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ORAL HISTORY RECORDING

ACCESSION NUMBER: S00227

TITLE: Doreen Langley’s service with the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force (WAAF) during the Second World War.

INTERVIEWEE: Doreen Langley

INTERVIEWER: Joyce Thomson

RECORDING DATE: 23rd August 1984

RECORDING LOCATION: Avonlea Beach

SUMMARY:

TRANSCRIBER: WRITEpeople

TRANSCRIPTION DATE: August 2004

www.writepeople.com.au 1 S01310 13/01/2021

Interview with Miss Doreen Langley at 34 Chisholm Avenue, Avonlea Beach on the 23rd August 1984.

LANGLEY: Doreen Langley, WAAF No. 110802. I was born in London. This was because my parents were married in Egypt. My mother was an English woman, my father was an Australian soldier, and my mother returned to England to have her baby, while my father returned with the troops from Egypt. I understand I was about six weeks old when I came out by boat with my mother in 1920. I’m reputed to have contracted smallpox aboard the ship. Anyway, I was an ailing baby. My mother hadn’t visited Australia before. Her life had been boarding school, university, in residence at the Royal Holloway College and then living in Egypt. Her father was Irish and her mother probably from Alsase. It’s a little bit vague but all her relations were in France and Holland, she was very much a European. I have one sister who is 7 ½ years younger and she was born in Warnambool, Victoria. I think my parents badly wanted a boy. There are no more Langleys of our particular grouping and my sister was named Patricia after Patrick Plunkett who was my mother’s father. I’ve rather said a lot about this because I think the fact that my father was Australia and my mother was English was a great source of argument and divisiveness in the family although they happily celebrated their golden wedding even though they were a highly incompatible couple. My primary education was at a large country town, Warnambool in Victoria. I guess as a small child, I had a feeling of being specially watched, as my father was headmaster of the local high school. There was strict vetting of one’s friends, compared to what children have now. The children I played with had to be children of my mother’s friends rather than children I had known. Perhaps I should say daughters rather than children because there didn’t seem to be any boys. My own interests were reading, dressing up, acting up, the usual kid’s plays, a fantasy world, play always had to be quiet and well behaved. Pretty well, it was always in my own home where we had a special playhouse where we could play. I learned a good deal of poetry and I think I must have started reading for myself at a fairly early age. Here again, the books were all English books and rather than the books that an Australian child would have. I did things like belonging to the Brownies because that was acceptable as a family friend was the Brown Owl. I was encouraged to cook and that again related to my mother because when she arrived at www.writepeople.com.au 2 S01310 13/01/2021 the first very small country town from England, she could not cook, quite literally, and had to return to England two years later to get as much information as she could about how to run a house. That’s to say that the expectation at that time was of course that she would not return to Australia but she did. We didn’t have things like camping holidays because she didn’t like them. We did live at a seaside town but again my mother didn’t like the beach, there was too much sand, we often had picnics in the summer evenings at some of the rocky scenic places but these were primarily designed for adults rather than children, compared to things that happened to children of my friends now. I learned the piano because that was the right thing to do but I wasn’t very successful and I suppose then and right through my life I’ve had the feeling that success was all important and it was not worth trying anything unless you were really going to succeed and be the best, so it means there’s a whole list of things that I simply do not do and perhaps haven’t even tried. In 1930 of all times actually, we went as a family to England because my father had never been and this seemed to be very important. We stayed with my mother’s mother who had actually visited Australia a few years before, but her main interest in life was not her family but contract bridge and I was ten at the time and felt very responsible for the behaviour of my small sister, especially when parents went to Switzerland and we were sent to stay with past college friends of my mother. It was a very successful year away but of course one did return to the Depression and a fairly unsettling time. The expectation for both my sister and myself were that we would automatically go onto University. My parents each had a degree. My mother felt very strongly, that we should earn our own living. We were not to be dependent on a man, but it was also a woman’s right that she should have a child, and I’ve fallen down on that very badly. Somehow this seemed to relate much more strongly to me than it did to my sister and I seemed to remember that I was the one who was responsible for my sister choosing, or being pushed, into physiotherapist, rather than my parents. I suppose that was natural because by that stage I had been to the university. Secondary education was at Warnambool High School after we returned from England in 1931. I must have been absolutely obnoxious because I loved London, had had several experiences that were unusual for a small girl from a country town, such as staying in a country house where there were butlers and servants, meeting Prince Ralph Motear, only a Polish prince but still, and these occasions were actually because of my father’s friendship with people who had been in the Imperial Camel Corp in World War One with whom he’d www.writepeople.com.au 3 S01310 13/01/2021 remained friendly. He had the ability to get on with everybody, he was a very likeable person, he enjoyed company, could tell a good story. There doesn’t seem to be the same success with my mother’s sort of school and university friends on that trip except for the husband of one of them where they all found they had a mutual fondness for cricket and of course this was the time of Bodyline and the Tests of 1930, which my parents attended. A lot of her friends had become what they were, English sort of upper class and we were very different being a rather impoverished schoolteacher from a country town in Victoria, a State of far-off Australia. So, because I was difficult, it was decided I would go to boarding school at the age of 14. One of my friends had gone to boarding school at Melbourne Church of England Grammar School and this seemed to be the right place for me. There were difficulties with me going to Warnambool High School where I did go for a couple of years. I was embarrassed that my father was headmaster. Whether he was embarrassed about me I don’t really know. My mother didn’t approve of the other girls there who were twelve, thirteen year olds who were interested in boys, physically well-developed and so on. I was very unhappy; I think puberty was a very unhappy time for me. I had painful menstruation, terribly bad skin, generally everything was wrong. So it was know as being good for me to go to boarding school but it was also expensive and how it was going to be paid for was rather a problem. At that time, my father became very restless with the Education Department, and became interested in politics. He hadn’t gone through the usual progression of local government because my mother didn’t approve of the local councillors but he had become very friendly with Jim Fairburn who was the State member at that time and Dad sort of ran his campaign, or ran his Warnambool office, and ran his campaign when he moved into Federal politics and parents became very friendly with both the Fairburns. So, this meant that we had the loan of the car, or permanent use of the car, and through the Fairburn connections my mother got a job on the Melbourne Herald, writing social notes once a week at tuppence a line, and when 1934 came along she visited the country homes in the Western District which were also celebrating their centenary at that time. So my boarding school was paid for at the rate of tuppence a line. That was one thing but there were also problems with clothes and how I dressed and so on, so this person, this woman who’d never sewn in her life went to the Warnambool Technical College, learned how to sew, made my clothes, and I also received parcels of clothes from her sister who lived in England and they were very exotic garments, some of which I can www.writepeople.com.au 4 S01310 13/01/2021 still remember. I guess by this time I knew a great deal about myself, that there were lots of things I couldn’t do. I couldn’t sing in tune, I couldn’t run, I was hopeless at sport; I was as tall as I am now, and I was skinny, unattractive. A lot of their expectations I was never going to fulfil but maybe I could go and fulfil the academic ones. At boarding school in found I could cope with most of the situations though there was a great deal I didn’t like about it and that was the sort of thing of mistresses having crushes on other mistresses and this was the boarding school part rather than the main school part, and pupils having crushes on mistresses and little girls having crushes on prefects and a really unhealthy atmosphere that I felt it was unhealthy at the time and looking back it still was. Gilman Jones was at the end of her time there and the school itself I think was reasonably running well although the people in charge of the boarding houses were rather sad people who obviously were very underpaid and badly paid I should think because they got their full accommodation so that they didn’t have much going for them in terms of personality or looking after children. Discipline was very strict but in the teaching side I think there were some really excellent teachers, particularly in mathematics who Miss Wardell who was an English woman from Gherkin, and I think I was the only person doing Honours Maths so they were by nature tutorials which was good. We had a very enthusiastic English mistress. Perhaps that’s where my real love of being read to aloud started because she used to read to us from very modern for the time books on Friday afternoons. We had very good physics mistress and this is the time for some reason I drifted and drifted is the only word I can use and it was probably because of either not liking a subject or the teacher giving the subject that I drifted into domestic science which is probably the start of nutrition. Again, I can’t remember the name of the teacher but I think I was the only person doing it, especially at a level for leaving certificate exams and I can still remember some of the things that we talked about.

THOMSON: What did you talk about?

LANGLEY: Well I can remember writing an essay on the sun and the importance of the sun to food basically but just general well being. I guess I’ve always loved the sun. There seemed to be what would now be the modern project and things, lots of those that one had to do on one’s own which was quite good. Boarding school and school, the main things were there were no men and being a boarder and not knowing www.writepeople.com.au 5 S01310 13/01/2021 very many people in Melbourne and certainly people who had sons, I really didn’t know any boys of the same age although some of my friends had friends at the Boys Grammar School. I went through I suppose the usual scenes at school, I was a probationer and a prefect, and I was Head of the boarding school in my last year, and much to everybody’s delight I got a prize for all-round excellence which was considered very funny as I was hopeless at sport but I did manage to play hockey and I think I helped rather than played. The book that I read at that time which I re-read last year, which did sort of make a tremendous impression on me, was Vera Britain’s Testament of Youth, which I think lots of people around that period read, and the events that took place was of course the abdication of Edward VIII, which we all listened to with tears in our eyes, and the rise of Hitler and into Poland at that stage, and I can remember thinking that that was the end of a particular era and the beginning of something else. I don’t think I can make any comparisons of teaching methods then which is a long while ago, and now, except to say that you know there’s always just one important thing, I think, as far as teaching’s concerned, and that is your ability to transmit your enthusiasm for the subject that you’re teaching, and I don’t think modern methods, old methods, anything makes any difference to that. If the teacher’s already bored, then no matter how often she stands on his or her head, it won’t make any difference to the pupils. They’ll be bored too. So methods might have changed but I think that’s a fundamental point. As for fliers, women fliers, I looked upon them I guess as heroes but we had some slight personal relationship with Jean Batton in that her brother was on the same ship as we travelled on when we returned from England so that had a personal impression. I had no wish to emulate them because then, as now, I still get travel sick so flying is something that just doesn’t appeal to me. I think I was more concerned at that time with my own growing up with, there always seemed problems with my parents getting on with each other, with politics which they were interested in, which I was starting to be interested in, and all the problems of money because we never seemed to have any. My father was a very generous man and he didn’t relate to his gifts to his income and so there were always great crises, particularly around tax time when there wasn’t pay as you earn in those days and it had to be found, so eventually my mother took over the handling of accounts which was probably a better thing. It was just assume that I would go onto university. I had to sit for a scholarship or bursary at Janet Clark Hall, and it was somehow assumed that I would go to Janet Clark Hall, I don’t quite remember what www.writepeople.com.au 6 S01310 13/01/2021 the connection was but I think it was a natural progression from Murten Hall that you went onto there.

