weight, which was quite a strain over in

Ceylon with the smooth water. That didn’t help you on take off at all.

I’m not sure of that but I think every twenty-five hours. Every time we landed they’d be serviced and checked, but the main servicing was two hundred to five hundred hours

and they were pulled down and rebuilt.

In Kalgoorlie. The RAAF had a engine depot in Kalgoorlie and they used to do them there. But a lot of these engines were built in Australia under licence, which used to

allow them to be serviced as well as built in Australia.

It was just a strip for light planes. They had Hurricanes and Spitfires, and sometimes the Fleet Air Army used to come down, I forget what they had.

But it was only just a fighter strip.

It was right on the coast this lake and with the usual coconut palms all around and a very pleasant spot with all the rain that they used to get in Ceylon. The undergrowth was terrific.

Well the first couple of trips we’d go to the hotel at Gaul and we’d just… It was a little town that you could go around shopping and had a lot of jewellers and tailors and all that sort of thing. And then Qantas managed to get their own two-storey house,

which was very palatial. Had about ten bedrooms and it was quite pleasant. They used to run their own mess there and cook a lot of food the Australian way. Other than that the Ceylon people used to have a lot of these curries and things like that. The food was quite good.

Qantas had, in this bay, it was a beautiful swimming area and quite a nice surfing area too. And the Aussies had a little board and they would do their surfing with this tiny little board, it was quite good.

About three days at a time. The first trip it was just over and back, and the next trip – I think we went to India on the second trip over. We’d stay about three days and then we’d go up to Karachi.

In the Indus River I think it was, in Karachi. You would just land in the water there. They had a breakwater right up at the top of it to keep the Red Sea out. I think it was the Red Sea up there and that was the spot there.

They were quite good there most times. Very few times you’d get it that rough that you couldn’t take off.

Shopping mostly, that was all you could do there. You didn’t like to get too far out of town in case they wanted you to go back on the aircraft, so we just mostly looked around the town.

You could get clothing made for you quite cheaply up there, compared with what you could get – well you couldn’t get anything done in Perth. The tailors were all busy making clothes for the Americans. By this time they were based in Perth and kept everybody occupied.

Oh, not a great lot. I never bothered about

new clothes over there because I had all our civilian clothes here in Perth.

Yes, I used to get a few things that you couldn’t get here. They had beautiful towels over there, twice the thickness of our towels. As a matter of fact I bought a couple of big white towels and

Con used them on our two boys when they were babies, and I think she gave them to their wives for their babies, so these towels lasted for a couple of generations.

They frowned on taking on any weight other than what was necessary, but we used to look around for jewellery was

was quite cheap in Ceylon. They had a lot of amethysts and rubies and things like that. Coloured gems like that. It’s the home of them and you could get all sorts of things. I think Con has lost most of her jewellery, it’s been pinched.

Yes, yes, they were about a quarter of the price that you could buy them for in Perth, cause during the war you couldn’t buy very much at all of anything. But over there things were pretty reasonable. You could get clothes made for you at about a quarter of the cost. Of course our Australian stuff was mostly superior. You couldn’t get any good materials over there.

The women’s materials, they’re colossuses. The women’s materials, brocades and things like that that we’d never seen in Australia before, you could see them there. And I stayed on a tea plantation several times when I was there.

Yes, in Ceylon. But Karachi was a dirty old town at

the time and just used to do a bit of shopping at the English stores and that’s about all we’d do up there.

It was a beautiful setup, really hard life. You’d get up at six o’clock in the morning and a room boy would come and bring you a cup of tea and some bananas or pineapple or pawpaw, whatever you fancied,

and you’d have that and you’d walk down and the chauffeur was at the door with the car, and he’d take the boss and I around to look the plantation over. They had about five thousand workers on this plantation, rubber tappers and tea pickers and all the rest of it. And we’d go round the plantation in the Rover car that he had and then we’d come home for breakfast

at about eight o’clock, beautiful meal. An elderly couple that was running this plantation, a Scotsman, James Middleton Stewart, a wonderful chap. We’d go down to the office for a couple of hours then come home for lunch, and then about three o’clock he wouldn’t go back to the office,

he’d go down to the club, have a whisky or two, then back to the house for tiffin and beautiful food. It was a hard life.

Oh just the local club, golf club, Nagumbo I think the name of the place was.

Oh I’ve forgotten it.

A chap that was on the same course as me, and he joined Qantas and he went up on the biscuit bombing in New Guinea, and he asked me to take a letter to his brother who was flying Vultee Vengeances [dive bombers] in Ceylon.

And I met his brother at Colombo and he told his mother about me being there, and his mother introduced me to this tea planter who used to come out to Australia pre-war, and they’d been on ship with him. And they asked me to take a letter to this chap, which I did, and I also took

one from Rusty’s brother to his fiancée it was then, and he later married her. So that was how we got to know them. I had no idea who they were or what up until then, but we became firm friends after that and after the war, when we got to Sydney

they came over and visited us in Sydney and when we went to Bridgetown they came over to Bridgetown and met us there.

Yes, the poor old fellow, of course he was a lot older than me, he passed on. And she came out a couple of times later and stayed with us, but she’s passed on too.

No, I would have liked to but no, we were too busy farming to be able to have leisure like that.

It was certainly most unusual, cause a lot of our poor friends were in New Guinea, scratching out an existence up there. The food was

poor. It was very nice to go into an American mess and get terrific food, and twice as much as you needed and with ice cream and things like that that weren’t available to the RAAF.

It was most unusual to see these poor devils. As a

matter of fact I, when Qantas had their own mess we had a room boy that was very sad and solemn. He had a little child that was sick and I bought him over a three pound tin of milk powder. He said his little kids were sick with this problem, so we took this three pound of milk powder to him and from then

on I couldn’t do anything wrong. I’d go for a shower and he’d stand outside the shower and hand me my towel and then my clothes; he’d hand everything to me. My buttons were all nicely polished and everything. There was quite a change in him after we helped with this, saved this little kid’s life; he was just so impressed.

Yes, some of their food was really good, or most unusual cause I’m fairly fortunate, I hope she’s not listening cause my wife’s a pretty good cook and she’s looked after me quite well for the sixty-two years we’ve been married and yes, she used to make quite a good curry,

but these curries were a lot hotter. And you used to have a big two litre iced water and you’d have a mouthful of curry and then a mouthful of iced water to cool it down.

Yes, when the war in Europe finished we got a lot of highly decorated chaps to come back, ex-Pathfinder chaps that wanted to keep flying and we had some

quite high ranking chaps, DSOs [Distinguished Service Orders] and DFCs and Bar and all the rest of it, and Qantas put quite a lot of those chaps on and it was quite interesting to hear their stories and the torrid times they’d had in Europe, and realised how pleasant the war we’d had out in the southern hemisphere.

They varied from trip to trip. Probably never the same crew together twice.

Yes, I was only first officer on the Indian Ocean. I didn’t become a skipper until we went to Sydney,

but you’d fly with all sorts of people. Some that had had terrific experience of long range with Qantas and some ex air force chaps. Gil Thurston, and another chap, a Western Australian family.

I’ll tell you this, old age, you can’t think of names too quickly. John Hampshire. John was quite an experienced pilot and had a good run and he would say, this was on the Sydney-Singapore run, “Do you want to do the landings and take-offs?” and I would say “Yeah,” and he’d say “Do the lot,” and you’d do the take-off and you’d just have to advise

him about ten minutes before we were due to land, and he’d come back and sit in the right hand seat while you did the landing. This was on Sunderlands. John was very good to fly with, as far as I was concerned. He let you do the lot, as I say do the take-off and landing. These heavy loads, there were not too many skippers that would let the

first officer do the take-offs because it was fairly precarious, but John Shields used to. He was an ex-English, he was an Australian but he went to England with 10 or 436, one of the flying boat squadrons over there, and he was quite happy to let his first officer do a heavily loaded take off, which was quite precarious as far

as some of the old skippers. They wouldn’t let you touch the controls on a heavy take-off.

An experienced chap and he was quite happy and confident that you could do it. I’d been with him for a few trips and he was

quite prepared to give you a go.

No, the camaraderie was good all the way through. I’ve never had a what you’d call a snag on doing the job and quite happy together. There

was one old, bar one. And he started to rule the roost and one of the boys christened him ‘the Fuhrer’, and he would give me an instruction to give to the second officer to tell the radio or the engineer what was needed. And I’d do that and I’d call up Phil and say, “Skipper wants to know the position from the navigator,”

so he’d come back to me and he’d say, “Achtung [danger], the Fuhrer says,” and he heard about it, this was the skipper, and he changed and from then on he was quite affable and he stayed in the field, quite a changed chap. He realised he’d been a bit apprehensive and grumpy and pulled his head in a little.

