Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Maxwell in NSW [New South Wales] on the 25th of October 1923. I was the fifth child of a family of six and my parents christened me Robert Lloyd Carr. And the funny thing about that birth date is that

up until I joined the navy, I always celebrated my birthday on the 25th of September, it was a bit of a mix up with the family because my brother also had a birthday in September and with so many kids they forgot the date and it was when I applied to join the navy, that I had to provide a birth certificate and that’s when I found that my birthday was the 25th of October. So I was a month younger than I thought I was and that sort of held me up a bit.

But shortly after I was born the family relocated to Toowoomba. My Dad was a watchmaker and he started to work up there for a fellow by the name of Fortescue who had a jewellery and jewellers shop up there. And at a very young age, I don’t remember when we actually moved up there but I do remember being a toddler there and some things stick in my mind. I remember I had

two sisters, I still have them as a matter of fact, Dulcie and Joan and they used to have the job of bathing me. And they had me in the bath this day and the tap was running and I wanted a drink and they said “No you can’t drink that.” I stuck my mouth under the tap anyhow and they turned the tap off and my tongue went up the tap and they didn’t know what to do. How to get it out though. So one of them had the bright idea that they’d turn the tap on and they nearly drowned me.

So that was one incident that I can remember. And they were quite athletic those two girls, and they would run down the hallway of this house and see how far out they could jump over the veranda and over the front steps. The other thing I remember, my Dad had a motorbike and side car, I think it was an Indian brand, and my brother Bill who was 12 years older than me, I pestered him and petered him

one day when the family was out and he said “Oh well, I’ll keep you quite, you can hop in the side car and I’ll drive you around the yard in the motorbike.” Which was all very good, very happy about that. And but unfortunately for Bill, he tried to drive it between a camphor laurel tree and the side fence and got it stuck. Well poor old Bill got some sort of a hiding from Dad because of that. Dad was pretty fussy about his equipment. And I can remember that in those early days,

it must’ve been pretty soon after they started air flights between Longreach and Brisbane or wherever, and I can remember sitting on the back corner fence watching the aircraft go over one day and it was explained to me what it was because I didn’t know what it was. And I think that is a pretty historical sort of thing to remember. The other thing that I can remember of Toowoomba is that I wasn’t sort of getting

my way one day and Mum wouldn’t have anything to do with me. She kept on hunting me out of the kitchen and in those days it was a wood fire and the kindling was in a box alongside the stove and I just happened to notice that some of the kindling was part of a fruit packing case. In those days fruit used to come in bushel cases and half bushel cases made out of timber and I noticed that one of these slats of timber had a nail

sticking up in it so I turned it over with the nail down, and I played up some more and Mum grabbed hold of the end of that and she swiped me with it and drove the nail into my bum. Then after that I got a lot of sympathy, for several days I was very much looked after, but I thought that was pretty cunning. And the other thing I can remember about Toowoomba really is that I got bitten on the insole of my foot by a red back spider and that created quite a bit of a problem for a while.

That was Toowoomba and the other thing too, now that I’ve come to think about it was I forever had earache up there, Toowoomba being a cold sort of a place. I don’t know why I got earache, but I used to suffer with it pretty badly. And by the time I was about four, the family relocated again down to Southport and my Dad started up his own business there as a watchmaker in a little shop. And we lived in

a street in not a very big house, I can’t remember the name of the street now but it wasn’t far from the school. And when I turned five, my brother took me to school on the first day and he wanted to take me in and I can remember I grabbed hold of the palings of the front fence of the school and I just wouldn’t go in and he pulled me back and I hung on so tight that I pulled the palings off the fence. So he took me

home again and Dad gave me a few switches and sent me back to school the next day and I thought well it was easier to go to school than it was to get another hiding. And in those days they had a different sort of a situation with schooling, you started at prep one and prep two and then you went to grade one and so on up through it. And I can always remember going into this class and around the wall in hangings, like on oilcloth, it had

all the alphabets, A, B right through to Z and it had ‘a’ like an apple and it was up there and ‘b’ like a baton or ‘c’ like a cat and ‘d’ like a dog and so you learned the alphabet and I can still remember the beautiful hangings. And time went on and then I progressed into prep two and around about that time everybody started to get sick and diarrhoea was

quite a problem and it would be nothing to be standing on parade and the bloke in front of you, he wouldn’t be able to control his bowels and it’d be all running down their leg and things like that, poor creatures and it was pretty sad. But one of the happy things about that time was, and you don’t see it now days but at certain times of the year the whole of the sky and area around the school grounds would be butterflies flying everywhere, and we’d

be running up and jumping up trying to get these butterflies, they were absolutely beautiful. Yeah that was great fun. And the of course in those days, there was no sewerage down there and we also had these blocks of toilets with the pans in it and the thing was the pan was serviced through a little door at the outside and

some of the senior boys, when the girls would be there, they’d go down and they’d open the back door and they’d tickle the kids’ bums with a bit of grass. I wasn’t up to that but I used to see some of the more senior boys play those sort of tricks. You wouldn’t dare think about doing that sort of thing today. But yeah, it was a good school, that Southport school and I progressed through.

At about 1929 or 30, I just couldn’t remember the exact year now there was an outbreak of infantile paralysis as they call now days, in those days they called it poliomyelitis and the Government decided that they wouldn’t open the schools until a later date and I can remember that I was swinging on the front gate one day and the other kids from up the road they were going

down to school and I said “Where are you kids going?” They said “We’re off to school, school starts today.” So I ran upstairs and I said to Mum, “Mum, Mum, school’s starting, I’ve got to go to school.” She said “All right Bobby, go up stairs and take your pants off,” she said “And I’ll wash them and you can go this afternoon,” Because I only owned one pair of pants, this was pretty bad times in those days. So I went to school in the afternoon and I said to the teacher “What did you tell the children this morning?”

And he said “If you didn’t have enough sense to come here this morning, well that’s just too bad. You’ll have to find out later on about it, I’m not going to tell you.” And I thought, you know that sort of set me back a bit, but they were hard times. We were living in a house called, in a street called White Street at the time and it was pretty much into the Depression period at that stage and things were pretty tough and I can remember that my brother around about that time, he’d

being 12 years older than me, he’d already left home and he was humping his swag around Queensland and Dad had got a job, they had what they called relief work in those days, and Dad I think it was the half a day a week that he used to get a job as the, swinging the hammer for the blacksmith at the local council. I forget what they called it, the blacksmith’s striker. Which was a pretty

tough thing for Dad to do to swing this hammer, because he had to be very careful about looking after his fingers being a watchmaker, it was very delicate. But of course in those days there was no work for a watchmaker and nobody had watches and if they did have a watch and it broke, they couldn’t afford to get it, couldn’t pay it to get it fixed. And so as a result of that Dad used to get a food voucher,

I can’t remember, it was once a week or once a fortnight now, but whenever he got the voucher I can always remember that I was allowed to have a whole saveloy and it was a Tuesday night, on that Tuesday night. It was really good. By the end of the week there’d be practically nothing to eat in the house except for dry rolled oats, there was no sugar, there was no milk, so you’d get a half a cup of rolled oats and eat that and the people next door, they had a choko vine overgrowing the fence

and Mum used to pick the chokos on our side and peel them and just boil them up and we were supposed to eat those. I couldn’t eat them, I couldn’t eat chokos for many, many years, they were absolutely terrible. But things got a little bit better after a while and Dad got a job at Victor Burtbecks jewellery, crockery shop in the main street of Southport. He got a job

there as a watchmaker. Became quite good friends with his boss, that was the wonderful thing about it. And we moved from there into another house called, in Andrew Street. And times were still very tough but things were a little bit better. We used to get food and there wasn’t a lot of it and I can always remember my Dad, it was a three bedroom house with a hall down the middle

and about an eight foot veranda across the front and it had a breakfast room out the back which was about eight foot wide and about 12 or 14 foot long and we’d sit there around that table and in those days, no such thing as a refrigerator. The family didn’t have enough money to own an icebox and the butter used to be kept in a crock, an earthenware crock which used to hang on a

wire outside the window in the shade and the bottom of the crock used to be filled with water to try and stop the butter from melting but in the summer of course that didn’t work. And if you had butter and you wanted to put it on you had to get a spoon to take it out and it was all melted when you put it on your bread. But Dad was always the same, he, we’d be sitting at the table and food would be pretty scarce

and he’d say to me “I’m not too hungry tonight Mum, here you have a little bit of this Bobby and you have a little bit of this Betty.” Betty was my younger sister. And poor old Dad that was the way he used to try and look after his children. Then he got to the stage that he got so sick that he got covered in all sorts and one thing and another like that, and they eventually called the local doctor, Dr Mackay and he came and had one look at him and he

said “You’re only problem,” he says “You’re suffering from malnutrition,” which was pretty tough. So there had to be a bit of a change in the house as far as the food was concerned. By this time my brother would occasionally come home and I idolised him, he was as I said 12 years older, and he’d always take the time to go down in the backyard and wrestle with me,

which was pretty good. And it was great fun to be able to wrestle with my 12-year-old brother. One of the things from that particular house I can remember one summer somebody had made arrangements with the family to pay a few bob to agist some horses in the yard. And the people that owned these horses, they used to take them over the main beach

and people could pay sixpence or a shilling for a ride on the horse and go up and down the beach on these things. And I can remember one day I was in the yard and one of the horses got a bit fractious and he’s pig rooting [bucking] around about the yard and his tail got caught over the side fence and underneath the tail, it got ripped by a nail or something and the blood was all running down the back of the poor beast’s legs, so we hurried away to the fellow that owned the horse and he came out and he wrapped

it up and stopped the bleeding and that was all pretty good, pretty happy about all that, and one of the things about that house was my sister wanted pets. That was Betty, she wants pets, so Dad made a rabbit hutch and he got wire netting and he dug down into the ground, put the wire netting down and then he put the

dirt back over and he made a wire netting frame and a roof over part of it and a little access way where you could keep these rabbits. And the reason he did that he said was “If he didn’t put the netting in the ground, well they’d just burrow out and away they would go.” And they were a great pet for my sister and she had those for many years. I can’t remember what happened to them. But one of the problems with that house was

there were green ants everywhere and you couldn’t much play in the yard without getting green ants and in those days the treatment for green ant bite, you’d run up to Mum and say “Mum I’ve been bitten by a green ant,” and she’d go and get the blue bag. And she’d wet the blue bag and rub that on it and you’d think it was all right and away you’d go again because in those days they used to have these little blue bags in

sort of a muslin little thing, it was about an inch square, inch round and about an inch high and to whiten the clothes they would put the blue bag in the water, the rinse water and put the clothes through it and rinse it out so when they put it out on the line they’d come out whiter, no such thing as a bleach in those days. Excuse me. I had some good friends there that

they lived nearby and their name was, I’ve forgotten their bloomin’ names, Stan and Kevin and they had a grandfather that was nearby and he had a horse and it was a great thing to be with those kids and to be able to ride the horse. And I can remember at one stage

they got another one and it was a young stallion and as it grew up a bit it got pretty fractious so that they decided that they’d castrate it. And I can still remember the land at the back was a vacant block of land and I can still remember how they haltered that horse up and tied its back legs and pulled the back legs up in between the front legs and then tied the back legs back and

then they operated on it. And after it was over they just undid all the ropes and got it on its feet and slapped it on the rump and away it went. And that was, I didn’t think too much of that at the time but by today’s standard it would’ve been pretty cruel. Yes we used to play cowboys and Indians. Backhouse was the kids’ name and there was another one that lived a couple of doors away, his name was Harris

and we used to call him Whistler. I don’t know why but we did and we of course we were on the edge of the bush down there, Southport wasn’t very big in those days and we used to play cowboys and Indians in the bush. And poor old Whistler was always the one that we used to catch and we’d rope him up and then as a punishment

we’d put him on the meat ant nest. Excuse me, I was worried about this. Excuse me I had an operation on me throat, I thought I would’ve been right.

Although we were very poor in those days, it was a great life really. There were no restrictions on us, what we did, providing we didn’t do anything illegal or too mischievous and I can remember at one stage we all decided that we’d go up to Benalla

which would’ve been about five mile away and there was a big bamboo stand up there and in those days everybody had a tomahawk. And we went up there and – this is terrible,

so we cut down this bamboo and laced it all together and we did a Huckleberry Fin down the Nerang River, poled all the way down there and that’s something that you wouldn’t allow your kids to do today. Too protective of our children. The other thing that we used to do, we used to play hockey. The council had a rubbish dump down, not too far away and they used to cover the

dump material with sawdust from the local mill. And we used to play hockey on that. Now our hockey sticks were, we’d go into the bush with our tomahawks and we’d select a limb that had a nice bed in it and we’d

shave off one edge of it and trim it all down and take the business off and make you know, they were quite good hockey sticks. We used to play down there for hours and hours and hours with these sticks, there wasn’t much to do, we never owned a football so we couldn’t play football. And swimming, that was a great past time. In those days we used to be able to cross a creek up the Nerang River

and at low tide we’d swim across to an island, forget the name of the island now. We’d walk around the end of the island and we’d swim across the other part of the river and go over to Narrow Neck and then we’d play in the surf. And some of our friends down there were aboriginal boys and they used to take us out into the bush and we’d get native fruits.

I still remember those things, they were absolutely beautiful to eat, little white berry with little black markings through them. Sandberries they used to call them. We used to feed up on those things and later on I managed, even though times were tough I managed to get a bike, there was a man by the name of Meethkey, he eventually got interned because he was a German

but he was a lovely fellow. And I got this bike on time payment and I think it was, I had to pay about two shillings a month repayment on it, incredible. And we’d, I was sort of living up, at the Nerang River in those days there was a bridge went over to the main bridge called the Jubilee Bridge. And the street that ran west from that

was Queen Street, and we were up towards the top of Queen Street, and if you saw kids doing it today you’d, you know you’d be very concerned about it but I’d get on the bike and I’d, my brother had made a rack on the back and I’d have one of my mates on the rack on the back and I’d be on the seat and I’d have another one sitting on the handle bars and we’d go down Queen St and

across the bridge and over to the surf. And there we’d swim until we were nearly too tired to get home again, but wonderful. And one time I remember I was sent on a message and I came from the town up over a hill and I had to go to the bakehouse to get some bread.

Came down the hill and I turned into the bakehouse driveway and with the baker’s cart going in and out, it was rutted. And I tried to go over the centre of the hump between the two ruts, missed it, hit the rut, slammed the bike into the front, into the fence and I was draped over the fence.

When I got up the front wheel of the bike was back behind the frame. I thought oh, here’s trouble. So I took it home and my Dad, he said “Oh well,” shook his head. Being clever he got downstairs with the blowlamp and he took the front yoke out

and he tried to straighten up the bit that went up the front of the frame and he heated up the frame and he tried to get it as straight as he could again, so that I could still ride the bike and it just had enough for the wheel if I wanted to turn, to just miss the frame. Well I rode that bike for many years and eventually I couldn’t afford to pay off the money any more, so I took it back to Mr Meethkey and I said

“I want to give this bike back Mr Meethkey,” and he had a look at it and he said “Oh Bobby,” he said “This is terrible.” And I said “I’m sorry Mr Meethkey, I can’t afford to pay you.” So he just took the bike, he said “Well it’s not much good to me, but” he said “I’ve got to take it anyhow.” Poor Mr Meethkey, he was a nice bloke. Another time that I thought that I’d get myself a new bike in the, they had

people down there by the name of Earles and they had a car franchise, and they had a competition once. They had a bike set up in the front of the, inside the front window and it was on two rolls. And you had to work out how many miles

that wheel would’ve gone around from a certain date to another date. I spent hours up there, Dad even loaned me a stopwatch. I’d go up there and I’d watch the wheel go around, wheel go around and stop it. But my mathematics weren’t good enough, I didn’t win the bike which was a shame, it was a lovely thing.

One of the things that we used to do when times were tough and we were always hungry, the school was one block away from the main street. Yeah, one block away from the main street and after school I’d, they had two shops that used to sell fruit. And I’d walk down the street and I’d go into those shops and I’d say, “Excuse me do you have any speck apples or speck fruit?”

because in those days they wouldn’t sell anything if it had a speck on it. And they would hand you out a speck apple or speck pear or something like that, only get one because probably they were saving any more for some of the other hungry kids that were coming down. And that used to happen fairly regularly. And I can remember my sister, my older sister, she got a job working in the

Sessilow Till as a cook, cook I think or cook’s assistant. And often my Mum used to say to me “Bobby, you go down and see Dulcie and ask if she can let you have two shillings, we don’t have any money.” But I’d go down and I’d stand out this side, outside the bedroom where Dulcie was, and I’d say “Are you there Dulcie?” and she said “Yes Bobby.” I’d say “Mummy said

can you let her have two shillings, we don’t have any money.” And she’d somehow get two shillings and come out and give you the two shillings and I’d take it home and in those days you’d be able to buy a half bushel of apples or oranges for about two and sixpence or something like that. That big, wonderful.

I think we probably got used to it, I think nearly everybody there was pretty hungry in those times. There weren’t too many people out of work but people in Southport in those days, they used to live in hessian camps up where the playground, where the showgrounds are now. There were dire times but…

Yeah, I suppose so. I was never really a good student. I used to work hard but I always found schooling very difficult. There was nobody in my home, Dad was a very clever fellow but he was academically

untutored and Mum was similarly so. They spoke good English but when it came to trying to assist anybody with their homework, it was not a possibility. As I said, my brother had gone, my eldest sister was away from home and I used to try and struggle on the best I could. I’d try hard but it never seemed to get me anywhere

most of the time I think I was always second bottom of the class. And I don’t know why. It wasn’t for the want of trying to work hard but there you go. The, one thing I can remember in my school days is I think I was in grade five

and there was a water spout came up through the water in front of Southport between the main beach, really whirled up and everybody got out of the classroom and had a look at this water spout because after it crossed the land it sort of faded out. And later on it rained fish, only little ones but it rained fish. That was absolutely marvellous, this black waterspout, I can still see it. It was great.

Yeah, so hungry in those days, never had any little lunch or anything like that, or big lunch to take to school. And I can still remember sitting alongside of some of the kids who did have a lunch and I’d wait until they’d eaten their piece of pineapple and I’d say “Can I have the skin?” or “Could I have the core of the apple” and things like that, we were just so hungry. There weren’t that many people had jobs in

Southport, there was people by the name of Carey had three grocery shops. As I said there were a couple of fruit shops. There was the superintendent of the ambulance, the town clerk, an engineer and a health surveyor and the council, there was the post master and the postman. I think they had in those days,

they used to have, people used to work in the telephone exchange. There was two chemist shops in the place and a picture theatre. The picture theatres were owned by a family by the name of Tams and I can remember on the Saturday, they always had a matinee,

cost sixpence to go in and I never had a sixpence, so I used to sit in the gutter outside the picture show and after interval, half an hour or so after interval, Mr Tams used to come and he’d say “All right Bobby, you can come in and see the rest of the show.” And it was always one, that part of the show when there was a serial on, and the

goodies were English people, or Americans I s’pose and the baddies were always Chinese. The Chinese used to have these water drip punishments, they’d have people tied down and the water dripping on their heads and all those sort of punishments, I can remember those. I can remember another occasion where

they had a competition, I think it was, might’ve been Mawson went to the south pole or something that was on, and my sister Joan, she got in there somewhere and she sat up underneath a light right up underneath the biobox and took notes of all of this business about this film and she won a prize. That was wonderful. Joan, she’s still alive but she’s very sick.

She got a job at the local photographers, Curtleys was their name, and she was quite young, I don’t know how old she was but quite young. I don’t know that she even got to do scholarship let alone sub-junior. And she was so poor that, well we all were, so poor in our family that she had a pair of shoes and they had holes in the bottom. So every morning before she went to work,

she’d cut a piece of cardboard and slip it in the sole of her shoe to go to work. But for all of the fact that she was so skint for money, at one stage I’d joined the local boy scouts and nobody really had the money to buy uniforms or anything, but one day it must’ve been a birthday or something, this big

box arrived for me and when I opened it up it was my scout hat. And it was just great, I was one of the kids that had a scout hat. And that was a very important part of my life, it taught me a lot. There was a fellow by the name of, the scout leader was a fellow by the name of Hospital. And he used to take us out and we used to learn to make rope bridges and tie knots and do all sorts of things.

Campfire and how to cook. They were just great and all of that’s stuck with me over all of the years, like to go in the bush I just knew exactly what to do. But I mentioned to my daughter only a week or so ago, her 13-year-old child is doing a Duke of Edinburgh award training in bush craft.

And I said to her, “Will she be on her own?” “Oh no, she’ll be with a group.” I said “Well the thing is, that she should take a cigarette lighter.” “Why Dad?” And I said “Well if, this is the big problem with people that get lost in the bush today, that they go into the bush and they don’t have any means of being able to tell people where they are lost.”

Because, I said “When I was a boy scout, we used to go into the bush and we used to have to light a little fire and get a whole lot of green branches and then we’d put the branches off and that used to make smoke go up so that anybody looking for you, they would look for the smoke.” I said “They don’t teach things like that any more, that I know of, and this is one of the things why people don’t get found very easily when they go into the bush, because they don’t know how to make themselves known where they are.” Anyhow,

that’s digressing. So yeah, a lot of the group that I was with, they were all very good swimmers and they joined the Southport Lifesaving Club and I never joined it because it cost two and six to become a member and so, I was sort of not involved in that, but

that group and I, we all went up to join the navy at the same time. But they were, they were fun days. It was a lot of fun that we had, there was sort of no restriction on you providing you didn’t misbehave.

Much the same as it is now. It was a big stone building,

it had a surf boat in it, it didn’t have rubber dinghies or anything like that and like a, I didn’t get into it much, I think I only got into it once because I wasn’t a member. But they had two buildings there, they had the public change room for males and females which was a brick building and Mr and Mrs Vickers used to be responsible for managing that

and I think you had to pay a penny or tuppence or something to go through and get changed. And I had, they were employees of the council, and I never paid anything because I was best mate of their son Keith who became the Australian Junior Surf Lifesaving Champion in his day and unfortunately I, last year I had to go down to Nerang and do the service ritual at his funeral.

Very sad. So that was the way that was. And another one of them, his name was Billy Gilmore and his Dad had the sanitary and garbage contract and it was sort of a, he had the trucks and sort of earth moving, and Billy at a very young age could drive one of these trucks and he used to have to go over to the beach area and

we’d just be there and we’d have to load this bloomin’ truck up with sand. We did it for nothing, we had nothing else to do so everybody got a shovel and we were shovelling this sand on these bloomin’ trucks. We just sort of said it was fun, it was good exercise and we weren’t doing anybody harm. So that particular family, they had a property and one of the daughters still

lives there now, Biggara Creek at, I don’t know that that’s the name, there is a Biggara Creek but not that one. And every Guy Fawkes night they used to have a big bonfire and have all of these crackers but I never got invited because I never had any crackers. But they used to have a lot of fun with that.

Times were pretty tough and Mum and Dad really did a good job of trying to keep the family together but at one stage, for quite some time the family got split up. Dad took me and I lived on a boat in the Nerang River. And

he used to get work where he could and Mum and my sisters used to live wherever they could and I can remember at one stage they were living underneath a house up the top of Queen St. They didn’t have any beds or anything, they, the only way they could sleep, they had the ordinary canvas deck chairs you know with the slots at the back and they’d sort of sleep there. Terrible. Really bad.