THOMSON: Did you get the bursary?

LANGLEY: Oh I got it, yes, and I got a free place from the Education Department for paying for the university fees. That was the four years there; it was a very happy time in my life. I think you were living with a group of girls, women, young women who had similar intellectual interests, certainly the ones who were in the senior years seem to be very excellent academic women to whom I could emulate I suppose. Only one girl from Murten Hall came on into Janet Clark Hall the same time as I did, and we’re still very good friends. So you formed a group of friends at that time that you didn’t really lose, no matter what happened afterwards, and to me if people ever asked me later on in life, whether they should send their child to boarding school or send them to college when they went to university, I’m a very firm believer of college at the university because I think those friends that you make there are the ones that you really keep.

THOMSON: And what course did you do?

LANGLEY: I did science. Why did I do science? Because what I wanted to do was medicine but medicine was a long course, six years I think, obviously my family was not going to be able to afford that. I was also led to believe that I was psychologically unsuited to do it so science was the next best thing, and you started with four subjects, the same more as less as what they are now, maths, zoology, physics and chemistry in first year. Then choices had to be made and I wanted to go onto biochemistry because I was very impressed by and attached to a biochemistry talk tutor who lived in residence at Janet Clark Hall, and with biochemistry went microbiology as we know it now, bacteriology as it was known then, and usually chemistry. I wasn’t good at chemistry and it’s important I excelled so that that’s where I switched to nutrition, which was a hotchpotch of a subject. You could do it as a major subject, so for the second and third year it was biochemistry, bacteriology and nutrition. I participated very little in university affairs because college gave us a very full life and of course I regret that now. Within the faculty and with college tutorials, there were both men www.writepeople.com.au 7 S01310 13/01/2021 and women students and I think we were as fellow students anywhere. I don’t think there was much difference in relationships, as they existed then, as they exist now, except that you wouldn’t be able to have as much contact. We could not have students in our room, male students in our rooms at Janet Clark Hall, we had to see them in what was called a mouse trap which was a room near the front door. We had very strict rules about going out at night and when you’d come back and so on, but life went on pretty well really, and there were always college dances and plays and so on where you could mix. Most of my friends were in medicine so there was a sort of ready built-in group there. I think women were respected, the university was a very small place and there were a lot of I think probably a higher proportion of woman tutors amongst the college people than there were men tutors and they were excellent and the men respected them a great deal. In the university I don’t think that women held any great positions other than in women’s sporting things though I don’t know terribly much about it. Certainly when I came later to Sydney University, I was shocked to find there was segregation in the male and female unions because I had only been used to one building and one union, but I would suspect there hadn’t been a female president at Melbourne University. I really only knew what I read in [inaudible] and I didn’t play any part in university politics so I was very aware of people like Chester Wilmot and [inaudible] Collin and the big names that were there. I think as far as we were conscious of anything, we were for the empire and against the nazis. We were also of course very interested in Russia and very much the utopian ideal of socialism as we believed it to be and I don’t know whether you remember, but there was about that time Admiral Von Ruckner, was it? I can remember going to this absolutely packed meeting where he spoke and we all knew he was a nazi spy, just setting out the coastline for the Germans. I think we were all starting to feel very critical about the idea of empire but again Nazis were evil so you knew there would be a war. There was in my mind, an absolute certainty there would be another war but somehow it didn’t seem to involve Australia very much. It would be fought in Europe. I think my main political discussion and arguments were in my home where I went for all my vacations and where I had very firm and definite beliefs of being absolutely right at the ages of 17, 18 and 19, and I can remember leaving the table many times in a violent temper with the lack of understanding of my parents. But I guess that happens in most homes except that I understand there were somethings people don’t discuss at the table but we did discuss and argue a great deal www.writepeople.com.au 8 S01310 13/01/2021 and there were a lot of arguments, especially about Russia and the conditions in Russia. I think I had very utopian views. In college, a lot of the discussions I remember occurred in senior students’ rooms and it was a great privilege to be asked to have supper in a senior student’s room, mainly they were, I seem to remember, art students who’ve discussed such areas as philosophy and history and English literature of which I knew nothing and these were terrific as far as I was concerned. I became even more interested in reading poetry and certainly just reading, reading, reading regardless, nothing to do with my work. I think for a while I was librarian for the college library so I was able to choose the books that were bought, which was great. I did read a lot and I think one of the great influences on me at that time was the biochemistry live-in college who was also very passionate of classical music and so I was introduced to that which was very different from the music we’d had musical evenings at home. I suppose we all went along assuming that England had a year to prepare for war after Munich and that Britain and her allies were win and would win fairly quickly. I can remember listening to the Declaration of War in the common room at JCH, with other students, but there was, as I thought at the time, was a Polish refugee that Principal Miss Joske had taken in, people tell me now she was German. Either way, while we were saying what tragedy that war was happening, she was taking it very personally and thought our fuss was ridiculous because either she was Polish and Poland was being attacked, or she was a German and they were her people doing the attacking. I can remember this really personal impact that it had for her and she felt very, she thought we were very silly I think. It was September, we were in the third year of our course and that was much more important than the war. It was important that one got a good degree and for my friends and medical students, their courses went on for another few years, another two years they were condensed and they lost out in a lot of their vocations and so the war didn’t make that much impact except again from my home point of view because my mother did have cousins and relations in Europe from whom, the ones in France, we didn’t hear after France fell and we did trace them through the Red Cross later, much later, and her uncle was a very large man, died of starvation during the war because he just couldn’t get enough to eat. But, you know, the war was sort of more personal, not really a general threat. Europe was a long way away. What else? The nutrition you ask about was a wonderful pot pouri of subjects. I can remember studying agriculture with Professor Waddon who is well known in Melbourne. I can remember going to the Emily www.writepeople.com.au 9 S01310 13/01/2021

