Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Brunswick, the fourth child to my parents, William and Hilda

Thomas. I was the only one of the family born in hospital. The others were all home births. I was born in Albion Street, I think on the corner of Cooraminta Street. I have an older sister and two brothers. I lived in Percy Street

until I was about nine and a half, and then we moved down to Lygon Street, and stopped there until I came up here to live.

Well he was working at the foundry. It was for Lux Stoves. They’re in Hope Street and he was an iron worker.

When we moved to Lygon Street it was in the Depression. He had just bought this house – not paid cash for it. He went on to two days a week. The only reason that my mother was able to manage was because my sister (who was 12 years older than myself,

and my brother was 10 years older than me), they were working, and that gave them the money to keep the house.

Office work. My sister was a secretary to Herbert Dalcott who was the German Consul here at that time,

and my brother worked for Wardlock. At that stage they were book suppliers. As I say Dad had only been in the house for a couple of months and then he went on to two days a week which was very hard times. We all went to Central Brunswick

School and that only went to the sixth grade. Then you either had to leave and go to high school or secondary college to do domestic arts and the boys went to technical school. As I say it was in the Depression and I left school at 13.

Actually I wasn’t 13, I was 12 and a half. I had obtained my Merit Certificate and was allowed to leave then. It was necessary for Mum to keep my other brother at school, and she couldn’t afford to keep two of us at school, so I had to leave. I went to night school and learned typing and shorthand up in Dawson Street

at the technical school. Then I swam at the …the Brunswick Baths were there. I had a lot of fun there. I went shopping with my mother when I was 14. I was doing this night school work. And we went into a shop

called Newholders in Bourke Street. The floor walker there was a friend of my mother’s from Storm. My mother and father both came from Ballarat, and he asked why I wasn’t working. Mum said I was doing typing and shorthand with the hope of getting into an office. He said to Mum (this was in November), he said to Mum

“He would give me a job in the sales there for over Christmas and in the New Year he would get me into the office there.” So I started on eleven shillings a week and I thought I was made because my girlfriend was an apprentice dressmaker, and she only got seven and six. It cost threepence to go into town

on the tram from Brunswick. I don’t know what it is today! So I stopped there at Newholders for two years. I went into the office after Christmas, and I handled the dockets for the sales and at that time…because we were just coming out of the Depression,

there were firms called Cash Order firms, and you would go to a Cash Order firm if you needed the money and they would give you vouchers for five shillings…to the value of a pound. So you would get four five shilling vouchers. You could go and redeem that at any of the stores.

That was part of my job. On the Monday I would collect all the Cash Order dockets and take them to the Cash Order firms and get the money back. If you borrowed from the Cash Order company, you repaid a guinea for every pound you got, and the firm who took your vouchers only got nineteen shillings for the pound. So the Cash Order company made

two shillings on every pound.

There were two firms that we dealt with I can remember. I was there two years….we worked from nine o’clock to six o’clock weekdays. Friday nights you worked until nine.

And Saturday morning’s you worked from nine to one. Then I saw another position advertised at Rockmans. It was better hours and a step up. So I went there in November 1936 and I stopped there until I joined up in 1942.

Dockets, sales dockets. They had five shops around Melbourne and then they had a lot of country stores in New South Wales and Queensland. Mr Rockman Senior, at morning tea would always want the figures that the local shops had taken

the previous day. So I had to have those on his desk at morning tea time. That was on listing machines which was more or less the same as what I had at the other firm. We were using a Burroughs accounting machine and then Burroughs wanted to sell Rockmans a ledger

machine, so they gave me the opportunity of learning the ledger machine for keeping the accounts, and that’s what I was doing. I was getting five pound ten a week which was big money then because most senior men’s wage was about four pound five. That’s what I was earning when

I joined up. To go from five pound ten a week to twenty one shillings was a bit of a change. But there were a lot of the boys from Rockmans who joined the AIF [Australian Imperial Force]. I used to run a Comfort Fund for them. We knitted socks and balaclavas and mittens, and

scarves and sent them over to the Middle East, along with cigarettes which they wanted. So that was 1939, 40. And then in 1941 they called for the women to enrol for service to release the men that were in

office job, desk jobs. I went to the recruiting depot which was the Melbourne Town Hall and put my name down for the Army, the Navy and the Air Force. But the Air Force was the first call up so I went into the Air Force.

No, not really.

My eldest brother was in the AIF, and I had two cousins in the Air Force, and another cousin in the AIF. My youngest brother was in a reserved occupation. They wouldn’t take them…he was a tool maker. But he had been

in the citizens army down at the North Carlton Drill Hall, I don’t know if that’s still there.

Just over the railway line somewhere there. They were in the artillery and several times a year they had to go down to the Remount yards down at South Melbourne - behind

the Victoria Barracks I think they were. Somewhere there, and they would attend to the horses and all that sort of thing. He was very upset that he couldn’t join the AIF but later on they took him in and he served up in New Guinea. But my eldest brother was sent to some very remote places in Australia.

Very remote. I always thought it was unfair that the personnel who didn’t get out of Australia were penalised. They didn’t have any option of where they were sent. They were sent there to do a job and they did it.

After I enlisted it would have been about 12 to 18 months before…my youngest brother…is that what you meant?

About 12 months.

Yes. They took one intake of WAAAFs [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force] in about November 1941

and the next lot were in March 1942, and that’s when I enlisted. It was about the end of 1942, that the Army got in touch with me and wanted me to go into the Army, and I said “No, I was in the Air Force.” They said they could second me because the Air Force was the

junior service, and what’s more the Navy was the senior service. But I elected to stay where I was and that’s where I stayed.

I enrolled at …I think it was a car show rooms that they had made into a recruiting depot

up at Russell Street next door to the Independent Church. We went there for a medical and an aptitude test. We were hanging around…rumours were rife about where we were going to go. Anyway, a transport truck

came along and we were all bundled into the back of the transport truck and taken down to West Melbourne where William Angliss is at the bottom of La Trobe Street, opposite the Flagstaff Gardens and that’s where I did my rookies. We were there for a month. We were taught how to march and learnt a bit of Air Force doggerel. Monday night was panic night.

I always remember that. We had to wash everything down, the shades on the light and so forth. A couple of the girls had been in Air Training Corp and one of the girls who was with us, Val, said she would wash the floor. Her idea of washing the floor was to get a bucket of water and just sluish it down.

Of course we were upstairs on a wooden floor and all the water seeped through the ceiling below and it happened to be the officers’ rooms, so we got extra duties for that. We never had beds, proper beds to sleep on. We had sort of a wooden cradle which had a wider flat bottom

and sides. We were only about six inches off the ground. So that was our bed and they gave us a hessian bag to fill with straw and issued us with three blankets, grey blankets with a blue stripe that had to be particularly folded up every morning for inspection. So it was a bit of an eye opener to me, although I

was coming 22, the ablutions and the latrines were so open that it just didn’t appeal to me at all. The yard that we marched on was very fine screenings and it was pretty hard because I had always worn spike heels and to come back to flat heels, I got cramp.

I didn’t know what cramp was until I got into flat heels. We used to march…when we got into a bit of formation, we would march down Spencer Street to Bourke Street and up Bourke Street and along King Street, then back down La Trobe Street and that was the march that we had to do. We had air raid drills.

The Flagstaff Gardens had trenches dug through it. Some of the girls were allotted to be stretcher bearers. Some of them had to carry lanterns and things like that. At five o’clock at night, I can remember one air raid siren went and it was only relative to the personnel at the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] base.

We had to tear over to the Flagstaff Gardens with all this paraphernalia. The people going home from work would be watching all these women in boiler suits, and of course as I said, we had…not WAAAF uniforms but men’s boiler suits. But later on the WAAAFs got very nice boiler suits with pockets and belts

and everything. But at this time we were just in these men’s boiler suits and we would be running over to these trenches and the people coming home from work must have thought we were a lot of ………We were in barracks for …I think we must have got off Saturday midday and had to be back by Sunday night. So living at Brunswick it was quite easy for me

to come and go. There were DMT’s [Driver Motor Transport] and fabric workers. It was a very mixed intake of girls doing the course and when we finished that course Val Shooter and myself were sent to Southern Area Headquarters which was down in the

Victoria Barracks. I was stationed at Victoria Barracks then. We were there for about three or four months when they decided to make headquarters in Sydney because the headquarters of the RAAF were in Melbourne at that stage. They made the Eastern Headquarters in Sydney.

Some of the more experienced personnel from the Southern area went over there to start the station there and a few months after that the Southern area moved down into the Deaf and Dumb buildings on the corner of High Street and St Kilda Road. We had our own store.

And it was made up mainly of officers. The rank and file personnel were very small there. There was a building where WAAAF Signals lived. They were the only ones who lived in. The men had Nissan huts at the back of the building.

So I had to go from Brunswick into town. That was a penny on the tram, and then another penny down St Kilda Road. So it cost me four pence a day for fares, and I went home every night and lived at home. So I felt I was a bit cheated in those days because it was a different atmosphere when you lived on

the station. There were only about 30 WAAAF and airmen there in the lower ranks. Mostly they were all made up of senior officers.

I went into the Equipment Store. Val went into Equipment office. I went into the store

and there was …they made a store because they hadn’t had a store up at Victoria Barracks. So we had uniforms…not uniforms, but shirts and stockings, shoes and equipment like that for the staff to US [unserviceable].

The WAAAF officers were very hard on the stockings. They made you darn them and it nearly finished up darn on darn before they would US them. The shoes were sent out to Ascot Vale to be repaired. That was where the shoe repairers were. Linen was sent out…because there was a special officers’

mess, and sergeants’ mess and airmen’s mess. The officers had good linen and everything on their tables and it was all sent out. So all that came through the store. I was very naïve. Very naïve. The sergeant in charge of the store said to me one day

“To ring Ascot Vale because some shoes hadn’t come back.” I said, “Alright, I’ll ring up.” And he said, “Ask for Randy.” So I got on the phone and asked for Randy and the person on the phone said, “Which one do you want?” I was just so stupid about it. We had a tailoress in the store for some time because a lot of the officers

were changing rank and they’d want the extra braid on their sleeves. I made my trousseau on her electric heavy sewing machine because I got engaged during my time down there. So I made my trousseau there.

We stayed there for…it was late, or about August I think 1942 that we went down there, and it would have been early 1944 that we moved from the Deaf and Dumb buildings up to

Callo Fawkner’s House…another car place next door to Melbourne Grammar. So the store was disbanded then. We used to cater for the chaps that went through to Radar Stations. They would have to have different equipment when they went to the stations.

In the store we didn’t have that much contact with officers - only the Equipment Officer, and the Fuel Officer and the Accountant. We would march up High Street along Punt Road and up to the Blind Institute corner and down that street and along St Kilda Road.

This was when we had to go on a route march.

I don’t know what the name of the Blind street was [St Kilda Road], but it was a couple of streets up. Wesley College was next door to the Deaf and Dumb, and they allowed us to use their swimming pool at lunch time which was great. I was very fond of swimming. We

used to play tennis and softball in the grounds at lunchtime.

There would have been about thirty girls and there would have been about thirty chaps I suppose. But there were more with the signal girls because they were separate from us altogether, and they had to live in the barracks there because they were on shift work. But we were regular nine to six.

It might have even been earlier than that, I can’t remember now. But they always said that I was late running up the drive. We had a long drive to run up although the tram dropped us right outside the building.

I met him there. We got engaged and he went to Darwin.

We were only married for about three or four weeks. He was sent away. So I got out. You were only enrolled then, you weren’t enlisted when I joined up. I went down to Laverton. I had been in about…over two years, and they sent us down to Laverton to do an equipment

course. That was the only…I spent a month in Laverton on the equipment course. That was the only time I really spent on a station. That was just after I got engaged. So we were married and of course, we had coupons. Living out at home

I was given meat, sugar and butter and tea coupons because you had to have those. We didn’t get any clothing coupons. My grandmothers gave me their clothing coupons so I could have a wedding dress and be married as a bride.

I got married in the Church of England in Glenlyon Road near the Brunswick Town Hall. I can always remember the Minister saying to us, “There’s no fifty-fifty in marriage. No two people have the same value of fifty percent. So if you were one hundred percent for each other

you couldn’t go wrong.” He said “No one knew…you might say that I’ve dusted the house and done that. I’ve done my share, that’s fifty percent, but the other person might not consider that.” I think we lived with that. I had a very happy marriage. My mother suffered a very bad heart attack in 1944,

late 1944, so I asked to be released on compassionate grounds, and just as it was going through, my husband came back from Darwin. He had been in air raids and what not up there. I got out in 1944, so I was out before the end of the war.

I still lived at home with my parents because things were very hard to get. I know we went house hunting at one stage and there were some funny little houses that we looked at because we never had much money. One house was very dark in the bathroom, and I said to my husband, “Gee it’s dark!”

And the woman turned around and said, “If you wash yourself all over you’d be clean” – so it didn’t matter how dark the bathroom was. However we never bought in Brunswick. Prior to the war my husband was an estate agent out at Footscray and his father and uncle established the Estate Agency in 1891 and it was the second oldest

estate agency in Footscray. Before the war Sam had gone into partnership with his father. He had bought his uncle out. So his father kept the business going while he was in the Air Force, but unfortunately he got cancer and they wouldn’t let Sam out…although the war was over. That had finished in August.