But anyhow Dad always tried to do the right thing by me. My sisters always said I was his favourite, perhaps I was. I didn’t appreciate him at the time, but I can remember, we were talking about the fireworks at the Gilmore’s, I remember one year fireworks night, Guy Fawkes night and we came ashore off this boat and he said “I’ve got some sparklers for you

Bobby.” And he had half a dozen sparklers and lit these things and I thought oh, no all those other kids down there with all their crackers and their throw downs and here’s me just standing here with – I really didn’t appreciate it and I should’ve because, you know what he did for me probably was food from somebody else. But then sort of things got a bit worse and we ended up in a boat on the bank of the Nerang River.

And it was alongside a boat builder’s place by the name of MacKenzie. And it was sort of stern up on the bank and the bow of the boat was just down on the water’s edge and he’d sunk a stump into the sank and used to stand on the stump and then up into the boat. And I can remember one day he gave me sixpence and he says “Go up to the bakehouse and buy a

loaf of bread.” So it was a pretty long walk for a little fella, up this Queen St again, into Crouse Bakehouse. When I got there the bread wasn’t out of the oven, so I had to wait. When I got back he said to me “Where have you been?” And I said “Well I’m lucky to be here yet.” Bang. And he hit me right across the head, knocked me off this stump. He said “Don’t you back answer me

like that.” Oh well, only a little kid and I guess he was under a lot of stress, poor old Dad. But he was so clever, he used to help MacKenzie with his boat building and he said to me one day, he says “We’ve got to put a plank in this boat Bobby,” he said “It’s full of sea worms, we’ve got to take this out. And we’ve got to bring this down and bend it round so it fits in there. And..” he said, “..now this is the way we’re going to do it.”

And he gets a big metal container and fills it up with water and he, on something or other he lit a fire and got the water boiling and just stood the plank in this bucket of water. And I thought I don’t know what he’s going to do but he said “Now that’ll soften it Bobby,” he says “Now I’ll be able to bend it around these things.” He said “And I’ve got to cut a bit off the corner so that it fits into the bow of the boat, the stem.” And sure enough, when he bent it

and it fitted in just lovely. I can remember that. Taught me a lot, I remember a lot of those things and it’s very handy around the house when I’m doing things now. But one thing he tried to do one day, he tried to teach me how to do a gearbox. Somehow or other he was helping with this gearbox. He said “Now I’ll take it to pieces and I’ll put it together again. And this thing goes up here and it makes that gear work and something else works and so on.” He said “Now I’ll take it to pieces again, now

you do it.” And I had no idea. And of course I got a slap across the other ear, “You’re not paying attention,” he said. Well it was beyond me, it was all gobbeldy-gook. So me, and I’m only a little fella, but he was very good.

My Dad was a New Zealander, he was born in Nelson and he became an apprentice watchmaker, a real watchmaker like he could pick up a piece of brass

and he could make wheels and he could do all of those things. Clever. He’d also done tinsmithing and he got very sick and had to leave New Zealand, he had a crook chest. And but, he understood electricity, in those days it was direct current and he knew, he said “Don’t touch that.” He said “That’ll draw you to it,” he said “Don’t touch that, it’ll kill you.” And he knew how to make radios,

and I can remember on this house in White St in Southport, where it had the front veranda and I used to, I had a bed there when we were able to live there at that time. An in the winter I used to have in addition to the one blanket, I had to have a couple of flour sacks from the bakehouse that had been washed and put those over. And I had a cat and the cat would come in and I’d get in there and it’d lay in between my bed

and my feet. And Dad would come out and he’d say “You got that cat in that bed Bobby?” And I said “No Dad, no Dad.” And he’d pick the blanket up and put the blanket up and all right away he’d go and I’d still have the cat. But I can remember one night and I was asleep and he comes out and he said “Bobby, Bobby, get out of bed quick.” So I get out of bed and he said “Come into the lounge,” which was the dining room actually, he says “I’ve got Japan on the radio,” he says “I’ve got Japan, come quick, quick.” I thought I don’t want to listen to Japan.

But that’s the sort of bloke he was, he could make a radio and he could do all of these things, he was very clever my Dad. I really didn’t appreciate him until I was about 32 and I found that I had children at that time, and I was saying things to my children and I realised, this is what Dad used to say to me. Oh yeah.

After a time, after the war was over, I found out that Dad during the First World War, he was unfit for military service. But because he could use a lathe, he went to England as a munitions worker and that actually qualified him for a war service home. And I never knew this until about 1960-odd and just by chance,

a fellow from the repatriation commission at the time, happened to be in the office discussion something with the building inspector with whom I shared the office. And I mentioned this and he said “Oh your Dad would be entitled to a war service home.” So I went down and I found out about it and I eventually was able to get them a house build up at Caloundra. But while I was working, Dad used to come down and he’d always come round to the office and he’ sit in the car with me

while I’d go out and do my inspections and things like that. But before that, after I got out of the navy, I, I’ll have to go back. Before I joined the navy I eventually was put on a train by Dad. My brother had got a contract at Mt Isa to spray paint the interior of about a ten

or twelve foot flews. It used to take the smoke out of the smelters and it was lead loaded and it had to go through these flews and into what they called a shaker house where they had these special suspended tubes of material and it used to shake like that and the smoke would go in and the lead would sort of come down out of it. My brother said “send Bobby up to me I’ll give him a job.” So Dad put me on the train at

Southport, my sister met me at Brisbane and put me on the train to Townsville and so on from there and that’s the way I went up there. He said “Well here’s ten shillings, that should cover you for anything you’ve got to eat on the way up there.” Well not long after that the war broke out and my brother joined the air force and I worked for a while in the community store and then I thought well I’ll go home. And I’d gotten a job as an apprentice barber.

And then I get to nearly18 and I decided I’d join the navy and the barber didn’t want to release me so Dad went down and thumped the table and he said “Well you’d better let him go.” So I went and anyhow, after the navy, after I got out of the navy, I ended up being a hair dresser at Rothwells in Edward St. And Dad used to come down to see me there at Rothwells and we’d go and have lunch.

It wasn’t very often but we used to, Edward St and we’d cross Queen St and on the other side of the road there was McDonald’s café which was on the first floor and he’d shout me pies and peas, that was our lunch when we’d get together. So Dad was sort of always together with me that way. But yes, so when they got up to Caloundra it was wonderful. My Mum said “Thank you Bobby,” she said

“This is the first time we’ve ever owned our own house.” But it was too late in life, they, not long after that poor old Dad got pretty sick. So yeah, it was a bit unfortunate but had I known earlier and I guess it somewhat the government’s fault because they didn’t let these people know that they could do these things, because there were a lot of people in Southport and otherwise who were in war service homes.

And they never seemed to lose their house, we always seemed to be going from house to house to house. Probably because they couldn’t pay the rent, I don’t know but that’s what happened. Yeah. So that was pretty good. And just before I joined the navy I’d been to a café in the main street

and we’d had, in those days it was a big thing to have a bolt of milk and the straws were in a glass container with a lift up lid. And I went to take one out of it and hit it like that and knocked the glass container over and it broke and it ended up slicing a bit out of my finger. So I thought oh dear, I hope that’s not going to spoil me for getting into the navy. I didn’t mention it so that was all right. But I could never then after that

become a maestro of the piano, it’s a good excuse. So, yeah. At that time we all seemed to have a little bit of a job. I was an apprentice and one of the others, he was a telegram deliverer for the post office and the big thing by that time, they had talkies in the films. And it was a big deal on a Saturday

night to all go to the pictures. I don’t know how much it cost to get in now, can’t remember, but after the pictures, everybody in the gang, we’d all go to this café. I don’t know was it, café or milk bar or something and everybody’d sit down and we’d all drink up big on these milk shakes. Big night out, I think the whole lot cost us two shillings but anyhow, those were fun times. Yes I can remember the movies when they were silent movies.

So that sort of tells how old I am doesn’t it? Oh yeah.

Yes it was, well everybody got sort of addicted to it the way they did when TV [Television] first came out here. There was nowhere else to go so you went to the pictures and it was a

big thing, it was a night out for the town to be able to go out on a Saturday night. Of course in those days everybody used to have to work six days a week, and I can remember when the 40 hours a week came in and Dad only had to work on Saturday mornings which was great, and Mum used to meet him down town and he’d get his pay when things got a bit better. And it did get better for Dad, during the war a lot

of Americans were stationed down at the Gold Coast and Dad started up his own watch repair business and he did pretty well there, as a matter of fact he bought two blocks of land in the heart of Surfers Paradise. He paid two hundred pound each for those and he thought he’d just buy them for the boys when they came back out of the services. And of course we came back out of the services and

we were too stupid to understand that that was a good thing. Probably in a couple of years later, they were sold for about 12,000 pound each. Fortune passed us by, so that was good. I can remember at one stage my brother and I happened to be home on leave together and we went up to the Sessilow Till because in those days it was sessions and we were standing at the bar

there and Billy had his beer and I had my beer and we didn’t really take any notice of what was happening and all of a sudden this arm came forward, took one of the beers and it was Dad. He said “I just come up to have a drink with my boys. I don’t usually drink but I’m having a drink with my boys.” So that was wonderful, good.

I can recall my father talking about when the Italians were taking, invading Abyssinia, I can recall about Chamberlain [Prime Minister of England] going to England and coming back and saying “There’ll be peace in our time,” and things like that. I can still

recall that I understood when he said that “War was declared.” But I guess, I probably heard it on the radio, I don’t know that I did but certainly I was informed of it. When I was a kid growing up I always wanted to be in the navy. I really did, see I was a water boy, a boat boy and I had a lot of experience with Dad and the kids

at this boat shed and that on the water. And at one stage, I don’t know when I actually wrote to Angus and Robertson and got their encyclopaedias, about half a dozen books I think it was, because it had one whole book on the navy. And I studied this up and I thought I’d love to join the navy. But I didn’t know how to go about it.

I really didn’t. And I guess I wouldn’t have been accepted as a cadet anyhow. And when the war broke out I thought this is good, now I’ll be able to join the navy. That was the first thing that happened, I thought I’ll be able to join the navy now. Which was good. When I did join the navy, I didn’t ask my parents permission. A gang of us went up and we went and applied

to join the navy and I came home and I said to Mum and Dad, I said “I went to Brisbane and joined the navy.” “Oh, oh all right.” “Got to get you to sign the form Dad.” So they both signed it. Then later on when I got the call up Dad said “I want to talk to you Bobby, downstairs.” I went downstairs and I thought to myself here we go, going to learn something here. He said “I just want to tell you, if

you get put on a destroyer, they’re very dangerous so be very careful in rough weather.” I thought, out goes the birds and the bees. Yeah, so it was great. Something else there that I wanted to tell you about that and it’s slipped my mind. Oh yeah, when I did join the navy, when I got my call up, you had to take the oath and

all of the 40 of us that were going in on this draft, we were all lined up in the drill hall down at the bottom end of Alice St, that’s where the navy depot was in Brisbane at that time. And you all had to say the oath and then the chaplain came past and he handed everybody a bible. Of course I was the only one that dropped it wasn’t I. Not good.

After I joined up and everybody else as well, in those days and I don’t know whether they do it now, what the system is, but the navy used to contact the local police and the police used to come a do a check up. And I can remember now that Norm Bower, he eventually became an inspector of police somewhere, he was the local detective and he came along to see me this day and he said

“Your joining the navy Bob?” I said “Yeah.” He said “I’m just doing a check up on you,” he said “so you’ll be right.” So that was how it went, no problems. Why he even bothered to come and tell me I don’t know but anyhow, that’s what they did, that’s what happened. So off I went into the navy. It was great. One of the things I can remember about living on that boat with my father

there were times of high delight from the food point of view. It had two primuses, he had to fill them with kerosene and it had a little channel around the jet where you put a bit of what was it, pipe cleaner I think, Dad used to tie this pipe cleaner around and he poured methylated spirits on that and then he’d light it and that would heat the jet. Then you’d tighten up the thing on the

butterfly cap on the inlet. Pump it up, pump it up and it’d get lit. And the staple diet, I used to have to cook sausages and a couple of potatoes. If we were very lucky we used to have condensed milk and I can remember occasionally and it was absolutely beautiful, Nestles’ milk, tinned milk used to make these little tins about

an inch and a half in diameter and about an inch high and it was Nestles’ cream. And Dad used to buy a tin of sliced peaches and he’d ladle it out and I think I used to be allowed four slices and I’d be able to have a little bit of this cream on it. Heaven, great stuff, very good. Along the front at Southport, it was sort of millionaire’s row, they weren’t millionaires but there was a lot of people along there that,

there was a big place called Seabank. Huge building. And the Governor used to come there every year for six weeks and it was hoi polloi. And then further north there was some, that place, there were a number of houses and graziers from the west,

they used to come down in the summer. It was two families by the name of Chandler, I can remember them. I can’t remember who the other ones were but I used to walk past there and they used to have garden parties out the front and they’d be drinking and eating and I’d look over the fence and I thought, wouldn’t that be marvellous to be in there, you know. Never got invited but that’s the way it was. Which goes to show that life has changed considerably

because nearly everyone now has a patio and they have a barbie [barbeque], people come and gather. Just what they did in those days.

Oh yes. Yeah there was. There was the haves and the have nots and the have nots were the predominant people.

I don’t think so.

Yes to me it did. To me it did because not being associated with those sort of people, when later on when I did become associated, particularly with officers in the navy and getting invited to other peoples homes during the war and all of that, I found it very difficult to have a conversation. I was sort of always stilted about everything.

One time I remember that the train used to go right down to the Broadwater at Southport and they had one of the carriages fitted up as a dental, school dental business. And the class was taken down and we were put in this carriage and we were told how to clean our teeth this way, not this way. I’m looking and I’m thinking about this:

if I only had a toothbrush I’d be right. Anyhow, it was sort of all over and the nurse or whatever she was, probably a nurse, I don’t think she would’ve been a doctor in those days, the nurse said “Now you tell me what’s the proper way to clean your teeth.” And I was dumbstruck, I couldn’t answer her, I knew how to do it but I couldn’t tell her. Oh and she roasted me something awful, “Not paying any attention, what’s the use of coming here,” you know, carrying on like that.

And there was another time when the Tams had a theatre, two theatres in the main street and one of them went through a sort of an arcade, no a real wide aisle way up to the theatre which was upstairs at the back of some shops. And I was in the boy scouts at the time and standing there nice and clean with my scout hat on, first on the line, why I was first on the line I’d have no idea.

But the scout, the Governor was coming to pay a visit for some reason or other. And the Scout Master said to me “Whenever he speaks you say yes Your Excellency.” And of course I’m first in the line and his excellency Sir Leslie Wilson, I still remember him standing there “Hello sonny” he said, “What’s your name?” I couldn’t answer him. I couldn’t answer him, he just shook his head and moved on. Terrible. So you know, that was,

that was a problem. You didn’t associate with those people so… terrible. It took me a long while but no, I can remember about 1936 they brought in this business of immunisation. I think it was ’36, about there abouts. And I still had my bike at that time and we used to have to go up

to the council chambers in those days the Southport Council was in the main street. I got jabbed with the needle, I got on my bike to go home and I was just going into the street, passed out and fell off the bike. So that’s how it went, but yes, strange things. I spent a fair bit of time, the Crouse family who had the bakehouse

were very kind to me. They used to encourage me to go into the bakehouse and I would work there and help them make the bread. They showed me how to make the bread and I could actually roll buns and roll bread rolls and do all of those sort of things. And I knew how to knock down the dough and cover it up again to let it rise the second time. And a good thing about it was that they, for all the fruit loaves that they had, they had

currents and sultanas in big bins and I used to sneak in and grab a handful. And I thought wow, this was great stuff a handful of this stuff. They were very kind but they had a, their senior baker, forgotten his name. He used to invite me home occasionally. I used to, he used to take me out on the rounds with him, he’d bake in the morning

and then he’d, this is how tough times were then, then he used to have to deliver the bread. And he used to go out all through the dairy farms at Benowa and places like that, all houses on them now days. He was a lovely fellow. He used to invite me home and say “Come down home,” then he’d say “Oh it’s dinner time, would you stay for lunch? We’ve got roast chicken” or we’ve got this or something. I’d say “Oh no, I’d better go home,

Mum will be expecting me you know.” I’d go home and might have a piece of bread. Those were the sort of things that happened. I can’t remember his name, nice bloke.

No, I can only

remember one of them getting knocked back. Kevin Wesner was his name and I don’t know why he got that. Whether it was, his father was of German extract of something like that but then I should’ve got knocked back too because, I’ll just digress here a moment. I was born Robert Lloyd Carr but my Dad was born

Herbert Arthur Kronk, he was the son of German migrants in New Zealand. And for some reason or other, there’s two stories why he changed his name, it doesn’t matter but he changed his name by deed poll. And but apparently that couldn’t have been any problem being of German descent because they accepted him in WW1 [World War I] and he went over and he was

as I said before, he was a munitions worker in England. So I don’t know why that would’ve been a reason why Wesner was refused entry but he was the only one that I know that was refused. We were all probably pretty scrawny, but we were all pretty fit because we did nothing but swim you see. We were hungry, skinny as greyhound dogs I suppose but none of us… Matter of fact

one of them by the name of Doug Bright who was a lifesaver, he was actually taken by a shark off Southport and he had big shark marks all down through his chest and around his midriff and up his back where the shark had bit him and then let him go. And he’d actually swum about 200 yards to shore before he collapsed. But for all of that they still took him. So no I,

see I suppose when one thinks back about those times, it was sort of a little bit better after the Depression. The Depression had gone away by that time. We were probably a little bit better fed and of course the whole populace was about that standard so it was all right. Anyhow I went in. In those days to get from Southport to Brisbane

if you didn’t go by train, you used to have to go by ferry. I think it was over three or four rivers, it was the Coomera and I can’t remember the name of the rivers now but yeah, you used to have to go by vehicle. You used to have to go across these ferries. I can remember I went on a couple of times but the usual way was to go by train. I remember one stage during my life

for some reason or other I got on the train and I went up to Brisbane. My older sister, not the eldest but the one older than me, she was married and living at the Grange and I just sort of knocked on the door and I thought oh, “Come on in, come on in.” And I stayed there and went home again and another time, a lot of the commerce to Southport was taken by boat.

The Clinesmiths owned the boats, there was the Regina was one of them, and Sport was the later one, it was a bigger boat. And a South Sea Islander by the name of Billy Emson was the skipper of these boats and of course being associated in that area the Willoughby kids were, Willoughby was the skipper of one and Emson was the skipper of another and

I was always on and off these boats. And I can remember going up to Brisbane with Emson one time and pulled into the jetty while it was getting loaded up and that and my brother at that stage, he was driving a taxi in Brisbane. So I rang him up, rang the taxi company and said “I’m over here at” this particular address, whatever it was “At South Brisbane.” And when he turned up he said “Was that you that rung?” And I said “Yeah.” He said “You ought to have more sense than

doing that,” he says “I’ve now got to pay the owner of this cab for the mileage that I’ve come over to see you.” And I thought oh god, here’s my lovely brother going crook at me. And anyhow on one occasion I was up with Emson and we were coming back and it was night time and I don’t know how old I was but we came out of the mouth of the Brisbane River and there was lights, you could see these lights all over.

And he said “Bob,” he said “Can you see that light down there?” And I said “Yeah,” I never said which one of course, and I lined up on one of these lights and he said “I’m going down for a bit of a sleep.” And I’m watching this light and I’m steering at this light and steering and Emson, he comes up and he said “Where are we?” Looks around and he said “Oh my God,” he said “We’re around the back of Coochie Mudlow.” I’d nearly run the boat up on a bank. Very luck, I was never allowed to steer

it again after that. I don’t know why. Another time, things that happen, Guy Fawkes Day, isn’t it marvellous. We were then living in a house up the top end of Nerang St and Guy Fawkes Day and my brother was in the militia at the time and he came up. I said “You got any crackers Billy?” He said “No, I’ve got something better than that.” So he went in

and he got his rifle and he put a 303 up and he said “Come out here to the front veranda” and he fired it. He said “How’s that?” I said “That’s good.” Well Billy got into a lot of trouble because he had to account for that bullet. I can remember in that house being very sick. I don’t know what it was, probably the flu I don’t know, but I was very sick. And Mum was nursing me and when I got better, she came in one day and

she said “Would you like something to eat?” And I said “Yes I think I would.” And she came back and she had two arrowroot biscuits. You know what arrowroot biscuits are? They’re elliptical shaped with arrowroot or Arnold, Arnotts stamped in the middle of it in warm milk. And they were so beautiful it had been so long, I’d had nothing to eat for I don’t know how long. And that was the good part of that, there was two good things about that house.

Two good, two other things that weren’t so good was that, and I was only a little bloke. On the bottom step, the back steps was a concrete block and I’d got Dad’s hammer and Dad was very particular about his tools, and I’m sitting there just banging on this concrete step with Dad’s hammer and he came back under the house and he saw me doing that and he ripped that off and he gave me a belting. “Look what you’ve done to my hammer,” he said.

Pitted it. Oh dear. Around the corner form that house there was a family by the name of Ryder, they were the local dairy people, milk delivery people. And on one occasion I was there and they said “Stay for lunch Bobby.” I said “Thank you.” “It’s tripe and onions.” I’d never heard of tripe and onions, anyhow, they were there at their table and I’m sitting on the top step on the landing

at the top of the back steps and they brought me up this plate of stuff and it was white and it had these funny looking things in it and I picked it up and I started to eat it and I thought this is great. I didn’t ask for more but I would’ve liked to. Another time I was there it was Christmas and they had this bloomin’ horse and they said “Look would you take this bottle of cream down to the,”

I forget the name of the people’s house, “They live in Marshall Lane. They want it for their Christmas dinner.” “Okay.” So they said “Take the horse.” Of course I wasn’t a very horse capable person, and I get on the horse and the damned horse didn’t want to go anywhere and I’m flogging it and it’s pulling and wanting to go home and I don’t know it took me ages to get there but I eventually got up there and I knocked on the door and they came out and they abused me, “Where have you been? We’ve been waiting for this

for our pudding,” and oh God, carried on like you wouldn’t believe. Poor me. Damned horse, could’ve killed it. Anyhow, they gave me another empty container and I get onto the horse and I go out and turned it home and it took off, bolted. And here’s me everywhere. Milk bottle went, I couldn’t have cared about the milk bottle I was flat out staying on but that horse never stopped galloping until it went through the back gate.

That was a terrible experience. I don’t think I ever got round to being happy at being around horses after that episode. It was incredible. Such was life, all of those things happening. Wouldn’t think that there’s so many things piled into your mind would you? So that was it. My childhood before I joined the navy.

Well eventually I was called up into the navy and inducted on 20th November 1941 at Brisbane. They marched us up Alice St, across the

Victoria Bridge and put us on the train at South Brisbane. I was very lucky that I was put into a compartment with a fellow by the name of Mickey Hall, Michael Hall. He became a lifetime friend of mine, Michael. And I guess I was very much a country bumpkin. And Mickey was a city boy, he lived at Moorooka and

he was pretty streetwise. When we got to Sydney, Mick had an aunty, I don’t know quite where it was but I know we got on a ferry and went over there and we sort of stayed the night and we had a bath there. And I can always remember that in that bathroom they had, for a sponge or a washer they had one of these sea sponges. Very good.