McPherson College to learn cooking, there were all sorts of bits and pieces, and I had to spend one year as a trainee dietitian at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, which was an old building. There were four of us, trainee dietitians, two had come from the Emily McPherson College, the other one had come from doing a degree course in New Zealand and she and I of course were the quote, unquote “superior members of the group” and we have remained friends. The more I did of the subject, the more I enjoyed it, and I got my medical side to it from the Royal Melbourne Hospital where diet was used in those days a great deal in the treatment of diabetes and gastric ulcers and so on. I also came to realise the importance of nutrition education which seemed to me could make a great difference to people, especially in Australia where we had so much good food. There shouldn’t be any malnutrition and yet you did come across pockets of it. After graduation, because of my honours degree in bacteriology, I was invited to go and work at the Walter Enlisa Hall Institute; Mac Burnett as he was then, was looking for somebody to work on dysentery bacteria [inaudible]. This was an incredibly lonely job because I worked by myself in a room that had leaking gas burners, again in the old Melbourne Hospital. Burnett at that stage was only deputy director, he was a very shy man, he hadn’t reached the stage of fame that very soon became his. I think it was that year he made his first trip to America and he was really shy of women. There were two women working for him and I was only prepared to work there until I got a job as a dietitian, which is what I wanted to do. I lived in a boarding house in Toorak, I was desperately unhappy, I didn’t like the job I was doing, didn’t have enough belief in myself and what I could do to be a good research worker because I think you really had to believe in what you were doing and that was again before the time there was a team doing the research. We were very much on our own and it was very lonely so when there was a job coming up at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, I decided I would be a junior dietitian there. Well, whether it was a good choice or bad one I don’t know. We were a group of junior dietitians who lived in a little house opposite the main hospital, which has since been pulled down. It was a cottage and there was only one other junior dietitian who hadn’t been trained at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and she came from New Zealand and we had still kept that friendship from all those years ago, a friendship based on hate actually, because of the place where we were working. The conditions were very bad. I was used to dietitians being highly respected and regarded because our chief dietitian at Melbourne Hospital was respected and loved by the hospital and this was www.writepeople.com.au 10 S01310 13/01/2021 not the case for Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and the dietitians were not liked and it was understandable why they weren’t, and life was very difficult. It was made even more difficult because of the war and the fact that unskilled people could get jobs in munitions factories which was infinitely preferable to working in a hospital kitchen so that one spent one’s day time literally cooking, preparing the meals because there weren’t enough cooks, and at night you did your diet lists and things that had to be done, and this was my introduction to the cockroach. I had not met one in my sheltered existence in Victoria but I don’t think Royal Prince Alfred Hospital’s ever been able to get rid of theirs. Again, I was very unhappy. I became quite ill with boils, which again was a new experience I hadn’t had. I saw my father occasionally who by this stage was a Brigadier in the army and I can remember weeping and being very utterly miserable. I left, and I went home, home being at that stage in Bendigo. I must have put my name down with the Melbourne University Appointments Board because I got a telegram saying there appeared to be an interesting job. I think too at this stage I also did make a tentative application to the army but didn’t seem to get very far and when I got this telegram saying that the Fourth General US Army Hospital which had taken over the New Melbourne Hospital which had never been used by Victorians, had come without dietitians or physiotherapists and was looking for them. So the New Zealand girl and myself, who had both trained together at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, went together as dietitians to the Fourth General US Army Hospital. I guess from my point of view, this achieved two things – I was contributing to the war effort, let it be the American war effort which was fairly important to us, and I found that that was very acceptable as far as I was concerned because we had had American soldiers billeted with us in Bendigo and one fellow and I are still friends after all these years, and I’ve stayed with him in the States and so the Americans were very much accepted, as being necessary for Australia, and at the same time I was doing the work that I knew which was being a hospital dietitian which again gave me the medical contacts as well as the food contact. Also, you know, there was an eye to the future because the war had not gone for that long and study of nutrition was much more advanced in the States than in Australia and this might give me a leg-in to that. I think I didn’t do anything else. I think my leisure time was taken up by, at this stage, I had a flat which I shared with a couple of other people, I would return to Bendigo fairly often because my mother and my sister were there, my father was away, and I was away. I still saw a good deal of my friends at www.writepeople.com.au 11 S01310 13/01/2021 the University who at this stage now were probably having their first babies. They had married and were living either with their parents or tiny flats so I thought I didn’t have to do anything else. I can’t really remember about attitudes towards servicewomen but I can’t remember any contrary attitudes. They were there; they were on the trams and the buses. They weren’t as well dressed or as well equipped or as well off as the Americans with whom I worked and especially comparing the American nurses with the American servicewomen, they were infinitely better dressed. That was to be expected. I didn’t have any friends in the women’s services because as I say, my university friends had mainly gone into the matrimonial and motherhood situation. So I knew very little about the women’s services and I can only recall one girl who might have been at primary school way back who went into the [inaudible]. So I worked with the Americans quite happily though towards the end it wasn’t happy because I think probably again my mother, probably my father thought that because you were working in a military establishment, you ought to have some sort of military title, rather than be a civilian working in that situation. The Americans were all the time saying they were going to move and they did eventually move up north and the question was whether you moved with them or whether you didn’t, and certainly again I had no intention of moving with them if I wasn’t given a commission, so in the end I think I left them or they left me, I’m not quite sure how it happened but I went back to Bendigo and I suppose because of the letters I’d written home it was decided that I should write and I should write up my experiences of working and living with the Americans which I did and which then was sort of send around to various people, such as the solicitor to take out all the libelous bits and various people who knew about writing. It was hailed as a great, great work but I never saw it as my book seeing the light of day and there were at this stage a lot of books being written about one’s experiences in the army or the air force or wherever, and I had a vague feeling about the time that I did see it as an American publication saying the same sorts of things. It certainly got a good critic from an American company, but there were problems of paper shortage and so on but certainly it gave me ideas that I would be alright which I think was terrible because I find it very difficult to write. For three months I was unemployed, apart from doing that. The end of it, I seemed to feel that the only thing for me to do was to join one of our own services and this certainly met with I should think real encouragement at home because my father was in the army. I certainly didn’t want a civilian job but again it www.writepeople.com.au 12 S01310 13/01/2021 was extraordinary that I just didn’t know any women in the services. I’d interviewed the army early in the year and I had been told that even to be an officer I’d first have to do a rookie’s course and also in the army were two dietitians that I’d known from Royal Prince Alfred Hospital with whom I’d had real problems working and I thought I’ll bet I’d be sent to where they were and I didn’t want that again. I rang the army again but didn’t seem to get much satisfaction. I suppose the army was at the top of my list because my father, being in the army. I went to the WAAF which took me back to my own school because the WAAF interviewed me which I thought, looking back, was pretty amazing when you’re a civilian off the street and you just want to find out about it and you actually got an interview with the director back in my old school. I waited in what I thought was the ironing room of those days, and she was, I had a very good interview and she was very searching and asking me as we well know of what I had done and why I’d left and so on, and she handed me over to a Squadron Officer who I don’t know who that would have been who was very charming and proceeded to laden me with lots of pamphlets. The same day I think I went to the WRANS in Little Collins Street when they were in need of cooks and mess stewards so I decided that it would be the WAAF after all. I was very conscious of how I looked, and their uniform looked best. Also, I was the potential writer and I thought I would find a lot more material there. Now I think that I was asked pretty well straight away to go onto a school but I actually had the flu and I couldn’t go and so I just had to refuse the first invitation and then there didn’t seem to be any information for quite a long while and I sent a telegram and I got a follow-up letter and then got a telegram saying to report. I reported at the WAAF recruiting in Russell Street. I don’t really remember this but I did find it all written down and so I can say at the time I was very impressed. It had been a garage and it was comfortable, it wasn’t just an office with hard seats. Pomp and pleasant corporal came along, took me to her office and told me to write an essay on the defence of Australia as a problem of its population or something about war in the Mediterranean or something about how junior officer can influence the ranks. This was something I was not expecting, I was fascinated by the subjects and assumed that the last one would be the trap for young players that you can fall into. I knew very little about the war in the Mediterranean because again I had been following the war in Russia, not in the Mediterranean so I had to settle for the top one. I was even asked if the subjects were suitable and I did sort of very faintly say yes, but wondered what would have happened if I said no. I was given a www.writepeople.com.au 13 S01310 13/01/2021 stopwatch and I was told that that writing and spelling would be taken into consideration. However, the corporal and somebody else who was waiting for an interview, started on a very great conversation and I asked them to shut up which they did, which again impressed me that they would. One then went through terrific adaptability tests which, you know, I found very searching and I thought must have been a terrific help if they were used, as I expect they were used, for sorting people into categories because I could tell they did find out a great deal. Then there was the usual medical examination, which I never enjoyed. After that, I had to rush to Manpower to secure a release but I didn’t have to be released because I had had a card saying I was unemployed for three months but I had great problems in getting them to give me a release, which was typical of the red tape and the bureaucracy. After that day, I actually heard nothing for a while from the WAAF again and then I got a telegram, when I enquired I was told I’d been assessed as suitable but not yet selected. Finally I got a telegram where I was staying of all places at Diamond Creek, having a holiday, so that was it. As I say I can’t imagine what my friends thought. They just thought it was a natural progression, you know, as I wasn’t married, to do that and my parents were certainly happy. Again, I’ve got a lot of information about the course held in Queens College at the University which was quite entertaining for me to go back to university college as I was writing letters home to my mother and to my father, both of them, at this stage. The course did include both RAAF and WAAF so my recollection is that the bulk of our lectures were held separately. There were only some that were held together and certainly yes, we lived separately. I suppose the greatest difficulties for me was in the nature of drill because of knowing that I was no good at any sport etc etc. However in the end, according to my letters I seem to have won that battle with great success actually and leading the people around. I was fascinated by the discipline and I could see very definitely how necessary it would be in order that large numbers of very desperate people could live together and without that sort of discipline it wouldn’t be possible so it didn’t worry me because it was necessary. I thought the course was very well structured and apart from law I think which I still do probably think is a boring subject, the lecturers seemed to be very well chosen and the amount of material that was concentrated in such a small time was to me quite amazing because university being pretty leisurely process with lots of time where we were expected to think, now there was no time to think at all, just to absorb like a sponge, fall into bed exhausted each night. Because I had lots of friends in www.writepeople.com.au 14 S01310 13/01/2021

Melbourne, generally parents of the people I had known in University, and I could go there for the occasional night off or weekend off and sometimes I went home. The important thing seems to be the importance of the uniform and the main comment I got from my friends was that the uniform suited me. Nothing about what it was like to be in there or anything like that. I can also remember buying a drab uniform from Wardrop Tailor for fourteen pounds, which seemed to be a great success as a uniform but nobody else, nobody made any sorts of comments. The bivouac on the course was a great experience. I’d never been camping before and I had the role of messing officer for the bivouac and of course the meat became flyblown. Anyway, I found the whole experience rather novel. I thrived on that course. I gained weight and I must have been much fitter at the end of it, than at the beginning. I really did enjoy it and made some good friends but I haven’t kept those all these years.

THOMSON: Where was the bivouac, can you remember?

LANGLEY: Was it in Hillsville, was it that area? Woodend. It was a country area. I don’t remember exactly. Anyway, my first posting was to be in charge of three great mansions of Toorak which were being used as barracks for the WAAF from 4 Maintenance Group so I was posted to 4 Maintenance Group. To start with I didn’t find enough to do in these places, it was very lonely because everyone, except for the few messing staff, went out each day. I lived there with a few other officers but I didn’t seem to have found them very companionable but at least I learned how to maintain a large building and this became very useful and many years later I found myself at Women’s College and my dietetic training came in very useful in organising Christmas dinner and in organising a third birthday dinner for the WAAF. We also seemed to have a few odd dinner parties there, of which D WAAF used to come to. She lived quite close by and again I was very impressed by this august personage. She’d come to dinner and then she’d say, right, I’d like to see the air women and she would walk around the barracks and find them all in their various stages of undress and the effect for those lowly ACWs to see the director, it was just incredible. They thought it was wonderful. And again the Christmas dinner when she and other WAAF officers waited on the WAAF, they found that really marvellous. I also came to know her a bit more than would have been normal in that I had a situation in which at the age of 24 or whatever, I couldn’t cope with, which was a girl, two girls, one of www.writepeople.com.au 15 S01310 13/01/2021 whom was a fairly simple youngster but the other one with whom she was having the relationship. The relationship existed between this rather simple girl and another young woman who had, appeared to have high academic qualifications, which were discovered to be fraudulent. The worst feature was always hearing her excellences extolled by RAAF Officers and the feeling that she should be encouraged in academic career when you knew it was all make-believe. D RAAF was extraordinarily helpful over all this. I often wondered what happened to the girl in the end but I don’t really know but I had several long interviews with D RAAF during this time and came to respect her judgment enormously. I had been told I would only be at the job for maintenance group for a couple of months and time was getting on and there was no sign of any movement so something that I would hate to do now, I had no hesitation in using the influence of my father who was a Brigadier to get me a more suitable posting. It seems incredible but I still have copies of letters he wrote about that time. Early in the new year, my mother and sister came to live in Sydney, sorry, to live in Melbourne, I get Melbourne and Sydney very confused at this stage, so that after February 1944 there were no more detailed letters like I had for the time of the course. My father also came over for a short time as he was out of the army but soon found another niche as Red Cross Commissioner and went to Britain. In February I went to see Wing Commander Creole, Director of DSS. He wanted to start a new branch that was there to improve airforce food, particularly the diets of pilots, and to arrange suitable menus in conjunction with the medical people. I must admit I wasn’t happy that this was going to be another office job. It seemed, in the language of the day, lousy, having to go straight from one headquarters to the lousy barracks without having had any station life at all. In the middle of February, I had also been to see Section Officer Allen who’d been to Port Moresby for a month, demonstrating the use and cooking of dehydrated foods and my comment at the time was she’d aged about six years since I last saw her a few months ago and I felt very sad about this that here were people who were doing a tremendous job and a lot of work and on the other hand there always are, sort of people who aren’t doing a thing and not enough people to help her. In fact I was going through a phase of feeling very fed up with the Australian war effort and once more under the influence of another book, this time Journey Among Warriors by Eve Currie, however, I mean, you get over these things and the job I had to do at that stage was to organise a third birthday dinner for the RAAF, for Maintenance Group which was at Kello House in Saint Kilda Road and www.writepeople.com.au 16 S01310 13/01/2021 was a very big event and it sort of, round about this time, and spending a lot of time preparing a birthday dinner which seemed awfully stupid with a war going on, I wondered if all the time one was spending on the WAAF was warranted by the work that they actually did. But of course I knew nothing other than full maintenance group and that was just the living quarters of people. I didn’t know what went on at the stations and the really great job that was being done elsewhere. It seemed to me I spent a lot of my time just listening to people’s personal problems and organising dances and my personal life of seeing old friends and going to endless movies. I don’t think at any stage in my life that I’ve been to so many movies. Anyway, finally I go to work in RAAF Headquarters and during this time, I live at home so I have very little record, written record of what I did but the work was back to nutrition, mainly nutrition education, to make the best use of the rations, to visit the hospitals and convalescent depots and just trying to help people with their rations as best I could. Relying on my memory, I have a general impression of these visits that made me see a lot of Australia which I hadn’t seen before, but that the visits were really very important in providing a listener so that people could gripe against RAAF Headquarters. I doubt whether it did more good than that though occasionally one could do something practical or so on, some misunderstanding.