So he wasn’t discharged until March or April 1946. So the business had to be sold and that’s how we came to live at Pakenham because they had a farm at Pakenham. My husband had land but no house on it next door to the family farm. So we came up here.

My eldest son was born in December 1945. His grandfather kept going…he was to be born on the 29th December, and Pop used to say, “Has he arrived yet?” Anyway, he died the day he should have been born. He didn’t see his grandson.

So I got out and we came up here to live because the firm had to be sold and he didn’t feel like starting an estate agency business on his own. He had Romney’s Sheep Stud here which he was paying his brother to do, because his brother was farming. He paid him to look after the sheep stud.

So we came up here and tried to make a life up here.

This was my 40th Wedding Anniversary house. No, because my husband had two sisters who never married and they were on the farm. One was the Principal at Prahran Technical College and she died suddenly in the September and her father died in the

November and that left this other sister on her own. My husband’s people had come from New Zealand. His uncle had come over to be with his brother, and so Lil went back to New Zealand with him and we went into the old family house. It was a house of many doors. When we pulled it down it

was over one hundred years old, and I used to say it was the house of many doors because we had about six doors to go in and out of the house. It was like Topsy, it grew from a little farmhouse to a big…I think everybody who had lived in it put another addition on. So Sam started to make alterations while we were living at home,

but he would come up here and work the farm during the week and come back to me at the weekends. So we decided that wasn’t much chop, so I came up here to live and I’ve been here ever since.

He used to always say…he had a car. They would travel down to Footscray from here before the war and

then of course petrol was dear, so they would travel down to Dandenong, leave the car at Thall’s Garage in Dandenong, catch the train out to Footscray during the war. The father and sister lived with friends in Hawthorn during the week and came home on the weekends. So that’s how we got around. But when I first came here to live

we had no power, no water. You can imagine coming from the city. A fire stove. My husband was very good. He would get up every morning and light the fire stove for me. So the kettle was boiling when I got up. Flat irons we had to work with. Then we got the power on. I think my daughter…I can’t remember whether she was five

or what. But I know we got a refrigerator for her birthday. I don’t know if she was five or six, but I know we got a refrigerator for her birthday.

My son was born in 1945. My daughter was born 14 months after him, but it was in ’47. Rod was born at the end of 1945 and she was born in February 1947. My other son was born on Christmas Eve 1949.

And my baby son that you met was born in 1952. So I had the four children. Anyway we got this refrigerator…we had had to buy…prior to that we had an ice chest and Coolgardie Safe. Do you know what a Coolgardie safe is? The flannels hang down

to keep the things cool. We had to bring the ice from Dandenong. The block of ice had melted considerably by the time you got it back here. They were good times. Then when we got the water, well…my eldest son was sixteen, and to get the water out here

they had to dig the trenches from down in the town, or on the outskirts of the town. Then under supervision pipes were laid and then the farmers along here had to backfill the trenches and that’s how we got the water out here. That was a great day because we had a loo out the back originally and we

had a septic tank…we built a washhouse and toilet on the end of the veranda, but with the septic tank we were always running out of water…because with the toilet you were flushing so we had to keep buying water because there wasn’t sufficient rainfall here

to keep it going.

My father was the caretaker of the foundry and they had lorries to deliver the stoves. We always had the horses there to look after, and I can remember the

loft where the chaff was stored. I would slide down the chute to the bin at the bottom. There was a big clock where the workmen had to punch in their number when they got to work, and my brother and I…I don’t know if my sister had done it earlier,

but my youngest brother and myself used to have to go and open the gates for the workmen to come in, but we always punched Dad’s number first. He was the first there! But Dad was still at home…the house butted onto the foundry. There had been a big gasometer there before I was born and then had been taken

out. I can remember Mum used to grow pumpkins and we would carve our names on the pumpkins to see whose pumpkin would grow the biggest. In the foundry they had this big furnace where I had an uncle working. He melted the iron down for the stoves. They would have…

coke was burnt in the furnace and they’d have these sort of buckets which had a black lining. I don’t know what it was made of, but the molten iron was poured into those and the men had to carry them along and pour them into the moulds of whatever they were making. Very, very hot work.

A lot of burns. They’d trip and it would go down in between their boots. The scrap heap of that was tossed in to fill up this big hole where this gasometer was and we would get on sheets of metal and slide down that to the bottom. We had a wonderful time.

They used to get a lot of flying stuff into their eyes. If they worked on the frets for the stove. I can remember going over to see him and he would be on a grinding wheel and he would be grinding the little pieces off that shouldn’t have been there.

There was a pattern maker there and they made gas and wood stoves.

Well, he didn’t complain. I suppose it was a job. When he first came down from Ballarat he lit the gas lamps on Princes Bridge.

That was how he came to town.

No, my mother was working for a doctor in Collins Street as a cook and she always told us (he was a Jew), Dr Moss and he had one of the first motor cars in Melbourne, and Mum always said he was a very good Jew. He wouldn’t make her work on his Sabbath

and he wouldn’t let her work on her Sabbath so she had Saturday and Sunday off. But I think her experiences as a cook stood her in very good stead for the Depression. She was a very, very good provider.

Yes. Mother used to make a pastie. She never made it as a pastie, she always made it

about this big in a baking dish about this thick. She used to go into the Victoria Market Tuesday and Friday and come home on the cable tram which used to run up Sydney Road then. We used to think…school holidays we would all go with her. But she had a special butcher that she would

go to; a special chap for rabbits; a special chap for fish; and a Chinaman for her fruit. But yes, she would go twice a week. Irish stews…that was one of hers, and I still make an Irish stew like she made it. She was a plane cook. My sister

was the fancy cook. When she was working her husband to be would pick her up at lunch time in a car and they would go down to the river or to the beach for lunch. May would always make cakes and slices and different things to take for lunch. Mum always said that May wasn’t a good cook because she had the best of

everything to cook with, but she said that a good cook could make a meal out of very little. My father used to belong to an angling club so we always had plenty of fish.

Down at Mordialloc. He went up to the Murray at Christmas time with men and Mum would take us down to

Barwon Heads with friends. We would go down to Barwon Heads for Christmas.

Well we went by …there were three families went. The Carters and the Youngs. They took us. We went in a furniture van…we didn’t, but they had connections with this furniture

van. The women all slept on mattresses in the back of the van and Max and I were the only kids…the others were all grown up, and they went down on motor bikes and side cars. I must have been a pain in the neck because I was always hanging around these engaged couples.

We used to call at Geelong and pick up Charlie Young’s mother and father. They were caretakers at a state school in Geelong and we’d pick them up and then all choof off down to Barwon Heads for Christmas.

Oh there would be two, four, six, ten…there would be about twelve of us.

I suppose the men slept in tents, but I can always remember having to climb over everybody in the back of the van.

Well I was only about four or five. I can remember at one stage my mother sent my brother up to get a

case because all the beds were off the floor, and she sent him up to the bedroom to get a case to pack up to go away on our holiday, and Max got this case and it had all our Christmas presents in it, so that was the end of Father Christmas for me. Mum came up to see what we were doing and we were playing with trains and things which were supposed to be our Christmas

surprises. He didn’t like swimming like I liked it. I loved the water. He fell in off the Geelong Pier one day and he came up to Mum and said, “Did you see me jump in?” And Mum said, “No love, go and do it again!” He wouldn’t. He would only go into the water up to his ankles, and yet when he had a family he was very

adamant that they all learned to swim. He lived up in Coburg, the Brunswick Baths once again.

Sydney Road, the Baptist Church. We went to Christian Endeavour

at ten o’clock. Church at eleven o’clock. Sunday School in the afternoon and when I grew older, church at night. So many happy days there. They had a Missionary over in India which was associated with the Church and she would send over beautiful saris, so when we had

…I wouldn’t say it was concerts that we had, I suppose it was sort of a concert, and we would dress up in these saris, and one of our main things was making scrap books to send over to India for the missionary to give out. I was saying, the trains had these …

they called them gate houses and people lived right at the gates. It was their job to open and shut the gates when the trains were coming through, and as a little one we would get on the gates and swing with the gates. We had lots of fun.

We never had a car.

Most people had bikes. My eldest brother had a car. It was a Singer (I’ve got a photo of it there), with two big acetylene lights on the side. We were …he took us up to Donnybrook in it. It had a little

dicky seat in the back and he took my sister and mother up to Donnybrook. There were springs up there. Max and I were sitting in the back but they must have had to carry extra petrol for it, and we were covered in petrol by the time we got up there. So he had this Singer motor car, and I can’t remember anybody else having a motor car really.

Well you went by train or the cable tram into town. We never had a car and I can’t even remember my father riding a bike. Well, he didn’t have to because he was right at work. He didn’t need transport to go to work.

Oh yes. We walked everywhere.

If we went to town it was full speed to sit on the front…in the front of the tram. I can remember my brother carrying a watermelon home. A beautiful watermelon, and as soon as he got off the tram he dropped the thing on the road and that was the end of the watermelon. One of the girls I went to school with, her father was a Gripman (the driver

who pulled the levers and all that) on the cable trams. Coming home from school we’d often wait to see if he came along on the tram and then get a ride up to Hope Street.

Better than they are today I think!

I can’t really remember much about the roads.

Much the same as it was back then. Harry was the rabbiter bloke we used to go to. Alex Watson was the butcher. My sister and her husband would go into the market to get their meat from Alex after they got married. But Mum used

to…they sold one of Dad’s horses to a Chinaman. All along Mary Creek there used to be Chinamen who had their market gardens. They used to do their lorries up and they would have this horse and cart and they would go to sleep and the horse would just travel into the Vic Markets. I believe at one stage

they sold Don the big horse to a Chinaman and my brother used to play tricks. He would get up there and the horse would be plodding along Sydney Road to the market, and Chris would whistle him and make him detour. We didn’t live very far from Brunswick Station and that was near Victoria Street. So we had the two modes of transport

to go into Brunswick.

I was about six, five or six. My sister used to take me every Sunday morning and taught me to swim. There was Mrs Ballingore there who really taught me to swim. I love breaststroke even to this day.

When I was younger, May used to take me to the beach and apparently she would take me out into the water and then sit me on the edge so she could go and have a swim. This particular day I followed her out and the bathers in those days were a sort of saltine and

the air got in them and would blow them up. Anyway, they found me and I was in this sort of blown up state and I came home and said to my mother…“I nearly got downed! I nearly got downed!” Mum never knew until I could swim that this aunt and May had nearly drowned me when I followed her out into the deep water.

We had a lot of fun at the Baths.

Yes, although I joined the Brunswick Swimming Club, but I was always a good last. But we taught (UNCLEAR) to swim classes and by the time I was 14 I was teaching swimming. They used to have a big pole,

chain and a belt. You would put the belt around the person and you walked along the edge of the baths holding them up and that was how we taught them to swim.

On the weekends. So I was very conscious of the fact that when I came up here to live

there was nowhere for the children to swim. We had to go down to Tooradin or Lang Lang and it was…you had to watch the tide because they were mud flats, so the chappie next door, Kenworthy, had an irrigation dam and

Billy was about two. I used to take children from the town into the irrigation dam to learn to swim because I felt that they should learn to swim. We were trying to get a pool in Pakenham and Henry Bolte was Premier at that stage. We had applied through the Council at that stage for a grant to put a pool in,

and they put us right down the bottom of the list, and of course the money ran out long before they got to us. Anyway, Bolte said “That every child should learn to swim”, so I wrote to him and said “We had applied for a grant but we didn’t get it, and therefore we couldn’t get a pool.” So he wrote back to me and to Peter Ronalds who was a councillor

and said to “Reapply for the money.” But the Council was so pig headed they wouldn’t reapply until the next year, but we finally got our pool in Pakenham. But two years ago they decided they wouldn’t reopen it and we’ve had a battle on our hands ever since. We’ve got a little heated pool in Pakenham which is adequate. The estate you saw this morning

are trying to get the Council to pull the pool down which is near the football and basketball ground.

Well I haven’t been swimming…I love the water, and I go to a hydro pool once a week to exercise my knees.

I was Secretary of the Swimming Club for about 15 years. I was more interested in Life Saving than competition swimming because I felt that the kids should learn to look after themselves and to look after other people in the water. When we bought the new pool…that was about 1962 it was opened,

the Education Department provided instructors for the state school children, but the Catholic children weren’t provided for at all. I had a friend who was Catholic and he had his family, so he asked me if I would take the St Patrick’s children

for swimming lesson. Mrs Mary Burton from Koo-Wee-Rup got on the bandwagon and asked if I would take the Koo-Wee-Rup children. So I used to go in two days a week to take them for their swimming because as I said, I didn’t see why the Catholics should drown and the Protestants be saved. One time…

there’s a very strong Catholic community in Koo-Wee-Rup, and I …I would always put them on the land first and tell them what I wanted them to do. Anyway this little boy was looking at me and saying “Yes, yes.” Well, he got in the water and he didn’t do a darn thing…and another little boy said, “Mrs Shallard, he doesn’t know English.” He had been there a week and I hadn’t realised he was a new Australian

I don’t know, he was just a little Italian boy. He didn’t know any English but he soon learned to swim.