And it was a lovely home. The next day of course we ended up over at Central Railway Station again and I remember I was talking to a young lady there and she told me her name was Loftus and gave me her address at, I don’t think it went any further than that. We eventually got to Melbourne and put on the train down to Frankston

I think was where the train went to in those days, then we had to get off that and go by bus to the Flinders Naval Depot, the HMAS Cerberus. And that was a real eye opener to get there and see all these people marching about and looking very smart in their uniforms and one thing and another like that. We were allocated to various messes and

we were a sort of a mixture of states in the mess I was in. One of the fellows that was in that mess was a fellow by the name of Terry Bruce, he’s in one of those photographs over there. He was very much an outgoing sort of a fellow Terry and he’d run a Victorian Mickey Rooney contest. Mickey Rooney in his day was a pretty well known film actor and

I must say that Terry was a bit bumptious. At one stage I took him on by sitting in his place at the mess deck table, he didn’t like that, we almost came to blows over that. But it was good. We got allocated to various classes and different people, different petty officers and leading seamen took us for various sorts of instructions.

One of the things that I used to like about it was that they used to have, the depot band used to play for us to march by and we’d march around so that everybody got to know left incline, right incline, about turn, stop and all of those sorts of things which was very good and we tried to be as good as we could. There was one fellow there who always sticks in my memory, he always marched

right arm, right foot, left arm, left foot. It was such a comic. I don’t know whether they ever got him over that or not, I can’t remember now. The first thing that was important there was the food was terrific, plenty of food. Oh dear, heaps of food and Sundays it was always pork and apple sauce. I can remember that, pork and apple sauce and I don’t think I’d ever tasted pork in my life before that, let alone apple sauce.

Yeah that was good. So we went through the training school, all of this business of marching and learning who to salute and not to salute and when to salute, and I can remember we were on in the class on parade at one stage and a warrant officer came up and we were all in ranks and I was in the front rank and the petty officer said “Come out and introduce yourself to the

officer.” And I just went out there and I said “I’m Bob Carr.” I was shunted back into the line and anyhow the next bloke that went out was a fellow by the name of John Whittle. And John went out and stands to attention, slaps stiffer and I thought that’s what I should’ve done. I thought oh well, out goes the door to being an admiral, but anyhow. But there were other things that were interesting, part of the course was to learn boat handling

and boat drill and stuff like this and that was a breeze for me. I got put in this whaler, they call them whalers, why they do I don’t know. Whaler and we had an old chief petty officer there by the name of Philp. And he says “Right-oh you, you take the helm and away you go.” See so that was pretty easy for me and there was this business of up oars

and we got through that all right and he said to the officer there he said “This bloke’s pretty good,” he said “He’ll be all right ship handling.” So I passed that part of it all right. But then we had to go and do, they had a tremendously big hall down there with a whole lot of guns of various sizes and we used to have to go down into this hall and do, learn gun drill. At the time it was all very much beyond me, I sort of couldn’t come to grips with it at all.

But now I think of it, it was all so elementary, it was pretty easy. I did it for so many years after that it just come natural. One other thing that they sort of taught us down there at the navy depot was aircraft and ship identification. And the aircraft identification, it absolutely left me for dead because they’d have these, at that time, it left me for dead but

they’d show aircraft on the screen and they’d show the gun at firing and the bullets going like that and it told you how to train ahead so that you’d hit the aircraft and they’d put silhouettes up of all the different aircraft with all the names under them and I had no memory of that at all. I couldn’t get into my mind that one aircraft looked any different from another so I just made no comment about that. So that went on.

I can remember at one stage the gunnery, a gunner’s mate, a petty officer gunnery trained, we were doing guard drill, gun drill and he stood everybody out and he said “We’ll have a bit of an exercise now,” he said “I want the class to go away and everybody bring me back a piece of four by four.” Of course I immediately think of a lank of timber four feet long, four inches by four inches and we’re all running around looking for this. And we come back, nobody could pass it and he said

“Here it is.” And he held up a piece of toilet paper four by four. Shock of shocks. There you go so no there was all these wits around about the place. There was an elderly stubby, short, rotund, not terribly rotund lieutenant commander used to take all the parades in the mornings and at lunchtime and that.

And we’d all be assembled along the main drag in front of all the accommodation blocks and other things, up on the rise, and he’d stand there and he’d say “I have something to promulgate.” He didn’t say “I’ve got to tell you something,” he always had to promulgate it. I can’t remember his name, a lot of the fellows can remember his name but anyhow, in the winter,

and like this was up on the roadway and there was a long slope down to all the drill halls and things like that down at the bottom, and we’d all get our instructions or the promulgations for the day and all the classes would veer off in their various directions and we’d all disappear down into the fog and sort of all of a sudden was blanketed by fog. A bit of an eerie sort of a situation but it was damned cold I’ll tell you.

After I sort of got a bit more qualified, about six weeks or so, I was given two duties. One of them, a fellow by the name of David Wallace-Barnett and I, as part of a roster system, we had to go down and feed the animals in the zoo every day. And that meant that we had to go around

the outside and pick green grass with our hands and throw it over the fence and go and do all of those sort of things. And there was an emu there and it took a great dislike to David and every time he got near the fence it’d peck him. And David had been given a new watch when he went into the navy and he was picking grass this day and he had seeds all over his hands and there was an up-stand tap there and he turned the tap on

and he’s washing himself and he washed his glass and of course, my Dad being a watchmaker, I’m a bit more careful than this and I said “David you shouldn’t put your watch under that tap,” I said “It’ll eventually get water.” “No, no” he said “This is a waterproof watch, that’s okay.” I don’t know whatever happened to it but anyhow that was David’s attitude. But he’s very generous, he’s still alive and he’s still a bachelor and he’s a nice bloke David. The other thing that we had to do was after the Japanese came into the war, they had a

great big tower, it’s about a quarter of the size of this room. What would that be, about 12 or 14 feet by square, and unroofed and we used to have to go up there and do aircraft duties. Day and night you’d be up there and it was freezing cold. A terrible job. How they ever expected Japanese aircraft to get down there that far I don’t know.

But anyhow that was some of the things that we had to do. There was also bad fires around about the naval depot in that Christmas period and we all had to come out doing fire prevention, you know wet sacks and hitting fires and things like that. Then they decided that they’d better dig a whole lot of slit trenches around the back of all the accommodation places and here we were like a whole heap of grave diggers

mulling away somewhere and digging this up. I found it quite good just to lean on the shovel because the group I was with, they had a farmer in there and he could just plod along and get it all done. He was great, he was a good fellow. So they were some of the things that we did there. One of the exercises we had to do was to see who could swim and they had a swimming pool there. They made us all get dressed

in our canvas suits and we had to swim the length of this pool to be able to qualify to get your swimming business. Of course I dived in and I plugged away and I got up and left everybody for dead. And the bloke said “You’re pretty good, you can go back again.” So I had to swim the pool twice but that was no great sweat, I was good at that. The think I’ve always been a bit ashamed of is that we also had to do

assault training with a rifle. They issued us all with the magazine with five bullets in it and a .303 rifle and we had to line up and run down and fall down and put the bullets in and go pop pop and away we’d go. And I did the whole lot and I could never get the bloomin’ magazine into the rifle to start with so I’d have been a dead cook, it’d be pretty far off the line but I never told anybody, I just handed the gun back and that was all there was about that.

There was some cagey people down there, clever old blokes, you learnt a few of these tricks as you went along but every payday, we got paid once a fortnight and we didn’t get much money, I was an ordinary seaman second class. Now you can’t get any lower than that except being a boy and they don’t have boys in the Royal Australian Navy, you had to be in the British Navy for that. And these old three badge ABs [Able Seamen] used to come along and sell raffle tickets.

One time the raffle was two ducks. One of the blokes in the mess won the raffle and he said “Where do I get the ducks?” And they said “Any two on the pond down there you’d like to catch.” That was the prize, cunning old fellas. Yeah it was strange. When I was a kid at school I used to play the side drum and I then became a member of the band down there and that was great, I learned

to play the side drum pretty well and the band master was a warrant officer by the name of Cochet he used to say, but his name was spelled C.O.C.K.H.E.A.D. - Cockhead, but he was called Cochet. He was a nice bloke and I learned to play all the various tunes by ear of course.

And I graduated to the stage where in the morning I’d be the loan drummer out there marching everybody down into the fog or whatever, which was pretty good. And because I was in the band we used to get several trips up to Melbourne to do various parades up Swanson St and we’d be up there marching away, real good, great. Win the war, I’m here now. And

we went on occasion I think, a couple of times we played at the commencement of football games. I don’t know where they were but we used to play at those particular venues. That was really great and there’s a photograph on the table there and some of those fellows, I can’t remember. The three I do, there’s myself and a fellow by the name of Reynolds and the other bloke was

Pincher Martin. Everybody in the navy was called Pincher if their name was Martin. And later on when he got drafted, he got drafted to Sydney and the chief band master there taught him dinner music and I’d just got to the stage of being invited into the band to practise dinner music and stuff like that when I went on draft. But when Pincher got there

he got invited to do this and after a period the Band PO [Petty Officer] or CPO [Chief Petty Officer], he had a bit of a business on the side and he used to have Pincher go out to various hotels and venues like that of a Saturday and he’d have to just turn up and play the drums and he said, I was speaking to him after the war he said “I used to get ten pound a night for that,” he said “It really put me on my feet for the rest of my life.” So those are the sort of things

that happened, they were good. Going ashore, we didn’t get ashore that often and we didn’t have a lot of money but Mickey Hall and I for a start, we used to go up and we’d stay at Tok-H and our favourite waterhole to have a drink was the Menzies Hotel. It was a very plush hotel, it was beautifully furnished, a great atmosphere and it, I suppose we used to

get some funny sorts of looks when we’d go in there in those days, the drink I preferred and I couldn’t have too many of them because I didn’t have much money, was rum and raspberry. Great, rum and raspberry. And we’re there once and this fellow said “Would you like to come up home with me?” And I said “Yeah, okay.” So off I tootled with him and he took me up somewhere, some high-rise building and when I got up there I found out that he was homosexual and he wanted to make advances.

I thought this is not too good so I took off in a hurry with very loud voices about the type of person he was. Very lucky. But we eventually got invited to a home out at Cue. Mr and Mrs Sterat, it was their home. And Mr Sterat had been a lieutenant in the army in the First World War and he found us to be a bit brash I think, he had difficulties handling Mick and I.

But Mrs Sterat was a lovely person. We used to sleep in a little room at sort of out the back of the house that they’d furnished with a couple of beds and we’d go up and we’d stay in there. And they had a son who was in the air force and he was overseas somewhere. And they had a daughter Shirley, she was in the air force and she would occasionally come home

and occasionally she would bring a WAAAF [Women’s Australian Auxiliary Air Force] friend with her and we’d possibly go into town and go to the pictures or on a nice weekend we’d go up to the upper reaches of the Yarra River and swim in the water of the upper Yarra. That was a pretty good time doing that. And strange as it may seem, whilst Mick was a Catholic, he and I used to go to the Presbyterian church of a Sunday. I’d been

in the Presbyterian church one way or another, wasn’t a dedicated person but it was somewhere to go of a Sunday. And I think there were odd occasions that we went to some theatre or something like that and they used to have comedy shows, live shows put on. That was another way of getting a day filled in up at Melbourne at the weekend. We were known to get drunk and of course the thing was if you were a drunken

sailor and you were with your mate, your mate always had to make sure that you bend down and pulled his long bell bottom trousers out of the way so that you didn’t get vomit over it. That was very important, couldn’t get vomit on your trousers, terrible. But that happened and we never seemed to get any great trouble and people in Melbourne were always pretty kind to us, we never sort of taken to task by the police or anything

like that, perhaps we weren’t doing too much that was wrong. I remember one occasion we would better go into Young and Jacksons [hotel] because we’d heard about the naked painting that was in there. So we went in to have a look at Chloe. And I saw this naked woman, it was the only one that I had seen until I got married many years later. Yeah those sort of things and Flinders St Station was the

place that we always used to detrain from and then go back to Flinders St to catch the train back to Frankston to go back to town again. We, when we first started to go up to Melbourne on our leave we always war the issue uniform which was pretty damned terrible.

I think I’ve got a photograph there that shows me in my issue uniform and hat, no way like it but we eventually learned that there was a tailor up there that would make our uniforms to fit. So we got our tiddly uniforms there made, number ones which were blue serge and number sixes which were the white drill I suppose you’d call the material.

And then we were really in a position to strut about and look not so much like new comers to the town. Had a great time. You see we were only allowed, I don’t think we were allowed to get out of the depot within the first month I don’t think and then it was only I think every second week that we sort of got away.

And then we didn’t always go away because we sometimes didn’t have any money and I was a fool I used to, one of the older fellows that had a crown and anchor board and I used to try and beat him on it and lose my money. I can remember on one occasion I was so broke a couple of days after payday that I went up to the Chaplain and said “Could you lend me five shillings?” Which he did. He was probably

used to young sailors coming up and asking to borrow money. A bit embarrassing now when I think looking back on it how stupid a man can be. We didn’t have much to do with officers at that stage in our life I don’t think, with the, it was mostly the officer of the day who was this lieutenant commander and then probably a gunnery officer and

I can’t remember much apart from that. I had one stint in the sick bay down there, I don’t know what the devil I had, probably a dose of the flu or something but I had two or three days in hospital which was good to get away from the routine. The other thing was that when

Japan came into the war it was the time when I, I can remember this clearly, I was getting kitted out and they said at the time “Japan has now entered the war, bombed Pearl Harbour.” So I thought well, that sticks in my memory. And later on after I don’t know, early in 1942 I guess, when the Americans sort of came over this way, an American

admiral decided to visit Flinders Naval Depot. And so being in the band they practised up on the marching song Marching Through Georgia, they thought for some reason or other that was the American national anthem and it wasn’t until a few hours before the admiral was due to get there they found that that was the rebel’s song. So we very had to quickly learn to play Stars and Stripes.

We managed and it was all right, but it was a bit of a kafuffle at the time. When we went in there of course one of the things that after a very short time was they gave everybody their immunisation and inoculations and there was blokes collapsing all over the place. They had reactions to some of these things, some of them might’ve been genuine, general reaction, genuine reaction,

some of them being a bit of a mental reaction I think, but they were falling all over the place and they were whipped off to sick bed, some of them had very sore arms, swollen arms. But one of the things that of course we had to early learn was how to sling a hammock and then the difficult part after that was to get into it. And for a long time you fell out of it more than you fell into it. Yes and then you had to learn how to

rope it up to take it away and stow it. And of course you had to get the rope around the seven times to represent the seven seas. And they all had to be equidistant up the bloomin’ hammock. And I for the love of me now, after all the years I slept in the hammock I can’t remember what happened to the

ends and the clues. The clues were all the little ropes that went from the ring around the thing that hooked on to the hammock bar down to the eyelets in the top of the hammock. I suppose we must’ve put those in before we wrapped them up. I can’t remember. But I know that we had an awful lot of difficulty with these bloomin’ hammocks when we first got in, people falling out of them all hours of the day and night. When we got on

board ship of course, we were educated pretty quickly that the best thing to do with your hammock was to get a piece of timber about yay big, I forget how long it was now and have a notch in each end. And then when you’d sling your hammock front and back with the clues, you’d put these spreaders in from the underside and that would make the clues come down straight and open your hammock up more like a bit of a bunk than anything else.

They were pretty comfortable. When I say they were comfortable you could lay in them and not worry about it after a while. It was like getting sea legs, you were getting hammock legs. But for all of the fact that you got pretty expert at sleeping in a hammock it was often people got thrown out of the hammocks in rough seas and get hurt and some of them quite badly.

Of course the hammocks were sort of slung in the mess deck in the ship I was on anyhow. The ship was 36 feet, 7 inches wide and it had a mess on each side with two tables with about two foot six between the one end and front end of the other and they ran fore and aft in the ship. And

in that space, there would be the table and the stools and the side lockers and at the end would be the crockery lockers and your dixies, where you put those in and then there’d be a small locker, upright locker where you could just put your money and other little things, about 18 inches square I suppose. And then there was a big case-on I s’pose you’d call it coming down

through the mess deck which, in which was the hydraulics to drive B gun which was up above us and well that was the space. Now when the hammocks were slung at night-time, everybody sort of had to duck their heads to get in and out around the mess deck. And there were hammocks actually slung over the tables as well, so there wasn’t a lot of room. And if you fell out over a table, it was a bit rough. A bit uncomfortable.

So when you got out in the morning, everybody was out at six o’clock no matter what watch you’d been on, call to hands at six, you’d get up and lash up, lash and stow they used to say it, lash up your hammock and there was two corrals at the front end of the mess where you used to stuff your hammocks, vertical they used to go in. And they were all out of the way and if the ship rolled

and tossed a bit, they never got thrown out around about the place at all. So sleeping in a hammock was, had its advantages, definite advantages because when the ship was going this way it was like the pendulum of a clock, it was pretty good. But when it was going up and down like that and then twitching again it wasn’t so comfortable. They were pretty snug to sleep in the colder weather.

In the hot weather, in the tropics they were terrible. You had canvas around you on your mattress and you had your blanket and everything in, you couldn’t get rid of your blanket out of it at all and you weren’t that far below the deck above. They were pretty hot and of course ships weren’t air-conditioned. They had forced air ventilators, which came in and we were pretty lucky on the deck that I was on as

they had port holes I suppose 12 inches in diameter and in moderate weather, calm weather we’d be able to put out a scuttle, the old thing that went out and had a curve on it like this which used to push the air in through the mess decks. That wasn’t too bad but that was all right unless the ship changed direction in a hurry and hit the sea and you’d get 12 inches of water coming falling through the mess deck.

Everybody laughed of course, ha ha. But in rough weather if you were unlucky enough to be in your hammock and you were really pounding into the seas and you were anywhere near the hatchway that the ammunition used to go up into the deck above for the gun, the sea water used to trickle through and sometimes spurt through with the heavy seas. It hit that and no matter how tight you screwed them down,

they would still leak and the water would shoot through like a deck and you’d end up with a hammock full of water. Not pleasant. It was also unpleasant for everybody else on board because very often everything else was wet, floor was wet. The people coming off of watch, they were all soaking wet and they were very uncomfortable times but you lived it, you didn’t complain about it. That was the fact of life. So

the ship I was on, the Norman, it had what was called a the name eludes me now. Repayment missing in that each person in the mess was allocated a certain amount of money and each mess elected its own caterer and the caterer would go down every day and order

the food from the stores for the mess for that day. And the system was that the last watch off had to prepare the meal that he said he wanted prepared, and they would have to prepare it and take it down to the galley and the galley would boil it, fry it or bake it or stew it, depending on what it was. And then come meal time, the cook of the mess then who would probably be the next watch to go on would go and get it

and bring it back to the mess deck. The meals were prepared by those people that were in the mess and I tell you there was some of the food there that was really ruined. It was not uncommon for new entries onto the ship to come aboard that didn’t even know how to open a can. You say “Open this,” and they’d say “How do I do it?” But they would have to prepare a meal so

it wasn’t all that good. But anyhow that’s digressing, I’m sorry, I’ve put the horse before the cart now. After my training at the Flinders Naval Depot, I was on draft to the Norman and everybody had to have a medical before they left the depot. They had to be sent away fit. And I didn’t pass because it was found that I had Dhobi’s infection of the groin.

Now Dhobi’s was, what happened was marching around in the heat in your blue uniforms, the dye got out and gave you a rash in the groin. So I missed out on that draft and I’m pretty fortunate because I’m pretty sure that had I been on the draft I would’ve ended up on HMAS Kuttabul which was sunk by a Japanese torpedo on the night of the 31st of June or May, 1942

so I was pretty lucky. But I eventually got away on draft to the Norman and they sent us by train and those days they issued us polar neck white heavy duty woollen pullovers and they came right up like this. And I was travelling at that time with a mate of mine by the name of Ted Ey, E.Y. was his name.

Lovely bloke Ted. And in the train we had to, on at Spencer St Station for that one and we went up as far as, is it Wagga or Albury? Wherever the train changes. And on the way up there I said “You know these new pullovers they’ve got Ted,” I said “They’re terrible, they’re made out of horse hair” I said, “Or bull’s wool, I’m not sure which.” And he said “Oh yeah, pretty rough aren’t they?” Anyhow it wasn’t until we got to

Albury that he said “I just woke up to what you said.” Whack, he cracked me. Anyhow we eventually got to Sydney and they sent us over to Balmoral and because of the problem with the Japanese submarines up and down the east coast of Australia, we had to wait until we got a ship that could be escorted. And eventually we left Sydney on the 23rd of August

1942 on a ship called the Felix Roussel, Roussel I think it’s spelled. And it was the only ship with two square funnels in all of the merchant navy that I know of. And anyhow, we’re on board the ship and it sails out of Sydney harbour and I was right down on the after rail and I’m watching the ship go down and up like this after it’d gone through the heads and I thought to myself, am I going to be sick? I thought oh,

I don’t want to be, so I made up my mind I wasn’t going to be seasick. As far as I remember we went almost due east out of Sydney then due east, due south, down around Tasmania and our escort was HMAS Adelaide and when we were going across the [Great Australian] Bight, the seas were really terrific. They were really terrific going across there. Very occasionally you’d see this little

bit of a stick sticking up in the water in the distance. It was the, that was the Adelaide sort of just coming up out of the troughs enough to be able to see it. And there was two guns on the foc’s’le [forecastle] of the Felix Roussel and the seas just flattened those back on the deck. Tremendous and it was I don’t know about 12,000 tonnes or something. But anyhow, it was a pretty uncomfortable ride and sort of a not all that pleasant a ship. It had a funny sort of an odour

about it from memory. I don’t know what it was, whether it was body odour or whether it was stores or something they’d had on the ship but anyhow we survived. We got over to Fremantle and the officer in charge of the draft was Lieutenant Commander Arnold Green and we pulled up alongside the wharf in Fremantle and no leave was given. And every day we’d be, have to call in at eight o’clock and he’d have us marching

up and down the wharf at Fremantle. And one day he stopped and he turned around, he had his wife on board and he turned around and he said a very rude word to his wife to get back from the railing on the ship. And I thought to myself, oh pig. Anyhow that was it. But the last night in Fremantle, we didn’t know it was the last night, but we were given leave in the afternoon and

we went to the shore and we got into the local brew. I don’t know what it was but I tell you this, the next morning they had us down first thing, we all had to get down and scrub the deck and I had the most abominable headache. It was absolutely terrible, getting down on hands and knees having to scrub this bloomin’ deck. Glad to get to sea. But later on we weren’t too far out to sea and

I was part of the first mutiny in the navy, that I had in the navy. They had Alaskan cooks on the Felix Roussel and we just didn’t like the food and that was what it was all about so they sort of, we’d call it a strike today I s’pose, but they had this bit of a strike and got in touch with Lieutenant Commander Green and said

“You’d better do something about this food or we’re going to play up.” This was the old hands on board. Fellas that had been overseas before and been home and were going back again. So anyhow the food improved but on reflection I think we eat a fair bit of Asian food these days and I think it might have just been Asian food that we hadn’t come across before and didn’t think it was good enough for us. But yeah, the other thing

about that trip over there was we got to mix fairly well with a lot of people that we hadn’t met before and we sort of sorted ourselves up into various groups and on the way over Arnold Green used to make us get all dressed up in our anti-flash gear. The headpiece and the gloves and things like that and he’d have us running around the one six inch gun on the afterdeck of the Felix Roussel

because it was what was known as a defensively equipped merchant ship, practising gun drill and one thing and another and he was laying it on the line about the use of this anti-flash gear and it didn’t mean a lot to us but it certainly meant a lot to him because he’d had a lot of time in the Mediterranean being subjected to aircraft bombings and things like that. Anyhow, the ship eventually arrived at Durban.

