Australians at War Film Archive

Marsden Hordern - Transcript of interview

Date of interview: 29th June 2004

http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/2277

Tape 1

00:42 Alright, to begin with Marsden, thankyou very much for agreeing to share your time with us today, we couldn’t do it without your help, so thankyou very much for doing that. To begin with we need a summary of your life, and as I just explained we don’t want any stories or detail right now, but basically just an overview

01:00 starting with where you were born and grew up. Can you take us through in point form, starting from when you were born?

I was born in Newcastle Street Rose Bay, a suburb of Sydney, at noon on the 26th March, 1922. My father was what was called in those days a clerk in holy orders, a clergyman. He shortly afterwards was

01:30 sent to the parish of St. Andrews, Seven Hills, which incorporated Prospect and Toongabbie and other parishes, it was a purely country environment. I remained there until 1928 when my father received an appointment to be an organising secretary

02:00 to raise money for the Anglican diocese to support the diocese of Tanganyika [now Tanzania] in Africa, and send missionaries out there and build hospitals. My father began not parochial work but parish work. We moved to Wahroonga into a rented cottage called Ingledean,

02:30 1639 Lane Cove Road, Wahroonga – down the Pacific Highway, opposite the big tower. We lived there and I went to Knox Grammar School, where clergymen’s sons were educated for half price, even if they weren't Presbyterian. That was surprising that the Presbyterians were so generous, but they needed pupils. After about seven years at Knox, after doing my

03:00 leaving certificate, I went to Morvan School, Hunters Hill. The headmaster was AJ Rolfe, Master of Arts, fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and remained there and left school in 1939, about eight weeks after war had been declared, and thereby hangs many tales.

03:30 There’s a story between here and then, but I wont elaborate on it now. I tried to join the air force but was frustrated, my mother said, “Marsden, because you talk so much, you must go to the university, do law, become a barrister and be paid for talking.” I was packed off to the university in 1940,

04:00 but she wanted me to have some smattering of education apart from the law, so I had to do arts before I did law. I joined the Army Reserve and was training – because we were still at war with the Germans, although they didn’t pose a great threat to life and limb here, but we were preparing for it and I was itching to go, as most other eighteen year olds were.

04:30 On the 7th December, 1941 Japan ran riot in the East and all thoughts of any further academic pursuits banished from our minds. What the Japanese were doing to the women and children in Hong Kong and Malaya, if they got down here what would happen to you mother and father and sisters? So then I went from

05:00 the Sydney University Regiment into the 110th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, got bored with that, offered myself for the navy, was accepted, became an ignorant sub-lieutenant and was at sea and in action in the Royal Australian Navy

05:30 in 1942. After that, serving in convoys on the east coast during the height of the Japanese submarine campaign, I was trained as an officer to man a new kind of fast type of patrol boat called the Fairmile. Fairmiles, I can tell you about them later in but there’s a whole story about them – they were small, fast,

06:00 aggressive, versatile and you had to be young to be on them. They had no showers or no facilities at all. I passed my Fairmile course in anti-submarine warfare and I was appointed to a first Fairmile built by Halvorsen Brothers [ship and boat builders] here in Sydney, which was to go north to fight the Japanese. After several 06:30 years – well that was ’43, ’44 – two years in Fairmiles as junior officer and then as first lieutenant, which is the second officer – I was given command of my own patrol boat and fitted it out in Sydney. It was an American one brought on the deck of a Liberty ship and put in with a crane at Garden Island, and I took that

07:00 ship from Sydney to Hollandia [now Jayapura, West Papua, Indonesia]. Hollandia is on the north coast of New Guinea, it was the capital of Dutch New Guinea, just below the equator. The war was still on, the Japanese were fighting and I was involved in some pretty unhappy and sad and gruesome scenes there. After the war I soldiered on in the islands because Australia

07:30 had an enormous responsibility for rounding up all the Japanese in the islands. There were hundreds and thousands of them – in Bougainville and Borneo and New Guinea and New Britain. Very little is known about this aspect of what happened after the war. All the soldiers were trying to get out, get home and get married and get on with their lives. But my ship was retained and we soldiered on there in New Guinea and made

08:00 some rather fascinating expeditions up the Sepik River [Papua New Guinea] to rescue prisoners of the Japanese, and some terrible things happened up there. Then I brought my ship back to Brisbane after a really astonishing lucky voyage, which was a very, very difficult one. I remained on in the navy until 1947,

08:30 studying part time to finish my arts degree at Sydney University, through the newly established department of external studies, which had been set up by Sydney University to help some of its undergraduates who were at war, get some way to rehabilitation. It was very far sighted of Sydney University, and it saved me and thousands of

09:00 others becoming drop outs. I most certainly would have been a university drop out, because having commanded a ship and being back from five years at war, and being twenty four, it was really very hard for me to go back into my father’s house and become a dependant child, and study for years in arts and law, that this generous arrangement by Sydney University managed me to complete my arts degree.

09:30 No more thought of law. My grandfather, Edward Kerr Hordern, and his two brothers, in about 1879 had founded Hordern Bros Ltd. a retail store in George St, Sydney running through to Pitt St. They were cousins of the Anthony Hordern’s who had the huge big universal

10:00 providores [department store] down in Brickfield Hill [Haymarket]. My grandfather had not had an easy life, and he had not started with a silver spoon in his mouth but he did well. At one stage the Hordern Bros employed over seven hundred and fifty people. He had buying offices in London and France, so I was invited by my uncle who was the managing director of that firm

10:30 to come in to Hordern Bros He had fought in World War 1 and he was a returned man, he had been wounded in France. He was my godfather, we later had a violent disagreement and we parted company. That was very sad – it’s a story in itself, that. So I started working in Hordern Bros in the dispatch department, seeing how invoices were made out

11:00 and checked against goods, and then the packing department and just about every department except for women’s underwear. This went on and I really wasn't mad about it. At this time, before I got out of the navy, the Cruising Yacht Squadron of Sydney – the CYC [Cruising Yacht Club] – excusing probably the club, asked the navy if they

11:30 knew of any officers that had been navigators because the second or the third Sydney to Hobart race was about to start. It started with (Innington UNCLEAR) in 1946 I think it was – it may have ’45. So in ’47 the Hobart race was beginning to take on. It’s six hundred and forty miles to Hobart, if you get a good hard western gale you can end

12:00 up two hundred miles out in the Tasman Sea, far out of sight of land carried this way or that way by currents and winds. It can be calmed and when the storm is over you can't have the faintest idea where you are unless you can take an altitude of the sun, work out your latitude, work out you longitude, set a new course from where you really were, to get around Tasman Island. This started a very happy period of me

12:30 of ocean racing and ocean sailing, and I participated in four of the early Sydney to Hobart races. Three of them in the schooner Mistral, I’ve got some lovely photographs in the library of that schooner Mistral. She was owned by Mr. Evans, a grazier of Rylstone – must have been an enormously wealthy man because there was no money involved in it, it wasn't paid, there was no advertising of it – you weren't allowed to advertise.

13:00 Today, it’s Hitachi this or Coca Cola that, it’s quite obscene what they do now for money. But this was something that people did just for the love. So that went on for about three or four years. I did not like the retail scene in Sydney very much, I had itchy feet and I longed to fly – I always wanted to fly. Because this goes

13:30 back to the story that we may later pursue about why and what happened about why I didn’t become a pilot in the air force. So, Ted Macarthur Onslow who had a private flying set up at Quarry Grove flying school near Camden – I met him through some service meeting, or somewhere army and navy got together.

14:00 He’d been a soldier and I said that I wanted to fly and somebody introduced me, and he said, “I’ll teach you, Marsden.” I used to, then in 1947, was living here in this house with my mother and father. I was unmarried of course and I had a little old second English Singer car with a little hood that you slide back, and I used to get out

14:30 of Hordern Bros at noon on Saturday – because we worked up to midday on Saturday, and I used to go tearing off to Bankstown – and Ted taught me fly Tiger Moths. We had a lot of adventures then. Then I got more restless about the Sydney scene so I had a friend of mine in Tasmania see if he could get me

15:00 a job in a retail store in Tasmania. I wanted to keep in retailing just in case it really agreed with me, I’d still know about the science of retailing and the culture of retailing. This man, whose name was Fred Bennett, 14 Red Knights Rd, Lower Sandy Bay, he had been my father’s church warden, or associated with my father when my father had been

15:30 a curate at St. Georges in Battery Point in Hobart, during World War 1, about 1916. The Bennetts became lifelong friends of the Horderns. So Mr. Bennett got me a job in a firm called Browndale’s, which was one of the major retailing organisations in Hobart. So I went down in a ship called the

16:00 Karuah, I had a little old open Willis then that I’d bought for a hundred pounds because I was a bachelor. I’d been getting eight pounds a week as a lieutenant in the navy but with everything found, and my pay in Hordern Bros was eight pounds a week with nothing found. But I’d managed to save a bit of money, and there came this wonderful thing called

16:30 deferred pay – you’ve heard about deferred pay? You got one and six, or nine pence every that you had served. I got this thing from the Commonwealth, I'd served for so many thousands of days, or hundreds of days, and I got a cheque for three hundred and sixty nine pounds, fourteen and tuppence ha’penny, or something like that. Now, three hundred pounds in your pocket then was terrific, so I bought this car for a hundred pounds and

17:00 I was paying a little rent to my mother and father because I was here. My father didn’t have many resources so I went off to Tasmania, took my little vehicle off to Launceston, motored across the island, found digs in Davies St. – a lovely old colonial house up in Davies St for about two pounds ten a week, a room at a boarding house. I had a lovely time working in

17:30 Browndale’s. They didn’t work on Saturdays, so on Saturdays I continued flying for the Aeroclub of Southern Tasmania. I was earning enough money to pay for my digs, for my food and flying, and I also went sailing and skiing. It was wonderful, it didn’t cost much at all, it was just simple joys. Of course there was no such thing as television or anything like that, you made your own fun.

18:00 Then about 1948 my uncle who had been managing director of Hordern Bros up here, he understood that I was restless because he said he was restless after World War 1 too. He put through what they called a long distance telephone call in those days, and to ring from Sydney to Hobart was, you know,

18:30 it’s a bit like signing your life away, it’s a big event to get a long distance telephone call. He rang through at dinner time one night in the boarding house, and he said, “Marsden, you’ve been down in Tasmania long enough, come back. Christmas is coming on, I want you to get experience of Christmas sales in Hordern Bros because all sorts of things happen at Christmas. There are sales and

19:00 promotions and it’s good” and then he said, “Next march I am going to London. I’m taking my wife and my three daughters, and we’re going to show the girls England and Europe. Why don’t you come with us, and you can work in London shops and get experience, and then you can work for

19:30 some time in the Hordern Bros London buying office, and it will be good experience for you.” So this was arranged, I came back. I left on the Orion on or about the 3rd of March, 1949 on this wonderful lined voyage to England. The empire still existed

20:00 and you went across to Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Colombo, Port Said, Aden – where you coaled or oiled or did something. Then it was through the Suez Canal, up through the Mediterranean ports. What an adventure as you came to see the culture of these places, from the viewpoint of being a luxury tourist.

20:30 I’ll just stop you at England because we’ve got up to 1949 and I just want to get through to the end, so maybe continue on from there but condense it a little bit more so we can get through this summary and go back. How long were you in England for?

Fifteen months. I returned to Australia, went back into Hordern Bros, did not like it. I had cousins my own age – they were cousins Horderns and then there were

21:00 uncles Horderns, and most of us were restless. Disagreements occurred between my generation and the older generation, which basically were based on too many of the one family all in one business, it never works, it’s just silly. We had an unnecessarily violent and traumatic

21:30 confrontation. I was dismissed without a reference, I couldn’t get another job. I sued my uncles for improper dismissal and won. My uncle retired from ill health and I was then made the director of the firm. My pay went from eight pounds a week to two thousand pounds a year, but it was short lived. I then went back to England

22:00 as a director of Hordern Bros and I worked in the London office for three years. By then I had married Lesley, whom I had met years before on the Orion on the way to England. Her father was a politician – the Honourable E.S. Spooner, he was a Minister in the New South Wales Government and also in the Federal

22:30 Government. He was in Prime Minister Billy Hughes’ cabinet. I had met Lesley on the first ship but I had married her in 1953, and in 1956 we were back in England for three years. Wonderful life there, travelling to Italy, and Germany was in ruins. The dams were still busted, the people lived in hovels, to be all built up with American money from the

23:00 Marshall Plan to save Germany from becoming communist. In 1958, not wanting to be an Englishman completely, and one of our children had been born there, that’s my son Nicholas – and I had a daughter Rosemary, that came back here to Sydney, and I realised selling brassieres and shoes and underpants and umbrellas, was not

23:30 an imaginative form of activity – even though it may have conferred considerable wealth, affluence and comfort. But I had during my period abroad, visited many art galleries and thought a lot about the Renaissance, and modern art and the Roman art, and I had realised that in Sydney here,

24:00 with a population I suppose approaching two million at that time – it’s four and a half now – girls didn’t even study art for the leaving certificate. There's a thing called the Wyndham Report, do you know of the Wyndham Report? Dr. Wyndham was a very enlightened educationalist. Dr. Wyndham brought about great changes and girls had to study art for the leaving certificate.

24:30 This meant that tens of thousands of young women would have to be exposed to art, and the cultures that art represented, of all nations. In Australia it meant all the high schools and the private schools that educated these future mothers of our country, had to get access to pictures – and not just

25:00 gum trees, not just horses, not just billabongs and swagmen, not just the ordinary Australian landscape that you see on calendars – although some of them like Hans Heysen were superb. They had to begin looking at things like Simone Martini, Michelangelo and think about it. And the French Impressionists, and the Fauves,

25:30 and the Cubists, and they had to think about all these things because this was part of the world in which these women would, really partly control. So I decided I would set up a small art gallery print business. I would have intellectually significant reproductions of art,

26:00 some hand coloured engravings – one of them is there on the wall, the picture of Queen Victoria. So with no capital at all I left – Hordern Bros had now been taken over by, of all things, Anthony Hordern. But Anthony Horderns had not been own by any members of the family since the

26:30 1920’s or ‘30’s. Anthony Horderns had been a pure public company and there weren't any Horderns in Anthony Horderns, but Hordern Bros was still a private company owned by my grandfather and his children, and a number of other share holders with preferred shares as well. So Anthony Horderns who were down in Brickfield Hill were wanting to get a site in what they call the

27:00 golden retailing block, that was where Farmer’s and David Jones and Hordern Bros, and McCarthy’s and Ways and Knock and Kirby’s – were right up in the centre near Martin Place. Whereas once Brickfield Hill had been the centre of everything when the railway stopped at Central, now with the Sydney Harbour Bridge built and the people coming in from the eastern suburbs, around Market St. was it. So Anthony Horderns bought out Hordern Bros I was overseas

27:30 at the time when this took place, and I knew nothing about the arrangements of the takeover. But my uncles and my cousins who were still in Hordern Bros as directors, they had legal advisors, and these legal advisors put it to Anthony Horderns,

28:00 which at that time was controlled I think by a man called Monroe, Frank Monroe – a very nice man – and Bishop. Bishop was a soldier, he was a brigadier or a general. He died not that long ago, he was the managing director of, I think Frank Monroe was the chairman. But Anthony Horderns accepted that if any of the

28:30 certain number of nominated executives of Hordern Bros elected not to stay with the new company and walked out, they would get two years salary. You look around at what happens today when people get multi million dollars, it was very, very little. There were no pensions of course, or no superannuation. Two years salary, here

29:00 was my golden opportunity. My brother and my cousin all stayed on, and I think forfeited this advantage. But when I came back and had to go and see Mr. Bishop, General Bishop, he was a bit terse because I hadn't fronted up to say what I was going to do, and he had all of these Horderns, what was he going to do with them? So eventually I went to go and see him 29:30 and as I went into his office, he looked at me and he was terse. I’ll never forget his words, he said, “Well now, Mr. Marsden Hordern, what are we going to do with you?” Perhaps patronising, but see his position, he had inherited all these young ones that still thought now it was a public company owned by the public, still thought that

30:00 perhaps they were still a bit special. So I said, “The only thing, Mr. Bishop that you are going to have the opportunity to do with me, is shake me by the hand and give me two years salary.” He said, “My God, I wish all your cousins had all done the same.” He called out for a chequebook and he wrote the cheque then and I walked out with four thousand pounds in my pocket, and that set me up. I was able to travel to England on my own, go to

30:30 the galleries, find agencies, buy a car. I by now had two children at Abbotsleigh and Knox schools. I was able to make enough money by getting really nice pictures, selling them to interior decorators – every time you went to some of the big interior decorators around Sydney, they were always called in to decorate homes, they wanted to have wonderful modern pictures –

31:00 French Impressionists. They were hard to get in Sydney, there were plenty of gum trees around. So I began taking orders from interior decorators and other people like that, and then I would write over to these people that I’d met in Vienna or Florence, or Paris or Lyon, or London, and I’d say, “Send me five of On the Banks of the Seine.” “Send me four of Van Gogh,

31:30 Starry Night.” And the business built up very slowly. My brother Hugh then left Hordern Bros and came in with me, and we started in a little office somewhere near the GPO [General Post Office], then we rented a little place in 133 Walker St North Sydney, down in the basement. We didn’t deal with the public but we just mainly dealt with interior decorators, schools. You’d go around and get in your car

32:00 and go up to Penrith. You’d make an appointment with the art teacher, you say, “I’ve just come back with a lot of lovely new pictures, I’d like to show you some samples” and they'd say, “Yes.” So you’d go to Penrith for instance and you'd have a suitcase with big pictures in, the art teacher would come out and say, “I’ll have one of that, one of that, one of that, two of that, five of that.” Then you'd go to Wollongong and do the same thing – “Six of this, eight of that,

32:30 nine of that.” And then you’d work like mad, you'd go to Canberra, we’re flying all over the country in an old Vanguard, a creaking old Vanguard station wagon, and you'd build up orders. Then you’d send these orders over to Zurich or Vienna – people whom by now you have established confidence with, and I always paid them before they sent the goods. If the goods didn’t come, complete it and we’d argue about it later.