Well the heated pool was only the ladies pool. Men weren’t allowed in the ladies pool, but the ladies were allowed in the summer time

to go in the outdoor pool which was the men’s pool. There weren’t any Italians or anything living there then. We noticed it when we went to live in Lygon Street. There was a very strong Jewish community

around us there. But not the others, no.

Mostly factories, manufacturing. When I was at Rockmans…on many occasions I had to…they were Polish Jews

and they had a factory in Carlton and one in Mason’s Lane, and then they would have these manufacturers…they had a big storeroom and they would have all this material and these manufacturers would come and get material, go back and make garments and then on a Tuesday morning

they would have a meeting with all the manageress’ of all the Melbourne shops. Some time country manageress’ came down. They would parade the garments that these manufacturers had made and order on those. Those manufacturers had weekly accounts; they were paid weekly for their garments – to keep going.

I used to have to go around to the Immigration Department which was around behind the Post Office in Little Bourke Street at the time. I went past it the other day and it’s now an apartment building. So it’s changed. But they brought a lot of their relatives out who were Polish Jews, and they started off with suitcases…they would take

bulk pieces of material from the warehouse and go out into the country selling. And they did that every week, and that’s how they started in the trade – the ones that I knew anyway. Two doors from us in Lygon Street there were the killers killing the poultry

for the Jews. Next door to us was a Jewish family and he was a furniture manufacturer.

Not much, no. They kept to themselves. There was very…I know my father when he went to town and that, he used to be very irritated if they all started talking

in Jewish [Hebrew orYiddish]. He was strong on the fact that when they were out here they should talk English.

The families around…next door they were grown up, so we didn’t really have any mixing with them really.

As I say, I left school in 1933 so I didn’t have any…but both firms, Newholders was a Jewish firm and Rockmans were Jews. So most of my working life…and they were very fair, very fair to me, although we had a Secretary

Mr Lay at Rockmans and he just sort of did everything for the office. A very good man.

Lygon Street.

Well my mother used to alter the rooms around! You’d go to work in the morning…the only room that never got altered was

Mother’s and Dad’s bedroom. That always stayed Mother’s and Dad’s bedroom

If you walked in the door that was on the left hand side. On the right hand side was another bedroom, but sometimes it would be the lounge room. How mother moved the furniture around I do not know. You went down the passage and the passage had an archway. You went down the passage and then on

the left was another smaller room which was my two brother’s bedroom. My sister and myself slept in the room opposite Mother in a double bed. The boys had single beds. Then there was another room on the right which was a lounge room and only used on special

occasions. Then you went into the vestibule…oh, there was a bathroom on the left. Then you went into a vestibule where we had a very large dining table, and then off that to the left was the kitchen and pantry with a kitchen table and that. We had

the chip heater when we first went there, but later on Mum had an electric hot water service but that wasn’t for many years. Then out in the back veranda was the wash house and toilet and a fernery and a garage right out the very back. When Dad went onto two days a week

work, he had a friend who was a concreter and this Mr Saunder’s used to be Dad’s shooting companion, and they would go fishing and shooting up the Murray. He helped Dad concrete all the paths and the verandas and they improved the place by putting in concrete paths.

I’ve got a little tub out the front that Dad concreted over to put plants in. He had to fill in his time doing something.

Yes, always had a vegetable garden and Mum always grew herbs around the vegetable garden.

My brother, my eldest brother later became a commercial traveller, so he would use the garage because he always had a car. You had to go down a back lane to get into the garage.

Three doors from the corner. We were the third house from the corner.

Yes, Blyth Street. So I only had to walk past three houses and across the road to the garage

to catch the tram into Melbourne, and of course it stopped outside our gate really when I came home, so I didn’t have very far to go home.

There might have been about ten houses altogether. There were only houses from Victoria Street up to Blyth Street.

Up further from Stewart Street there may have been a few houses over the other side. But not many houses, there were mainly shops and factories.

Not really. Mum did all the shopping. She would go up from Lygon Street up to Sydney Road. She had a little trolley, her shopping jeep.

She went there shopping. She had a friend who had a grocery store around in Albion Street, she would go around there a bit. She had this cane shopping jeep and one day when she got home she must have caught the sugar on the cane and she didn’t have any sugar left when she got home.

It spilled out of the bag. My brother’s were involved with the Carlton Scouts. There was a Scout Hall down there just around near the railway line. They were very involved with that. I had my 21st birthday down in the Scout Hall. It was a nice night.

But a lot of the boys were away. My eldest brother missed out because he was away.

I don’t know. Well we played tennis of a Saturday,

at the Church. We had tennis courts. My brother’s mates. When I made my debut, I had a friend of my eldest brothers in that, and from that we formed a younger set. We worked …

at that time there was a polio epidemic and we worked making woollen stockings to go over the splints. They carried patients in long wicker prams and they went to the City Mission which was opposite our place for treatment. They

wanted these long stockings to cover their legs and the splints while they were in these prams. I had a meeting or party at our place one time and my father said, “Never again!” The Albion Hall was nearly opposite and he reckoned it was easier for him to hire the supper

room for us to have our parties and dances and that, than interfering with the house. We had a lounge suite and it had a wooden frame around it and rather sharp corners, and the walls were plaster cast sort of walls and we got the chair and shoved it and it went through the wall.

So I wasn’t very popular then, but we had some great times.

Yes, we had the parties and dances across the road.

Yes we had a three or four piece band. The chap who played for my sister’s wedding used to come and play for us and

we had dances for the soldiers. Rockmans had moved from Mason’s Lane out to the corner of Grattan Street there opposite the Melbourne University, and we had an upstairs where we had mornings and afternoon teas and it was quite a big room, so they let us run dances

for the servicemen there. We had a chap come from down Brighton way with dance records, so we didn’t have to worry about bands then. We just danced to all these good records.

Well, Begin the Beguine was during the war, I can remember that one.

All of the dance tunes because I used to love dancing. Before the war I would go four and five nights a week dancing. My youngest brother was in a troop of old time dances. When I say old time dances…they were bringing dances out all the time and there was a group of

eight couples and they would demonstrate because with old time dancing you could follow the person in front of you. They would demonstrate and break up and go round the Brunswick Town Hall and you would then follow then. Well that’s how we learnt. I was allowed to go and the first company ball I was allowed to go to

I had to be home at ten o’clock. When we went to Pakenham for a ball they wouldn’t start until then. There used to be a bus which would go from Blyth Street and over to Moonee Ponds and I had to be on that ten o’clock bus and my father was there to meet me every time. That altered later on I can tell you but

we had some great times.

No. Pride of Erin and the Lancers and all those sorts of things. We used to go into the Masonic Hall up the top of Collins Street and they would have Old Time Dancing on a Thursday night. During the war we would have dances at the Melbourne Town Hall on a

Friday and the servicemen would go to those.

Lots of people. Civilians and all. During the war there were places around Melbourne where servicemen could go and have a cup of tea and coffee.

Well he was in the Service Police at Russell Street and he had contact with the first Japanese prisoner of war taken. They brought him

down to Melbourne for interrogation. He had written in Sam’s diary a letter, but Sam wasn’t happy about getting it translated, well he didn’t have anyone to translate it, but he shouldn’t have really had it. He didn’t know what it really contained until quite a number of years later when we were able to get it translated.

And then we found out what it was.

Yes, it was really his last Will and a message to his parents. It said he couldn’t go back to Japan, and he died in the Cowra revolt.

Harry Gordon had written this book, They died like Carp, and when Sam read it he said “It wasn’t true to what he was”, so he wrote to him and told him. He said that he “Wished he had met Sam in the early stages when he was writing the book”, because there was so much that he heard from

people afterwards. I think he wrote another book to correct it.

That’s right. No, we had had the first bit translated, but he hadn’t…but the Mr Oakley one he hadn’t had translated.

It was from Bill’s work that they found out the first translation, but only that this boy had been a boy of eight or nine during the war and he didn’t really know what had happened during the war.

No.

No, the chap

who translated it for us was my daughter-in-law’s boss from Marribeenie’s, a Japanese store. But Bill worked for Bridgestone which was a subsidy of theirs, and that’s how we got the association. The photo and that has gone over to America now so I haven’t got Minarmi

Todayo.

Minarmi Todayo.

“Mr Shallard. I would thank you very much for your hospitality

and particularly the story of Japan which you have told me time to time. I would hope you would do your best for your country in the future. I would like to thank you very much for the kindness which you have given me. I have spent healthy and quiet days up to today but I am quite prepared to die anytime. This is the time to say goodbye to you. I can really hear that my mother

in my home town is saying: ‘You die for the mother country’. Then I want to say sayonara. To have a life for 25 years, or goodbye for 50 years. It does not make much difference to me. I could be shot. I can satisfy myself. I have no regrets to die since I shot down two fighters anyway.

Todayo Minarmi”. Sam carried that letter for many days, many years before he got it translated. And Harry Gordon sent it to his mother.

The book – They died like Carp.

I believe so.

Sam said he was very clean. Very respectful and they played badminton with him and exercised a lot. The only thing they weren’t allowed to play was wrestling or anything like that. They had no body contact. That was a no-no.

But he said he was a very nice young man really.

Well yes and no. I think we all had a very strong feeling about the Japanese. Our soldiers…

a friend of my brother said, he’s kept two bullets, one for himself and one for me if the Japanese ever came to Australia. Sam was very fair. Very considerate. I think he felt if he was in the same position how would he be. Later on

when he was in Darwin he had more experience with the Japanese with the bombings, then when he came back he taught…he went into the Special Investigation Branch and then taught Law out at Finch Street Malvern. To the Air Force…the Service Police.

Not good. Not good because we knew what they were doing to our prisoners of war, but I think he thought that they were doing a job for their country the same as he was doing one for his. And it’s just unfortunate.

I think it’s a bit like religion. It’s whatever house you’re born into and that’s the way it is.

Yes. They kept him up at Russell Street for some time while they were interrogating him. All he had was his diaries

and he was frightened to have it translated because he just had no idea what was in them.

Sam only had the one diary. There were different words for foods that he had written down, but as I say that’s all gone over to America – Jeff’s taken all that.

I wouldn’t have a clue.

I don’t think they would have been allowed too.

He led the revolt and he was killed in the revolt. In the letter he said he was prepared to die and be shot, and at that time the Japanese weren’t

wanting to go home. They were disgraced. They couldn’t go home as ex-prisoners of war. That was the rule of the country at that time which was rather hard when you think of all the prisoners of war that we had to wait to come home.

He was sad.

He was rather taken by him as a young man. I think he was sad for anyone who was taken prisoner of war. My cousin was one of the first Spitfire pilots shot down and he was a prisoner of war in Germany for many years. It’s hard waiting for them to come home.

And it’s just the same for a Japanese family as mothers and that. You all have the same feelings for your children, don’t you.

I suppose it was the way we were brought up. Sam’s father always said

“Beware of the yellow peril.” He was always saying that even before the war. I don’t think he was surprised -however he died at the end of the war. They were hard times.

You can look back on it now and see some funny things that happened, but it was a trying time all round. Or I thought it was anyway.

Well, we were married. It was very hard in Melbourne to get a hotel to put you up for the night. Like we were married in the afternoon and went to see ‘White Horse Inn’ at Her Majesty’s

with our bridesmaid and a couple of friends, and we had booked into the Hotel Alexander down in Spencer Street, but we went to quite a few hotels before they would take a hotel for service people. They thought you were out for a naughty weekend I think. We went to Marysville. A hotel room…I’ve still got the receipt there for it, was one pound

seven and sixpence for the night. We went to Mary Lands up at Marysville and that was three pounds ten a week for each of us. So that was seven pounds for our week’s holiday up at Marysville. The first person…we had to catch a train from Flinders

Street to Healesville and then a coach to Marysville, and the first person we bumped into was a Squadron Leader from Southern Area, and he thought we were there for a naughty weekend too. He said, “Good luck Sarg.” So we thought that was rather funny because it hadn’t come out

in Daily Orders or anything about our marriage. So that was rather embarrassing. He sent us on a wild goose chase…he told us to go on a good walk and there were fallen trees. However it was the first time I had seen snow, but it turned to slush very quickly. So that was it.

I was very lucky that my grandmothers gave me the vouchers to buy the material for the frock. It was used twice after I had worn it. A friend in the Sergeant’s Mess, her sister was getting married and Lorna had been married in uniform, but her sister wanted to be married as a bride.

So I said, “She can have my wedding dress if it will fit her.” But Lorna said, “I can’t be in uniform as a Matron of Honour.” So I said, “I’ve got an evening frock.” So they had my wedding dress and an evening frock for the Matron of Honour. I called to see her a couple of years ago

up at Mildura and she’s still got the photo and she was very grateful for that. Then there was…Wendy Barber was a Sister from England. She came out to the Pakenham Hospital and she was there and I was having…it must have been Billy. Anyway she wanted to be dressed as a bride. She had met her husband

coming out on the boat from England. He was in Queensland. So I said “You can have a lend of my dress”, so it went the rounds. But going up to Queensland it got the humidity spots on it, so that was the end of the wedding dress. It came home and was made into doll’s clothes for my daughter. It did good service I think.