Oh his background was he’d been a very junior captain with Qantas and this Indian Ocean was sort of went to his head a bit. This captain on the Indian Ocean was big time, that’s probably what it was. And he became a

little bit bumptious sort of thing and throwing his weight around. There was another occasion with the same chap. They were coming back and this was with another fellow that I put you onto, Phil Hicks, I must give you his, he was on the Indian Ocean as a pilot, and there was an oil leak and of course on

a thirty hour flight you don’t know just how quick that oils going to disappear, and it was very worrying in case the engine seized up. And he was telling Phil all the emergency precautions to do, because you had to maintain every inch of height, because you had another fifteen hundred miles to go and if one engine packed up you’d have put the revs up on the other one

and that could pack up too. And the other alternative was to go three hundred miles north and become a POW with the Japanese, so the alternative wasn’t too good. So he was telling this to Phil and the engineer had put a tin of sausages on the hotplate and forgotten about it, and at the

psychological minute of him pointing this oil leak out to Phil, the tin of sausages exploded and Lenny jumped up and yells out, “Shoot,” and Hicksey says, “No, Sir, sausages.” Now that was a funny story from one trip. That was about the only funny thing that happened on the Indian Ocean. Everything was hard work to get there.

No, if you had a mechanical problem you used to find it the day before, if at all possible. You used to do a test flight before each trip and the test flight would usually find if anything was not running properly and they’d fix it before you took off. But I, touch wood, had a fairly good trip.

We had no problems mechanical and yes, the maintenance was terrific.

No, we didn’t personally and there was only the one crew that did that had gone into Cocos to pick up this chap with appendicitis. That was the only one

that we knew of.

Well you just went and did the job, that was all there was to it. We had flown up to Darwin and to Moresby and hadn’t encountered the Japs on either of those occasions, although

we just got out of Batchelor and the Japs came over there about twenty minutes later. We heard the next time we went up that we’d just missed them, so we were fairly fortunate.

Well we never thought about it. It was our job and we just did it. That was the attitude of most of them.

Oh yes the Cat was just so much slower. The Zeros [Japanese fighters] could do double the speed and were so more manoeuvrable, but the main thing that the Cats used to do if they were spotted by the

Japs was get down close to the water and hope that the Japs would come at them and wouldn’t pull out in time and go into the water. They got quite a few that way.

Oh not with us, but there were with the RAAF, oh yes. Oh yes, quite a number shot down and lost. Actually Qantas lost a

few, they didn’t loose any Catalinas but they lost a few flying boats to the Japs. One chap was shot down off Copan and he managed to swim ashore with a broken leg. About five hours in the water with a broken leg, in shark-infested waters, too. Anyway Captain Cosh, he was in

Darwin when the Japs bombed Darwin and they managed to put him on a plane and get him back to Sydney, and he later became chief pilot of TAA [Trans Australian Airlines].

Well we realised that they were fairly close,

and we didn’t see the devastation of Broome but it was a lot worse than the papers said. There was two hundred and thirty people died in Broome and the papers only said four, which didn’t give you the story at all.

In before VE [Victory in Europe] Day we got the Libs. Yes we were still flying the Cats on VE Day. We had the Libs and the Cats operating together for a while and then the Cats pulled out altogether. They got the second Liberator then and were able

to do two services a week then with the Liberators.

Well the Catalina could only take three passengers, where the Lib could take fifteen and the Liberator took about four hours less.

The availability of aircraft. There were no Liberators available until the end of ’44.

I went to the air force base at Tocumwal and did a conversion course over there. All the Qantas pilots did that. They

went over to Tocumwal and did their conversion there.

Only took a couple of days. It was just flying around, that was all you did, take-offs and landings.

Uh?

Oh yes, it was so much easier, so much more comfortable in a Liberator. Had a chair that went up and down, and backwards and forwards,

whereas in the old Cat there was just one old solid chair with no padding on the side or no armrests, or anything like that.

No, a nice smooth runway is much easier. A patch of water that you don’t know what’s under it.

No.

The Liberator went from here to Learmonth, or Potshot it was called in those days, and then it went across to Ceylon nonstop, and then towards the end of the service they went into Cocos. They’d put a, they’d lengthened the strip at Cocos and we were able to land at Cocos and then we went from Cocos, Learmonth to Sydney. From

Learmonth to Sydney was nonstop.

Well the Liberator, being a land plane, all you had to do was line it up on the runway. There were no flaps on a Catalina but you had

a flap on a Liberator. You used to have to put in about fifteen degrees of flap to give you that extra lift, because of the heavy load that you had. Because you had a lot of extra petrol on board the Lib and you had them fully loaded to do the distance and had four engines instead of two. They were the same motors by the way, the Pratt & Whitneys, and

just line it up and away you’d go.

The actual flight, once you got airborne was the same. The navigator used to navigate. He was much closer to you than he was in the Cat. There was no engineer on the Liberator, and yes,

instead of having an engineer, you had a steward and you’d just whistle the steward up, “A cup of coffee, George.” It was a hard life compared to the Cat.

On a Cat you needed an engineer, the configuration of the plane. You needed an engineer to start the motors. Whereas on a Liberator it was

all electric and the pilots would just press the buttons and start them themselves. And on a Cat the floats would be operated by an engineer. Get the floats up, over in Ceylon we used to get the floats up as soon as you had about forty knots on the clock. You had a full wing to

give you all that extra lift which you needed over there with a short runway.

Uh?

The float was about two foot in diameter. It used to give you extra lift. It was up in your wing and it helped you on your take-off run

to get that extra lift, especially if you had coconut palms just ahead, that you wanted to get up above.

He’d just press a button. They were electric floats. He’d just press a button and away they’d go.

No, they’d stay up during the flight. He would do it

on instructions from the skipper. On the Cat they were so noisy that they had little electric lights between the, for communication with little switches. You’d press the switch for which to start the motor and then another button to say start, and then once it was

going the pilot would control the propellers whether they had fine pitch or whatever the revs were. The Skipper would press a button ‘start engine’ “Which engine?” He’d tell him which engine to start and he’d start that and as soon as that one was going he’d tell him to start the other one, and once he had two engines going he’d do a procedure to warm them up. And then you’d check the magnetos,

you’d check the rev drop. If there was too big a rev drop you’d go back to get the magnetos changed or re-tuned or something. But that very rarely happened that you had to do that.

Well the standard one was ‘trim wicks, mix fuel, flaps and ‘sperry’’, was all standard in those days.

So you’d check your trim, you’d check that your mixture was rich and the engineer would have checked your fuel before you started off and there was no flaps on a Cat, so your sperry, a little instrument on the front, you’d stick it on zero when you were taking off, so you’d stay with it on zero and that’s about the standard thing.

The engineer used to watch all the cylinder head temperatures. He would do that by opening up the gills. It was a hand method on the old Cat to open up the gills to let the heat out so as the engines would run cooler.

When people started to come through Geraldton they would tell us the devastation that went on up there.

Like there were a lot of aircraft would come through Broome on their way out of Java. They were still coming through.

It was an amazing sight to see some of the Lockheeds that came out from No. 2 Squadron. Australia had a couple of Liberators, Lockheeds and they withdrew gradually to Java, as it was then, and some of the stories. I remember one plane came through. It had eighty

holes in it, eighty bullet holes and they only had one petrol tank that had fuel and they had about forty four gallon cans and they’d pour this four gallon can into a funnel that would go into the tank that was going, and that’s how they got to Australia.

I was in

Ceylon on Lake Kovala and I remember talking to Squadron Leader Burgess, he’d been a lawyer in Mooloola before the war and he was a navigation officer over there. As a matter of fact, he was one of

the very few to do a trip across the Indian Ocean and he said, “No more for me, I’m going to stick to the squadron, that’s much easier.” These twenty-eight, thirty hour trips from a chap that was a heavy smoker, and we took his matches off him and he used to still have that cigarette in

his mouth, without any matches to light it, on the trip across the Indian Ocean. Of course he wasn’t able to smoke on that, he didn’t enjoy that at all.

In his hut, he had a hut on the lake at Lake Kovala and I knew his wife

and I used to have a letter for him and I’d take this letter to him and have a beer overlooking the lake. It was a really hard life being a squadron leader. He had it really tough.

Uh?

We couldn’t take much over to him because we were overloaded, but they

could get it over there. And when they went out of grog, they’d go across to India and get all kinds of wines and spirits in India. And the locals had a brew called arak, and this arak would fold you up at the knees if you had too many glasses, if you had too much arak. You’d see everybody that was folded up at the knees laying against the wall. Their knees, they just couldn’t work their knees

from this arak. I don’t know what it was. I’d never had it myself.

No, Qantas used to frown on us doing too much, so we didn’t. The RAAF blokes get across to India every now and then and get a plane load, mostly wines

and gin and whisky from Bangalore, I think it was, the spot they used to go to.

Yes, there was not very much fraternisation. There was not too many Americans in Ceylon. They

were mostly British and there was never any problems over there. The only women were black and the Americans weren’t too interested in them.

Well we used to

have our own mess and we didn’t go anywhere. On the Liberators, when we used to stay in Colombo, we used to go to Mt Lavinia. It was a beautiful hotel right on the sea. But grog was so expensive over there that it never worried me at the time. I wasn’t a big drinker

and we used to prefer a lemon or orange squash for the few days that we were there.

Yes, yes, that was, everybody was quite happy that things were coming to a conclusion. They didn’t realise that things were going to take another five months

for the Japs to capitulate.