33:00 We built up a reputation for paying on the dot and then we made wonderful friendships. For thirty eight years I ran that business, and I retired from that a few years ago to write books.

Alright, we’ll stop you there at that point because the summary had gone on a bit long. We’ll get back to our topic but we’ll come back to it if we have time and talk about those books, because obviously the historical influence is important to us.

33:30 You can cut all that out anyhow.

Well people might find it incredibly interesting, but we’ll come back to the subject at hand. We’re going to go back to the beginning, so take yourself back from the period we were talking about then to your early childhood, and talk about your memories of that. It was a hard time in many ways,

34:00 can you tell us a little bit about your memories of the Depression as a young boy?

The Depression or the country before it.

The country before it, let’s start at the very beginning. What do you remember of that?

My first impressions are of a lovely old two-storey rectory, St. Andrews, Seven Hills. Acres and acres of fields and crops around it, kerosene lamps and candles, tank water and well water.

34:30 Open fires in all the rooms, cows, horses, calves, pigs, corn and all these things. My father was at heart a country man, I’ve still got his leggings, and he had about six or seven horses. He had sulky and he used to visit all his flock with horse and sulky.

35:00 He sometimes when I was five, because there were six children in our family, only five I was the second youngest. Too probably old not to have to do something, but Sunday morning was a particularly busy day and so my father used to go off in the horse and sulky and take a number of services,

35:30 baptisms. He’d leave at about eight o'clock in the morning and we’d get back at about six o'clock at night. We’d have lunch or dinner in some lovely old home, people were wonderful to us, and I used to sleep in the sulky under a shade with a rug over me, or if it was cold, inside. I have wonderful memories – he milked the cows, we kept bees, we had bonfires, and although as I realise now,

36:00 when my father went into the church, his father didn’t want him to go into the church. His father, my grandfather E. Kerr Hordern, wanted my father, Frederick Hugh Hordern to go into Hordern Bros – because fathers want their sons to follow. Misguided sometimes, but that’s what they do. But my father refused, he wanted, he’d been influenced by a man called George Alexander Chambers –

36:30 later Bishop Chambers, later the first Bishop of Central Tanganyika – and father took holy orders. Archbishop Wright, who was the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney at the time said to my grandfather, If your boy is going to take hold orders he’s got to get the best education.” So father was sent to England to Durham University, and he took his

37:00 theological degree at Durham University before World War 1. When he came back here he was given this country parish, after he’d been a curate of course down in Tasmania. One of my most magic memories of that countryside is, I used to be packed off with him in the sulky when he went visiting people, people would be dying. He’d go into a house

37:30 where an old man had been sick – the old man was probably fifty, fifty five, sixty – I’m eighty two, they were just kids really, when you think about it. But they weren't really kids because mortality pressed more heavily without the drugs than they do now. We were trotting along this country road on a summer day, and father was there, and Brown Bess was the horse’s name, and ‘Clip, clop, clip, clop’, the kookaburras were singing,

38:00 the magpies were in the fields around and suddenly father looked at his watch. He said, “Whoa”, and he reined in the horse underneath a tree. He said, “Take off your hat.” I took off my hat, he took off his hat. I used to talk a lot even then, and he said, “Be quiet Marsden.” So I’m quiet

38:30 and father waited. He said, “Put on your hat.” ‘Clip, clop, clip, clop’ and he said, “Do you know what that was?” I said, “No Dad, what was it?” He said, “It was eleven o'clock on Armistice Day. We have passed through the most dreadful war that ever the world has had. It’s the war to end all wars. About fifty to sixty percent of the boys that I knew

39:00 at Durham University in 1913, 1914, died in the mud and horror of Flanders. Never forget the debt we owe for the people who fought for the country.” And whether it was an immoral war, of course it was a ridiculous war, the Germans and the English should have been fighting together because the Germans and the English had so much in common. Our families were so

39:30 closely associated in J.S Bach and Martin Luther and George Frederick Handel. Where do you stop? So that was one of the lessons of the country, there were many other but I can't go on with them all.

What was your father doing during the war?

My father was a clergyman, and he was a clergyman before the war. And clergy were required generally to stay because they were part of the

40:00 ministry of people. There were so many men being killed, and the clergy had to minister to the young wives. After Gallipoli the number of people Dad had to go and tell, “Your husband’s never coming back. Your children are never going to see their father again.” And they'd collapse, they'd cry, they'd weep, they'd go to pieces – and here was a great social and spiritual service, to minister to these women and families in distress. Generally

40:30 speaking, many, many clergy had to stay put – if you had all the spiritual help, all the Roman Catholic priests, all the Presbyterian Ministers, all the Church of England, all rushing off and either being wasted as privates in the army – because there wouldn’t have been enough room for chaplains for them all. So it was probably better, I don't know, I don’t think – although I don't know, my father did offer to be a chaplain but the Archbishop would not allow him to go. So that’s that story.

Tape 2

00:41 We were talking about your father, what kind of a father was he? Obviously he was a dedicated Christian man.

He was a tomboy, he was pretty hopeless, according to my wife Lesley, in bringing us up. She said we all brought ourselves up.

01:00 We were all, there were six of us, mother used to retire with a headache if things got too obstreperous, or if the argument became too noisy. She had a lot of interests herself, she was interested in – her father was a remarkable man, Walter David White. I dedicated my first book to him, he was a Bristol man. But my father was a very loving, happy,

01:30 practical man. He was not a very academic thinker but he had enormous humanity, and one of the little – you’ve asked me a question, what sort of man was my father? and I will answer it my telling you a very brief story. He died in 1975 and virtually

02:00 in this house, he actually got to hospital a few hours before he died, but he and mother virtually spent their last years happily, and days here. After father died, Lesley and I moved in here. We lived in another house in Wahroonga and we sold that and we moved in here. I'd been here about six months, and there was a knock at the door –

02:30 the same door you knocked on this morning. There was a man there I'd never seen before, he said, “Is your name Hordern?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Were you any relation to the clergyman that used to live here?” I said, “Yes, my father, he’s dead.” He said, “Can I come in?” He came in and he sat down right here and he said, “I just want to tell you something that as a son you should

03:00 know. We’re not, we don’t care much for the church. It’s not what people say, it’s what people do. And after all, the founder of the Christian religion said, ‘By their deeds ye shall know them’, not what they say, nor what church they belong to. It doesn’t matter what they did but ‘by their deeds they shall know them.’” He said, “We were moving into Hastings Rd.

03:30 two doors down. We had four kids, dogs, cats, rabbits, goldfish – it one of Sydney’s stinking hot days, one hundred and five in the shade with a dreadful wind.” He said, “The pantechnicon was full of furniture parked in the street and everything was hell. My wife was exhausted, the kids were all fighting

04:00 and everything and we were trying to get the things in, and it was all mayhem, and we were just wondering how we were going to cope. Suddenly a man appeared with a basket and things under a cover, and he came up and said, “I don't know who you are, I don't know anything about you but I know what’s happening today – being a family man myself – and in view of the weather,

04:30 I just want you stop for ten minutes and have cold drinks and Icy Poles” or something or other that he got for the kids. And he said it just broke the whole tension, it broke all the strain and they laughed. He and my father became great friends. So this bloke said, “I just wanted you to know that that’s what we think ‘by thy deeds ye shall know’”. I never saw the man again.

05:00 So that’s the sort of man my father was. He was not a strict disciplinarian, he was apt to be swayed by whichever child’s argument got to him last. If some child wanted to borrow his car or have this or have that, one of the girls – I had two sisters and three brothers, so there were six of us. I don't know how many children were in your family? How many brothers and

05:30 sisters have you got?

I’ve got two.

Two, well double that and that was us, and it was a pretty democratic community. So father was gentle, kind, generous, loving, undisciplined and just a lovely man.

Were you a naughty child yourself? How would you describe yourself as a youngster?

Well I was sent to boarding school, paid for by my grandfather of course.

06:00 My father had no money to pay for that thing. This was, and I suppose I was naughty because I was rebellious, and I used to get the backside thrashed off me at Knox. I wrote an article for a book that Knox brought out called “Knox in Our Own Words” and Knox asked me to write a feature for this book. I got it our from my library there, unfortunately that book is

06:30 not indexed, it should be indexed, but it gives some of the impressions of a boarder at a boys school in the days when there was fierce physical discipline, which almost in some cases added to sadism. You'd have prefects who were boys of sixteen with a huge big cane and a string arm being able to thrash and belt smaller boys, and we were thrashed regularly because we were,

07:00 well I was, pretty argumentative. My father never had any of that sort of discipline on us, but in answer to was I naughty boy, I suppose I was beaten – myself and a man called Ned Quince. Ned Quince is still alive, he’d be eighty two I suppose now. He was a boarder with me, and another boy called David Nesbitt. David Nesbitt’s father was a Presbyterian clergyman, he was

07:30 a boarder too, and David Nesbitt, Ned Quince and I were thrashed regularly and harshly. Under the shower – the cold shower in the morning at Knox, you’d see all the weals across the boys buttocks. And sometimes the end of the cane, the supple cane it would come around and would hit the hip bone. That caused a nasty blue bruise and they were sore for a very long time, you couldn’t sit down on the hard benches.

08:00 But those marks on the backsides of the boys under the cold shower, they were the marks of puberty and almost like wounds – proud wounds that we wore in defiance of authority.

What sort of crimes would they be for?

One of the most amazing incidents concerned the third table in Knox boarding school and I have written in length

08:30 about this in this article. It is called “Okey’s Best Boy”. Mr. Okey was the headmaster. Okey was a most remarkable man, he was a fierce disciplinarian and a tough cookie. The Presbyterian schools in the ‘30’s, in the Depression were pretty Spartan. Lesley went to PLC [Presbyterian Ladies College] and she said that they were freezing cold up at Orange, 09:00 the girls had very poor food, and you really got very, very poor food. It was a summer night and we walked in and I was in the third table, we were all in alphabetical order, so there was Hewson, Hodgkinson, Hordern, Guilder and round the G’s and the H’s. The maids there were

09:30 not all together as perhaps they might have been, I suppose it was hard to get people for employment, and I – my mother used to teach us always, wash your hands after you’ve been to the bathroom, always wash your hands before touching food, never handle food on the table that’s going into somebody else’s mouth.

10:00 So we got into this particular evening meal around about half past five, Okey came in and he said, “Grace Benedictus, (Benedicat UNCLEAR)” and we all sat down, and there was some food that we were about to eat but we each had one piece of bread, and there was one little cube of butter – I suppose half an inch by half an inch –

10:30 and there was a bit pot of strawberry jam in the middle. I looked down at my cube of butter, it was melting because it was a hot afternoon, no air conditioning, and I saw unmistakably the deep imprint of a forefinger and a thumb each side, indicating that the maid or the person in the kitchen – it might have been a man – had actually

11:00 picked up that piece of butter with his forefinger and thumb and put it on the side of my plate. How did I know that that man had washed his hands after he’d last used the bathroom? My mother’s words rang in my ears, this was unhygienic. So I sad to Hodgkinson, “Look at this, Mum says

11:30 this shouldn’t be done.” And so was theirs, every square of butter on that table had been put on there by being squeezed with bare finger and thumb and jam down, and it was melting and there they were. So they said, “What are we going to do?” and I said, “Well I reckon” – because I always talk too much, “I reckon we ought to make a communal protest.”

12:00 “What sort of a protest?” “We won’t eat the butter. We will leave those squares of butter exactly where they are, and we’ll eat the piece of white bread and jam.” “Good idea.” So the eight of us decided, we had our meal whatever the other thing was, and walked out leaving eight cubes of butter around the table. Nothing happened.

12:30 The following night was also hot, we went in and there on the seven plates, or eight plates, the same now much more saggy, much more melty, much more disreputable pieces of butter with fingerprints remaining. So the establishment was saying to us, “Eat what you're given,

13:00 don’t waste, don’t criticise, get on with it.” So I said, “We can't allow this to happen.” You asked me was I naughty, perhaps this is naughtiness, I don't know. Perhaps it’s individuality, perhaps it was crazy. This sort of thing has got me into trouble all my life – it got me into trouble with Hordern Bros later. But they said, “What do we do?” I said, “Well, we’re not going to have this. We will mash the

13:30 strawberry jam into these pieces of butter on the side of the plate, and we’ll eat a bit of jam on the bread.” “Good idea.” So we all had dry bread again and strawberry jam, but we mushed with our spoons an awful mess, a sort of yellowy greasy stuff on the plate, so we couldn’t get it again. At eight thirty that night

14:00 Okey walked in – all the boarders were doing their homework, and we had prayers and then we all went to the dormitory. “I want to see all the whole third table in my office immediately after prayers.” We could feel it coming, we knew what was on. After prayers,

14:30 seven young boys – I probably would have been about fourteen – Okey was a big strong man. We went up, we all went in and he berated us. He said, “You are disgusting, your disgusting behaviour.” He used some rather harsh words that I won’t repeat now because he’s dead, and we made our peace in the end in

15:00 an extraordinary way after the war. He said, “What do you expect to become if you behave like this? Lawless, dirty, destructive, rebellious. Have you got anything to say for yourselves? I’m going to thrash you.” And I said, “Well, Sir,

15:30 my mother told me that you should never handle butter with your fingers because how do we know that whoever did that washed their hands after they last attended themselves in the bathroom?” He said, “You’re the worst Hordern, you're the ringleader.”

16:00 I said, “No, Sir.” And he said, “Get out, I’m going to thrash you.” So the whole lot of us went out and I knew from experience that if there are six of you to be thrashed, you don’t know how many stripes you’re going to get. The thing to do is to get I first because then if you're right down the end of the tail you see the boy coming out with tears streaming down his eye, his face wracked with pain, and you suffer again

16:30 the agony as all those boys come out. So if you get in first it’s all over, whatever it is. So I went in first, I didn’t know how many he was going to give me – I hoped for two. There was a trick if you're being beaten which boys learn – the people that survive it – you bend over but you don’t bend too far. If you don’t bend too far the skin on your buttocks 17:00 is loose, and also your pants are loose and they form a bit of a cushion, and they some dissipate the brutality of the contact of hard cane on bare bottom. So I bent over and he said, “Go down lower.” So I went down a bit lower and he got my head and pushed it right down, and then it started. ‘Whooisht, bang.