Well you had to have your coupons. I’m not sure now how many coupons you had to have for a metre of material. The girlfriend who started work at seven and six a week, made my frock and her own. She was my bridesmaid. But as I say, the two grandmothers’ and I think

mother probably put in some coupons too …and I’ve got a letter there that my father sent me when we were on our honeymoon enclosing some coupons. So we must have had to have some coupons to give to the guesthouse. We went off sugar so we had plenty of sugar coupons.

It was white satin and heavily beaded across the top and up the front. I know I said to my husband, when we went to order the flowers, I said “Am I going to get an orchid?” And he said, “No fear!” Islands did the

bouquet and in the centre was an orchid and a card which said, “To take out and wear on your going-away frock.” So I got one after all.

Yes, it was quite the thing to have.

Yes.

Well it was blue and I had a suit and it was beaded with

brown beads. It had beads as oak leaves on it. My husband said to me, “I don’t like that. Put your coat on! You look like a bandmaster.” It had these oak leaves because beading was very much in. If you could afford it. Una used to have a lot of Jewish customers and they were really onto the beads.

Of course her frock was well beaded and so was mine.

Yes.

Yes. It was very nice. Buttoned down the back.

Well I made my nightgowns and that on this

industrial machine…a power machine, and of course you could just run up anything. I made a dressing gown, and one of the storemen came in and he said, “What are you making?” I said, “I’m making some nightgowns”, and he said, “You don’t need nightgown, you only need to put one under the pillow in case of a fire.” I made several nightgowns.

The dressing gown which I had for many, many years. It was a woollen dressing gown. When I …I had this supper cloth to make and when Sam went away I decided I would do a leaf a night to get it finished. It was done with German

silks and I walked Chapel Street, Prahran and St Kilda to try and get silks to finish it because they were very hard to get. But I had finished when he came home.

It was something I just wanted to do. All the girls did fancy work then. Or most of them.

As I say, I had started it and I wanted to finish it. You had it in your glory box, which they don’t have these days. They don’t seem to worry about Glory Boxes but we did.

So many sheets and so many pillow cases and all this sort of thing. Tea towels and

of course during the war you didn’t get…like at our wedding we got War Bonds and I had a list there of what I got from different relatives and if you got…well five pounds was a lot of money. I had quite a number of five pound gifts.

But you didn’t get presents for wedding presents during the war. I didn’t at any rate. I was very fortunate that I got a lot of mine when I turned 21.

From the people who came to my 21st birthday and I had things like that. Mother gave me a dinner set

when I was married and a tea set and I’ve still got the tea set, but with the dinner set I’ve only got one plate left. Which isn’t bad after 60 years, is it.

Yes, all linen. Sheets and pillow cases and towels. So many pairs of towels.

No. Or I never did, no. When I was at school in the Depression, my parents never had enough money to give you wool for your sewing classes.

We were very restricted. The Red Cross supplied the girls at Moreland Secondary School with wool to make baby’s singlets which they gave to the women’s hospital and flannelette which were made into little matinee jackets. That covered your knitting and sewing and that was given by the Red Cross.

I know I had to hem a tea towel and my sister being 12 years older than me, I gave it to her for her glory box. When I had a row with her I would ask for it back. She gave it back to me about 20 years ago. She had never used it. Oh, it’s beautifully done. Great big crowbar stitches.

So I’ve still got the first tea towel that I ever embroidered.

Fourteen. When I left school I was about the smallest in the grade. I swam for a year. When I went to night school I stayed home.

I got a pass to the Brunswick Baths and I used to go swimming all the time, and when May was married I was the biggest one in the wedding party. I had grown that much with the swimming. I was 14 when she married.

We always had roasts. Mum always saved the dripping. It was always lovely beef dripping. There was many a meal we had with bread and dripping or toast and dripping. Mum used to use dripping in the pastry.

As I say she was a very, very good cook.

Yes a doll. It was a big celluloid doll, a baby doll. That was given to me, and when I was seven (I’ve still got it in the drawer) a doll that was given to me by my grandmother and belonged to my mother’s sister. So I’ve still got him.

That’s about 100 years old. I’ve always had a passion for dolls. I love them. I was in town about a month ago getting my service medals redone; there was a doll shop opposite. My daughter-in-law said to me, “Come and have a look in the doll shop.” Anyway we went over

and I had always wanted an aboriginal doll. We found one there. So home she came. I’ve got my aboriginal doll at last.

Oh, not very big. Roselyn, my daughter travelled overseas and every country she went to

she got me a doll – from Spain and Greece. I’ve got them in costume. A couple of little Dutch dolls all in a cupboard out there. We had a speaker at Probus -

she helped write Jackson’s Track, the aboriginal place down at Drouin. She spoke of the women from Tyres making these aboriginal dolls, and there was a sculptor who said “They didn’t have a proper aboriginal face.” So he sculptured a face for them to make them more genuine. But

Billy and I looked them up on the Internet and they were so expensive and I thought I will never have an aboriginal doll. But this doll was made by someone else who had sculptured an aboriginal face. I was going to go away for five days with Probus but that fell through because they couldn’t get the numbers to go, so the money I would have spent I spent on my aboriginal doll.

Prams. I always had tea sets and doll parties as you can see by the photos. I always had dolls’ parties with Max. I always had my dolls. I always had a puppy. I can remember at one stage I had a friend came and

my mother (I was about seven I suppose)…and I said “Kitty wanted a drink of milk.” She said, “Well, there’s a sardine tin out there.” She didn’t realise that I was talking about my girlfriend Kitty. I got a box over the ears because I gave her a drink out of a can of sardines.

Never mind.

I regretted it in one way but I knew Mum couldn’t afford to keep me at school as well as my brother. It was more necessary…he was two years older than me. She didn’t want him walking the

streets with the Depression and with nothing to do. Whereas she thought she could handle me better at home than she could him. So you just took it that that’s how it had to be. We just never had the money and that was it. So I was very glad to get the first job at eleven shillings a week.

Well we used to play tennis or go swimming. Later on I had a friend who had a couple of brothers who played cricket and we might be scorer for them. So we would go and watch the cricket.

We filled in our time that way.

When I was home or at Rookies?

At Rookies we started with a parade.

Then we had the march up and down. Then we had classes where we were supposed to learn all the ranks for the three services. We had to learn how to salute which didn’t come easy. We filled in our days in that way.

I was glad to get into bed at night – such as the bed it was. Going home at the weekends was good. When I went to Southern Area and living at home, well I would nip out in civilian clothes sometimes, although you weren’t supposed to get out of uniform.

Parade. Running up the drive to get to parade on time. Parade and then just the store. The store was at the back of the building, so we never had much contact with the officers. Only our equipment officer and fuel officer and that.

We would be US’ing all the stockings. I can remember the stockings. You had to learn all the codes. I recollect that stockings were L22L or something like that. ‘Stockings drab for the use of.’ We would be ordering stuff in. The Signals

Girls would come in at all times for equipment and US’ing clothes. When we moved to Callow House we did away with the store. We didn’t have a store, so I went into the office there and I used to have to chart the serviceability of engines

and things like that. How much fuel was still available? We didn’t have a great deal to do with the officers. My husband always said that he regretted I hadn’t been longer on the station because

it was a different life.

I don’t know if I would have or not. I didn’t enjoy the month I was down at Laverton very much. I supposed you made your own fun and went to things.

To salvage them. You had to go and get a form filled in from either the WAAAF Officer or the Equipment Officer, which would say “That the clothes were no longer serviceable.” Then you would US them and you would hand them into the store and be given a replacement. At one stage I can remember one of the Squadron leaders came back from

England and over there they were given money to buy their underwear and things like that. They were given their uniforms but they had to buy their underwear. We had some fun when those officers came in and wanted to US their underwear. We had polka dots and all sorts of things coming in.

We had one Equipment Officer; he was a single chap I think. He would come into the store and say, “I want a new collar” (the collars were detached from the shirts). He never washed his collars; he would come in and get a new one from the store. He wanted a new collar to go out in.

The WAAAF Officers were pretty hard on the girls. I know one lass, she wasn’t a mess steward or a cook. She must have had to have been there some time. But her shoes had had fat or something spilled on them and she couldn’t polish them and every time she was on parade,

of course they would inspect your shoes… and your hair had to be an inch above your collar and all this sort of business…she was always in strife because she couldn’t polish her shoes. They wouldn’t polish up properly. We would send them out to Ascot Vale to get them US’ed, so she could get a new pair, but they would come back mended.

Very strict.

We had to make an effort. At the Southern Area we had carpenters and plumbers because they had to keep the building going…boiler attendant, and DMT’s to drive the bosses around. In one of the books here I’ve got

a photo of one of our DMT’s. I went up to Darwin for the 50 year reunion for the all ex-service women. WAAAF’s, Army, Navy and everything. We went up there in 1995, and I met this Dell Cutton and she was now living over in Western Australia. It was nice to have met up with her.

Yes, and of course the Yanks were here and there was quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing with the yanks. But I never went with any Americans.

A lot of them had their friends and went overseas. There was one lass who worked with me in the store. She was married but she had no family and her husband worked for Burns Philp, the shipping place. So he was in essential service. Well, we would go down to

Howsey’s for tea of a Friday night and it was very embarrassing for Bill to be the only civilian and in civilian clothes. It used to hurt him because we were all in uniform. A lot of them met up with different ones in the Air Force and the Army and that.

I don’t think we sort of figured that much on making…OK I got married while I was in the Air Force, but I think there was so much uncertainty about everything. And you were waiting

for the boys to come home from the Middle East, and of course they were back no time and then they were up in New Guinea. It was very fleeting. The Air Force was unfortunately…or I thought for the males at any rate…in the Army you went as a Battalion and a Regiment and you were always together, but the Air Force

used to just post you haphazardly around and you might be with one unit today and another one tomorrow. There wasn’t that continuity. At Southern Area we had a lot of officers that came back from overseas service who were badly burnt. They weren’t on active service.

They were absorbed into the…as I say we didn’t have much to do with the officers. One officer, a Commanding Officer there, he had been in Number 10 Squadron overseas and he had a great big handle bar moustache out here. But as I say we didn’t see them working out in the store.

We didn’t come in contact with a great number of officers. And of course it was very hush hush…about what you were doing or what you …all the letters from Darwin were censored. Bits cut out and that.

Well, they were all censored.

We had a couple of code names. No, I think we were aware of what we had to do, or what we could do and you just did it.

I don’t know. It seems so different to me today, the attitude of people. Whether we were stupid or…I don’t know. But we did what we were told, whereas today I think a lot of people would query what they would do. They wouldn’t just be blindly led into it.

I think it’s a bad thing because not long ago I heard them talking on the air. They were talking to wives or sweethearts where their folks had gone off to the Gulf. One woman said, “My husband has left on the such and such. That would have been…” and she finished up saying, “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

The ship had gone. Well, you never discussed anything like that. It was just taboo. You never knew…they used to say that “loose lips sink ships.” It sort of brought it back to me as soon as I heard her, particularly when she said, “Oh, I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

So they just sort of can’t help themselves, whereas it was drummed into us.

It was weeks old when you got anything in the papers. It’s quite a different thing now. You’re right amongst the thick of it.

You would use your imagination about what you got because I never knew about what my husband went through up in Darwin. Food and that, although they had a very good CO [Commanding Officer]. The fall of the tide is so great in Darwin so they put fish traps

out into the harbour and when the tide would come in, the fish would come in and when they went out the fish would be trapped in these fish traps and that supplemented their food. He got very friendly with Herbert’s that had Humpty Doo Station and

he got permission from them to go shooting. So on their days off they’d go shooting and they’d come back with geese and duck and things like that. I believe they had a very good cook for the sergeant’s mess and the higher officers were always trying to get him because he made such very good meals. He was in the sergeant’s mess and he wasn’t going to go to the officer’s mess.

But they would catch crocodiles and everything in these fish nets. Sam said “That at one time they caught a little croc and they put it on a case under a chap’s bed and he was red headed.” When he pulled out this case there was this croc sitting on it, and Sam said “He went up and down, up and down and nearly died of fright.”

They had its mouth propped open, but never realising that it got air down into its lung and it started to walk away. So they were always playing pranks to pass the time of day.

Oh later.

A couple of times a week. He had been injured here when he did a combat course. When he went up to Darwin he was bed ridden for about six weeks, and they had to cart him around on a stretcher and things like that. We were trying to send medication up to him

and so forth. The postman said to me, “Don’t send it airmail because everything has to go airmail. Don’t go and pay the extra to send it.” That was something he told us because everything had to go airmail.

I had a little book and I had all the days

(I’ll show it to you after). I had all the days numbered and I’d cross them out…waiting for him to come home. But as I said, I set myself the job of finishing the supper cloth and used to go out and visit his father and sister at Hawthorn during the week.

It was a worrying time. I mean you just had to make the best of it. I can understand Mum having her heart attack with the two boys away. She hadn’t really been a well woman for many years really.

I think so. As I say whenever something was on like a wedding or anything she would lose her voice. Dad would say, “It’s a benefit!” She always lost her voice when anything

big came up.