Well eventually we arrived at Durban and we were put on a ship called the Chantilly, which was sort of a depot ship for the time because we were still on draft to pick up our allocated ships. And I don’t remember how long we were there but one of the things

that happened there, I was lucky enough to be part of a group that went ashore for a couple of days into Durban itself. They were having a big parade, a festivity or something and we had to decorate all the lampposts with flags and banners and stuff like that. It was just great, we had a walk around and got into a bit of trouble with the police, not hard to do but you

got to learn that different countries have different rules. But they in the main street of Durban they had not a taxi rank but a rickshaw rank and these fellows that man these rickshaws were great, big strong black men. Zulus I suppose, with these beautiful big hair, plumed head-dresses and that on. And

we would stand on the other side of the road and get a handful of pennies and throw the pennies up the gutter and they’d all duck off and scrabble for these pennies and block all the traffic and things like that. The police didn’t really like it at all. Well there was two reasons, apart from that fact that these fellows were a hazard ducking into the traffic and it was holding up the traffic, but we didn’t understand the situation in relation to whites and blacks over there at the time and a few pennies for

the blacks was worth a lot of money to them. So yeah, somewhere or other I’ve got a photograph of one or two of the blokes, but they were the sort of things. But that was very early in the peace, but eventually and I can’t remember how long we were there in Durban at that stage, but we were put on a ship called the Rangatata and we sailed up to Mombassa and that was an interesting trip.

That’s the first time I’d ever seen a ship log in actual action with a big long skinny rope out the back and this thing twirling around right out at the stern. I learnt a bit about that and the beer…

A ship’s log? This is the way, that’s the thing that they measure the distance that a ship travels. It’s like a, you’ve heard of an air anemometer which you

the speed of air, well this sort of depending on how many rotations or something, it worked out how many kilometre – how many nautical miles they done. Apparently. And that’s different from the ship’s log where they write everything down. Okay, so they decided that they’d give everybody a bit of a surprise and they had a beer issue, and they had these big metal containers full of beer.

And it was Alsop’s English beer. Dirty, smelly, brown liquid, no taste, had all this flotsam all through it. I couldn’t drink it, terrible stuff. Some of the fellas said “We’re getting it for nothing, we’ll drink it anyhow.” I can’t remember what the food was like but one of the things that I noticed there on that ship was an English soldier and a British WRAF [Women’s Royal Air Force] were

in [flagrante] delicto [caught red handed] on one of the bins on the side of the ship. I thought oh, that’s an interesting life isn’t it? So anyhow we eventually got to Mombassa and the ship had sailed back for some reason or another. We were late or it left early. It with the other ships and the British fleet had taken off to go down and recapture Madagascar and oust the fishy French that were on there. And of course

we were put in a camp on the south east corner of Mombassa Harbour in what was it called, Rycony camp. And we were in these bandas they called these things, I think from memory they had a thatched roof and timber walls and one thing and another and the fellow that was in charge of us down there was an elderly British chief petty officer

by the name of Carpenter. He was a lovely old fellow but he didn’t, we respected him. And I imagine that he would have been a retired fellow that had been recalled because of the war and who sort of does this depot duty sort of thing which allowed the fit young fellows to get away. But we didn’t give him any trouble, the only time that he came and spoke to us was we were a bit rowdy

in the back room. He sort of occupied a room at the front of the banda that I was in and we were in the back. But it was a great time there. We were on the beach front, no surf of course because I was inside the harbour and we used to swim every day, most often in the nudie and our great pleasure of the day was to get dressed up and sit out the front because there was twin girls, I don’t remember how old

they are now but they used to come home with their father after work or whatever they did and I used to listen to some of the conversation of these other blokes, older blokes and I thought I’ve got a lot to learn yet. But yeah, that was a good time now, I enjoyed that. It was lovely, it was just like being at Southport, out here and into the water and swim. Great. The one little incident that happened there was

stuck in my memory was one of the fellows got tied up somewhere. It was somebody that was doing a séance. He could do séances see and they went out, a group of them in this night and a candle in the middle of the table and knocking on the floor and all of that sort of nonsense. Nothing eventuated. So the next night he said, he set up, it was going to be held out in the bush, I don’t know how far away the bush was. Anyhow they all get up there and they’re all sitting around in a group and they’ve got this table and this

and next minute this apparition comes out of the bush, a big white business over it going “Oooohhhhh”. Apparently they all levitated and came back into the banda and nobody ever went out again that night. Yes Spanky, character, that was good. Well eventually they decided that the Norma wouldn’t come back into Mombassa to pick, or the other ships, there was crews for the Napier and the Noiseham and that as well.

They put us on HMS Capetown which was a light, British light cruiser and we headed off down south again, down the Mozambique Channel to Durban. Well it wasn’t terribly rough and it was sort of uncomfortable a bit and I spent a bit of time in the waist with my head stuck over the sides didn’t I. The cold breeze hitting my face a bit. But

the food on that ship, I don’t know how they continue to be sustained those British people. The evening meal, there was, we were allocated ex-number to a mess and we were put up the, the mess deck tables on that ship, they ran it forward ships and we were put up right up the ship’s side end and they slid up a couple of tins of

herrings in tomato sauce and a bottle of pickles and some cheese. And one of the blokes says “Can we have some bread please?” And they said “No bread.” And then he said “Is that all?” And he said “What do you mean is that all?” he said “That’s got to do the lot of us.” You know, I thought bit rough, I was hungry and I thought to myself, gee if this is all I’ve got to eat I feel a bit embarrassed about eating it. I didn’t know whether they’d allocated more food for us as well or whether we were taking it out of the mouths of these poor bloomin’ sailors.

I thought that was pretty poor sort of sustenance. Anyhow, we eventually arrived in Durban and I don’t know whether Capetown pulled in but I know we were put on a truck and we were driven away to a wharf and the Norman was along side the wharf and we were about from here to the corner of the road over there, about a hundred metres away, all unloaded, all our gear hammocks and duffle bags

and everything like that, and then an officer came by and he said “Are you people for the Norman?” And we said “Yes.” And he pointed at me and he said “Okay, you take all of this gear on board.” And I thought oh, why have I got to do all of that? So all the others they just got up and they walked off and left me hump all this bloomin’ gear on, I was doing it for about half an hour. But when I got on board, when I went in there, I walked through a doorway thing

into the enclosed area and I put my cap up on a cable support, a web mesh business. Of course it was a bloomin’ nuisance handling this stuff, and later on when it was all done I went to get my cap and I thought oh, blow, who’s knocked that off. So I eventually saw the head that was wearing that cap but it didn’t have my name in it so I couldn’t do a thing about it. So I got another cap which I eventually punched into size

and the next day, we were told then to just go forward and get our heads down anywhere because we’d be off to sea shortly and we were off to sea at one o’clock the next morning. And the next day the first lieutenant called us down one by one and he allocated us our watches and our cruising stations and our action stations. Where we had to be. Well I didn’t know a bee from a bull’s foot about the ship but quickly learned and I was in

blue watch. I was first part of starboard which was if you go into four watches and that was also my duty watch if I was, if we were in harbour and weren’t at action station or cruising station. And my place of duty would be the bridge lookout on the port side of the bridge. And my action station would be in the same

place. So I eventually get up there and I get out, up these ladders and onto the bridge and across the bridge and through a little gateway business and step down and into this sponson with a, got a seat on it with an upright swivel seat with a pair of binoculars set that would go up and down so that you could sort of traverse that way and you could swing away, because the seat moved that way. And you had to

sector the sea, we were told how to do the sea first and then you come up and you do that much and then you do this much and up as far as it go. And you had so far that way and so far forward. All right, okay. So I’m up there and I’m doing my duty and then one night I went up there and it was as rough as guts and it was raining like you wouldn’t believe and I didn’t have a coat and the officer of the watch said “Port lookout.”

“Yes sir?” “You’d better come inside the bridge. It’s dangerous you see.” So in I went and the way they have it there is you’ve got the superstructure and then above that there’s about that much of glass right across the front of it. And in that there’s a little window, centrifugally which spins and anything that hit it is immediately thrown off, the water, and you look through that. There I am standing there

wet as a shag, cold as an iceberg and the officer of the watch said to me “Don’t you have a coat?” I said “No Sir.” “Why don’t you have a coat?” I said “Well it was stolen on the Rangatata.” “Why?” And I said “Well I had to take gear down and I put my Burberry on the Purser’s desk and when I come back to get it it was gone.” A thousand people on board, who’d know who had it. Beautiful, those Burberrys, they were wonderful things.

Anyhow not that it would have been any, they were a dress coat and they were really no good for wet weather on board a ship. And in the mess deck there was only two oil skins there, I don’t know who actually owned them but whoever was going on watch out of that particular mess could wear them if they were in an exposed position. So that’s how we sort of got on that way. Eventually I

bought an army coat at Cape town. Big heavy thing but it kept me warm. Didn’t fit me, it was too narrow across the shoulders and it was as big as an elephant around the hips but it was all I could buy, so that’s what happened about that. So I was lookout and on one occasion we were out of Mombassa doing Fleet exercises and

in the night time, and a ship, I don’t know which one fired a star shell. Lit up the whole sky, you could see ships everywhere. And I made no comment about this. Next minute the officer of the watch is leaning over the side of the bridge giving me a real blast. “Port lookout!” “Yes Sir.” “Did you see that star shell?” “Yes Sir.” “Why didn’t you report it?” “I don’t know Sir.”

I wasn’t game enough to say well blind Harry could see the damned thing. So little things like that occurred. A few nights after I was on board, well pretty soon after I was on board, I was allocated to Eight Mess first up, was my mess, and a fellow by the name of Sherman was the Kellick of the mess and he took me in hand.

Some people would probably say he was a sea daddy and a sea daddy is not what a lot of people think they are. He’s the sort of bloke who takes a newcomer in and teaches him the systems and how to be safe and do all of those other things. He allocated me a space and I’m in my hammock and I hear that ‘voomph’. Up like a jackrabbit. And one of the old hands said, “That’s all right son, it’s only the ping merchant’s probably got a

ping on a whale or something. Don’t worry about it, it’s only one can.” That was my first experience of a depth charge going off. But you get to know these things. But we, after a while I graduated out of that business. For some reason or another they just decided that myself and some others, we would

be sent up to Pietermaritzburg, where they had a training facility up there for various other things, a part of it was gunnery. And another mate that I was very friendly with and we went up there and we did what was known as a QR3, Quarters Rating 3rd Class gunnery course. And Pietermaritzburg, it was a tented camp and

it was, you know how dusty the desert can get, that’s what it was like up there and it was infested with fleas. Oh god it was full of fleas. No matter where you went you had fleas all over you, people picking fleas off and scratching and getting lumps from these bloomin’ fleas. Anyhow we went to these classes and when it was examination time and I’m standing alongside of all of these monitors of something and a lieutenant comes up and stands alongside

of me and a bloke on the other side of me is an Englishman and he said to me, he said “What’s that?” And I looked at it and I thought what’s that? And the Englishman said “It’s a, it’s a director repeater.” And the officer turned around and he got stuck right into him and I thought well now it’s time for me to get out the way. Anyhow when I got back on board they decided to make me a

part of the gun’s crew. And the first lieutenant said “I’d like you to be the communication, the gun’s communication man portside.” I said “gee,” I said “Any chance I can’t do that because I’m frightened that I mightn’t hear the orders that come through.” “Oh all right” he said, “You be breach worker.” So he then made me breach worker of the left hand side gun of B gun for cruising stations

and the left hand side of X gun for action stations. And that was a good position because it needed physical exercise. The bridge lever was sprung, heavily sprung and it’d come out like that and you had to grab hold of it and really push it to close it. And when you wanted to open it again after the gun had fired, you’d have to release it, it had like a sort of a bike pedal grip on it, you’d grip it and then you had to come

otherwise if you let it go it’d come back and smack you in the mouth. So that was my position then all the time I was on the Norman. It was, and you were a bit out of the weather, if you could say that you were a bit out of the weather. But whilst that was my position, when you were on watch at night, not at action stations, when you were on watch at night you used to take turns at being the communications man to give the bloke a bit of a chance. The only two that never took over the communication

head set was the gun loader on one side and the gun trainer on the other because they had to get up and get into a chair and if he was needed in a hurry you couldn’t expect them to be scrambling around, they had to be there straight away because they had the repeater businesses from the director tower there and so they could start to train to load the gun if any balloon went up. Anyhow so I’m on my headset this night and I was getting as bored as you wouldn’t believe

so I said, “B gun TES [Tactical Exploitation System].” “Yes B gun?” “Could you please give me a reading on the chronometer?” I didn’t know what time it was I thought chronometer. “Hang on.” A few minutes later there was a bloke coming up the ladder, he says “What’s a chronometer?” I says “It’s a ruddy clock.” I got into trouble over that. And then another night it was windy and wet and rough

and I’m sitting there all huddled up and obviously they’d been trying to call up B gun and next minute I can see this vision coming. Head up over the ladder and coming across the deck see and I’m sitting there like this trying to keep dry and the bloke’s standing there. I said “What do you want?” He said “Are you asleep?” I said “I wouldn’t be talking to you if I’m asleep.” He said “We’ve been trying to call you.” And I said “I haven’t heard you.” I turned around and the plug in the connector plug from the headset to the

outlet wasn’t in properly so I thought I was, they thought I was sleeping on duty. Those things happen. Another occasion I was a bridge hand and during a night watch and the Officer of the Watch said “Carr you can go down and get the kai.” You know what kai is? It’s like chocolate broken up. It’s all sugary and sweet,

you make with hot water, it’s great it’s like having a meal. It’s like drinking mud but it’s still like having a meal. And I had to go down the bridge a couple of ladders then down another ladder and I had a sort of square hatchway and I’m going down there and the ship gave a bit of a jerk and I banged my head on the side of the bloomin’ thing and I walked into the mess to get the dixie to make the kai and I made the mistake of sitting down and putting me hand on the side of my head like that. Fell asleep.

Next thing I know I’m getting shaken by the Duty PO, “You asleep Carr?” “No.” “You’re wanted on the bridge.” So I get on the bridge and the officer of the watch said “Where have you been?” I said “I’m waiting for the kai.” He said “Well that was 15 minutes ago.” But I didn’t get charged. I thought gee I was lucky to get out of that one. Anyhow that’s the way the cookie crumbled. One of the things that on board there was

nowhere really to exercise. When you’re at sea like you’ve got this floating cigar, it’s shrouded and ten feet long and 37feet six wide and every bit of space that’s available is for fighting the ship or looking after the ship or something, boats and bits and pieces everywhere and there’s one bit of a space probably not much bigger than this room, perhaps a bit wider about three parts aft and

where the crew used to fall in for Sunday divisions and other whatever was required, but there was really nowhere to exercise, so I guess in rough weather you didn’t need anywhere to exercise because you were getting enough exercise just tying to stand upright. But it was all games within the mess. There were people, they were all illegal of course, there was unders

and overs, there was crown and anchor, there was pontoon, there was another 91, there was crib they used to bet on all of those things. And of course I was always the world’s worst gambler, terrible, always lost my money. But one advantage I had because having been an apprentice barber before I went in, I got the permission to become a ship’s barber. And I used to cut hear for a shilling a pop which was a lot of money.

But I was a fool and instead of allocating my pay home to be put in the bank or for Mum and Dad to use it for whatever they wanted, I used to take it ashore and drink it. Mad but there were a lot of cuts of hair that I did that I never got paid for too because one of the things that we were in, if we were in Mombassa or Aden or Trincomalee, the exercise you could get

they would pipe swimming over the side, either port side or starboard side depending on what boats were out or something like that. And when you swam over the side there was always a bloke up on the port or starboard lookout Swanson with a .303 air rifle, shooting the sharks. Watching, watching, psychological. Often they would just get out of the water and say “Okay, want a haircut.” So you’d cut the wet hair and put the gear away and I’d think oh, “I’ll pay ya.” “Yeah right-oh,”

and you’d just forget who it was. That was life. But there were a lot of people that had a lot of games. A lot of little businesses on there. There was those that ran the gaming games, that was theirs, theirs wasn’t approved but then there was a fella who did the sewing, and he was the fellow that had a little sewing machine and did the sewing. There was the barber and then there was the fellow that had, he had the rights for photography.

There was two of those in my time, one was Bob Flanders, he was the first one and the second bloke was by the name of Doug Love.

Well they’d take photographs of the fellows on board and they could get photographs of ships and things like that and of course they could be handed around to the ships company, you could pay for those but you weren’t allowed to sell them ashore or anything like that. And there was the fellow who had the rights for

dhobi-ing [washing], Tommy Moore had that right. I said “How do you make it out?” He said “I reckon every time it went clunk clunk it was a halfpenny” or something, he used to say. Yeah so and then there was the hobbler, no cobbler. Bloke who did the cobbling. Yeah there was a lot of little businesses like that. They were, the other things that they used to do apart from these games and things was the

recognised navy gambling of tombola [game like bingo] in harbour mostly. It was tombola. Occasionally if we were sort of up in the Indian Ocean where the seas were smooth and you had a following breeze you could have tombola because you were scribbling on bits of paper and you had to hang on to them. It was like what do you call it today? Bingo. One of the petty officers, that was his lurk.

They always won, they always took ten percent out of whatever it was. Yes, so the other thing was writing letters. Used to write a lot of letters to a lot of people. There was one fellow on board I’ll tell you about him later on, he used to, he married an English girl and he used to write a letter every day on this finest paper. Not much thicker than toilet paper but he used to get it on and

write these letters every day. He was one participant in only the two fights I saw on board that ship in three years. The first one was, we’d gone out of Durban eastwards to pick up the Amsterdam and on the way back we were getting a real battering. It had smashed the whaler and the jolly boat which was only a little runabout for the captain to go out in.

It had got unshipped off its block in the waist, the sea’s coming in and the first lieutenant and the leading hand are out there trying to wrest this damned thing back and lock it down again, lash it down again and there was a group of us just inside the archway door like that and reasonable dry area, no use any more go out because there’s no room to work. And one of the blokes said “Wish the pommy bastard would get washed over board.”

My mate took umbrage about this and they had a few wild swings but with the ship going every which way I don’t think either of them connected but anyhow that was broken up. That was the first one and the second one was with this fellow that used to write these letters to the English woman, to his wife. We’d been into Seychelles which is in the middle of the Indian Ocean, up in the middle part of the Indian Ocean. And they had shore leave

and this bloke came back, he was Kellick of my mess, leading hand of my mess at the time and he came back and he stood at the head of the table he said “five mess,” he said “Are you going to be behind me?” “Why what’s wrong with you?” “Well Ratray reckons he’s going to come back and knock my bloody head off.” “What for?” “Well he reckoned I stole his girl.” Everybody looked at him askance, say what? Anyhow, next liberty boat that comes back, Ratray’s about a bloke this big,

storms up the starboard passage way, in through seven mess, over the calming head of five mess and comes up and goes whack. That was the end. That was only the second fight I’ve seen, so finished that argument. Seychelles was a very pretty place. We never got around to Victoria to go ashore, I think the ship went there once but we sort of went on the other side of this island. Beautiful harbour and

the little sort of hamlet I think, I never really got into the town part of it. But they had these sort of kiosk businesses around on the edge of the island and they used to make beautiful crocus shell ornaments and I actually bought one, it was a cigarette case made out of crocus shells. I don’t know what ever happened to it, it was a beautiful thing. And of course the fellows used to, and they could get a bit of booze there which was, some of them loved that.

I don’t know what sort of booze it was, I never drank any. But it used to be good and usually whenever we went out there the skipper would drop a depth charge over and the boat would go away and pick up any fish and I’ve actually got, I thought I had a photograph of the gunner’s mate, Petty Office Joe Pine, lovely Englishman standing there on the upper deck with this,

holding a fish up. He’s holding it like that and the nose is just touching the deck. Later on in life I went to Adelaide for our NFAS reunion and the fellow came up to me and he said “Were you on the Norman?” And I said “Yeah.” He said “my Dad was on the Norman.” I said “Yeah, what’s his name?” He said “Joe Pine.” So it was his son. Just recently I notice that Senator Pine from South Australia was having a few words to say in Parliament to the press or something

so I wrote to him and said, told him the story but I haven’t heard. I don’t know whether it went into the waste paper basket or whatever happened to it, whether he ever got it but anyhow. It brought back a fond memory. The people in Durban were really marvellous people, they opened up their homes to the people. And they were very considerate of us. I think Australians by and large have a pretty good

reputation. Well we used to get drunk and stuff like that but we weren’t ones for fighting. I can remember once I went ashore with a fellow by the name of Smith out of my mess deck and we were walking somewhere or other and walked out of these ships and we got jumped by five South African civilians. And some elderly fellow came in and sort of said “Cut it out you blokes, these fellows are Australians.”

They sort of gave up on that. Durban was years ahead of Australia. They had a complex there, it had two theatres down the back and you would walk in through the front and there was a bit aisle down the middle. On the right hand side seated probably about 100 people and it had a big island kitchen, people used to eat there and on the left hand side

they had a big bar where all the drunks used to go. And of course that’s where they went. So that, it was a great place, it was at Gunning Point. And of course there was as many females on the drunk side as there were men. That’s how it was. And one incident, I’ll tell you the incident because it’s quite good. I was there with a fellow and the lady in charge of the reception for the money for your orders for your meal

took a liking to me and she was somewhat older than I was. And she came around after and got to talking. She says “Would you like to come up home later for a drink?” And the other bloke and I said “Yeah we’ll go thank you.” Anyhow we get up there and then when we get up there she’s got a friend with her. And we’re talking away and talking away and so this is just before Christmas I think. Christmas ’43,’44. And

anyhow she said to me “What do you know about fornication?” And I’m thinking what’s the Latin for fornication, I didn’t learn much Latin see. And I say “I don’t know.” I’m making all these stupid comments and she says “look it up in the dictionary.” I said “No, I’ll work it out, I’ll work it out.” Anyway she eventually gave up and I said to this mate of mine “Come on we’d better be getting back to the ship.” So on the way out and I said to this other lass that was there I said “You going home to your family for Christmas?”

She said “No, no I’m going to stay over here.” I said “Why don’t you go home for Christmas, spend your Christmas with your Mum and Dad. That’d be nice.” She said “No, no I’ll be right here.” Anyhow away we went, we go away and this bloke says to me “Look I’ll meet you back on board.” I said “Okay.” So anyhow I saw him the next day, I said “Where have you been?” He said “I went back there, I spent the night with those two birds.” So there you go. Stupid me. But no

there was another occasion we were at sea and one of my mates, there were pretty well four of us there was Doug Trout, Ronny MacKintyre, Ronny Burton and myself. We were usually the going ashore blokes depending on what watch we were in. And Ronny’s duty was up in the director tower which was high up which the gunnery officers business for scanning enemy. I don’t know whether he was going up or he was coming out of the tower but the sea was rough

and he got tossed out of there down into the starboard lookout swanson and he smashed his leg all up and he got to Durban and they put him into hospital. Anyhow we went back about six or eight weeks later and he got discharged and we met him at the hospital and took him in hand and we went for a few drinks. And I was Up Palmers, we used to go Up Palmers, this one place because Ronny was coming out, I said “Look, you blokes,” they were Sydney fellows,

“You blokes take Ronny and I’ll go to this other Up Palmers.” So I went there with a fellow that was pretty religious. He used to go down on his hands and knees every night in the mess deck and say his prayers and he had Up Palmers at this place. So I went there and they were strong Methodist people, very nice. Anyhow, went out with the boys and picked Ronny up and we had a few drinks and they said “Well we’d better get going” and they all climbed into a

taxi and they took me to this place and one or two of them took me up against the front door and leaned me on the door and pressed the bell. When the door opened I went flat on my face on the floor. Not a good impression. So this other sailor bloke, he came up and got me up and shuffled me off to bed. So I came down the next morning and I apologised to the people, I said “I think I’d better go.” And they didn’t say no you stay, so I went.