Well I just spent it with Eric on the station. He had a bottle of whisky and that’s about as far as we went. We polished of a half a bottle of whisky between us

and I had to fly the next day, so I couldn’t drink too much. See the higher you get, with grog, and once you get up in an aeroplane it expands and the alcoholic contents comes out very strongly.

Listening to the radio, we heard it on the radio. Eric had his own little hut and a mongoose in the roof and he turned his radio on and there it was. Of course all the station knew about it and it was on for young and old then.

Uh?

Look, it

was. We knew that the Germans were having a real struggle with things, from what we’d heard, but of course the Russians had come into it by this time and they were making inroads into Germany too.

He said to me,

“What are you going to do after the war?” and I said, “I wouldn’t mind going farming,” and he said, “I suppose I’ll go back to the old grind of being a lawyer.” And four years later I went to Bridgetown and there, walking in the street, was Eric Burgess. And he’d gone back to Woolooma, didn’t like Woolooma or being a lawyer, so he bought a farm at Bridgetown

and I met up with him again at Bridgetown.

It certainly was, because I thought he would have been back at Woolooma. But apparently Woolooma had gone backwards in those days. Instead of having a population of a couple of thousand, the gold business had slumped and there was only about a hundred people in Woolooma. Eric’s wife had come from a farm, and they’d spotted this farm down at Bridgetown

and there they were, farming.

No, no I had nothing to do with farming prior to the war and it wasn’t until my mother passed away over here in Perth in 1948

that we came back to Perth. And I took three weeks leave while we were here and went down to Bridgetown and was staying with one of Con’s aunts and uncles and he took me round and showed me all the things that went on with an apple orchard and stone fruit and sheep and I thought, “This is not a bad life.” And he showed me an

orchard down there only a mile from him and said he’d show me what to do if I took it. So I took it and left Con, she had a beautiful two-storey house in Sydney, she never saw that again. She stayed in Perth while I went back and sold the house up and paid for this farm in Bridgetown.

Well I was so busy working, Julian, that I didn’t take any notice. I just kept on, I had to learn so much in such a short time. I took this place over. It had stone fruit and apples and pears and I was so busy picking the fruit for six months, that there we were a seasoned orchardist by the time the fruit

season finished. And then Bill taught me how to prune and we did fairly well there. We were able to buy a block further out, that had an orchard on it and we purchased that and Ian when he came back on the farm after leaving school, he decided we wanted a bigger farm, so that’s

when we went over to Darkan.

Yes, he’s still got the farm, but as I say he’s making more money out of his tourism effort on the farm with this four hundred and fifty acre lake, that water skiers are getting squeezed out of Perth, so they come down there every weekend. He has water skiers down and

he’s put up toilets and ablution blocks and things like that and people seem to be quite a happy family down there.

We just kept on flying Liberators

until VJ [Victory over Japan] Day and then Qantas moved from Perth to Sydney, and that’s when Con came over to Sydney too. By this time our eldest son was born and the pilot that, I happened to be away at the time,

but the pilot who flew Con to Sydney came down and said, “If the little boy’s lips turn blue let me know and I’ll go down.” He was flying at about nine thousand feet and Con, of course, she got no sleep for the rest of that night, looking at John’s lips to see if they went blue. But he didn’t, so they got to Sydney all right.

Actually accommodation was very difficult in Sydney and the nearest, we shared a house up in Blackheath, seventy-five miles out and fortunately I didn’t have to go to Sydney every day. And after about three months up there we managed to share another one, with the

the same people, at Palm Beach, which was a lot, only about twenty miles out of Sydney. And then about six months later we managed to buy our own house in Gladesville, a lovely two-storey place. And poor Con had to get five hundred pounds out of the bank. You couldn’t buy a house in those days unless you had black market money,

so Con had to walk around Sydney with five hundred pounds in her pocket while I went to the lawyer to sign the thing and give the chap his five hundred pounds, as well as the cheque for the deposit on the house.

Well the houses were valued at a certain price, cause they

were starting to go up then, and they were so scarce that they could get their black market money on them, above their value and nobody would sell at the agreed value, so you had to give this black market money.

The Liberators kept going and I stayed as second dicky on Libs up to Singapore a few times, and then the Catalinas were requested to do a survey of the Pacific and I went back to the Catalinas and we did a survey to Lord Howe Island,

which was an absolute paradise, because you couldn’t get fish or fresh cream in Sydney and here at Lord Howe you could get the lot. It was so beautiful. And the first time over you had to get out of Lord Howe in an hour or the tide got too low and there were little spikes of coral coming up. So the first trip we had over there

we couldn’t get off in the hour, it was so lovely. So we stayed the night and went back home the next day with a fish and cream.

Yeah, it was, it was really difficult. But that was only four hundred miles, four fifty miles away from Sydney, Lord Howe.

Just to survey it to see what the landing area was like and

that it was feasible. So Qantas started a flying boat run to Lord Howe [Island] after that, and later on they put a strip there and land planes were able to go there, but that was the only way of getting across to Lord Howe, was by flying boat or by boat.

Uh?

About a hundred people. And they used to do a bit of fishing and, yes, there was only a couple of families there and they ran this boarding house which was an absolute paradise there with the scenery was so beautiful, the water was so crystal clear. Had a glass-bottom boat that you could just go out and see the fish swimming down underneath,

and you’d drop a line over with whatever bait they took and catch one, a real tough life.

Yes it was.

We originally got a hundred and eighty.

Yeah, and of those hundred and eighty, wait a minute…

I won’t go far.

Are you?

Where are we? It’s right in the back. There’s a list of…

There’s a list of the numbers of them. I surely haven’t lost it.

Well 11th Squadron was still going and they’ve got O’Ryans now. Oh here we are. Three hundred and eighty six they’ve got here, but I think there’s some numbers missing in between.

No.

Oh yes, here we are, there’s a hundred not allocated. So there’s two hundred and sixty that the RAAF must have had.

No, no they flew them out.

Yes, yes they definitely flew them cause Qantas flew them. And by this time the Yanks [Americans] had changed their minds and started the lease lend arrangement and we were able to go there in uniform and get them back. They, yes the,

they got a few through the RAF as well. The RAF were supposed to get them. They got some for the RAF that they weren’t ready to take across the Atlantic and so some came via Australia. These that Qantas used were through

England, through the RAF.

They came from England. They were flown out by British Overseas Airways and modified by them, extra tanks put in by British Overseas Airways. But the normal Australian Liberator, they came across the Pacific.

No, that was the lease lend arrangement. If they weren’t, if they were still on charge at the end of the war you had to destroy them or return them to America. It was cheaper to destroy them than to fly them back to America.

That was the lease lend agreement between President Roosevelt [of the United States] and Britain. So there’s a terrific amount of stuff destroyed. As a matter of fact on one of the islands up north, Biak, was a base for the Americans and at the end of the war I think there were about a hundred Liberators there. They just pushed them up to the

edge of the cliff, and over the cliff and into the sea. Some of them were only just flown out from America.

Oh it was, but there you are, that was war for you. They were all written off by their thing, and a lot of millionaires were made in America by supplying this stuff.

As long as they were still there and available. It wasn’t available for to take them over, the RAAF took over about fifteen that they paid for, but they had to pay a colossal price for them. I think the actual cost of making them was about twenty thousand pounds, in those days and they had to pay about eighty thousand,

for the ones that they took on, and destroy the rest.

What was that again?

I beg your pardon, we just commandeered them.

Oh a colossal amount at the end of the war.

A bit difficult to hide one of them. As a matter of fact some of the places up north that was just abandoned, whole squadron of aeroplanes were just

left in the bush, cause it’s a good wide bush up there. And fuel dumps – they’re still finding the odd fuel dump up around Truscott and those places, secret locations of stuff that ready for something that never happened.

They were the five that Qantas used. They were flown out by RAAF chaps and the British navy came and blew the bottoms out with TNT [explosive], because they were lease lend aircraft and they didn’t want to buy them. So they were just good aeroplanes that had just flown the Pacific, at least

the Indian Ocean, in good apple pie condition, because they flew them out there. Yes, that was a terrific waste at the end of the war with all the materials when they were just dropped into the sea.

The government, there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s all government to government.

There were quite a few aeroplanes bought by individuals. There was one chap in Sydney, Monkton, he bought four Sunderlands – only paid about two thousand pounds for the lot – and he flew them over to Lord Howe Island and he, are you still recording? Oh I’d better not tell you

this story because there was a Catalina destroyed at Rose Bay and they blamed Mr Monkton for doing it, but he had a good lawyer and he got off the charge. So they reckoned he blew that one up because it was upsetting his trips across to Lord Howe.

Oh

forty nine, fifty.

No, as a matter of fact one of our chaps was his engineer, on Catalinas, and he was telling me the story.

It was just so much of a kudos to fly a Cat. You had to be above average marks and that type of thing to get onto the Cat because there was a lot more to it than land planes. You had to more or less have a seaman’s certificate to learn how to handle them on water, because there’s

just so much difficulty compared with a nice land plane. You’ve got a handbrake that can make you turn a corner and all this sort of thing.