THOMSON: Were you involved in the alteration in WAAF diet?

LANGLEY: I can’t remember, honestly. I think that might have happened because they had had their third birthday so I think that had happened. But we produced a marvellous cooking manual which I think you’ve seen and I can remember lecturing to mess officers and I can remember visiting units where I have to say, was the nursing sisters, where there wouldn’t be WAAFS so you’d stay within the hospital and you know, invariably the matron was always painted as some great ogre and she was a very nice person. I also did a lot of travelling, I saw more of Australia than I’d ever seen before which was terrific from my point of view. The third person in our team was under Officer Hudson who’d at one time been a cook at Government House and she did a lot of the practical work of converting rations into “edible food” and once when I went up to Broome and Darwin, I know I had three abortive take-offs or at least you’d get out to the airfield to take off but the weather would be no good so you’d go back again, and I have a very vivid memory of being smuggled into the www.writepeople.com.au 17 S01310 13/01/2021 servants’ quarters of Government House and sleeping there. You know, it was a tremendous experience to go up to Port Hedland and to Broome and to Darwin. We weren’t meant to be stopping at Port Hedland but the plan couldn’t go on, so one woman coming onto an all-male unit created quite a lot of strife.

THOMSON: In what way did it create strife?

LANGLEY: Well they had to find somewhere for me to sleep, somewhere for me to wash, I’d go to the loo and I used to have practically an armed escort when I moved but it was good fun and you know, as over the last few years when Port Hedland became an altogether different place it’s been interesting to think well I was there way back at that time and certainly I’ve never been back to Darwin either.

THOMSON: Were you inspecting the out of left arc?

LANGLEY: Not at that point, we weren’t doing anything. It was just having to come down. I was really heading for hospital at Broome and at Darwin so that was just an inadvertent stop.

THOMSON: And what was the food like in Broome and Darwin?

LANGLEY: I can only remember masses of oysters from the beach. I guess the food was alright. I can’t really remember the bad things about it at all. And I think Darwin wasn’t too bad. They did have tropical fruits and things like that.

THOMSON: And did you find on the whole that messing conditions were good or average or poor?

LANGLEY: I think it must have been pretty average and the things just varied depending on the messing officer in charge, whether he or she was really interested. I think the really important people of course were always the sergeants and the warrant officers and whether they were really interested in what they were doing. Then there were some hopeless, awful cooks and it was no fun trying to make something good out of dehydrated mutton or all those terrible dehydrated vegetables and there were www.writepeople.com.au 18 S01310 13/01/2021 some, we could help, we could produce recipes for some, but you did depend heavily on the skill and interest of the cook and the serving of it. The other memory I have of that time is the great post-war food that could arrive and never having to peel an onion again, and having dehydrated onions. I suppose the dehydrated soups and things we use all stemmed from this time. Thank goodness we don’t have to have dehydrated mutton. I think that was absolutely the worst and I noticed in that cooking manual we said at no stage should this be served without additives, and it smelt so rotten. I haven’t got any firm impressions of food being either good or bad. I think it was just probably ordinary and all right except occasionally it would be bad. I don’t think anywhere it was particularly good so that was my main war effort and a lot of nutrition education in producing war pamphlets or other pamphlets and preparing the manual, giving lectures.

THOMSON: Whom did you lecture to?

LANGLEY: I once lectured to messing officers. I remember very vividly in feeling very nervous and unsure and quite inadequate because I’d never had to be a messing officer anywhere. They all knew far more about it than I did. But they didn’t know about nutrition and I did so that one could always tell them something.

THOMSON: And how many people wrote the pamphlet, the booklet?

LANGLEY: I find all this hard to remember. I think that the work was always shared between the three that I remember as being the section but then we’d have access to certainly Army education and shared their publications and there must have been an education section that would take things from us and print them and so on. I don’t think we had to follow that through. We just provided the material. It was a very tiny, tight little section, Section Officer Allen, myself and under Officer Hudson and there we were, going around, working very hard. On the whole, I certainly had the best of it and I had a lot of trips around, saw a lot of places. When the war stopped, I was sent to do a crash course in teaching which, again, like my training course was an excellent course and I can’t remember any of the other people in the group. We were all from different areas but we had to teach each other which had to perform in front

www.writepeople.com.au 19 S01310 13/01/2021 of your peers and I think the things I learned then about teaching were things that stood me in very good stead later on.

THOMSON: And where was that course held?

LANGLEY: I haven’t a clue. It was probably in Sydney, I don’t know, either Sydney or Melbourne, I’m not sure. I have very little recollection of where I lived during a lot of these things and then I was living at home. I know I did come to Sydney about this time, either then, for the course or later.

THOMSON: [inaudible] is in Melbourne.

LANGLEY: Melbourne, alright, then I was at home..

THOMSON: Technical Training.

LANGLEY: Where was it?

THOMSON: Down in West Melbourne.

LANGLEY: Oh, I had no memory of where it was, at all, not at all. Then I came to Sydney obviously and once more travelled a lot going up the north of Australia and again I haven’t got very vivid memories of it at all except catching up with old friends around Brisbane and Rockhampton and places like that. But I think what we were aiming to do was teaching the WAAF something useful to them in civilian life and so it was probably teaching them cooking which would always be useful. I can’t really remember. It was a certainly very relaxed period because of course the war was over and the problem was to win the peace. My own personal war was over, my father had come home and gone back to teaching and was pretty restless. I suppose what I regretted was that I had never suffered; I’d never been in any real danger apart from an occasional flight with an inexperienced pilot, nothing real. We’d had rationing but again it wasn’t very real, there was always plenty. I had no personal grief or anything through the war so that although we’d had a war, in one way we’d missed out. I was sort of envious of Europeans who’d been tested and survived I expect and then I went www.writepeople.com.au 20 S01310 13/01/2021 from discharge to a post-graduate course in nutrition. It was held at the Institute of Anatomy in Canberra and I think this came through, what you say, the RTF, I think because we were a very mixed group on this, and I think there were a couple of others who’d been in the services and so we were paid for, and I think the others paid for themselves. There’s no diploma or piece of paper or anything associated with this course. It was just a post-graduate course in nutrition. I think it might have only run for one year or there might have been another course. It was very short-lived. It was the baby of a man again who influenced me again, a Dr Clemments who was the director of the Institute of Anatomy, and again although it was a hotchpotch, it was a magnificent course. We had lectures in economics from J.G. Crawford, later Sir John Crawford, who was the lecturer, and this was brilliant. We again went back to food preparation where we had quite well known dietitian, we did statistics, which I think everybody ought to do at some stage, if only to be able to sort out the truth from the garbage, and stuff you’re given to read. We did field practical work by doing a food survey in Gippsland and this set the pattern of a much bigger Australia-wide food survey that was done next year I think. Some of the people from the course went on and did that which produced, it’s the only one that’s been done in Australia and produced a standard of knowing what people ate. Having been in the WAAF I found it easier to gain, one of a group, sort of again had a superior feeling that I seemed to be getting that, having had a service background, was more acceptable than having had a civilian one, and one of the people I became friendly with and the terrible hash houses we lived in in Canberra was Gavin Long, who was the war historian, and it was nice to be able to share the fact that at least you had been in the war even though it hadn’t been very special. That Canberra year was interesting. We used bicycles to get around Canberra. We were an interesting group of people and there were quite interesting people there. It led to the 1947 New Guinea nutrition survey expedition which two of us who’d been on the course, went with Dr Clemments and that I think was probably one of the greatest experiences I’ve had in my life. At the time there was a provisional administration of Papua New Guinea and Australia was wishing to establish its credentials in taking over the trusteeship. The reason for the New Guinea nutrition survey is officially given as follows: That the Institute of Anatomy where I’d been for the previous twelve months, officially advised the Department of External Territories on ration scales but absence of any reliable data made it very difficult to devise ration scales that were based on native foods rather than bully beef and bread www.writepeople.com.au 21 S01310 13/01/2021 so this information had to be collected and at the same time one could ascertain the nutritional status and the health of the people. It was also decided to gather quantitative data on food production consumption in areas where conditions weren’t known to be normal and where they weren’t suffering from drought or famine or flood etc and the third purpose was to ascertain whether it was possible in these villages to combine a cash crop with growing their own foods for their own subsistence. The funding was from various parts of the Australian Government, probably divided between Health and External Territories and the field party consisted of a medical officer, a parasitologist who was from the University of Sydney, two biochemists, one who had done the same post-graduate at the Institute that I’d done, and she changed from being a chemist, biochemist to becoming a PhD in anthropology as a result of this trip. The other biochemist was already working at the Institute of Anatomy. We had at times one, sometimes two, dental officers who were from the Dental Hospital in Sydney and we had a Department of Information photographer with us for part of the time, and actually a film was made which I have seen. Also we had an agriculturist and an anthropologist from New Guinea Administration and this was tremendous because they really knew the place, and each place we were given a patrol officer who also knew the area.

THOMSON: What was the name of the film, just before we go on?

LANGLEY: I can’t remember what the name of the film is, but I think it probably is just a film called The New Guinea Survey Expedition.

THOMSON: That would be in 1947?

LANGLEY: Yes, 1947. The man who made the film’s name was Jim Fitzpatrick which you know was associated with Fitzpatrick Travel [inaudible] in that period but he didn’t have anything to do with it but it was a very good film and I think it was just called New Guinea

THOMSON: And the Department of Information brought it out?