A right fool. Yeah terrible. But often, when we went ashore, it was a pretty favourite spot with the Australian sailors. There was a two-storey boarding house there, very nice and clean and it was called Annandale House I think. And you could stay there for either two shillings or two and six a night. And if we had overnight leave we most often ended up there.

And they had these black servants and quite frankly they used to be very generous and clean up an awful lot of mess that our fellows made and they were happy to get two bob to clean up the mess. Another time I went ashore and somehow or other I got picked up by these two young ladies and they said “Come home and have dinner with us.” So I said “Okay.”

So I went home and when I get home there’s two mid-shipmen there and these girls were in the South African navy, I don’t know what they called them but they were in the South African navy. They were wireless operators and of course I felt so out of place. I guess somewhere back along in my breeding, the way I grew up during the Depression that I felt it wasn’t a place for me to be.

They were socially better than me and two budding officers and these two girls and a lovely home and things like that. On another occasion I was invited out to a house and I was most welcomed into the place and the father was very generous, he gave me a couple of drinks and we retired into the lounge and he started to talk about sciences and one thing and another and the speed of light and everything like that and I’m thinking I don’t know what, I’ve heard about it but I don’t know what it was.

But I felt out of place there too so I never went back, but they were a nice family. People were always generous there, that was a real good place. There was a lady there by the name of Doris Mendoza. She was a florist and had a florist business in an arcade somewhere. A lot of Australian sailors used to drop in there for a chat and she was always very good Doris. She’d say “Boys, come on we’ll go home and have a meal.” And she’d give us a meal and we’d

say “Thanks Doris.” We used to call her Gran, “Thanks Gran.” Away we’d go off to ship. On another occasion I went to a lady, an elderly lady that lived in a hotel somewhere and she took me and another couple of fellows in for a meal, we’re sitting at the dining room table and main course and I, we’re talking away and I put my knife and fort together on the plate and next minute plate’s gone. I said “Hey, I haven’t

finished that.” And it’s an Indian waiter, he said “Oh sorry sir, you indicated that you’d finished with that meal.” I said “No I didn’t.” He said “Sir, you had your knife and fork together,” he said “That means you’re finished.” He says “If you’re not finished you put your knife and fork on the side.” I thought well bugger me. So there you go. Now that lady told me, she said “Have you bet on horses?” I said “No not really.” She said “Well I’ll give you the name of this horse,

it’s going to run in the Epson this year. Now you back it.” Anyhow, I went away, I went off to sea and did what we had to do and I came back and met her again, she said “Come and have dinner.” She said “Did you back that horse?” I said “No.” “Oh,” she said “It won and it paid favourably.” So there you go.

The Normans spent a tremendous amount of time at sea and that period just after I joined the Normans there was a pack of U-boats south of South Africa and it might surprise you to know I think from memory sixty-eight ships sunk in the northern ocean

in ’43 and there was another thirty odd sunk in 1944. And Norman did a tremendous amount of sea time and we used to go from about opposite the mouth of the Congo river down around the West coast of Africa, down around past Cape Town and the east coast and come up to Durban and possible up through

to Mombassa and we’d escort those convoys and we’d try to protect them from submarines and drop depth charges. We were never credited with a kill or anything like that and sometimes you wouldn't know whether they were submarines you were going because it might have been a whale or a close knit school of fish or sometimes like that but that was our job. There were a number

of ships sunk in our company and we did on more than one occasion rescue sailors out of the sea and they were not very friendly waters to sail in. You’ve seen what happened in the Sydney to Hobart race and it wasn’t uncommon to have seas like that around that area there because we were some many miles south of Cape of Good Hope which probably puts

you round about the equivalent of Bass Strait. I was never frightened of getting sunk except went going up the west coast of Africa. I would not have wanted to get sunk there because the sharks used to just bask on the ocean surface and I was, part of my duties was to be in the armed boarding party and we would go up the west coast of Africa

and on occasions we’d be up on the foc’s’le in reasonable weather practising to shoot with revolvers and we’d sort of aim at these sharks and the distance and they also had these light machine guns called Lancaster’s machine guns and they were a funny sort if thing. They had a, the magazine sort of stuck out the side like an elongated piece of chocolate and I forget how many rounds now but you’d, I don't know whether I was

not any good or whether it was the fact that I couldn't do shooting and worry about the roll of the sea and things like that but anyhow that’s what used to happen up there.

Well, there's nothing spectacular about a rescue. You’d get an indication that a ship had

been sunk somewhere and you’d steam at speed to get to the position and here would be these very wet and uncomfortable survivors on a sort of an egg crate situation made out of slats of wood and things like that and the ship would pull up alongside and usually a Jacob’s ladder would go over – a Jacob’s ladder is one of those that’s got sides on it and rungs but no hand rail. And they would

go down and get onto these things and help the survivors up onboard and they would be taken forward and dried out and the doctor would possibly check them over to make sure they didn't have any injuries which need medical assistance so we didn't pick up, our ship didn't pick up all that many I don’t think. Probably about three times we did it.

But other ships I know – the Myzan – it was handy when one of the British – I think it was the Orchides or something like that sunk and she was very busy picking up survivors. It was a little bit different when we got to Burma because there were doing bombardments and taking, seeing that the army fellows were getting ashore and that the wounded would be coming back in the barges to the ship and something like that

but you know you’d see people with their legs missing and things shot off and that was a bit distressing. But no, it was part of seamanship – you’d do the best you could as quickly as you could. That’s how it went. The only time I think I was very uncomfortable at sea was we were coming around the Cape and we were on the port side of the convoy

and the next ship to us was an ammunition ship loaded with all explosives and things like that and sure it had over the side - it was streamed out on big spars – was an anti-torpedo net it was on it as it went along and I was glad – I think it left us somewhere about Port Elizabeth – and I was happy to see that go because I reckon if that had got blown up we probably would have got roller over too. It was

hard work. You’d be into harbour – very often you’d only have time to oil and perhaps revision and you’d be out of harbour again and doing all this thing and it was cold and it was wet. But there were good times as well. At one stage, I can't remember when it was now, but pretty early I think. Probably about the latter part of 1943 the ship had to go into

dock in Symond’s Town. Now the thing about down there was you didn't go into Cape Town with your ship you went into Symond’s Town and you caught a train up to Cape Town. We went into dock there for I don't know a boiler clean or some minor refit and the ship was split into two watches and I think each watch got abut four days leave and I went ashore with a group of fellows and we went up to a place called Weinberg.

Stayed in a little hotel up there, did the vineyards, came home one day and I won’t mention this no because I might be wrong but this other sailor and I we had a binge session in the hotel and he drank after being in the vineyard all day he drank fifteen gins and I thought he was going to die on me. I took him up and put him in the bath and ran the tap on him but he really scared me. The thing about that time

was I was suffering badly from boils. I suppose a little bit of it was a lack of nutrition out of what I was eating the other thing it might have been the salt water, continually in salt water but when I went on that leave I had a big carbuncle on my arm here. Wretched thing and I was sitting in a lounge chair, within the first night or two I was up there and an old three badge old AB called Yorkie

Yorkie Roundtree, he came over and he just leaned on my arms like that and he said ‘What's up son? You don’t look well’ and when he put his hand here he put it over that carbuncle and it ruptured the carbuncle and the relief was immediate. I’ve still got the scar but after that I started to feel much better you know because obviously it was getting into my system but..

Oh yes there was a doctor on board and a sick berth attendant. Now during my periods of service we had two doctors; one was Dr. Reader and the other one I think was Dr Oxenford. The sick berth attendant was - starts with an S – Standard I think. He later became a pharmacist in Melbourne.

Yeah but you sort of didn't go to the doctor too much. You got bumps and bruises and things like that but you sort of didn't go anywhere near him much at all except that I got a broken hand which meant that I couldn't go on the gun so I was put on a look out – of course I didn't have to use my broken hand to be the lookout and somebody else did that action and you know there was only a limited amount of men to do the work on the ship. You didn't

sort of carry any spares so with bumps and bruises and things like that people continued to go. We had one fellow on board by the name of Georgie Weiss – wonderful bloke – from Western Australia. George was seasick the whole time. He had one of these big fruit tins – about yay big – with a wire handle on it and as soon as we threw of the lines to go to sea he’d put that over his wrist and he’d just be sick like that until he got home again.

I have an idea that they may have eventually boarded him out. I’m not too sure about that but he was a real Briton, you know, he just kept on going and going. Apart from all the convoy work we did we also when we would get up around Mombassa and that where the fleet was based, we’d do a lot of exercising and patrolling with the fleet. That meant a lot of manoeuvring like that.

Whilst I was principally an upper deck sailor which was all the putting lines out and taking lines in and all those sorts of things and gunnery, one of the things I used to like to do – I reckon it was a real buzz – to go up to the wheel house and get permission to take the wheel. And there's nothing like a drive in a seventeen hundred ton ship trying to keep a straight line and I’d do that sometimes in my spare time.

Blokes sort of did those little things to just sort of change the routine a bit. The one thing that was always a worry was lack of sleep. If you went three watches it wasn’t too bad but if you went on watch at eight o’clock at night and came off at night you’d be up at dawn – action stations – it could be half past four you’d get back to bed

you’d call the hands at six o’clock in the morning, you’d work part of ships then you’d go on watch again and the next night you’d be on midnight – from what they call the middle watch from twelve o’clock to four o’clock in the morning but you probably wouldn't get to sleep until about nine o’clock. You’d do your middle watch, you might get off at four o’clock get to bed, and get to sleep and you’re called out for dawn action stations again and that was always a problem. I used to find living in the mess deck pretty

stuffy in the tropics because at night time port holes and everything were shut and the lead lights were clapped down and if it was a moderate sea and a calm sea I’d located two underdeck bolts on the port side of the upper deck. You imagine the ship upper deck came down like that and then it turned in like this and on the port side was the

big area intake for the turbines where the engines got their air for down in the boiler rooms and that and I used to sling my hammock there. I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m pretty deaf now was because there was a terrible roar that went through there. We were told not to do it you know you didn't realise that while you were asleep your ears were still getting a battering – that’s how it went. We

would escort convoys even up to Ayden. We went with convoys into the Red Sea and out of the Red Sea and we would take them over to Bombay or Colombo and then come back again and we might be with the fleet going over there and back again. Ayden wasn’t such a wonderful place to be in – it had of course there was no alcohol at Ayden.

It had a nice little recreational area there that was nice greenery and a canteen and stuff like that and you could go and have a meal. I remember one time we went ashore and we hired an open unroofed taxi and they took us out to a place called the crater city where you went sort of – it was the crater of a volcano I think from memory –

and you went through a tunnel to get there and it was rally out of bounds and all these real hovels in there but they just drove in and drove out and then we went out to a place called the oasis which was very nice. It was an oasis and there was water there and it was nice and cool and just a good spot to look at and on the way back the taxi broke down so we hopped out and hailed another one and went back into Ayden and we refused to pay the taxi driver because he didn't

take us back but got back but got back to Ayden later on I got a tap on the shoulder from a policeman and heres the taxi driver there so I had to cough up the fare. We used to swim overboard in Ayden and I remember on one occasion we were there with the fleet and they decided that they’d have a fleet whaler race and it was either the (UNCLEAR) or the

Quickmatch was tied up alongside of us in harbour and both ships entered a whaler and we came first and second for the whole fleet. Beat the pants off the whole lot. I wasn’t in the crew, I just wasn’t in the crew that’s all there was about it but the ship just about turned over with everybody on the one side, barracking for these people. That was a bit of an interlude from the hard work of being at sea.

The other occasion when we sort of had a win again over the British fleet was in Trincomalee. They decided that they’d have a swimming race. And on the HMS Quilliam were these five mates of mine who had been lifesavers and they entered in it and they one it and a couple of the blokes off the Norman didn't do so badly either. While we were in Trincomalee

I got permission to take the whaler away one day and sort of have a picnic behind one of the islands and we rode up there behind the island and we had out lunch, swam all day and on the way back we passed one of the cruisers there and the bloke up on the foc’s’le with the mega phone said ‘Are you with the Norman boat?’ ‘Yep’ ‘Can’t you read the signal?’ ‘Nope’ ‘That’s a recall signal’ ‘Oh yeah’

So anyhow we went back to the ship and they’d been waiting for us to come back because they’d been ordered to go to sea. I wasn’t the favourite leading seaman at the time but I still feel that if we’d just been ashore absent without leave they’d have sailed without us but they weren’t prepared to go out without the boat. That’s an experience. But we went into Bombay – that was another one of the places we used to

escort ships into and that’s where I bought that memorabilia there – that’s all that I’ve got left of that. It's a very interesting place Bombay, you can smell it way out to sea, it just had this smell about it and I don't know that it was a noxious smell but it was an odour and we used to anchor out in the harbour and you’d go in by Liberty boat.

And onto this great big wharf and through the gate of India which was like the Arch De Triumph only it was Indian and the Taj Mahal hotel, a massive big place there, we weren’t allowed into it, it was only for officers and we were told that it was actually built the wrong way round – instead of facing the harbour it was built facing the main streets and I don't know, that’s

just what we heard. My first experience there was went ashore and I sat down on a garden edge - like a brick edge around an elevated garden - and I just sat down there and I’d hardly sat down and there was a fellow there with a long piece of stick with a bit of dirty cotton wool on it tyring to pick my ears out. He wanted to be paid for it so I quickly gave him the shunt - I didn't want to have anything to do with that. Like the fool that I was, knowing no

different at the time, I got myself a couple of tattoos – one on the left arm and one on the right arm. Wasn’t till many years later that I could have put my health in jeopardy by having it done there - the disease transference by needles and stuff – so I was fortunate to get out of that. Principal mode of transport at that time were these unroofed Gowrie’s

- that was like a great big sort of thing with a horse and was driven around and we used to get these and drive around the town. And our entertainment there was to go to the Eros Theatre – Picture Theatre. And it was a bit of a hoi polloi [common] sort of stuff, the civilians used to go there with their suits and go to the show and they’d come out into the foyer

and they’d have coffee and nibbles and that at half time but we sailors never sort of entered into that - we’d go and watch the pictures and have a soft drink and that would be the way it was. But I don’t ever remember what food we ate there – I can't remember – but I know at one stage we were in, the ship had to go into dry dock at Colombo. We were having a lot of trouble with one of the propeller shafts - eye brackets. And

not far away they had sort of a country club situation where there were tennis courts and a swimming pool. I used to go there every day to swim to try and get myself into better nick and one of the things that they used to have which I thought was a delicacy was deep fried bananas and I uses to have these and it was probably a mistake because I ended up having dysentery out of that. So that was a real problem – I was in dock and I used

to have to get off the ship and go onto the dock side and race up to the toilet at the other end of the dock and the doctor had a great treatment for that – he said ‘Drink lots of water and drink this half a cup of castor oil’. That was a treatment – not good – but anyhow I survived. But Colombo. It had a beautiful beach Colombo. We used to go in – I can't remember where it was now – but we used to go and

swim in Colombo on the beach. The shopping at Bombay was different to Colombo. In India the cows and that they are sacred and you could go into a shop and they’d be a cow mooching around inside and they wouldn't try to get it out but it was a great place for bargaining India, you could bargain things away like you wouldn't believe

so that was it but later on after all they sort of got control over the U-boats around South Africa and getting control in the Mediterranean the British fleet moved over the be based in Trincomalee which was round the North coast of Ceylon, Sri Lanka. And we did a lot of

work out of there – still convoy work around and up to Bombay and then over to Ayden and back and we then towards the end of 1944 we went with the fleet and we met up with the [USS] Saratoga – that’s a big American ship – went back into Trincomalee with that and then also did a – I can't remember the sequence of this – I’d have to look at note -

did action against the Japanese on the Andaman Islands and the Nicobar Islands where the aircraft carriers went over and we escorted them over there and they did the bombing of these particular islands and I think that was diversionary tactics to keep the Japanese tied up as much as they could in that area because the Americans and that were sort of taking

actions in the Pacific around about that time. There were a couple of incidents when the aircraft were coming back to land on the aircraft carrier that they went straight into the sea. We did pick up the survivors out of one of those and in the course of our operations with the fleet over a long time from you know when I joined the Norman and we started to do operations on and off with the fleet,

we were frequently the attendant destroyer to the aircraft carrier. Usually they had two; one at the front and on at the back so when the acv took off if they couldn't make it into the air and they ended in the drink well the one in the front could pick them up. Now our duty at the stern would be when they were coming back and they’d hit and dropped in or they landed and skewed off to side then we’d sort of slip up alongside and

pluck the pilot and navigator and whatever was on out of the thing and bring them back onboard and if they weren’t injured of course they would be sent by Jackstay back to the aircraft carrier. Now a Jackstay is where the destroyer would fire what they call a Costen gun, it's just a, looks like an ordinary .303 without any rifling in it and there's a shaft goes

just down in that that’s got a thin cord attached to a loop on the top of it and you’ve got all this other stuff out all coiled out and you fire this rod out and it goes sailing over and it takes the light line across, it's secured on the other end to a bigger line and then you go backwards and forwards and then that’s hooked up on their ship and our ship and blocks and tackles are rigged up and then people are put in chairs or canvas bags and

pulled backwards and forwards across like that. We did a lot of work like that in the Pacific ship that’s the sort of thing where we would pluck people out of the drink. It was a bit sad when they would dive straight into the drink and sort of go underneath – that was unfortunate. I was in the highlight on one occasion – I was pretty worried about it – one of the aircrafts lost aircraft a carley float overboard and

they just said ‘blink, blink, blink’ to our ship and as I was duty watch I was on charge on duty watch I was told to get the grappling on and go forward and retrieve this carley float and I thought ‘Damned Admiral’s and everybody up there was going to be watching me’ but I was pretty lucky I had a couple of blokes there who knew a bit about it and I let out plenty of slack and I heaved this grappling on over and fortunately it went right over the middle of the carley float on the jet and pulled and secured it

so tick for me. Yes so occasionally I did the right thing – lucky. With, in 1944 we were very lucky – we had to escort the HMS Renown I think it was that’s a British battleship back to Durban and that gave up a bit of a Christmas break we had four days of peace

there in Durban at that time – that was great. In April 1944 the ship came back to Australia and it put the West Australians ashore and then we called into Adelaide and it put the South Australians ashore and then we called into Melbourne and the Victorians and station Australians were put ashore

and then we headed round to go to Sydney and on the way around somewhere opposite Cape Otway or thereabouts, instructor was at night and I’d come off watch soaking wet – it was heavy seas running and |I was standing on the lockers at the side of the mess deck between along the ships side. I’d got out of my clothes and I had one foot in a pair of dry pants and then the ship tossed and pitched and rolled and it knocked me right over the mess deck table and I landed on the back

of my neck on the other side against the table in the other side of the ship which has left me with a problem. That was a surprise that one. After we’d done the Durban trip we came back and we were involved in 1941 in the Burma campaign

and the N-Class destroyers were involved there and we had to escort the fleet in and the troop ships in. We had people that we had to get ashore and we stood off to do bombardments when they called for us to pinpoint bombardments and things like that. There were a number of air raids during that period. We weren’t involved particularly with them

like they had air raid reds and planes would come over and do whatever they did and then the air raids rights and things like that but it was for the time that we were there which was pretty extensive I think overall something like ten days, we were closed up at action stations a lot of that – actually I have a copy of the ships log bout everything that happened there but at action stations

everybody was closed up at their action stations and the minute that situation the petty officer cook and the other cooks they would prepare all the meals and then they would take them around and feed all the men at their action stations and when the activities dropped down a bit we would go into second degree of readiness which was fours on and four hours off and that would allow you to

get up and have a bath and go to the toilet and perhaps have your own – get your own meal and things like that in the mess deck and perhaps have a bit of a sleep and do your washing or whatever. I think I mentioned before a sad part of that was these injured people that were coming back towards the ship – and ours weren’t the only ship they were brought back - but I sometimes wonder whether those that were being brought back were

caused as a result of our firing. One would never know but it was a bit of a concern that you might have hurt somebody that was a friend. It was pretty exhausting. After that we came back to Trincomalee and we weren’t hardly inside Trincomalee and we got word that a

ship by the name of something or other ‘moller’ had been torpedoed north east of Trincomalee so us and two other destroyers we headed off at speed to do the rescue of those people. One ship I forget it's name off the top of my head – it rescued all the personnel off that ship – there was something like 78 or 79 people -

they got those people off and we and the other destroyer we chased that submarine for something like three days without locating it or being able to destroy it and what happened to it I don't know but anyhow – nobody got any credit for that. At one stage whilst we were in Trincomalee we got a few days leave and we were put on a train to go up to

to Jatalawa – that was a resort up in the mountains and we went up there on this train. The seating in it was like a garden seat – just batons you know – pretty uncomfortable and

the accommodation there wasn’t all that bad but the ablution facilities were a bit tough for me. They didn't have any hot water and the water up there was icy cold. The days were beautiful. We got taken out to go around a tea plantation and saw all of these Ceylonese women with all the baskets over their back and picking up all these tips off the tea plants and

then they took us back to the a factory – I don't know whether you’d call it a factory – but it was a huge building with sort of polished floors and I guess the floors become polished by just the activity that was on them because the women would spread the contents of their basket all over the floor and then hey would sit down and would move forward and pick all the little bits out that weren’t got stuff and put them aside and put all the good leaves in another container.

Well that’s just the way they did it. After that I was always pretty particular to make sure that I always made tea with boiling water. But anyhow, whilst we were there a couple of fellow – we were all a cheeky mob – they had an officers – call it a canteen or whatever – an officer’s club and of course we were up there and we didn't

have any caps on and we were in khaki shirts and shorts and long socks and a couple of them – we walked past this place and they said “Lets peel off and we’ll go in there and see if we can get a drink” and they just walked in there and they sat down and they clicked their fingers and the waiter came by and gave them a couple of drinks and people sort of looked at them an wondered who the devil they were and back they came again so they got away with it – it was good.

Where did we go from there? After we did the Burma campaign, before that I just must say that about September 1944 I was in the second mutiny and that was on the Norman. It was late in September and it was a hot day like we had here a couple of days ago

we were in Durban and we were due to sail and the naval officer in charge at Durban he’d put the rig of the day up on the signal hoist and that was to be number threes for leaving harbour which was blue suits – pretty hot. So we decide that we didn't want that so we went up in our khaki shorts and the skipper sent us down two by two to change into

the rig of the day and we just stayed down there til the ship got to sea. When the ship got to sea he cleared lower deck and he was most displeased, Commander Buchanan who was captain at the time, and after that he became very heavy handed with us. He gave us as much big stick as he could. He was later that year promoted captain and when he left the ship he said ‘Well, you haven’t been the

best crew for me but I’m now going to be captain D and I’m now going to have more authority and I’ll now have a bigger stick’ and whenever there was any duty to be done at sea and we were in harbour we copped the duty so that’s what happened. But he was really a nice bloke and I suppose we were stupid to have done what we did do.