That’s a new word. I’ve got a letter there that my grandmother wrote me when I was married. She wrote to me and I’ve kept it all these years and I at last have a granddaughter to hand it on to.

I’ve looked back on it many times and it’s really true what she said in it. About how you have to live your life.

I forget how it starts off…“Now you’ve become a wife, your cares aren’t all over.

You’ll have your troubles to. Don’t go to sleep with any resentment. Work things out before you go to sleep. That if you’re blessed with children then rear them properly.” A good old Scotch woman’s advice, I suppose.

Yes in many ways. You have to bite your tongue at times and she tells you to bite your tongue. You have to be able to see the other person’s point of view. I was very lucky with Sam. Although in later years

he suffered greatly. He eventually went blind before he had the cataracts removed and it was a very trying time for him and for all of us really. He just couldn’t see. He would say to me, “I know you’re there because I know that’s where you sit.” And things like that. He had the cataracts removed. He had sugar

diabetes in the end. He had the cataracts removed but only partly successful. At one stage the doctor said to me, “If you don’t give him any worry and keep peace then you’ll keep him going for two years.” About six months after than Bill lost his leg, so how do you keep

worries from a family man? My daughter came back from overseas and she said, “Mum you’ve got him like a little boy.” She said, “He calls the tune and you jump.” I said, “Well, I’ve got to live with him. If that’s the way I’ve got to live to give him peace”…and I kept him going for 20 years which was a lot longer than the 2 years that the doctor said.

He did suffer greatly. He was in hospital up at Pakenham. We were lucky that we had a hospital – which we haven’t got now. He was in there for five months before he died. So I finished up writing a book on the history of the hospital.

I went there and said to them, “Where’s the history of the hospital?” It was a bush nursing hospital and they had a bush nursing book there and Pakenham was only mentioned when it was built, and that’s about all they had put in it. So I said to the secretary, “Where’s the history of Pakenham hospital?” And he said, “We haven’t got it. You can write it if you like.”

I interviewed a few people who gave me different information about it, and my husband said, “You’ll never write it. You’ll never finish!” Which of course made me more determined to get it finished when he died. My daughter’s an editor and so she edited it for me. But the only sorrow

was that the hospital was still going, functioning, but four years later it was finished. I only wrote up until that period and four years later they closed it down. We don’t have a bush nursing hospital any more.

Yes and no. I know one lass,

it ruined her. I wouldn’t like to talk about that. It just made things very hard for her later in life. I think the war was instrumental with two of my cousins and their bad health. The one that was a prisoner

of war in Germany, he’s got very bad health. The other one died 18 months ago. Not good health. I think it ruined my eldest brother’s life. But as I say, he was sent into some very remote areas of Australia

and what they put into the war effort wasn’t acknowledged. That was very wrong. It’s the same, I’ve got a friend in Pakenham, her husband was in the Air Force and he enlisted to go anywhere but he wasn’t sent out of Australia. Yet another friend of mine, her husband was overseas for five years.

She had a very worrying time with him before he died but he didn’t die of war injuries so she wasn’t entitled to a war pension. She just gets the ordinary aged pension. Things like that I think are wrong. When you think about what they’re getting now -

so much money a day extra for war service. I went from five pound ten to a guinea a week.

Yes, I really do because as I say, they enlisted but they had no say where they were sent. I believe, I don’t know, but Val told

me that the WAAAF’s that joined up from Tasmania were considered overseas service because they came over the sea.

The only thing they acknowledged was if you were in Darwin when the air raids were on. But anyone who went to Darwin after

the air raids, they weren’t acknowledged as service.

Yes. We were fortunate that way. Fortunate in one way and not in others.

I don’t know, but the RSL [Returned and Services League] were.

They were sort of looked down on a little bit. Those who didn’t go overseas. But as I say, it wasn’t in their hands, and as far as…like when we enrolled, we enrolled to release the men for active service. That was the idea.

It was hard. I know Max felt it greatly, particularly when his friends were in the Army because he had given many, many years to this Citizen’s Force and to be restricted

in that, he felt it greatly. But as I said, he finished up in New Guinea. I know when we would go to town to dinner on a Friday night with Bill Gaston. He was just…especially if any soldiers walked by, they would have a chip at him.

You were made aware that you weren’t doing your bit if you weren’t in uniform.

When you joined up they would always sing out, “You’ll be sorry mate”. When we were route marching or something like that. They would sing out “You’ll be sorry mate”.

I really don’t know what…I never went…like a lot of them went down to hotels after work. Well I never went. I was never a drinker. They would say I was a cheap drunk. Half a glass of beer would have settled me.

I sort of didn’t really associate that much. Ok, I went to the dances and that, but because I lived at home I spent the time travelling and staying home. I had things to do at home. I know my sister-in-law, my eldest brother, when he joined up he had a little girl.

Dad used to look after his wife with any bills or so forth and they came out regularly to see Mum and Dad. But as I say he was sent to these remote areas and it really played up on him in later life.

As to what they would say to the men…I know they made Bill feel very uncomfortable... particularly when his wife was in uniform. He felt it greatly.

Jeff’s godfather was a World War One veteran. He was my husband’s shooting partner. Sam’s family had always had English Setters

and they were all quail shooters. Frank used to come up here for quail and he was godfather to Jeff. He had been gassed during the First World War and he spent a lot of time out at Heidelberg.

He was in and out of hospital. I remember when I was about eleven I used to go to a dancing class and the teacher would put on a concert out at Caulfield Hospital and they had these long wards with all these soldiers. And I can remember going out there and until many, many years later…about five or ten years ago,

I was thinking over things and thinking how ridiculous the song that we were performing was…“Have you ever been lonely? Have you ever been blue?” You’d be there and they’d be carting the men out. There were just these long wards of men that had been… Really, I had to take

Sam out to Heidelberg quite a lot because of his cataracts and diabetes. He was very frightened that he would lose his legs. With diabetes a lot of them would lose their limbs, and we would see some pitiful cases. There was one gentleman, he had been a prisoner of war,

a fine big chap, about six foot two, six foot three, and he couldn’t get a pension because they wouldn’t classify it as their war injury. You’d see other chaps there. They had mental places and they would bring patients into the hospital.

Honestly, the way they would dress them. It would break your heart. A chap with his trousers up to here and a coat with sleeves up to here. Just because they were mental. It used to…you always came home and counted your blessings. Whatever you had…one old lady said to me, a family friend of the

Shallards. “When Bill lost his leg I was devastated”, and she said to me, “You know Heather, God never gives you any burden you can’t bear.” And I said, “Sometimes Jess it seems to be a bit lopsided.” But I often think of her. It’s the same…I go down to a hydro pool and there’s these mental patients that are there

and you count your blessings that you’re not taking them home.

I think, I’ve always said my prayers at night. I believe in God and I think …I was brought up that way.

I feel…He’s given me strength. I’ve always prayed that I would be given strength to nurse Sam. When it came to the end…I went into a church…I was in New Zealand. It was a

church at Russell and it had connections to the Shallard Family. An uncle had been buried in the church yard there. I went over from the Bay of Islands to see this church. I caught a ferry over at about half past seven in the morning. There was a cruise coming around to pick us up later. Anyway, I went around and found the grave

and someone came and opened that church before eight o’clock in the morning and I went in and I really prayed that he would be taken if I couldn’t do any more for him. And he went that night. So that’s it. I was stuck over in New Zealand.

I had been up at the hospital for five months with him and Veterans’ Affairs said he couldn’t stay there any longer. They said they could put him into a nursing home down at Chelsea. Well, I couldn’t go down to Chelsea everyday to see him and feed him at the hospital and stay there until they bedded him down at night.

So they said they would put him into the nursing home for respite care for a month, and that I was to go away for a holiday because I was arranging to get a hospital bed here. So I said “If I didn’t get it right away, I would just automatically go up to the hospital every day.”

I read the paper and there was this five day trip to the Bay of Islands. We had been to New Zealand before but I hadn’t been to the Bay of Islands, so I went over and that was it. It was a bit of a sad thing that he went while I was away, but Bill and his sister were with him.

As I say, I prayed that I would be given strength to look after him. But you can only do a certain amount.

But as I say, he was a very good man.

He sort of helped me for many years and we had a good life. I always say that when your grieving time’s over you look back on the good times, and I have those to look back on, and we did, we had many good times.

That’s it. I can’t tell you anything else.

Well, we had to work Sunday’s just the same. We lived out and we had to take our own food to the thing. Christmas

Day they had a luncheon which we all went to and everyday was a working day – whether it was Christmas Day or Boxing Day. When we had to take our meals on a Sunday, when we were working, my mother used to make a pastie. A huge pastie. I would take it over to the kitchen to get them to heat it up. And the cook asked

how many he could serve it up for because he didn’t think he would cook that day. So we all had this pastie that Mum made for us. I never went down to the hotels. A lot of them would go down to the hotel for a drink, but I wasn’t interested in that.

So I really spent the time at home when I wasn’t on the station. Christmas Day…they had a Christmas party for the staff and they were able to take their children. I never had any children so I took my two nieces and they enjoyed Father Christmas. They had it out in front of the

WAAAF’s barracks. They had it in this big area where they used to play softball. That was mainly how we spent Christmas.

We had tea rations, butter rations, sugar rations, meat rations, and of course we didn’t get any clothing coupon rations because we were in uniform,

but we got all the other rations. They were well used. We would pass them around. If you didn’t take sugar you would pass them to someone who could use more sugar. I can’t remember whether we had to buy our own tea for morning tea, or whether we got that supplied. We may

have got that supplied from the mess rooms. I don’t think we put our own coupons in for that.

We made them. They were pretty scarce. I always did a lot of needlework, knitting and crocheting.

I really can’t remember much about our Christmas presents. As I say, I was married during the war and we got money and war bonds for presents. There wasn’t a great deal you could buy. There was very little crockery and that about.

As I say I was fortunate to get a lot of my crystal and that for my 21st birthday. But as the war went on things got scarcer. I can’t remember what we did for presents really. Just made the best of what we had I suppose.

Well Mother always seemed to have something for us. Not a lot, but I can remember wanting to go out somewhere and I wasn’t allowed to go because we didn’t have the money. But having the local Baths, that filled a lot of time in, and opposite us was the

City Mission which had a gymnasium class, and that was run by a Mr McCelland. He had these gymnasium classes in different suburbs and once a year we combined all together and went to Worth’s Olympia where they had Worth’s Circus over on the river bank where the Arts Centre is now.

We would have one big display there. We had navy serge pleated skirts and tops and big wide sailor collars. That was our uniform. He had a big home in Dandenong Road near Williams Road and he would invite us all down there once a year. He had tennis courts and

different things like that. He would give us a party down there. We filled in with things like that. I tried to learn to ride a bike. I never had a bike but my girlfriend had a bike which was quite unusual. We were trying to learn to ride a bike because Lygon Street was a very busy street. Nicholson Street was a very busy street, and we had another

girlfriend who lived in Victoria Street and we could just ride the bike up and down. I can remember I tried to ride the bike but I couldn’t turn it around and I went up the blue stone gutter and grazed all my knees and we were all ready for a gymnasium display that night. I was never a bike rider. Even the kids laughed up here. I would get on the bike and I would go down the drive and run into the front fence, and that was the only way I could get

off it. All the children had bikes. The boys used to ride in from there to the station, to technical school. But I was never a bike rider.

Well we used to have clubs and rods

and a vaulting horse…you know, a spring board. There was a lot of marching around and all the rest of it. But those were great days and when we came to Pakenham, that’s why I got involved with the youth club here because our children were missing out on such a lot when you lived in the suburbs.

So as I say, coming up here and of course being five miles out of the town, we had to take our children to everything. So we were involved in that way. In the city the young children would just walk to the venue whereas we would have to take ours in. So if you had to wait you may as well be involved.

There were a few gymnasium classes around the suburbs. A lot of the churches had groups. The Baptist Church never had anything like that though. They were pretty strict in many ways. They didn’t believe in dancing. When I made my debut, the

Mayor and Mayoress invited the Baptist Minister to say Grace at the ball, and we got into trouble for making our debut. But I couldn’t see why that happened when they had the Minister there to say Grace at the ball. They were not keen on dancing and that sort of thing.

I loved it.

Well as I say, I wandered away from the church after that because we were really told off about making our debut and dancing. They had a few social nights but it wasn’t enough to keep me. I wanted to go dancing.

We had a picture theatre in Lygon Street. It wasn’t very far from home. There was a picture theatre in Sydney Road which we went to when we were kids. It had a sliding roof that opened up. That was the only way you could see in. They would darken it down when the pictures were on. They didn’t have power I suppose

to light up the theatre, so they would open up this sliding roof to let the light in, and closed it down when the pictures were on. We always had films there for Empire Day. All the school children went to that for Empire Day with the films like Rule Britannia and all the rest of it.

At school we saluted the flag and had that every Monday morning. They don’t have that sort of thing now. I always think America is very oriented to their flag and everything. It seems it’s lapsed here and I think they should bring it back. Marching into school. We were always marching.

We filled in our days.