www.writepeople.com.au 22 S01310 13/01/2021

LANGLEY: Did we have? Yes I think so. It was an official photographer anyway from the Government, so Departments keep changing their names so I’m sort of confused to what they were called then, what they’re called now, but I think it’s Department of Information. The report came out, as just called The Report of the New Guinea Nutrition Survey Expedition 1947, and I was very flattered to find it’s still being used as a base line at Garoka Hospital in 1980 when I visited there from the Australian Institute of National Affairs. I think the survey was very important to me because it did establish that my major interest was in tropical nutrition, both from the medical point of view, and the role that nutrition education would become more and more important to the health of the people was they had more and more contact with our manufactured foods and we were attracted to them because of the prestige associated with them. I think also I was very intrigued of what was meant to be European in an undeveloped country and that everything you said and did was given this tremendous value way beyond what it was worth so that just being there meant a great deal of responsibility but at the same time you had a great deal of power which one had to be very careful about. We all talked a lot in that period and we all had very definite ideas on how governments should select its officers to go up to the Department of External Territories as patrol officers and district officers because it seemed to me there was no way you could select these people in Australia because conditions were just so different. Once more, one came to enjoy those long discussions that went long into the night and actually we didn’t drink, we drank cocoa. We hardly can remember having any alcohol on the trip. We might have had some and there was also the messing ups and we went to great trouble getting strange supplies in Port Moresby and Lae whenever we got back to a town. It was one of the most fascinating times. I think when I came back to Australia; my disappointment was really intense in that nobody was the remotest bit interested in Papua New Guinea. This was hurtful in that I felt there was a country that had served us with extraordinary courage and suffered actually a great deal in the war and our own men had suffered in that country, but no one was interested and no-one was interested in the future for which we were going to be very largely responsible. On the personal side of course I learned very quickly that lesson that when you’ve been away nobody wants to know about it, when you come back, then you settle back into what their problems have been. During the survey we spent a month each in five villages, which had returned to relatively stable condition after the war and each one had a different www.writepeople.com.au 23 S01310 13/01/2021 food staple. Besowna in the Hughen Gulf, which was quite close to Lae had taro and they had had a good deal of fighting around Salamo and that area during the war but had more or less settled back though there were still some people who they said had worked with the Japanese and there was still some friction going on in the village and we lived in a village hut which was more or less the same style as the village but had been specially built for us. Then we went to Carapet in the Marken Valley where they lived on bananas and that was in Cooni Country with very high grass and there had been a lot of fighting in that valley and you wondered how on earth they’d done it because when you walked in the Cooni no-one could see you. There we lived in the patrol officers’ house and when one turned, everybody turned. There was privacy whatsoever. Then we went on a very horrible, nine-hour road journey to Partup, which is up near the Warbalu Goldfields and is quite high. I think they’d been fairly free from the war. They had sweet potato, was their staple, and it was pretty remote, it was quite cold. It was up in a cloudy region and rather than come back on that horrible road on a motor journey, a few of us walked out and walked across what was probably pretty close to the Kakoda Trail and came back to Besowna on the Hughen Gulf again and then took the boat back to Lae. Then after much dilly-dallying, we got a plane that took us over the Trobian Islands and that was just the most beautiful place and I gather now it’s quite a very acceptable, highly regarded tourist resort which I can well imagine and they’re the most beautiful people, and physically beautiful as well, and was studied a great deal by Melanoscy and other anthropologists. There they lived on yams and fish, had a very good diet. Great difficulty getting back from there but finally we did by plane and naval vessel and various things and went out west to Coriabi which is in the Perari Delta where they lived by cutting down sago trees and using the sago and that was pretty remote. I don’t think they’d been very touched by the war and in fact, you know, there were people there who would tell you that the greatest sport of all was sort of hunting and eating people. It was a marvellous experience and you saw it first-hand really, the results of colonialism in the towns like Port Moresby and Lae. Lae of course had been devastated by the war and was just starting to build up again. In the villages, the contact had really been mainly through missionaries which had had quite a strong influence in some areas and by the local government officers, the patrol officers, the district officers, of doing head counts or looking after sick or something like that. You did some of the residue of the war. The Europeans I think at that stage, as I seem to remember, there were www.writepeople.com.au 24 S01310 13/01/2021 two kinds of Europeans visiting the Territory. One which we were told we belonged was the New Order who were the Europeans wanting to bring education and trades and skills and some understanding of what these people were going to face in terms of the wider world because they had to be dragged into the 20th century somehow or other could no longer be avoided, all the exploration had been done, the war had been fought and so there were people associated with the government who were wanting to help this, to make it as trouble-free as possible and in hindsight, I think Australia did an extraordinarily good job and the fact that Samari has managed so extremely well I think, whether we tried or didn’t try, it’s worked very well. The other sort of visitor of course who we just did not like, was the person who was there, buying up scraps, seeing what could be exploited, making a quick quid, and they were there also. We were there for eight months, and there were only about four or five of us who were there all the time, others came and went a bit. Often it was uncomfortable, being tipped into the river with crocodiles, and things like that, but it was never dull. We had to do quite a bit by water and I’m a very bad sailor, traveller in any way, so I was often quite sick. We were a very compatible group apart from the man who was our leader but we all united against him so that was alright and it was just the most fascinating time to be in Papua New Guinea, to actually have the opportunity to live in the villages, to work with the people, and it sort of put me off ever being a tourist in those sorts of places. I felt really sorry for people who had to be tourists when you could work there. We returned to Canberra to write up the report and I promptly got malaria and was quite sick for a while. At the same time I was found to have a chronic appendix, which was going to be a handicap because tropical nutrition was what I wanted to specialise in, and after the report I went back to Melbourne. I applied unsuccessfully for overseas scholarships. I had my appendix out to create a diversion of the rather difficult time we were having at home and so the decision was more or less made now that I would wait until 1949 when my sister had earned some money as a physiotherapist and that we both had enough money to at least pay for our fares to go to the UK. Hopefully we’d get a job there and have enough money to pay for when we wanted to come back. That sort of post-war period, the young were on the move I think. I wasn’t quite so young. I was 7 ½ years older, and in my late 20s but people in their early and mid 20s were definitely moving out to look at Europe so while I was at home I did this part-time teaching at Fitzroy Girls High, slum area. I had no teaching qualification other than the beautiful teaching course I could produce www.writepeople.com.au 25 S01310 13/01/2021 that I’d had in the WAAF and I think through influence of my father I got the job but they wanted people and I was just a sort of dog’s body who would teach anything that was wanted. I was also a very much self-styled expert on drill which came in useful because I seemed to remember some marching display, which my group did extremely well. It was one of those schools, which are very sad because the moment the child was 14 she left school. I can’t remember any migrants there, perhaps it was a bit early for that area but there were very disturbed families and disturbed children and it was nothing for the fathers or brothers to be inside. I had not come across any of this in my life before. I can remember teaching them English, I got them to write stories and plays and said we’d act the best ones and taking them home to read them they were quite horrible and horrendous to realise that what they were writing from was their own experience. Then finally we go to the UK. I guess I’d always wanted to go back to Britain because since I’d been there at the age of ten, I always thought that it was home. I loved London, loved it almost physically, I just adored London and I wanted to go back to it and my sister couldn’t remember anything of it so it was time to go back. My sister and I had really not shared very much together because there was a 7½ years difference in age and so for us it was a good two years that we did get to know each other. We went over of course on one-class ships which very cheaply operated in those days and you stayed in youth hostels and we’d hitch-hike all over Europe which you’d be appalled at now but one’s parents didn’t know about it until many weeks later when they got the letters so it didn’t really matter. The monetary problem was more to do with the exchange rate but once you started to earn in the UK, then that wasn’t so bad and getting there was easy. Coming back was more difficult because the one-class ships were very full of migrants and so coming back became more of a problem. I had no trouble in getting a job because the news of the Papua New Guinea Survey had appeared in some British Colonial Journal and one of my father’s World War One friends had gone on to be, had continued as a doctor in the Colonial Service and knew people in the medical research council who had an experimental station in West Africa. They were wanting nutritionists and here was one, ready and waiting, so that I was more or less, they sort of found me, I seem to remember, on Victoria Railways Station or somewhere, when I was about to go to Switzerland for three weeks and said the job was mine, I could have it. My sister had a lot more trouble finding work as a physiotherapist but she got one. We lived in an attic that was owned by a friend of my mother’s, a college friend. We did pay rent but www.writepeople.com.au 26 S01310 13/01/2021 it was very minimal and our aim was to see as much as we could of England and my uncle and my mother’s brother’s second wife, lent us a tiny little car, a little Morris which we toured all over Britain, and we as I said, apart from the very first trip to Switzerland which we did very properly by train, after that we hitch-hiked over Europe, stayed in youth hostels and it was a wonderful lot of people that were travelling in those days that would tell you which hostels were good, which were bad and so on. We made lots of temporary friends, no lasting friendships or that, but we kept bumping into people that we knew from here. I worked I think for probably a full time of eight months and two years. I hate to think what we lived on but we could live very frugally. The Medical Research Council Nutrition Unit seemed to be interwoven with the Colonial Office because I was paid by the Colonial Office and one of the interesting things about the Colonial Office is that anybody who works for them is supposed to have money of their own and not really need the money they get as payment. It was very different for me; I was stamping up and down, saying when am I going to be paid. London office was in the School of Tropical Medicine and the doctor associated with this particular project had actually been a POW under the Japanese so that we had some sort of rapport over that and both he and his wife had been prisoners and they were very kind to me and I enjoyed them both very much. I regret that I no longer know what’s happened to them. I know that he died but I don’t know about her. The survey that we were doing was to check out the nutritional status of a village in Gambia. Now because the people were Muslims, they ceased normal feeding during Ramadam and that coincided with a period of greatest work and so you’d have this pattern of them having being a certain weight and then Ramadam coming and the weight dropping but it would build up again but it would never come back to what it had been before and so they wanted to keep, quite a long- going few years survey going on this and what had happened was that the nutritionist of this particular unit had been out there and had quote unquote “tour” the locals to keep the records. These were coming back to London. These were obviously all done inside somebody’s hut, you know, no real results were coming out of this so that I was to go out there. There was a manager permanently stationed there and we had several visiting doctors. It was a very pleasant set-up compared to what had been in Papua New Guinea except that getting to this village was pretty horrendous, again on the back of a truck and difficult water crossings and usual sort of things. Once you were there, I spent most of my time down in the village. We were quite a long journey www.writepeople.com.au 27 S01310 13/01/2021 from the main town, which in those days was called Bathurst, and I can’t remember what it’s called now. I worked in the village for about three months. There were all sorts of personality problems with the manager in that village and with the man in charge and the nutritionist in charge back in London, probably because of distance and also because their personalities, there were very real clashes. There was almost stealing of academic work, there was an attitude about the work, that I had not come across before, of people stealing results, publishing staff not acknowledging it, all sorts of things that I thought academics were way and above that sort of thing but suddenly I was face-to-face with these sorts of problems and much though I loved the job and loved the work, I felt after eight months that I couldn’t stay under those sorts of conditions that existed, not so much for me, but for the other people who were associated with it. So I did resign, and I didn’t actually get another job in London. I applied for a nutrition job in Nigeria again with the Colonial Office but they took a long time replying. By the time I’d replied they’d found their own nutritionist, and the Colonial Office offered me something in Mauritius and something somewhere else, and I thought no, no. By this time I’ll come home. I would certainly have very much liked to stay in the United Kingdom. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t got another tropical nutrition job. I might have gone on and got a higher degree. I don’t know, but the sort of moral pressures were very strong for me to return home and so I did return to Australia. I seem to recall being offered a job, again as a nutritionist, and again into the beloved tropics with the South Pacific Health Service stationed at Suva, Fiji. I don’t think there were many people with the sort of training I’d had and in fact I was probably the only person there. So I was appointed as a nutritionist to the South Pacific Health Service, the senior nutritionist who was New Zealand-trained, called Susan Holmes with whom I’m still a great friend, she’s still in Suva and in fact is now a Fijian. Our headquarters were in Suva and again there was the same mixture of nutrition education, we taught nutrition to medical students, nurses, we gave broadcasts over the radio, did a lot of nutrition education. At the same time, we went to different areas that came under the South Pacific Health Service to do the nutrition survey which really was just to see what people were eating at that time and generally working with the medical officer to examine their nutritional status. These have all been base surveys, which is still looked back on as quite historical documents now, especially in that area where the diet has changed enormously. I went to Tonga, which again is a place I love very much. I love the www.writepeople.com.au 28 S01310 13/01/2021 independence of the Tongan people who hadn’t really been a colony. They’d only had a Treaty of Friendship with Queen Victoria of which they were very proud, and I went to Nurai Island and that was also very interesting but tinged with sort of high drama and sadness in that just after I left there, the administrator of the Island was murdered by one of the Nuraians and I lived in the village in Fiji, in Vitilogo, the main island, which is round near Singitoto where all the great tourist places are now, to keep on going back to that village to see what changes there were. So I went on doing the same sort of work that I’d been used to. I also did even a bit of hospital nutrition, looking at what the hospitals were doing both in Latoka and Suva and to bring it right up to date I think I was there when the first tourist ship that came into Suva. People appeared on the wharves that you’d never seen before, selling purple coral and I just feel I was very lucky to have lived and worked there as a proper person with the Fijians and the Indians rather than being a tourist. Again I was intensely aware of the political problems of this place, that had more imported Indians than there were Fijians and yet it was Fiji for the Fijians and things like the local club would admit Fijians but would not admit Indians even though the person might be a doctor or lawyer or nurse and so on, and it seemed to me that there would be a tremendous explosion from the Indians if they ever got the leadership. But it hasn’t really happened. There were only some strikes at one stage and I think the Indians had learned political skills and things have worked out all right. I have not been back to Fiji since that time. Once more, I came back to Australia at the end of what was a two-year stint and I felt that two years was enough in that job and that either I’d like to work as the person in charge, rather than the second person, and perhaps again there were family pressures to come and work in Australia rather than always working in the tropics. I went to an ANZAS conference, and I think it was at that ANZAS conference that I was told about a job as a lecturer in nutrition at the Department of Education in Sydney, so here I was back to teaching nutrition, teaching nutrition education and living in Sydney. It brought me from Melbourne to Sydney for which I was very grateful because I certainly didn’t ever want to live in my own home and even then there was difficulties of living in a flat when you weren’t married and your parents still lived in the town. That doesn’t happen at all now but that died hard in my parents’ generation so it suited me very well to come to Sydney and I must say I love Sydney. The course was very much for students who became demonstrators for gas companies or they wanted, it was a home science course really. I don’t think anybody www.writepeople.com.au 29 S01310 13/01/2021 was very interested in what I was bursting with my problems of the Pacific and they were not very interested with problems to do with the Third World countries. In fact I find nutrition education a very difficult subject to teach because we have such an abundance of foods here that you don’t have to be careful what you eat because it’s scarce. You only have to be selective in order to get the very best of what we have to offer. It’s interesting to think that these things that you did back in those years, nutrition is very much an in-thing. Where I was dining last night, the six year old came back from school with very much the same basic poster as we used to use in those days, only much more attractive, but explaining to her mother that she should eat more from this food group and that food group, and this from another food groups and how important it all was, and I really felt quite a thrill out of hearing these words from a very young, some 25 years or more later. That was the sort of job that I was doing. I lived in the flat in Kings Cross and later in Double Bay and later again still in Elizabeth Bay, and in fact I had just found what was a nice flat with a bit of a harbour view. Again, I seemed to be haunted by personality problems, which you begin to feel, are you and not them, but we did have a problem person in charge of us. She was seeking psychiatric help and it did make working conditions very difficult. There were three of us who did most of the home science teaching and all of us were feeling that it was time that we moved. My sister pointed out to me that there had been an advertisement for being Principal of the Women’s College, and why don’t you apply, you enjoyed being in College when you were a student, why don’t you do that? That wasn’t quite as brash as it sounded because when I had been in Fiji, the Principal of Janet Clark Hall where I had been, had written and said she was retiring, and would I be interested in applying for that job. While I was immensely flattered, I had just started a new job and so I wasn’t interested, but I think the seed had been sown and so here was one in Sydney. I had to go to the library and find the paper where the advertisement was and find that if I applied within the next couple of days I would just get in in time before applications closed, which I did. I had as referees Dr Clemments who had been Head of the Institute of Anatomy in Canberra, and a friend of both the families and had been a friend of mind, and was a very well and respected Sydney person, which I thought, were good referees to have. One still felt very strongly that you were Melbourne and not Sydney and that you were there under a disadvantage. I applied and I literally did forget that I had put this piece of paper in, until I got a letter asking me to come for an interview. At that stage I was interviewed www.writepeople.com.au 30 S01310 13/01/2021 by a small committee but it was such that various people obviously working for me to get this job and back came another connection, that the Chairman of the College Council was one Dr Margaret Mulvee who’d been a junior resident who had married Bertie Schlink who was the Head of Royal Prince Albert Hospital when I had actually been there as a junior dietitian and when she asked me the question about what I remembered of the hospital, all I can say is [end of tape].