I think all flying boats you have that passion for them. Like the Sunderlands – they’re a group that stick together

and they’re quite happy knowing that they’re a flying boat and much more difficult to fly than a land plane.

Yes there was a lot of cooperation. There definitely was when I was president. The two clubs used to invite each other to various functions and that sort of

thing. It was quite good.

Well all aircrew had that happy disposition towards each other and there

was no animosity at all. Just because you were on Cats and you were on something, you were all doing a job and that was what it all was.

Much easier to fly on the water, or to handle on the water because you had four engines instead of two. The two on a Cat were fairly close together

and on a Sunderland you had four and you could turn much easier. They’re a lot more solid than the Cat but the Cat could land in rougher water.

Mainly because of the weight. The Sunderland weighed another, oh about thirty thousand pounds and that extra weight,

and the Cat, you could stall a Cat much easier than a Sunderland. They’d stall into the water a lot easier.

Very, very correct because if you were too high, you’d flop in with a big flop

and do a lot of damage, but if you had it just right it was only a small drop. Just imagine putting fifteen tons down on the water and fall from twenty feet, it’s a big fall. If it falls only from one foot, it just sort of squashes in nicely.

On a Cat it was particularly

important because there was no closeness of communication. The engineer was a long way back and there was so much noise you couldn’t hear instructions. So there had to be lights too. As you were taking off a light would come on, ‘raise floats’, or whatever they wanted. Because the noise

from a Cat on take-off was terrific. As I say the motors were so close, you were only about two foot six from them and twelve hundred horsepower was quite noisy.

We didn’t in those days. Earmuffs

or things in your ears were not heard of, but now that I’ve gone very deaf they said I should have had them. That was only sixty years ago.

Yes.

Well we

didn’t carry parachutes on our Cats, because it was weight and weight was the crucial factor. There was no parachutes on, I don’t know of any civil airline that does carry parachutes at all. It was only military planes that had parachutes and so we never had them at all, because of the weight factor.

And then later, after the war, it was just if an aeroplane wasn’t serviceable and not going to do the distance, you didn’t go. Safety was the feature and there was no thought of them stopping like they did in the olden days.

You

did with the Catalinas, yeah, but I think they were about the, oh yeah, I don’t think the Loadstars and things like that that were dropping. That’s a question you want to ask Phil Hicks when you talk to him, whether they had parachutes or not. They probably didn’t, knowing Mr Qantas.

My wife was flown across and flown back but no, actually they’ve been rather mean; they have been with the old-timers. I know the new staff with Qantas get

a free or cheap flights everywhere around the world, but one of our chaps who did about forty crossings of the Indian Ocean tried to get a cheap fare across to America and they knocked him back. Cause it was only twenty-five years since he flew with them, but there you are. But all the current staff,

they get freebies. They can fly anywhere for nothing on most international routes.

No, it’s right if the firm can afford it.

Well we were up at

Geraldton at the time and it was all in the papers and news forecasts, news reports and everything, Singapore falling.

No, I was really surprised because it was so heavily defended, but the big things that made

the Japanese so successful, their Fifth Column in the Islands was terrific. They had it all organised and where the Australians and Indians were on all of these islands, they had Fifth Column where they were and they’d just ride their bikes around the back and there they were in action and you had to fight a rear guard action instead of

in front of you. And, of course, half of the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] that were in Malaysia, they were unprepared. They didn’t even have their rifles. But they were on one ship and they didn’t arrive until virtually Singapore was just about ready to fall.

No, no, we didn’t but the RAAF did. There was quite a few of the lads flew up to Lagenae [?] and even as far as Japan and bought them back.

Not a great amount. We knew that they were starting to execute air crew in all sorts of places. The chap, Newton, was the first one that we heard was executed in the… He was a Boston pilot and the story was that the little Jap had to stand on a box so as he could swing his sword to chop his head off.

It wasn’t a very nice thought at all about your enemy. But I was very pleased at how the Australians were able to stand up to the Japs, wherever they were. On the Kokoda Trail they got eight Japs to every Australian casualty and Timor there were two and a half thousand

Japs in, no, wait a minute, fifteen thousand Japs in Timor, and there were I think there were about five hundred Australians, and those five hundred Aussies kept the Japs occupied for about three years and their casualties I think, were seventy. And they got

two and a half thousand Japs, so. And Milne Bay, the Australians were the first to turn the Japs. The Japs kept on advancing until they got to Milne Bay and that was the first time that the Japs had been knocked up.

Very pleased that the

Aussies, the navy, army and air force, were got together and sent the Japs back.

No, propaganda was very light from the Australian point of view. You’d hear a bit of Tokyo Rose every now and again. Their knowledge was fantastic, the Japanese –

the things that they knew of ship movements and things like that?

Oh I can’t remember any now.

Yes, yes there was that; that was on.

Uh?

No, I had a good old faithful wife that I knew she wouldn’t race off with any Yank.

Air crew. I don’t know their reason for it, but it’s apparently what they did. So you were very worried if you were a pilot and shot down because your fate was more or less assured. You can’t imagine

how beastly they were. I listened into a lot of war crime trials in Singapore, after the war this was, and some of the things that they did, you just wouldn’t want to record it. And of course, our own sisters off the Vyner Brooke, with Matron Bullwinkel – it was a typical story

to shoot women in the back while they’re in the water and things like that. Some of the atrocities are unthinkable that even humans would think of it.

I have no love for them, but they’re humans and they’re taking a lot of our produce,

and we need them and they need us.

Yes, yes, it was up at Geraldton. We had no friends there, nobody was invited, and

Squadron Leader Cooper gave us our wings. Actually I’ve got a photo of it somewhere amongst the photos, just me, all by myself, getting my wings.

It was, it was a real achievement for a lad that had to leave eighth standard and had to do his study at night school to get there,

and my younger brother did the same.

Terrific, the whole family. The first time I came down wearing all my… Had a party, of course.

Oh, at home.

Yeah.

Yes, I was with Qantas and we did the Pacific survey with Catalinas. And that was Lord Howe. That was an absolute paradise there. And then we went to Noumea and Vila and

Esperanto Santo – they’re all islands up there – and then Fiji. We started running Catalinas then once a week across to Fiji and…

Passengers – we used to take nine passengers there. And unfortunately for the Catalinas, Constellations came

into the game. And the Constellation took eighty-five passengers, whereas we only used to take nine. And, of course, the Catalinas didn’t last very long once the Constellations came.

No, that was a land plane, a Lockheed.

Yes,

well that was modern and carried so many, and it wasn’t much longer until the jet came in and of course that revolutionised air travel. The [Boeing] 707 that used to take about one hundred and twenty. And of course the flying boat became a thing of the past, only going to various islands where they couldn’t put

a landing strip.

The Catalinas were phased out in forty-eight. That was when the Constellation took them over.

Oh it’s so revolutionised now. You push a button now to find out how much petrol you’ve got and where you can go and all this sort of thing, and it’s give you your heading. You don’t have to bother to

navigate any more. You can see where you are visually or you can just press a button and find out where you are with this box that they have now.

They’d need practice for them.

Of course the Tiger Moth was a fairly stable machine. Unless you did something really wrong, you’d never hurt yourself in it. They were just so safe. And of course with the Tiger Moth you could get them down to about fifty miles an hour before they would stall out of the sky. But these things they stall at about a hundred and fifty,

three times as fast, and your judgment at three times as fast is nowhere near what it is at a slow speed.

Uh?

Oh yes it has, with all the navigational and radio aids that they have. You’d never get lost now, where you would in the old days.

Oh you’d want about two thousand gallons of fuel and, see, they’re only twin engined, so

you wouldn’t take a great load in the Catalina. There’s just no comparison with the Jumbo, cause the Jumbos take a colossal amount of fuel. I was talking to a chap that refuelled the Concorde when that came out, and he was telling me that they put on a hundred and twenty thousand litres of fuel, so that’s roughly,

what, about thirty thousand gallons. Just imagine thirty one thousand gallon tanks full of fuel?

Well yes, but that Concorde did the same trip across the Indian Ocean, from Perth to Ceylon, in two and a half hours, whereas we used to take twenty-

four to thirty. They took eighty passengers.

The advantage, yeah. I was talking to another chap that had flown across the Atlantic in the Concorde, and the captain called them up and said, “We’re just crossing the coast of Ireland. We’re landing at Heathrow in four

and a half minutes,” – from the coast of Ireland to landing at Heathrow. Apparently they know the Concorde, the moment it gets airborne at New York, exactly to the minute when it’s going to land at Heathrow. That minute they clear all aircraft out of the way and the Concorde comes straight in. Doesn’t do the circuit like everything else. It’s amazing.

Yes, I stayed with Qantas and became captain on their Hiths, that was the Sunderland’s [aircraft] going from Sydney to Singapore.

It was just promoted by Qantas. I’d been first officer on the Cats for so long and they considered I could fly and become a captain. So I did a course in Sydney and the Department of Civil Aviation approved of me being a captain, and

I did several trips of being in command with a supervisor and then they let me off by myself.