Well, we did it I suppose to help England, more than Australia. When I enlisted it was to release the

men who were in the Air Force or the Army, whichever the idea was, to release them for active service. They were jobs that they reckoned the women could do. That was the idea that they could release the men. We knew we would never be sent overseas.

The idea was to release the men so they could go on active service.

A bit upset because I was the only one at home. My eldest brother was married and of course he was in the Army. And then when Max wanted to go and

couldn’t, and I joined up. Mum felt she was losing the baby of the family. When I was able to live at home during the war years, that helped a lot.

No matter how old you get you’re still the baby of the family. It’s like Bill, he’s still my baby. Mum used to worry a lot and I think Dad took it more in his stride than Mum did really.

I forget. I think we got 21 shillings a week. About 3 shillings a day. So it was a come down for me because I was earning five pound ten a week. To come back to a guinea…but as I say, we didn’t have to…for clothes…

I’m afraid I always had a fetish for shoes and hats, and working in town you always wore a hat to work. They were the things I missed.

Yes. You had to wear your uniform the whole time. Occasionally I got out of it. I took the risk,

but nine out of ten times I was in uniform. When I went in to the Air Force I gave a lot of my clothes away because I thought I won’t wear them. I gave my sister-in-law most of my clothes because it saved their coupons. I had a lot of tailored costumes

which was quite prevalent at that stage. So they were distributed around. Even my mother wore some of my things. We were much of a muchness in size then. I was taller than Mother, Mum was about five foot four I suppose, but I was five foot six and a half. I’ve shrunk.

That’s how we coped.

Well, the makeup was pretty plastered on in one way. Revlon…Max Factor was a great one. Pancake mixture

was something you put on your face. The hairstyle was curls on the top here. You would have a little cluster of curls. Swept up over the side and the back and of course when we went into the Air Force it had to be an inch above your collar. So…my hair never grew

very thick. We used to get a false roll and pin that either side and roll the hair over it. It made a firm roll to go around. Much the same as in the wedding photos. That was the way the hair was then.

Perms. We were able to get perms. My hair was very straight, so I would always have to have a perm to keep it tidy. There was a hairdresser on Manchester Building on the corner of Collins Street, and every Friday night

after work I would go and have my hair set. We used to go to dances at the Melbourne Town Hall on Friday nights. It was lacquered to keep it up in those days and for a shilling on the Monday or Tuesday you could go back and they would comb it up

and relacquer it, so it kept you going until Friday night.

No.

Yes on Friday night. They used to have a little atomiser with the lacquer in it. Once you lacquered your hair you would have to wash it all out otherwise it would all glue up because you wouldn’t be able to

make use of it the next week. That’s how we kept the hair up in those days.

No, that was later. No. I never had my hair back combed in those days.

It was set in kiss curls. Do you know kiss curls?

Well you started at the end and then you rolled it up and then you had a pin through it and you had those all down the side. When you combed them out it made one long curl and you would just put clips in to keep it up.

Yes. A slide because hairpins didn’t stay in. It was generally the lacquer that kept it up. It was stiff as a board.

I haven’t got a clue. But I was pretty potent. It was very, very stiff.

I’ll have to ask the hairdresser the next time I go. I’ll have to ask him what was in it. I think he was…I don’t know if he would have been hairdressing at that time. Sixty odd years ago, or more than that.

Yes because you couldn’t just …

you just had to wash your own hair and do it up. But you could buy the lacquer. As I say we had these little atomisers which we used. But there weren’t many visits to the hairdressers much during the war. You had to make your own hairdo. But as I say, we must have been able to go and get perms.

That I can’t remember. It was necessary at any rate for my hair. Earlier than that you had what you called Marcel Waves where you had heating tongs. You heated them on the gas fire and then you would test it on a piece of paper to make sure it wasn’t too

hot, because if the paper went brown then you wouldn’t put your hair in it and curl it up, because when you took it away all your hair would be singed. So that was the curling tongs. You used to be able to buy little cans about so big of canned heat, and you opened that up and put a match to it and you could heat the tongs on that.

But a lot of it was where they would finger wave the hair and set it in these great big butterfly clips. The waves were very pronounced.

One time we did have a gel sort of thing

which we put in. But I think it was probably just the wet hair set into waves and butterfly clips stuck in. But I know when I made my debut it was in winter and I had it Marcel Waved at the hairdressers, and when I got home it had all

fallen out, and my sister had to tong me up again because she always had curling tongs. I think I was 14 or 15 when I had my first perm, so I’ve been having perms for a very long time.

There were about 16 other girls who made their debut. We did the Lancers as a group and we had to go for rehearsals for several weeks before. We had to learn to dance

and fortunately I had had a little bit of experience by then. But the Lancers was something…whereas they always did the Alberts at the Old Time Dances, they didn’t do the Lancers. We had some fun at rehearsals. As I say, some of the boys had two left feet,

some of the girls had two left feet too. But we had a great night. It was quite an experience to go. Then the next year we were asked to the return ball. The Mayor gave the first ball with the debutants and then we had the return ball. We paid to go to it. They had a very nice big supper

and it was in the Town Hall and it consisted of three halls really. Later on when we went dancing, they would have old time dancing in one hall, modern in the other…the halls were connecting, and as one band finished the other would start up, so there would be an exit

from one hall to the other hall, and you just danced all night. They were great nights really. When I first went dancing they had silent pictures at the Brunswick Town Hall. Up in the balcony you could go to the pictures and you could look over and see everybody dancing around down below.

Initially, that’s where we went to the silent pictures on a Saturday night and it progressed until we went to the dances.

A lot of Laurel and Hardy stuff I think. They were silent and they would flash it up on the screen. Clara Bow and all this sort of business.

That was an experience to sit up there in the balcony, and you were able to go up there from the dance floor. So if you wanted to stop dancing you could always go up there and watch the picture. It wasn’t very good viewing from the dance floor, it was better from upstairs.

We had dance bands which played at Northcote and Brunswick and Moonee Ponds. They had their own followings.

Well modern dancing was the fox trot, the modern waltz.

Old time was Pride of Erin. The barn dance. Waltz. Two steps. It was quick steps and fox trots and the modern waltz was the modern dancing. But they were always bringing out a new old time dance.

So you were learning old time dances. They weren’t dances from back when my mother was a girl. Some of them may have been. Yes, the Pride of Erin, and the barn dance was great because they were progressive. They made them progressive and you could go round and round the hall. Even up to when we had them up here, no one wanted the barn dance to stop.

They would just keep clapping and on they would go again. It mixed you up because you changed partners all the time.

That’s right. You got asked for the next dance. That’s how we filled in our time.

Not until I was 18.

I had him for a few years but finished up…I was very…I hated drink. There was always drink in our house if anyone came. Even in my married life although my husband and I never drank.

We always had beer or wines or that if anyone wanted them. This chap who I was going with took me to a party at St Kilda one night. I had to be home by 12 o’clock, so he took me home, but his brother was at this party and we were going to go to Ballarat the next day.

At that time you could go to Ballarat for five shillings. A special on a Sunday. Anyway I waited for him to come on the Sunday and he arrived too late to go by train but not to go by car. He had gone back to the party and got drunk with his brother. So I said “Well, if that’s the way you want it, it’s not the way I want it.”

So I knocked it off after three years. My father used to say…during the war I was friendly with all the boys who went overseas because of the comfort fund. I used to write to them all. Different ones would go to a dance and bring me home.

My brother had a boyfriend…he didn’t have a girlfriend…I wasn’t his girlfriend but if he wanted a girl to go out with I would go, and if I wanted a boy I would ask him to accompany me. Dad said he was going to mount a machine gun on the front fence and mow them down as they came along after the war. I said there was safety in numbers.

Yes. I didn’t meet him really…again, although I was sitting on the tram…because I would get the tram at St Kilda and we would sit outside in the centre of the tram, and

it was pulling out at Flinders Street and he pulled my leg. He was standing in the safety zone, but I didn’t see him much. He went over to my sister’s. We used to go over there a lot, and he went over there and tried to get her to persuade me to come back to him. I said “No” and he eventually married someone else.

I wasn’t…I liked the company and going out but I wasn’t really that fussed about having a permanent boyfriend after that. It cheesed me off a bit. But as I say I was very intolerant of drink.

It may have, I don’t know. But even during the war years they would go down to the hotel and a lot would get drunk and that didn’t appeal to me. I couldn’t see any sense in it. Going on like that. So I didn’t mix with those who were that way inclined.

It was the same even when I went to the WAAAF reunions. There were some that liked to drink more than others. If they behaved themselves it didn’t worry me in that way, but I just didn’t want it myself. I’ll have a drink of wine or that now, but not to the extent that you don’t know what’s going on around you. I always suffered with very

bad migraines, so whether that may have been a no-no too. I had enough headaches without inflicting it upon myself with alcohol. It may have been from the Baptist upbringing, I don’t know.

Very, very hard to get. The Americans always had silk stockings, but of course we were supposed to wear these drab lisle stockings. They were an awful colour. You could buy a very fine lisle stocking in the stores. You couldn’t buy nylons or that.

Or silk stockings because nylon wasn’t really in then. Silk stockings were completely out. A friend of my husband’s was able to get me some silk stockings for a wedding. I used to buy these lighter lisle stockings to wear to work but

I had to be careful that I didn’t have them on when there was a parade because WAAAF officers were very strict on you wearing service stockings.

Lisle, but they were very heavy. They didn’t do much for you. We used to have these other stockings

which I would always wear if I went out at night. I could have got into trouble. There were a lot of things I could have got into trouble for I suppose. We played softball at the barracks and there was only this one little room upstairs for the WAAAFs to change in,

and have a shower in. The men’s ablutions were out the back and they were near the store. So one of the storemen used to stand guard at the men’s quarters and I would sneak in there and have my shower, and get back to work quickly that way. Fortunately it was only an airmen’s quarters,

but they had all these showers there. The airmen lived in the Nissan huts. Bill used to stand on guard for me while I went in and had a shower. So I could have gone up on a charge no doubt for that.

No. I got reprimanded for rolling my sleeves up in the drab uniform when we were on parade and waiting in the sun. I was always after whatever sun I could get hold of. I got reprimanded several times for that. I always said that being at the end of the alphabet as we were, Thomas, I only went up one letter when I got married.

But you were at the end of the line for all injections and parades and everything else. It wasn’t too good sometimes. You would see the WAAAF’s fainting ahead of you when they were going for injections. You were at the last of the line. Being at the end of the line I always thought they should start at the other end occasionally.

The parades were…we weren’t on parade everyday. Not down at the Deaf and Dumb. I think Monday morning may have been parade day and then we’d march around

down High Street and Punt Road and home again. That kept us in trim I suppose. Or kept us in order.

That was later in life.

About 1960 or 1970. But we went to the Railway sales in Spencer Street at one stage

then they moved them out to Spotswood. You went over the Westgate Bridge and into Spotswood and the railway sales were around there. You could go and look at what they had on the Monday and the sale was on the Tuesday. So you would see if it was worth going down to.

You would pick up mattresses and billiard tables. We finished up camping and our camp was full of railway sale stuff. We couldn’t have afforded to go otherwise.

Yes, and of course there’s no railway sales now I don’t think because they don’t carry that much stock. Everything is in containers. But they would have all these umbrellas because people leave umbrellas in trains. Cases…they would sell cases of clothing and you’d never know what was in them. We never bought any unless it was a very good case.

In that case you would buy the case. Materials and all. It was such a mixed grill of stuff. Because my husband had been in the estate business and his father had been an auctioneer, he had a great liking for sales. So in later life we indulged ourselves

by going to a lot of auctions and filled in a lot of time that way. Bill got in the way of going to auctions too. He’ll go to auctions now. He absolutely loves an auction. He’s fishing around on computers and that these days. Surprising what he goes to. Swap Meets and all. So he’s had it in his blood because my mother

used to go to auctions and she used to be friendly with the auctioneer. And she would often go and start…you know, if he was asking for a start on something, Mum would start offering him so much. A lot of crockery that we’ve got now that Mother …

…they were plates and things that he had given her for helping with the auctions. He’s really had it drilled into him. It’s in the blood I would say.

Yes. He was in charge of the Service Police when we moved down to the Deaf and Dumb Building. I met him down there.

That’s where it blossomed from. No one knew that we were going out together. He was on different shifts to what I was on. We managed to…they had a New Year’s party in the Rec Room and we were all asked to go.

The WAAAF officer was running it and she had us playing two’s and three’s – can you imagine? Stopping the music and all this sort of business. Sam got sick of that so he just grabbed me and we started dancing and that was the end of it. Any rate he took me home from that and that’s where it started.

We were only engaged for three months when we got married. There was no reason to wait. But as I say a lot didn’t know that we were going out together. There had been a WAAAF dance, not from the Southern Area,

but at Green Mill, or the Trocadero as it was called. I asked him to go to it, and he said “No, he wouldn’t go to it because some other WAAAF had asked him to go and he had knocked her back”. So he said “He wouldn’t take me and be seen there.” So I was a bit shirty on that I can tell you because I wanted to go.

But as I say he wouldn’t go because he had knocked someone back, but later on we went there. It was continuous dancing and he just danced me into the floor. I had to cry for mercy in the end. My feet were that sore. Then we were married and …

… we were married in the July and he went away in the August.

Three months.

