Australians at War Film Archive

Well, I was born in the inner suburb of Sydney, Rozelle, and after, during my primary school years, I learnt to play guitar with the encouragement of my mother,

who paid for the lessons and from that day on I knew I had a will to be a musician and an entertainer and that’s exactly what I did. So the highlights would be, definitely at twenty years old going to Vietnam and entertaining the troops, appearing at the Opera House in the 1980s, becoming involved with the

booking and engaging of entertainers within the club industry, and meeting some of the world’s best. They’d be the highlights of my life. Apart from that, my close family.

Both my parents were migrants,

that were here before the war [World War II]. They moved from the country to inner suburban Sydney, and my father was a fisherman, had very little education, and as a result he would stretch his nets on the telegraph poles in inner Sydney and sell his wares door to door, such as prawns on a Saturday morning and all those things. Everyone was basically

poor in that area that I grew up in, and they were struggling for work in the early 1950s.

In Rozelle, in Wise Street, near the Sackville Hotel. I’ll never forget the embarrassment, my father stretching fishing nets on them, but he saw no problem with it at all.

No, no, I don’t ever recall having seen anybody doing it,

perhaps they did it closer to the wharves and the fishing boats.

I left there when I was eleven and we then moved to Lilyfield, which was another inner city suburb, not too far from Rozelle.

I remember the frustration of my parents with the lack of income,

a lot of welfare situations hadn’t been set up yet, for example, child welfare, child endowment and things like that had only just been introduced to assist parents. I remember the frustration of my parents with the lack of English, which soon diminished with their kids growing up in Australian schools. I remember the differences in the cultures,

being from southern Italy, the values that were taught to me and the values that I learnt at school were conflicting at times. Those are probably the memories that I have.

He came from Sicily,

and they, basically, he had very little education so he was depended upon to provide for the family by way of fishing, which most of the village people did. As a result when he was here, he could see the need to want to expand his education, although he never ever did. Life gave him that survival technique and various things he needed to get through.

For example, broken English, he soon learned the important words to communicate. He found out about the markets, he’d go to the markets and buy food for the family rather than buy from the local store, so every Saturday morning he’d go to the markets in Haymarket, buy fruit and vegetables, whatever he needed, and carry it in a sack on a tram home. My mother,

she was like anybody else I guess, in those days kept very busy with the home life, she had four kids. Once again communicating with neighbours, Australian neighbours, with food, introducing new cultures to the street. People were aghast that so much garlic, for example, was used in

food, that wine was served and all those sorts of things were just developing as a culture in Australia. Now of course, they’re everywhere.

Yes. Not necessarily solely. There were other Italian families there too, but I mean the curiosity of the kids for example. She’d say, “Look, come in for lunch and have lunch with my son,” and the kids would soon learn there was nothing wrong with salami on a sandwich.

Well, I can remember a situation when we went on holidays to Nambucca Heads, which was where my parents originally migrated to, and one of the neighbours knocked on the door and my mother was cooking. The Australian neighbour, she took a clove of garlic out of the bowl and eat it straight. She said, “I love this stuff, I don’t know why I’ve never had

any before”, and we realised that garlic was not used commonly in food. There was also, one of the other cultures that was conflicting was – not that that was conflicting – but one of the other cultures that was conflicting was the fact that we had been raised according to the Catholic Church, an interpretation of the Catholic Church, by the southern Italian

version, and we’d go to church in Australia, with a difference in what you could and couldn’t do within the church.

They weren’t necessarily dominated by the southern Italian practices but I take it from what my parents were doing in Sicily, it was important to go to church every

Sunday and it just happened to be a very, very Catholic country.

No, because they were both done in Latin, the difference was in the level of morality interpreted by say the English version of the Catholic Church, where we could communicate the balance of morality, but the Sicilian

morality was a lot stricter, sometimes to the point of being unreasonable. For example, what you would do unto your fellow man, ‘do unto others’ was really very important. If someone offends you, the level of sensitivity, in many respects I think it was a double

standard.

Yes, far more acute. The spirituality was almost as if they carried it with them every day of the week and every moment. Before they made any decisions there was always that fear there.

Well I think like any

person who is over-religious, you’d see that they’d be more accountable to God, for example, every day of the week and every minute of the day as opposed to somebody who’d think logically and not necessarily consider the moral result.

Fear of God, fear

of the Devil. My mother let me go to school on my own, but she always reminded me ‘that God is watching you’, so that fear, you grow up with that fear, and you think, “Gee, I really should worry about whether God is…God, are you looking at me?” That sort of thing, every day. I grew up with that and I think my family did too, my brothers and sisters.

Good question. The morality that I was exposed to at home was ‘fear of God’; fine, always to be looking respectable, looking respectable for the sake of those who might be looking at you.

The Sicilians have a term for that, it’s called figura [figure/’face’ (Italian)], which means ‘make a good impression’. And if you didn’t, then they’d fear that people would think badly of us, like immorally, because we were strangers, not me necessarily, I didn’t think I was, but they thought they were strangers in Australia.

Right up until they died about twenty years ago. They were always very, very aware of morality. Well, if you look at the morality of Australia, the importance of morality has declined. Well not declined, it’s diminished over the years. For example, I can remember in the 1960s when we all considered nudity in

movies as being immoral. If you look at it now, the language in movies and the language on television is, some people would say it has declined or diminished, the morality aspect.

Imagine those moralities in the 1950s and 60s,

doubly interpreted by southern Italians as being our culture having been deteriorated and then the diminishing of the morality seriousness along the way after about twenty or thirty years and that will give you some indication of how it’s… For example, when my parents died, my older sister started to go out a

lot more, but it was considered immoral for a lady to go out on her own or with friends, part of that interpretation is the island mentality I think too.

Sicily.

Well, I believe their personalities came about

as a result of their coming to a new country. My father was a very basic man. He loved basic things, food, wasn’t a drinker, wasn’t a smoker, but he loved food, boats. I’ve inherited a lot of his love of boats and the ocean. My mother was a very strict person, and I think

that came about guarding the children’s morals, as we’ve just discussed. Her personality was, you could see that she was frustrated by her marriage. I think my father didn’t make the grade. They separated after some time. My father went back to Nambucca Heads and lived up there until he died. I think her personality was coloured by the frustration in her own marriage, perhaps he didn’t make the grade and perhaps she expected too much

of him.

I was a little boy I’d say about four when they separated. I still haven’t realised why he went and moved up there, so I didn’t have that role model for all of my life really.

I remember telling the rest of the kids that my father gave me a

gift of a pen knife, when in fact he didn’t. Because a lot of the kids had fathers, and they’d say things like, “Dad did this for me,” or “Dad did that for me.” But today, I think it made it closer to my own children, my own sons. I think I developed a rationality as a parent that I may not have had otherwise, if it hadn’t have been

for the drama of my own parents separating.

Well, I don’t lose my temper. If there’s a crisis or a problem, I look for a solution and I think I’ve told my kids, “Rather than concern yourself with the problem over and over again, let’s find a solution and activate it.” That kind of reasonable approach, I think they have developed as well,

rather than panic and the kind of panic that my own parents would. I think my mother would have gladly punched a front-row footballer [rugby forward] in the face if she could have. She was a very angry lady.

Silly little things like spillages and accidents, and I remember she bought me a new pair of pants, school uniform, and I fell over in the

playground and put a hole in them. I was too scared to take them home. We had to find another way of patching them so that she didn’t realise and of course, she saw them straightaway and was very upset. Those are the basic things that I think a lot of uneducated people tend to handle problems with anger, because they’ve reached their limit.

Rather than looking at the big

picture and handling the situation accordingly. But I see that every day.

Absolutely. She depended on my older brother and sister, who both had a good education and good jobs at the time to bring in as much money as possible, but to this day I think they were frustrated by the lack of income

themselves. They didn’t have the freedom of using all their wages for example. They had to give to my mother to help with the day to day living.

No, no. My parents were older when I was born than the average parents. I think my mother made headlines in the local paper. She was forty-nine when I was born, and

he – I can remember them both retiring on the old age pension when I was very young, so he had his pension and she had hers.

Ever since I can remember, he had a launch at Balmain. He had two at one stage. He used to go out independently, sometimes

in the middle of the night. He was constantly – as a child, I can remember him making his own nets. He always had the tools to make his own nets, dipping them in tar and bringing home loads and loads of fish. I often, I’ve been known to tell people that I still like seafood, but we’d eat like kings with no money, because he’d bring home things like lobsters and crabs

and oysters, especially oysters and mussels. Mussels is another thing that wasn’t commonly eaten in the fifties or sixties. It’s only more recently that they’re cooked in soups and things now.

No.

No, he didn’t. He used to fish both for the family and any excess, he’d sell

in the street, door to door. Some people depended on him coming every week. It was not pocket money, it was a living for him, and I think he eventually gave it away when he got a bit older, and worked on the wharves as a painter and docker, which was very common for the migrants then too.

Yes, all the time, yes.

Yes.

Yes. Once again with the culture of fishing being a means of supplying the family with food.

Not enough I feel. Mind you, my brother and sisters know a lot more about their life in Sicily than I do. We were all born

here. Because I was the youngest, I don’t ever recall them talking about their life in Sicily at all. In fact I’ve gone to great lengths at times to find out more about that. I know that my mother came from a well-to-do family and that my father was married before. His wife died and he came from a poor family, so that may have been

the cross to bear for my mother, who was very frustrated by his lack of education and that could have been the reason they separated, I don’t know.

They came on, as far as I know, on a cheap migration scheme and decided to set up a life in Australia. But mind you, a lot of relatives were already here and of course they correspond, and the relatives

may have said, “Well, come here and you’ll find it a better lifestyle altogether than the frustrations you’ve suffered in Sicily,” for all I know. My mother, I know, was sponsor to many other relatives who wanted to come to Australia. She took them in, and got them placed in homes and things, and eventually they bought their own homes.

Yes.

No, no, prior.

Pre-war.

I guess you could say that.

Yes I do. I think it was a

source of frustration for me then as it is now, because I often think in Sicilian, even though I’ve never been there. I think it’s more of an expressive language and I often have to think two cultures or two morals, automatically instead of

consciously doing it, sometimes happens that way. Even though I’ve found my identity in the entertainment, I still have that little conflict every now and then, but it’s not necessarily a problem.

Yes, I often look at things on television and think, “Oh, that’s just disgusting,” and other times I can look at it and think, “Well, it really is disgusting, but

I suppose it’s reality,” so there’s a kind of fantasy and reality conflict rather than, “should I be watching that?” That kind of thing. It’s not necessarily a problem.

What were the sorts of things that affected my life?

Well, a good example is sandwiches that my mother would pack for me to take to school. Often you’d say to the kid next to you, “What have you got?” and they’d ask you what you’ve got and I’d have veal cutlets on my sandwiches or preserved capsicum or eggplant, which was a source of embarrassment

for me, even though I loved it and still do, the kids would go, “Ooh, it looks terrible, what is it?” And all it was, was cooked eggplant; absolutely terrific these days, but not then.

Nobody made it like my mother did. It was absolutely terrific. So I’d often eat alone, very quickly.

Well we used to make fun of them at home. Strawberry jam, Vegemite, cheese with no relish on it, I would consider that very ordinary, you see.

Went to school at Rozelle.

I was very good at spelling in those days, and grammar. I left there and went to Pioneers Park Boys’ High School at Leichhardt, in the first year that that was open. It was there that I took on the cultures of, the influences of music. We had a very good music teacher who would encourage, once again away from the disciplines

of learning class, giving topics of music and to expand and go into pop music, which was very rare in the 1960s. Most schools wanted you to do what the curriculum said.

Folk music, understanding classical music more than…but certainly avoiding. I often got the impression it was the immorality of

pop music, because rock and roll was in, and the Beatles [English pop/rock group] were just coming in and it was, some people thought it was immoral in the 1950s. These days, it’s tame by comparison.

Patricia Boyd.

She had…I can remember one lesson, we hated music because we couldn’t associate with the classical music at the time. I remember one lesson where she introduced popular music, a Top 40 [contemporary list of popular songs in order of record sales] song of the time, and she asked us to analyse it, and I remember feeling very important, because I had probably more to say than the others, and probably

contributed more to that class and that was the beginning, I think, that I appreciated her efforts. She also encouraged - we started a little band from the high school kids - she also encouraged us to perform before the school assemblies and things like that. We had another teacher who encouraged us even more. He used to get us to play at his kids’ birthday parties and things like that.

I left school at fifteen, it would have been, I started to learn to play guitar at eleven. I didn’t really play until I got involved with the other kids at high school, so I would have been about thirteen.

Yes, the kinds of things that, well, I think it can be clearly defined in the kind of artists that were popular prior to rock and roll. They went from semi-operatic popular singers such as Mario Lanza [American Italian tenor/actor] from the movies, ‘cause the movies had the money to produce those wonderful sounds, orchestras and things like that. From Mario Lanza and

the Peter Dawsons [Peter Dawson, popular Australian baritone 1920s-40s] and the people who came from a classical background, an operatic background, and gradually moved it into popular music and then you had the crooners, such as in the early 1950s, Perry Como [American popular singer 1940s-50s], some of the best recording from Frank Sinatra [iconic American singer/entertainer 1930s-90s], and etcetera and etcetera. As Billy May [American band leader/arranger], who was Frank Sinatra’s arranger, said, “And then

the ‘wowsers’ with the tight pants and the three chords came into being,” and by that, I guess he was talking about Elvis Presley [iconic American rock and roll singer/actor, 1950s-70s].

Was it the wowsers? It might have been another term, but the…

No I can’t either, but I think that’s what he said, because he was talking about, I think he was sending it up more than anything, and saying the sophistication of a three-chord, tight pants

singer, rather than someone who’d come up through the technical education of music. Elvis came in, developed from the blues, black suppressed people of America, rock and roll was born with Bill Haley and the Comets [first popular rock and roll band] and etcetera and etcetera. And from then on, it was considered immoral by the

parents, but I have this little theory that every phenomena has been considered immoral by parents because they are a product of the times. When the times change, the parents don’t want to change, so the music becomes a token of those changes.

My parents were

of the opinion that I should be either working in a factory as a labourer to get a decent income, that music would never amount to anything, and in my case I think they were absolutely right. I’ve got a love of entertaining, but in this country, I mean I can, if I die tomorrow I can say I’ve had a great deal of personal satisfaction

from entertaining people all over the world, accolades and lots of acceptance, but I didn’t make any money out of it, because you can’t make money out of entertainment in Australia. You make money out of marketing and if someone’s not willing to market you in a big way, these days more than then, the least you can do is make some accessories to your normal income. So they wanted me to have a day job.

It’s the old story: get a real job.

I imagine art is, where any aspect of art is required, that there would be those doubts because it’s not a matter of just walking into a job. You have to create and music

is creating , the same as someone with a brush and paint.

We had quite a few. We had mostly American guitar players. Started out with the simplicity of Duane Eddy, who was popular at the time, the incredible complicated approach of, and

wonderful playing of Chet Atkins who influenced people to this day like Tommy Emmanuel. But then after doing all those things, I realised I had my limitations on guitar and was influenced more to sing. I got a job as a professional, we call it professional because with a musician if you’re working a full time living, then you’re a professional musician. I had a job working

in a band - in those days, all bands were working seven shows a week - in a pub in Sydney, the Civic Hotel, which was the roughest pub in Sydney, but we worked there seven shows a week.

Goulburn Street, yeah, yeah, it was rough.

Sailors, soldiers, prostitutes, fights, brawls, murders, but they

wanted to be entertained. That’s where I learnt. The band leader who taught me a hell of a lot, he said, “You have to sing to be in this band,” and I said, “Well, I don’t sing.” He said, “Well, you have to.” He gave me a couple of songs to sing, and he thought it was good enough to give me a Tom Jones song called, With These Hands, and I had to feature it in a floor show for all these people was incredible.

If they didn’t like you, they’d throw potato chips at you and things like that, and I sang With These Hands and there was a big high note at the end, and he said, “Well, I think we might start giving you some Tom Jones to sing,” so we did it from then on. I still do the Tom Jones songs but I’ve taken them down a few keys.

Once again, I often say it was incredible because we often, well just when I first started

going to school, it was at the end of World War II, well I was born at the end of World War II, but post-war, that racism was still there against the Italians, and I imagine against the Germans as well. I was often called ‘Dago’ [derogatory term for southern European (from Diego, Spanish for James)]. I didn’t ever know why, but I used to get very upset at being called a dago. These days it doesn’t worry me. They can call me what they

like as far as my origins go. I’m proud of them and that’s it.

It affected me badly, because I didn’t know whether to react and fight, whether to feel, to keep it inside, whether to tell someone, because my parents, and here’s where the little conflict came, my parents never ever taught me about racism. They told

me to consider that I was Australian, that I had Italian parents, there was nothing wrong with that and I should be proud of it. But they did never say, not once did I ever remember my mother saying, “Australians are a bad lot.” I got the feeling that they were very happy to be here.

No, I encounter more prejudice today

than I did then, because I look Middle Eastern somewhat, and as a result now I have more people saying to me, they call me ‘Saddam’ [after Saddam Hussein, former Iraqi president -2003], presumably because of the moustache, and as I get older, I look less and less like a young Australian of Anglo origins, and more and more like perhaps an Italian or a southern Italian.

But I get it more now than ever before, especially in the clubs with the drunks and even some of the kids.

I’m disappointed. I think there’s quite a number of things in Australia that have deteriorated from that aspect because of the worldly events. I can’t change those, so I live my life accordingly.