No, no it was just by being there and

having the experience. By this time I had about four thousand hours of flying experience. I had five hundred before I joined Qantas. Qantas used to fly you to the maximum number of hours they could in those days.

The DCA [Department of Civil Aviation] put a rule in that you weren’t allowed to do more than a hundred a month, and one trip across the Indian Ocean, we went from here to Ceylon, had a night off in Ceylon, and the next morning we went up to Karachi, had a night in Karachi, and back to Ceylon, and back to Australia, and there was

just on a hundred hours in that. And DCA made Qantas give us four weeks leave without flying, so it was quite nice to get four weeks off, for one week’s work.

No, Qantas made a roster and you just filled in the roster when they put you there.

Yes, yes, the Americans almost had that when they took these meteorologists across to Lord Howe, Cocos and couldn’t find it. They ran out of fuel just off Exmouth and had to be towed into Exmouth to get some fuel again.

Some were very, very good, some were quite experienced. As a matter of fact, the early chaps that came down from the Philippines and also from Pearl Harbor, they were quite experienced because they were pre-war chaps and had quite a few hours. But the Americans put quite a few chaps on flying with only a hundred and fifty hours

and they were losing quite a few of them with inexperience. As a matter of fact, they had a lot of Australians used to go with the Americans to teach them local conditions and things like that.

Well yes, you want to talk to Phil Hick’s about flying in the mountains of New Guinea because the clouds used to come in about eleven o’clock or midday and the cloud would come down the gullies and there was no way you were going to get through those gullies, with mountains of twelve thousand foot high. If you had an aeroplane that was scratching to get over six thousand feet,

you were in a lot of trouble. So in mountainous country it was quite a problem, but Australia was a wonderful country as far as flying. The east coast you get some pretty rough weather from Sydney to Brisbane. You’d fly from Sydney of a night-time and you’d see flash, bang, flash, bang

out to sea. The land air’s hitting the sea air and the electrical currents out there would argue with one another.

No, your maps would tell you the height of them. Before you left

you’d realise that at that point you’d have to go to that height or something like that, in case you got cloud. If you flew into cloud, well you couldn’t see anything, so you had to know the height of the mountains to be safe.

Yes.

My mother took sick and I’d bent one of their Sunderlands which belonged to British Overseas Airways, and they’d demoted me back to first officer. I was taking off in Surabaya and it was the day, I can remember it vividly, it was the day that Queen Juliana

abdicated in September 1948 and the harbour was deserted – they were all up town celebrating. And we were taking off and it was pretty rough sea and there must have been some debris still in the water and of course it hit the front, the starboard float, and

broke it off from the front mountings. And so I abandoned take-off and got all the passengers and the freight out and I sent one chap up on the opposite wing to counterbalance the water in the float, but he was too light and the wing dipped in the water, and it eventually rolled over on its back. By this time we got all the passengers

and the freight and the mail off and it was that night it landed on a sandbank, at least it was on a sandbank when it was tethered for the night, and a storm came up and blew it away. So I couldn’t prove the theory that it was the rough or the damage to the float that

caused the float bracket to break, cause these planes were, oh, just on fourteen years old by the time we got them, so corrosion could have set in or anything. But anyway they said, “We’ll put you back as a first officer for six months.” And my mother passed away in Perth at the time. She took a stroke and passed away by the time we got over here. And

so we decided to take three weeks’ holiday and that’s when we went down to Bridgetown and one of Con’s uncles said, “If you’d like to go farming, here’s a orchard you can buy,” So that’s how it happened that I went farming instead of staying with Qantas.

Yes, a complete change because I’d never been on an orchard and didn’t realise

the work that was in it. But this uncle of Con’s was a fantastic chap and the first year he came across every morning and said, “You should be doing this,” and showed me what to do and away we went from there.

I didn’t think that I would, cause it didn’t do terribly wrong in bending

the aeroplane cause I thought it was a weakness in the float. But that was how it turned out and they were a bit cross with me because they said that they’d spent a lot of money training me and wanted me to stay. But we’d bought this place by this time and sold our house in Sydney

that was able to pay for the farm, and Con wanted to come back to Perth and join her family. So that was how it happened.

Salt water especially, yes, fresh water’s not so bad but salt water. There was one chap

came out to Australia in a, the Proctor family, that’s right, yeah, in a Beaver, a twin engine plane that looked very much like a Cat, and he wouldn’t land in our river. He landed out at Jandakot and we went over the plane, and he said if he landed in any salt water he would spend an hour and a half

washing the salt water off it, and every joint he’d spend, had to have extra high pressure to wash the salt out of these joints in case the corrosion set up between the rivet spots.

Yes that’s a major problem.

Oh very well, Julian. Bridgetown was a lovely place, and having Con’s uncle in the town as well all the neighbours were very friendly there, and the war had been over just a couple of years, and the Returned Services League welcomed you with open arms, and the whole town was a

very patriotic town, Bridgetown, and everybody was working hard to re-establish themselves. It was a very happy town, Bridgetown. People were close together. Further out like in Darkan for instance, the farms over there averaged about fifteen hundred acres, where in Bridgetown only used

to be about thirty, and so you’ve got a lot more people on the same ground.

In Bridgetown? In those days it was about three thousand for the district.

Very strong, yes it was a very good RSL. I became president after a while. I’ve got a certificate there from them.

Very pleasant days. As a matter of fact we had a retired general down there, General Sir Henry Wilcox, and every Anzac Day Sir Henry used to come across to the dawn service, and he’d have a hip flask of whisky and everybody would have a nip that attended the dawn service.

Well it’s memory of all those great Australians that did their bit in those days and it’s… We celebrate all the other wars on the same day. And yes, we’ve got to be proud of our Australians because wherever they were they were remarkable soldiers to have done what they did

at Gallipoli and all other places since. I can always remember that General Montgomery, when he was held up in Cayenne I think it was in Europe, said, “Oh, for a battalion of Australians,” cause in the Middle East the Aussies were really good. You’ve only got to think of our

two good West Aussies, General Potts and Brigadier Heeman. They were in Syria and the French had had Tunisia for thirty years and had defended this particular place with about thirty thousand and they reckoned that they were impregnable

in this particular spot. I forget the name of the town, but the Aussies went in and overnight the French capitulated with the fierceness of the Australians fighting them. And it was the same all the way through, even the Germans, the great fighters they were, the Aussies had them fairly well frightened.

I think their love of one another, looking after one another. They became quite patriotic, even though they were fighting other people’s battles. As a group they were great wherever they went. Every battle was the same.

If there was an Australian group in it, they did well.

Oh I still love it of course, and I’m quite impressed by what our boys are doing wherever they go; they do well.

In the Middle East there, you’ve only got to look at their casualties there, compared with the Americans and the British and, touch wood, they’re so superior that you’re quite proud of them. Every Anzac Day that my grandson’s here, he’s in the SAS [Special Air Service], he marches alongside me.

No, I think it was just the fluxion of time with him. He was in the military and he just, they chose him to get in the SAS. He’s sort of that lad, a country lad and full of the joys of living like the same as most kids.

As a matter of fact when he was over in Iraq he was watching the internet one night and he saw Shack Motors advertising the latest Monaro. And they still had it when he got back a fortnight later, so he went and bought it. And he’s – the little devil’s wound it up over two hundred mile an hour, so.

Yes, I can remember when he was nine years old. He was driving the Bedford truck while Mum and Dad… Dad would pick up these bales of hay and put them on the back of the truck and his wife would stack them on the truck, and when they had it fully loaded they went out of the paddock and he

just kept driving up this big hill, and I could hear the truck going slower and slower and slower and I thought, “How the hell is this kid going to change gears?” And he’d been seeing Dad with these two speed diffs [differentials], and he could see Dad, did what Dad did, and he just pressed this button on the gear change, one click of the clutch and it was down this lower gear and he just crept up the hill.

No, this is at Duranillin.

Just out of Darkan, between Darkan and Kojonup.

In 1966 we shifted from Bridgetown to Darkan

and we’ve been at Darkan ever since – well Ian has. We retired about twenty years ago. We used to go down to the farm, a fortnight down and a fortnight home, but we’ve spent most of the time home this year.

Well one was cropping, and in Bridgetown we just had sheep and about ten acres of hay,

and then the orchard was the main income, but over at Duranillin you’d have about fifty to a hundred acres of hay, your grain. You’ve got silos for your grain and most of the grain used to go off to CBH [Co-operative Bulk Handling]

to the silos, and grain was the chief income.

My son wasn’t really interested in the orchard and he thought driving tractors was much better, so we went where there was tractor driving and he bought himself a bulldozer. And he’s been doing quite well with his bulldozer

for quite a while.

Yes, yes it’s how to go these days cause at the time Britain had stopped the [European] Common Market. From Australia’s point of view, Bridgetown had half a million to three quarters of a million bushels of apples and pears that used to go to UK,

and when England joined the Common Market they weren’t taking it, so there was all that fruit that we had to find new markets for. And a lot of the older orchards, like Bridgetown, they just went out of existence and they are just grazing properties now. A few of them have got stone fruit, which is quite profitable still, but there’s no apples or pears, or there’s

only a quarter of the quantity of apples and pears exported that there used to be in those days. And irrigation had come into its own too, and there’s not much water around Bridgetown for irrigation. The Blackwood River has gone salty. We used to irrigate out of the Blackwood River, but that got too salty, just after we left. It wasn’t till after we left that

that was salty, but now across at Duranillin a lot of that has gone salty too. But Ian with his bulldozer is reorganising the creeks and getting rid of the salt.