17:30 Whooisht, bang’ and I started and he said, “Get down.” ‘Whooisht, bang’. I said, “He’s giving me three.” ‘Whooisht’ – Four. ‘Whooisht’ – Five. I was now almost – the tears were running, the pain was almost unbearable. ‘Whooisht’ – Six. And I staggered out rubbing – you had to rub it very hard. I looked at the horror on the faces of all the other boys waiting to go in. We had

18:00 a thing which was called the water treatment. It was an old wives’ tale, and this was if you go straight away to the shower rooms, you take your pants off, you fill up the basin with cold water and you sit in the basin of cold water. It somehow numbs the pain and causes the quickness. We often tried it – Ned Quince and David Nesbitt and I often tried the water treatment.

18:30 We don’t know whether it really worked, but it definitely gave you something to think about, it took you mind off it all. Anyhow, we got six. Now that incident was one of many brutalities which would never be allowed today – I mean the school would be sued for assault. Just imagine what would happen today. And you had boys hitting boys like this. I went away to the war, I became captain of my own ship and I had the power of life and death over men. I had to leave

19:00 people on a beach to die. I grew up very quickly, by the time I was twenty three I’d had years of this sort of thing. Some people today at twenty three are still almost dependant on their parents. It quite shocks me, but war, if you survive it, makes you think. You have to grow up quickly or you're finished. I still nurtured distaste for Okey.

19:30 I was now an officer in the navy, and I knew that he’d been in the army because he was – and I thought, ‘If I ever run across him, ever, in civilian life, we’re both men, I’m going to go up to him and say, “What in hell do you think you were doing way back then with those boys? How could you have done it?”’ I was going to give him a piece of my mind. And it was strange that all through the war, among terrible scenes and

20:00 happy scenes, and one of fun with wonderful comrades, I never forgot Okey. I was going to give him hell if I ever met him. At the end of the war I joined an association called the Anti-Submarine Officers Association and we marched on Anzac [Australia and New Zealand Army Corps] Day. A blue sky with blue banners flying, and huge crowds, and the Governor taking the salute on the Town Hall steps.

20:30 There must have been thirty thousand, forty thousand of us marching. Now, it’s a pathetic lot of old cripples hobbling along, dropping off every year. Just like we used to see the World War 1 fellas, it’s funny history repeats itself. It must have been about 1950, and I was swinging up George St. and we were coming up to the Town Hall where the salute was going to be taken from the dais on the right. It must have twenty or thirty abreast, rows and rows of us with the army coming

21:00 up behind and the air force coming up behind. As we approached the saluting dais, opposite the Town Hall, there were marshals who were controlling the march and they were dividing the marsh. These ten go that side of the street, these ten go that side of the street. I looked and there was Okey.

21:30 Marshall – “Get over, get over.” And I thought, ‘My God. Here it is. Here’s this man still pushing people about. Pushing people around. I’m going to break ranks and I’m going to say, “Mr Okey, remember me?”’ And I had no fear now that I’d been through a lot too. But by the time I'd debated with myself and the Governor was there and everybody was there, to break ranks

22:00 and to walk out in an undisciplined way and go and start saying something to a marshal, would have made a scene. After all, we’d fought for a decent society and an orderly society, so by the time that I’d debated with myself the moment had passed. You know I always miss the bus, I should have known that. So all that year I thought about it. The next year there he was again.

22:30 “Get over to the right, get over to the left.” I thought, ‘Right, Marsden, catch the moment or you’re going to regret it all your life. You’ll say, “Why didn’t I?” You’re arbiter of your own fate, get into it.’ I broke ranks and walked out, and I can still see my comrades looking, “What’s he doing?” I walked straight up to Okey.

23:00 I’d forgotten about this, in the year that had passed I'd had lunch with an old Knox friend of mine and I told him about this thing about Okey, and I said, “If I ever see Okey again I’m just going to talk to him, why did he behave like that?” He said, “I wouldn’t be too tough, Marsden on Okey if I were you.” I said, “Why not?”

23:30 He said, “Okey was captured by the Japanese at Singapore.” And that was absolutely appalling what happened, you know with these men and the cruelties and the sadism and the tortures. And he said, “Okey stood up to the Japanese, and he supported his men. Okey was responsible for a lot of our fellas living instead of dying. He’s a tough

24:00 cookie, but there is a good side to somebody who’s tough.” Now that incident had happened in between the year, I forgot to mention that. So now I’ve broken ranks and I’m bearing down on him, and I must be about thirty yards away from him, and he suddenly looked smaller than he’d ever looked at school – because I was here then, and he was here.

24:30 He was greyer, and as I got close to him, I looked at him and suddenly there was a warning bell inside me, and I said quite kindly to him, “Mr. Okey?” And he looked at me and a lovely smile came over his face, and he said, “Marsden Hordern,

25:00 one of my best boys.” And that’s the title of the story that is published in that Knox, and it’s called “Okey’s Best Boy”. I said, “Mr. Okey, how nice to see you again.” He said, “Oh, I do love seeing boys. You’re in the navy I see.” “Yes, Sir.” I said – I still called him sir. He said, “Why don’t you and I get together and have dinner one night?” I said, “Gee, that would be lovely, Sir. It would be just like old times.”

25:30 He missed that point, but we arranged to give each other a ring and we were going to have dinner. We went out, and then he died, suddenly, but he and I had made our peace. Wonderful thing.

A great story.

True, too.

Just one thing, that brings up is the subject of Anzac Day, do you remember any memories of Anzac Day as a boy, or the First World War people?

26:00 Yes. Dawn service, four o'clock. Lots of my father’s friends were killed in the war, that war. I’d had aunts who’d been engaged to boys. There were – the statistics are probably wrong, but there were about four million inhabitants of Australia when World War 1 broke out. We were part of the Empire. Two million roughly of them would have women. Of the two million males

26:30 that were left, an enormous number of them would have been under sixteen or over forty. Take that little tiny segment of virile manhood of Australia’s, hundreds of thousands I suppose, but certainly a hundred thousand, I don't know how many were killed. You wouldn’t know because you're into this thing. But the number of young men who went off in that futile war to fight

27:00 against the Kaiser, and all that Gallipoli and France war, that were killed in France, denied an equal number of young women the chance to be mothers and rear a new generation. The sum total of the impact of that war in Australian society – I suppose it was the same in Germany and France and England and Italy – but the sum total on this pioneering society, this remote society –

27:30 aeroplanes didn’t exist, radios hardly existed, nobody had motor cars. You go around to little places like Bergalia or Araluen, and look at those pathetic war memorials. I was looking at one in Araluen three or four weeks ago, read the names, run your fingers down them. “Abbot, Anson, Johnson, Smith, Richards, Thomas.” All Anglo Saxon, no oriental or

28:00 Middle Eastern names. Today if Australia was attacked again and we had another war, lots of people with names that would be quite foreign to us would be the young men who would be dying.

How was impact evident to you as a young boy?

Mainly in maiden aunts, godmothers, and people who’s fiancés were killed in the war. These boys had gone off at eighteen and nineteen, they wrote to them, they proposed to them.

28:30 These women were denied marriage. If you have a hundred thousand young virile men suddenly taken out of action in a city like Sydney, you’ve got a hundred thousand virile, or feminine young women denied motherhood. Those women never held one of their own babies in their arms. Think of the impact of that, think of the spiritual impact of the denial of motherhood to those

29:00 women.

What about veterans that had come back? Were they prominent in your life at all?

Yes they were. There was my uncle Stanley White who won the DSM [Distinguished Service Medal] at Passchendale. There were veteran airmen, Mr. McNeill, who was the first remarkable headmaster of Knox Grammar School, Military Cross, flyer, flew SE-5’s. He was a

29:30 wonderful man, he was the inaugural headmaster of Knox Grammar School. He was almost a saint in the Knox history now, particularly to men my age. Uncompromising, he knew that the permissiveness did not lead to a disciplined and successful society. He knew that men sew what they reap and he

30:00 taught us the precepts of service to others – loyalty, work, and trying to be cheerful under all circumstances. These were high ideals, and the boys that were leaving Knox for the war were launched out on a very perilous, dangerous and painful seas. And although a lot of us never lived up to the high ideals

30:30 taught to us by Mr. McNeill, they were at least a guiding light. And in them is perhaps my greatest debt and gratitude to Knox.

How old were you when you started boarding at Knox? Well I used to write for the Knox Grammarian and I used to write poems that they used to publish. I think it would have been about

31:00 1932, I don't know, I could find out.

Pre-teen, a ten year old?

Yeah, I would have been ten.

What was the state of the Depression at that time? I mean, your extended family was quite rich but not your immediate family.

No, well I might have said, if I said it before, we had no money but we had our dental fees and school fees,

31:30 our holidays paid for by grandfather Hordern. We were very much a St. Paul I think it was, writing to the Corinthians, talking to them as Christians as having nothing and yet possessing all things. So although we had no money, we had to very, very carefully – we had a penny pocket money a week, this was when I was a dayboy.

32:00 When a calf was born, when we were in the country, that calf would be allocated to the next child’s birthday, that would be their birthday present. When the calf grew up and was sold, the money from the sale of that calf would go into a special bank account. It might be seven and sixpence for the child, and the child was allowed to have a shilling and they could buy ice creams or do things like that with it. That was the

32:30 environment, we never lacked anything that we needed, but we never had any money in our hands and that was the most wonderful thing because it taught us to be frugal, and it taught us that money doesn’t bring happiness. But you asked me about the Depression, I have one very, very powerful memory of the Depression and I have written a book of the present moment –

33:00 it is at present with a publisher now, and he is considering whether he will publish it. I’ve called the title of the book “Journeying Mercies”. It was a phrase my father had about the little things that happen in life that are good – finding a flat tyre in a car when the car was at a service station; getting a blackout in church when you had an electrician in the congregation; some immediate escape from overwhelming death

33:30 and disaster, which has happened to me many times – they are all journeying mercies. One of the journeying mercies I had was to have a happy family in this rented place, but this is the memory of the Depression – my mother was cooking a roast in the kitchen of Ingledean, number 3 Naringa Avenue, Wahroonga – no, number 1. The kitchen

34:00 window looked out over a gravel drive that wound up to a rickety gate. Underneath the roast mother had a dish to catch the dripping, as the roast cooked the fat dripped into this dish and we had bread and dripping for tea. Dripping, not

34:30 bread and butter, bread and dripping. While she was there, I was with her – it was probably about ’29, or 1930 perhaps, so I would have been eight then. And we were looking out the little window from the kitchen towards the front gate and the gate opened. A tall man – not as tall as you, Chris [Interviewer] but still tall –

35:00 stooped, came in with a bag over his shoulder. A few possessions over in a sack. My mother said, “Another poor devil.” Because as a boy who was eight, I knew nothing about the Depression. I know nothing about economics, I didn’t know that seven hundred and fifty thousand were unemployed. I didn’t know that school masters, doctors, clergymen,

35:30 were walking the streets without a job. I didn’t know that the dole was food coupons picked up at a post office worth a pound a week, and that unless you had a doctor’s certificate or that you were married you could only pick up those food coupons at a post office ten miles away. We had picked it up last time, they stamped it, “Wahroonga, Pennant Hills.”

36:00 You had to walk, you couldn’t congregate in large pools of unemployed, you had to walk, and when you're walking you could chop wood for someone and get a fee. Or you could sharpen scissors, or you could paint a house, or you could do something so there was a chance of work for food. When times come really down to survival all sorts of things happen – you’re a young man and you can't possibly

36:30 understand what this is like. The human race has an incredible capacity to survive. And times are going to come again upon humanity such as we’ve never seen before, and some humans will survive, back to the Depression, back to the old man walking down the street. Walked up on the steps, knocked on the door – I’m standing beside my

37:00 mum and she opens it up. He spoke with a beautiful voice, nicely spoken like you – I’m not flattering you, but a nice voice, polite. He said, “Good morning, madam. I cannot ask you for work because I know you’ll have no money to pay me.” 37:30 But he said, “For the love of God, can you give me something to eat?” Now here suddenly I sensed was a terrible moment, he was an educated man – it could have been you, Chris, at your age now.

Just be careful when you're addressing comments to me because I’m not on the archive, people will be confused by that in the future, so just talk generally about a young man.

Well, I’ll just say you're the bloke… alright, yeah. Well you can cut that bit out.

38:00 He was an educated man and he was now begging for food. The impact of this had not yet completely touched me. He came through the house, there was a hall – it’s now demolished, the red brick reservoir opposite the big silver water tank, just past Abbotsleigh – that big reservoir was built on the place where this happened. We were living in a water board cottage.

38:30 So that’s where it was. He walked through and at the back of the little house there was a verandah, and this verandah had the sun coming in it. My took mother took him out and she said, “Sit down there.” So he sat down and he said, “Thankyou madam.” Then she went in and she pulled out the tray with the dripping in it, and she cut two big thick pieces of brown bread.

39:00 She put them on a plate and she smeared very liberal, thick dripping, hot grease over these two bits of bread. She made a big pot of strong tea and she put a little jug of milk, and she put a bowl of sugar. She said, “Take it to him, Marsden.” I picked it up and I went out, and he was out there

39:30 and I put it down beside him. He said, “Thankyou, sonny.” I went in but I was curious. There was a window which looked from an inner room onto this verandah, it had a lace curtain over it through which one could see but not be seen. He didn’t do anything while I was on the verandah, but

40:00 when I left, he looked around like this and no-one’s there. Then he looked down, he picked up the pieces of bread and he broke the crust from around both of them. He put the crust over on one side. Then he poured himself a

40:30 cup of strong tea, and he put about five teaspoons full of sugar into it – I suppose he was starved for sweetness too. All this of course, is the mature consideration of an older boy, I didn’t comprehend any of this at the time, except that it was a vivid mental image which remains with me as clearly as I’m talking to you now. It’s happening again seventy five years ago.

41:00 He had a pull of the tea, he drank the tea and put it down, and then he picked up the pieces of dripping, bread and he wolfed them down like a dog. Munching, swallowing, then he had another drink of tea – and I’m still glued to the, this is education to me, education in the raw – then he picked up the bits of crust which had no dripping on them, or very little, and

41:30 he went right around the big plate getting every little scrap of dripping and put them to his mouth and just kept them in his mouth, and just savoured them. Then he finished the tea and he just sat there. Then he picked up the tray and he came in, I was back in the kitchen with mother. He brought the tray back in and he said, “Thankyou, madam. God bless you.” And he walked out the door and back up the drive…

Tape 3

00:48 So Marsden, you were telling a story about this fellow now walking up the driveway. Can you start it from there?

Yes I was standing in the kitchen with my mother and she was going on the prepare the meal for the family

01:00 and this stooping man who had just said God bless you, walked up the path to the gate, out onto the Pacific Highway opposite where Abbotsleigh main building is today. I watched him go, and as I watched him go I was conscious – although I didn’t understand it as a child, but in some sort of

01:30 childish way that I had been privy to some great drama. I didn’t understand well as I do now, of course, but I had an inkling. Humans have sort of inklings even if they're not fully understanding. And I thought, ‘That poor man, what has he had to go through? That could be Dad, father begging for food. Was he a

02:00 schoolmaster, was he a postmaster, was he a doctor, was he a solicitor?’ I don't know, I didn’t reason like this in my mind then, it was just this poor man. We had received our weeks pocket money and I had my penny, and I hadn't spent it. I could have gone down to Mussett’s, which was the local store near the railway station at Wahroonga, and I could have bought a penny ice cream or

02:30 a big back of sweets for a penny. I had that penny in my hand and I suddenly felt I had to give him the penny. He needed it far more than I. I ran out and it was like Okey, I deliberated, I didn’t act immediately, I turned it over in my mind and I was almost in danger – I would have been ten I suppose – of 03:00 letting the moment escape. But I’d been so moved by what I had seen that I had the penny – I said nothing to Mum – I ran up the garden gate, through the gate, across Naringa Avenue and there he was, slouching along down what is now the Pacific Highway towards Kunabarres Road. There was a bakery in a field with horses in it on the corner where the service

03:30 station is now – Butler’s I think it was. He was just slumping along and I ran pretty fast and I caught up with him, and as I got behind him, probably about six or seven yards, I called out in a childish voice, “Excuse me?” He stopped and turned around, and I was terrified.

04:00 Tears were streaming down his face, his eyes were bloodshot, it was probably the first time this sensitive, well spoken and obviously educated young man, had had to beg for food. I had heard stories about men killing little boys, about wicked men with bloodshot eyes jumping on little boys and strangling them. You heard all sorts of things, it’s like Grimm’s fairy tales.