We’re now up to my time at the Women’s College and my appointment in 1957 coincided with the release of the report of the Committee of Australian Universities, known as the Murray report in September 1957, and this was under the Menzie’s Government and Menzies often referred to it as the thing that he was proudest of having done during this time in office. For people who were in charge of residential colleges, it made a great deal of difference because the Murray report advocated more colleges for Australian universities and they make such statements as that they are confident that the college contribution to life of the universities has been an invaluable one and we wish that more students had the opportunity of receiving the benefits of residence. So we all went for it to get money from the government, both from the Federal government and the State government, to raise money ourselves and to increase accommodation. When I went to Women’s College there were 97 students and when I left there was accommodation for something like about 270 but it trebled in the time that I was there which was very much thanks to the Murray report. I found it very difficult taking over from someone with as much charisma as Betty Archdale and I did feel very shy about it because when people would say what is your experience it was hard to say anything particular with my experience to make me Principal of the Women’s College and one of my great supporters at the time was Sir Charles Bickerton Blackburn who was as Chancellor of the University, was official visitor to the college and we started a sort of tradition of having him over for a birthday dinner every year and we were only hoping we would go to his 100th but Sir Charles died suddenly at the age of 98 so that we didn’t ever have that. But I always remember him saying to me, not to worry about Betty Archdale and the past, you know, in twelve months I’ll have done it all once and then it will be alright. The other marvellous thing for me was when the announcement of my appointment was made in the paper, and before I’d even gone to the Women’s College, and in fact I think the first phone call I had to say well, isn’t that great, was from one Claire Stevenson who www.writepeople.com.au 31 S01310 13/01/2021