I don’t remember any encounter after primary school that I can say was based on any prejudices. Italians in, I imagine similar in the big cities in America, the Italians offspring in Australia were accepted after a while. I mean, you didn’t miss out on anything because you had an

Italian name, not that I know of anyway. But I don’t remember ever encountering any incident of prejudice after primary school, especially at high school. That did never happen. I think once I found my legs, my identity with music, that in some cases some of the kids that I was in high school with would be in awe of someone who played an instrument,

good or bad.

Yeah, I can remember, it still stays with me this particular incident.

I often reflect on that. I can remember a fellow, he was taller than me in primary school, probably in Year 6, who called me a dago and I punched him as hard as I could in the stomach. He

keeled over, recovered and then as I was walking away, he tapped me on the shoulder and did the same to me. And the pain and being winded and all that, he did exactly the same to me and it was there that I learnt a very important lesson, I felt what I had done to him, so I decided I would no longer hit anybody without thinking about what I

was doing. And that was one incident. There was another incident. Once again, Rozelle was full of Italians and there were a lot of problems there from the end of the war. I think the parents were a little bit coloured as to who their kids should play with and things like that, not necessarily in a major way, but some parents were reluctant to have an Italian kid.

Yeah, that happened a couple of times. It happened probably more to my brother who was a bit older, but to me it happened a few times where they were reluctant. I think it was just a lack of…ignorance, as I said, with time though that disappeared.

Well only as far as I know, the

Italians were allies of the Germans at one stage, even though Mussolini [Benito Mussolini, Italian Fascist leader before and during World War II] was killed by Italians, and I think they were prejudiced towards any of the Germans’ allies. I mean in time they lost that fear of the Germans anyway after the war. There were German migrants, I guess. Is that what you mean?

Neither had I. I knew nothing about it. It all ended when I was born, but I still had, I had my older brother used to explain these things to me, and say this is the reason that they were doing that.

Nino Culotta, yeah. [Humorous book by John O’Brien on experience of Italian migrant Nino Culotta]

That’s right, yeah, yeah, that’s a good example of what was considered or what was required to

humorise the thing rather than make it a serious event.

Oh sure. I mean if you have a look at the current series that was on TV [television] years ago, but more recently, Wogs Out of Work, I think they humorised the word ‘wogs’ [slang for Middle Eastern person]. I don’t think there’d be too many people who would consider the word ‘wog’ as being

offensive based on the fact that it all of a sudden appeared in the title of a play and is still appearing in things now. I always used to say to people, “I don’t mind you calling me ‘wog’, ‘dago’ or anything you like, as long as you smile when you say it.” And I often get called in good humour, ‘you wog bastard’.

I did find it difficult only from the point of view that I thought I was Australian. As I say to you, these days I have more and more people saying - I do a little act, I entertain on a Sunday at a resort and they’re senior citizens - and in

that act, I tell them the story about how I…I say to them how I often get asked what my origins are. Because people do, they come and say, the old ladies always say, “What country are you from?” I’ve had everything. One lady even said, “Japan?” China, Middle Eastern, Greek, because of the moustache, Italian. Very few people guess it. “I’m Australian,”

and they give a great big cheer and then I say, “almost,” and tell them the story about my father being a fisherman. But it is a conflict these days, because I often think in the back of my mind, to be honest, I often think, “Are they looking at me because they think I may be of Middle Eastern origin? Am I missing out on something because of this?”

And in fact, I don’t believe I am. I was at a play the other night, sitting in the audience, and Warren Mitchell [British comedian, best known as ‘Alf Garnett’] was the comedian, did a stand up comedy thing at the end of the play. He was talking to people in the audience, very funny man, and he made a remark to someone sitting in front of me, who was a female about, “You’re not going to hold us up are you?

You’re not going, you haven’t got a gun have you?” and I thought he was talking to me and I said, “No,” but he was talking to the lady in front of me. In the end when we met him out in the foyer, I said, “Were you talking to me?” and he said, “No, I was talking to the lady in front of you who looked as if she was going to kill me.” “Oh,” guilty conscience, not necessary. So a lot of it is all little bits and pieces that I go

back to that are not necessary. Lessons learnt.

Absolutely, yeah.

My

father was in the Italian Navy. He never ever spoke of it. There was a photograph of him on the wall, inlaid on a picture of his ship. He never ever spoke of that. My brother-in-law was a chef in the Italian Army and he never ever spoke about it. I don’t know why. Actually it’s something that’s just triggered in my own mind. I should speak to my sisters about it. They didn’t

ever, ever speak of World War II. I guess because my parents were here before World War II and I know for a fact my father wasn’t in the navy during World War II, he was here in Australia.

They were not interned. I’ve got friends whose parents were interned. I don’t know why they weren’t, perhaps it was because they

naturalised, or I don’t know. They weren’t interned. I don’t know the answer to that, because I’ve never discussed it with them, what sort of a time they had. My older brother, who’s much older, had a terrible time during the war, I know that.

Well he was going to school and going to high school, and because he had a name like Castelli

he was often, possibly persecuted because, I’m not sure to the extent of it but I know he was. He often used to say, “I had a terrible time during the war.”

No, no, I often used to learn about these things from movies and then go home and ask them about it

and they’d say, “Oh yes, Fascist regimes,” and little bits and pieces, but they would never discuss it. So I think I missed out on something there. I wish they were back here now, so I could say to them, “Look, what did you go through?” Because I didn’t enquire because I wasn’t necessarily interested and they didn’t ever discuss it.

Yeah, that’s a good topic. Firstly, I think that,

apart from the fact that it began to give me an identity in life, rather than all the confusion of my parents saying, “You should work in a factory”, it started to give me an identity, it started to give me a little bit of respect amongst my peers. But the affect of emotions through music started with me. I was at frustration point with my parents, and it was usually

over some difference in the cultures. I would lock myself in my room and pick up the guitar. It was like a friend and I could create visions of serenity or anger, ‘cause that’s what music does. And I discovered very early in life that I could relieve my tensions that way, and I think to this day even though friends of mine who are not in the industry of entertainment have died

already of heart attacks and things under stress, I think the reason that I keep fit is because I can vent those frustrations through singing and playing guitar, and I do it every weekend, so I feel comfortable with that. So emotions started to come in very early in the piece. Rock and roll is the ultimate thing for venting emotions, whether they be positive or negative.

Always has been, and that’s how I believe it came about. I mean, music today is far more angry than it was in the fifties [1950s], and in the fifties, it was far more angry than it had been in the past. But music is a form of, whether you’re a listener or a performer, is a form of venting emotions, better than any I’ve ever seen. Probably the reason we sing in church, probably the reason

that before we’re born, we listen to a heartbeat and, when we’re born, toddlers or babies often have rhythm that is suppressed by embarrassment as they get older. They don’t have that, they suppress it by way of embarrassment. What’s the word for that? It doesn’t matter.

The peer pressure that changes; my youngest boy used to dance like Michael Jackson when he was younger, until he was laughed at and stopped. But dancing, all those sorts of art forms are a release and music especially that I can vouch for. All those emotions that I held of the frustrations of parents separating, of unreasonable contact with parents, all those sorts of things,

were vented that way. I’ve often been heard to say that if I didn’t become a musician I would have been a delinquent - but it stopped me, it gave me a reason to exist.

Yes, I keep a lot of emotions inside, but as I say I vent them nearly every week.

I mean, I’m a very powerful singer. Whether or not I’m any good or not is up to the people who listen to it but I use a lot of power to get that out.

Yeah, they were good times. I worked last Friday night with an old time rock and roll band, and the

drummer was the drummer that we had at high school. The high school band came about by two brothers who were at Pioneers Park Boys’ High School. They were both very good guitar players at the time. They taught me a lot. We started a band. One of the brothers took up bass guitar and we copied the music of The Shadows, Hank Marvin and the Shadows [British rock and roll band, 1950-60s, backing Cliff Richard],

which was the trend for males. I still play a lot, well I don’t play a lot, I play one or two of Hank Marvin’s Shadows tunes these days, and I’ve discovered that most women don’t like The Shadows, but most men go crazy over it.

Musically yeah, on CD, but the men identify with that era when they all wanted to be a guitar player in a band like The Shadows, but the women don’t have an identification with

the show.

In those days, I don’t think most women wanted to be a lead guitarist in The Shadows, in fact there weren’t any women bands at all that I can remember, and I’m happy to say that’s changed now. So we copied the music of The Shadows. And I watched an interview the other night, which I’ve got on video, of Tommy Emmanuel, who said exactly the same thing, he doesn’t read music,

he copied the tunes of The Shadows, like we all did.

Yes, as a lead guitarist, playing the lead instrument.

Usually four like The Shadows, a rhythm guitarist, a lead guitarist, a bass guitarist and drums.

No, we had a singer, Bruce Halloran. He had

what we didn’t, he had the nerve to get out front and sing and he was quite good. He was a nice kid and he used to learn his songs but it was strictly Cliff Richard songs, because Cliff Richard had The Shadows as a backing band.

Yeah, that’s right. So he was a rock and roll idol from England and occasionally we’d put in an Elvis Presley song and maybe, and later on of course we went strictly for the

Beatles.

A hero he was, because one of the things we did was go to the Sydney Stadium to see these shows, ‘cause it wasn’t a matter of Friday night at the local RSL [Returned and Services League (club)] or anything like that, like they do now. The only time that we could ever see anything produced properly from the point of view of sounds and effects and audience reactions was Sydney Stadium, and I had an

older sister who used to take me to all the Sydney Stadium shows. And I’ll never forget the first time I saw O’Keefe, the most dynamic entertainer I’ve ever seen. In later years I worked with him and got to know him and of course he was an affected character, like so many superstars. I mean I read a lot of biographies. I’ve just finished a biography of Frank Sinatra’s valet. Now of all the things I’ve read, Frank Sinatra’s valet has given me an insight

into the real Sinatra at home, a devil of a man, but a perfectionist in his music and to this day very hard to beat those recordings in terms of quality.

O’Keefe was more or less a similar sort of personality, affected.

Yeah, it’s probably considered normal

to view a young person going through an identity crisis. I think rock and roll came out of those crises. If you consider the insecurity of a young person, not knowing whether to be what his parents want, that’s often a common story in biographies. O’Keefe was a rebel. He did all the things that rock and roll people were attached to

from the point of view of an image: he had the groupies, he wasted his money, he had the car crashes, he had the disasters, he had the accolades, he had all those things. So he was an affected person, because he wasn’t considered in the mainstream mould of stable people, something that’s common amongst entertainers. And I include myself there.

Yeah. I know all those guys and I still see the survivors of those bands

today. John Bogie, the drummer of the Joy Boys, is the entertainment manager at Ryde East Leagues Club. Dave Bridge, the guitar player, I often see him. All of those people are affected in terms of society today. I mean, Dave Bridge is broke; he hasn’t got a cent. He lives in a shed. Dave Bridge was my idol as a kid because he was the greatest guitar player, well his whole pop theme of being on

O’Keefe’s shows was that of being a wonderful guitar player, very well groomed, and today he’s not, he’s lost everything. He just rang me the other day, and he’s lost his licence ‘cause he was drunk on the road.

The lifestyle, yes, but I guess to summarise what I’m saying, an entertainer who’s a superstar like O’Keefe, as opposed to

someone like Col Joye, who was as you put it, more mainstream, more loveable by the parents because he didn’t seem to be as much of a wild man, is one of the wealthiest businessmen in Australia. He’s attached to the Jacobsons, as you probably know. His last name is Jacobsen. They have a large organisational group called ATA [ATA Artists Pty Ltd]; they import big shows.

I noticed in the news the other day that the Jacobsons have rendered themselves in the red, but his stability is obvious to those who wish to have a stable entertainer in front of them and he’s also a very wealthy man. O’Keefe was wealthy, but only through business rather than through entertaining. He was an unstable character. A lot of his friends these days are friends of mine.

He was a devil of a man, so to speak. He had his enemies because of that. If you’ve seen the series, the movie Shout, that will indicate those instabilities.

I had a stable

existence at home in terms of I had a house, a mother who adored me, gave me food, cared, although sometimes unreasonable, I thought then, living on the edge didn’t really appeal to me at all. What appealed to me was the love of the audience, the notoriety of being the world’s best guitar player; I’m talking about when I was very young.

I dreamed of getting up before an audience with my band and having them think it was terrific, those sorts of ego-centred thoughts were upmost in my mind, all the time. And I guess looking back on that, after a bit of study, I was probably screaming for love.

No, we did commercial jobs and birthday parties and all that sort of thing. We did – there was a place in Sydney at Taylor Square called ‘Beatle Village’, named after the Beatles, and people would come in there with their navy collared shirts and jackets and wearing Beatle wigs,

which was an industry in itself in those days. All the bands had them and we used to work there.

As you go up Oxford Street, there’s a hotel on your left, the Oxford Hotel, next door, down in the basement.

Oh yeah, yeah, to get a job there was unbelievable. Many

years later, I saw the manager, Jerry Golden, of that place and he didn’t remember me but I remembered him, and he said, “Oh yes, it went for about five years or something until it went broke, and Beatles fell off the ladder a bit and people thought wearing wigs was ridiculous, the trends went elsewhere.”

We performed there in the band. I still see some of the people that were in

other bands. Yeah, we were there for maybe once a month for about a year, one of the popular bands.

Not myself. I liked the fact that a lot of their songs were very simple to learn, and we had a singer in the band at that time, and he learnt a lot of the Beatles songs and of course the fact that they had

recorded five or six old rock and roll songs, like Rock and Roll Beethoven and Long Tall Sally and they were old rock and roll songs, and we could add those very easily into our repertoire because they were, we already knew them. Then we’d do the basic Beatle tunes, they had a great variety of songs in those days.

Yes, very much so.

Sure, when I left school I took on an apprenticeship as a fitter and turner. This was to please my parents. My brother was the head architect,

draftsman of the company, which was Bright Steel at Rozelle, and I got the job there as a fitter and turner. Well I thought it was going to be terrific, regular income, until I realised that if I worked one Saturday night with the band I could earn the same as what I earned for a whole week as a first year apprentice, so I started to go, to drift away from the idea of being a fitter and turner. I cut my fingers and I couldn’t play and all that sort of thing.

So I, what was the question again?

Oh, exactly, okay. I left the apprenticeship and worked with a man by the name of Neil Purgie, who was the drummer, and we went wherever there was a bandleader who could get work and he got us some at the East Gosford Hotel on a regular basis, so I left

my apprenticeship. We worked at a homosexual club in Sydney. It was called, it was owned by a man called Candy Johnson. The hotel was in Surrey Hills, can’t think of the name of it, it was a tiny room and it was the first time I’d ever encountered drag queens and things like that, so we were working there three nights a week. And the bandleader who came in, who was a well known

band leader in the hotel circuit of entertainment, was homosexual and he saw me playing and said, “I’d like you to join my band, I’m working at the Civic Hotel. My guitar player’s just left, we’re working seven shows a week.” Well I did a big scream, “Whoopee, this is my first full time job as a guitar player”.

It was Johnny Cross and the Regents, yeah.

Bruce Wormald. I still see Bruce. He’s probably down and out. He lives at Canterbury. He was a big influence on me going from the amateur fantasy world of music

to the serious professional side of music and learning. He took the time to show me the principles of music on paper. He showed me the methods used to learn a song. He got me started in singing and I worked for him for fourteen years, different bands, on the Miller’s circuit of hotels, clubs, all over the place. Even

a gay nightclub up in Taylor Square called the Bird Cage, which I worked there for about ten years, late at night, finished the Civic Hotel, drive up to Taylor Square and work there until three in the morning. It was just like a Les Girls thing [Kings Cross nightclub featuring female impersonators]. The downstairs lounge was for their entertainment and upstairs was a floorshow of drag queens.

We were playing downstairs in the lounge, yeah.

That became confusing, as it was the first time I’d ever encountered drag queens or homosexuals in the en masse.

Well, at the time I was very much a ladies man, in that I wanted to meet as many girls as possible. The drag queens, they didn’t

bother me. I think I knew what my sexuality was. In fact, some of them were quite friendly and there was no real problems there with a crisis for me, but I used to wonder at the bandleader who never ever showed any signs of homosexuality towards me or any other members of the band, but one day I remember the shock of seeing him kiss another man in the

lounge. That really shocked me, oh my God. But no, there was no effect there. I used to feel sorry for some of them because they had hard lives. I can imagine being a drag queen and having everybody consider you subnormal.

These days more so, yeah. I mean if you have a look at Beauty and the Beast [TV panel series] and seeing, what’s her name on the panel?

Carlotta on the panel; that to me indicates a mode of acceptance.

I can remember working at the Bird Cage one night, a few doors down

was the Taxi Club, another very, very rough club. In the early sixties, it was well known for gangsters and all the hoodlums. They had all decided, hoodlums and etcetera, decided to come to the Bird Cage one night and beat up every homosexual they could get their hands on. On that night, there was a different band playing, I was in the audience with a friend of mine, who was in the band.

I remember jumping on the band and pretending I was part of it, because they were beating up everyone and it was vicious, absolutely vicious. The police couldn’t do anything. In later years, there was a bouncer there called Tim, he was a really nice fellow, he was an ex-wrestler. And I said, “I need a dinner suit,” ‘cause in those days, a lot of musicians used dinner suits in clubs. He sold me his dinner suit and in the back there was,

I bought his dinner suit off him, and in the back he had sewn a stitch down the centre of his back pockets, and years later I said, “What was the stitch down the back centre?” He said, “I used to keep an iron bar in there’, a little iron bar. He’d pull it out and hit people. It was a terrible place. Taylor Square in the sixties was really bad.