04:30 These things go on, they happen, so they’re into sort of law. I was terrified, I turned, I had the penny in my hand, I threw the penny at the ground at his feet. I turned and I called out, “Mummy!” I went lickety split back home as fast as I could go. The last memory I have of this is that man’s broken voice calling out,

05:00 “Come back little boy, I won’t hurt you.” You asked me for a Depression memory, there it is. What humanity is behind that. what tragedy? And we’re going to do it all again because humans, the greed that one sees in corporate life today – in American, in England, here, Asia, India. The extravagance, the wanton destruction of resources,

05:30 mankind cannot continue like this. But mankind will survive. In 1826 when Charles Darwin, that man with a powerful mind, was on the Beagle in South America. They went to the Galapagos Islands and Charles Darwin was then studying natural history, and he had heard that the

06:00 Galapagos turtles at a certain time of the year had a remarkable breeding cycle. Captain Fitzroy of the Beagle put Charles Darwin on the Galapagos Islands with two men and a tent, and rations for two or three days, so that they could observe this remarkable phenomenon. Out in the library there is a picture of the Beagle about to land Charles Darwin on the island – I’ll show it to you afterwards,

06:30 it’s a wonderful picture. Charles Darwin rode ashore and he set up camp on this long beach where these turtles were to come in. Night fell, the moon rose, and far out over the sea the water began to thrash, thousands of female turtles heavy with egg, coming in to get on this sandy beach to breed. The beach was a long,

07:00 sloping sandy beach that came up as you often see, and there was about a three or four foot vertical cliff of eroded sand backs – you often find them on the beaches. He watched amazed as thousands of these turtles came up, waddled up and then tried to get up and fell over backwards – when a turtle falls over backwards it dies, it takes days and days to die. More and more came up because turtles have to lay their eggs

07:30 beyond the high water mark. Climbing over the upturned body of their sisters, and a number of them made it to the top, scratched a hole, laid their eggs and went back to sea. Charles Darwin’s powerful mind concentrated on this drama, this thing and he was thinking about humanity, and he was deeply religious. He then thought, ‘When those eggs hatch out, the birds

08:00 are going to be after them, the lizards are going to be after them. A few little baby turtles will make their way back to the sea and then the fish will get them and then the sharks will get them.’ Charles Darwin said, “These turtles are carrying out a destructive way of life and they’re going to be extinct.” The Galapagos turtle is now extinct but Charles Darwin summed this up, and he was only about twenty four, and he said these words – and it’s relevant to what you’ve been talking to me about and what I’m talking to you about now -

08:30 these were Charles Darwin’s words, and he used the Royal plural – “Can we believe that if a society continues to practice a habit which is injurious to its survival, that it will not survive? We cannot.” So that re. humanity, and think of the Depression.

Thankyou for sharing that,

09:00 we’ll come back now travelling farther forward. The war, what did you know of the coming events of the war? Did you think there would be a war?

We were in school in the last year or so of our life. The Empire was supreme, the British Empire was the most powerful empire in the world since the Roman Empire. The British Navy was the most powerful instrument of

09:30 policy in the world. We were outraged at what Hitler was doing, because as boys our headmasters were telling us about it. The Munich meeting with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain – when Chamberlain came back and said, “Peace in our time” and waved that piece of paper. We were so enraged with Hitler that the Prime Minister of the greatest empire, the King,

10:00 and our Empire had had to go and talk to this Nazi German fella with all these jack-booted fellas. How humiliating, we thought, ‘It’s about time we told these Germans where to get off’. We were quite ignorant of the fact that Germany had been preparing for war for the last six years – the Luftwaffe and the Wermacht were the most powerful armies and air forces in the world. And Britain

10:30 we were quite ignorant of the fact that Britain was weak. There was the battleships in the navy and there was the King, and here were the Germans that we beat in the war before, which our fathers had told us all about. So we anticipated that something was going to happen, and we really – this is a terrible thing to say – but we really

11:00 were young and spoiling for a fight. If you're young and a member of a confident community, your King and your Empire is the most powerful in the world, you’ve been dressed up on this. Perhaps it was true, perhaps it wasn't. The flag was there, “God Save the Queen”, “Rule Britannia”, we used to sing it all the time. And the wonderful prayers from the Book of Common Prayers

11:30 about God blessing our arms and fighting against the heathen, and all that sort of thing. You know, you're a man associated with the church, you would have thought about all these things. So we were disappointed that the war didn’t happen, and we’d get the Germans out of the way and it would all be over in a few months. Then when it finally broke out on the 3rd September 1939, that perfidy

12:00 and Germans went into Poland, and Britain and France stood together against it. We just felt the thing was so absolutely dreadful, and we’d learnt, or we were told – like we’d told in World War 1 about what the Germans were doing with the women, and babies and houses and churches. We were intelligent enough to think about this, we were sixteen or seventeen. ‘What if Germany wins and

12:30 Australia becomes German? What happens to our mothers and fathers? What happens to our sisters?’ Of course it was a worse story when the Japanese came in but that’s a later story. So we were burning to fight and anxious for war, because when you're sixteen or seventeen you are inviolate, you can never be killed. Other people can have their leg shot off, and other people can die or be captured, or starved, or beaten to death, but not you. Not Mrs. Hordern’s little boy Marsden, he’s right.

13:00 All the others can go – the invincibility of youth.

You mentioned earlier just briefly about going and trying to join the air force. Can you talk us through that story?

We left school in November, I had written a poem about asking boys to be enlightened spiritually. The headmaster had found it

13:30 and he had it printed and he had it stuck in the books of all prizes given at that years prize giving, which was late November or early December of 1939 – war was only weeks old. We were burning to fight. I had two particular friends at school, John Small – whose father had been in the AIF [Australian Imperial Forces]

14:00 in World War 1 and a machine gunner at Gallipoli, and Guy Roberts – I’ve got photos of them in the album out there, lovely boys. For years they had grown up as best friends of mine. I’d been in and out of their homes, they’d been in and out of my homes. They used to call Mum aunty, you know how you call old friends of families aunty? And so John Small,

14:30 Guy Roberts, Marsden Hordern were wonderful friends. We broke up from school early in December, and John Thomas who was another fellow who was also another friend of us, borrowed his father’s little baby Austin, and the four of us went down to Newport and we camped in the bush near Newport for four days. We swam on that

15:00 golden beach, we fished, we cooked sausages and we cooked them over a fire. We got up in the morning when the dew was on the ground, the kookaburras and the parrots were flashing, and we talked about life. We decided, in the wisdom of youth, that there had never had been such a friendship as we boys, ever, it was unique. The ignorance of youth – the presumption of it.

15:30 And we took a solemn oath around the campfire in the bush at Newport – no alcohol – that the three of us would continue through life as best friends, we would be godfathers to each other’s children, we would be best men at each other’s weddings, and

16:00 presumption of presumption, if any one of us fell in love with a girl and wanted to marry her of which the others did not approve, he would give the girl up. How about that, for going against nature? So that’s how close we were. We came back from Newport,

16:30 John Small, Guy Roberts and I, went to Woolloomooloo RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] recruiting depot. They wanted airmen to build up and fight the Germans, but we didn’t have any planes. The Germans had plenty of Blenheims, of Stukas and Heinkels, and Messerschmitts [aeroplanes], and England was scratching along and the German factories were

17:00 turning them out in thousands. Highly sophisticated aircraft and we weren't even in the race for about two years to get parity with the Germans. So looking ahead, the authorities understood that we were going to need tens of thousands of pilots because Germany was probably going to be broken by air power, which it largely was, with the thousand-bomber raids, the 17:30 Ruhr, the Marne and the Eider dam (UNCLEAR). They began setting up a thing called the Empire Air Training Scheme, have you heard of it? You’ve probably spoken to people who’ve – they trained in Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe] and Calgary in Canada. If boys went in and started to become pilots or air gunners, now, they might be ready to fly aeroplanes in nine months time when they would be built. So we were all seventeen, off we went to

18:00 Woolloomooloo in high spirits, and the sergeant pilot said, “What do you fellas want?” “We want to join up, we want to get in straight away.” “Well, if you want to get in as ground crew you can come in straight away, but do you want to be?” We said, “We want to be aircrew. I want to be a pilot, I want to shoot down a Messerschmitts.” I just wanted to kill Germans,

18:30 and so did John Small and so did Guy Roberts. He said, “Did you pass your intermediate certificate?” “Yeah.” “Have you passed your leaving certificate?” “Yeah”. “Did you do maths?” “Yeah” “Oh, well you could probably be a navigator or you could probably be a pilot, or a wireless operator.” “That’s alright.” “Right, pee in this bottle.”

19:00 Inflate your chest, measure your expansion, look down your teeth, look up your backside to see if you’ve got piles. Do this, do that, and then sign here that you agree to go overseas and fight wherever you're sent. This, that and the other thing, according to His Majesty’s pleasure, or whatever the words were.

19:30 When we came down the bloke said, “How old are you?” I said, “Seventeen.” He said to John Small, “How old are you?” and he said, “Seventeen.” He said to Guy Roberts, “How old are you?” “Seventeen.” “Oh, we’ve got a bit of a problem, it’s only technical.” He said, “You can't sign, you're a minor. You’ve got to take these forms home to your guardian or you mother or your father, and get them to sign, bring them back tomorrow and you're in.”

20:00 “No sweat, no trouble, easy.” So John Small, Guy Roberts went off with their forms, and I took mine home. My father at this time was the rector of St. Paul’s Church, Cleveland St. Sydney. A beautiful Blackett [Edmund Blackett, colonial architect] church which is now the Greek Orthodox Cathedral – a lovely church, I used to fly model aeroplanes from the tower there, and there was a

20:30 rather ugly red brick rectory. It’s all on a tiny bit of land, industrial area right beside the railway – I don't know if you know it? And yet it’s a beautiful church. But father was the rectory there for ten years, and at this time he was rectory of St. Paul’s Church, Cleveland St. Sydney. Father was out on rounds, or baptisms, or funerals or something, I burst into the door and I said, “Mum, sign this.” And she said, - the arrogance of youth -

21:00 and I said, “Sign this.” I didn’t say please even. “Quick, sign this.” I wanted to get back down there with it, you see. I knew there was a tram for a penny back down to Woolloomooloo. The same bloke would have been down there, it was about midday. She said, “What is it, Marsden?” I said, “It’s just a form.” She picked it up and she read it with a troubled face, and she read it again. She said, “Sit down, Marsden.”

21:30 So I sat down, and she put the paper over on the table and she said, “I will not sign this, nor will your father.” I said, “Why not, Mum?” and she said, “I did not rear you to go and die in an unequal war against the German air force.

22:00 Britain will be years before we have aeroplanes to equal theirs, and thousands of young men are going to die in unequal combat.” She said, “Join the navy if you must.” I said, “But you’ve got to sign it.” She said, “Would you please tell me why I’ve got to sign it?” I said, “The other boys’ mothers are signing it.” She said,

22:30 “Marsden, may I remind you I am not the other boys’ mothers.” I felt ashamed and shocked. John Small and Guy Roberts mothers signed their death warrants that morning. Those two boys joyfully went back to Woolloomooloo with a guardian’s approval.

23:00 We kept in touch because we were still wonderful friends, we wrote to each other. They went to Canada, they learnt to be bomber or fighter pilots, or air gunners. Both of them died before they were twenty. None of them ever held their baby in their arms, none of them ever held a young wife in their arms, none of them

23:30 had the pride of setting up a home. Sixty years of life were denied to them and I survived. Why did I survive? Because of my mother, that was the story. But then, she said, “As a matter of fact you're too young to join anything yet. The Germany War is a long way away. You’re going to have to go to the university.” So that was how I was sent to the university in 1940. I spent

24:00 1940 and ’41 in the university, when I was in the University Regiment, then the Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, then the navy.

Could you share with me then, the University Regiment when you were there, what were they doing in respect to the war effort?

They had artillery, they had a machine gun battalions and they had infantry – I was in C Company.

24:30 I was a corporal in C Company, we were camped at Ingleburn, we had big heavy boots, army clothes. The boots hurt your feet, we had palliasses and kit bags, and we route marched for miles around the Narellan in the heat of summer. We slept under trees, under bridges, we dug slit trenches, and we learned

25:00 all sorts of bayonet drill, barbed wire entanglements, and then what happened was, on the 7th December, 1941, the Japanese ran mad pouring down through the far east, burning, raping, killing, torturing, sinking – without even declaring war.

25:30 Life suddenly became serious, this powerful carrier fleet of the Japanese practically destroyed the whole United States Navy at Pearl Harbor – except the aircraft carriers which were out, and saved our bacon. But this incredibly powerful fleet of Japan – Japan had the second most powerful navy in the world. Great battleships, aircraft carriers – she’d been preparing for it,

26:00 this militaristic nation had been preparing for it for so long, and she struck just when she thought she had people at her mercy. How did Singapore – here they were, everything was rolling up. Britain was embattled, American had only just come into the war but she herself was embattled. The main thing – you know the story, you would have heard this dozens of times –

26:30 Suddenly the powers that be in the Australian eastern command, thought, ‘What would happen if a Japanese armada appeared off Wollongong, or Newcastle?’ Port Kembla steelworks, where all the steel is made for our Bren gun carriers and bayonets, and knives and mills bombs. They could capture that, so the

27:00 members of C Company, Sydney University Regiment – of which I was a corporal, and I suppose other companies, we were told to standby and we were put into trucks, Blitz buggies and we were taken to Port Kembla. We were untrucked, carrying our rifles,

27:30 bayonets, mess kit, water proof jacket, about forty rounds of ammunition. We marched up onto the slopes of Port Kembla, we began to dig slit trenches. Meantime, the limbers and the wagons of the army brought up food and mess kits, and we dug latrines, we pitched camps, we set up machine guns, and we stood there for about ten days or a week, looking out to sea with out binoculars.

28:00 Looking to sea the top masts of a Japanese armada coming over the – it would have been absolutely murder had they come. Just a few rookies like us, kids of about nineteen. I’ve still got a letter to my mother, because she kept all my letters. After she died, in the attic of this house I found a big box, and in her writing, “Keep. Letters from the

28:30 boys at the war.” I had two brothers, one in the air force and another one in the navy – Hugh and John. John was in the navy, Hugh was in the air force. I wrote to mother on Australian Comfort Fund, or Salvation Army paper. It’s still there, that letter is out in the library now, and I’ve quoted from it in the book of memoirs that I’m writing. I said, “We’re here, Mum.” And I said, “The officer has told us

29:00 that this is the closest thing we’ll ever be to being in action without really being in it. If the Jap's come, we’re ready for them and we’ll tear into them.” There were about sixteen of us with bayonets – the innocence and the unpreparedness of youth.

Your two brothers, Hugh and John, were they allowed to join the war effort at the very beginning?

29:30 Particularly Hugh in the air force?

No, I think my brother John was not allowed to join until he was eighteen or nineteen. Nor was my brother, after all, just imagine you have a son, you’re twenty years away from it now and you’ve got a boy who’s sixteen or seventeen and this happens. And you are allowed to say, are you going to throw him into this sort of a bear pit, at sixteen

30:00 or seventeen, or wait until he’s liable for it. You would exercise parental discipline, wouldn’t you?

So Hugh didn’t join the air force in ’39, ’40?

No, well he would have. Hugh’s older than me, he would have been – first of all he joined the armoured regiment, he was in the armoured regiment, and wore berets and they were up at Singleton I think. They had Bren gun carriers, and then he went into the

30:30 air force marine section, and he was up in Arnhem Land and Northern Australia in the aerodromes and things. So I would imagine, what happened, war was on and you weren't too much involved what your brothers and sisters were doing, it was sort of yourself. So Hugh was probably in the armed forced before I was, because he’s eighteen months older than me. I think he almost certainly would have been. And John was younger so he probably would have been in – we all went in

31:00 when we were about eighteen or nineteen.

The equipment while you were in the reserves in Sydney University, you mentioned having rifles and forty rounds defending Port Kembla, but did the unit have much equipment?

Not much, it had limbers that were drawn by horse – horse drawn limbers. Two horses that were sort of a big trailer with wagon wheels. 31:30 We didn’t see much in the way of military transport – don’t forget, we weren't the AIF. The AIF were being sent to Benghazi [Libya], and the Australian Imperial Forces, all the money and all the effort from this seven million people country, mainly (UNCLEAR), we couldn’t make a motor car even. We couldn’t make an aeroplane, we couldn’t make a motor car or a railway track. The money went for those boys who were going to fight the Germans.