I had not seen or not heard of since I left the WAAF but she lived in Sydney and daughters of one of her particular friends actually attended Women’s College so there were sort of connections, and I was just so grateful to be told it was a good thing, that I’d got this job, but also to renew this friendship which, since that date actually, since 1957, has been a very strong one and during my time at college was just invaluable because here was somebody with all the wisdom in the world, who could help me with some of the problems that I felt I couldn’t discuss with other people. That really is probably one of the greatest things that being in the WAAF did for me. I think the other thing, I suddenly realised, was here I was in charge of a building that had been built in 1894 and in many ways wasn’t that different from those houses in Toorak and had all the same problems of maintenance, in fact the first thing that had to be done when I got there was get the guttering renewed and there were all these sorts of problems, and a gardener, and a maintenance man and the people who’d been the LACs in the airforce were now there doing the same sorts of things, and requiring the same sort of attention when you dealt with them. And there was also all the messing problems and we did have a housekeeper there but she promptly announced, gave in her resignation, because she didn’t like the new principal and so one was faced with all the problems of just literally running the place, and in time that gradually sorted itself out and we tried different systems and I think when I left it, we were having a catering service to do the catering and a manager to look after the rest of the place. But this was not such a really horrible situation for me as I could come back on my experience in the airforce and did know what it mean that a room should be cleaned and I can remember being absolutely horrible when I went round looking at the place and remembering all those tricks that people had done to me when I was a trainee of deciding whether you’d dusted on top of the door or not. Really bad, nasty things I now look back upon. But still, it worked, and the place looked nice and we had a lovely garden, and could always have lots of flowers. What my duties and responsibilities were was very hard to work out and in fact even at the stage I was leaving I was still asking the council to work out what the role of the principal was. They found this quite hard to do. I considered from my point of view that my job was to provide accommodation and a proper, suitable, pleasant environment for students who were at the university where they could do their work, where they would have opportunities to meet people who had gone a long way in their own particular profession, where they could talk to students who were in higher years, where they www.writepeople.com.au 32 S01310 13/01/2021 could have a really very good life. When you look back at your life as a student, the only time when you can do exactly what you want, when you don’t have any responsibility to anybody except yourself, and when you life in a college, you don’t have any responsibilities to family or any of those pressures and it’s a wonderful time in your life. I enjoyed my own time as a student and I seem to remember saying quite naively to the council why I wanted the job was that I’d been happy when I was a student and I saw no reason why I couldn’t be happy sort of making other people enjoy their university life. I think it is good time but I think it’s hard and does require a good deal of self discipline and of course these are the sorts of people who crash at university when they come from a very disciplined environment and suddenly there is none and so they’ve got to learn to have self discipline. So that, my job at Women’s College was very much involved with getting more bed space so we could have more students and this became quite difficult because what was the acceptable maximum students you could have at that sort of residence. The current wisdom was that it was 150 but I wanted more than that and I really was interested in how you could do it. So my trips overseas at the time during my, especially in the 60s at Women’s College, was to look at other establishments and see what they’d done, pick the eyes out of them, what was bad about them. This was fairly difficult because the Australian college system was rather a unique one, we’re not in the tradition of Oxbridge though sometimes we like to think we were, and we’re not in the tradition of the States where the places were all dormitories, except at Harvard, and we were perhaps similar to some of the Redbrick universities in England and perhaps Harvard, but I went to 18 institutions on one trip which was a hell of a lot, I went from institution to institution in England where I had assistance from the British council, and then went to America. But I do think it paid off because you could sort things out. We were lucky that we had a very good architect on the Women’s College Council who had been one of the early women architects in Sydney and previous buildings had been done by her and another woman architect but as we went into the big stuff we needed a big firm of architects and we used two different firms, the late John Mansfield was our first architect and again I remember him coming round with his plans and having dinner and talking to the students and then going to the drawing room where we had coffee afterwards, and everybody sitting on the floor, looking at these plans, and the architecture students telling him exactly what was wrong with them and he had to take them away and re-draw them so I kind of tried to use this approach all the way www.writepeople.com.au 33 S01310 13/01/2021 through that the students knew what was happening and that the architects did the best that they could with the restrictions on money of course. It got worse as time went on but we were pretty lucky as far as money was concerned in the beginning. The other thing I firmly believed in was that the students had their own governing body within the college with a system of a senior student, secretary, treasurer, various clubs and so on and it was for them to decide what the domestic things were. It was for them to make decisions as to whether they wanted men in the place or not and for them to control them. I found the students very conservative and I think I was always several leaps ahead of them but when they did come to say look we’d like to invite men, to have men in our rooms every night, or perhaps at the start it was only on Saturday nights or something but it seemed to me there was nothing wrong with this. I mean the only things that mattered were that you didn’t disturb or embarrass other people and provided that was carried out, that was OK. And I can remember sort of announcing this to Council and sort of reporting what had been going on, that you know, the students passed this rule and this was going to happen and that it was all sort of well controlled, and the council were aghast and they would not accept it. Well, I would not have it defeated either because I said as far as I was concerned, I was there to do the day-to-day running and I supported the students and if was going to be defeated then I was going to leave. The problem was that on that council were a number of past students of the College whose memories went back to the days when you were allowed to have a man in the College in your room once a term and that was the situation when I went there and I put up with one of those nights and the atmosphere was absolutely ghastly, sort of rampant kind of sex, you could smell it in the air, the whole place was just horrible and the students were asking for this to become an ordinary thing to become often. What the Council was seeing was this sort of one night of term being repeated every night without realising that it wouldn’t be like that at all. So that battle went on for quite a long time, probably almost a term but I was still determined to either win or get out, and hopefully to win which one did in the end but there were a few fights like that and my other clashes with Council seemed always there in regard with decisions that the Students Committee had made which I thought were perfectly reasonable and that their control of them was perfectly reasonable and if it wasn’t well then stop. I think I got this reputation of “you always support the students”. Well OK that was what I was there for. My other clashes with Council were with regard to my own salary and this again was very interesting www.writepeople.com.au 34 S01310 13/01/2021 because in 1894, I don’t know if you’re interested in this or not, but in 1894 the Residential Colleges of the University of Sydney were paid by the State Government 500 pounds which was a lot of money for the salary of the principal. In some instances that was still being paid by the State Government for the salary of the principal. It wasn’t having to be paid by the College and so it was grace and favour really what the College paid you, and you were asked to leave the room while they had a little think about it. I was appalled by this and thought that the least that could happen was that we went onto one of the University scales so that when the University went up, you just automatically went up and you never had this. This led to enormous rows with the Council and so much so they did have a finance meeting and I was a member of the Finance Committee, ex officio Principal but I was not invited to this and I said either you had a meeting and I resign because I wasn’t there, or you didn’t have a meeting, you just had a discussion. Anyway, again, I was pretty obnoxious but I won, because I think this was a matter of strong principle and in the majority of colleges, of halls of residences, the principal’s salary is related to the university salary and certainly much higher than the one I was related to. They were battles that seemed to be needed to be fought in the early 1960s. Very early in my time at Women’s College, then Member of the University Senate, Member of the University Women’s College Council and a very formidable lady in her own right, one Fanny Cohen, who was on the Board of Management of the Women’s Union, suddenly had me on that as President of the Board and at that time I can remember I was actually in hospital having just suffered an operation and she came and told me that this was it, there was no way I could get out of that. I was very glad in the end for that, because I enjoyed my contact with the altogether other group of students, not the residents, and I was appalled of course that there was a woman’s union and a men’s union and worked very hard for amalgamation which did come. It meant I got to know a lot of these really interesting student politicians of the 60s, like Michael Kirby, Pete Wilenski, all these people, and this was great, and you got to know them at meetings, you got to know them at meetings, you could invite them over to the College and they were the most extraordinary lot of young men, more men than women again, I think Daphne Cox, probably one of the young women who’s kept on her role with the University but there were a lot of very exciting young men who were very involved with university politics and the 60s were a great time of course to be involved in university politics. Also in the beginning, we had a lot of overseas www.writepeople.com.au 35 S01310 13/01/2021 students and in fact at one stage we had something like ten percent overseas students and this was good. It meant they got to know a lot of Australian students, I still keep up correspondence with some of these overseas students and you know, they still made some very firm friends. This all went of course when International House came and because of my role in Women’s College, I was put on the Provisional Board of Management of International House and perhaps I hate to say it, I’m still on the Board of International House and at the moment I’m President or Chairperson or whatever of that Board and I think it’s 1964 we had our first meeting so that next year we celebrate our 21st birthday of the Provisional Board which later became the Board of Management and the 20th birthday of the first director, Graham de Graph, you might know his wife Lauris Elms who’s an opera singer. So I’ve had a long association with International House and my only regret about it was that it meant we lost our overseas students to International House but that was neither here nor there. It’s gone extremely well, it’s kept up its mix of overseas and Australian students, undergraduates and graduates. The only group they have trouble attracting are Australian post-graduates, women, and of course this was men and women in the one building which was rather new in 1963 but was definitely on the way in. I think they’ve managed to avoid any racial antagonisms in fact I’ve never heard of any and it’s a very very happy place indeed and a very adult place. I also got thrown into the Sydney University Settlement and that I felt I had in duty to do because the first Principal of the Women’s College Louise McDonald, was one of the founders of the Sydney University Settlement so I did that. I never quite understood what the Settlement was all about, it really, I didn’t know what it was achieving, whether it was achieving something for that area or whether it was considered a necessary role for university students to have contact with that area. That’s all changed now, completely of course because it’s being run by the people of the area for the area. A lot of the changes came when Mrs Roma Williams, the wife of the Vice Chancellor, Sir Bruce Williams who was the second Vice Chancellor after I was there, came and again I think rather brought the Settlement into the 20th century. I think it was a little out of date.

THOMSON: What was its age?