But I had known him for six months before that. So it was about 12 months before we got married. Even my sister didn’t know.

She knew I was going out with him. She was 12 years older and her husband always wanted to inspect whoever I went out with. He would be critical of who I would be going out with. I went out with a chap one evening. They were great dancers, and we were going to a Masonic Lodge dance.

This Clem offered to go with me, to partner me. May and Bert picked him up because he lived at Clifton Hill and the dance was up at Moreland. Anyway, they took him home and that was the last I saw of him. They warned him off. They thought he was a bit too old for me and something else. So I said, “I’m not going to let them know who

I’m going out with.” It was my niece’s birthday and we had got engaged on the Saturday morning, so I went out and said “I’ve got engaged today.” That was a bit of a shock to them although they had known I was going out with him because they had a holiday home down at Carrum and I

had leave and I was down there. I rang him up and he came down to the beach with me. They didn’t know things were as far advanced as they were.

Cut it out!

No. It was rather funny at one stage. The store we were in was up high and I was looking out the window one day and he was around the area and he threw a kiss and I said to the other girls,

“He’s a cheeky bugger, isn’t he.” That was really the start of things. The proposal. His father…my father knew of his father and Sam’s family had been

interested in Red Setters and a friend of Dad’s trained them. So that was a connection, and my Aunt that you saw the photo of with the dogs, she was in the Doggy world and Sam’s father showed the dogs as well as hunt with them, so my Aunt knew the family too. So it wasn’t that the family was unknown.

Yes. It was a different lifestyle then to now.

Yes. Well there was none of this going off and living together and

anything like that. My mother and father were strict in one way – I had to be home by 12 o’clock. We would often walk home…from the Deaf and Dumb we would walk along St Kilda Road from the city when we changed

shifts. He wanted me to stop out one night and see the sun rise and I said, “No, I wouldn’t have been able to go home.” My mother would have been there waiting. Even when I was going with this other chap and we had the car, when it was getting late, Mum would come out

and switch the front veranda light on and off. Tim said to her, “Are you signalling for the aeroplanes to come in and land?”…They used to fly over our place to Essendon. He would always say “Are you signalling for the planes?”, but it was a signal for me to be inside.

I think there were always a few who…and particularly in the WAAAF’s, we had some who were from interstate. They were younger and they didn’t care who they went out with. I was that bit older.

When Sam went away I never went out. Only out to see his father and over to my sister’s. But I never went dancing or anything like that during the time he was away. I was busy doing that supper cloth that I had to get finished before he came back.

A lot of them… and of course a lot got into trouble. But you get that no matter where you go I think.

Well, unfortunately Sam saw a bit of the bad side of things.

At one stage there was a couple of WAAAF’s who had had abortions and they were tossed out. They might have come to grief in a park or something like that. It was a bit upsetting and you would always have some that would play up.

I can remember one very bad time. Sam was very upset because he had to go view this girl. They found her and she was dead. Some of them I think…the freedom they had when they joined the service.

As I say even these days it happens, so it’s always about.

Yes. Bad abortions. But I didn’t know of anyone who had left the service because of having

children out of marriage or that. I didn’t know of any that way. There were married women in with us. My friend who worked with me in the store, she had been married eight years. No family and it was her husband who was in the essential service and he wasn’t allowed

in, but Chris had been married eight years. I can remember her saying “She never wanted to be thirty because she had no family.” She wanted a family before she was thirty. She must have got out about the same time as I did. We kept in touch and she rang me and “Told me she was pregnant”, and I said, “So am I.”

Her daughter was born in the January and Rod was born in the December.

Yes. We needed coupons and my

sister-in-law she taught at…she was Headmistress at Prahran Technical School. I got friendly with the sewing mistress at Prahran Tech and she taught me how to smock. So I had an extensive wardrobe of viola smocked dresses

which were turned into romper suits because I had a boy. That was my teaching for smocking babies wear and of course Mother was a great knitter so she made plenty of little singlets and that. We bought flannelette and made our nightgowns and everything like that.

I had made that many for my first baby, I didn’t have to make anything for when my daughter came along. My sister-in-law said to me, “You’re not going to have a daughter come into the world without clothes of her own”, when I told her I had enough from the first that I would never use. So I had to make baby dresses for her.

I had Ros…I didn’t know I was having Roslyn until I was four and a half months pregnant. I was breast feeding Rodney and that was a myth that you couldn’t fall pregnant while you were breast feeding. We found that was a no-no.

So Ros always said.

She was only a four and a half month old baby. When she went to the Education Department they asked her if she was full time and all this sort of business and she said, “No, I was only four and a half months.” But having the two of them pretty close together…Rod was only 14 months old when Ros was born. So I had my pigeon pair.

She was like a little China doll and he was so fair. She was our darkie.

Haven’t you. They would say if you had a boy and a girl it was a pigeon pair and that was all you needed.

Haven’t you. Yes, that was quite a well-known saying.

Then I had Jeffery and then Bill.

I sewed all their clothes. Until they went to Technical School and we found that Fletcher Jones trousers for the boys, you could let them down and they were very well wearing. I suppose they were expensive to buy in one way, but they did always

look nice. I made all their clothes up until they were 11 or 12. Boy’s trousers with fly’s in them and all this sort of business because there were no zips then, only button holes. Jackets, bathers.

The two boys were very fair, so I made bathers and little shirts the same as the bathers to keep them covered so they didn’t sunburn. I made Roslyn’s clothes until she was about 21. Then she started to sew for herself

and was a much better sewer than I was. She finished things in a fastidious way. When they were younger I was more fastidious. Now I make the occasional thing but I said “If I get to this stage in my life, I’ll buy what I like

and see what it looked like on.” Often you would make something and it didn’t turn out the same way as you wanted it.

Even like after I was married, I had to make do with a lot of things because we never had much money after the war.

When we tried to establish ourselves on the farm, we had the sheep to start with but we were only getting two cheques a year - when you sold your lambs and when you sold the wool. With a growing family that’s when Sam decided we would have to do milking or something like that so we had income every month.

It wasn’t really until we sold the land…as I told you his sister died in September and his father died in the November and left one sister on her own in the farmhouse. Coming up here after the war, Sam had the 75 acres next door but we couldn’t get the material to build a house.

So we lived in the old farmhouse and his brother married and that took a lot of time for us to get enough material for him to build a house. We lived there and it wasn’t really until…Sam had to sell his land to pay the probate when his sister died. It wasn’t until we sold the land that we had any spare money

and that’s how I came to get this house after we had been married for 40 years. We lived in the old house all that time. Fortunately it’s all flat this house and it was a godsend when Sam was so sick because I couldn’t have managed him in the old house. This was really excellent for me to manage him. So as it turned out it was a blessing.

I’m sure if I had built a house when we first came up here to live then I wouldn’t have got one after 40 years.

Well,

that was about when I made my debut when the polio outbreak was. My sister had a baby and she lived at Alphington and she was very reluctant to come over to Brunswick and they had the City Mission opposite us as a Polio Centre. They were bringing them there for treatment and May was very, very worried.

She used to bring her own pots to cook the child’s meals in. She wouldn’t use Mum’s pops or anything. It was a scary time. A lot of people never got over it. As I say, we made woollen stockings…I’ve still got the size 8 needles here. I’m trying to teach my grand daughter.

We had to knit with 8 ply wool. We made these long stockings because they had wooden splints up their legs and we made these long socks to go over it. They were like a sailor’s sock. There was no heel in them. You just had the toe and you would pull them up over these splints. That was a very worrying time.

They had high cane prams with big wheels on them. They wheeled them around and that’s how they transported them around. Billy was a very sick baby and we often went to the Children’s

Hospital and we would see the little children almost crucified on these frames. Although Bill was very sick we were glad we didn’t have some of the problems that you saw there. That was the only bad epidemic that

we had until about 1957 when we had the Asian Flu. That was a very bad time. I lost my father with that. Sam’s brother got very sick with it and that was the end of him farming with Sam and that’s when I had to step in and help with the farm work.

I became a farmer properly then.

No not really. It just seemed to come out of the blue. I don’t think we had anything extra special that we had to do.

Not like the flu after the First World War. That was very bad because they turned everything into hospitals with that plague that they had then in 1919.

No I can’t remember

really. May was very cautious of using anything. I think she thought the whole area was contaminated. She was very, very cautious about any of the germs that might have come across the road.

Yes, it was frightening because

they didn’t know as much about it then as they do now. Later on, after I was up here and married, I would go down to the Dame Mary Herring Centre at Malvern and take children that were in callipers and all that sort of thing for swimming.

The Dame Mary Herring Centre never had access to a pool. Loralla had their own pool to put the people in. The Dame Mary Herring Centre had to go up to Hawthorn, somewhere near the Hawthorn Football Ground to a private pool. I went there once a week

helping until my arthritis got too bad. I couldn’t do the callipers up. You had to be able to undress and dress them. We were trained in the Hallowell method and taught them the exercises. It was amazing what they could do in the water that they couldn’t do on land.

So after my arthritis became very bad I just couldn’t manage the callipers, the buckles. So I had to give that away. It was very rewarding, or I felt it was. I was contributing something.

I think because the children lived out here and we had to go into Pakenham,

to take them to the things. I was very conscious of what Pakenham lacked and what I had when I was growing up. So the initial thing was the swimming which I started to teach in the dam. Then Sam got involved with the Boy’s Youth Club and

I helped start a girl’s one. So we had the girls on a Monday night and the boys on a Wednesday night. And from that it flowed into the Swimming Club when we got the big pool. Rodney got involved in the Young Farmers. He was in that

until he had to retire because of his age. They had an age limit. And he would act as an adjudicator for their debating team, so he continued in that for many years. He was in the Pakenham Rural Fire Brigade and was Captain of it during the 1983 fires. I didn’t see him for five days when that was on.

He was involved with the Pakenham Show, with the sheep division. He was a steward there for many years. He served a term as President. So he was always involved in that side of things with the community. Roslyn obtained her Award of Merit in the swimming. She was more scholastic. She didn’t play basketball.

Jeff was an all rounder. He played cricket, tennis, football. He played finally for Richmond Under 19 Premiership year in 1968. He was asked to be put on the senior list and he was playing a

practice game before the season started and one of the senior chaps, Mike Reem ran through the back of him and damaged his back and that was the end of his football career. When he went over to America he took on cross country skiing. He could do that but he couldn’t run or anything with his back.

They wouldn’t operate on it. If he had been a labourer, the orthopaedic man from Richmond said they would have operated, but he was training as a civil engineer and he wouldn’t be doing heavy lifting, so they preferred to leave his back as it was. But he still carries a bad back to this day.

His father with a bad back. His mother with a bad back, and he had a bad back. He didn’t have much chance did he? Bill, unfortunately had been a sick baby. His condition meant that when he was 19 he lost his leg. But he was always interested in motors and as a little boy he

would have his aeroplanes and boats which had motors in them. He would struggle down to the beach with his hoppy leg and get the motor going on the beach. People would be gathered around to see these boats running around in the water. Still to this day he loves motors. He trained as a draughtsman,

which we thought would help him with the leg condition. We were at a railway sale and he came down to Dad and I and he said, “Do you mind if I give up the draughting, and go as a tyre representative?” We said “We didn’t care what he did so long as he was happy.” The local vet

drove a mini minor in the motor racing and Bill finished up making a trailer and going to these meets with Alex. Just before he had his leg off he came home very proud one day and told us “He had been able to throw the clutch on the racing car.” So when he went to work for Bridgestone, as a tyre

consultant and he used to take a very big van to all the motor races. He was very involved with Peter Brock. He had a speciality of grooving the tyres from the slick tyres that they used when it was dry. If it looked like being wet the next day he had to groove the tyres. So he would be up all night

and he would always…at that time we had a video, and I’d have to video the race meeting, so he could see it when he came home because he never saw much of the race. He was always doing tyres and changing tyres. He still can be going along somewhere and say that tyre needs changing.

When he got very ill he had to leave. But before he would go round and check transports that had fleets of trucks. As I say he still has to keep an eye on the road.

As I say, he’s still mad on motors. He is fixing up a slot car for his son at the moment. Rejuvenating an old Monaro. He keeps all the motor mowers in check because I can’t do the garden or the mowing now. His wife does all the mowing of the lawns

for me. We keep him busy with mowers. So they all turned out pretty good kids.

(NO VISION. AUDIO ONLY)

No.

Well I was pretty pregnant. That was in August and I was six months pregnant. So I didn’t join in the celebrations

really. I was happy that it was over but that was something that I missed by not being in the service. Where they would have thrown their hats in the air and been very happy about it, I was just happy that it was over and hoping that Sam could get out. But they wouldn’t let him out

until the following April. He had to stay in and wind things down. So that was an experience I didn’t have.

That was when I was a child at school. They used to have Empire Day which was in May I think.

No. As I say it was always Empire Day and the theatre was called the Empire Theatre. It had this roof that they opened up to let the light in, but I always went there until I was about ten. When we moved down to

Lygon Street we never had them at the other schools that I went to. We would still go to the Lygon Street pictures of a Saturday night and things like that.

Down near Glenlyon Road. There was a grocer shop on the corner

and then there was another shop and then there was the Lygon Street Theatre. So I don’t know whether that’s still there.