32:00 We were caught completely, out here with the Japanese War, defenceless. There was no equipment in Australia, it had all gone to support our troops in the army and the navy. The navy were everywhere – the moment the war broke out the Royal Australian Navy was in the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean and in the Indian Ocean. The Royal Australia Navy – there were only five thousand odd men in the Royal Australian Navy at the outbreak of war. There were thirty five thousand at the end of it.

32:30 And at the end of the war, nearly one million Australians were in uniform, out of a population of seven million – and I am told that that was a greater percentage of people on uniform from any continent of the population, including Russia, America, Japan – because all of them had such big populations. But if you have one million in uniform out of a

33:00 total population of seven, lots of them old, lots of them young, lots of them women. What an enormous contribution Australia did to fight those Japanese and those Germans.

Given that obviously while you were in the reserves, you were at university at the same time, can you describe for me the makeup of the fellows who were also in the reserves and why they hadn't gone on to join the AIF or anything else?

33:30 They were like me, mostly you had to pay to go to Sydney University, it wasn't much. My father certainly I don't think would have been able to pay, because he was a rector, and was probably getting about eight pounds a week, and he had six kids. I don't think there would have been money there, but somehow or other I didn’t ask – probably my grandfather paid for it – but I found

34:00 at Sydney University I met people like Trevor Rowe, was one of them. His father had been in the carpet business, he was the managing director of a big firm, and generally speaking the boys and the girls who were in Arts 1, the first year of the Faculty of Arts in 1940,

34:30 seemed to have come from what must have been a fairly fortunate background. They had probably been to private schools, and public schools, but there was another great segment of our society and these were people who didn’t have access to as much material resources. These young men, some of them are the finest men and women

35:00 that you can meet – one of them, John Dougherty, who is still one of my closest friend and who I met as a sub-lieutenant on a patrol boat in 1943, and with whom I had some amazing adventures. His father, they lived at Russell Lea, 38 Clement St. Russell Lea. His father and mother were wonderful people, I think John Dougherty because he was a very clever

35:30 brilliant boy, I think he became dux of Fort St. High School - I might be wrong, and if he ever finds out that I’ve said this I’ll be in trouble, because he might not have been. But he had to go and work in a bank as a teller and then study at the university at night, and pay for it from his earnings – he later became secretary of the Reserve Bank, with Duncan Coombes.

36:00 Just a quick question surrounding the university side of things, did you ever come across pacifists or anti-war movements?

Yeah, Donald Horne [journalist and historian], he was a leader of the Labor Party, or the Labor group, and there were pacifists there, and there were Communists, and Communists were almost worse than being an atheist. If somebody was a Communist, for me coming from the sort of background, and there were people in the world

36:30 and atheists were very sad people. They were people who didn’t believe that God existed, what was going to happen to them in the final days when they confronted God and learned that they had been wrong all their lives. So poor atheists, didn’t give them much chance at happy lives. Communists were just about as bad because Communists believed that everybody owned everything – this is how it was taught to us. We didn’t understand, I never read Karl Marx.

37:00 I’d never read Mein Kampf [book by Adolf Hitler] but you got what was dished up to you, and you tended to believe what you heard, you were told by your betters. But there were people who were professors at Sydney University, and there was one whose name you would probably know,

37:30 the name just escapes me at the moment, he was a brilliant professor. He was always controversial, he was always against what we had been brought up to think of was the established, ordered, proper way of life. Generally speaking the boys and girls that I met at Sydney University were a happy, pleasant lot. They

38:00 didn’t show signs of great material wealth, they certainly didn’t show signs of hardship or poverty. Nothing like that Depression story was there, and so I suppose they were in the main, people that had come from the same sort of background as I had come from. You don’t organise these things, the coin tosses and how it lands, that’s what happens to you. Tape 4

00:40 Let’s continue, the 110th Light Anti-Aircraft, how did you get involved with that?

Well when the war began to get serious and Japan was in it, the Sydney University Regiment was disbanded and we

01:00 were sent as two units to the army. Not the AIF but the militia, because the militia were the boys that were fighting in the Kokoda Trail, you know the boys that stopped the Japs – I won’t go on about that, you know all about that. But the militia was the line of defence that the Japanese appeared at Palm Beach, or Wollongong. So we were sent to Kensington [Randwick] race course.

01:30 I, having been a corporal in the infantry, now became a bombardier which is the same, in the artillery, anti-aircraft. We camped in Kensington race course and we began to be instructed in the use of the new forty millimetre Bofors gun, which I’ve got some shell cases by the fireside there. This was a new gun, like the

02:00 Oerlikon. Well the Oerlikon is made by the Swiss and sold to the Germans and us, and we kill each other with the Swiss, with the same weapons. But it was a very good gun, the Bofors forty millimetre, quick firing, explosive shell gun. While we were at Kensington digging up all the garden and making slit trenches, and putting poles up in the race courses to stop Japanese paratroopers and gliders landing. Putting obstacles up at two o'clock in the

02:30 morning, we were all hauled out of our tents and told to prepare for immediate movement. It’s the crack of dawn and there are a whole lot of trucks there and got into them and we drove down to Circular Quay. There was a ferry along and we all got onto the ferry, and we went out and what had happened

03:00 was the two greatest lines in the world, the Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary had come to Sydney bringing thousands and thousands of American troops – many of whom were shortly to die in the Solomon Islands. These two great powerful venerable ships, they anchored in Sydney Harbour for a number of days while they were getting

03:30 ready to take, I believe Australian troops overseas. Troopships had come with Americans, got rid of them, and then I think – I’m not sure about this, you people can find this out. But while those two great liners lay in Sydney Harbour, what would happen if a Japanese task force appeared out at sea and their Bettys [Betty bombers, codename for Japanese Mitsubishi G4M bombers] and their Tonys [Kawasaki Ki61 Hien fighters] and their Zeros [Mitsubishi A6M fighters] came roaring

04:00 in over South Head, those two ships would be gone. Those two ships were stiff with guns, because guns would be put on them as soon as they were made transport ships. They had great big three inch, four inch guns, they had all sorts of guns. So the soldiers of the 110th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment were put onto those two ships to man those guns while the ships were in Sydney Harbour in case of Japanese

04:30 air attack, when we would have to defend those ships trying to shoot down those Japanese planes. I was sent to the Queen Elizabeth, some went to the Queen Mary. The ferry came along and she towered above us like a great steel cliff. We went in carrying our rifles and bayonets, and boots and all our equipment and mess kits. We walked on miles of subterranean passages and came into a great stateroom.

05:00 A grand piano, everything – because these had been luxury liners on the Atlantic run – and eventually we were shown our cabins. I was put in a cabin that had been knocked up with six bunks, because all the accommodation had been changed. It stank of cigarette smoke, the Americans had just left it, it hadn't been cleaned, and there were three bunks. I walked in and there was a white piece of paper lying on the floor. I picked it up

05:30 and it had the White House, Washington on the back. I opened up and there was a wonderful little message – I’ve still got it, and I’m reproducing it in this thing I’m doing. It said, “You are a soldier of the United States Navy. You are leaving for far places where the war is being fought.

06:00 Never have the forces of our enemy been more cruel, tyrannical, bestial. Yours is a God fearing country, the victory that you will win will be the victory of all people, common to them all. You will

06:30 be supported by the whole power and force of this nation, and the victory you will win will be the victory for all the people common to the law. You go with the thanks, the hopes and prayers of your President, Franklin D. Roosevelt.” I’ve got it right there still.

07:00 It hadn't even been opened. I climbed up, got myself a bunk, then we were all hauled out onto the deck. Our officer said, “You fellas have got to master how these guns work quickly. You’ve never seen guns like these before.” They were great big things, huge big shells. Then he said, “Any questions?” I said – I was on a huge big gun, about four inches – a great big thing like this. If it went off the noise and recoil would be awful. 07:30 I said, “Sir, you don’t fire these sort of things at a Zero coming in” I said, “One great big thing half as big as a billycart going hurling threw the air, what’s that going to do?” He said, “I knew you’d ask some stupid question like that.” He said, “You’ve got to try to hit it with the one thing, but if you see an aeroplane coming over South Head and you fire one of these things at it, and it just goes

08:00 very close to him, it’ll knock him off aim and it might save him torpedoing you. Next question.” Well I didn’t have any more questions, so we stayed on that ship twenty four hours a day manning the guns. Meals brought up to us on deck if we were manning it. As I was there, I watched lithe grey warships slip in and out of Sydney

08:30 Harbour on convoy. Destroyers creep in and creep out, corvettes, tankers, ships lining up for convoy. Of course now, the Japanese were attacking the east coast, a great number of ships were sunk. The Japanese had four I Class submarines working on the east coast – one of them of course put the planes over that attacked Sydney. And I kept hearing my mother’s words, “Join the navy.

09:00 Join the navy. Join the navy” singing in my ears. I thought, ‘That’s what I’m going to, I’m going to join the navy.’ When the ships were ready to sail, we were all taken out of the ships and sent back to Kensington. The next day I got leave, I got the tram into Martin Place, went down just near the

09:30 men’s lavatory that had a big sort of a light over the top of it and you went down to a porcelain sticking place below. There was a big tent up there and it was a Sydney recruiting depot. It had a huge sign right across, a painted sign and it showed a British destroyer with the white ends and streaming in the breeze.

10:00 Tearing down a big wave with bow waves like this, and at the bottom of the wave was a German submarine and a big Nazi swastika painted on the conning tower, and the Germans didn’t paint swastikas on the thing. And the British were firing machine guns onto the conning tower, and on the conning tower there were Germans all leaning back, cowering before this onslaught. You could see their German hats, they were all very German.

10:30 And above it were the words, “Men of action, join the navy.” I went in and there was a petty officer there, and I said, “I want to join the navy.” He said, “That’s alright, but I see you're in the army.” I said, “Yeah, but I don’t think I can because I’m a bombardier in the army.” He said, “Bugger the army, we’re the senior service. If you want to join us and we want you, we’ll get you.”

11:00 He said, “Have you done your leaving certificate?” and I said, “Yes.” He said did you do your leaving certificate?” and I said, “Yes.” He said, “And did you do mathematics?” and I said, “Yes.” He said, “What did you do after it?” I said, “I’ve been a university undergraduate.” “Oh, you might be fit to be an officer.” “Oh, might I?” He said, “Yeah, I’ll get someone to talk to you.”

11:30 So, a lieutenant came out of some place and he said, “What did you study at Sydney University?” I said, “History, Oriental history, English, anthropology” or whatever it was. He took all these notes and he said, “Yes, I’ll put in a report about this. Go back to your unit and you’ll hear from us.” A very short time after, a few days

12:00 a letter came saying that I had been selected to join the navy and they wanted me to attend a board at Rushcutter’s Bay, HMAS Rushcutter, for possible new entry thing, if you had certain capacities or were judged to be fit you might be able to be what they called

12:30 a direct entry officer – a sub-lieutenant on probation, the lowest form of maritime life, really. But I had been a soldier so I didn’t feel – this was beyond my expectations. So the date was fixed for me to go down and be boarded. I went down, the officers were Commander Newcomb, Commander Harvey Newcombe – a remarkable man, about whom

13:00 much has been written. Mr. A.H. Quince, who was Ned Quince’s father, who had been a master at Knox and was an old sea-going officer who had served in the Royal Navy and fought as a boy in the Battle of Shetland (UNCLEAR). I walked in and here are these three officers all this gold braid and I’m in my army uniform, and there’s Mr. Quince.

13:30 And Mr. Quince had been my form master in 1929. He said, “Hello, Marsden.” I said, “Hello, Sir.” He said, “Fancy seeing you here.” And that was only – and then they asked me a whole lot of questions. One of the questions said, “Why do you want to join the navy?” and I said, “To get out of the army.” And that went down very well, they all laughed, they liked that because I hadn't done it by design

14:00 but it was absolutely true. I’ve told you why I wanted to join the navy, “Men of action, join the navy”, get out of the army. So, “Why do you want to get out of the army?” “To join the navy.” That was good. The next thing I had been reading the paper and at this moment the Germans were rolling through the wheat fields of Russia. They wanted to get to Moscow, they end of the summer was coming, the Germans

14:30 had a bitter pill to learn in Stalingrad, but they were making for the Russian city of Kiev. I had been following this, and why would the Russians asked after Kiev? I didn’t know, I’d never heard of Kiev before, but when I thought about it and got the map out and looked about it, some of the articles said that Kiev was the key city to the Ukraine, the key to Russia’s granary. 15:00 The food for the Germans. So the next question, this was a journeying mercy, one of those little things in life where you have a lucky break. “What do you know about Kiev?” and I said, “Oh, Kiev is the key city to Ukraine, if the Germans can capture Kiev, the Germans can get all that food. What a coup it will be for the Germans in this war.”

15:30 They made a few notes, and they asked me about three or four questions of which I either fumbled an answer or gave what they considered was an acceptable answer. I heard later that they were trying to get a look at your overall capacity to look at things, understand things. I didn’t know, so they made no

16:00 sign back, I went back to the regiment. About a week later I was told to report to Rushcutter, I had been appointed sub-lieutenant on probation and I would be kitted up and given a course to see if I would be fit to see if I would be fit to be this, that or the other thing. I can go on but perhaps you might like to ask me something because perhaps I’ve talked too much about this.

16:30 No, you’ve done well. Just a couple of questions about the Queen Elizabeth. While you were on board for those ten or so days, can you just describe for me Sydney and what it was like, what it looked in the day and in the night time?

It was magic. It was magic, they were autumn days, still, clear, autumn days. Trains rattled over the Sydney Harbour Bridge,

17:00 down near Sydney Cove was the elegant sandstone colonial spire at the land’s building. Nothing was high rise – perhaps there was the Astor, maybe David Jones six stories high. There was the AWA [Amalgamated Wireless Australasia] tower, that elegant mini Eiffel Tower that you see southward over the bridge, which was the tallest building I think in Sydney. Ferries

17:30 gently made their way across to Cremorne and Neilson Park and Manly. Occasionally a yacht would sail past and we’d wave to them over the top, or there’d be a boy and a girl in a VJ – a Vaucluse Junior – have you ever heard of them? They were beautiful little eight or ten foot boat with a deck, and you could tip them over and they'd come back up

18:00 because they were a deck. There’d be people, occasional families picnicking on the sand at Neilson Park. Not many people had cars because petrol rationing was in. My father had a gasbag put on the top – have you ever heard of the gasbags they had? Methane gas, a charcoal burning unit a thing that was put in the boot of the car. My father still had to bury people, marry people, visit the dying, go around his pastoral duties.

18:30 But petrol was out, all the petrol was needed, here we had none from the war effort. So his car had a big gasbag fitted to the top, and it wouldn’t go up hills, it lost all it’s power and it was terribly – it used to choke everything up and spark plugs and everything. He teetered around in this old thing, so hardly anybody had cars. Mostly it was public transport – trams.

19:00 So if anybody was picnicking on those lovely autumn days at Neilson Park, they would have either walked there or have gone in public transport – no such thing as crowds anywhere. It was very sombre, Australia had its back to the wall and its fate was very uncertain. But it was magic, it was dry and it wad bright, and I remember continually looking out over South Head lighthouse, because that’s where we expected the Japanese to come.

19:30 From the ship, your view of Sydney at night? What did you see?

There were night lights everywhere but nothing like lit windows like you see today in the big buildings. Lights, noises – when the ship was quiet you’d hear trams, you’d hear an occasional toot. You’d hear the trains rattling over the bridge. You’d hear the lions roaring at Taronga Park Zoo, that came across the water quite clearly

20:00 we weren't parked far from Taronga Park. So certainly the lions roaring, the trains on the bridge, the ferries, the boys and girls in Vaucluse Juniors, and the sparkling nights at night. No fancy lights at all but a lot of it was blacked out, and even the cars had little slits of light. Father’s car had black over the headlights with just a little slit, and they had the blackout too, and if

20:30 the blackout was in then, not many lights at all.

Excellent. Could you pick the story up now, you were at Rushcutter’s Bay, the training you actually went through?