When he went the ship was taken over by a Lieutenant Commander Plunkett Cole – he was a lovely bloke. We were in Trincomalee and he came in I think he had been on the Nepal and we were at anchor and he came around sort of doing a right hand u-turn to come up port side to starboard side and I don't know what happened but it

didn't come around neatly and the back of the ship struck our bow almost at ninety degrees angle and we were up on the foc’s’le and we were wishing him on, wishing him on. We thought if we did enough damage we wouldn't have to go to sea. But the engine room artifices they quickly turned up with welding equipment and put a patch over it and it didn't make any difference to what we had to do so but I don’t think

Commander Cole was very pleased about the fact that we were urging him on to try to smash our ship but he was a nice man – became an admiral. It was very important out of all those N-class destroyers – a tremendous amount of officers became admirals and chief of navy staff. I suppose they had the advantage that they had ships early in the war and had each others ships where they kept on going

all the time so we were very lucky. The officers we had they weren’t regimentarians. You know on board ships you could be wandering around in a pair of skivvies and sandals and things like that. You didn't have to salute them everything you saw them and that was the sort of thing that went overboard if you were going ashore we naturally, we got tidily dressed and we did our best, we looked as smart as we possibly could and

we did tried to make sure that when we were ashore we were proud of our ship and our country and didn't try to do anything that was going to reflect badly on the ship. So I was always glad that I became a drummer in the navy instead of getting a bugle because I reckon if I’d learnt to play the bugle I probably would have got sent to a cruiser because the

cruisers give most of their calls to the crew by bugle call and of course the life onboard a cruiser was far more regimented than we had on ours – we were pretty laid back the way we could get about the ship. It was great – lovely. And since I was sorry when it was all over. Anyhow,

when we went back to, we’d been back to Australia late in ’44, in April ’44 we went back and as I said we went to Durban and then we went back and did Burma and after Burma was over we came back and we came back to Sydney in February 1945 and we became part of the British Pacific fleet.

That was quite different, extremely hard work. I wasn’t in any action where we were bombed or had to shoot at other ships – do you want to stop?

End of tape

Just before I go on about what happened in the Pacific I’d just like to backtrack over Norman in the Indian Ocean. You might remember that I said we had re-payment missing – what we used to do when we were in harbour – we’d all make a donation to the mess kit and the caterer would go ashore and he would buy

fruit - he might get apples, he might get oranges, whatever happened to be around. He might be lucky enough to get a bit of cake and he used to buy bread and the bread was absolutely terrible. It was mealy bread and it was sort of a loaf about twelve inches by three inches by three inches and it weighed a ton but at least it was bread, We never used to get much bread out of the ships galley at all of course what I

learnt later was that the reason for that is the stove that they used to make the bread in had bacteria in it caused rotten bread but what we used to do in the messes was they’d make a sort of a damper and send it down and we had one bloke who lives up at Tin Can Bay now, he used to like to make cakes and I can remember on one occasion he made a cake he put some

washing up powder in it by mistake, it went in and they baked it and it came back out of the galley and one of the blokes the signalman from the lower forward desk came out and he said ‘You want a cake?’ and he said ‘Yeah’ ‘Have this one’. So they took the cake down and they ate it and they thought it was good – didn't do them any real harm I suppose. But the butcher when he used to…. They had a freezer on board which was

for meat and butter - when he wanted to divvy up the meat he had a board about a metre square or something – get a slice of beef up there and he’d get an axe and chop it up on the upper deck and you’d get your bit of meat for the day. It was no cruise ship. Didn't get fresh vegetables, on the starboard side

in the starboard waist – the folks would come down like that and then down a ladder and that is the waist there and there was a locked about eight feet I suppose about two and four metres by a metre and a metre – that’s roughly and the potatoes and the cabbage would go in there and particularly in the tropics – you know there's 240 people on board – you had to be fair – so you didn't

get much fresh vegetables and if it was in the tropics well about three days later the cabbage would be all rotten and dribbling down through the holes at the bottom of the things because there were holes in the bottom to let any sea water get through it. We lived as best we could. I suppose somewhere along the line somebody had worked out that you needed a certain amount of joules per day per man and this is what they tried to get that amount of sustenance

into us. We had one caterer – he had a love for baked beans – a South African - and they weren’t the ordinary baked beans that we get, they were like a broad bean and we probably had these three times a week and we ended up we nicknamed him ‘Yippy’ that was his nickname. Came from Kyogle – nice bloke -

-that was the food situation there – we would get fresh stuff when we could buy it ourselves so that’s just the way the system worked. We accepted it. The other thing was I spent my twenty first birthday in harbour on duty ship. There was no great flag waving about that day I can tell you so that’s how I spent my twenty first birthday. Bit disappointed. Didn't even get

a letter in the mail!

Probably not all that bad. Before I joined the navy I’d met a girl at Southport and she was a Tasmanian girl and she’d been sick and she’d come up to stay at her Aunts place there and I was sort of laying about on the beach there waiting for my call up when I met her and we undertook to write to

one another and I used to write to her pretty regularly and she’d write to me fairly regularly. But I didn't have all that amount of people to write to – it was only Mum and Dad and my sisters and they all, two of them lived at home with the parents and the occasional letter would go to my brother but yeah, we got mail and when we did get mail it was great to get it. The other thing that used to happen – we had one fellow in our mess – no names no pack-drill -

he came from Tasmania – we used to get parcels from home like usually it was a fruit cake you know something that had a bit of rum in it or something to preserve it or something like that and usually when you got one you put it on the mess deck table, counted the number of heads and cut up so many pieces but not this bloke. He used to put his in his locker and he’d go down and he’d cut a piece off and

this went on for a long time and one day someone said ‘Hey, his locker’s open’ so they raffled the lot. Didn't change him but anyhow, that was his way. He did his other duties without any problems so that was just a little quirk for that man. One of the things that when you’re in harbour there was always – even though you weren’t on watch up there you’d gaze at the sky and things like that - and there

was always one part of the ship that was duty watch. If the ship had to be moved from one berth to another it was called a duty watch – you weren’t allowed to go ashore you were duty watch and you had to shift the ship – it might – if you were in the tropics you might have to put awnings around the officers quarters at the back or you might be called out if it blew up a bit at night – a bit of a storm you’d be called, duty watch would be called out to put flapping lines over the awnings and stuff like that.

Being in harbour wasn’t always a joke and being in harbour was a time when the first lieutenant who was responsible for the working of the ship and the maintenance of the ship used to get us to make sure that we did the chipping of the rust and the painting and all of those things that were necessary to keep this ship in good maintenance. Got quite expert in painting the side of the ship over on a plank over the

ships side. This bloke up at Tin Can Bay I was over on the plank painting away and ‘Pull her up!’ and he pulled it up like this the paint pot and it caught on something and it tipped the whole lot of paint all down over me. Bit of a mess but anyway those things happen and the rule was shipside this way, superstructure up and down.

There was one chore that I had to do once and I didn't like but I had to, in the rain, get up and scrub the mast right from the top with the yard arms and everything like that and…

Anyhow they set me up at the top of this mast- it was in the rain – with a scrubbing brush and a bucket

hands are cold and I’m scrubbing away and scrubbing away on this blessed thing up there trying to keep the rain out of the back of my neck and do the job and twisting around. Why they wanted it painted or scrubbed I don't know buy anyhow I lost the grip on the scrubbing brush and it was going down and down and down and I’m singing out “Under below! Under below!” and just then a midshipman

walked out of the portside door onto the upper deck. Boompf! Alongside him. I nearly killed that man – terrible. They just sent up another scrubbing brush. God that was a terrible job up there trying to scrub that blooming mast. One of the other duties…

One of the other duties was masthead lookout and you’ve got the crows next which is right up on the mast and you sort of went up a Jacobs ladder to get there and I’ll use the glass as an example – this is the crows nest and it had a ring around the bottom and you’d get up and you’d stand up and hang on the edge of the crows nest and the bloke in it would get out and get round to there and go down and then you’d get back up into that crows nest and

it wasn’t a good place to be. If you had a following breeze or wind and you were going at just a little less speed than the wind which often happened because with convoy work you would do you were governed by the maximum speed of the slowest ship and then you had to zigzag as well and things like that. You’d be up there and you’d be just above the top of the funnel and all these funnel fumes would be

coming over and it’d be suffocating. It used to be absolutely terrible. And in rough weather of course if you were up there and I don't know how high it was the ships only thirty-six feet wide and that’s eighteen feet to the middle and you’re in the middle of it and you’d be right over like that and you’d be looking at the drink this side and then back like this and looking in the drink the other side. Exciting stuff!

We had one fellow – I’m going to mention his name – Kango Holness I think his name was. And I can remember him going up there with a mutton bone. Chewing it away up there like a bloody pirate with a sword in his mouth but

no… I enjoyed it if I got up there apart from this business of the fumes coming out of the funnel at the back. I didn't object to it at all you know because you were away up there and sea everywhere and you were hopeful that you might see a submarine’s periscope and get a DSM [Distinguished Service Medal] or something like that. I think I mentioned before that I used to get permission to go up into the wheel house and

steer the ship but that wasn’t all, whilst you were out of the weather when you were on duty it wasn’t always a real safe place to be in rough weather you know because you can get such violent movement in the ships that the helmsmen get thrown off the wheel altogether and I know one fellow that you know he got thrown around like that and really damaged his knee

and these things just happened. We had a coxswain onboard – a coxswain is really the helmsman for the whole ship and he’s supposed to be there in action and when we’d go alongside ships at sea we had another fellow from Tasmania – poor fellow is now dead – he was such an expert little fellow on that wheel that the skipper used to say

“Get’…. Trevor Webb, get Webb on the wheel!” and he was just so delicate the way he could do it because we used to do a tremendous amount of coming alongside other ships at sea as I explained about the Gatling gun and things like that to put people across or oiling at

sea - that was a thing that often happened. It might be off a cruiser or off an aircraft carrier or off a battleship or a battle cruiser and of course you’re going along like this and if the sea was a bit lumpy the big ship – it was riding fairly like an old duck in a pond but the destroyer would be sort of jazzing backwards and forwards and it was terribly difficult to sort of manage this surge between the ships and

it was more than once that the Norman was not able to take over an oil line because of the conditions at sea. I know up in the Pacific about three or four times we made an effort to get fuel and had to sort of let it go. But I remember we were going from I don’t remember if it was Mombassa or Aden over to Bombay with the fleet and we had to go alongside the Queen Elizabeth – the battleship Queen Elizabeth to oil and

they had an anti-torpedo bolsch on the outside of them - you know if a torpedo hit it and exploded it wouldn't damage the inside of the ship sort of situation. (STOPPED) Yeah we had to go alongside the Queen Elizabeth to oil and we went up like this and they shot the (UNCLEAR) and they started to get together

and then whoomp! Norman went up and just touched this bubble at the side and then veered away again and had another crack at it and whoomp! Touched it again and the marine band as on the quarter deck so they struck up the tune- Here she comes, here she comes again. But we made it the next time and that was alright and no great damage done. Nobody got any demotions because of that

but I remember we eventually got into harbour - I can't remember where it was – it must have been Trincomalee I think and they, we were alongside the QEII [Queen Elizabeth II] and they at night time they had a concert and of course all the crew of the QEII were there and as many of us as could get over and those that couldn't were on their own foc’s’le these beautiful women they were singing and dancing and carrying

on like that and when it was all over they took their wigs off and everything and they were two blokes! What a let down it was but it was a good show I remember that – these two blokes – terrible. So that’s life. Ok, I might have to come back to those days in the Indian Ocean but if

you don’t mind we might move around now into the Pacific. As I said we got around there and we were fortunate enough – I got a few weeks leave and I lost some good mates then. One of the blokes that lived in Ballina whom I wrote to the company about, Mullion Creek to see him he died

just recently – sad. The fellow that, he left the ship at that stage, and the fellow that got his leg broken that was tossed out of the director tower he got drafted to the Australia and he was up in the Pacific and his gun position got hit by a kamikaze and poor old Ronnie he got killed. That was sad.

But that sort of broke up the foursome. Though other fellow, Ronnie McIntyre, when Captain Buchanan took over command of HMAS Napier as Captain B, Ron had been his jolly boat driver on the HMAS Norman and he took Ronnie with him so that was the end of the four of us as a group. Ronnie McIntyre had a latent ability

that he didn't show very much of – one of the fellows in the mess had a guitar and at night in the dark this guitar music was playing and this voice was singing and it turned out to be Ronnie McIntyre – he was a dark horse. Married man, but lived quietly. So anyhow, I got on holidays up to Southport which was a bit of a arduous journey – get the train and get to Brisbane and then

somehow get down to Southport and I somehow ended up bumming a ride down in the back of a utility there and two of my mates who I mentioned before that I joined up with – they were off the Quibron and they happened to be home at the same time so we were fated very well throughout Southport at that time. And my brother in law, that’s my immediately older sister, he’d been invalided out of the

army and of course he was a New Guinea veteran and I contracted him and he managed to get two bottles of gin and a bottle of rum put on the train fro Brisbane down to us and we met one night at my parents home – I don't know where Dad was but my Mum and my sister Betty, the younger sister, were there and so we said ‘We think you’d better go to bed’ and they did so we managed to

demolish those three bottles of liquor which was pretty good going. So we had a good holiday together – we swam and went to all the people in town and got back aboard. But towards the end of April the ship had been refitted and new draftees were onboard and they were reallocated to their particular stations and one thing and another of that and we had a few officers changed.

And then we headed off up into the Pacific and we went first to Manus Island and then up to Leyte where we joined the fleet and our first operation was out through Okinawa into the Sakishima group of Japanese Islands which…. Sakishima-shoto includes Okinawa and a whole lot of other little islands and the aircraft carriers sort of went out and we sort of did the

escorts. They flew off and they did their bombing and they came back and we attended to them. I don't think there were any casualties in that lot and then we came back into Leyte and a couple of air flights over and disturbed our sleep and stuff like that. And so that sort of work went on until the middle of June and we were up we were known as the fleet train,

the British fleet train, that’s where you had the ammunition ships, you had the for ships you had the oil tankers you had the second class aircraft carriers, and hospital ships I think they were, oh no I don't think they were associated. They sort of stood about a hundred miles distant I think from memory. And we were sort of the mailmen

and the milkmen and in a matter of I think six days I think we did 62 or something alongside ships. We might have to take personnel off an aircraft carrier but before I tell you about that – the first thing we had to do, we had to make great big canvas bags. Heavy duty canvas was sewn rope around the side with loops sewn

into these and we’d rig a jackstay over from an aircraft carrier which was high up there and to our foc’s’le deck and it would carry up to five people and if personnel had to be taken from a second degree carrier and put at pace up to the front line we’d shoot across and gun along and over we’d go with the bag, men would get in it and they’d come zooming

down this blooming thing across the ships side and they’d say ‘Walk back on the falls!’ and sometimes they’d walk back but not quick enough because the ships at war and bags would hit the superstructure of these fellows. No courtesy – you’d undo the loops and just tip them out on the deck because the bag would have to go back again. And this happened not only for men but parts and other equipment and first aid stuff and mail and all of those sorts of things and

you’d get them there but then you’d zoom off at speed to some other ship and drop this one off there or that off somewhere and then go to somewhere else or you might have to go somewhere else, oil ship, and do all of those things. It was flat out all the time – there was no rest and most of the time when we were doing that sort of work we were in second degree of readiness which meant four hours on and four hours off and those that were four hours off had to go and do this seamanship work. Pretty tiring stuff. Anyhow, that was

somewhere about six weeks. Never put foot ashore in that time, the only people that got ashore were perhaps the captain and one of the officers had to go ashore for duties of something like that. The postman used to go ashore, and I think the supply PO night have gone ashore to organise fodder.

Even the food if we were getting any was brought out on a barge, if we had to ammunition ship that was all brought out and we’d have to do it off the ammunition barge. Oiling was much as I said done at sea, there was no time, no time at all, and in between times like that you had to try to get a bit of sleep and live very tiring. The whole fleet came back to Sydney to replenish

somewhere – I don't know whether it was the middle of June but anyhow we were back in Sydney for about ten days and then we were off again certainly before the end of June. And the same thing continued for the rest of the time until after the war ended in August. It was just go, go, go, go. All of that work.

We on the N-class destroyers were a bit upset about this, you know we were only maids of war work, and the reason was that the N-class destroyers had twin mounted guns which meant that they had to have twice as much ammunition, twice as many shell cartridges, whereas the Q’s [Q-Class Destroyer] only had

single guns which meant that they had more fuel capacity and because they had more fuel capacity they were able to go forward with the front fleet and that was much more exciting work for those on the Q ships. And I think there were a couple of the tribals up there – [HMAS] Warramunga and one or two others I think and the real war, as far as I was concerned , we were sort of, I don't know what

you’d call it. We were part and parcel of the war but were sort of next door. And with the Q’s they had kamikaze attacks on them and all that sort of business and we got up to within three hundred miles of Japan, somewhere up about, to the east of Japan but somewhere about the middle of the two islands on the Norman. And our really great disappointment was

on this occasion we were to go with the main fleet for an attack on the home islands. And just on dawn in the middle of a fog the whole fleet had to do a ninety to starboard and we were port quarter attendant destroyer and HMS Quillium was the port bow attendant destroyer

and when the ship turned around like that something happened and Quillum should have been coming I don't know whether she was supposed to go in front of or behind this aircraft carrier but she ran into the port quarter with her bow and that just turned the bow right round like that back to first or second (UNCLEAR), watertight (UNCLEAR). So much to our disappointment we were Johnny on the spot and

we got the signal to take her in tow and tow her back towards Manus Island. So we were out of the action and we weren’t really happy about that. You know we’d gone all of this time to be at the kill and somebody pulled the plug. Not good. Anyhow we towed that wretched ship back and towed it back and then I forget – I think it was the New Zealand cruiser the Black Prince ended up taking

her I tow then a sea going tug called the Weasel I think it was, it came up and took it in tow, I think the Black Prince chuffed off but we were sort of left there as a protector. Chewing the fat. Oh it was terrible, terrible slog round and round and round. Terrible. Anyhow, we eventually detailed off and we went

back but we weren’t back there very long and then we all went back to Leyte and we were in Leyte on the day the Japanese surrendered and the signal came in ‘Japs unconditional surrender’ and some sailor unknown trained B gun to port and fired a star shell over Leyte or was it Manus?

It might have been. I don't remember, a balloon went up then. Well of course the ship got punished you see. [HMAS] Napier and [HMAS] Nizam went straight back with the fleet up to Sagarmi One, waited around there until they decided everything was okay and Nizam and Napier were the first two Australian ships to go into Tokyo bay after the cessation of hostilities.

But Norman was detailed to escort the Sea Nymph which was a partially disabled British submarine that could only steam at about 5 knots back to Darwin. Round and round and round it went. Terrible trip. Well, I guess that was our punishment. So we got to Darwin, we got there

probably about 7 am in the morning and we got the signal to oil and return at speed to Manus which we went alongside, we oiled and I think we departed Darwin about half past six that night thereabouts. And we steamed at speed back to Manus and from then on we made our way back to Japan and we entered Tokyo bay on the

sixteenth of September 1945. That was after war was ended – it wasn’t what we would like. We arrived in Tokyo bay just at the beginning of the formation of a typhoon and we anchored and the seas before the typhoon actually struck were so heavy at night they used to coming up at night that at anchor

the water from the waves used to come up through the horse pipes. We had to take our boats inboard – otherwise they would have smashed up and then I’m not sure if it was the next day or the day after the typhoon struck and Norman dragged it's anchor and then the capstan wouldn't work and we had to go slow ahead to sort of do that and the ship dragged anchor all over the place so they eventually got another anchor down but we weren’t the only ship in trouble because there were aircraft carriers

and bigger ships – they were also dragging their anchors. It was a terrible sight though. Typhoon – vicious And after that they moved the ship – we were told to go over into Yokohama harbour where we went over there and in the course of our stay there they decided that they would reopen the British embassy and some

of the sailors off various ships were selected and it was those that still happened to have a white summer tropical uniform. If you had white shirt, white hat, white trousers, white socks you were in the group. I didn't so I didn't make it. One of our blokes did and so they got ashore – they were only there for the day but eventually

the ships company was – out of the two watches – one watch each were given half a day ashore and I went ashore and it was absolutely desolate. Huge tracks of land with just a few bricks here and there and full of dust and ruined buildings all over the place. And I’m still not sure whether I was at Yokohama or Tokyo to be honest about it – at the time I probably knew but now I’ve forgotten. I did

pick up a Japanese pendant which I took home and I guess that somewhere along the line somebody else had lost it and it blew onto this vacant land because anything else like that that had been there at the time would have sizzled out. So that was the only memento I had of that and I had it for many, many years and I don't know what happened to it. I have no idea. Anyhow, they eventually

decided towards the end of September that Norman would be detailed off to take the hospital ship, Fazner I think was the name, escort it down to Okinawa and there she was to unload prisoners of war.

That was on the eastern side and then we went around to the western side of Okinawa and we had to put to sea again because another typhoon was coming through and there was some two hundred odd ships. It was not really a harbour, it was like a big bight with all of these ships in there so they sort of divided all of the ships up I think into about four groups and they all sort of steamed out yonder into sea. That was sort of the rule

if a typhoon or cyclone was coming you had to give yourself plenty of lee-water. Anyhow, I don't know how long we were out there but we were out there for some time and we came back when it had moderated and we anchored in this harbour again or bay and we couldn't oil because the seas were so high and rolling so badly that we couldn't go alongside anybody to oil and I can remember sitting there on the starboard bollards, the midship bollards with my feet

up on the guard rail and the ship would roll over an the sea would come up to the edge pf the deck and then they’d go over and I’d think ‘Oh, that’s not too bad’ and then I’d look over there and an American ship going like this, like this and I’d think ‘Gee, they’re having a bad time over there’ so that went on for about four days and eventually we managed to get oil but we’d run out of food and we couldn't get food easily because the Americans had decided that lend lease had

finished at war’s end and that left not only us but a lot of the other Australian ships probably too pretty light on tucker because we’d been light on tucker well before we got to Japan. Very minimal the food on board. So Arnold Green by this time he’d taken over the ship – can’t remember when he actually took command,

might have been just before we went… actually the final leg to Tokyo – but Arnold Green was the skipper and he made some arrangements with a skipper of an American supply ship. He went ashore, went alongside with a chit and some ward room grog and they ended up getting some food on board which sort of did us until we could get back to Manus. So we put to sea again, headed back, final destination was

Sydney of course. But we were not long out at sea and another horrific typhoon hit us. And it was absolutely terrible and whilst there were many S.O.S’s [a distress signal] for help with the ships that were sailing south it’s entered in the Norman’s log that we could render no assistance because we were fighting for our own life ourself. It was forbidden to go on the upper

deck. In ordinary times of rough weather what happened was they rigged safety lines from the after bulkhead of the foc’s’le to the forward bulkhead of the ward room flap which was the front wall of the ex-gun in other words. And on either side they’d have these short lengths of rope, which was on

an eyelet with a Turks head on the bottom of it and you’d grab hold of this and you’d run and when the seas came over the side of the ship you’d lift your feet up and hope you had enough weigh on to keep on going so that when you hit the deck again you wouldn't have to stop and start to run so that was your way you used to get backwards and forwards in rough weather. But it was so bad on this occasion that they just forbade any activity on the upper deck. Those that were forward had to stay there and those that were aft had to stay aft. But

the thing was it didn't really matter because the war was over and we didn't have to worry about getting to action stations or anything so that as a bit of a plus. So we eventually got back to Manus…

Yeah there were a few. You’ve probably read that a lot of the Japanese soldiers still didn't realise that the war was over some years later but

that was a bit of a concern but we didn't at our level we didn't know about it. We thought ‘Good-o, we’re going back to Sydney. That’s enough for us’. After we hit Manus we resupplied a bit and went down to Milne Bay and resupplied a bit more, not enough but enough to get us back to Sydney. And all the way back we put the ship in order and

we painted and we scratched and we painted and we cleaned and even the quarter seen on the upper deck… When you come out of the after part of the foc’s’le area onto the deck which is flat all the way up, there's sort of like a walkway and it had this quarter seen on it. If you didn't have that you wouldn't have been able to walk on it. It was hot enough just in the summer without having the engine rooms under there. We

even had that painted white with raw cement. We mixed it up with cement and painted it on and when we came into harbour we were so proud of that ship. And we had to berth starboard side to port side of HMS Queenborough and we pulled up alongside and Captain Green our skipper, Arnold Green, roared out to

the officer of the watch on the Queenborough ‘Stop making that so and so black smoke out of your officers galley polluting my ship!’ and story has it he went on board the Queenborough and had many words with the captain of that ship after he’d had a walk around and he came back and he said to our officer of the watch ‘You know, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen a British officer in the navy cry’.