Oh lots of blood, drag queens being dragged across the dance floor and kicked, all those sorts of things. Yeah, it was just a place for us to go, but as I say, the homosexuals and the drag queens never ever bothered me and I can never see why they were socially crucified if that’s the way they were. I mean it was probably as natural to them as it was for us to be heterosexual. I think I had an empathy there.

They didn’t…I think people who are afraid of them or who are angry with them are concerned with their own sexuality really.

The band was called the

‘Wooden Horse’. The bandleader had a sense of humour and it came from the joke, well it was a joke then, “Did you hear about the wooden horse? It wouldn’t shit.”

That’s where the name came from. And it was called the Wooden Horse.

It started out with five,

he was a keyboard player, Bruce. My best friend now, who’s my solicitor, who is a solicitor I should say, was the drummer in that band, John Burns. There was five of us. I started with them at the Miller’s Hotel at Parramatta, which is now Westfield Shopping Centre. We went from there to the Brighton Hotel at

Brighton Beach, basically the Miller’s circuit of hotels with Bruce. I learnt a hell of a lot. I learnt to arrange music for horns, because eventually when we got to the Miller’s circuit, the Coogee Oceanic Hotel, which was a high class hotel in those days, the lounge, we went up to nine piece with horns. And in those days, late nineteen sixties, there were bands like ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’ and ‘Chicago’ [both American pop bands],

who were incorporating jazz with rock and very popular. So we arranged for that sort of music. I was still very reluctant to get out front myself, as I got older I lost the fear but I had a bad case of nerves about getting out the front. Sometimes I’d be very concerned with whether I was doing a good job or not.

As a singer.

It was Bruce Wormald.

At the Civic. I didn’t sing until I joined his band.

Well, he dangled the job in front of me all the time. He used to say things like, “If

you want to work here…” because nobody or very few bands were working seven shows a week, that’s Saturday afternoon. Seven shows a week meant a full time living. So he used to say, “Look, if you want to work with me, you’re going to have learn some discipline and that is learn a new song every week, learn to read music,” ‘cause we had to back guest artists coming in, “Learn to present yourself a little better

and from time to time take the guitar off and get out front,” which I did very nervously the first time. But I realised that the voice was there, it was all the power, it was all coming out. It was a style in those days to sing powerfully like the Tom Jones’ and the Englebert Humperdinks [both popular singers] and all that sort of thing. It was very popular starting out.

Tom Jones especially, yeah. Because Tom Jones,

because when I was in Vietnam, I learnt a lot about black music. I realised that that’s what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a black singer in terms of because they portrayed their feelings far better to me than a lot of white singers did in that time. So I started to emulate them and he realised that, Bruce Wormald realised that, and gave me the opportunity to sing those songs, which incidentally

in the 1990s became famous with the movie The Commitment [about an Irish pop group]. They sang all the songs that I did in the 1960s, from people like Wilson Pickett and Joe Tex and all those black singers that were not popular in Australia but very big in America.

Mustang Sally was Wilson Pickett. I used to do that in 1964. And getting back to Tom Jones, Tom Jones used to sing all those songs.

I used to joke and say, “Tom Jones keeps recording songs that I sing,” but it was just the influences on him, Otis Redding, songs like Hang On, I’m Coming and Mustang Sally, Try A Little Tenderness, all those were recorded by Tom Jones and more.

The Wooden Horse.

No, no.

I did a lot of recordings later on in years when I went to Vietnam the third time. We did some terrific recordings in Australia before we left and then I went on the Hilton circuit with my own band in the 1970s. We did some good recordings before we went away on that.

Once again, I didn’t take much interest in the war when I first heard about it. It would have been on the news. There were lots of pictures coming back to us, via the news, on television but I first heard about it on an entertainment perspective,

when a friend of mine went there before me with a show, came back and said to my parents, “Look I’d love Norm to come with us on another show we’re taking to Vietnam. It’s perfectly safe, there’s nothing to worry about” and they said, “Well, fine, it might be an idea to see the world,” and away I went. So when I heard about it, it was on the news. When I first heard about it from an entertainment point of view was from a friend who’d already been there.

I, like many other young people were probably influenced by fact that you had parents and politicians saying, “We must avoid communism at all costs.” I didn’t realise, I didn’t know what communism really was til I went to university as a mature age student and studied

sociology, and learnt that there was a reason for them creating that manifesto [Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 1848]. But I didn’t quite see why it was such a threat to capitalism in those days, in the early days; I didn’t understand it at all. Only that we should avoid it, that’s how basic it was, I mean I didn’t understand it at the time.

I went in [19] ‘68, which I think I was probably twenty, twenty-one, for the first in March ‘68. The war itself broke out, I think we started sending troops there in ‘65, so I would have been hearing about it a few years before I went there.

As I recall those of the older school, the parents and such, were reeling from the effects of communism, perhaps from the Korean War, or perhaps from World War II. They were under the impression that Australia was under threat as well, if the communists

come down and invade South Vietnam and eventually get to Darwin, as some of them used to relate to me that Darwin was attacked during World War II, the Japanese came down, why shouldn’t the communists from North Vietnam or China come down? Some of them were in favour of supporting the Americans and stopping the down flow of communists,

others, especially the younger ones, were beginning to show an organised, an orchestrated rebellion to the war and probably now, looking back, for good reasons.

At that stage,

I think once again via the news on television. We saw people like what’s his name, Townsend [Simon Townsend], who was totally opposed, and I think went to gaol for not wishing to be signed up. There was lots and lots of talk of people who were talking about the lottery, about getting called up, there was lots of those people opposed,

and they were making a noise, but really socially I think most people were looking down on those who didn’t wish to get called up and opposed the war. It wasn’t until later on, when lots of people were getting killed and those dreadful movies coming back from on the news, that they realised the seriousness of it, I think.

I was at a risk. I missed out. I was notified that I missed out, then stupidly decided to go as an entertainer. It was an adventure to me, and that’s all I could think of, but I got a letter to say that I was eligible but missed out in the lottery.

Well that’s a good question too. I was very frightened when I got the letter. I was afraid of getting killed; I didn’t want to go at all. As to whether I opposed it or not, I think my parents would have probably have encouraged

me. They wouldn’t have wanted me to go but they would have encouraged me to do the right thing, even though I don’t know what I would have done. I was very scared at the time that I was going to be called up; I just didn’t want to go.

Yeah I just, I don’t know whether it was stupidity or naivety, but that friend of mine that came back and said, “Look you know this is a good opportunity,

you’re entertaining Americans and it could mean that after entertaining Americans in Vietnam, that we go on to America itself. You’ll love the American audience, it’s perfectly safe”, it’s this, it’s that. I thought, “Oh well, I can’t see him lying,” so I decided to go.

Paul Bartlett. A genius of a man. I’ve got a photograph of him of there. He was a genius, and I mean a genius of – musically he ended up

writing incredible things in America. That’s where he lives now.

I was very excited, because it was the first time I’d ever been on an aeroplane, the first time I was going away overseas. The organisation that was sending me over there with Paul was organising the passport and everything.

It was all very exciting. I think a little bit of my childhood was left behind in Vietnam, because when I arrived in Saigon, the fantasy of it being an adventure and the reality of war hit me the minute I opened, well they opened the door of the aeroplane and I stepped out. For the first time in my life, I saw people all dressed in green

with machine guns and automatic weapons, the serious look on their faces, the intense heat, the smells of Saigon, which were another colouration to the adventure, and the first thing I did was I felt shocked at these people with automatic weapons.

What did I expect? It was war and then I realised, “I’ve got a reason to be frightened here, I don’t know what to expect.” But we drove to a Chinese hotel in the middle of Saigon and we stayed in that hotel until we got our first directions to the first show

and that was a very scary place. It was a civilian hotel in the middle of Saigon, and there were soldiers staying in there, both Vietnamese and Americans, and I was totally confused as to whose side we had to look for, because the Viet Cong were not dressed in uniform. So it was there that I gained an understanding of guerrilla warfare and the seriousness of it, because you just didn’t know who was going to throw a hand grenade in your

truck, as basic as that.

Yeah, extreme noises of motor scooters, motorbikes; I remember someone saying there there’s fifteen million people or something and fifteen million motorcycles. The unusual sight of seeing three or four people on a motorbike,

the noise as I mentioned, the noise of motorcycles, the smells of garbage rotting in the streets, all throughout Saigon, garbage rotting in the streets. The smell of unusual food, or what I thought was food, and the overcrowding and it hit me just how poor some of these people lived.

They seemed to me to be in an archaic state, with things didn’t progress beyond motorbikes and fire under a stove, under a pot to cook with in the street and children playing in the rubbish. I remember that distinctly, piles and piles of rubbish in the streets, and funny little men and the Asian march. Their normal walking style

had a kind of shuffle to it.

Yeah, sorry, the walk of an everyday person. It was very common among Asian people, especially of the lower classes, as they called it. They shuffled. The sight of enormous amounts of black pyjamas,

pointy hats, all these things were fresh to me. I’d never seen anything like it. The closest I’d ever been to an Asian was going to a Chinese restaurant, so all those dynamics didn’t ever leave me especially coming off, opening the door of that plane and getting out into machine guns, “What’s going on here?” And artillery over there and jet fighters, and thousands of helicopters all camouflaged.

That was quite an experience.

I was so naïve and I’ll admit it, I had no – I’d just come out of school - I had no concept of the outside world whatsoever. I took my friend who said, “Oh, it’s perfectly safe”. What a load of rot I found that out to be later on in Vietnam. I didn’t know what to expect,

but I was certainly shocked to see everyone had guns and things in the street. I expected the army would be out in the fields fighting, but the city would be the city, but I don’t know, that’s what I thought.

Was it?

Incredible.

Well, as one person described it to me, ‘In a thousand years of war, Vietnam has had twenty years of peace’. It seemed to me that the Vietnamese people were accustomed to living with war. They’d had the intensity of the war before the Americans; they had the Japanese and the Chinese in there in

Indochina. It was almost as though they lived around the war and it used to surprise me that they didn’t ever appear to me to be frightened. We got there, I think it was March or April, it was April I think, of ‘68 and it was just after the Tet Offensive [named for Vietnamese lunar new year, 1 February 1968] where the Viet Cong, combined with the North Vietnamese forces decided to

overtake Saigon, and they almost did, caught the Americans unaware, and we got in there after that, thank God, and saw the devastation to a lot of the buildings and sites in Saigon. Some of the historic sites were just ruined.

These are things that stuck in my mind, when we arrived in Vietnam, one of the things we had to do

with the show was audition for the American Services officials, to give the show a rating and according, and what happened there was we had to audition, so they’d give us a rating and then the person in charge would know what to charge the American clubs for the show. Whatever the rating was, that’s what you had to charge them. We travelled after that, and the first time we travelled out of Saigon,

the little outskirts of buildings completely shot up with probably fifty calibre machine gun bullets, but seeing a building for the first time riddled with bullets brought home just how much danger there was in the place and the intensity of the danger to a young fellow who’d never seen anything like it. Beautiful buildings that probably

the French built with the roofs off, completely blown away and just the basic skeleton.

Yeah.

That had been destroyed, beautiful buildings that were probably large homes, they looked like large homes to the wealthy, that had been completely shot up by, bullet-ridden. The other thing I noticed was

the homes that had been devastated, but had been repaired by cardboard boxes, thick cardboard. The cardboard was usually of beer cartons and the things they did with beer cans. They’d cut them, flatten them and use that as an exterior wall, by applying them in patches to the walls; that was very common.

Just the different ways they went about fixing, stopping the rain from coming in cause the, what they called the wet, was actually very wet, the monsoons and because of the devastation to most of the places in Saigon after the Tet Offensive, they had to find ways to repair them, so they’d get all the old beer cans,

flatten them and make walls out of them, and big thick cardboard boxes, they’d line the outside with that, even though if it rained they’d probably fall to bits eventually but they did that. That’s all they could do. It was the first sense that I had of a poor distribution of wealth, where there were some very wealthy people in Saigon who were affected by the war, but generally

speaking everyone lived in poverty. I mean a good example of that was the children playing in loads of rubbish, probably because there was little means of taking the rubbish away. The Americans did as much as they could, I feel, with buildings especially by building huge

establishments for the people to stay in if they were and there was a great deal of benevolence there, I felt, but still nowhere near what was required when we first got there. There were a lot of buildings devastated, one of the things I found.

We’d just arrived in Saigon, and one of the things we had to do was audition for the grading of the show for the Americans and that meant that if they gave it a certain grade, it was before a panel, if they gave it a certain grading, that’s what we could charge the clubs, what the agent could charge the clubs. If it was say a grading of say six out of ten then it would be what,

two hundred and fifty dollars a show, something like that. We did the show and we got a grading I think of around about sixty-five percent, because though it had been rehearsed and rehearsed, it was pretty rough under those conditions. We had problems with power voltage and things like that. We’d finished the show and we had gone to the show with some American EOD, with an American EOD unit,

EOD standing for Explosive Ordnance Disposal, so they were experts at disarming bombs and they were friends of friends in the show. We were driving back from the show, and I was in a jeep, a big jeep, and there was a guy, an American, sitting behind me with a grenade launcher, ‘cause it was late at night,

and I had the window down, fortunately for me, and he had the grenade launcher leaning up against my left shoulder, the driver was on the right and I don’t know whether they hit a bump or what, but he pulled the trigger, and it was on my shoulder. When the round, which is as big as a golf ball, hit my shoulder

it went out the window and all we heard was this great big bang, and I don’t know to this day why I was very calm, but I went very calm and I said to them, I thought I’d been shot from someone outside, and I said to them, “I don’t want to alarm anybody, but I think I’ve been shot.” Well, they went into an incredible panic. “Get him to the hospital straightaway.”

There was blood coming from my shoulder, I knew that because I touched it, and when we got to the hospital, the fellow said, “Look, what’s happened is my grenade launcher went off.” If the window had have been wound up, you can imagine what could have happened if the round hit the window, but I had the window wound down cause it was hot. Got to the hospital, and the fellow said, “Whatever you do, don’t tell them what happened, because I’ll be in a lot of trouble”.

The lady doctor came out. She said, “Oh my God, what happened to you?” I said, “Have I been shot? Can it be repaired?” She said, “All you’ve got is a little burn.” It was a deep gash but it was a burn. She said, “That will repair in time. How did it happen?” I said, “Oh, ah, uh,” I didn’t know what to say, ‘cause the American colonel who was with us said, “He was burnt by a gun that just went off,

he accidentally backed into the barrel.” Now I’d never had anything like guns around me in my life and here I am, the first or second day in Vietnam and I’ve had my shoulder bandaged up and they’re taking photos of me and I thought, “Oh my God.” All of a sudden I felt relieved. I thought, “If this is as bad as it gets, I’m going to be brave.” Nothing happened worse than that except a lot of fearful incidents

which didn’t include me.

I asked the same question. The doctor says she takes photographs of everyone that comes in that are wounded in any way. It was with a Polaroid camera and I don’t know, they keep it on their files for records to, I know I had to sign a few papers to say that I’d been there.

Oh not very long. I think

it was possibly a few days. My shoulder felt like it had been pulled out. I had a muscle ache or something. The burn healed; after a couple of months it disappeared completely.

The agent was Lola McDonald who lives on the Gold Coast. She was also the singer in the band, one of

the acts in the show, and she did it purely on a business basis and she made a lot of money out of it. She had three or four shows go through Vietnam.

She was a very sophisticated lady. She was older than most of us. I was twenty, she was forty-seven, I think. Sophisticated singer, sophisticated performer,

very reserved, very highly disciplined and disciplined us, but easy to get on with. I saw her for many years later and we often got together and talked about old times.

Well, ‘cause we were young, if we did silly things, for example,

this is this line between fantasy and reality. I had a fantasy connection with guns. All of a sudden, I thought this is my cowboys and indians days, you know, my childhood mentality, and an American gave me a 38 Smith and Wesson [pistol] that I used to put in my camera bag and think, “This will protect me.” And she was totally opposed to us carrying any guns, so I had a grenade launcher of my own.

There were just hundreds of guns everywhere. Every American said, “What do you want? You want a gun, I’ll get you a gun.” Yep, so I had a 38 stub nose gun, brand new, and a grenade launcher of my own. All these things that I thought might happen to me, these would protect me. I later found out that I would be better off leaving them alone. But I put them in a cupboard and when we were away up country, Lola

got rid of them. She didn’t want us anywhere near guns ourselves.

No, I meant that she was a disciplinarian, she wasn’t necessarily disciplining us but she always made sure that we were on time. If we missed a plane to get somewhere out in the middle of the boonies [boondocks, the bush], there’s no second chance, then you missed the show and you’d be possibly sent home.

There was always that threat, but because we’ve travelled most places by helicopter, C-130 [Hercules medium transport aircraft], there’s always a chance you’d miss the plane. In fact, it happened twice, not with me, but one of the members of the show missed the plane. If you’re not there, and on time, the plane might not go there for another week, so there’s those sort of disciplines, general discipline. She wasn’t someone who was loose with

or careless with time, I should say.

The show was Whatever Is A Nice Girl Like You Doing In A Place Like This, and there was another show over there that I often talk about. It was an Australian show and it was called O410E and the Americans

used to look at it and say, “Why do they call it ‘zero four one zero’ and you’d say, “It’s, ‘Oh for one naughty’” and they’d say, “What does that mean?”. Didn’t quite catch the meaning, but that was understandable.