I think that rural Australia is lacking in decent education. There is very few really good, highly qualified teachers that will go to the country – they like to stay in the city. And that was a big snag with the country, that you’ve got to send your children away if you want to give them an education. Like our John, he went to Scotch [College] and

got himself a commonwealth scholarship and he’s working in the Agriculture Department. But Ian, he also went to Scotch, but he just wanted to come home. He didn’t like being up there as a boarder. He just wanted to come home, so when we let him come home he became a farmer full time.

The communities themselves are

still good, happy people and they’re getting slightly better education and their hospitals are improving all the time too. But there is no doubt that a country life is so much better than a city life. And in the old world we never had a key for the front door. You could just go in any time you liked, but

here you’ve got to lock the front door, back door and put screens on the windows.

Yes, some areas are doing really well and some are scratching. If you’ve got a favourable season you’re doing very well. And of course, with the downfall of wool, that made quite a difference to the country.

And now of course you can sell any amount of sheep that you’ve got and you can sell all the wool you’ve got for a good price and the country is looking a lot more profitable. But where there’s a drought it is a real problem, and some poor devils are unlucky and two or three years of drought. And some of them go under, which is a shame.

Oh yes, technology is improving all the time and they’re growing more grain per acre, per hectare and all this sort of this thing than they were. We’re a very fortunate country that we’ve got a very good agriculture department, doing research all the time to

help things. But I think we’ve been left out once or twice, especially when England joined the Common Market, by Britain letting us down, by not taking our products. They did, they took the New Zealand lamb and fruit, but they wouldn’t take Australian, which makes me wonder.

Yes, yes, well United States are very powerful and they’ve got really great lobbyists over there, but I don’t really think we get a very fair deal from the Americans. They want, they object to our [Australian] Wheat Board having a sole selling right. Well that was the best thing we could have done was to have a sole base for selling. They knew how much grain

there was to be sold and could sell it to the best advantage. But the Yanks reckoned that it’s not right that we should have that, but they’ve got the same opportunity to do it but I’m hoping that they’ll talk them round and stick to their guns and get a fair deal.

As long as we get

the rain, very good. But you’ve only got to have a bare patch that doesn’t get rain and you don’t get a crop, and you’ve spent a lot of money and not getting anything. But drought is the big problem. If we knew what the rain was going to be each year and planted accordingly, you could make a fortune and go for a holiday when you’re not going to get a crop and be good. But yeah, being a dry country you

can’t rely on our rainfall, which is not good.

Oh yes, yes we’re a big country. As long as they can keep the salt from encroaching any more

and they’re planting trees and doing all sorts of…draining the soil and getting rid of things, getting rid of as much salt as they can, no. I still say we’re a lucky country, the best country to be in the world at the moment.

What was that?

Yes, with travel the way it is. If you want to go down to Perth to go to a show or something, you get in the car and you’re there in a short time. But in the old days,

when you think of some of our early settlers that settled the country, coming up from Albany, with a wheelbarrow with all their equipment wheelbarrowed all the way up through (UNCLEAR) to Boyup Brook, to places like that, that’s how that was established. I don’t know about romantic, but by crikeys it was a wonderful achievement.

Yes, but not as often as we’d like, Julian. They’re lovely people there and we get some of them up here to see us quite a bit and it’s lovely keeping in touch with them. My son, Ian, he keeps in touch with them. He’s over at Duranillin and he goes across there for quite a few functions.

Yes, it’s changed terrifically. It was a lovely little town of about three thousand citizens and everybody had their own little orchard and they’d come to town Friday afternoon shopping and very patriotic group of people, but it’s

just not the same. You can walk down the streets in Bridgetown and you wouldn’t see a soul that you knew fifty years ago cause they’ve all either passed on or their children have got their farms, the same as we have.

They used to meet once a month and their meetings were very

friendly. Cause after the war you were finding out what each other did and where they were and all that sort of thing, and there was some interesting chaps there. And we had quite a few air crews that had been to Europe and things like that . And they were amazed that the Catalina was flying the Indian Ocean, all secret. They didn’t know anything about it.

When the war finished there was no story about it in the papers. Qantas just disappeared back to Sydney and started to run things from Sydney.

Well it didn’t worry us very much, although one old lady saw me in civvies one day, and I heard her on the bus saying to a next door neighbour, “That young fellow shouldn’t be walking around not in uniform.”

But it didn’t worry us at the time.

Well it was the only direct route to Europe that they could have kept going.

And by not letting the Japs know that they were operating on it, the Japs didn’t worry about trying to knock it out of existence, which they were doing on every other opportunity that they had.

Not personally, no, we just weren’t allowed to talk anywhere about

what we were doing We weren’t supposed to tell our own family, but we did of course.

Taking VIPs to Europe and vice versa, and diplomatic mail and secret documents. The skipper was occasionally

given a particular letter to go to the governor or somebody like that, and that was the main purpose of it, to keep the air route going so that people could get there quickly.

Oh, instructions of whether they support some move or do something or other.

Probably was, but we never knew. You weren’t allowed to delve into them.

By ship. And lots of ships were sunk and yeah, that’s about the only other way that they would have got through.

Either that or go via America, and that was a thirty day trip to the UK via America and England that way.

Well we used to take one day to get to Ceylon, and then another day to get to Karachi, and then British Overseas Airways would take it from there to Cairo,

and I’m not sure whether they used to go to Portugal or straight through to the UK [United Kingdom] from Alexandria and Cairo.

Oh it was at least thirty days by sea, the direct route, and of course there

were Japs and Germans across in the Indian Ocean at the time and also in the Atlantic.

I wouldn’t say that, it was just developed to expedite people in a hurry. Like the, see Australia built

a lot of British aircraft out here. We built the Beaufighters, we built Mosquitoes [fighters] and all those planes they would fly them out and people to talk top military stuff, like Lord Louis Mountbatten’s aide [aide-de-camp] and all that sort of person would be flown out.

I had the best of both worlds I’m sure, but the country life was really good, it was most enjoyable. Lovely people that you could rely on, if you had a fire on your place, all the neighbours would flock in and have it out in

no time. And the country people are, well I found them particularly helpful and a reliable people. But since we’ve been up in the city we’ve been robbed seven times here. Yes, but we never had anything like that in Bridgetown. Never even have a key for the front or

back door.

Had I gone different ways and got overseas to Europe and become a bomber pilot or something like that, I might have done a lot better, but might have done a lot worse too. A lot of my mates that did get over

there never got back, and so I’m quite happy to be here.

No, I didn’t at the time. Just sort of evolved that way. And the air force at Nhill they said, “There’s that Anson there, we want to four of you to fly down to Essendon,” and, “There’s a captain there that

wants to speak to you,” so we just went down and that’s how it came about. He took all four of us.

Uh?

Yeah.

Not really.

I try Lotto every week but I’ve done no good there.

Yes, yes, that was I was made president of the club because the previous president took quite ill, and I was vice president and had to fill the guernsey. And they’d

had a Catalina reunion lined up for Western Australia, and this chap had been to all the reunions since Catalina Club was formed and I’d never joined up the Catalina. I didn’t know anything about them until we came to Perth from the farm.

They have four meetings a year, a quarterly meeting

in at Anzac House, and get together with all the other clubs and information from all the rest of Australia, and talk about what we’re as far as… See the Catalinas been forgotten, even by the RAAF. They put out a film 75 Years of the RAAF and they didn’t put a Catalina in. Now the Catalina

it was the first aircraft shot down in the Pacific. It was two days before the Japanese declared war. They shot a 205 Squadron Catalina down off Malaya. This crew had spotted the Japs so they shot it down. It was two days before war was declared and that was how our friends the Japanese operated.

And but the club’s a great group of chaps. As a matter of fact, I turned eighty, and while I was away at one reunion and I told a chap, I said, “I got an OBE [Order of the British Empire] today,” and before I had a chance to tell him, he grabbed my hand and patted my back and, “So you should,” and all this sort of thing and I told him what it was – Over

Bloody Eighty – and he roared his head off. But the camaraderie’s still there from these chaps. There’s another Western Australian, Athol Woollan, he lost a leg at Cairns but he still flies. Oh he’s not flying today, he’s retired of course, but

he led that raid on the Philippines, where twenty-four Cats took off at night and flew up at a hundred and fifty feet, all the way to the Philippines and dropped their forty-eight mines in the Philippines and knocked off about forty percent of the Jap ships, and the Japs were frightened to move their ships that were in Manila

and that was one of the big things of how the Philippines became American again, all the mining jobs that the Catalinas did.