Whether that’s true or not I don't know because I wasn’t the quartermaster at the time. But the thing was that he was so upset about the condition of Queenborough that you have to understand he sent a signal to the Navy board that he wouldn't take over the Queenborough until it had got cleaned up. So the order was given for Queenborough to be cleaned up and then we changed ships companies and when we went

onboard we found that it was still like a pigsty. There was waste food ground into the mess decks and all of that so the skipper said we’d clean it up so we took tables and stools and lockers and everything like that out onto the upper deck and we scrubbed them and we scraped the decks and we cleaned it up and made the thing hospitable because that’s just the way we were used to living.

It was on the Norman just when we got to harbour just before we got up to Sydney that the captain said “Oh well, you’ve done a pretty good job getting the ship clean on the way down and nice and fiddly – you’ll be able to have stand easys every afternoon…”

It was on the Norman just before we reached Sydney that the skipper Arnold Green told us that we could have make amends every afternoon. That meant that we could have shore leave and everything like that and of course when we

transferred ship he said “No. You’re not going to have it. You’re going to work here” and that constituted the third muting I was involved in. Of course all the fellows reckoned the war was over and they had done their bit and there should have been a bit of a relaxation. Anyhow, the Kellick of the mess – you know what a Kellick is? Kellick is a leading seaman – they call them a Kellick. Kellick of each mess

was called down to the Captains cabin which is aft and we had to go in and he said “Leading Seaman Carr, what's all this about your mess not wanting to work?” and I just said “You said that we could all have make amends every afternoon and you’ve just told us we haven’t.” “Oh, I don't remember saying that” he said. He said “Well, what were you before you joined the navy and I said “I was an apprentice barber” “Oh,” he said,

“How about you come up to Cootamundra” – I think it was where he came from – he says “I’m starting a barber shop up there” and I said “Oh, I don’t think so.” So he said “Would you like a beer?” and I said “Well this is the only chance I’m ever going to get” so I said “Yes, I’ll have a beer thanks.” He gave me a beer and it didn't make any difference to my opinion and the coxswain's marching up and down outside the day cabin and I was saying “Get out of here. Come on. We want to get ashore.”

But he sort of relaxed after a while and the ships company sort of did what they wanted to do anyhow so that’s how that was. But I must go back a bit – I talked about the filth of the Queenborough I remember at one stage in Durban we had to vacate the ship for 24 hours because the cockroaches – not that the ship was dirty – but the cockroaches had run rampant in the ship and

they had to fumigate the whole ship so we had to get off it. But the cockroaches had got that bad that you’d be trying to get a bit of sleep or sit down on the locker and they’d come up out of the locker and bite you. Great big long things they were but anyhow they fixed that up. I don't know what they did but they cured all that for us so that was sort of my naval service.

No, no. No mice, no bedbugs either. Strange we never had because some of the fellows slept in some odd sort of places ashore and bedbugs never came back on board that I know. We never had lice or anything like that. Had lots of cases of venereal disease but I’m glad I was a good boy and yes,

some terrible cases.

Yes. They used to tell us you know but they never used to issue any condoms or anything like they do in the navy now. Before the boys and girls go ashore they take a handful of condoms out to go ashore with but that wasn’t the policy in my day at sea. But there could be some that knew they could get them.

I don't know if they had any on board. It never occurred to me to ask or need them. One stage when we were up in Trincomalee to go ashore cholera was, I wonder if we were in the Pacific or the Indian Ocean but cholera was endemic ashore anyhow and if you

didn't want to get vaccinated against cholera you weren’t’ allowed to go ashore and quite frankly I’d personally got to the stage where I didn't ever want to go ashore again into some of these native countries. It just didn't appeal to me anymore.

Mainly the food, the squalor that you saw.

First time I went to Bombay I told you about the ear business but here you’d see all these cripples laying in the foot path and they’re put there to beginning. People own them and they take them there and plonk them on the footpath in the mornings and they beg and everything that goes into the dish goes to whoever owns the cripple I think. So that was terrible I thought there wasn’t thoughts about good life at all. And

no I just - I’d had enough – I guess I was just getting worn out anyhow. Pretty tired. One of the things about when I was at, the ship went into dock at Symond’s Town and we were allowed to have this four days leave there and those that were still on board there was a British submarine

tied up at the wharf stern of us and we were invited to go and have a look at the submarine and I went along I thought “I’ll go and have a look at this.” So I got in there and I went down the conning tower and into this area and I thought “This is not for me – I’ve got to get out of here.” It was too claustrophobic for me. I just couldn't have seen myself in that sort of a situation and yet later on in the Norman to save

having to get dressed up and go to, hands the rig of the day for a ship going to sea or coming into harbour I got a special sea duty, special sea duty men didn't have to do that and I got the job of – it was a bit of a perk – of being B room shell gun and cordite room sweeper and I was down there amongst all the shells on one side

shells on the starboard side and cordite on the port side and I’d be down there in that confined space and it never worried me but whilst it was confined it was much larger in space then down in that submarine and it was on duty once in the shell room that I broke this hand. What would happen – when you had an action they would fire the shells. Now the

shells and the cordite were in bins like that, in a lateral situation and they had these four inch slats that sort of went down into a key way and as you took the shells out you took the slats out so that you could get to the next one and then of course when the action was over you would have to bring shells from the furthest one down nearer to the hoist again and in doing that I’d put a shell into the bin

and it had hit the slat at the back and it had jumped, bounced back and it smacked my hand against the front one and of course shells were fifty six pounds and it just went crunch. It aches a bit but that happens. I used to use my duty in the shell room as a form of exercise. Those shells were fifty-six pound and I’d take a shell out of this bin and I’d go -

It was one way of getting exercise.

This mate of mine down at Ballina who recently died I went down to see him and he said “I hate you” and I said “Why do you hate me?” and he said “Look at you. You’ve still got muscles on your arms,” he said, “Look at me – my arms are all droopy and wrinkly” and he said “And Billy’s the same.” That was another mate of ours that he’d served with on the HMAS Nestor

and he said “His are like that too” and I said “Well, you know I was a breach worker with this hand, I used to do exercise, just a matter of keep on working Dave” and that’s all it was about it but I notice now I’m starting to get a bit floppy. Start having to pick the wife up I think but Symond’s Town was a cold bleak hole. Terrible place. Windswept and that. And one of the things that I’ve always been sorry about was the

I saw Table Mountain in Cape Town from a distance. I never took the trouble to try to get to the top. Some of the others did and they got up there – I don't know how they got up there – but they go tup there. I was always sorry about that. One place that I got to in West Africa was a place called Windhoek.

Now to this day I can't remember how I got ashore there because it was sort of inland and I think I must have been up the Congo river and sort of got over there from there but I can still picture the building that was there. Just this one big building that was at Windhoek. Strange isn’t it how things come back to you. There you have it.

I think that about winds it up unless you’ve got any questions you want to ask me about the navy service.

Yes. Okay. Well I think as I explained earlier and I don't know if I explained it to you here or over there but at the beginning of the war there weren’t many ships in the navy, Australian navy and they only had I think

four destroyers; the HMAS Waterhen, the HMAS Voyager, the HMAS Vampire, the HMAS Stuart and there might have been another one I don't know but they were old World War I destroyers and shortly after the start of the war they did a lot of magnificent service in the Mediterranean and the admiral in charge of submarines Vice Admiral Tovey, was so impressed with the seamanship

and daring of the men of the Australian manned ships that he put it to the British Admiralty that they put another flotilla of new destroyers out and have them manned by Australians. That was approved by the Admiralty and then they had to get the approval of the Australian Government for that to happen and the Australian Government agreed and there were eight ships built of that N-class and unfortunately

the Australian navy didn't have enough crews to be able to man the whole eight of them and two of them went to the Dutch free navy and one of them went to the Polish navy. So that’s five; Napier a senior ship Captain D, HMAS Nizam, HMAS Nestor, HMAS Norman and HMAS Nepal. Now the flotilla leader at that time was an English Captain and then

you get seniority then comes down. The seniority as far as an officer’s is concerned is what date you joined the navy first or what time you received that rank first. If we were all together then Captain D was in charge. If the Napier was away somewhere and there were other ships there it was who was next senior then became responsible for the balance of those ships.

At our stage Commander Burrell was the first skipper of the Norman and then came on Commander Buchanan and when he left was made acting captain and it went to Napier as Captain D. Lieutenant Plunkett Cole, he then came onboard as our captain and when he got transferred just at the end of the war

Lieutenant Commander Green became captain of the Norman. Now at the end of the war they decided that they would go in and take over the Osaka naval base at Osaka which is just South of Tokyo and Captain Buchanan was selected out of all the officers in the British navy system to head up that

team to go ashore and take over that naval base which meant that then the next senior person happened to be Lieutenant Bill Cook who was on the Nizam – he was the next senior lieutenant and he was captain of the Nizam so that when it came to being who would be first ship into Tokyo bay, it would be Captain Cook as lieutenant who lead the Nizam in and it had to be followed

by Napier and that’s how the system works within the navy. That’s seniority scale. And those five ships – well Norman it did 270,000 nautical miles. It was commissioned in September 1941 and it sailed up until the end of the war in September 1945. It did 270,000

nautical miles and if you work down to kilometres that’s 497,000 nautical miles it did in those four years so you can see that it did a lot of sea time and the other ships were comparable for that amount as well. Nizam did more nautical miles than all the others because she was more senior but HMAS Nepal for the time of her commission she did more time at sea

per month than the others on the average so that’s how it all worked out – it's all very interesting. We were all proud – watch out here we come. At one stage, I think it was the sixth division was coming back from the Middle East across the Indian Ocean and we had to go out, us and Napier, and escort it part of the way and Captain Buchanan had a kangaroo,

the engine room make a metal kangaroo and he had that stuck up on the top of the mast and we steamed up through the troop ship fleet, the convoy, and we had our big Australian battle flag coming and there were cooees all over the place. It was just great you know – here we are chaps, don’t worry about it, we’re here. Yeah, it was wonderful.

Don’t try to get between me and my best friend. We loved our ship – we were all very proud of our ships. Really proud we were. ‘I’m off the Norman’ but the thing was that as far as the other N-class people were concerned and even the Quick Match and the Quibron when they came round eventually and joined us up around

South Africa, we were all like, see the Quibron and the Quick Match they were pretty well the same as our N-class except they only had single guns instead of twins. And we were all like one big family and we knew that we could totally rely on those others – these were Australian. That was the way it was and if we were ashore and something was happened it didn't matter which ship you were off -

if it was the Australian in trouble, you just helped them. It was just the way it was – we were a sort of ex-patriot family. Huge number. There was about on the Ns at any given time there would have been about eleven hundred men over the five ships but that could vary up and down a little bit depending whether people were drafted off or whether they were drafted on for passage to go somewhere else or things like that so

yeah it was a pretty good little floating town. We were all proud of one another ‘You beaut.’ You know. Didn't so much matter if it was an English ship or something like there wasn’t the same rapport – we just understood. It was good. Could have been the same with the others – they might have felt the same with their ilk but that’s how we were. I think it's very hard to explain

to a lady that you’re all living cramped up in a room about this size, just about another six feet longer than this but this area with forty eight men in there. Half the time they’re naked – they’re either getting changed to go ashore or getting changed to go on watch or they’re getting a towel around them to go into the bathroom. They’re

smoking and they’re telling dirty stories. They’re cooking and they’re sewing and they’re writing letters and they’re cleaning and doing all of the things that a woman would do. I think that’s why I find it a bit hard here sometimes; I’m not doing it Dells way. When I had my family – Dell incidentally is my second wife – when my young girls were coming up everything was done my way – this is the way you should do it

you know. So yes you had to be considerate of the rest of the people, you couldn't really get angry with anyone – so I explained I only saw in three years two bouts of fisticuffs. You were always helpful to one another; there was one business I did mention that one of the fellows had.

He was the moneylender and if people want to go ashore and they didn't have any money it was a pound for twenty-five. You borrowed a pound off him which was twenty shillings – you had to give him twenty-five back – it was good business. So that’s the way it was. They would help you to get dressed and they would help you to get undressed. Now for instance the tidily clothes that we wore, they were like a skin.

To get them off whoever was dressed and wanted his jacket off he’d lean forward with his hands on the hips of the other fellow and he’d put his hands down and pull the bottom of it and pull it up over your head to get it off. Well to get it on you’d put your arms through it like that and someone would peel it over you. You have a look at one of those photos and see how they fit. We just wanted to be so smart.

No that’s the trick. Is that they didn't have flies on navy suits. They had a flap on the front they had a flap. I can't remember… Might have had one button in the middle and one at the top and of course you’d just undo that and you’re in business.

Well you had to go to the toilet somehow didn’t you? Yes.

Oh yeah. Always very particular the way you ironed your pants too. You had to have the seven creases in and each crease had to be opposite one another and they must fold the same. No use having a crease

folding this way and the other one folding that way because when you walked down the road you’d look different, so that was it. Everyone was very keen to, usually you’d come back from the shore and the first thing you’d go and do was you’d do your daubing – do you know what daubing is? That’s your laundry. And usually you know the mates and you’d get a bucket and everyone would throw it in and somebody would do the dickie fronts and the singlets and the underpants and the socks and they’d go and

do all of that. But you never left your dirty clothes around – it was, and before you went ashore that the iron was full. Yeah everybody really got themselves smart.

I think it was only the Australians that ever got into tiddliest – I don't know much about the Americans but the English sort of never got into tiddlies. We

were like to the English pay-wise like the Americans were to us. We were getting a bit more than the English and as a consequent of which we spent our money on clothes. We didn't spend, didn't buy too many suits because we cared for them and we never got fat because we didn't have enough food, didn't get enough sleep, didn't get enough rest

and got a lot of exercise so we all remained pretty trim. As a matter of a fact I’ll show you a photograph after of me after I got out of the navy I’d been out of the navy about five years and I was probably still as skinny as a greyhound dog with its hair cut off. But no, we were very particular. And I’ll give you an example, I’ve seen

English stokers come aboard to do a boiler clean. Now that’s where - I don’t really know what a boiler clean is but I think they go down and they get the gunk out of the tubes for the boilers and things like that and they’d come up at the end of the day in harbour working in there clothes and they’d come to the bathroom, and I’ll explain a bathroom in a minute, roll their sleeves up, they’d roll they’re trousers up, they’d wash down to here, up to there and up to there and away they’d go – ready to go ashore.

And they wondered why they couldn't pick up a girl. There you go. A bathroom – well now that was something. The bathroom on the ship I think had ten bowls I think about that round and they wee shaped with a lip over them all the way around so that when the ship rolled the water would

go up and hit the lid and go back into the bowl. Now you’re only allowed – you’re only supposed to be allowed one bowl per day so you’d go in there and you’d fill the bowl up and you’d wash yourself and you’d soap yourself all over and you’d splash that off and then fill it up again and wash yourself all over and that was your bath. But they were particular about having that bath and if possible they’d get two in a day and sometimes in the tropics

they’d want to get three in a day and the engineer would say ‘The water will only be on between such and such a time and such and such a time’ so everybody would be in a rush to get in there and have a bath. Then you know you’d have all of these naked fellows all around soaping themselves and it didn't pay to be modest – that was just the way it was. I think onboard the ship there was only one bath and that was down in the officers’ quarters and I think the only time I can ever remember a sailor

having use of that bath was when we were on a trip from Durban to Bombay and one of the fellows had had a lot of what we thought was good luck but it turned out to be bad luck and he got to the stage when he couldn't pass water about three days out of Durban so the doctor on board was putting him in hot baths, cold baths, hot baths, cold baths to try to let him pass water which wasn’t too good and we were in the company of a cruiser

so the signal went over and asked permission to leave the convoy and advance to Bombay and put this man ashore and the signal came back and said “No. Operate on him on board” so they just opened him up and put a spigot in and released his bladder and when they got to Colombo they just put him into hospital. And sometime later when we went back there he came back aboard again

and then he was a very excited man. We said to him “How are you?” he said “Oh great!” And he said “Look at what they did to me! They cut it open and scraped it all up and then sewed it all up again. No troubles now.” Terrible story to tell but it's a fact – that’s how life was. Some fellows got some awful sickness. That was it.

I don't know what else I can tell you. I really don’t.

Yes – the thing was you became particular mates with the people that you were

on watch with. You would really help each other as I said before go and do their daubing or do their ironing or do whatever you wanted, you’d go ashore with them, you’d sort of look out of them I they were sort of having a bad time ashore. Sometimes you’d go ashore and you’d have a few drinks and because you were so tired like the drinks would take over after a couple like two or three drinks and they’d sort of get silly as a wheel so you

looked after them that way. If they got bad news from home for some reason or other you would offer them condolences and be with them and try to talk out and you would certainly, certainly have great secrets with them. They would tell their deepest secrets to you but that happened all the time with your real mates. A thing about it onboard

is that you had signalman and telegraphists, ASDIC [Sonar detection system – anti-submarine detection investigation committee] operators, and radar operators; they all seemed to be in a mess of their own. You would have the stokers and the torpedo men and they would be on two separate messes of their own in another part of the ship so that really you didn't get to know a lot of those people

at all. When I say you didn't, you’d recognise them onboard and probably know their name but you didn't really become mates with those people because they had their own group and they would be on different watches so it was very often sometimes you wouldn't see another fellow on the boat for a week. Because you’d be on watch and he’d be off watch and whatever and the other thing was it was only the

seaman that had to fall in every day for part of ship duties at eight o’clock in the morning at sea or in harbour. You would have to fall in and according to what part of the ship you would fall in there and then you’d be detailed off to do your job. The signalmen and the AZDIC and the telegraphers and the radar operators and the stokers they did fall in part of ship. The stokers probably had their duties but they didn't have to go and line up and go and get their duties. The signalmen

probably had to my mind the most onerous job onboard because they were on watch 24 hours a day. Even in harbour whereas the others like sailors or seamen we weren’t on watch unless we were on duty watch but we didn't have to stand around doing it we only had to be on call but the signalmen often had to be up on the bridge to watch the ships in the harbour and receive visual lights and signals and things like

that. The telegraphers I think probably they were the same because the wireless was going all the time and I think they probably had the same situation. The only seamen that had to be that way would be the quartermaster and the boson’s mate because they would have to man the gangway on rotation. It would be the officer of the day, the quartermaster and the boson’s mate and

I think the quartermaster used to have to keep a register of those going on and off the ship and the boson’s mate used to have to do the calls round about the ship if anybody was wanted to go and pipe for them and run messages and things like that. But the whole ship was mate ship, you know if you all went ashore and there was stokers and other people there well they were part of the family but they weren’t the close part of the family if you understand what I mean, It was a good

life.

Great. Used to think well get a sleep tonight that’s the first think that you would sleep of - if you were coming in the afternoon. Sometimes you would come into harbour and it would be… well, you’ have to get dressed in the rig of the day for a start. You’d have to dress ship – that’s line up on both sides of the ship in you’re particular parts

of the ship and whether you were going to a buoy would depend in whether the buoy jumper had to go down and you’d have to lower a boat and take him around to the buoy and that sort of thing. Or if you were going alongside another ship it was a matter of handling the lines and to or from the other ships or to or from the jetty. They might pipe ‘Port watch’ or ‘First part of starboard leave from 1800 to 2100’

or something like that and they’d be a mad scramble to get in and scrub up and dress and away shore but if you were on duty that night or you weren’t allowed ashore you could say ‘I’ll get a full nights sleep tonight’ and that was just great. Loved that. It was good.

I really think the thing that gave me most pleasure on board was if I was asked to do something and I felt in my mind ‘I can do this and I can do it well’. And see the outcome was right – that gave me the most pleasure and it was nice as you

went along. The strange thing about when we were on board we never had any classes to learn – like nobody took you aside and said ‘You six people will go aft into the ward room flat and you will study knot splices and bends today’ or ‘You will learn something about flags’ or do anything like that. They never had actual classes.

When I first went onboard and I was part of ship on the foc’s’le and I had to pull the lines and the heavy horses in and put them around the bollards I had to be told ‘You don’t just put it over like that you’ve got to bring it round here and around that one and then pop it over so that the whole bollard takes the weight’. They were the sort of things that you learnt as you went along – there was no actual class for it and I don't know whether the navy is different nowadays and they sort of learn those things.

Probably, I don't know. But certainly at sea there would have been no time for that unless they wanted to take the people off watch to go and do that and really when you were off watch you had other duties to do. You had your part of ship, you might have had to prepare the next meal, you had to do your washing or whatever. So it was difficult but we got on. I was always glad

to get back onboard – I was very happy to go back on my ship. Never hated it one moment – not like that, no.

Well, the first thing I had to do was get over the disappointment of not being in the final push against Japan

and not being there to be able to go into harbour. We probably would have been first ship into the harbour because we were senior ship to the Nizam. Those disappointments I had to get over and then there was joy about the fact of right we’re coming home. It's a funny thing when you’re away like that – Australia is your country and you love it

and you’re so happy to get back and then get home to see your family. It was good. I really enjoyed that, I think ‘I’m going home’ I really do. And after the war I was offered the position to go on the quadrant up to Japan and I said, I declined, I said “No. I’m too tired. I’m too sick. I just want to go home.” I just had had enough, worn out.