That was that one; that was Whatever’s A Nice Girl, the first show, Lola was the singer. We rehearsed it at her sister’s place at Vaucluse before we left. I had two

songs to sing in the show, because at the time Sam Cook was very big. He had hits with a song called Shake, which Max Merritt later recorded, and Cupid was another. But I used to sing Tom Jones’ version of Lucky Old Sun. I especially used to like the high note at the end. I don’t know why but the dynamics

of the high note at the end of a song seemed to measure whether the song went over with the people or not. Lucky Old Sun had a significance. I used to dedicate it the enlisted men, ‘up in the morning, out on the job, work like a devil for my pay’ and somehow that used to get a round of applause. And the rest of the show,

Paul Bartlett played keyboard, he played bass, he played everything and he wrote all the music for the show. The show was opened with – because Lola was singing the opening song, she sang Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets, that was the opening song, and then we had a contortionist in the show, who was actually German but she used to have a French name, Lisette Lemar and of course the Americans loved

her, especially when she did the splits, they’d all get excited. It never amazed me the intensity of their appreciation of women, especially in the shows. And that was basically the show. I had two songs to sing Lucky Old Sun and Shake and we had, Lisette Lemar did two songs. She

did her act in two songs. Lola sang maybe four or five and Paul used to do comedy as well, so it was a very basic show. But we really appreciated the fact that, as basic as it was, the Americans were fantastic audiences and they appreciated, especially lyrics, appreciated songs that they’d never heard before. Often we were asked to stay back

and sing some more, and we’d do some more things for them and they were very, very appreciative, always appreciative.

Very little, very little. We were

basically staying always in American compounds. They’d find places for us to sleep. The boys would find some kind of hooch [shelter, tent] and the girls would be spirited away to hooch [be accommodated], probably with more convenience.

A hooch was like a plywood dormitory for about four or

five people, like little units, and some of them were absolutely atrocious, rat infested places, terrible. Yes, so what was the question again, sorry?

Very, very seldom. I don’t remember any, except for maybe when we were back in Saigon

where the villa was and we’d walk down the street and buy some things off the black market. I’ll never forget one incident where one of the girls had her pair of jeans [taken] off the line in the villa at Saigon, and walked down the alley, where there were all little kind of little stalls and things where they’d sell things, and bought them back, bought her jeans back off the black marketeers.

Lots of American Army distributions such as uniforms, boots, hats, underwear, things that were stolen from the PXs [Post Exchange, American canteen service] and the hoochies themselves.

I have no idea. I suspect it was mainly individuals who were trying

to survive. It was a very poor area.

Oh yeah, well we were dealing with the Vietnamese when we bought anything, but there might have been an American behind it or not. I doubt that very much.

I can only remember one interaction, one friend that I had; she was Vietnamese,

and I remember going to her house on the other side of Saigon and there were curfews, and I could never stay at her house because apparently the police were down on that sort of thing, so I had to get back from the other side of town and there was no public transport, or anything like that. There was an old fellow, no, a young fellow fixing his motorcycle outside, when I left

her house, Marie, and I said, “Look, I’ll give you ten dollars if you’ll take me back to Tan Son Nhut,” which was where the villa was in Saigon and he said, “Okay.” Well, he drove me back through the curfews. There were police shooting in the air for us to stop, and he kept going. I thought, “Oh no, this is the end,” but finally I got back.

She was very attractive. Not like most Vietnamese girls. She was very outward, because she had been dealing with Americans for many years, as a dancer in different shows. I was devastated because when I went away up country and came back, she was having an affair with my good American friend next door. But I got over it.

I would have regarded that at the time, and then we were looking forward to seeing each other. I think it was just a case of me being homesick anyway. I’d forgotten about it a couple of days later really.

It was an apartment,

as opposed to a house. It was, there were people living underneath as well. We went upstairs into a doorway with, there were two bedrooms. They slept often on a mat, a straw mat, rather than a mattress. That used to surprise me. It was not much different to our own, less decoration, less

comfortable furniture, tables, chairs, yes. About the only difference I could see, cooking facilities were very basic, often over a fire and the bedding was different. They’d have like a settee, like a lounge, that sort of thing as well.

I didn’t eat.

It was only once and I didn’t eat any food there. I just said that I’d escort her home. Her mother was cooking in the other room, but I left before they did anything with it. It was late at night. I don’t know why she was cooking late at night, but she was rattling pots and pans. It may have been a hint for me to go home.

Well that was another story.

We were given fourteen dollars in piastas, Vietnamese money, per week to eat. First of all, the food was not fit for consumption, in the streets. The bread rolls for example, were… “You’ll

get used to it”’ so I would look to eat in American mess halls. Most of them wouldn’t allow us onto the compound if we weren’t working there, because we were considered by the Americans to be third country nationals, meaning even though we had troops there as allies, that we were considered third country nationals, meaning not permitted to enter any American installation without written permission and on top of that,

often you had to pay for your food in American with MPC, military payment certificates [currency issued to US forces in Vietnam]. They wouldn’t allow us to go in there without military payment certificates and for us to have military payment certificates was illegal. The only place that you could get them was on the black market. So you’d have to pay for a ten-dollar MPC certificate,

you’d pay maybe fifty or sixty dollars in piastas, so it was useless. We did a lot of conning, asking Americans for American money or MPC or piastas, so that we could change it and buy decent food. Food was a problem, except when we were on bases.

The girls were incredible. They used to con the best accommodation, the best of food, the best of facilities, because any American on any of the compounds were more than eager to meet the girls. They’d give them anything, rides to the best restaurants, everything. But us guys, we had to con as much as we could from the Americans and we ended up getting quite good at it. If you got an individual away from his unit and say, “Look can you get us some food, we’d

like some.” What we liked were C rations [American Combat (field) rations]. They’d give us a big case of C rations and they were intriguing, ‘cause you’d open up a can and inside would be tuna fish and all different things like that, biscuits.

Yeah, mostly in cans and packets, new things. I was very intrigued by the packet of scrambled eggs, add water, hot water and shake and all of a sudden scrambled eggs were there, things I hadn’t seen before. C rations contained everything

from salmon, beef, the sort of things that you’d see that would make a cheap breakfast, I guess, like sausages and beans and desserts, so if ever we were hungry and we were in the middle of nowhere we’d open those, always keep a couple of cartons onboard. The girls were very good at conning those out of Americans, so we talked the girls into sharing.

Do you know, I don’t know that. I believe…

The letter C, right, C rations, yeah. I don’t know the answer to that and I’ve heard them called ‘K Rations’ in other wars, so I don’t know.

Well when I was at university, years later, we learnt about a thing

called ‘small group syndrome’. Basically birds of a feather flock together. People with things in common under common conditions tend, there’s a kind of brethren there, a brotherhood. We looked out for each other, we understood the problems that some of us had, and I think we became close while we were away.

There were all kinds of the usual small group syndrome, problems, such as some jealousies where the resources were limited. If the girls, for example, got a dinner in a terrific officers’ mess, and the boys were left there eating C rations, we’d often say, “Look, what about telling the Americans that we’re here too?” but of course that was

sometimes not applicable. But aside from that, we were always protective of each other. For example in Vietnam, about thirty percent of the time, about a third of the time, when you’re doing a show, the sirens would go off, meaning the compound is being hit by either rockets, mortar, or surrounded by ground troops, which

happened to us once. That was incredible. So if it was being in anyway hit, we would rely on the Americans to protect us. Now I’ve lost the track of what I was saying again, can you tell me?

The fear was one of the reasons

that we stuck together, we’d look after each other. If one person in the show was more fearful than the others, then there was a degree of comforting. We eventually got used to being scared by the sirens and the bombs coming in, rockets and mortar and things like that. After all, we were in a war zone. It took me a long time to realise that, but I did. And so there was a bonding there, if you like,

never spoken about. I mean, it was an invisible bonding; we took care of each other. For example, that’s what I was saying, one night when the bombs started flying in, everybody rushes for a bunker in the middle of the night. One of the guys was still in bed asleep and refused to sort of go, so we carried his bed and everything into the bunker. He woke up in the morning in the bunker and couldn’t believe. We all cracked up laughing at the reaction when he woke up. But

that was the sort of thing we had to do, otherwise we’d all feel responsible for anything that happened to him. So there was bit of bonding there, I think.

Coming into Vietnam in 1968, there were something like thirty or forty different shows travelling the country

of a stable of various agents, some were American, not many, maybe one or two. Because of the distances involved, it would have been impossible for Americans to send American entertainers in there, other than the major ones like Bob Hope and James Brown, who I saw in Vietnam. So it

it was mainly a handful of Australian agents, some from Perth, some from Queensland, mostly from New South Wales, who were creating shows in Sydney, and sending them over there. It was an easy way to make money for an agent, because of the bulk of the shows required. And Australia, along with the Philippines, was a close source of entertainment. Not only because it was logistically

close, but because we were, as the Americans called us, ‘round eyed’, instead of slanty-eyed, so there was an association with beautiful American women, even though we were Australian, and the music we were playing was spoken with proper English, as opposed to Filipinos who did the music correctly, but often had an accent. So they were happy with us, so the more entertainers they could get over there, the better.

We auditioned for an organisation that governed and scrutinised the activities of these shows, making sure for example, that the shows were not too over – the girls were not overly exposed – that’s there’s nothing that would affect the soldiers that hadn’t seen a girl for twelve months, a round-eyed girl for twelve months, that they wouldn’t be attacked, that

they wouldn’t attack the show, in other words, morally they had to make sure it was correct. That’s the way the Americans were then. The organisation was, I believe, a panel of people from what the Americans called the USO [United Service Organisation]. Now I forget what the USO stands for, but it’s the organisation through all theatres of war, where the Americans were involved, who looked after the morals of the men and the entertainment for them. Bob Hope, for example, would have

toured the various wars that he went to, to entertain the troops, through the USO, so I think that was the organisation that auditioned us.

I thought the rating was realistic. I didn’t think the show was perfect. We had some technical problems with voltage. The Americans operated with a hundred and ten volts, which affected

the cycles of the keyboard, which put the keyboard slightly out of tune, so we had to tune the rest of the instruments to the keyboard, slightly out of tune, all those sorts of things. So I didn’t think it was all that good myself, but the dynamics were there. What they wanted to see were the girls and basically it went across, I thought sixty-five percent was reasonable.

0410E, yeah.

It was basically the same as ours. It had the necessary two girls in it, which they used to call ‘go-go girls’ in those days, and a basic band of possibly three musicians,

and maybe a male singer or a female singer. It was through a different agent, but we’d often meet up in airports, one heading in one direction, one in the other, so we got to know those people. I think that particular show was from Sydney. There was another show called the Beaumarks, who had one of my very favourite singers in it, a man by the name of Rick Stuff, who

happens to be on a web site for Vietnam entertainers at the moment. Rick, a terrible story - I still see one of the Beaumarks today, Terry Wright - he killed himself, he jumped off a building in Saigon, Rick. A wonderful singer, a great soul singer, big voice, a good, soulful singer, but he had a problem with drugs and he got badly beaten up by some Americans

and didn’t quite get over it and threw himself off a building. He’s one of the entertainers who died in Vietnam, very sad. He was in a show called the Beaumarks and the Beaumarks were a very, very good show band. I don’t know whether they had any girls in the show, but he was. There were other shows. There were Maori shows from New Zealand, or shows containing Maoris from New Zealand.

One of the best shows I ever saw was Wilma Redding who was, both her and her sister I know very well, but Wilma was like a superstar in Vietnam. She was a tall, Shirley Bassey [English torch singer] style singer, who happened to be a black girl as well. She was from one of the islands north of Queensland I think, a wonderful sophisticated singer and of course, made a big name for herself in America

as well. She had a show there. Many of the shows, in my opinion, were sub-standard but useful for the morale of people who hadn’t been home for a long time. The one thing to remember too in Vietnam, all of the servicemen were dressed in green. The psychological effects of that must have been a dynamic in itself, because wherever you went, you saw green.

If you went to a show, everyone would be dressed in green fatigues, so to see a colourful show, with coloured shirts and long hair, long hair was an issue because they had all their hair shaved, all the servicemen. Cause they’d look, “Oh look at that guy, he’s got, just reminds me of home.” All that sort of thing. There’s a lot of little sociological and psychological things I think, that apply to any theatre of war, especially if they’re there for a long time.

Well, I’ll tell you about the outfit. The Americans who were overly moralistic, I remember one or two situations with white men, as opposed to black men, I mean, from the south of America, from Texas and from places like that, who were absolutely, some of them were fantastic, like

all races there’s good and bad. But I went in to do a show one night, I used to wear a red shirt, I had real long hair and fatigue pants, because they were practical in the dust, before we changed into our show gear, of course, so I went in to set up all our equipment. There was a guy at the bar looking at me, staring. He said, “Don’t give that man a drink,” he said to the bartender. The bartender said, “Why not?”

He said, “Look at his long hair, look at him.” He was making snarling remarks and I thought, “Gee,” and he kept at it and at it and at it, and finally I said to the man, “Look, you might have a problem with long hair and the way I dress, but there are people who are coming to the show tonight who haven’t seen long hair or coloured clothes for a long time, you have the problem,

not me, now realise that.” It actually got a bit more heated than that. He started to argue back and then he broke down and cried. He said, “You’re absolutely right,” and I corresponded with that man for maybe twenty years after the Vietnam War. We ended up being friends at the end of the night. He sat in the front row, cross legged, and watched the whole show, and he said, “I’m just absolutely embarrassed about my behaviour

earlier on,” but there are people who are prejudiced against long-haired youths in the south [southern states of America]. There was one incident where I was talking, they were both Green Beret [Special Forces], the ultimate American soldier, I was talking to a black American at a bar, really nice man, we were talking about music and things like that, and a man who I had met earlier, a white man from Texas, who was sitting on this side, completely ignored me.

I’d been having drinks with this man for a week, completely ignored me and I tried to get him on the conversation and he turned his back on me. And that night I said to him, “What happened at the bar? I don’t understand, ‘cause where I come from there’s none of these sorts of problems,” and he said, “You forfeited your friendship with me when you struck up a friendship with that black man.” That was the kind of American prejudice that we encountered quite a few times.

I ended up saying to Americans in a group one night, “Where I come from, there’s no such prejudice,” because in the 1960s there wasn’t. We didn’t know about racism and things like that, not that I know about anyway.

Yes, I guess I should qualify that and say there was no, I didn’t know of any, for example, there were black Americans who came to Australia for R&R [rest and recreation]. They were just treated like everybody else, in most cases. I didn’t know any black and white prejudice in Australia. It wasn’t as black and white as what it is in America, especially in the south.

The guys that came from New York and things like that just didn’t seem to bother with it, but from the south, boy, there was quite a heavy thing about it with blacks and especially with longhaired youths. I suppose they’d had a history in that area with black fellas that they didn’t like.

Yeah.

Yeah, I can tell you what I felt at the time was, “Boy, this man is listening to me and not only that, he’s changed his opinion,” because what I tried to do was shame him into realising that his remarks were not applicable, that he wasn’t the only person in this room,

that there were people waiting to see the show, or preparing to see the show that night, that were enlisted men that hadn’t seen anything from the world. What they used to call the ‘world’ was the world outside Vietnam and it took me quite a long time to get my point across, but I shamed him into it. I said, “Is my hair the only thing you can criticise me for? You don’t know me. What’s hair got to do with it? Where I

come from, it’s trendy. It’s probably trendy in America too, but because you see me as someone who wears his hair long and wears a different shirt to you, you think it’s a possible threat to you? It isn’t. Enjoy the show, come and see the show. I want you to come and see the show”. I started to back pedal and started to talk to him like a human being and he broke down and cried because he was ashamed of his behaviour, as he said to me.

Yeah, George Kennedy. He wrote to me for many, many years later, maybe once or twice a year but I got letters from him right up the late 1970s I think, oh

no, about 82, was the last letter I got from him. He moved house. He said he was moving house, he may not be alive for all I know.

At the time I felt as though

I had won a battle. That’s what I felt. To be honest, I felt proud of myself at the time because I didn’t want to fight with this man or argue with him. I wanted to change his mind about what he was seeing and I did, so I felt like I had achieved something, that’s what I felt, felt like I’d achieved something. There were many small incidents like that probably not worth a mention, but it did indicate to me that there were

a lot of Americans that were brought up, some of them went through military schools and things like that. They were taught not to sway from and focus on what they were doing rather than the human elements involved in associating with others.

No, generally enlisted men’s clubs in the Army - there were what they called the EMs, enlisted men; there were non-commissioned officers, NCOs, which were the sergeants; the officers, which ranged from warrant officers up, were another kettle of fish, so there were like you do here with

different markets, families etcetera. The enlisted men were the wild ones; they wanted to see the girls and the rock and roll music. They were always wild, always full of incidents. The NCOs were more reserved, the sergeants were more reserved but they also needed a wild time and we gave it to them, music-wise. The officers were very reserved, seldom laughed at jokes and especially where enlisted men were serving them, they wouldn’t

want to show any emotions at all, but they were always appreciative. I learnt a lot about the war by talking to American officers. One general we were entertaining, he said, I’ll never forget it, he said, “What I wouldn’t give to have a platoon of Australian soldiers.” He said, “They’re the best soldiers in the world.” And they were very, very, respected.

He thought that they were far more disciplined, that they were trained, because they were trained in jungles, as he put it, they were better equipped mentally, physically and technologically in the jungle, they were better. He’d had a lot to do with them when forces joined and he observed. He said, “What I wouldn’t give

to have a platoon of Australian soldiers, out in the jungles.” And the British base I think had a lot to do with the way Australian soldiers were trained and respected in those days. They were very, very good at what they did.