First thing we were kitted out, and Anthony Hordern and Sons universal providers were contractors to the navy. The first thing I was given was an order to go to Anthony Hordern’s to be kitted out with two blue uniforms, two white uniforms, a great cap and a cap. I was fitted out in

21:00 sartorial magnificence, far from the old clumsy army clothes and a pair of boots that were too big that were thrown at you, you were fitted out, you were given two or three fittings. Shirts, underpants, socks, half wellington boots – marvellous. When all that was done, reported back to Rushcutter and I was given my commission, it’s framed up

21:30 out in the library there. It was signed by Henry, the Royal Duke, he was the Duke of Gloucester. He enjoins me to go and fight the enemies and just signed Henry – it’s a collector’s piece. Then I was put on a train, because I was an officer given a sleeper. Imagine, we’d been in trucks, we’d been sleeping under bridges, we’d been all sorts of things. The hardships that would have come were enormous,

22:00 and here were absolute luxury and I began to think, ‘God, this is an officer’s life?’ Went to Albury, changed trains because of the changing cage there, went on to Melbourne, got into another train, went to Flinders depot, and there went into the great Flinders wardroom filled with brass canon, roaring log fires, stewards, billiard tables,

22:30 books. We slept in a dormitory, nine potential officers to a dormitory, and there for about a month we studied tradition, gunnery, seamanship – we went out on a ship called HMAS Bingara. We lowered life boats or whalers, we rowed, we learned to row, we learnt lifesaving, we learnt gunnery, we learnt the responsibilities of

23:00 command, the duties of an officer to his men, the duty of men to their officers, the duty of all ourselves to the King and country, the tradition of the navy, the principals we were fighting for, and we were trained in a number of aspects of naval life. Then it was decided where we would go – there would have been about thirty of us.

23:30 Some were sent to general service, that meant they could go anywhere, they could be sent to a battleships in the Mediterranean, they could be sent to a corvette on the east coast on a submarine campaign. I was chosen as a young officer to go to a new class of Australian ship called the Fairmile – a hundred and twelve foot patrol boat. Heavily armed, cloak and dagger work, anti-submarine work –

24:00 there are pictures of them out there, I’ll show you those if you're interested in them. Mostly young people because the hardships were great, there was no shower on this ships and yet we were bound for the tropics. No awnings and yet we laboured under the sizzling sun, and lots of fellas got skin cancer and other things like that. Very, very hard conditions suitable for young men. So we went back

24:30 to Rushcutter where we did an anti-submarine course. England was in the forefront of anti-submarine technology, having been nearly starved to death by the U-boats [Untersee boots – German submarines] in the First World War, she had been preparing for another war and they knew that the German U-boats would try and starve them again, which they jolly near did. So they had built up a formidable anti- submarine technology,

25:00 and I had to learn how to operate these underwater devices, how to be able to pick a sound under the water and know whether it was a whale or a wreck or a submarine. How deep it was, and then to arrange the ship so that the ship would steam over the top of that place and you’d release all of these depth charges. Each one five hundred pounds of amatol high explosive.

25:30 The object was to get the submarine underneath you and drop a depth charge before you came over it, as you ran over where it was you fired to, depth charges each side, and as you passed over where, drop another depth charge. All those had to be set to explode at five hundred feet, one hundred feet, or fifty feet, however you had estimated the depth of the submarine. And when they fell around like that they would, ‘Whoomp’ –

26:00 they’d crush the submarine and all those poor wretches down there died, choking in fumes, or water or a burst lung. We didn’t worry at all about killing them because of what they were doing to us. I never stopped to think until afterwards what a horrible death we were planning, and being trained to inflict on other young men, and the wretched immorality of this is.

26:30 And if you and I had been to school together, we’d grown up and left school at the same time. You’d been a German or a Japanese and I'd been an Australian and we’d been good friends, and this happened in my story a boy called Michael Mathey. He was a German and he went to Knox and he was a good friend of mine at Knox. He went back, he was recalled and he became a member of the German Army. Joined the German

27:00 Army, he was a very strong supporter of Nazism – he used to say it was the only thing, the British Empire should recognise this. If Michael Mathey and I had of met each other in the mountains in Greece, we would have hacked each other to death. Yet, he knew my mum and he knew my dad. The immorality of war. I get a bit more pacifist now these days, it’s so stupid.

27:30 Just a couple of questions about what you’ve just shared with us. The actual equipment you were training on, could you explain how it worked?

Yes I can. There was an underwater dome that was lowered down underneath the ship, and in it there were quartz crystals, and there was a thing called

28:00 a high frequency motor alternator. And this was in the bottom of the Fairmile. This was an electrical device which generated a lot of pulsating electronics. Now, I haven't thought about this for sixty years, and there maybe somebody looking at this and saying that Hordern got it all wrong, but I’m giving you what is called an old man’s retrospective thoughts

28:30 about what it was. I do not claim that I’m going to be technically accurate. These reverberations, these electric pulses were applied to the quartz crystal in this streamlined metal dome under the ship. It made them vibrate at a very high speed and as they vibrated they sent out a beam, 29:00 a sonic beam under the water. If they hit something they bounced back, and the reverberation that came back from them – like you shouting from a cliff and hearing your voice come back to you, the echo that came back to them was recorded on a receiver, and in the

29:30 wheelhouse of these Fairmiles there was a screen that had an iodised stylus and it was recording visually the sound that went out underneath. So it would go back out and would hit something and you'd hear it go out, because we had amplifiers on the bridge, and it would go out, ‘Ping, ping, ping’ – and that meant it was just disappearing into infinity.

30:00 But if it hit something it would go, ‘Ping-pip, ping-pip.’ So, there's something there. Now, it could be a sandbank, in which the reverberation back might be blurred. It could be a whale, in which the reverberation would be slightly different, but if it

30:30 was sharp and clear it was from a metal object, and it could be a wreck or it could be an enemy submarine waiting to torpedo one of the ships that were full of war material, full of people that you were entrusted to guard. They didn’t generally torpedo us, they torpedoed the merchant ship which were full of humans a treasure – military treasure. So then you had to decide was it a submarine.

31:00 Now if it was moving to the right or to the left, you would suddenly send out your ping there and nothing would happen, so you'd swing left five degrees and you'd ‘ping-pip’. And if you got it there, he’s moved. So you keep tracking him and record where he’s moved. Now, there was a thing called the Doppler effect – Doppler I believe was a German scientist and he understood this [Christian Johann Doppler, German physicist].

31:30 In this particular technology, when you're beam went out and it hit something, if that beam went out and it was stationary and you were stationary, that beam would go out and it would be ‘beep-blip, beep- blip’ – if it was stationary. But if it was moving towards you,

32:00 the beams that were coming back were compressed and you would get a higher note, so you'd get, ‘Beep-bip’, so that was called Doppler high. So if your reverberations were Doppler high the object under water was coming towards you. If it came back and it was, ‘Beep-bop’, that was Doppler low,

32:30 so the object is going away from you. So now you knew whether the object was going left or right, coming towards you or away. You had to work all sorts of things, you had to have your depth charges ready to drop, you had to have your guns ready to train on the sea, because if the submarine was busted and it surfaced, you had to kill them before they could get out of the conning tower, because if they got out of the conning tower

33:00 with their gun, that gun was like that – our guns were like this, they'd blow us out of the water. So you had to kill them before they got their guns, that was the theory.

Just in respect to that very clear explanation, was it to determine whether it was an enemy submarine or an Allied submarine?

No, you always knew. If they were Allied submarines in the vicinity,

33:30 you always knew, so any submarine below, if there was none proclamated there, it was your mortal enemy. You didn’t ask questions. But you raised a question, I don't know whether you're going to talk about this later on, one of the most terrifying experiences I ever had in my life was up in the north of Australia with an Allied submarine. It’s a terrible story, but that’s another story.

Well, we’ll come to that a little bit later.

34:00 You mentioned this was a new boat, the Fairmile.

Brand spanking new.

Did you know what you were getting yourself in for once you'd been assigned to it?

Not in the slightest, and you don’t. When you go to war as a young man, you take what comes, you have to . What could you do? Too much philosophy can send you mad. You don’t want to think too much. You think about it afterwards.

You mentioned that you do have a picture in there, but for those who are watching this interview in the archive

34:30 could you actually just describe for them the Fairmile, the size of the boat and the layout?

I certainly can but are you able to take a photograph of these things I’ve been talking to you about? There’s the University Regiment, there’s the Fairmile, and that will give them a visual picture.

Yep, we’ll take a photo but if you could just describe it for someone?

Right, the Fairmile. The man that was the father of the Fairmile was a man called Macklin. He fought in the Dover patrol in the First World War. 35:00 He was an industrialist, he went to Eton, he was an eccentric, he had a pet lion at school. In World War 1 he fought in the army in France, was invalided out and fought in the Dover patrol. After the war he was a very intelligent man and he knew that war was coming again between England and Germany.

35:30 And he set up a boat building business, he thought that Britain goes war again with Germany, what we need is fast, lethal patrol boats – rather like the German E-boat [Enemy Boats- German attack boats]. So it would get in and get around them, because the Germans had E-boats and they were pretty good. So he started building on his industrial estate in a town called Fairmile in Surrey, boats which would

36:00 be the forerunners of fast attack boats and patrol boats if it ever came to war. As war approached he began to get a contract from the Admiralty for one or two or three. In the end probably six or seven hundred of these were built all around England – it’s a romantic story.

36:30 Bell founders, who used to make brass bells for church began making propellers for them. Furniture makers began making hulls, motorcar manufacturers began making engines. But when Japan came into the war here, we needed something like this too to do cloak and dagger work in the islands, to take commandos off, to rescue people from

37:00 beaches. But we had nothing, so England, the Royal Navy sent out a very few kits of Fairmile pre-cut – in other words there were the bulkheads, and there was this, which could be one or two of them could be put together out here. The Royal Australian Navy started building them and Halvorsens at Neutral Bay and Ryde took up

37:30 story, and Halvorsens built the first Fairmile which I was on the, Fairmile 814 I was on, the 813 was the first. They all had 8-numbers. Another firm called Concrete Constructions at Green Point, somewhere on the Parramatta River, also made Fairmiles, and very soon – about four or five weeks, the Commonwealth Government is about to

38:00 rename a park very close to there, Fairmile Park. We have all been invited to go along and wear our medals, those of us that served in Fairmiles sixty years ago. The Fairmile was a hundred and twelve feet long, seventeen feet ten inches in beam, and draft of about five feet. Its top speed, depending upon its

38:30 load was anything between eighteen and twenty knots. It was armed with a two pounder gun up for’ard – the first ones which were on our ship were called Rolls Royce guns, and they had been designed by the Rolls Royce factory in England – to put on the roof of their factory to shoot down Germans attacking them. It was a beastly old thing, and it fired single shots and you had to get another one and put it in, and it was slow. And

39:00 sometimes in some of them false, when it recoiled after firing the whole thing came back and shot back out of the thing, and if the man had been standing behind it instead of beside it, he would have been killed by his own gun. These were eventually replaced by the Bofors gun, this fast thing which I knew about, because I had been studying the Bofors gun in the army. So the Fairmiles later had a Bofors gun up for’ard, which was quick firing forty millimetre, explosive shell.

39:30 Then it had two or three twenty millimetre fast canons, it had three or four machine guns, it had depth charges all around the decks, a Y-gun – a great big thing which two depth charges sat on sort of stalks. And there was a big iron chamber down here and you put the explosive charge into there and you stood back and you pulled a lanyard

40:00 and it went ‘Whoomf’, and both of those depth charges went up over the side with their big carrier and they went down. That was to throw them sideways. But the most terrifying and horrible weapon that I had anything to do with, was a thing called the Schmerly Rocket. And the Schmerly Rocket was a Heath Robinson arrangement if ever I saw one. There’s something about ingenuity in wartime, people will do anything to

40:30 survive, and this Schmerly Rocket – although it sounds as though it was made by a German, and probably was – in theory it was absolutely wonderful. What used to happen with convoys, particularly in the Atlantic, they used to have balloons that went up on the air and they had wires up, so that aeroplanes came in to rake the ships, they’d all get tangled up in the wires. But that didn’t happen in

41:00 small warships which were vulnerable to attack by low flying aircraft or bombers, particularly low flying aircraft. So some genius had developed in England this Schmerly Rocket, and here it was, and I was particularly involved in this because I had to master it. You were about to be attacked by an aircraft, you can see him, he’s circling and he’s looking at you. He’s out of range

41:30 and he’s just going backwards and forwards, but he’s going to come rushing in with all his guns or bombs. You're just a little ship here and there he is. Enter the Schmerly Rocket. On the bridge in a round open pipe stood was an ordinary thing like a great big rocket, a round thing about as big as that with a conical head in it. And it was packed with…

Tape 5 00:40 Marsden, you were just describing for us the Schmerly Rocket, maybe you could start that description again. Also could you just spell Schmerly, do you know how that word is written?

Probably S-c-h-m-e-r-l-y or a close

01:00 relation to that word.

That just might help somebody trying to find a record. So just start that description again.

The Schmerly Rocket was designed by some Heath Robinson genius in Europe, probably in England, to be a sort of not so much of a defence but a deterrent to low flying aircraft attacking a warship, or perhaps a merchant ship too.

01:30 It was on the open bridge up above the wheelhouse of the Fairmile, is the only place I ever saw it and used it. It was a very big vertical cylinder about three inches in diameter. The rocket there had an explosive propellant in the top of it. You were all on this open bridge and there was a lanyard, a long lanyard on it and you stood right back and you watched

02:00 the attacking aircraft. This was the theory, I never saw it used in action. When the attacking aircraft turned to make his run on you, firing, metal going all over the place and there’s bits falling off everywhere, fellas getting shot and wood and metal everything. Somebody had to have the presence of mind to pull this lanyard. Then there was the most appalling

02:30 ‘whoosh’ and this thing soared into the air above the bridge, showering sparks and burning embers and everything down on the fellas below, getting in their ears, eyes nose, whatever it was. There was a great big ‘whoosh’ and when it was about four hundred feet up in the air – and it might not even have been four – it exploded and out came

03:00 a parachute. And as it came up it trailed thin wire, and now just before – this is the theory of it – this things gone up there now, three hundred feet up and there’s a wire connected to it. The wire wraps around the aeroplane’s propellers, the aeroplane crashes into the sea – and you are all dead anyway because he shoots you before he hit the wire. That was the theory. I don't know what the enemy

03:30 pilots ever thought about the Schmerly Rocket, but it terrified me to use it.

Was it ever used in practice, in your experience?

Oh, we used in practice, we had to, but no Japanese aircraft – they attacked us and dropped bombs and one of our men was wounded by Japanese fire later. But nothing came close enough to get the Schmerly Rocket involved.

04:00 You’ve gone through the Fairmile description with weaponry, can you just finish that off for us? Were there any other specifications to the boat that were interesting?

Are you talking about accommodation or are you talking…

The whole thing, we’ve done the weaponry, or were there any more?

I think I’ve covered it – you had machine guns, you had depth charges, you had a Y-gun, you had Bofors and of course later in the Pacific War we armed ourselves with guns that we got

04:30 from the Americans. One Fairmile had a bazooka – have you heard of a bazooka? A bazooka was a pretty powerful sort of a rocket, and we had all sorts of unauthorised weapons on board. I got into a lot of trouble later on for disposing of a gun allegedly worth two thousand pounds – but that’s a later story.

So what about the rest of the boat?

Alright, it had a crew of about eighteen to twenty. The sailors lived in what was called the mess deck,

05:00 which was up forehead. The petty officer who was the coxswain, and the chief engineer who was called generally the chief or the motor mechanic, he lived in a little cabin with the coxswain up forehead. They had a kerosene operated refrigerator for about sixteen men up there,

05:30 and we had a spirit operated stove, or a kerosene operated stove. The three officers lived in the wardroom down aft, right down where the depth charges were on the deck, and we had a little wardroom flat down there. Our accommodation was a lot more comfortable because there were only three of us, because our room was not so big as the mess deck. We had a little refrigerator, we had a

06:00 toilet that you pumped, a hand basin but no shower. So in the tropics where you stank and you were sweaty you had no freshwater showers, or you could not have any freshwater bath on the ship. These ships were built for the England Channel, and they were built for men to go ashore after quick patrol, and move into accommodation alongside the wharf where there were showers and kitchens and everything else. But out here we were desperate to survive, and they were just

06:30 pushed into the breach and used perhaps as they were never designed to. So that’s the accommodation.

Did that pose problems with water storage? It did, we carried two thousand, three hundred gallons of petrol – hundred octane petrol. We carried hundreds of gallons of water, and there were two Hall-Scott marine six hundred and thirty horsepower engines – twin – they were American engines.