It did. And a chap who’d been President of the

Catalina Club of Australia, a namesake of mine, Arthur Pierce, I tease him that we Western Australians even named an aerodrome after him, Pierce Aerodrome and, “What’s more, they spell it the same way as you, and not for me.” Anyway there’s a fair amount of jiving goes on between the clubs, but they’ve all got

the same purpose of letting the Australian public know what Catalinas did, because as I say even the RAAF have forgotten.

Because there’s nobody flying boats any more in the RAAF’s top brass. They’re all fighter pilots or bombers or reconnaissance planes and they’ve just forgotten.

No, not of any size. There’s a lot of little float planes, little light fellows. As a matter of fact one of the chaps, one of the engineers, the only engineer that used to fly with Qantas alive today in Perth, his son operates three or four of them out of Kununurra –

Crocodile Airlines – that’s what they call him. He’s got seventeen aircraft this lad, well he’s not a lad, he’s about forty, but he does a lot of tourism up around Kakadu and places like that with these sea planes that he’s got. But they’re just so much dearer to look after.

Just the maintenance of them, and in water,

corrosion from metal is terrific, and the maintenance of them – you’ve got to pull them ashore to do any work on them.

Yeah.

Australia-wide, just

on a thousand. Not all air crew, a lot of them were ground staff and yes, their numbers are dwindling. We got two hundred and forty over here for our reunion that we had. Eight years ago now since we had a reunion and, oh, it was a terrific show.

As a matter of fact we had an RAAF group captain, retired, and he came out and he bought the R & I Bank for Scotland while he was here. Sir Thomas Thriske, he was the manager of the Bank of Scotland and he came out for the reunion and that was when he started negotiation for the R & I Bank, so

our Catalinas done us a lot of harm, giving away our banks, anyway he was a nice bloke.

Just what they did is the main thing and what some of the crews did. We had one chap, unfortunately he died last year, he flew all the way up to.

Yes, yes, Geoff Nolan, he was a farmer from Kojonup, he was an eastern states chap and he was telling me that they mined the China coast and Taiwan, they dropped these mines up there.

It was, it was a twenty-four hour trip, heavily loaded with these mines as well as the fuel loads of petrol and they went through two minor typhoons on the way and shook them around considerably. And they did the job and got back and were able to tell the tale.

You had to drop them from a hundred feet and they wouldn’t have been so specific up there but for Manila. When they dropped that they had to be within a hundred feet of where they were supposed to drop them, so as the Americans could pull those out that hadn’t gone off,

when they took the harbour over again, cause they didn’t want to come in with their ships and get them blown up on their mines, so they had to know exactly where they were. And their minesweeper would go in first and look at those particular spots to see if the mines had gone off.

And bravery too, as far as I’m concerned.

To drop them, oh my word – and at night, used to do it all at night with the Cats because they were just so slow. And a hundred and fifty feet at night, it’s not much fun. It’s all right if you can see what’s around you, but if you can’t see anything, on new country that you’ve never been in

before it’s, yeah it is a bit scary. I’ve never had to do it fortunately.

Mainly for night flying they were blackened, yeah.

Uh?

No, no they still had a lot of greys and camouflaged. And ours were camouflaged

for ocean flying with the pale blue underneath.

Well I’ll show you a picture.

Well just in waves and sort of, just so it didn’t stand out. Just so that it looked part of the… If you were flying over jungle you saw some green in

it, and if you were flying over the sea there was a bit of blue in it. It sort of mingled with everything that was around.

We weren’t, but the Americans and the Aussies, some of them had pretty girls and all this sort of thing, the Americans especially.

But yes, there’s one of ours, the ‘Dabster’, what did that have on it? This Dabster was one that went in on the Manila trip, that’s right, there was one missing off the Manila trip and that one went in. And if you go into Anzac House at all, on the left hand side as you go in through the first door, like you go into foyer and then the first door to the left, there’s a big picture of a Catalina, about

nine feet by five feet and there’s a story under that. There were three West Australians in that crew and the same chap that did that map of all the places where Catalinas were, he did that painting for us and donated to it us, so we’ve hung it in Anzac House, so that they don’t forget what

Catalinas looked like.

Yes, ours were named after stars, the Rigel Star, Anteris was another one, Rigel, Anteris, Altere was another star. Yes, they all had names and they all had British registration, GAG, the British

Civil Aviation registration.

Getting ours?

It is, one of our American, they knew we were looking for one because, actually the past president’s son and his wife

did a world tour, and while they were on this world tour they looked in Canada and all they could find up there were water bombers. And they looked around America and that was all they could find there, and went to South America and that was all they could find there, and eventually one of our American club members rang and said there

was one alongside a restaurant in Houston, Texas, and if you’d like, to ring this fellow and find out what he wants to do with it. So they rang him and they eventually negotiated.

It was sold to this chap and he thought he’d put it there as a gimmick

for his restaurant, and it was still catching eyes over there and people would go to this Catalina restaurant. Anyway he sold it to this Bob Schneider who restored President Bush’s Corsair that was lost in the Pacific and we negotiated with him

and he restored it for us.

A hundred and ten thousand.

All over America. He was a chap that knew where the bits were, and he’s got it, and he’s got it in pristine condition. There was twelve of our blokes went over for

the handing over and it was handed over to the Australian ambassador and the night after his hangar caught fire, and we had a hundred thousand dollars worth of damage done that night.

Yeah, and then

Well it’s only money after all, isn’t it?

Anyway he restored it the second time and it was supposed to come to Perth. See this Admiral Moura at the time was Commander of the American Navy, and he was Lieutenant Moura when he was in Western Australia, flying a Catalina to the Philippines, and he flew a few trips across to Timor

to pick up these commandos who were keeping the Japs occupied. And he was so impressed with Australians that anyway, Greg Norman, he’s a friend of Greg Norman’s, and Greg’s a patron of the club and he said, “These fellows have got a Catalina and they want it taken to Australia.” He said, “Right, we’ll put it on the big aircraft carrier, Constellation, and drop it

off in Fremantle for you.” And it wasn’t ready in time for the Constellation, so they put it on the Comstock, and the Comstock was only going as far as Darwin. So at Darwin they couldn’t handle it. It had to come straight off the Comstock and put straight on the Kimberley, with the Comstock’s crane, so that’s how it got to Fremantle.

Oh well they’ve been

out of production now for sixty years.

Well there probably would be, but you’ve got to know your way around America. I believe there’s a few in different museums around America. As a matter of fact they’ve got one cut in halves that you can just see half, can see inside the aeroplane from the outside to

see the half.

No, it’s all… The fuselage itself is in one piece. That’s the photograph that you see there. The wings are in another seatainer, the engines are in another seatainer, the guns are in another seatainer

and so forth. We’ve got, Misk gave us three forty five foot seatainers free of charge and we’ve had them now for two years and they’re still brand new seatainers, they’ve only done the one trip, but they’ve been from the Comstock to the Kimberley, from the Kimberley to ANAs, and when ANA went broke we had to shift

it over night to Midland and it’s now in the Midland Workshops waiting for Crawley to be built and we’ll put it there.

We hope, it took us about three years there. All the local Aborigines wanted to be paid to attend our meetings and we eventually got through to them that we’re a voluntary organisation

and we had no money and they weren’t going to get any pay, and they weren’t going to get paid for the site that it’s going to go on. And so they eventually came to the party as long as they can put some of their artefacts in the museum, and so we’ve agreed to that. And it took three years to get that from them. But it’s a beautiful piece of ground, as you go round past the

university onto Hackett Drive and you go down to Pelican Point, the Americans were in the Bay at Matilda Bay and Qantas was around in Nedlands. If you go down to Nedlands at all where the windsurfers go from, just to the right of that, there’s a big rock with a plaque, “Qantas used this site to

operate Catalinas during World War II,” and a plaque there with that history on it.

Because it was Matilda Bay, the Americans had about twenty-eight planes in Matilda Bay, during the war and Qantas had five in Nedlands. At the early stages we had to go around to Crawley to get refuelled and

things like that until they got their own refuelling set-up going.

Yes, it would be, yes, we’ve had it for two completely restored, for two years and then it took

another year to restore it. It would be three years.

Yes, yes, the seatainers have got covers on them and the machine itself is shrink-wrapped. It’s a special wrap that they’ve done in America with padding on the inside and all this white plastic of some description.

Yes, I’ve even got a

I’ve even got a photo somewhere of the museum.

…where of the

actual museum, it’s built in the shape of a aircraft wing. If you could imagine a big thick wing and the Catalina is going to go in there and it’s going to be an educational centre as well as the Catalina display.

Uh?

Just the Catalina and some artefacts

of the natives. And we hope to have a chap running it that knows a bit about what Catalinas did.

On semi-trailers. There’s a transport company that charges about five thousand to shift it.

Cause you’ve got four seatainers as well, they’ve got to be shifted. They’re all solid. But the Cat is on a cradle that is very securely built and it’s all angle, not angle iron, channel iron, and it’s really solid. It’s able to stand a ride on a ship.