No,

not necessarily. Usually what happened with enlisted men, the show used to go for about an hour and fifteen minutes, and if the enlisted men wanted more, the girls would go and we would do more music for them, just the band and they’d dance. The one point I should have brought up, you asked whether they were segregated, I didn’t ever see that, but often there were shows where they were just black because it might be a unit of truck

drivers, or people that do menial jobs, and a lot of them happened to be black and if we were coming in to do a show for them, most of them would be black. But I don’t know, I used to associate with them a lot because we had that appreciation of music. It was the first time I’d ever heard B.B. King and I loved B.B. King. His Live at Cook County Gaol was just fabulous stuff.

I learnt to appreciate the meaning of their music, the lyrics, where it came from, the basic blues, the three-chord, the twelve-bar blue progression and why it came about and how it came about and all those things I learnt from the black people who invented it.

Yeah. It’s not part of our culture, that kind of music. We just learnt to appreciate it because the Americans were producing it and the music that we danced to during World War II was all American. There was the Glenn Miller Orchestra, and some of the English entertainers yes, but the things we admired the most about music was the music that were churning out of

America.

Yes, that was very common.

There was an incident there, where Lola McDonald had just left the show, and

we had another lady in to take her place and, even though she denies it now and she doesn’t remember it, it was a very big incident at the time. We used to get guys out of, the girls used to get guys up out of the audience to dance with them while we played music for them, towards the finale of the show. And on one occasion, there were three girls and they’d get down

and they’d get people out of the audience, and the guys would volunteer, “Take me, take me.” And this one lady refused a black man, she said, “No,” and she’s looking for the white guy, “Come on, the white guy in the gold,” and the white guy said, “No, no, no,” and another black man came up and took her hand towards the stage and she said, “No,” still looking for a white man and it nearly caused a riot

because it was automatically deemed to be racist. There was another incident where the girls used to get guys up out of the audience, and they had all white guys in the audience and all these white guys kept coming up onto the stage, and when a black guy got up onto the stage it happened to be the end of the song, so we stopped. And the black guy came over and started screaming at me, “You stopped because I came up here.” I said

“No, no, it’s the end of the song. We don’t think like that.” “No, no, you stopped,” so he got onto the microphone and started telling the rest of the crowd. That almost started a riot too, so we just started the music again and off we went. But we had to calm them down, that was really terrible. They were very, very sensitive times.

Yeah,

all the time. The worst problems we had were not with the Viet Cong, although we were frightened a lot of the Viet Cong, because of the rockets always coming in and things like that, was between blacks and whites and different American cultures. There was one incident where we were waiting to go in and do the show and they’re all drinking outside a club and this black guy…they all had guns remember, that was the most dangerous part. When they drink and drink, they take their guns in with them. He was going around and beating

people up. He got one guy and said, “What country?” – no, no, “Where are you from?” “I’m from Texas.” “I don’t like Texans”, and he’d bash them. He’s just going around in a circle while we’re having a beer and a barbeque and he came around to me and grabbed my shirt and said, “Where are from, man?” I said, “Sydney, Australia.” He said, “That’s alright.” Thank God for that. He said, “That’s alright then, you okay.”

Yeah, I think I was very relieved. I think he knew, because Australia was very popular with Americans for R&R, because the white ladies and the round eyes and the country was civilised and we used to tell Americans terrible stories. They’d always say to us, “Where should we go when I get to Sydney? I’m going down there next week on R&R”.

“Well”, Paul Bartlett used to say to them, “First thing you should do if you want to see the city at it’s most beautiful, hire one of the kangaroo tours.” “Kangaroo tours? Is that a bus?” “No, it’s a kangaroo. You can hire a kangaroo from one end of the Harbour Bridge to the other and the scenery’s just superb.” “Really?” “Yes.” Some would actually take it on board. Terrible things we did.

Paul

taught me so much musically. He was an actual genius. I’ve got a picture of him. He was a thin man with a long pointy nose and he reminded me of a bird. He wore huge horn-rimmed glasses, and total eccentric, total eccentric. To give you an idea of his ability, I told him when we got back from Vietnam, I said, “Paul, I’m doing a show, a floorshow, at the

Oceanic Hotel on my own with the orchestra and I’d like an arrangement done, a musical arrangement of this Tom Jones song called I Know and it was an elaborate arrangement. He said, “I’ve got that album.” I said, “Trouble is, I need it by the end of the week.” He said, “When are you doing your show?” I said, “I start tomorrow, but I wanted to do that for this special function at the end of the week.”

He said, “When are you rehearsing with the band?” I said, “Well, I’m rehearsing the show tomorrow.” He said, “I’ll come down by train,” I forgot where he lived. He wrote the entire arrangement on the train, out of his memory, for that song. When he got to the club, and we were rehearsing, he gave all the parts to the musicians. There was nine musicians. He wrote it in pencil on the train coming down. There wasn’t one note out of place. It was the best - I’ve still got it - the most beautiful arrangement. He arranged it

for the horns to do the string parts, just wonderful stuff. But he was a genius that way, but totally eccentric.

Oh well, he was bombastic, he was self-opinionated. He’d tell things to the Americans that were not accurate, but he did them with so much,

he acted the part so well of being assertive at something, that people would just believe him. In the end, I didn’t know, ‘cause I was very young and I didn’t know half the things he said were lies. So I used to tell Americans the same thing, “Well, if you go down to Australia, Australia is, if you turn Australia upside down and put it on the map of America, it fits,” all those sorts of things. He’d tell them all these things and they’d believe him, and so did I. But he was – he ended

up being a very good friend. He had the patience to sit down and really teach me a lot about music and arranging, but I never seemed to go to school. He ended up being a famous arranger in America. He wrote for movies and things like that but he played acoustic bass. One night we were in Thailand renewing our visas for Vietnam, and he went into a nightclub, a jazz nightclub and he said, “Can I get up?” and they said, “Sure.” He got up and played all their tunes, the jazz standards and they thought he was

just brilliant. They gave him a round of applause after every song. Just a brilliant man, but he’s an American now, he lives in America.

Certainly a mentor, musically, not a father figure. I found a lot of the things he said and did irresponsible. He had no

regard for his personal presentation. He always wore sloppy old clothes and didn’t care, just the usual eccentricities that you’d see in a brilliant person. Didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, oh yes, he was a chain smoker, didn’t drink.

Well she was what I would call typically German,

she had no sense of humour whatsoever, and if we had an English saying, for example like, “It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay,” she used to say, “Why do you always say ‘it will be okay’? What does that mean?” She’d try and analyse our statement like that, it’s a throwaway sentence. She had no sense of humour whatsoever. She was a lovable person, but you never tried comedy on her of any kind.

She’d get upset, because she couldn’t understand what we were talking about. She was a contortionist, did amazing tricks. I’ve got some photographs I think of her. She did, a photograph of her inside out on the lounge room floor, she was an incredible act. She used to dance to the tune of Love Is Blue. Oh, we did a lot of shows with her. I know the whole routine

now. I can still remember it. You were saying about Geoff Mack, and what he remembers, those comedy routines, if you rehearse them a lot and do them a hundred, two hundred times in different places, you remember those routines and they stay with you for the rest of your life. I mean, I’m playing tunes now that I learnt when I was eighteen, I’m singing songs that I learnt when I was eighteen, you don’t forget the words, because I’ve done them so many times. Incredible.

We had a drummer called Laurie on one of the shows. We had a drummer in the first show called Dennis Tombs, he ended up, he didn’t like touring Vietnam at all, so he went home early. We got another drummer over called Laurie, a young fellow, whose father played saxophone at the St George’s League Club

in the St George’s League Club Orchestra. Laurie one night was walking home from a hooch and fell into a ditch and broke both legs, in the dark, into a trench, so he had to be sent home early too. I’ve got photographs of him with two legs in plaster.

There was only four of us. There was Laurie and myself, Paul and Lola and two dancers. One was Jackie Edwards, and I can’t remember the other girl’s name. She was the most attractive and the youngest of troop. The girls really went for her, sorry, the guys went for her. The girls probably would have too, but there

was none there.

Well Liz Layton tells a story of she was accosted one night, I think it

was two black men, I can’t remember. Where the girls were sleeping, they broke in and accosted her somehow. That would have been pretty scary. I wasn’t there at the time but very, very, I mean the level of sexuality, not sexuality, but the level of sexual desire at the time was intense. It used to intrigue me, the levels that the American soldiers would go to,

to find sex of any description. I mean it was such an important thing to them. It used to surprise me just how much they’d talk about it and want it and it’s not that sex wasn’t available over there. I remember one fellow saying to legalise prostitution in Vietnam, you’d have to put a roof on the country. It’s the Caucasian-looking people

were rare, scarce.

Not much, except that they were

on every second corner, so to speak. Once or twice, members of the band would make use of them, but I don’t remember there ever being a brothel as such. What I remember is massage parlours. Now massage parlours meant that you would get a massage,

but they would offer extras for extra money. As I didn’t encounter that, I mean I didn’t go to any of those because one of the reasons was I had a girlfriend and the other one was we were always too busy. We were flying out and flying in all the time, almost every day, sometimes three shows a day but I think they used to go over the guise of, either the guise of being a massage

parlour or the guys would go in there and get a massage and call it Christmas. I don’t know, they probably paid the extra to get a bit more, but I know there was plenty of them. It was one way they could make money from the soldiers.

The Wooden Horse to me was a working band, so what it did was it created a base for me to come back to when I went away for another weekly wage, I’d come back to it and get a weekly wage,

or so I thought. But when I put this to the bandleader, Bruce Wormald, I said, “Look, I’m going away for six months.” He was very unhappy about me leaving, after all we’d achieved, so I thought, “Oh well, I’ll have to come back to nothing, but I’ll give it a go.” But I ended up staying, the first tour I ended up staying in Vietnam for eleven months. I left a good wage behind for a much lesser wage to go to Vietnam.

Yes, I was earning a hundred and sixty dollars a week from the band and I went to Vietnam for a hundred and ten Australian dollars a week, so I dropped what was considerable then, forty or fifty dollars.

He was bitter; he was nasty about it. He wouldn’t talk to me, because I was one of the main singers in the band

and all of a sudden he’s got to find a replacement, but as it turned out I went away for eleven months, I came back and it just so happens that his guitar player/singer that he did have was not happy, so he quit and I went back into the band anyway. So I was happy about that and I was with him, with his bands in different clubs for at least for around fourteen years, I played with his bands in Sydney.

Then I went on the second tour.

Sure.

In the first tour, we did two hundred and forty flights in all, cause I kept a diary, two hundred and forty-odd flights. We were based in the Tan Son Nhut area, which was the international airport for Saigon, and we would tour South Vietnam by way of road, for example, Long Binh was

one of the major show places. It was a huge base out of Saigon; for example, when James Brown and Bob Hope would come to Vietnam they would do a show at Long Binh because it was one of the major areas of, major groups of American troops. In other words, they were despatched from Long Binh. We would go by road. That

was a dangerous road by night. We’d go by convoy to those shows and come back by convoy, because often the convoys were attacked by the side of the road. It didn’t happen to us. We did a lot of shows in Long Binh, but I did never see any attacks on that road. The road to Vung Tau where the Australians were was extremely dangerous, so we’d fly into that by usually by Caribou [short range transport aircraft flown by the Royal Australian Air force (RAAF)]

or Huey helicopter [Bell UH-1H utility helicopter]. We did it by road once and there was a bit of activity from Viet Cong shooting at a jeep up ahead of us, the jeep was shooting back, but we got through that. That was a dangerous road to Vung Tau, but then we’d fly up country. The furthest north we went in South Vietnam was Da Nang, and then we had a base at Da Nang,

the Grand Hotel, from which we’d do all the shows out of Da Nang. Pleiku was in the centre of the country and it was sometimes very cold there because it was mountainous. We did a lot of shows out of Pleiku, but most of the time we’d stay with the troops, either in their billets, where they’d sleep, for want of a better term, and then or in tents, sometimes in tents. Not all the time but

sometimes in tents. The shows, each one of the places that we visited had special meanings to us, especially if we’d been there before. Pleiku was dangerous, because the Viet Cong would just hide in the mountains and just fire rockets in and very hard for them to find, for the Americans to find the Viet Cong. Then Nha Trang was terrific for its beaches. I

noticed that Nha Trang is now putting out a pamphlet for it’s beaches, beautiful. Vietnam itself, South Vietnam itself had the most beautiful scenery I’d ever seen in tropical climate. The beaches were outstanding, probably somewhat close to the good Sydney beaches. Pleiku had a beach I think, no, it wasn’t Pleiku; anyway the beaches were outstanding. There was Nha Trang, there was

another base further up north, which was a Korean compound. Now, from what I remember, the Koreans were feared soldiers, they were ruthless, and the Viet Cong wouldn’t come anywhere near them, so we were always happy to go there. That had a terrific beach, and the Korean soldiers were very friendly but absolutely terrible, terribly feared soldiers, so we

were always happy to go there. As I say, each place had a memorable attribute.

Well, what I mean by that was if we knew we were going back to Nha Trang, we’d say, “Right, we’re going to go to the beach on our day off,” or when we’d finish our show we’d go to the beach. If we went to Pleiku, there was a

Green Beret soldiers unit. We used to go to the firing range. We knew the guys there, and we’d shoot the guns in the firing range and we could say we were practicing shooting. If we went to Da Nang there was a beautiful, there was a very good French restaurant in the hotel. We knew we could get a good plate of spaghetti there, cheap. And there was a river there, so we could get boat rides with the Americans.

So that’s one thing and each place we went to, we knew what we were getting there if we’d been there before and often we did them more than once.

Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

Wherever we went, especially in Da Nang, there were always signs of what had happened there. As soon as they

were blown up, some of the airport buildings, they were rebuilt by the Americans, who developed a real keen method for putting up buildings in a quick way and some it’s still used today. Same as Velcro [fibre fastening] was used originally by the astronauts, I guess that became an industry in itself. But some of the methods they’d do for prefab [prefabricated (buildings)] was visible, because one time we’d go there and the building would be shot down and a couple of

weeks later, there’d be a new building there. And they left all that behind of course.

I think I did, but I think…

We didn’t vary it. We modified it in the first instance, when things weren’t working and we got a tight, you aim for a tight show where things flow quickly and you exclude the things that don’t go over.

Now, for example, there might be some comedy sketch that might be funny to Australians and English, but certainly not to Americans, so we’d take that out. So we were constantly tightening the show, but certainly not changing things over then taking things out.

Ninety percent of the time. There were only a few places in Vietnam that housed Australians. It was a vastly different audience between

Australians and Americans. We had one incident, which I’ll never forget, and it was the only time that I ever got emotional about Vietnam really, and I still see the argument today about Waltzing Matilda. We were at a place, it was Pleiku I think, where there was a mixture of Australian servicemen and American servicemen, but it was an American club.

We were told that the show would be at nine o’clock in the morning. When we got there, the manager said, “Look, the show will go on at nine o’clock in the morning, but there’s something I have to tell you. All these boys saw very heavy action in the jungle the night before and they’re coming straight in from the jungle for a show, please remember that. So don’t say anything that might hurt their feelings or anything like that.

They’ve had a terrible, terrible time. They’ve lost six of their fellow soldiers.” And I thought, “Wow.” He said, “Now, I’d appreciate it if you could play the Australian national anthem and the American national anthem first because there’s more American troops there.” Well instead of playing the Australian national anthem, it was requested by the sergeant who came in with these guys at nine o’clock. They came in absolutely filthy dirty,

dropped all their clothes and went for the bar. He said, “Will you play Waltzing Matilda instead?” Now I don’t know whether you know, but Waltzing Matilda is so commonly known all over the world, everywhere I went people were always requesting Waltzing Matilda. So we started with the American national anthem, and the Americans all stood with their hand over their heart and some of them were crying their eyes out over the losses, obviously the losses and what they’d

been through the night before. And then we played Waltzing Matilda and the same Americans and Australians were all up crying, the tears flowing from their eyes, and it was the first time I’d felt, not heard it, but felt Waltzing Matilda as a national song, and that really got to me. I really think it should be a national song, because it’s just not the words which are not applicable but the melody itself and played as a march is just

stirring.

It was.

I couldn’t sing. I just became all lump in the throat, emotional. The hairs were standing up on my arms, sort of thing. I’d never seen anything like it, these grown men, some of them big men too, had just lost their compatriots, their fellow servicemen and

were crying. Not all of them, there was about six or seven of them in the front row, absolutely devastated by what they’d been through and I thought, “Well, I’ll remember that.” Every time I hear it I get emotional, funny isn’t it?

No, we didn’t sing it, we played it, because I felt it would be,

the words, whilst they’re good and they’re memorable, they weren’t applicable to what we saw in front of us, it wasn’t the national anthem.

It is, yeah, it is, yeah.

Yeah. When I hear the argument, if it is an argument, that they were going to ban it from the rugby thing [Rugby World Cup 2003], I thought, “They don’t know,” and wasn’t there an argument against it?

They’re going to do it anyway. So much so that I believe everybody in the arena will sing it that knows it.

Yeah, I do.

I did then, and that was one of the things I learnt. I did then and I still do.

It’s a release for a lot of people. It’s no use me, if I had my way, I’d be singing Frank Sinatra songs and singing jazz and things like that, but as one person said to me years ago, “You can’t eat jazz.” Jazz is not a, in Australia, is not a means of income, but doing commercial songs and nostalgic songs for people is. They can relate to that by way of what they’ve heard on the radio.

Well, I think the importance is evidenced by how many shows the Americans had going through Vietnam at the time. Had dozens from Australia, they had some from the Philippines, some from Thailand, and even some Vietnamese shows. There were some very good Vietnamese bands.