07:00 But the water we had to be extremely careful with the water, and the water we took on with hoses from islands and places like Darwin, and Thursday Island, was often tanked or come from somewhere else, and it wasn't very pure. When it got into our water tanks and we went to sea, and the ship was leaping around and jumping, it all churned up and sometimes it was stinking. It was awful and we sometimes had

07:30 to go and lie still and then syphon off a bit of water from the top. But sometimes we had very good water, but it was any water you could get.

Were there any other equipment or action stations on board?

There were action stations all the time. There was an action station for aircraft attack, there was an action station for submarine attack, there was an action station for fire, there was an action station for abandon ship drill.

08:00 All these action stations, each man had a different place to go to and a different duty to perform.

What sort of duties were they, apart from obviously manning the guns?

Well in action stations the captain would be on the bridge. I was the junior officer in the first Fairmile I went to, and I was on the after gun, directing it with two men firing it.

08:30 I would watch where the aeroplanes were and I would say that one and this one. Naturally the engineer officers or the engineer ratings all went to the engine room. The cook would be on one of the guns, the signalman would be down in the signal thing waiting for messages or to send messages – you know, “Enemy in sight, broken off, abandon ship, action, over.” Or waiting to receive instructions from whether it was Darwin or New Guinea or

09:00 things like that.

Where were the controls for the, was it ASDIC [submarine detector, from Anti- Submarine Detection Investigation Committee] equipment or the (UNCLEAR)?

Yeah, they were in the wheelhouse below the flying bridge where we stood.

What provisions were there for fighting fire?

We had special fire extinguishers, methyl bromide fire extinguishers and you could press a button – in the engine room was the main thing because we had two

09:30 thousand three hundred gallons of high octane fuel. When you were fuelling people had to rope soled shoes or bare feet lest a nail from you shoe hit a piece of metal and there was a spark, and inferno. Fire was the greatest horror of all. In the raid on St Nazaire [WW2 bombing of German fortifications, France]

10:00 about fourteen Fairmiles went and about two got out, or about three got out. One of the captains was one of my captains who got out – he won a DSC [Distinguished Service Cross], Norman Brian Wallace – a marvellous man. He was my captain in a Fairmile and we bacame great friends. He died under interesting circumstances. But fire was the great fear that we all had, so we had to be particularly careful. When you were fuelling, pumping fuel from

10:30 forty gallon drums, you had it on your deck and you pumped it in like this with a hand pump. All electric switches in the ship had to be cut, no fans, nothing that could form an electric short circuit. Nobody was allowed to smoke – all smoking out. I was involved in a time, a very funny thing which was later. We had a bloke who was fuelling,

11:00 this is a captain of another ship, and he was smoking a pipe. His smoke and sparks were all over the place, and when I complained to him, I said, “You Sir, should not be smoking that pipe while you're transferring these drums of petrol to us.” He looked up at the stack of his coal burner, which was breathing fire and brimstone and they were falling all over us, and he said, “Pipes are irrelevant my boy.” Anyhow, that was all

11:30 about a Fairmile.

Any other safety precautions, lifeboats and that kind of thing?

You had one dinghy, about a ten foot dinghy. And you had to Carlie floats, which sort of had nets underneath them, and you got in the water but you wouldn’t be dry in them. They just about took the crew – the Carlie floats had about six in each.

12:00 You all had Mae Wests – you know about Mae Wests? These inflatable rubber things [life preservers] that were supposed to have the seductive lines of the Hollywood film star. But it didn’t.

Were there rations on board in the Carlie floats? Yes, we had water. We had chocolate that melted, we had dried foods

12:30 but that many men died in rafts of starvation because there wasn't enough. One of our trips to Timor – as we got close to Timor I was scared stiff, we were all scared stiff. I said to the captain – the Armidale had been sunk – this is another story, I shouldn’t come into it yet I suppose.

Alright, we wont go into that but we’ll keep that in mind about the Armidale.

13:00 These ships – did you call them boats or ships, just to get the terminology right?

We called them ships. Or the Fairmile.

Ships, so it’s not a patrol boat, it’s a Fairmile. These Fairmiles were designed obviously for much shorter patrol work. How far could you patrol, and what was the limitations that you were placed under?

Well if you were going fast, at high speed

13:30 you might only have a range of a few hundred miles, but if you came down to about eight or nine knots you might have a range of around a thousand miles. So it depends upon how fast you were going, because when we were doing two thousand three hundred revolutions per minute on the Hall-Scott engines, to give us a speed of around

14:00 eighteen or nineteen knots, we would be using ninety gallons of petrol an hour. If we were doing eight knots we were using far less. So your endurance at sea was much longer if you were slower.

What were they used for? When you first joined the Fairmiles what sort of work were they being used for?

14:30 When I first joined them they were used for anti-submarine – the Japanese were attacking ships on the east coast of Australia. And Fairmiles were used for escorting or helping to escort merchant ships. They were used as boom patrol boats – not many people know that Sydney had a boom that went right across, a

15:00 big boom of heavy chain, and a ship was there with a steel winch that had to open this boom by pulling back the chain gate to let ships go through and out. This was the boom that the Japanese submarines got fouled up in when they came through. But outside Sydney Harbour there were things called loops – have you ever heard of loops? Very ingenious you know, when you think about the technology of war, it’s still pretty marvellous.

15:30 Because money doesn’t come into it, you can spend anything you like because if we don’t survive, nothing’s worth anything. There were loops that were cables, electric cables laid on the seabed outside Sydney Head, and other ports. These went to an observation office up on South Head where there was a screen, and these

16:00 loops had some electronic component, and when a ship sailed over these loops the magnets that were in the ship triggered a little signal in the ship and it came up as a little blip on the screen on South Head. So, what happened, these loops covered hundreds and hundreds of acres,

16:30 I don't know how big they were, they might have gone for miles, but what happened by night or day, there were watchmen on South Head, and there was a sailor watching these loops the whole time. If he saw a blip on the screen, which represented what was happening with these loops, and he looked over with his binoculars and there was no ship on the surface, it was a submarine. Then

17:00 all hell broke lose and we had duties – I myself when I commanded a ship carried out these duties for a short time before I went to New Guinea. We were called boom gate patrol vessels, and our job, we were anchored to seaward of the Sydney boom, we were anchored actually in Obelisk Bay.

17:30 Obelisk Bay had a lovely beach there where you can swim, you probably know it, and the obelisk is there, it was a leading mark for bringing ships in and out. So we were anchored with all our guns and depth charges outside the boom. The moment the trigger sign came on the loop, we would get an order

18:00 to weigh anchor immediately and proceed to reference point latitude such and such, longitude such and such, and search for a submarine. So that was an exciting job to have to be. We never found a submarine but it was potentially, it kept you on your toes. So by day and night, when we were part of the boom control vessel, we were part of the first defence of Sydney Harbour – a big adventure. Most of the lads

18:30 on the ship were eighteen or nineteen, I was when I first went to sea in a Fairmile I was twenty – a big adventure.

I want to know about when you first went to sea. Obviously after the period of training at Rushcutter you were assigned to a particular ship.

Yes, that is very interesting question. The Fairmiles were being built, rather like the aeroplanes that were being built for the boys that joined you know when, and there was no Fairmile 19:00 for me to go to. I was designated to be a Fairmile officer, so while we were waiting for Fairmiles to be built I was sent to sea on convoy duty in a ship called the HMAS Abraham Crijnssen

19:30 she was about the size of a corvette, five or six hundred tonnes or a bit smaller. She’d been built by the Dutch to be a mine layer in the Dutch East Indies as part of the Royal Netherlands Navy. There were four of them built. After the fall of Singapore when the Japanese

20:00 swept through Java and Sumatra, three of her sister ships were lost in enemy action. She camouflaged herself with trees and she laid right under the jungle in beside the beach by night – by day when the Japanese were looking for her. And by night she’d do a belt for Australia. She had a lot of refugees, Dutch women on it. They escaped the Japanese, they ran out

20:30 of fuel near Geraldton in Western Australia. The Australian Air Force picked her up and thought she was a Japanese submarine, and they were going to go out and bomber her, but eventually they didn’t. She was towed into Geraldton, taken into Fremantle, eventually brought into Sydney and refitted to do the job of a corvette in the Royal Australian Navy. She had a third of the crew were Dutch, a third of the crew were English survivors from the destroyer Jupiter – sank

21:00 somewhere up in the Java Sea, and the third of us were Australians. All the guns were in metric, all the things were metric – Dutch. I was sent as an additional officer to HMAS Abraham Crijnssen involved in convoying ships on the east coast of Australia. Lots of ship went from Whyalla in South Australia, where they took on iron ore, and they

21:30 took that iron ore to Newcastle, where it was turned by the BHP [Broken Hill Proprietary – mining/steel company] company into steel for bayonets and guns. The Japanese submarines were wreaking havoc at this time up and down the coast of Australia. And all up and down the coast, along the beaches, the residents of little shires on the South coast…

Just stop for a second, when your hand’s up there the microphone is obstructed.

22:00 All up and down the South Coast the residents of these hamlets were used to bullet-riddled lifeboats, bedding, mattresses, bodies, and the flotsam and jetsam of sea warfare rolling up on their beaches, and we were involved in all this. So I was now sent off in absolutely nothing, as the junior officer of HMAS Abraham Crijnssen

22:30 under a redoubtable man called Erwin Chapman. Erwin Chapman had been in the merchant service and he was my captain. He is still alive now, he lives at Burradoo in the Southern Highlands. He must be eight or nine years older than me, and in full possession of his faculties. I owe a great deal to Chapman and I have given him due credit and salute

23:00 in the manuscript that I keep mentioning. So I am suddenly put onto the Abraham Crijnssen and off we go. Here is an education.

What did you learn, it must have been a very steep learning curve?

It was a steep learning curve. The first thing I knew nothing – I could send Morse Code, I could operate things, but I had no sea experience at all. Chapman called his officers

23:30 into the wardroom of the Abraham Crijnssen, about eight or nine officers. One of them was Dutch, one name was Bob Hart, there was another one called Cole, there was another one called John Moyes – who was the nephew of the Bishop Moyes, and John Moyes wrote a number of books, one called Scrap Iron Flotilla that was one of them. He wrote some of his books on the Abraham Crijnssen – and I know because I was a

24:00 university student and was supposed to be literate, I actually proofread the first copy of one of his books called Might Midgets, which was sold by Angus and Robertson, and years and years later my mother said, “Marsden, I’ll give you Mighty Midgets for your birthday”, and I said, “No thanks Mum, I’ve proof read it, I’ve read it.” Anyhow, back to this. Chapman says, “There's a convoy of ten ships, we’re leaving at

24:30 ten o'clock this morning, we’re taking them to Melbourne. Here are the list of the ships, here are their speeds. There’s one called George Eslevinos – a Greek ship, she can only do eight knots. There’s one called the Iron Knight – she’s a BHP ship, she can do twelve knots. There’s all these ships, there they were and their speeds, they’re going to be sailing in three columns. There’s one corvette and ourselves are the only

25:00 two escorts. We’ve got to be out on the starboard and port bow of the convoy, pinging with our anti- submarine gear, covering an arc from dead ahead to right down around the aft beam, about a hundred degrees on the starboard, and we’re on the port.” So we’re out about a mile, half a mile in front of the convoy, with all our anti-submarine warfare equipment which are

25:30 such as that I have just described to you, only more sophisticated, because the corvettes had better equipment and more of it. So our job was to get out on the starboard bow and the port bow of the convoy, because there were only two of us, and we moved forward at the speed of the slowest ship. The slowest ship would be busting its boilers to do eight, so eight knots would be the speed of advance. And we had to continually

26:00 every minute of every day, search the sea and sky for the sign of a periscope, visually and underwater with our equipment. In theory if we were moving ahead, we would come up with any enemy before it could attack, get within torpedo range. So this was a continual alert business. So for me it was a great experience.

26:30 He said, “We’ll go out now with the corvette and we’ll wait out there and the convoy will come out and form up.” Off we went out through the sound, past the sound through the boom gate, out onto this heavily rolling blue sea, it was a bright morning. And then out come the ships, smoky old freighters, iron ore carriers, merchant ships and everywhere a whole flurry of

27:00 brilliant flag hoists – you know, ‘move back a bit’, ‘take my station’, ‘I’m doing my best’, ‘form up’, ‘drop back’. And here were all these lights flashing at us, Morse Code light signals – flash, flash, flash. ‘Do this’, ‘do that’, and it was absolutely amazing for me to see these experienced officers on my ship, and of course it happened on the corvette. Later on of course I came to do it myself,

27:30 but it was all a new world for me to experience as a young man. It was exciting, at any moment I was waiting for a torpedo to come tearing in and for everything to go up, and I was scared stiff. I thought, ‘Gee, what am I in, I should have stayed in the army.’ Up were going these signals and off we go. Then as we get along, we’re getting towards Botany Bay, the captain says, “Alright, Hordern

28:00 you’re on watch now. Your job it to see that the convoy doesn’t straggle.” I said, “What do you mean straggle, Sir?” He said, “They’ve got firemen there and they don’t put coal on, or if they put too much coal on, and ships fall back, and if the convoy falls back the convoy can stretch for five miles and we can't protect them. They’ve all got to keep up, they’ve only got to be two hundred yards from each other,

28:30 and they can't spread out. Your job is what they call station keeping.” And there was a marvellous little machine, and it was called Stewart’s Distance Metre. Stewart was some man in the Royal Navy I suppose who was wonderful at these things. It was like a thing almost like a pair of opera glasses, and you looked through at

29:00 the ships of the convoy and you had two little things you moved, and you moved them up and down and its masts were about so high, and you moved a little knob until you brought the double image of the tops of their masts together. Then you looked down on a piece of paper that you’d been given

29:30 before the convoy left, and you had been told that if that was the Iron Chieftain, the Iron Chieftain’s mast was a hundred and thirty feet high, so then you looked down to a hundred and thirty and you found that the Iron Chieftain was three quarters of a mile away, and the Iron Chieftain should have been half a mile away. So then you got the signalman to call

30:00 the Iron Chieftain signalman up with the Aldis lamp, ‘Da-di-da, di-di-di’, “Close up one hundred yards.” And the Iron Chieftain’s fellow would say, “Ok.” The next thing smoke would be coming out of the Iron Chieftain’s funnels, they were told to pull up, and she’d close up. If they fell back the reverse happened – what an experience for a young man.

30:30 You hadn't been away to sea for a long period of time before, and corvettes aren't the most steady of craft, how did you fare in that respect?

Well, there were furious gales, sometimes we were reduced down to three or four knots. There was damage aboard, on one occasion a big sea burst through a bulkhead, hurling sailors in the Abraham Crijnssen along

31:00 the deck and breaking the collar bone of one – we had no doctor on board. One of the sailors who was a sick berth attendant, he stitched it up. I myself was thrown – we had to get some signals out of a heavy iron case with a great big heavy lid. I went down and I pushed the lid up, and ship gave a vicious roll, the door came back and I nearly cut the top of my finger off – you can still see the scar it goes there.

31:30 That was stitched up, it swelled up and throbbed and ached for about six days, but the top of my finger is still there.

How did you go with seasickness?

I didn’t get seasick, but some of them got dreadfully seasick. It’s very interesting, we talked about “Men of action, join the navy”, had I stayed on the anti-aircraft regiment I probably would have ended up defending

32:00 some aerodrome they were building in Cape York or Arnhem Land or somewhere. But we had our first action in the Abraham Crijnssen on Australia Day, 1943. When there was an attack of a Japanese submarine in Bass Strait, we were very much involved in it, it was quite a dramatic thing.

What happened on that occasion, can you take us through it from the beginning?

We’d left Port Phillip 32:30 with a convoy either bound for Sydney or Newcastle. I think it was the corvette Warrnambool but I’m not sure. I’ve got it, I kept a journal and I could give you that, but it was 26th January, 1943 – it was Australia Day, I got that from my journal. We were coming along

33:00 rolling eastward towards Gabo Island and the ninety mile beach convoy was coming along behind, all with two lines, smoke and rolling and pitching. It was very, very interesting sight, a convoy at sea. We were out on the starboard bow of the convoy, the convoy was out on the port bow. The anti-submarine pings

33:30 were going out in this monotonous regularity, ‘Ping, ping, ping.’ Nothing there. I was on the bridge standing close to Chapman, the captain – there was a little dog called Kos, a Dutch dog rather a bit like Tigger.