Well we used to walk down there to catch a bus over to Westgarth Station and we’d catch the train

to Alphington to go over to my sister. Sometimes we’d catch a bus down Blyth Street. It would go over to Separation Street, but that was a longer walk. It was easier to go by train to Alphington

Station. May lived down near the river. I used to go and stay with them on the weekends because I was 14 when she was married. I had joined the Alphington Swimming Club and we used to swim over in the river. They had a couple of diving boards in the river.

A couple of years ago I heard them say on the air that they “Were trying to re-establish it to get it back.” There was a bit of a bend in the river where they could cross with steps down into it…for the children who couldn’t swim and where they could play. We had the two diving boards and the

club had…we were across the river…we had to swim across the river again for the club races. There was an old tree over there that we used to climb and dive into the river.

Yes. I can remember…I was working

and I’d go Saturday afternoon and stay with May and Bert and they’d take me home. We had a lot of fun with the races - you were

(VISION BEGINS) handicapped. And of course if you broke your time by so many seconds then you were out.

I wasn’t…I won races and things but I wasn’t a good swimmer by the standards of Brunswick Pool. It was nothing. There was one girl and she wouldn’t…she put her times in but no one at the Club had taken her times and she started off in this freestyle race.

She was across the river and turned to come back before I was allowed to start. Of course she well and truly broke her time and I can remember the fuss there was over that. She was disqualified because of that. I won by default. I’ve still got some little cups in there that I won for diving,

swimming, breast stroke, freestyle and that. That went on for many years. You were saying about the Brunswick Baths. I went back there during the war. I wanted to go for a swim. The men were in the ladies pool and everything. Any rate, I dived in and I got a kick in the stomach

and someone else kicked me in the back. I swam across the pool and got out. It was so congested. You couldn’t swim. You looked for a spot to dive in and that was it. So that was the end of the Brunswick Baths. But I had many, many happy years swimming there.

Not that I was aware…none of our boys came back injured from the Middle East. I had my one cousin who was taken prisoner of war. The main ones that I really did see

were boys who came back as air crew over in England. They came back to headquarters and some of them were pretty badly burnt. You felt that you were amongst it when you saw them. Unfortunately,

being at headquarters the parents of deceased often had to come and get their belongings. That was rather a harrowing experience. I mean you were aware of what was going on with other people. Not like on the station. I’ve got that history of the lass that was down at Laverton.

They were involved in packing chutes and having to wash the casualties. Having to wash and repair the chutes and fold them up. They saw a lot of accidents and fatalities. But at headquarters we didn’t see much.

That was fortunate, or I think it was. I don’t have the horrors of that to carry with me.

No. They were officers. Lowly ACW’s [Aircraftwomen] or corporals didn’t talk to the officers. We saluted them and got on. And working out in the store we didn’t see a great many.

Yes. What it was. Fortunately, none of my friends were injured during the war. Since I’ve been out I’ve met different ones who were

injured and different things like that. In the corvettes and the Navy and that. But I didn’t have any harrowing experiences.

No. Not amongst my immediate family or friends.

My cousin who came back from the prisoner of war camp, well he’s in a very bad way now. It has played on his mind. My youngest brother didn’t go on the Kokoda Trail although he was up in New Guinea.

A lot of the chaps, even though they didn’t go overseas…I can remember Sam telling me of one experience. There was a little island off Darwin where they had airmen, whether it was a radar station or not I don’t know. But the boat which was supposed to be taking them supplies hadn’t

called, and when they were brought back to Darwin he said “They were just starved.” He said “They were just like hungry dogs. They had forgotten all about them. They had just been left. They were things that airmen suffered but they weren’t classified as overseas duties.”

There’s the things…my eldest brother, he was in some very remote parts of Australia and I think sometimes he suffered more than Max did by going to New Guinea. But he wasn’t classified as overseas service and I thought that was a bit of an injustice. And I still do.

Heart broken. We had the parents who came to Southern Area. There wasn’t the camaraderie in the Air Force. There may have been overseas when they were in an air crew, but

the airmen and the WAAAFs in general were single postings. You weren’t posted from one station to another, which meant you were meeting up with different ones all the time. You weren’t in a group and go as a group from place to place. That’s where I think those who were on a station

did have some of that camaraderie that we missed. I was speaking to a friend, Edna Trewin and she had been down at Laverton and had been a friend of this Linda that I had first met on the rookies course. She didn’t know that I knew about her or anything.

She said “We worked in the store near them” …As I say we didn’t really come across the casualties. I met up with a lot of it after because I was a regular visitor at Heidelberg with Sam.

He developed diabetes and went blind with cataracts and during the different visits…every week we headed out to Heidelberg. I used to take him because if the Government sent a car for him they would come about seven o’clock

in the morning, and perhaps he wouldn’t get home until seven o’clock at night. If they had someone else in the car that had to go for treatment, you’d have to wait until everybody who went was treated and the others would just be hanging around there for hours after. I’m afraid Sam wasn’t very tolerant

of that sort of thing. He would like to get it over and done with and come home. I used to say we could just put the car on the road and it would just head for Heidelberg. There was a diabetes clinic and eye specialist and X-rays and different things like that. It was just continuous during the last years.

Well, they were all different ones there for treatment. There was this one chap who was blind and he was such a big powerful man. In the diabetes clinic there were such a lot who had lost limbs and it was

always at the back of Sam’s mind that he might lose his limbs with the diabetes and that. It was a sad experience to see them deteriorating. You’d go out there and there would be four or six in the ward and then the next time you’d go out there would only be four.

But that’s life.

Very frightening.

When Colinsky or some name like that from over at Royal Park…Sam…one of the murdered women was the wife of one of the service policemen, and so it hit home.

You didn’t go out where you might run into trouble. We always went with a group and having the tram stop right outside my house,

I was quite sure about being able to get home safely if we went out by tram. We were cautioned. But you had to know who you were going out with. And of course the Americans,

they were so well dressed to what our people were. They used to call our boys the Blue Orchids. Menzies’s Blue Orchids and of course the army used to call them that. They all got on well together. The Americans used to come down and play softball down

on the oval at the Deaf and Dumb. So on the station we always had a good game of softball for them for recreation. They used to run around Albert Park Lake for exercise. Sam was always very athletic

and there was a runner, Dick Crosby. Sam had been in the Essendon Harriers and he used to go running with Dick at lunchtime. He got halfway and said, “This is too far I’m going back.” Sam said, “Well you’re half way, you may as well keep going because you’ve got as far to go back and you have to go

forward.” Southern Area had a football team and I used to follow them of a Sunday. They would play a training group.

No, not really. Not in my travels. No.

Our boys were pretty sour on the girls who went out with the Yanks.

Well we had one lass in the store who went out with them. She became very involved with them. But in the majority we kept to ourselves with our own

men. As I say with the army, when the boys came back from the Middle East, I had them out home. Mum would always say she would have them back home when they came back. Mother prepared meals for them and that.

As a matter of fact I had four of them out for tea the night before I got engaged to Sam. I said, “Well, we always said they would be asked out to home for a meal when they came back.” But we were just good friends. That was it.

Oh yes. For Royal Park, to go around that area. You were warned not to go out because you just never knew when

it was going to strike again. You had to be cautious with everybody you went out with because you didn’t know everyone. I suppose some of the airmen could have been as bad. You just didn’t know. It was unfortunate

but as I say it was scary because we were aware it was so silently happening. I wouldn’t say we were frightened to go out because you just had to keep going out. Coming home from work it could have happened. My parents were very

concerned about me going out at night or anything like that. I think that’s what prayed on Mum’s mind when she had the heart attack. Worrying about what could happen to you.

I can’t really recall just exactly what happened in those times.

I had had my feet reconstructed in the February and the Darwin trip was in June and I just got through the OK from the

doctor to go on the Darwin trip. You had to book in months and months ahead, so I had been…it was really the first reunion out of Melbourne that I had been to, because I wasn’t able to go to…I went to all the Melbourne reunions, but I never went interstate because I had the

four children and trying to work a farm, and I just couldn’t leave four children to go. When…like Sam had died, and I was free to go to Darwin, and Val Chamberlain who lives up at Beaconsfield…her husband died a month before Sam,

so I would take her down to WAAAF headquarters for the reunions and social days and that, and I didn’t meet her until after the war. So she said, “We’ll go to Darwin.” So we booked to go to Darwin and it was absolutely out of this world. It was all ex-service women. It wasn’t just

Air Force and the organization was just remarkable. It was just a credit to them. I was anxious to go to Darwin because that’s where Sam had served. They had these big buses which they took us everywhere in. We went to Adelaide River for a church service.

Out to the war memorial and the cemetery. We had a day at Darwin races and that was a great show. A very big reunion dinner at Marrara or some name like that.

A recreation room it was, and they had all the cadets waiting on the tables. Friends, Brian and Pat Saunders had travelled up from Western Australia to Darwin by car. Brian took us to different spots in between the reunion that we

were able to go to that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. We went to the casino. Well, that was the first casino I had every been to. Poor Brian wasn’t allowed in because he had shorts on. So I sat out in the foyer with Brian because he wasn’t allowed in with shorts. We had gone to Mindil Beach, a market

on the Thursday or Friday night because it was a special night. Val and I had arranged after the reunion to go on a tour from Darwin to Broome and we went …so after the reunion we went there. We had a marvellous time. It was really a credit to whoever organised it.

Nancy Wake was there as a celebrity. We went to the …one of the clubs put on a special BBQ night and BBQ’s were all around this big arena and it was absolutely wonderful. I was very pleased to have had it and we had such a wonderful trip from Darwin to Broome. We went to Kakadu Park.

I went up in a plane, a light plane there. We went to Litchfield Park. The coach driver had worked as a stockman up there on stations, so he knew the area very well and was very conversant.

We went to the Ord River, and Lake Argyle and we went for another plane trip over the Bungle Bungles. We went right across and the Kimberley is just so majestic. The colouring you just couldn’t capture it on the camera.

We finished up in Broome and flew from Broome to Perth and then home again. At Kakadu we went out on the river and they had all these crocodiles which they fed. And from the boat they would have a

pole with bits of meat and they had all these different crocodiles, different sizes and that. I came away and didn’t want to see another crocodile in all my life.

To those who have been on the stations and that. I didn’t feel I got a lot out of the reunions as a lot did.

There was only one other friend that I had met who was still about and I was in contact with her during the years. It wasn’t like going to a reunion and meeting someone you knew years and years ago. OK it was the company of Val and Edna

and there was half a dozen or so of us. I had never been to Sydney until 1997. I had never been to Sydney. I had been into Arthurton to see Jeff at one stage when he was there. But I had never been to Sydney. “Oh, you’ve got to come to Sydney Reunion.” That was at Darling Harbour.

That was another experience because we went out on one of the boats on the harbour. A cruise on the harbour and went on several tours while we were there and this Brian and Pat, they were there

with us. Of course we went to another casino. Val and them had friends that they could go to and when they had the reunion in 1999 in Hobart, I went over there, and we did a tour with Coach Tours down the east

coast down from Launceston to Hobart before the reunion started. So I saw a lot of Hobart and Tasmania. We went to Port Arthur and all that. So to have the companionship of friends that I had met during the war

…so we all met up and had a good time.

Yes. But I did miss a lot. I always went to the Melbourne reunion. The first one they ever held was in the North Melbourne Drill Hall. Most of the girls

at Southern Area were interstate girls, so it wasn’t until…then there was one in Queens Road, then they had another one at the Government Building at Ascot Vale at the showgrounds. In 1991 they had a big one for 50 years at the Southern Cross. You had to book it at these things

12 months ahead. Val’s husband was ill and Sam was ill, so we only booked in to go to dinner. And they died…Charles died in October and Sam in November, and the reunion was in March, so we were able then to try and get a booking in Melbourne where everyone was booked out. I rang

the Southern Cross to see if they had any vacancies and we were able to get a room there on the Saturday and Sunday nights. So that meant we could go to the rest of the reunion. We missed out on the cocktail hour on the Friday night. So we stayed at the Southern Cross and we didn’t have far to go to the dinner. It was a great night, fifty years. But as I say, the earlier reunions, Val had

had been over to Perth. Apparently when they went to these reunions they also did a tour, and this time they went to Perth up to Singapore. But I say, financially and everything else, I wasn’t able to go to anything like that. Four children to rear and farm to help run.

As I say I’ve made up for it in the last years. I went to the last one over in Adelaide but I wasn’t able to go to the one that’s just been in Alice Springs. I would have liked to have been able to go to that but I wasn’t far enough advanced after my knee replacement.

I don’t know. They had difficulty after the Hobart one. The Hobart one was going to be the last. There was a lass in Hobart and she said she “Would keep them going in Hobart”, but Adelaide came to the party. The Alice Spring’s one was organised from Sydney.

They usually announce at the reunion where the next one will be. They’re every two years. But haven’t heard. The numbers are dwindling. Even Pat who went to the reunions with us, she’s gone.

The numbers are going down. We always went to the WAAAF’s Christmas Dinner and Birthday in town, but then they started…perhaps the last three or four years, they had them in the daytime because

a lot couldn’t go out at night.