I think if it hadn’t have been for the Americans placing importance on it, the Australians wouldn’t have done anything about it. That’s not to be critical of the Australians. I think that the pressure on the Americans, the pressure on them was far, as individuals, was far higher than it was on the Australian soldiers. The Australians, because they were limited in numbers, wouldn’t have produced the resources for getting dozens of bands through.

Absolutely, even more so, because the Australians were so efficient that they were often given duties out of Vung Tau and Nui Dat that were really tough assignments to get through. No, I didn’t mean it from a war or effectiveness, I meant from a political point of view. The Americans had four times more

soldiers than we did there, probably more, maybe five or six times more soldiers there, so the pressure on them was not to get the job done, they were getting the job done anyway, but it was because of the vast numbers of soldiers there that they would have to deal more with the morale than what the Australians did. In Vung Tau for example,

the beach in Vung Tau was divided into several beaches by way of a fence. Now the Australian beach had lifesavers in Vung Tau. It was always tidy and clean. The Korean one was dirty; they’d leave the rubbish in the sand and had no lifesavers. The Vietnamese, well forget it. That’s where they dumped their rubbish,

I think and you could tell the difference. The American one also had lifesavers but they had a little boat that they did. So the morale of the Australians was, they had an L-shaped swimming pool, air-conditioned quarters, this is the air force in Vung Tau, they had Vegemite [Australian brand of spread made from yeast extract] on the table and they were eating lamb chops and bacon, because that’s how we treat our servicemen.

The Americans had so many there that often the food was sub-standard. They’d have things like powdered eggs, never fresh eggs, ‘cause there was too many. So the pressures on them were not so much about the war, which would have been a set of pressures anyhow, but about the morale, having so many there and as I said earlier, dressed in green and all those things that go with it. The Australians had a more comfortable way, away from the war.

It was a resort. It was once a big resort. They’d have things like horse-driven carts to ride on. You’d pay someone. I often remember the difference. When you’re in the city that’s dominated by American soldiers, the Vietnamese take on an American accent, sometimes southern, and the Vietnamese girls would come up and say, “Hey GI [‘government issue’, American soldier], would you

like to buy?” The American accent, but in Vung Tau it was quite funny. We got to Vung Tau towards the end of the first tour, and a girl came up to me, “Hey listen mate, want to buy some shades?” Selling me sunglasses with an Australian accent, unbelievable. Vung Tau was unique.

Oh she could hear us, and we were talking to them I think.

No.

I didn’t ever get that sense. I got that sense almost everywhere I went. We were always on our guard. You don’t know who the

Viet Cong are, but that’s a possibility. I mean there’s a possibility that everybody lived so well from the economy of the soldiers in Vung Tau that the Viet Cong were perhaps not necessarily North Vietnamese sympathisers anymore. Maybe they were getting so much money they were living a life of Riley [living well], who knows? I don’t know. I didn’t experience those thoughts until, in reverse I guess,

we were in, wherever we went, I mentioned earlier the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team who warned us that there are booby traps everywhere. You don’t know, if a Vietnamese comes up to you and says, “Here have this”, without asking you for money, be very wary. It could be a booby trap. Now the kind of booby traps they’d have would be the Zippo lighter [brand of cigarette lighter] filled with flash powder. You’d put it near your face and it blows your skin away

from your eyes and nose and all that sort of thing. Just to devastate one person would make them happy, the Viet Cong. There was a pen filled with a detonator or something that, they showed us this, they had a museum, and it was filled with acid, and when you tipped the pen up, you might find it on a bar or something, you tip it up, it explodes in your hand. So we’re always wary cause we didn’t know who the enemy was as we travelled

through the cities, day by day.

With regularity, the worst that ever happened with regularity would be, we’d be doing a show and there’d be a rocket attack from the hills or the mountains. When the sirens go off, all the audience disappears to bunkers. We had one situation where

we had a new lady in the show, in fact it was Liz Layton, and she was doing her first show with us, and we didn’t tell her about the possibility of a rocket attack. And we’d do the show and there’s this wonderful audience in front of us, and all of a sudden the sirens went off, they all disappeared into the bunkers, and she’s still in the middle of her song, and she looked at me and said, “Well, I never.” I said, “You’ve got to get in there real quick.” She

didn’t know what to do. All of a sudden, the audience disappeared, but in terms of danger that was about the worst we ever got. There were small incidents. I’ll tell you this one story that I, we’d been on the Green Beret shooting range. If you remember I said in Pleiku, we often got on the shooting range and we’d learn target shoot.

I had an M16 [M16 5.56mm calibre rifle], I didn’t have an M16 rifle but one day on the shooting range, I tried one out and learnt how to cock it and all that sort of thing. We were doing a show, I forget where it was, and in the middle of the show, the sirens went off. The manager came running in, stopped the show. He said, “Everybody into my office from the show.” He said, “We’re surrounded by Viet Cong.” I said, “You’ve got to be

kidding?” “No,” he said, “We’re absolutely surrounded, I’ve called in the choppers, and they’ll deal with it. Get in there and get on the ground, on the floor.” He threw each of us, Paul Bartlett, myself and the drummer an M16. He said, “If anything walks in that door with slanty eyes, shoot it first.” Well I went into a state of panic, not screaming or anything like that. I was lying on the floor, and I had taught Paul how to cock

this thing and make sure it’s operational on the firing range, and I was lying there, “Paul, I forget how to cock this thing, what do I do, what do I do?” “Oh, shut up,” he says. I completely went to pieces. I thought, “This is it, we’re surrounded, they’re going to come in that door and I’m going to kill someone, or they’re going to kill me, worse still”. And I didn’t want to wake up dead.

What happened was the choppers came in and killed about

twenty of them, and the next morning all the wounded came to the door of the infirmary asking for help.

Wounded VC, well they came to the door. They were all villagers and things like that, came to the hospital and said, “We need help and bandages. We’ve got a wounded man here and this one’s been shot in the leg.” And the Americans would fix them up and send them on their way again, to do it again.

There’s another story that happened to me a bit later. We were on a barge in the Mekong River and we flew in. Did you want to get onto something else?

We fly in on a helicopter on the back of a barge. Now the barge was primarily in the middle of the Mekong River. It was a ship, a small ship, but it had no motor and it was pulled by a tug and

it housed, it housed all the rockets and ammunition for the helicopter gunships in that area. They’d fly in, reload and fly out again. We flew in to do a show, and the first thing I would ask all Americans is, that I encountered, I’d say, “When was the last time you got hit?” And they’d say, “We’ve never been hit.” That’s what they said to me, “We’ve never been hit, we’ve been here five years and we’ve never been hit by anything”.

I thought, “That will be just my luck to get hit tonight.” So sure enough, we set up all the equipment for the show and they were firing and rockets and shooting from both sides of the river, a very narrow river, at this boat. I’ll never forget this guy. He was just like, what’s his name in Apocalypse Now [Vietnam War movie]? The fellow who said…

The Robert Duval character, he wore a cowboy hat. He said to me, he said, and there’s all rockets going off

and everything, and they put us under the mess hall tables, which were made of steel. They said, “That’s the safest place, get under there’ and I’ll never forget, we were looking out and they dragged a gunner in who had been shot in the ear, and they were shooting guns outside the walls. I thought, “This is the end,” and the hero of the whole scene was the gunship operator,

who came down and he said, “Norm, don’t be scared, in five minutes there won’t be any Viet Cong left.” I thought, “Oh no,” and we’re saying our prayers and one of the guys in the band was in tears, worried about it, the young fellow. He took off, we watched him. He went over to where the bunkers were that they were firing from and just blew them all up, one big swoop, mini guns, rockets, fired everything. It reminded me of that scene in Apocalypse Now where

he turned on the classical music, what was it now?

Yes, turned that up full blast and did the whole thing. This guy would have done the same; he was a character and a half. He came back and he said, “I told you there was nothing to be worried about”. Well, the next morning, all the sampans and the boats were coming across with the wounded for the American doctors to fix.

Oh, absolutely,

I said to them, “I mean that’s ridiculous, they were shooting at you.” He said, “What’s more they turn up with guns, our guns, that we didn’t give them of course, they steal them.” There were people coming out of the bunkers that they were shooting from.

Well as I mentioned earlier,

you can get used to rocket attacks and the sirens going off. You were very seldom hurt, because you’d run into the bunkers and the action might be three or four kilometres away, but they still sound the siren because they put everybody on alert. So we got used to that, that we, it’s like if you hear the sirens go off, you know what it’s for, but

eventually, you just dawdle out to the bunkers instead of panicking and running, but incidents such as that one were rare, so they were so extreme to us that we’d be frightened, that’s for sure.

From the point of view of fear?

Yes, I didn’t realise it until I got back from the first tour and I got back on cracker night,

what they used to call cracker night, fireworks. I was walking with my girlfriend up at, we were walking up at Kings Cross and someone threw a bunger out of a car and it went off and I fell to the ground. That was conditioning. We were told if ever you hear any street fire or anything, fall to the ground straightaway, don’t think twice about it, just do it. And I always did, but that was the kind of conditioning. I didn’t realise just how much tension

I was suppressing until I got back and learnt to relax. I mean a little thing like a bunger going off was enough to make me realise that.

One important aspect, I think,

is when I got home, I got in the taxi from the airport to get home and the taxi driver said, “Where are you coming from?” as they normally do when you get off the plane and I said, “From Vietnam.” He said, “Oh you blokes.” I said, “No, I wasn’t in the services, I was over there entertaining the troops.” He said, “Oh that’s alright.” He said, “You’re nice and safe there,” he said and he likened what I was doing with Bob Hope.

Now Bob Hope used to fly in, do a show and fly out to another country for safety. He would never expose himself - he was an American icon - to any kind of danger, but we lived with the troops, and I remember taking offence at that remark, because he was putting me into a category without talking to me about it.

I didn’t say anything or argue the point. I don’t see any point in arguing with someone I don’t know because

it’s pointless. I’ll get out of the cab, and he’ll go his way, and I’ll go mine. I saw it as being ignorant and there was a lot of ignorance regarding the war back home, and a lot of ignorance from the soldiers there too, who thought they were doing the world a great service, and now when we look back we see some horrific political decisions made by both Nixon and Johnson.

Well I often feel sorry for politicians who say something when they’re younger, and when they’re a lot older it’s thrown back at them,

but I was in favour of the war when I came back because I’d been dealing with officers of the American army and getting their opinion of the war, not realising that their opinion would have been coloured by what they were sent to do. It’s like me saying, “Well, my job’s better than yours, that’s because I know what my job is and I don’t know what yours is”.

Well, they often used to do little drawings on coasters and things about how

the North Vietnamese were being supported by the Chinese and that they were coming down into Laos, and the Americans didn’t have a kind of good relationship with Laos, so they allowed the Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese, and shoot artillery across the South Vietnamese border and the Americans

couldn’t do anything about it. They felt that the South Vietnamese were being suppressed by the North Vietnamese, and a lot of the Southern Vietnamese would agree with them and that’s where you got the sympathisers and they justified it in all, mostly in the way that they were handling the war and why they were there. Even though I couldn’t see why we were there at all, they expressed strongly that there were dangers to Australia, because if the

Chinese become involved and decides to support the North Vietnamese that could drag down to the tips of Australia, and Australia would be at a loss.

Yeah, yeah, it did never happen. Everyone there, by the way, always, those who knew they were doing a good job, but knew there was only one way that the war would end,

expressed foresight, because the war ended by the Americans getting out and South Vietnam being taken by North Vietnam.

Most of the young servicemen that I spoke to would say, “There’s only one way that this war will end, the way it is now we’ve got enough artillery and weapons here to wipe out North Vietnam off the map,” but they didn’t. They did it all in South Vietnam. The occasional bomber would go over and bomb Hanoi,

we knew that, but they survived. It was like they were getting killed and coming out of the ground. They survived and they won. A lot of North Vietnamese that I spoke to, very intelligent, very well educated, were people who expressed Ho Chi Minh’s [ President of North Vietnam] philosophy for endurance.

Well, it was the first time I’d seen a concerted effort to get our troops out of there after the first time that I was there, the moratoriums were spoken of. At the time I thought, “These people are ignorant, they don’t understand what’s going on. Don’t they realise that if we’re not there that the Chinese could come down and take it?” I look back on what my thoughts were then and I’m embarrassed.

It was just youthful ignorance.

My family read the newspapers and that was about it. They didn’t ever voice an opinion on anything political, current, for two reasons. Both my mother and father didn’t speak English very well and

my brother and sister, they both had careers and were just not interested. There are a lot of people like that.

No, except that, not politically, but except a lot of people wondered what I was on about. When I came back, I came back full of adventure and experiences and stories that I wanted to tell somebody about.

Well, I soon realised that I was boring them to tears and a lot of the things that happened, I found out later on, they thought were all lies and stories made up, because, “After all, Bob Hope goes to wars all the time”. They kept associating what we did in Vietnam with what Bob Hope does and it’s just a show. They didn’t realise that we were in A sites, we were working with people that were firing cannons

back and receiving rockets in their backyard and that disappointed me a bit. There was a bit of ignorance there in regards to what we did.

Yes. The second tour was already organised.

While I was over

there the first time, I ran into The Delltones in Da Nang. Their manager, Bill Watson, said, “Would you be interested in going a second time?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Well, I know that Digger Revell is putting together a show to go over there with an Australian comedian called Roy Giles.”

I’d met up with The Delltones in Vietnam, the first time, and their manager Bill Watson had arranged, he didn’t arrange, he asked me if I wanted to go again and he knew of a second show going. So when I got home, I contacted Digger Revell,

yeah Digger Revell and Johnny Charters, his keyboard player at the time, and I said to him, “I’ll go again,” and they organised the show and we rehearsed it. Roy Giles was a singer and comedian: he was in the show. We had a girl singer, Karen Hughes, and another one I can’t remember, and that was a nice show.

Yes, now Digger Revell had one show, Roy Giles and the two girls and myself and the band had another show, but we both went over together and working for the same agent, who happened to be Lola McDonald again, out of Vietnam. So she was booking two shows. When we came back to the villa in

Saigon, which was our base, we’d get together with Digger Revell and do all that sort of thing, socialise, discuss where we were going next and how best to go about it. The show consisted of Roy Giles, who was a former resident on the Johnny O’Keefe Show on Channel 2 [Australian television channel], who was a high-pitched singer with a degree of stand up comedy

expertise. He’d been doing it for a long time and he used to do the same routine. He was a good example, how he barged in and thought he was going to kill the Americans with his comedy and none of them knew what he was talking about. So he modified his routine to make it more, he had to because he was getting no laughs. And the two singers, one was a sophisticated Shirley Bassey style singer, and the other one was like a cute jazz singer, she’d sort of swing things.

She was very popular with the Americans this time because they loved her music.

Karen Hughes was one.

And the other one, I wasn’t too sure of her name. I’ve still got the poster at home. And this time I had prepared a better style of show for myself. I sang four songs

and they were more attuned to what they wanted to hear, because often the pop tunes in Australia were not necessarily the number one hits in America and a lot of them didn’t know them. They knew the music more by their favourite artists. For example, Jimmy Hendrix and all those people were very much in the fore. Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin and The Who, they were all very popular in Vietnam the second time round. So there was a little bit of

that in there.

All Along The Watchtower was one, which was Jimmy Hendrix, a Jimmy Hendrix song. I used to do a medley of songs by Otis Redding but I included Mustang Sally in there. By this time I decided that this is what the Americans wanted to hear. They didn’t want to hear show tunes because a lot of them were young fellows. If it was an officers’

mess and only officers’ were in the audience, I’d change my routines to something a little bit more appropriate. But mostly soul songs, Try A Little Tenderness, because we had an organ in the show, a keyboard. Try A Little Tenderness was used to come up quite good with the limited instruments and technology we didn’t have today.

It was a variation but I tried to keep the basic format of what he did in there. I think I had a ‘wah-wah’ pedal in 1969, which was just starting to be introduced.

A pedal is a, Jimmy Hendrix used them a lot. It’s a pedal that changes the note that you’re playing from

bass to treble, so you go ‘wah-wah-wah-wah-wah’, that sort of effect on the note, that was Jimmy Hendrix. He sort of mastered that technique of using the ‘wah-wah’ pedal and of course you could buy them then. You can buy them now, they’re about six hundred dollars. I think I paid about thirty dollars for one, however, that I decided to go from sophisticated Lucky Old Sun to more of the soul music and the black Americans would get up on tables and do their dancing with their short

sticks or freedom sticks, letting everybody know that they’re short.

Well one of the art forms of the Vietnamese in the villages was to sell walking sticks to Americans, or make them to sell to Americans. Some of them the top would unscrew and you’d pull out a blade, but it just looked like a walking stick. A short stick was a

shorter stick which you would notch according to how many days you had left in Vietnam. That was very important. They had short certificates, where they’d have pinned on their wall next to their bed and cross out the number of days. They couldn’t wait to get home and I can see why. And they had this terminology, they’d say, “I’m not going to do that, because I’m short, I don’t want to carry that, I’m short, I want to go home soon and I don’t want to injure

myself.” So they used that as a, it was really light-humoured really. That was a short stick or a freedom stick or then they’d describe the aeroplane that would take them home as a ‘freedom bird’. If you’re at the airport, it’s all military aircraft there but they’d see a 707 come in and leave for America and they’d say, “Oh, the freedom bird.”

That’s what they called the freedom bird.