www.writepeople.com.au 36 S01310 13/01/2021

LANGLEY: I’m not sure. You see, I really am not sure. They had a hall and they ran activities for children in the area. It was mainly to look after the children in the sort of Redfern area. As I say, a lot of that was to give experience to university students. Louise McDonald brought the idea from the East London Settlements, the need wasn’t as vital as it was in East London and I found it very hard to understand. It was always desperately short of money and so a lot of the work was done by ladies to raise money and these sort of dances etc required a certain amount of social cache and your daughter had to come out at the Settlement Ball and the Settlement Ball was held in the Great Hall, and all that I found a bit difficult to take but as I say I couldn’t really see the value of it and now I think it’s much better now it’s self-managed by the people in the area and they do the things they want to do. At Melbourne University, a Head of College is always a member of the governing body of the Council of Melbourne University so that they take it in turns. There is no such Head of a College being represented on the Senate of the University of Sydney and in order to overcome it, the Colleges had always put up a candidate to be a Fellow of the Senate and had actually lobbied the past students of the colleges to vote for that person and Bert Wiley from Wesley College was a long-time Fellow of the Senate of the University. It seemed to me that there was a slightly unwritten rule to say that you did your five year stint which it was, and then you stepped down to let the next one up. This of course didn’t work and my getting onto the Senate was a very sad, sort of situation again, because there were still two Heads of Colleges on the Senate who, one from ten years back and one from five years back and now it was the turn for somebody else to go up but nobody was going to step down and for some reason it was decided that it would be my turn and it was, a lot of heartburning went on, and I did get on in an election and I did beat the other two Heads which made it even worse. Anyway, that was that. I enjoyed myself on the University Senate. I only stayed there for the five years because, at the end of the five years, I had just left Women’s College. I considered I was getting old and I thought that it was essentially a body that should have some young people on it and it was quite hard to get on because about 35 people stand for a ticket of ten or something and so I left and I don’t think I’ve got any real regrets. I enjoyed it, I mean one does enjoy the power and I learned a lot about the University, I was on the Building and Grounds Committee, I finally made the Glory of the Finance Committee which the Senate itself never got the proper minutes of, you learned all sorts of things being on it, but I got off and I was again quite fascinated to www.writepeople.com.au 37 S01310 13/01/2021 find that the people who did get on were getting a good ten years older than I was so that my object in getting off really didn’t succeed anywhere. We had a Heads of Colleges Association and this had been started as Heads of Males Colleges, females didn’t count, first thing of course was to admit the Women’s Colleges to it and in about that 1957/58 period, the women were just being accepted as part of it. At that stage there was a new lot of people coming in which were not Colleges but were mere halls of residence in that the buildings had been put up by the University and they were under the University jurisdiction, they were not independent. And we had many bitter meetings as to whether these people would be admitted to it, which would mean changing the Constitution and so on, and changing our title but you know, people shouldn’t fight too hard against these things. They are inevitable and so we became the Australian Association of Heads of Colleges, which meant that everybody was covered in that. And then we added Halls and I think we’ve added CAEs and so on and it’s got a great advantage in covering a wider number because not only do you get an idea of all their problems that exist but you also become a much stronger lobbying group. The period when I was on the Executive was a period of lobbying because that’s when the guilt was going off the gingerbread of giving the money to residences although we felt that we still needed it and especially it was beginning to be badly needed by some of the old old colleges just through sheer maintenance and having to get your fire regulations right and things like this, so that was the time when there was the Australian Universities Commission, Professor Carmel was head of that, and we had lots of meetings. Even though I was president of that, I had a Jesuit as a secretary which is a great help and Bill Packet, perhaps he was treasurer and Bill Packet was secretary, so that one knew the Canberra scene and one knew the really good way to argue so that the three of us got on very well. I don’t know that we were seeking any particular changes but I think we were seeking their continued support more than anything else. Not only had they supported us in giving us money for capital grants but we also got a recurrent grant which to me is very very strange and it is only just now, this year, starting to be phased out which is quite amazing that a recurrent grant has gone on. Of course it’s been very helpful because it has managed to keep down fees in the colleges and the other thing that happened again in my time, both as Principal and associated with the Association, was that suddenly we were all taking in conferences in vacations and this of course is the real thing that’s managed to keep college fees in any sort of reasonable perspective at all and this was very infradig in www.writepeople.com.au 38 S01310 13/01/2021 the beginning and of course in women’s place you could have men and all these problems that arose. There were quite a few of us that could see that it in itself was a very professional management problem and one had to do it professionally to keep getting the people, and that it didn’t matter if the people didn’t have a university association and suddenly these sorts of topics were becoming papers that were presented and discussed at Heads of Colleges conferences instead of the usual ones of discipline and all the other things that were the hardy annuals or biennials that went on. It was a wonderful job for 17 years being at the Women’s College because you did have contact with so many people who, in themselves, were just very interesting. One of the great advantages of being at Women’s College was being able to meet people, having the official capacity to be able to invite them over to the College so that students could meet them and getting to know a lot of really wonderful people and I do wish that I had kept a diary all those years and had something to recall about the many people I knew. Another thing I did just because of my role of being Principal of the Women’s College, was to serve on the, what became known as the Bell Committee which was the Report of the Committee of Enquiry into Teacher Education in 1971. In fact it came out at the end of ’71. What people were concerned about in New South Wales at that time was the wastage of the people who took up a teacher’s college scholarship and they either used the scholarship to get their degree and then the family paid off the bond or they left, very shortly after they were employed by the Education Department? Harold Bell was a really excellent Chairman of the Committee and the report is very much largely due to him and I think reflects his style actually. The committee probably wouldn’t even have been bothered about happening the few years that it elapsed because the problems seemed to just go over the next few years but the things we asked to do, we did report on which was how recruitment and selection of student teachers could be improved. We felt that so few careers advisers in schools really knew very little, they knew very little about university education, they knew very little about what they were advising their students on, probably still goes on, and it’s not their fault. It’s just the very large load that they have to carry. I think we also felt very strongly that the Department of Education just didn’t have good public relations, just didn’t make any effort to help these young people, or to encourage them for further education, or to even assist them when they suddenly came out and had to face real classes. Maybe you know, English may have been their specialty and they were put in front of a class to teach geography www.writepeople.com.au 39 S01310 13/01/2021 or were always given the worst classes because they were the most junior whereas the most senior people should be the ones handling the most difficult groups. We made 29 recommendations, how many of those ever happened I just don’t know because I tended to lose sight of that Committee because it was in around that time that my father died and this then threw me back very much to sort of looking after my mother. My parents had moved to Sydney from Melbourne, a year before, because my father started to show senility, my mother had had various problems with rheumatism, back trouble, this that and the other thing, and I was finding that I was having to visit Melbourne every month and this was getting a bit much so when the opportunity came for a house which shared a back fence with my sister, they took it and bought this house and my sister went back to the role of being little girl who looked after them again, and she was marvellous. My mother never had to do any shopping ever when she came to Sydney and she expected us to look after her very well indeed when my father died until she said “I looked after him, now you can look after me” and I really did lose my temper and said that both of us had jobs and could not afford 24 hours a day to look after her. So that, incidentally, was when we encouraged her to go through my father’s papers so within a couple of years, three years after that, she had produced her book Sand, Sweat and Camels which was the history of the Australians in the Imperial Camel Corp in World War One which came out when she was 83 and it was a stalwart effort but she had very great self-discipline and she could tell a very good story, and she didn’t mind from where she plagiarized and stuff. That was that, but as I say, the Bell Committee, while it was interesting and we had a lot of interesting people sort of came and gave us information and were interviewed by the Committee, it’s a bit hazy. Also at this time was when I was made President of the Association of Heads of Colleges at a meeting up in Townsville so that things were interspersed with things that happened with the family at that time. I must say that all through those years in Women’s College I brought up some very firm ideas about education, not necessarily women’s education but just the sort of system that occurred. I felt very sorry for students, especially as it became really tough to get into the university and where the cut-off point for any faculty in the mark up was all- important. I’d been there for the change because when I first went to Women’s College anybody could get in, provided they’d passed and some who ultimately became the best students might get on what was called then 5 Bs or something like that. I particularly remember this in association with a school like Ascom where www.writepeople.com.au 40 S01310 13/01/2021 pupils had been taught to work on their own and they did very well when they came to university whereas other students from schools that had been spoon-fed I suppose might have got better initial results but it just collapsed when they had to work on their own at the university so I’ve seen the changes and that’s why I was not a very firm believer in this mark and this cut-off point. I used to have these endless discussions with people and a lot of this was triggered by the fact that I interviewed potential students well, quite often through the year, and before they actually sat for their exams so that they knew and I knew that whether they’d get into university and primary and then into Women’s College would depend on their results and the results of you know, one three hour exam one particular day and anything could happen to change that and so I hated that system and there were other people like student councillors at the university who also hated the system and we used to have these great talk sessions and thinking we might try and change the system but I think really we were beaten by the fact that it was very easy to use a computer to get these things through and it was something that everybody believed in, it was an objective system and there was nothing subjective about it. But Newcastle University, for their medical course, do have one lot of 10% I think of their students are chosen by another system, not just on marks, and Melbourne University, I don’t know if still, but for quite a long time, again in the medical faculty, which is you know the most prestigious would still have a percentage of students who would not necessarily get in just because of their marks and we all felt that there ought to be some way of helping into university those people who for no good reason, other than their own home environment or their school environment, might just not be up with those top marks but had all the potential of being a very good university person. I also had another hobby horse of being a great believer in doing something else, going off for a year in between school and university, so you could really make up your mind that university was what you wanted because again there’s this awful snob value of you must come to university. There are lots of other things that people can do, they don’t have to come to university and I think that quite often the 17 or 18 year old just hadn’t had a chance to sit down and work it out for themselves. They were just reflecting what their families or their teachers thought and they had had to work so hard at school they had not had time to think and you know, if you didn’t come to university after that 12 months, then it didn’t matter. At least you’d probably made up your mind what it was you could do and the university at least was good about this, that if you applied and got in they held www.writepeople.com.au 41 S01310 13/01/2021 the position for you for twelve months so you could take it up later. As I say, I still think that that’s pretty important. The other thing I seem to spend my time saying to people was when they’d come and say they wanted to be a journalist or they wanted to be a solicitor or they wanted to do this or that and you’d say to them well have you ever done any writing or have you ever been in a solicitor’s office or have you ever been to a hospital, and which they hadn’t, and so you’d say look, surely your parents or somebody knows somebody that you could just go and make cups of tea, but you could go and see how it all works. That would quite often help them I think. I found I was often the first person to whom they talked about coming to the university, especially if they came from a country town and I’d be fascinated to know how they came to be there, coming to the Women’s College and more often than not it was through a past student of the College who might be on the staff at school or somewhere in the district that they’d known and said why don’t you go down and have a talk. I believe very firmly in the [inaudible]. They used to nearly kill one, they took a long time and you found yourself almost going to sleep because you were saying the same things and when at the end of the day, a student could really interest me, I knew that that person was pretty good. I felt that Women’s College did a service for ordinary university students because once they got into college they either became very privileged because they had all the expertise of the university just by coming and talking to me or the Vice Principal or one of the tutors and we knew exactly where to go whereas the poor student, the one of however many 18,000 at the university would have to battle to find these places. Now it’s nice to know that work experience for school students is just part of the natural program of events so that there was a lot to do. People used to say to me, what’s your job, and I’d find it pretty hard to describe what my job was. My job was certainly building for a lot of the period and then there were five years where I didn’t build so that one tried then to see what one wanted for the College itself. I think what I wanted very much was to build up the academic side of it because I felt that this was a place where students who were very keen on their work and wanted to go onto post-graduate work had a splendid opportunity without other distractions to get on with that. They didn’t have the distractions of having to live at home or look after themselves in a flat. I would have liked to have seen the College go in that direction, to build up a fairly large I think post-graduate group because by this stage of course, becoming more acceptable for people to live in flats and residences around the area which it hadn’t been when I first www.writepeople.com.au 42 S01310 13/01/2021 went there and because of this, students have become duller because the brighter students went off and lived elsewhere. They didn’t want to live in an institution and changes had been interesting and in another ten years to see what’s become of the place. Again it will be interesting. I always remember John Burnholme saying that the colleges really hadn’t served their role because there had not been any great piece of scholarship come out of any of the colleges and that was true and there was just so much opportunity for people to work there. Certainly we had people there studying for PhDs and went on to great things and certainly some of our Honour students went onto great things, but I felt we had reached the time when it could actually be happening there as there was no longer this pressing need for under-graduate accommodation which there had been earlier. So, it was an appropriate time to leave. It worked in with my own personal things, my house at Avalon had been paid off, I’d added on to it when I knew what date I was leaving (I planned a couple of years ahead). I’d also found it very boring for people to keep saying to me but what are you going to do, you’ve been so busy, what are you going to do? And so to counteract that, mainly, I undertook a diploma course in criminology at the Sydney University Law School. It was the one thing I felt I could do that was available. I was certainly also very interested in prisons which I felt had not changed since the last century and one of the areas where we had not advanced into the 20th century and I thought by doing a diploma in criminology maybe my next job could be something that would take me into that field because there was obviously no way I could go back to nutrition which I had got a long way from. So it was then a wonderful conversation stopper when I said I was doing a diploma in criminology. I wondered actually if I could do it because I hadn’t done any study for years and years and years so I started off rather tentatively with statistics I did know something about and gradually worked my way through law and got a distinction for forensic psychiatry which I’m sure was only due to my experience in Women’s College. Out of that came a job as publications officer with the Institute of Criminology which is useful in that it brings in a bit of money and I can work in my own house but it isn’t as interesting a job as I would have hoped for. What I did decide to do when I came to live at Avalon was that when I had settled myself, to go and work at the Manly-Waringa Citizens Advice Bureau which I had read about in our wonderful paper called The Manly Daily. I knew the sort of thing they did was to answer anybody’s query about anything. They were information givers and I thought that would be great for half a day a week to www.writepeople.com.au 43 S01310 13/01/2021 volunteer there. They had a course for volunteers, which was again an excellent course, I seem to be very lucky in all the courses that I’ve done. I went in there and I was immediately recognised, my past life came and hit me in the form of a friend of Clare Stevenson’s who knew me, having stayed for a conference at Women’s College and immediately they were wanting a chairperson for their home-help committee and so back I found myself trekking to Clare to ask her advice about home help and committees and the sort of people, all this voluntary work was very much a closed book to me and it took a lot of learning. I was on that committee for a while and then when her friend Hope Clayton who founded the Manly-Waringa Citizens Advice Bureau decided to leave, she would only leave on condition that I became president and I became president on condition that I would only be that for three years and changed the constitution. It was a tremendously impressive voluntary organisation and one was staggered that one worked it into dollars, it was something like well over $100 000 and that was a few years ago, in terms of work that volunteers gave. The volunteers were trained and they were good, and I came out with a new part of my life of really respecting the work that volunteers do. We all know that do it for all sorts of reasons but that doesn’t matter. The job has to be done, it can’t be done by government and I think more and more, the person thing’s going to come and going to be needed. And again, all the past skills came up, like writing reports and submissions to government and arguing about money and I suppose everything comes back to what one had learned in the past. I think they’re the main things and you know, the whole experience in the WAAF was a good one. I learned new skills, I certainly made at least one very good friend and I saw a great deal of Australia which I hadn’t seen before and never likely to see, so I was very grateful for that.

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