We’ve got plenty of volunteers. As a matter of fact the RAAF, there’s a chap that will come all the way from Queensland to help us with it. He’s helped to restore one at the Catalina Club of Victoria, plus the War Museum, the one at Point Cook in Melbourne, and that’s

was a post-war model and it hasn’t got the true Catalina motors. It’s got Wright Cyclones, which is another two hundred horsepower more, but it used to fly around Western Australia. Used to belong to Geophysical Survey, and theirs has cost them four hundred thousand it was a couple of years ago.

I think it’s up to six hundred thousand now for the alterations to make it look like a true Catalina. They’ve had to put blisters on the side, they’ve had to put a turret on the front and they’ve had to put an engineer’s compartment, because the newer model fighter, not fighter, fire fighters are being made just to be run by two pilots. They just fly it from the front, pop down

and fill up their thousand gallon tanks with water in about eight seconds, fly away and drop it on a fire. But the water bomber section and all that had to be rebuilt in this one, and they’ve spend just on six hundred thousand. And it will never be a true

Catalina because it’s got the higher horsepower engines and will look like one, but is not a true one.

It will be but we’re not going to fly it. As I say, the millionaires from Sydney bought one in Spain, flew it to Paris, pranged it

in Paris and it’s taken them twelve months to repair it, and I believe it’s on it’s way out to Australia now. It’ll come into Darwin, go down as far as Broome, and then go across from Broome to Sydney. I was hoping that they were going to fly it over here and help us to raise some money, but so far that is all they’re going to do.

Yeah, yeah, there’s, as a matter of fact the lad, the son of the lad who taught Don Dobson to fly, he wants to have it and flying over here. Poor old Alec has passed on unfortunately. He was on the same course as me, Alec Fleming, and his son wants to have it here flying but

there’s no way, it would cost too much. See this one that the Sydney millionaire’s have got, Dick Smith’s in it, Dick Smith, John Singleton, I think it’s Harvey Norman. I’m not sure of the names of the rest of the blokes, but they’ve all put a lot of money into this one that they’ve got on its way out now.

Well actually you’d just fill it up with petrol and

batteries are about all that ours needs. It’s all in beautiful condition and the chap that restored it said, “This will fly. It’s in beautiful nick.”

About a thousand just to let it do a circle around Perth.

No, well after the war we could buy it in Bridgetown for two and threepence a gallon, that’s four litres for two and threepence, that’s just how much petrol was.

Twenty three cents would buy a four litres of petrol, so it was only five cents a litre.

Much more, much more profit in it.

Yes, they’re flying one in New Zealand. New Zealand has got one. They bought if from some people in Zimbabwe, when Zimbabwe started to get into trouble politically. This crowd were doing tourist trips down the

Nile to Zimbabwe, and then they went broke. And the New Zealanders had bought one in America and they were flying it out to Australia, and one of the motors started to play up and they tried to feather the motor and they couldn’t and it just kept turning. And there was no way that they could fly it without feathering that engine, so they had to go down into the sea and land on one engine. And they did that and lost it.

It pranged. And the insurance, they had it insured, and the money they got from the insurance paid for this one from Zimbabwe. And they flew it to New Zealand and it’s flying in New Zealand today. One of my nieces and her husband had a trip on it about six months ago. You all right? Was that Con calling?

Anyway it flies in New Zealand and they’re making money out of it by having weekend flights at a hundred dollars a pop.

Except they don’t fly it off the water. You’ve only got it off a strip. They won’t put it in the water because of the maintenance.

Wheels, it’s an amphibian. Ours weren’t amphibious because we needed the capacity for fuel and weight. Weight became a problem, so ours were stripped of everything that wasn’t usable on the trip.

Three, three.

It started at a Catalina luncheon at Matilda Bay Tea Rooms, and poor old Brian Buzzard said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a Catalina here?” And Keith Mattingley happened to be at the meeting and we all said it would.

And I said, “Well I’m too busy to be chairman, who are you going to get?” And Keith volunteered and has been chairman ever since. He’s got a terrific amount of contacts, and that’s how we’ve got it where we’ve got it. We talked Richard Court into buying it for us, so that’s how things are. We’ve got the plane, we’ve got it in Australia, free of charge, and all we want is the museum to put it in.

And we’ve got BGC [real estate/property developers] to give us half a million off the price of a building.

Money. We’ve got to get that first million in and tell the government that we’re dinkum, but we can’t impress them yet.

Well it’s going to belong to the museum, so they might as well foot the bill for the museum. It’s a pity Richard Court’s still not in power because one of our lads suggested that we put the Catalina on top of the Bell tower. But he’s not a bad bloke, Richard.

Well I’d like to see it done next week, because I’m just about tired of it, of going to meetings and trying to get people to be enthusiastic about it.

Oh it must happen. We’ve got the plane here, it surely must happen.

But I rang Barry McKinnon last week, he’s a go-getter Barry, he’s a darn good lad from Bridgetown. I told him all about it and he’s pushing it as much as he can for us and yes, we hope it will get off the ground fairly soon.

Yes, it was used in the Atlantic by the Americans. It hasn’t done a great amount of hours. I think it’s only done about two hundred and fifty hours of actual war time flying, so it’s still in pretty good condition. And the chap assures us that it will fly, this Bob Schneider from Houston

in Texas.

Ah no, it hasn’t, it’s just a plain old BPY5A.

Yes, we should call it the Black Swan or Waltzing Matilda, well it’s Matilda Bay.

Yes, all those Qantas ones were named after stars.

Quite happy about it because the Japanese at that stage were coming absolutely objectionable, executing soldiers

who had no guns on them or anything like that. It was just absolutely inhumane. And starving them like they did on the Burma Road. No, I’m afraid I could never love the Japanese again, until they at least apologise for what they did.

No.

I think a few have but no, that’s something the Jap can’t do apparently.

Definitely for being so inhuman, some of the things they did. There was a chap in Bridgetown, Murray Knight, terrific sense of humour. This bloke, railway vet, wrote a book about behind bamboo,

and he mentions Murray in this book. And Murray, don’t matter what they do, he can’t wear a set of teeth. They bent his jaw so badly that they can’t put teeth on him. But he still hasn’t lost his sense of humour. Terrific chap. Never married, he’s got, used to do a terrific lot for charity

locally in Bridgetown and for that sort of thing – you can’t forgive people for being such beastly people and for starving all those chaps on the railway and places like that. There’s no excuse for it at all. And denying them medicine that they needed to keep

alive, just to let a chap starve to death. Murray’s reported to have, in this book of railway vets, he’s carried a dixie of rice four miles back along the track for a chap that just had cholera or one of those things, that couldn’t walk. He carried this fellow a dixie of rice.

Oh a little

they used to call them dixies. They were a little food container, a little metal food containers, used to have whatever food you’ve got in this little dixie, about five inches by four inches by about two inches and you fill it up with whatever there was, stew or... Anyway he took this rice to this chap in the bush and whether he survived I don’t know. That’s the sort of bloke he was.

And all the crowd used to sit around Murray when playing bridge because he used to have such funny sayings, and it was just tear-jerking what this fellow had done for his mates who were in trouble.

It’s an Australian way of life

fortunately, and it’s pulled a lot of Aussies through in a lot of difficult places.

Well it means caring for each other, which is very important.

It’s got less, unfortunately, but I’m still very proud of my Aussies.

With difficulty. There was a door at the back about that wide and about that tall and we had a lady, Lady Summerskill was on board and we had to show her where the toilet was. I don’t know how she got on. She wasn’t on the

trip with me. But she had to. And the thirty hour trip she would no doubt want to go to the toilet. And there was this door that would be like that and about wide to go and there was no light out there so it would be very difficult, day or night, to go to this toilet, even in daytime.

No it was just one of those chemical

ones that they used to dig out when you got to your destination.

It was just a little toilet, just a tiny little toilet, a chemical one, one of those dissolving chemicals, and right out the back in this cold and windy tunnel. It wasn’t convivial.

No, only one pilot at a time and we had three of them. One bloke could rest and one bloke could relieve the engineer for an hour or relieve the navigator for an hour or the radio man for an hour.

There shouldn’t be wars. People should be satisfied and negotiate without bloodshed. But there’s so many nasties about these days. Even this Bali business. And I think Pauline Hanson is right in

keeping Australia for Australians. I think she’s got the right idea and I think what the government has done to her is disgraceful.

Sorry?

Yeah, that was absolutely disgraceful. You can’t understand the

mentality of people wanting to do that sort of thing. And that’s what they’re up against. How to get it out of the sadistic people that there are, and there’s far too many of them.

No, I think they’re building all these new weapons of destruction that they’ll sophisticate them even more.

And anybody with a lot of money can get hold of them, which is dreadful, cause some of these power-hungry punks from around the world with their sadistic ideas… I think Australia’s been a lucky country. If we can keep them out, all for the good.

The bible says that

Armageddon could happen, and it might do the way things are going, blow each other off the face of the earth and what’s going to happen after that, nobody knows.

To try and live with one another peacefully and

love Australia like we all should, because we are a lucky country. Yes, I’ve met some wonderful people in Australia and I’ve met some bs [bastards] as well.

It’s a pleasure. And I’m hoping that somebody will keep thinking about Catalinas and what they did, and just because the air force has forgotten them, that we haven’t.

Yes, it would be very nice if we did, before I get too old.