It was very much the same sort of, well you’ve seen the two faces of show business, the laughing clown and the crying clown, which is often depicted in plays or magazines where they want you to

detach your thoughts to a theatrical thing. I found the audience, the Americans, far more sensitive to what you’re singing about, the lyrics meant a lot. I’ll give you an example. The second time round, I used to do a song called Tobacco Road, which was originally recorded by the Nashville Teens, I think, as a rock tune, but Lou Rawles did a version with a trio, which was very, very

slow and sensitive and it was bass and piano and him; are you familiar with Lou Rawles’ material? He’s got a deep voice and I didn’t understand what that was about really, but I used to sing it because it was full of emotion. It was sort of a thump, thump. It was boom, boom, click, click, the audience would click their finger, boom, boom,

‘I was born in a dump, my mama died and my daddy got drunk.’ It was about living and being raised in Tobacco Road in the dumps of the big cities and as a result the reaction the first time I did it was unbelievable. People were in, the blacks in the audience were emotional. Later on, they’d come up to me

and say, “Look, that reminded us so much of home,” and when I started to analyse the lyrics more and more, realised what it meant. It was not that it was ambiguous, I realised what it meant to them. To me it was just a piece of art, a poem, but to them it was depicting the world that they lived in as kids, in those big cities, like New York, and Chicago and whatever, and all those areas of

economic destruction that they lived in poverty. So that in itself was, to me I just loved the audiences. So in terms of their reactions, we learnt to make them laugh, which wasn’t easy with an American audience, not as easy as singing to them. We learnt that the best songs we can do are the songs that are appropriate, not only to the times but appropriate to their

conditions. You can always find a song that, oh, the song was of course, Eric Burdon’s We’ve Got To Get Out Of This Place; that would get uproar, ‘in this dirty old part of the city’. We learnt that that song was appropriate to everyone that was there. That was huge, that’s a good example of finding material that was appropriate.

Yeah, well I’m glad to see you appreciate that very sentiment, because it’s one of those things that is often lost between an audience and a singer, an entertainer, because, for example, I’ve entertained

in New Zealand where they don’t understand the sentimentality of something. I watched an interview the other day with Tony Bennett in which Rove [McManus, Rove Live] on television said to him, “You’ve been described as being a master of your art, a soulful singer of this and that and a sentimentalist,” and Tony Bennett said, “Well, I like all those things you’ve given me in your description, but except the word sentimentalist.”

He said, “All the critics are concerned with sentimentality.” He said, “If I can’t feel something in a song and portray it and put my heart on my sleeve, what’s the purpose of me trying to communicate with you through a song? Sentimentality is very important, but the critics don’t like anything that is sentimental”. He said the critics have described him as being too sentimental. He said, “What does that mean?” And I feel the same

way. I think the kind of singers that I listen to are Sinatra’s prime years of the fifties, Tony Bennett’s sentimentality, which is communicating with me. I just don’t listen to it, I feel it. Feeling something is totally different to listening to it.

Yeah, oh yes, yeah, yeah, The Good Life, yeah.

By that time, the Americans had pulled out just about half their troops, so a lot of the clubs that we did in the first one weren’t there; they weren’t occupied, that is. The audiences were smaller, they weren’t quite as badly

under threat. We saw less incidents. There was a lot of in fighting that we saw in the clubs. There was one fellow in one club went crazy with a gun and started shooting up the place, shooting the windows out. The tension when you put, things like alcohol to excess, a deadly weapon in someone’s hands and they all had them, and the tension involved

and no release from the tension, then you’d expect those sorts of things. But towards the end, there was a lot of problems.

Yeah, between each other. The Americans were starting to lose it.

We did a show - I remember it like it

was yesterday - and they were having raffles, they had raffles there. It was very unusual. The kind of raffle they had was things like meat and vegetables and underwear from the PX, fresh underwear and things like that. And we started the show and we heard this shooting outside, and

of course as soon as you hear shooting, it means someone is shooting at someone or whatever, so everyone puts their helmets on and disappears. And as it turns out, it was some young Italian guy, American Italian, who had a dispute with someone in his barracks over a theft or something and was screaming for him to come out. And when the officer came out, oh no, it

was an MP came out, with his MP band on and cap and everything, the guy shot him in the shoulder and he went down and they all grabbed him, grabbed the Italian guy, twisted his arm up his back, took the gun off him. It was just a, that was a disruption, but that sort of argument, the arguments between each other, we saw a lot on the second trip because I think they had

more idle time. They were less concerned with the dangers of war. They were going through political, they’d stopped the bombing of North Vietnam, which I think caused the North Vietnamese to further install things along the Laos border, and

it wasn’t as exciting.

Only that they were probably, I didn’t ever see anything in the audience in the way of a fight, except for one or two occasions when the girls appeared to be unbalanced in their choosing of black and white to come up on the stage. There was one time there when we thought a riot was going to – there were arguments screaming at each other over this business, “She doesn’t want to talk

to me because I’m black.” They took over the whole show in the end, it was ridiculous, but I would describe those as lots of small incidents of people under intense pressure. And I don’t think I could ever be a soldier successfully, not then and not now.

Well for a start I didn’t have the training, but

I couldn’t live through life thinking that the next eleven months that I’m here for, someone may be a sniper or someone is going to shoot me, maim me or kill me from behind or anywhere. I didn’t know who the enemy was and they didn’t know. And I think that kind of pressure really does a lot to a person if you don’t know who your enemy is.

I don’t know if I really did or not, to be honest. I suppressed, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of anxiety over the various things. For example, I couldn’t bring myself, I forced myself to get into a helicopter, I forced myself to get into the gunner’s seat of a helicopter, which is on the side. When a helicopter banks you feel like you’re going to

tip out of it, because you don’t because of the centrifugal force, but I remember sitting in the gunner’s seat, don’t ask me why, I mean the gunner’s the first one they’re going to shoot. I used to sit next to him on the side of the helicopter and in open air.

Yeah.

We were always travelling to, most of the flights we did were in helicopters, by helicopter.

Yes.

There was only one time we realised just how vulnerable we were in helicopters. It was a nighttime flight and tracers were going up into the air and we thought, I said to the pilot, the co-pilot, I said, “What’s going on? What’s with these?” He said, “They’re shooting at us.” I said, “Aren’t you concerned they might shoot through the belly of the thing and hit me in the foot?”

He said, “No, no, no, not yet, not yet.” He said, “When you hear a little tinkle then you know the helicopter’s been hit, then you panic, not yet.” The calmness of these people was unbelievable. There were tracers coming up. Someone down there, it was in the city too, flying over the city, someone shooting at us. That sort of frightened me a bit. We had another scare in a helicopter once when something went wrong and the thing dropped in height and left my stomach up there

and that was pretty scary. There were a couple of flights that went wrong, and they had to turn back to the airport.

We were in a, not a C-130, they were fairly reliable and so were the Caribous, the C-17. It was a C-114, I can’t remember the correct number, but it was a jet propelled, a jet-assisted propeller, and one of the, it had no glass in the windows and when you looked out you could

see that there was oil dripping from one of the engines, so I said to the loadmaster, “If you look out there, you’ll see.” “Oh thank you,” rushed up and told the pilot and they turned around and went back. We got back safely.

Oh, the clubs in Vietnam were mostly made of plywood, like a waterproof plywood. They could be anything from a dirt floor to the imagination of whoever put them together. The guys would get together in a compound and they’d build a clubhouse. The clubhouse usually consisted of wooden walls, a straight box type room, a large room,

with a bar at one end and a stage at the other, and maybe an office for someone to administrate it, but it’s the beer was sometimes kept in bathtubs full of ice or containers full of ice. Others in the bigger city, had refrigeration, proper refrigeration, very basic stuff.

Generally speaking, the stages were a box, a large box, a small box, sometimes they went to the trouble of building proper, like the one out here, stages that are built in, even had dressing rooms sometimes. That one we were supposed to be surrounded by Viet Cong and they threw us in the dressing room and on the floor with guns, that

was a proper stage, properly built.

Never in a situation like a Bob Hope situation because what they would do for Bob Hope was they would look for

a large outdoor venue, because he would, there would be plenty of American servicemen especially, who would want to fly in to see that, so they’d bring them by truck. Long Binh was a control centre, they’d bring them from everywhere to come and see him. You might get two or three thousand people sitting watching that. We did lots of outdoor shows, they were more or less a stage, a

makeshift stage with a back on it, so that you didn’t fall off the back, which often happened. And the guys would sit on the ground, on the grass, in the trenches. The one in Da Nang was pretty scary stuff; I took movies of that. We were about to do a show, we set up the equipment and an ammunition dump blew up in the distance. And we thought we were being attacked.

That just goes to show there’s a nasty incident. The ammunition dump blew up, it was a napalm thing, it just kept exploding. The impact of the explosions after you see the flare would vibrate. One of the girls was in the dressing room at the back of the stage, a little shed and it fell down on her. It was Liz Layton, a very popular Sydney club act,

and I didn’t see her after that. We ended up having to go home after that big thing, but there were guys in trenches. They all disappeared into bunkers and we were taught whenever it happens, you disappear into the bunker or a brick building. There was a brick building on the side of the stage, which was the clubhouse. I ran for the door and this big American southerner, “You can’t come in here, boy,” he said, “you’re getting paid to entertain the people,

get out there and entertain them.” He said, “I’m not going to let you in here, you’re supposed to be out there”. I sort of forced him out of the way, picked his arm up, ducked under it and ran inside. But I don’t know what he was on about, but his suggestion was that no matter, if you’re getting paid for it, no matter what you encounter regarding the war you should be out there entertaining them.

Hours. There were people injured, there were people killed in and around the dump itself. It would have been half a kilometre away but the impact was felt enormously.

Well I asked her about that just recently, and

she said, well, she was taken to hospital and they released her after a while. I think she said she was pregnant too, and she just went back to Australia after us, but we were all concerned about her because she was taken to hospital on the day. Something apparently came down and hit her across the back of the neck, so the story goes.

He wanted us to remain on stage and wouldn’t let me in the brick building. Maybe he was the man paying the

cheque, I don’t know.

We hadn’t started.

No. We’d just set up the equipment and the equipment, which was a PA [public address (system)] in a steel case, was all on the floor. It had fallen off the stand and that’s the impact of those explosions.

Oh it happened to us twice. Where there was a box, they’d build the box up high and it usually happened to the

drummer, it usually happens with the drummer who’s at the back of the stage. He’d set up his drums and be playing away and getting carried away and all of a sudden, he’d disappear off the back because the back leg of his stool would go down the back of the stage. That happened twice. One was very high and one not so high.

No, we had a good laugh though.

Well we had one camera between us. The opportunities to buy film were limited. We weren’t allowed, as I mentioned earlier, we weren’t allowed as third country nationals into American PXs, so we’d often get, when we had money, which was very rare, we’d often get the Americans to buy it for us. So whenever we could, we did.

We took some video. Some of it was spoiled over the years, but the one of the ammunition dump going, blowing up, I gave to a friend who converted it to video.

Yep, yep, a couple. They’re also included on that video.

No, not in particular, because the war had diminished in intensity.

No, he’d be off touring separately. We’d meet only at the base.

In terms of stage duration?

I think it was around an hour and fifteen minutes, and I think with an encore we’d do an extra fifteen minutes if we were asked.

Yeah, always straight through.

I’ve never encountered in my life anyone who was on heroin that I know of, and I don’t ever remember heroin being even there, or coke or any of those things. In movies these days, they seem to depict that very commonly. I don’t remember any time where I encountered anything other than heaps and heaps of

marijuana and maybe some of the guys were on pep pills or something, but marijuana you could buy on the streets. The Vietnamese used to have stalls where they’d, for example, get a packet of American Kool [brand of mentholated] cigarettes, and carefully take the band off one side, take the cellophane off, open the packet carefully,

take one cigarette out at a time and roll the tobacco out and fill it up with marijuana, twist the end of it and carefully put it back, and then seal it with a little bit of glue and the band and everything and people would think it was ordinary cigarettes. And the Americans would go up to the stall and say, “I want a packet of Kool marijuana’ or whatever they called it, and that’s what they would get.

I don’t know, I don’t really remember. I know that cigarettes were very, very cheap. You could buy a packet of cigarettes in the PX for ten cents, for a packet of full strength cigarettes.

Oh yeah, yeah. If you want to know what the Americans were like in their war habitat in Vietnam,

look at the movie Platoon. I think the Platoon depicts those tent activities with the short stick, the kind of weird accessories to their clothing, even when they were out in the jungle. The pot smoking was as common as eating a meal and the pipes and the bongs that was available.

That was another industry there.

I didn’t do enough Australian, I didn’t do enough shows for Australians to know, I did only a few, but I can tell you it was less likely to be a predominant factor of enjoyment or entertainment, marijuana that is, less likely in Vietnam for the

Australian soldiers. And I suspect one of those things that general was talking to me about, wishing he had a platoon of Australian soldiers and wipe out a few of the Viet Cong, he was talking about the, not just the lack of discipline of American soldiers, but the constant use of marijuana.

I think they were scrutinised probably a little better. I think the officers

were in fact guardians of their lives, of their social lives and lives. The Americans had very little officers’ discipline. They were sort of let loose in their own tents and they did whatever. They drank vodka the night before a patrol out of cans and there was no real control on their habit, whether they’d be a force against the

Viet Cong or whatever. Maybe it was just an emotional political situation that they relied heavily on artillery and aircraft to do their business, but you could certainly see the difference in the disciplines.

All the time, especially for those outside waiting to go in,

it was accepted. It may not have been accepted all the time, but it was just a basic, you got used to it. I tried it. The Americans there often used to pass the joint, and all that, and I soon realised, I was a drinker at the time, not a heavy drinker, but I used to enjoy after a show I’d have

three cold beers, which were always welcome in that heat, or maybe a bourbon or something. You can’t drink and smoke dope, you just get sick for three days, so it only took me one time at getting sick and I’ll never forget it, and I didn’t bother anymore. I didn’t see any purpose for it. I like being in control of my mind, getting drunk and stoned, boy, why?

Responsibilities, that’s right, yeah.

I had an opportunity to put something together myself, put a show together, for a different agent.

The second tour ended with that ammunition dump blowing up in Da Nang, and our equipment was lost, we were almost at the end of the tour. We cancelled two or three more shows and went back home. And then the third tour came about by way of an agent, who rang me and said, “We’ve heard through the grapevine,” which was probably a friend of mine, another musician,

“that you’ve done two tours of Vietnam as an entertainer, can you put something together for me? It will be worth more money to you.” So I said, “Yes.” I went and got a show together, got one girl singer, that was Jenny White,

and a trio together. That was myself, a keyboard player, Kenny someone and the drummer was Bill Mottsic, Bill Mottsic, I think. When we went away on the third trip, it was because there’d be more money in it for me, I had control over the show,

he would do all the bookings etcetera and etcetera. In the three months and three weeks that we were there the last time, all those bookings sort of fell through, because what was happening was they booked I think it was sixteen or seventeen shows but all of a sudden we’d say, “Okay, this booking’s on Saturday,” and the club we discovered, the unit had moved back to America and the club was never there.

It wasn’t there anymore or it wasn’t used anymore. That happened three or four times, so I had to make phone calls back and forward, which were not easy, and I rang the bandleader up that I worked for, it wasn’t Bruce Wormald at that time, it was Bob McKinnon, rang him up and said, “Have you got a place in the band?” and he said, “Yeah, I have.” And he was working at the Oceanic, so I did twelve shows the third time round and decided to come back because the

war was almost non-existent for Americans.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It still was happening. They were finally getting Johnson to, who was it after Johnson?

Nixon.

They were finally getting Nixon to say yes to a removal of all the troops when hell broke loose. I think the North Vietnamese were just waiting for more and more Americans to leave before they overran it, which they did. I think, I can’t remember how many troops were there, but it was less than half that were left, they were just guarding mostly the bigger cities. And

even the number of people in the audience the third time round was only about ten or fifteen, where there used to be maybe thirty or forty or fifty. They’d come in and see a show. The war was a lot lighter on them, so they weren’t quite as concerned. You could see it. The third time round we saw no evidence, we encountered no incidents of the war. There were no sirens, no rocket attacks,

nothing like that. The worst we saw was infighting.

I didn’t mind so much, because I was eager to get back. By this time, we’d had too much idle time in between shows, it was getting to be a bit of a bore, even though we had comfortable accommodation,

musically it wasn’t any fun without the people. We found ourselves doing a lot of free shows, just for having a good time with some of the American servicemen that were still there, and though they were appreciative they had a thing where they’d call it ‘Pass the Hat’, so they’d pass the hat to get us some money and if we were lucky, we’d get a hundred dollars or something

between three or four of us and use that money for drinks and having a good time. But it became something we’d prefer to do at home rather than in Vietnam, where there was expenses involved and waiting so long in between jobs. Fourteen jobs in three and a half months would have been okay if it was three and a half weeks, but fourteen jobs is a long time

between shows. We’d do two in one week, nothing in the second week and then four shows in the next and so on, so we decided to come home early.

It was very, very easy to make friends, with Americans especially, because we were Australian, we had music to discuss with them, in common with them.

They wanted to see music, they wanted to see someone from the real world or as they called it, ‘the world’. They wanted company of a different kind other than themselves. Someone who was wearing civilian clothes and we wanted some diversions from our boredom and often we’d meet some terrific characters, some wonderful Americans. Americans were the most hospitable people I ever met in my life. They could make you feel good and safe.

They weren’t all stable people, like neither we have in Australia, but I think they were just wonderful people in general and I found that later on when I went to do the Hilton circuit round the world with my band. The Americans were the most hospitable audiences, hospitable in terms of inviting you into their home and making you feel good, they knew how to do that best.