Yep. A lot of fellows were like that. Pretty exhausted lot of people after the war. But by the same token, on the Queenborough life hadn’t changed much. Ashore we didn't have to do night watches and things but at that stage there was a points system

to get demobilised. Like the married men with two kids got discharged before the married men with one and the length of service you were in it were all worked out to the number of points so what the government did they decided that to keep the men active in the navy anyhow, they would keep ships going and if you bought a victory bond for ten pounds you could go to sea on a destroyer for a day. Well that’s pretty good for the people

who are only going to come aboard and be there for a day but the actual getting ready, sailing out, doing all the jobs you’ve got to do at sea and bring it in and undo all the jobs again like you had to get yourself scrubbed. You had to do your mess duties, then you had to be part of ship, you had to man the ship to go to sea, you had to dress ship to go to sea just the same as you ordinarily did, you had to control the sea at sea

for function of the day and when you bring it back you had to dress ship again and bring it in and tie it up and do all of those things while the other people just walked on and walked off. It was a hard days work. But the thing was that we did it in and out of Sydney harbour for I don’t know how long, and then they sent us down to Hobart and we did it in and out of there for some time, and then they sent us up over to Adelaide and we did it in and out of Adelaide for some time. And at Adelaide we

were the guests of the city to march through the city streets so we went up there and marched through the streets. It was surprising and once we got ashore and started to march we all started to lift our heads and get our shoulders back. So that’s what happened. I can't really remember what I did on the quadrant. I got to the stage, the quadrant when it went to sea and I had to go on watch, at that stage I was just sleeping on the deck

in the port passage way and they would come along and they would say “Come on Bob, you’ve got to get up and watch” and they’d sort of get me up and say “Go that way” and that was it. That’s how tired I was so I don't know if I’ve got any great memories of what happened on the quadrant at all. Really can’t.

End of tape

One of the big things of course when you were at sea was tiredness. You know you had broken sleep all the time, I think I said earlier when you’d go on watch and when you’d come off watch you and you might have the middle watch, you might get an hour, hour and a half before you’d get off you might have an hour and a half, two hours at a dawn action station and you might

get back to bed and then they’d call the hands. You never got to have a sleep during the day because there was nowhere to sleep. You know the whole area was taken up with people doing things – there was no space. The only time I can remember anyone having to lay about at all was in the foc’s’le mess which was the furthest one forward for the seamen. There was two fellows; Benson and Grey I think they were, they were in my mess,

they were good mates and one or the other of them would open the hammock up flat in the space between the two hammock bins with just enough space there and they’d flake out there but that was their spot. Nobody would ever try to intrude on that but for the rest of us to have a rest during the day, no matter how tired you were you just couldn't do it. It just wasn’t available. You could go to bed at night

and you’d think ‘Oh, I’ve got from ten o’clock til four o’clock in the morning. You beauty’ and you’d be sound asleep and the alarm bells would go and you’d go from a dead sleep put of your hammock into a dead run and run and if you weren’t at your action stations within a minute you were in trouble. And I used to have to get out of my hammock wherever I was and get down the upper deck and onto X-gun and have it ready

in 60 seconds from a dead sleep. And these are the sort of things that would happen in your sleep period and it was just exhausting. It really was, just exhausting. The stupid thing about it was when you did get to harbour instead of staying aboard and sleeping your head off if you weren’t duty watch, you’d go ashore with the gang and you’d probably go to the pictures, you might get pretty drunk,

or something like that and you really didn't get any rest. You might stagger back on board at midnight in time to get onboard and then six o’clock the next morning you’re up with a headache so it wasn’t all the navy’s fault but principally it was because you spent more time at sea than you did doing those things in harbour and I got to the stage, I had this particular mate of mine in five mess. We were both in Blue watch

and we could take turns at listening for the Boson’s pipe before we went to watch. You’d say “Your turn to hear the watch, the pipe tonight” and I’d hear it and the next night it’d be his turn. And I wouldn't hear it and those are the things we might get another half a minute. It was terrific. The other difficulty was, remember that all the living was in the mess deck

the food preparation, the cleaning up, the washing, the ironing, the letter writing, the playing cards and all of those thing, and you could get up into your hammock at say eight o’clock if you were lucky and you’d be in your hammock and there’d be all this noise underneath you and they’d probably, fifty percent of them would be smoking and the smoke would be tendriling up and falling into your hammock and you’d be breathing this is because

there was no ventilation in the mess and there was no prohibition of smoking in the mess and I think probably most of the fellows smoked up to fifty cigarettes a day and it was mostly all in the mess deck so it was a pretty passive smoking area and you’d go to bed and get up into your hammock at eight o’clock and it might be ten o’clock before you got to sleep really. Like into a decent sleep and you’d be awake again at ten to twelve.

Off and away you go again. The wonderful thing about it was, if you were in an area of no probable hostility they could go down to four watches where you’d have one watch one and three off and if you were lucky you might get a whole nights sleep. You might get to bed at eight o’clock and you mightn't be called to the Hanson until six o’clock the following morning but that was pretty rare. Usually it was three watches. Quite

often it was only two so it was pretty tiring.

There was a definite division. All the officers all called you by your title. It was either able seaman, or leading seaman or petty officer.

Or you called them ‘Sir’. There was no first names. Like in the navy today it's first names, probably good. I’m not going to make any comment about that because I went on a ship and I thought it was bloody terrible. The officers had a job to do, by and large they weren’t overbearing about it,

as I said before they were pretty laid back. The thing about the navy was you were never allowed to say please or thank you. That took time. And the reason why that

was, if you were in an action situation, that half second or whatever could make all the difference so it was always an order even at the lower ranks. As the leading seaman I would never have said “Would you please do this” I’d have said “Peter, go and fix that rope up” and you would go and fix it up. But the officers onboard the Norman

it was pretty agreeable really. If you got into trouble of course they’d put you on charge but you sort of expected that but the only time there was sort of any shouting or anything was if you were going alongside another ship to oil,

you know you’re at sea in a probably hostile situation you’d put the Costen gun over, you’d have to rig it up first and get everything ready and I’ll explain that in a minute and you’d be starting to lay back and get things over and the skipper would lean over the edge of the bridge and say “Hurry up down there! Hurry up! Hurry up!” because it was important, the ships were slowed down and they were going on a set course and if there was a submarine somewhere he would know that if you were

going at that pace then certainly he could hit you with a torpedo but no, there was never any sort of belligerent attitude about the officers onboard, it was all pretty good.

Yeah. At Burma it was

sort of an elongated sort of a business there. The first we went to was called Labutta and we went there with a ship called from memory the Amir and it was loaded up with troops and we had to get the troops ashore and then to do that before they went ashore we went in close and we

did some certain bombardments, some certain gun positions or something like that but I would presume an aircraft had been over and they had spotted where they were and there was one thing about the navy with their gun rig – if they had a distance with their radar to take bearings and things like that from known positions, and with the intricacies of their firing mechanisms they were pretty accurate

as to where they could lob things but the thing was to go in and try and take out anything that was dangerous and then once the troops were ashore if they needed a pre-bombardment at all to assist them well it would be a radio back and you’d just send a few shells over to that particular place and that’s the way the system worked. And in the Syrian campaign – I wasn’t there

but the Nizam was very much involved in Syria when the Australians went up and knocked the Vichy French out of Syria. They were doing a four hour rip down to – I forget the name of the place – they’d pick troops up and they’d zap them back and put them again and then they’d do bombardments and the troops that were ashore and things like that. Sort of break down the enemy a bit and that was the purpose of it. And as I said before I’m a bit

upset that I really don’t know whether some of the injured that came back aboard was the result of our firing what we did, who knows. Nobody would tell us. There were aircraft that sort of went backwards and forwards but we never got bombed or anything like that so that was it.

Yeah. Very interesting. Fate takes a lot of hands in things.

When my demob came up I was sent back to Brisbane at the Alice Street depot and I had to go before a vocational guidance officer – a young lieutenant. And he gave me a scrap of paper and it had squares and diamonds and rectangles in it and it had wheels and it had lines going along this way and it had an arrow on one line and you had to say which direction the arrow would be going on -

that wheel or that wheel and which one of those would go into what you know and it was a bit of a breeze I did it. And he said “You show great aptitude for engineering – would you like to be an engineer?” and I said “I wouldn't mind that” and he said “What was your educational standard?” and I said “Well I was only did sub-junior and I had to leave home” and he said “Oh well you’ll have to go back and do your junior and your senior,” and he

said “Six years at University for engineering,” and he said I don’t think the government would be able to assist you with that. And I said “Oh. All right” and he said “What did you do before?” and I said “Well, I was an apprentice barber.” “Oh,” He said “Yes. You show great aptitude for artistry and design. I suggest you go back to barbering.” So back to barbering I went and the rehabilitation at that stage had a system where you could get a job for three months and be trained up.

So I went back to Southport to a barber that I knew and he took me on for three months and I said ‘Have another crack because they’re paying me to do this’. So he put in for another three months of rehab, he said I wasn’t doing too well so I got six months down there. Then I was met by this young lady who said that she knew me and we got to know one another pretty well and so

I managed to get a job in Brisbane at Rothwell’s outfitters, men’s outfitters in Edwards street and they had a mezzanine floor there with four barbers chairs in it so I applied for a job there and I got it and after a while I started to cut the hair of the Deputy Chief Health Inspector of the Brisbane City Council. And he said to me one day, he said

“Bob, ever thought of becoming a health inspector?” and I thought to myself “Yeah, I have.” He said “Oh, that’s good” because I thought that during the depression the council had shire clerk and engineer and health inspector and I thought that would be a pretty good job so I thought that would do me so he arranged for me to get a job up in the city council as a mosquito locater and so

I resigned from Rothwell’s and went up there as a mosquito locator and the fellow who was in charge of the section for mosquito locator was a former Army hygiene officer sergeant hygiene officer and he took a lot of ex-personnel – didn't have to be army – under his wing and he ran a course at home

in parallel with the course people. I’ll explain that in a minute, so he said “What’s your education?” and I said “Sub-junior” “Well, ‘look, to become a health inspector you’ve got to be a plumber or a builder or have a junior certificate.” I said “Well, I’m not a plumber and I’m not a builder” and he said

“What are you going to do?” and I said “Well, I’ll go back and I’ll study for my junior certificate.” So I used to take two lunches to work, eat one at lunchtime and then I’d jump on the tram at evening and I’d eat my last lunch on the tram over to the Trocadero which was the adult education place at South Brisbane and I took five subjects – English, Maths, Geography, Algebra and Geography. Geography was a breeze – I’d been everywhere.

I passed the junior that year and by this time I had one child which made it a bit difficult. So okay, then I got moved up into the City Hall proper as a clerk now that I had a juniors certificate I could become a clerk in the health department and that’s where I learnt the office work associated with what the health inspectors did and one

night a week I used to go with three other fellows down to Pat Sparks’ home underneath his house and he coached us with the course because it was sanitary inspectors certificate that was run by the Royal Sanitary Institute in London and the state government health department were the local board of examiners and each

member of that board had set papers that he used to send you – it was by correspondence. What they didn't tell you was give you any tuition on the Health Acts and Regulations oh no, they just said “These are the Acts and Regulations so we’d go down over to Pat Sparks” and he would lecture us on the diseases, period of incubation, period of infectivity and the duration of the disease and he’d ask you a question and if

you couldn't answer it the whole class used to have to sit there til you eventually came up with the answer. Anyhow, after two years I qualified as a health inspector and I started at the Brisbane City Council in 1952 as a health inspector after being employed there for two years and they called for an inspectors and it was wonderful it as about eight pound a week. I thought ‘You Beaut’. When they appointed me because they wanted to appoint another

one who’d been a cadet they dropped us all back to assistant inspectors and saved 2 bucks a week which paid for the other fellow’s wages. So the Union said “You can appeal this if you want to” said to a couple of us and I said “Look, I’ve got the job and I’m pleased to have got started” and the other bloke said “Yeah, forget about it. We’ll go this way.” Because I thought well this early in the game I don’t want to get any black marks – you know first cab off the rank so

after a couple of years poking around about the city areas under pretty close supervision I was sent out to an outside area and which involved a lot of things. In those days a health inspector’s job was entirely different to what it was now. We had a lot of infectious diseases which were happening because of bad drainage and general hygiene after the war. A development of house without drainage and stuff like that.

No food control and food poisoning was fairly rampant and we had control of piggeries and diaries and horse stables and kennels and catteries and all the other nuisances that people felt rightly to complain about and drainage and apart from drainage, storm water drainage and all those sorts of things you had to learn. And because of that I went back to the

Tech and I took a drainers course because until I did that I couldn't picture what was going on underground and I needed to do that. I went back to the University and I did a course on mosquito and biting midges control and I went up to Gatton and did a course there on food handling and then later on I went down to the QUT [Queensland University of Technology] and I did a course on noise control so

I felt that that was, would fill the job because the course itself didn't hold those things and about 1966 the association became amalgamated with NSW [New South Wales] and Victoria and all those places – a national body and it was mooted that we would move up away out of this correspondence with London and become our own thing. So I got involved,

I started off to make overtures to the director of health to get away from that and set up a course in the QUT and fortunately Bernie Keefer who was the chief involved mental health officer in the state government, he foresaw this as well because I could see that down the track, things were going to change and we weren’t qualified to do the job. So eventually about

after about six years, about 1972 I suppose the course was moved away from London into the QIT [Queensland Institute of Technology] as an associate diploma but we were in and they said “Are you happy with that?” I said “We’re in. Now we start to work on getting what we want.” Because they decided what we would be taught and Bernie and I both knew that what they wanted to teach us wasn’t what the job required so we remained on this

commonwealth educational part of it for about three years until we got the course balanced out and now they all come out as graduates in environmental health. In 1973 I was selected to become one of the two supervising health surveyors and I was made Supervising Health Surveyor North and a mate of mine that just died, Vince, he was

made Supervising Health Surveyor South and we had about twenty men each underneath us and in that period there, there were some men [who] wanted certain ordinances made to cover different things so I was given the job of drafting them and I drafted up what I saw the job needed and then I tool it down to the city solicitor and he sort of put in legalese and

so they then went to the local government department and the laws were passed and the last one I did was they asked for a standard for caravan parks and camping grounds and I did that one and Brisbane City Council made it an ordinance and I’m given to understand hat after a while the state government took the whole lot of that up as their state standard for camping grounds and caravan parks.

I found it a disadvantage actually. Strange isn’t it? Because of all of those years when everything had to be do this, don’t do that, I lacked a persuasion

that I would go out and I would see that something was wrong and I would say “I’m sorry Peter, but what is on your place is wrong and I’m going to have to write a notice on you to fix it up” and I would write a notice and I would say “Now, if you do this, you’ll be okay and if anyone else comes along to you and says anything different you just say to them ‘Well you just take

that up with Bob Carr’ because that’s what he said and there's the bit of paper see?’’. But I wasn’t a smooth talker. I don't know what's the term, I can’t think of the term but…

Yeah. I think I came over too strong. I think that was an old navy thing – I’m different now. Quite different, I’ve sort of mellowed.

One thing I’ve learnt about all of that time you know after the war people lived under some pretty terrible conditions like under the old army huts and things like that all around about the place and hygiene and sanitation was at a low ebb and then they started to get out in houses and people talk about them now and say ‘Oh they’ve only got that little shanty down the road’ and I say to them ‘But it's their home you know? If that’s all they can afford accept it.

Do what you can do for them’ whereas once upon a time I would have gone in there with a rod of stone and said ‘Fix this, fix that’ and so on and so forth but what always problemed me with my work, even though I knew what I was asking them to do was very important I always took it home that it worried me that I was asking those people to spend money – quite likely they didn't have it to spend. Because I reckon by comparison I had a good job and I didn't have enough money to do

what had to be done so I always had that bit of heart in me that worried about it. But I always remembered that I didn't make the law. And it was a special section in the health act that neglect of duty and it wasn’t up to me to make my own rules as I went along and that was the way I worked. It was unfortunate, the law says you shall do this and you shall do it as far as I was concerned so I didn't have

any right to change it but I like to feel that in the long run I accomplished something. But I got married and I had three children – that’s my lovely three daughters up there and they’ve given me seven grandkids of which I’m very proud. It was only a temporary job – I joined the council in 1950 and I resigned from there in 1983. In the meantime I’d lost my first wife through a divorce

and I think probably the reason for that was that I was too busy doing things for health inspectors and not enough time that way because I did all of this business of getting the educational standard up and when I got that up I took on both the Brisbane City Council and all the authorities in Queensland on an industrial issue which took a lot out of me and sort of fell by the wayside so that’s very unfortunate.

But I just hope that accomplished something that by what I did people were more disease free and I’ve got a son-in-law who’s a doctor and I’ve had even my own doctor at the time saying “I work against you fellows” was my own MLO [Medical Liaison Officer] at the time. He said “What do you mean?” I said “I work hard to see that

you don’t get sick patients” and he said “Well that’s fair enough.” It's a funny thing when my youngest daughter married this doctor I happened to be there one night and I was invited to dinner because he was having a doctor who’d qualified with him and his wife over for dinner that night and he said to me he said “What’s it like now to have a doctor in the family Bob?” and I said

“Doesn’t faze me very much” and I said that my first wife’s cousin was the Director of Public Health and I said “The local medical officer of health always used to get me to go out on the communicable diseases with him and tell him what to do and then he’d get me to write a report so he could sign it. I’m pretty used to them!” Went off like a bloody lead blanket but that was a fact. No after I retired and of course

after the divorce of course I didn't have much money I built this place with the amount of money I had, it's sort of an owner-builder job, and I’d just about got it finished and I was on the pension and the government changed the goal posts and that meant that I didn't have a pension anymore – well, I had about thirty bucks a fortnight so just at that stage I was invited by the Noosa Shire Council to go up and work up there.

The chief up there had a bit of a problem he’d had a fellow working under him that was used to grow marijuana under the front ramp to the council and if the surf was up he’d have his surf board out so the chief up there he was told if he didn't get the department straightened up in six months he’d get the chop so he asked me to go up and well, I’m afraid I was hard work for them.

In Hastings Street alone I think there was four aldermen, and this one incident, the husband of one of the aldermen owned the last restaurant in Hastings Street and I worked out a system where I’d start on a particular facet and I would work right through all of those so that if I was going to you, you could say “What about Michelle? You haven’t gone to her place.” And I’d say “No, but I’ve been to Bob Carr’s, I’m doing you and then

I’ll do Michelle. I won’t miss anybody” and when I got to this bloke in Hastings Street he says “You know they’re all talking about you in this town Bob” and I said “Is that a fact?“ ”Yeah, hey reckon they’re all in leaning over the fence” and so I said “Well thanks very much.” So I said “But no matter, I’m going to inspect your place and you’re going to be no difference.” and he said ‘That’s good, cause my wife’s a councillor, I wouldn't want anything else.” When I went back to the office I said to the engineer I said “Could I please have one of those pink

iridescent hats that the men wear on the road?” and he said “What would you want on of those for?” I said “Because they’re talking about me in town and they don’t want to miss me. So I want to walk and wear that hat when I’m going around so they can say ‘There he is!’’. I still have the hat out there. So that was my life. Well, since then I lasted up there for nine months and I was pretty sick, the health department was in a bit of a mess and of course the council

itself didn’t know the law and they delegated it to this poor fellow and he was doing these things when the law said that it was the Councils responsibility. So he said to me “What are you going to do?” and I said “Leave it to me”. So all the flammable and combustible liquids the council had to make the decisions you see so I did all of those, sent all of these files up and they got this first two heaps of files up there because I was living away from home just boarding in a room up there; work

all day and go home and write it up about eleven o’clock at night and they called me up at the first meeting and they said “What’s all this? All this reading we’ve got to do?” I said “Well, the law says that you’ve got to make a decision on these things” “Oh, have we?” I said “Yep. That’s yours” “Have we got to read all these things?” Of course being Brisbane City Council I knew how to do it see. So I said “Well, look. Each one of those has got to have a recommendation on it; either you grant it or

you hold it or you refuse it. How about if I send all the files up and I send a schedule up and all of those that have got grant or recommend on it you just work off the schedule and recommend that. Those that you want refused have a good look at those and make up your mind whether you want to refuse them or whether you want to give them more time but if those you want to hold just have a read of it and say “We’ll withhold it for a month”. “Oh that’s a great idea”.

So by the time I left that Christmas, one of the aldermen came down and he said “Well, thanks very much,” he said “You’ve pulled us up by the boot strings into the twentieth century”. But there was one thing that I fell out with and that was the Mayor. I’d done all of the food premises I said to you in order and I was told that the owner of a property

at Pomona would give me a hard time. So I left him til the dead last and I went out there and he gave me a hard time then he called his wife in and she didn’t want me to, if I wanted to look at something she’d go and stand in front of it and do all of that but, too old up here so I saw everything I wanted and got all the answers I wanted and said “This si what we’re going to have to do” and then they started “Come

and sit down here. We’re involved with this church and we do all of these things for the community and that things for the community and you’re asking us to do all of these things and we’ll have to spend money here that we can’t somewhere else” so I said “Well, I’ve asked everybody else to do the same thing and you’re the last one I’ve had to ask”. That went on for about an hour or more and I went back to the office and never thought anything more about it and then the next morning I was going into the office and the chief said to me “Oh,” he said “I haven’t

introduced you to the Major yet,” he said “He saw me the other day and he said “I haven’t met this new bloke yet”. So he took me up into his office and he said “This is Bob Carr” and he said “What were you doing out at Pomona yesterday? You go out there and you run a riot over all these people” and I said to myself “I don’t have to cop this” so I got stuck into him. And he was starting to walk around to the end of the desk and I thought “We’re going to come to blows

over this” and just then there was a knock on the door and his secretary came in and she said “You’re appointment’s ready”. He said “I’ll see you later”. But that was the end of that. I wasn’t prepared to back down I was prepared to walk away so anyhow that was, I never spoke to him again in the whole of the rest of the time I worked for that shore council so that was the end of my working life.

Yes. I think that Anzac Day is probably in my book anyway the most important date in the calendar. I recognise that right back even as far as the Boer war, people have recognised Australia as the place to live to have friends, to be worth fighting for, and to

keep us the way we live sacrosanct and I didn’t see any actual death on my ship. But there were a lot of people who gave their lives for that – I lost an uncle in the first war and I think it’s really, really important that the public keep on getting this brought before them every year. And I think what is great happening at the moment is the fact that many of the RSLs [Returned and Services League] are now going around and getting the children

to recognise the RSL and Anzac Day in particular. What does distress me is some of the veterans in the Second World War particularly object strongly to youth marching in their parades and I think that’s wrong. If a youth wants to march in a parade that his father or grandfather was in I think these fellows that

want to put a stop to that or try to put a stop to that are very short in their mind. I know that I go down to the combined, Anzac Day combined parade committee and I listen to this sort of business and it always comes out that these sorts of things are raised and it always comes out that if the unit is prepared to have those children there then that is the units right to do so and of course here on Bribie Island they’ve got this community

link which is pretty strong - have you heard about that? It was started off by a fellow here on the island that we get the schools to recognise Anzac Day and be part of the communities link to the forbears. They need not necessarily have a relative whose passed on, they might only have somebody that they know that doesn’t have a relative whose passed on and they want to recognise that person and every

second year here on the island the community link people supported by the RSL and the club, they take a bus down to Canberra to march on Anzac Day. I think that’s great and I’m damn proud to get out there and march with the N-Class fellows in Anzac Day because we were there, we did our bit too. It’s great.

Say that again please.

I did it with dedication. I was full on with what I did in the navy. I tried to do everything that was asked if me the right way and do it without complaint. I felt that my contribution was worthy because the people who were governing me from the captain through the hierarchy to wherever saw the need for me to be where I was whether it was a job I didn’t particularly like to do like the fleet train or something else. That was what they wanted me to do, I was proud to be part of

the navy per se and the N-class destroyers in particular. And I was pretty satisfied. I think I did my bit.