No, not in particular. There are times when we had, where we could get phone calls through to Sydney and argue with this agent about when we come home and when we don’t. I mean he was delaying as much as possible because he was hoping to fill those gaps with more

shows. Well, you know, we couldn’t just hang around and wait. I voiced my disappointment in the whole thing. He made money but he didn’t make much. I made some money but it wasn’t as much as I hoped to make, and we came home.

Sirens or incoming rockets. We didn’t ever encounter a rocket coming in on the show. About the worst we encountered was the incident I mentioned earlier, where we were surrounded by Viet Cong who came down from the mountains on foot.

But the sirens would go if there were any encounters from rockets anywhere in the perimeter of that entire compound, which may be half a kilometre or more in circumference. So how often? I would say one in every two or three shows. It was fairly frequent,

but we were never in real danger that I can speak of as far as the rockets and things. We always managed to get to a bunker in time.

Oh, all the time, all the time. I mean we’d hear gunfire in the middle of the night. There was one place we went to where outside the window where I was sleeping were a bunch of American, sorry,

where I was sleeping were about three or four Americans, and I had a bed near the door and outside was a twenty millimetre cannon off all night. And these Americans were sound asleep, they were used to it. And I’d jump every five seconds, as soon as the cannon was, it was outside my windows, it was as loud as anything. Was it any wonder I came home and hit the floor when a bunger went off.

Without a doubt, the time I thought I’d had it was when I was on the barge and the fear of the people in charge of that barge was that they’re firing rockets from both sides of the river and that the barge was there for the purpose of storing ammunition, one good rocket placed in the right place and the whole thing would be

blown to the sky. I think that’s the time I’d thought I’d had it, yeah.

I was praying, I was praying to get me out of this. I remember that specifically. All little things were happening, a lot of shouting, a lot of

yelling, and people being dragged in off the deck with all bloodied and one fellow had his ear shot off, he was being helped by the medics, and a lot of gunfire. What was going through my mind was absolute fear. I was not a brave person. I don’t see any reason why I should have been. It was just too dangerous. Always, I always said, “I hate being here,” I thought, “What am I doing here?”

But then I’d do a show where these people appreciated it so much, and I thought, “I’m coming back, I’ve got to come back here, these people are so appreciative,” and I enjoyed it so much.

We were all in an emotional state. We were placed in a situation where all of us, them especially who were fighting back, the war, we were in a precarious state from the moment we woke up to the moment we’d go to bed. What happened in the middle of the night could be anybody’s business. But because it was an emotional state,

the best thing I could do to communicate with them was through songs that communicated that very thing. They identified with that, and that’s why they appreciated it. You might find in other circumstances, American audiences may not be quite as sensitive, so they may not appreciate, they may wish to have more fun songs, rather than songs that mean something to them lyrically.

So I think what I can consider the best part of those shows was the fact that I was one of the people, fortunately, who was able to contribute by way of the fact that I appreciated their emotional state and they appreciated the fact that I could communicate that.

I feel strongly about that, because it was one of the only times in my life, as soon as I came back to Australia all the emotions went out of my singing. I lost a lot of my…‘wearing your heart on your sleeve’ is not necessarily something that’s appreciated by an Australian culture. I mean we’ve got other cultures that are far more impressive, but they didn’t appreciate what I was doing here

when I got back, so I had to change my complete style and repertoire to suit clubs, to make an enhanced living, a supportive living to what I was earning from.

Well,

I think I mentioned earlier in the interview that my parents had an interpretation of the Catholic religion. I rebelled at fifteen. I found that I asked myself all these questions. I’d say, “If God is God, why isn’t he doing this and why is he allowing so many people to suffer, why isn’t he distributing wealth and food and all the natural things that would help

other countries?” And that was my rebellion, so I didn’t have a closeness with God. I’m ashamed to say, or maybe I’m happy to say, admit, that I was one of those people who would pray to get out of a jam, that’s about the size of it,

and it’s something you reach for. You reach for anything. I had never been in situations as bad as that before and/or since, so when someone says, “You’re in a boat full of ammunition and you’ve got people firing on both sides,” what do you do? Pray, and if he’s up there and he is a good God, he’ll be listening to me, believe me because he could feel the desperation.

I got out of it, absolutely. It didn’t make me religious, but it presented the possibilities.

This was very important. I wasn’t necessarily close to my family.

There were problems there, nothing major but it was a great deal of arrogance. I was the youngest in the family. I came by late. My brother was trying to establish his studies and his career and my sisters, I gather, were somewhat a little embarrassed by the fact that they had a baby son [he means brother] when they were teenagers and so on. But I found the letters, I’ve got the letters that I wrote to them,

and I was never afraid to sign off by telling them how much I loved them and missed them, something I’d never do face to face with them and I think it was because I was concerned with just how dangerous the war was. I was very concerned with that when I got there. I didn’t realise how bad it was going to be, so just in case they can’t say I didn’t ever show any love,

because I did.

Very, very important. I felt as though I’d been alienated completely from home, especially on that trip, cause letters were difficult to come through. If they sent them to the Australian embassy, they’d come via the Saigon post office, definitely not reliable. A couple of

times my parents sent me American dollars, wrapped up in paper and put in an envelope. The Vietnamese had a system where they could, I don’t know how they do it, but they smelt money in envelopes. And they showed me, one fellow showed me how they did it, like they put like a long pen inside the thing and rolled, inside the top of the envelope, and rolled the letter out, by pulling it to one side,

took the money out and rolled the letter back in. They were very, very skilled at theft and things like that. And often the mail wouldn’t get there. My mother sent me a great big package at Christmas with coffee, coffee granules and things like that. Did never arrive. And to send letters

to make sure they got home, I would give them to an American serviceman that I knew, his name was Puck, in Saigon and he would send them with his letters, via American post offices to Australia. So it wasn’t easy, because we had no military resources ourselves. We’d put them through the post office, but as soon as they got to the post office, “Ah, letter to Australia,”

straight through, roll up the old pen and see if there’s any money in it.

I started to regret, when I was away from home, and this was the first time I’d been away from home, I started to regret some of the things

I’d done to cause problems to my parents. Not that they were major, but they were more like needling things that I did, and I was concerned how dangerous, this was the thoughts that were going through my mind as a young man, I was concerned with the danger and if something happened to me, I used to think about it a lot, that their only memory of me was someone who was

opposing everything they told me to do. So I would often feel homesick as though I should be at home, if I let my mind wander I always felt like I should be back home and not in this God forsaken place. As I said to you earlier, those things were overruled by the good we were doing, we felt we were doing to some of these poor

enlisted men, who some of them were as young as seventeen and showing no outward fear. They weren’t allowed to, really. I mean the peer pressure was, “Let’s go out and murder someone,” but they were really scared. Some of them were terribly scared if you spoke to them privately. So I think that,

well, I think they appreciated it and that’s how I overcame my homesickness.

When it was time to come home, I couldn’t wait to get on that plane. I just wanted; when I got home it was almost as though I was looking to

see that everything was still there. The house was still there, mother and father still there, the needling, the this, the that, I thought, “Oh, time for me to go again.” I just wanted to be sure that everything was alright, ‘cause the communications were very difficult by mail. You couldn’t use a phone. One time we tried to use a phone up country. An American had all the devices to contact America but to get to Australia by like ham radio sort of thing and

connect to a telephone line was very difficult in those days.

It was Qantas and we were given our airfare, return airfare, before we left, so it was never a question of being diddled out of your return airfare, like

some people had said. So we came home by Qantas, which was a pleasure, and we went over there by Air Vietnam, which was also very good service, I remember that. I kept those in my diary, and getting home as I said was a pleasure. There was a great deal of ignorance that hit me by just what I’d been through and what people were saying about it. There was almost opposing sentiments. They just

didn’t realise. They may have been against the war, which was one thing, but as I mentioned earlier, they would often consider that we were never in danger, so it was boring to hear all the war stories when all we were doing was entertaining, but in fact we were there with the servicemen in their dormitories and their mess halls, right in the middle of where the rockets were falling. The only thing we never did, thank God, was to

go out on patrol with them, although I was offered once or twice.

Well, like I’d never been. The only problems I encountered when I came home with people as to how I was treated they seemed to be concerned with

my stories and the kind of stories I’m telling here. They were just day-to-day encounters in Vietnam, everybody had guns, there was a war going on, I mean it’s very hard to avoid it. You don’t fly in and fly out after you’ve finished the show, although I wished we had have. And you speak to people and they go, “Not a war story!” and, “Come on, that didn’t happen.” That happened all the time, so I stopped talking about it after a while, even with family, they’d say, “Here he goes,” so

I didn’t bother.

It was at the time. I learnt to control my frustrations with that because I realise they weren’t there. For those who were there, they realised what I was talking about and we could carry on a conversation about it, but I stopped. Very frustrating because I wanted to scream at people, “Look, I’m not lying, this is what

happened,” and also I wanted to release it all because I was with people over there who encountered even more things than I did. There was nobody I could tell, because they’d already been through it. So when I got home, I was anxious to tell people.

Not really important at all, although last Friday night I worked in an old time rock and

band, as I mentioned, with the drummer who was over there at the same time as I was. He was my high school drummer, he went to Vietnam with a different show altogether, and we talked about Vietnam on Friday night in the breaks, having a good old natter. We ran into each other in Vietnam, but other than that, I haven’t been in touch. Liz Layton I’m still in touch

with, other than that I haven’t seen any of them. Paul Bartlett’s in America.

Not really, as I said to you, I wasn’t disturbed by not being able to,

what’s the word, recount the many different incidents and things. I learned to control it. I think this has been good today, as a matter of fact, because I haven’t spoken in such length before, but I think in time I learnt to control it or suppress it or get rid of it. I get rid of a lot of things by singing. I feel good

about that and after a while I had other things to contend with. I had children and a successful business at the time, when I came back.

Yeah. Before I left for Vietnam, I was a full-time musician, meaning I made a week’s wages out of playing.

When I went to Vietnam and worked for American audiences, I could see how they would appreciate it; how they appreciated it more. Looking back now I would put that down to the street cultures from a large, heavily populated city, like most big cities in America are, or cities are, so there’s out of America and I’ll relate this in a minute to your question,

out of America comes jazz, country music, Latin music, because of the cultures from South America, and sophisticated cabaret. All those songs that were written, apart from pop tunes, or some of which, are all as a result of the cultures

of the street, jazz in particular, Latin in particular. And as a result, I felt that they were more appreciative of the emotional street value, if you like, of these songs that I was doing. When I came back to Australia and I don’t see it, I’m not being critical, what I’m being is stating the differences. When I came back to Australia, Australian

audiences at the time had not experienced any of these, it was a country free of emotional turmoil, even political turmoil. By comparison, Australia’s political turmoil was mild, a storm in a tea cup, so to speak, by comparison. We didn’t have a mixture of cultures frustrated by non-compliance or non-understanding of their cultures. So the street crime was

not there, as a result of different cultures, not to any great degree anyway. So they were void of all these feelings and my portrayal of music to the Americans was more their style, so when I came back I realised Tobacco Road has no meaning to Australia. Tobacco Road might as well be the street down the road here, turn right at Tobacco Road, but Tobacco Road to an American in the big cities means

slums, hunger, all kinds of deviations in their lifestyle. So I guess what I’m saying is we were fortunate in this country, we didn’t have those problems, so it stands to reason they wouldn’t necessarily feel anything for a song like Tobacco Road or Stormy Monday Blues or any blues for that matter. They’re only starting to appreciate it, now that the numbers in Australia are getting bigger, the cultures are coming in,

the diversions from the usual, ‘Yummy, yummy, yummy, I’ve got love in my tummy’ type pop tunes are starting to become more sophisticated now. We’re now producing pop songs better than ever before, not better musically necessarily, but produced better than ever before. So the street culture is starting to seep through. If I sing jazz downtown, jazz is starting to be more predominant.

People like Norah Jones is jazz based and Diane Krall is now jazz, very popular in Australia. I never thought I’d ever live to see it, so the difference is not that I’m critical of Australian audiences but simply that B. B. King said it in one of his books, music books. He said, “If you haven’t lived it, it doesn’t come out of your horn,” which I thought was very appropriate.

Okay, I had to do it the hard way and that was by trial and error and eliminating things out

of my show. I mean, if you came to see me do a three-hour show now, with the computerised and sequenced backings, it’s all nineteen sixties and seventies party tunes. The show that I do now is a result of those past experiences. It’s called ‘A Tribute to the Kings’ where I do the popular songs of Elvis. I don’t sing like Elvis, I sing them myself, in my own style, but they’re popular backings and popular

songs of Elvis, not all of them, some of them are not, but most of them are very popular to dance to. The songs of Elton John, the songs of Tom Jones that are popular, the songs of - I toured New Zealand with the ‘Tribute to the Kings’ - so it’s the artist by the way of, my way of handling this was to find the artists that are number one hit makers that have been hit makers over the last twenty

or thirty years. And you can’t fail with that, if you can do them. I stay away from those I can’t do, from those kings I can’t do, but I’ve still got the throat chops, but I’m getting older now.

I missed them dearly. I don’t know whether I could do it now but I’d love to have an American audience again. They were just so appreciative. The last

time I had them, was I went to Guam in 1973, the Guam Hilton, went from there to Oklahoma and Hong Kong Hilton, and on Guam we had the naval base and the air force base and their families would come into the Bunker Bar in Guam and it’s a small intimate bar with my band, the Easy Riders, named after the movie at the time and

they were just as appreciative as Vietnam.

Since Vietnam I was determined, first of all, to come back and form

a band suitable for clubs, with the material change, that is, the repertoire of songs would be appropriate for whatever club that would be. I was fortunate to get into the Mount Pritchard Community Club, which was developing all the time. It’s an incredible area, where they’ve got such a huge membership, lots of poker machines and lots of cultures, especially Asian. And so I formed this band and worked very hard at writing

all the music for it, and buying all the music for it, it was a nine-piece band at the time and it won awards. It won several nominations for Mo Awards and then won in one in 1982. From then on, I became entertainment manager at that club, marketing and entertainment. I booked all the overseas acts, some of the world-famous acts for that club, I was

the orchestra leader, the bandleader, the singer, the compere, the guitar player, the agent for the club and the marketing manager, all those things at that time and from then I had a database of experiences that I could then take to other clubs if I wanted to. And from there I went to Bankstown Sports. I became a mature age student at the University of New South Wales, studying

arts.

Well when I was working there, there were no Vietnamese. It became a Vietnamese area after. I was there from

1975 to 1983, and the Vietnamese didn’t start being a predominant force in the area and I don’t ever remember seeing an Asian person there. When I actually went there recently, it’s Asian; it’s all unbelievable.

When I was in Vietnam, I used to think, “If Vietnamese ever come to this country,

to Australia, we are going to have a tremendous problem with crime,” because they’d been accustomed to crime. They’d have been accustomed to petty theft from Americans, using Americans to get money from, the black market, all those things that I saw over there, were going to come to Australia. When they finally arrived here, before

I became a mature age student, I was working at the University of New South Wales and I was dealing with Vietnamese all the time in the medical centre, in the medical college. They were the nicest people, but we were talking about a class difference. We were talking about people who had become educated or whose parents or whoever had the resources to put them through an education. They were very, very gentle, very nice people. I’d be

concerned about living in Fairfield, although the Italians who live in Fairfield say it’s the greatest place on earth, probably is. I’d be concerned living where there is a known crime area for the Vietnamese because I don’t believe that a lot of those that are, the Vietnamese that are crime-orientated are vicious, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I’m not saying

Vietnamese are vicious, I’m saying those who are crime-orientated, and it’s much like Sicily may have been in before the war with the Mafia [Sicilian-based criminal organisation]. There’s a lot of organised crime in the area.

I was searching for myself. I wanted to see, I wanted to find a lot of explanations about myself.

I tried psychology, but I’ve never been an academic person, so I found psychology was, I thought psychology was going to be the study of human behaviour, but in fact it was the process they use at university level was by statistics, and statistics meant mathematics and I was not good at that at school.

Yeah, first year, so I dropped out after the first year, even though I passed

it and went and took on sociology with a vengeance and enjoyed it very much.

Bankstown Sports I did the same thing, I did the advertising, the booking of the entertainment, put it through the Mo Awards and all that sort of thing. They won a Mo Award when I was there and then from there, as I said, became a mature age student.

After that, I worked at Gosford RSL Club as promotions manager and then more recently Wentworthville Leagues Club as marketing and entertaining manager.

Club Berowra. I left Wentworthville Leagues Club and bought a business in Terrigal, a video shop, thinking I’d

had enough of the entertainment industry. It was deteriorating in comparison to what it used to be, so I sold the shop and decided to move down here again, where many more things happen. There’s no work on the central coast of New South Wales in my field, so there’s probably

far better things to do here in Sydney.

Two boys, wonderful kids. I can see one of them struggling with identity, but I think that will be overcome when he, especially if he moves towards the city ‘cause he lives in a country town and there’s very little stimulus there for a young fellow. He’s re-educating himself,

he’s got a little recording studio and my other son, as I mentioned earlier, is a guitar student, classical guitar student at the Conservatorium of Music at Newcastle. Both of them fine boys.

No, not particularly, except to say that the Vietnam episode was an education in itself. It was scary, it taught me fear, it taught me benevolence. Looking back philosophically, the one thing I got out of all of that was I promised myself I would think more about

people than I had before. It’s not such a good thing to do today because, although we should all do it, today it’s a dog eat dog world more than ever, but the thing I learnt was to appreciate people a little more for their failures, for their frailties and their talents, no matter what it is or no matter how intense it is and above all because I can see that

everybody are struggling at first and those that don’t struggle get my respect, and that’s what I learnt from it.

It was a great pleasure.