34:00 It was everywhere every time, and whenever there was action stations it raced up the iron ladder, hopped on the deck and sat on the signal desk to get a dog’s-eye view of the action. Suddenly about two o'clock in the afternoon, ‘Ping-pip, ping-pip.’ Chapman hit the alarm, action stations and everything happened. Men came

34:30 pouring up from below. My job was beside him, with the headphones on, those headphones went down to the gun, which was a three inch gun – a big gun for us, small for most other people – and I had to continue to relay the distance and bearing of the underwater

35:00 contact to that guns’ crew and their job, even though nothing could be seen, was to keep this gun pointing in the direction where I was telling them. Because if the submarine was blasted to the surface or decided to surface, which some of the submarines did because those submarines had bigger guns that corvettes. If that submarine thought that the best thing that it crashed surface,

35:30 and got it’s men out and they had a four or five inch gun, they could blow us out of the water – we couldn’t get near them, it would be all over. Then they could torpedo the convoy without any effect. So I was handing down the distance and bearing of the underwater. The echoes got louder and louder, Chapman clapped on speed and immediately sent a signal to

36:00 the corvette which was right out on the port quarter. The next thing I see a great big black flag go up from the corvette, and that means it’s also in an attacking mode, the corvette also had the echo, and it was moving. So, here we are, we’re in fairly shallow water, because all these millions of dollars, vital war

36:30 that’s in use in these ships, here’s a powerful Japanese I-Class submarine. It knows we’re there and it’s after us, and we are the only defenders.

Sorry, can we just pause there… So you’ve identified the submarine, it’s in the water around you. What happened next?

37:00 Well all hell broke lose. Chapman put on full speed – in anti-submarine warfare, there is a procedure and it is called, it was called an official naval parlance the counter attack. And if you get a contact

37:30 under the water of a submarine that’s moving in on a convoy the first thing you can do is get as close to him and suddenly drop a lot of depth charges – even if you know they're not going to be on him, because a submarine commander who had just lining up his periscope, just turned and he’s picking the big plumb, he’s going to tear the bottom out of it and he’s

38:00 just waiting to kill all these people. Suddenly if there’s an enormous explosion in the water near him, it can rattle him. It can rattle him, it can put him off his aim, he can think, ‘God, better get out of this bit and come back again.’ So the first thing to do is to counter attack. Chapman used this, and Chapman behaved absolutely correctly, so within seconds, while

38:30 the Abraham Crijnssen is increasing speed from about nine knots to about twelve or thirteen knots, and the engines are going full steam and they're throwing up foam behind, and he is racing towards this underwater contact. He fires a set of depth charges, set to fifty

39:00 feet. Now fifty feet means that they explode quickly. If you set them to two hundred feet they take much longer to get down. The object is to get an enormous explosion going pretty quickly. But there are safe speeds at which you can drop depth charges, obviously if you’re doing one knot and you drop a depth charge, you’ve lost yourself and destroyed your own ship.

39:30 The Abraham Crijnssen was at this moment just building up speed, and we had not reached the safe speed at which to drop a shallow setting of depth charges to cause this enormous explosion to put this Japanese submarine commander off. But it is a decision that the twenty six year old Chapman had to make. He made it.

40:00 The subsequent explosion was absolutely enormous, it lifted the stern of the Abraham Crijnssen out of the water. It so shook the ship that a twelve inch telescope, which was on top of the mast – it must have weighed about a hundred pounds, or fifty pounds, with a great big metal fitting on top 40:30 of the mast, was smashed from the top of the mast right above us. It crashed down – I was standing as close to Chapman as I am to you now, and it crashed down between Chapman and myself, and I don't think it knocked his cap off, but if it had of been another foot that way or this way, he or I would have been dead. Alright, that happened.

41:00 the electric telephone conversation that I was having with the gun, they were talking to me, went dead – all the electrics had blown. Chapman raced on but the anti-submarine equipment was working and we were still getting echoes from the submarine that was now making off. So now we and the corvette are now both hunting it.

41:30 Chapman says, “Hordern, go down below and assess the damage.” He knew there’d been damage. I went down below, the glass gauges had been smashed in the engine room. Rivets had been sprung in the tiller flat and water was coming in down in the wardroom. I had a look down there…

Tape 6

00:50 So if we can pick up the story and not “go downstairs” but “go below”, to assess the damage.

Well I was sent as I said, below

01:00 to assess the damage from these explosions. The engine room had gauges broken, water was coming into the tiller flat, but in the wardroom where I went down, I saw an astonishing sight, which sticks in my sight as clearly as anything. It had been rather like the ship having been bombed by about four five hundred pound bombs, which had almost fallen, exploded just stern of us. In the wardroom

01:30 galley where the food was prepared there were fifteen white china cups, and they were all held on hooks. When the ship rolled, they’d all roll one way and when the ship rolled the other way, and they wouldn’t clink together and cut each other and slide around. Everyone of those cups was smashed and there were fifteen handles hanging on fifteen hooks. What had

02:00 happened? They'd all gone like that, you see. I thought this was a sort of an instant impression, what a curious thing. In the wardroom was chaos, the writing table was tipped up, a bottle of ink that had been on the writing table had smashed ink all over the carpet. On the wall was a picture of Queen Wilhelmina, because it was a Dutch ship, they still had, and Dutch officers there, they still had the picture of

02:30 Queen Wilhelmina. I’ll never forget it, there was the table where we ate, there was Queen Wilhelmina at the top, over here was an old engraving of Admiral Abraham Crijnssen whipping a British squadron in the Dutch wars two hundred years ago. And over there was a picture of Rita Hayworth [Hollywood actress] in a very, very provocative and scanty clothing

03:00 with practically nothing on – very sexy, and underneath it in ink was written, “To the boys of the Abraham Crijnssen, from Rita.” Some person had got it from somewhere, perhaps the Abraham Crijnssen had been in New York, perhaps they got it, perhaps someone had written that across. Anyhow, chaos everywhere, Queen Wilhelmina down on the deck, smashed glass. Admiral Abraham Crijnssen and his

03:30 Victoria Squadron ninety degrees list to starboard, hanging by one hook. Rita hadn't budged, she was up there still smiling down on the boys. So Rita could take it, the Queen couldn’t. I wrote this at the time in my diary, it was rather funny. Anyhow, we continued the attack on that submarine and the corvette. We gave the order for the convoy to scatter.

04:00 If the convoy scatters at least they can't shoot three or four of them in line. The convoy all made off for Gabo Island. We hunted that submarine for hours, it was fast and it was skilful. It knew when we were coming and it dodged. It didn’t come up, thank God, or it probably would have shot us both out of the sea. And then night was coming on. The captain of the corvette had to make a decision, he was the senior officer of the two.

04:30 What would you do? How did he know that there weren't a couple more Japanese submarine waiting at Gabo Island for these undefended ships? So we abandoned the hunt and hurried on to shepherd our sheep. There was no more attack. That was, as it turned out after the war when records became available through the Americans, that was one of three submarines –

05:00 I-Class submarines. I’ve written the names of which ones were down but we’re not sure which. They all got back to Japan, and one of those submarines was the one that sank the hospital ship Centaur. And had it been that one and had of killed it, we would have saved all those nurses, all those people that died on that hospital ship. Isn't life curious? So we possible were attacking that submarine.

05:30 When we got back to Sydney the Abraham Crijnssen had to go back into dock because we were leaking. We had about twenty eight sprung rivets and there was a court of inquiry in which Chapman thought he was going to lose his command, but the admiral in command of Sydney, and I think it was Sir Guy Royle I think finally signed the report, and they said – and it was 06:00 a very short answer – “Counter attack justified.” Chapman breathed again and we went on to sail again together. That’s the story of the Abraham Crijnssen for me.

How did you react yourself when you engaged with this submarine?

Well all fear left me. Adrenaline was pumping, explosions were going off, two Beaufort planes came out and they were circling around the dispat water.

06:30 You didn’t have time to think of anything, all I was wondering and hoping was, if a dark black conning tower appeared out of the water three hundred yards away, and the Japanese gunners came down pouring out of the thing, who would kill who first? Who knows?

Once you came back to Sydney did you remain aboard the boat?

In February, 1943

07:00 as we returned to Sydney after a long convoy, Chapman had been on the bridge for about seventy two hours. He was stubble faced and grey, he was a great teacher. We let the ships come in first and then we came in afterwards, and then we were coming towards the boom entrance.

07:30 Now, the ship that worked the boom gate had a series of signals to show whether the boom gate was open or whether the boom gate was shut, because you couldn’t see because the boom gate was level with the water. If a ship went charging straight through there and there was this great big heavy chain across, it would lose its propellers and do untold damage. There were a series of display signals which were displayed by day or night to show whether the boom gate was open or not.

08:00 One of them was two large cylindrical black shapes, they were actually canvas things on hoops but they made a ball about as round as that, and those two balls hoisted up to the yardarm of the boom gate to show that the boom gate was open. Now I’m under instruction, I’m still a young man, I know nothing. I’m pretty

08:30 ignorant but I did know a fair bit because I’d swatted up on all this. Here was Chapman and we were coming in, and he was tired but he was still a good teacher, he wanted to teach young officers. We’re coming in past the south peak, and we’re going south towards the south boom gate, and I’m standing there beside him and he says, “Hordern?”, “Yes, Sir?” And he’s got his binoculars and he’s spanning it around looking at the ships going. He said, “How do I know

09:00 that the boom gate is open?” Smarty – I knew because I’d done my homework. I said, “Well, Sir, you’ve got two black balls” – he picked up his binoculars again and he looked around the harbour and he said, “Hordern, I’ll have you know, my balls are not black.” Even the quartermaster laughed. But there he was, what

09:30 a teacher.

In respect to his teaching of you, what sort of things was he trying to teach?

Seamanship, looking ahead to see what dangers or responsibilities lay ahead, anticipating danger, efficiency in operating,

10:00 and in some ways he was a very hard task master. He taught me many wonderful lessons, and one dreadful night there was a head gale on. We were leading the convoy into a gale and we were ploughing down towards the Victorian coast towards Cape Everard. There was a lighthouse on Cape Everard and it had two flashes, I think they were every thirty seconds. I was

10:30 an assistant officer on watch, Chapman had been on watch for hours and hours and he had a little sleeping cabin just below the deck of the bridge. He was tired, he went and looked at the chart and he saw how far off we were from Cape Everard, and when we were going to be able to sight the light – because you could sight it at twenty miles, or ten miles. So he said, “Hordern, I’m going to my bunk. Call me when you sight the Cape Everard

11:00 light.” Down he went. ‘God’ I thought, ‘I’ve got to be right about this.’ So I began watching, I checked the chart, what speed we were doing, how far out at sea you could see this light, and when the time began to come I watched in the binoculars and at last, there they were. The flashes, the welcoming flashes of light out in the dark in this wild gale. I slid down the iron

11:30 companionway to the door of his sea cabin, knocked. No answer. I opened and went in. Chapman was lying on his back, snoring, exhausted. “Sir, we have raised Cape Everard light”, [snore]. “Sir,

12:00 we have raised Cape Everard light”, [snore]. What am I to do? I have been told to call him when we raise Cape Everard light. I’ve called him and he hasn’t answered. What would any young person do? I was innocent, I had a lot to learn. I leant forward and I touched him on the shoulder.

12:30 Immediately he opened his eyes and he said, “Don’t touch me.” That’s was Jesus said to Mary, (“No leave me to dream UNCLEAR). Don’t touch me.” When she went to him the day after the resurrection, and here’s Chapman – not a very religious man but a wonderful man – saying the same thing. Exactly the same words – “Don’t touch me.” 13:00 Within thirty seconds, stubble faced and tired, he’s back up on the bridge looking at Everard light, ‘Are we safe, is it right, is there danger for the convoy?’ I had yet to learn how offensive it was for a tired captain to be manhandled out of his sleep. That was to happen to me years afterwards, at war and at sea.

Just in respect of being at sea, and the

13:30 issues of relating to other men and general hygiene, how did things differ from obviously the standards that were set back when you were learning to become a seaman?

Well when I was learning to become a seaman we were in shore bases. You had septic tanks, you had cisterns, you had properly cooked meals cooked in stable kitchens. You had fresh bread and food and milk and bacon and eggs. All that sort of thing

14:00 for the forces here. Once you're at sea in small ships, very different cup of tea. Try cooking a decent meal in a thing that’s rolling forty five degrees each way, plunging and lurching and screaming winds, and water sweeping the deck. Sometimes there were times in Fairmiles where we just did nothing but ate dry biscuits and corned, tinned beef and drank water. Couldn’t even get a cup of tea, for days on end in gales, because they were much smaller but much more violent.

14:30 But things like shaving on board?

I grew a beard. You’ll see in one of those pictures taken of me, shows you that’s why sailors didn’t shave, or grew beards whenever they could. Some sailors did shave, but you couldn’t shave everyday in small ships like that, it was impossible. Everyone was scruffy, everybody stank, it was the smell particularly in the tropics, of stale sweat on you.

15:00 We got tinea and we got skin lesions and diseases and things like that but that was all part of it. So were the Japanese, so were the soldiers much worse in New Guinea – we were lucky, we were at sea. At least we could have a salt water bath and they had salt water soap – in the Fairmiles I’m talking about now. You pull a bucket up over the side, you stripped off, put the bucket up over you and you rubbed yourself with this ghastly soap. It was supposed to lather but it never did, you felt sticky and salty after it anyway.

15:30 Again, just a few more questions about the general side of while you were at sea, one of the areas that the archive is interested in is obviously socially and how men relate. The issue of, I guess homosexuality on board, did anything like that arise?

There was always homosexuality and there always has been in mankind since the beginning of time, how did Sodom and Gomorrah – how did the word sodomy get its name? From the practices

16:00 that were alleged to be going on in Sodom in the time Abraham – it goes right back. It isn't considered by the majority of people to be normal. It isn't considered by the majority of people to be productive. It may be a thing that in people who are built this way, find some expression, but for those of us who are not, it was

16:30 pretty offensive. As a very young officer, I was propositioned by a very burly dockyard labourer, and I had a very, very nasty incident at Garden Island. I could tell you about it but you probably don’t want to know.

Actually that’s the very thing that the archive is interested in.

17:00 Alright, we go forward now, I’m now captain of ML-1347. The time is December or January, 1945. I’m fitting this ship out in Garden Island in Sydney, and we’re going to take it up to New Guinea to fight the Jap's. The ship had come from America, deck cargo on a Liberty ship, and it had to be pretty well refitted, the

17:30 shell of it, lots of things had to be done with it. So we are lying at the fitting out wharf at Garden Island and dockyard workers are swarming all over it. There are carpenters, there were electricians, there were plumbers, there were people checking the oiling fuelling system, there were people who were putting in anti-submarine gear and equipment – because it did come without these things. There were carpenters and one of the carpenters was a very

18:00 big burly man. I was twenty three I suppose, and very fresh faced I suppose. He would have been about thirty five or forty, much stronger and bigger than I was. He was working on fitting out the wardroom, he made a pipe rack for me – I’ve still got it, it’s down under the house but it’s got screw drivers and spanners in it. This pipe rack was to screw into the wall,

18:30 and I smoked a pipe, so you could have two or three pipes there and they just hang there. He was extremely nice, he was friendly, he kept wanting to talk. He used a lot of body language – he’d tap you on the shoulder or on the knee or like this. I was pretty innocent of this sort of thing, because I hadn't had much experience, I knew a bit about it. Anyhow as the days went past he became more and more close, and sort of

19:00 hanging around and saying, “Let’s go and see the pictures together”, because you went off at night. I said, “No I don’t want to. I want to go out dancing with some girl” or something. I didn’t even – he was a nice man, perhaps he’s lonely. Well, he hung around, and he hung around and it got worse and worse, and he began making suggestions to me, which I didn’t think my mother and father would have approved of –

19:30 nor did I approve of. So I said – I knew about, we used to call them poofters, homosexuality was a long way of saying something that was short, and it is bad language to use a longer word to describe a shorter operation. So, if you talk about homosexuality in the navy noone would have known what you were talking about, it was all poofters. So there were all sorts of jokes, cruel jokes about them, because you’ve got to look at it from these poor people’s point of view,

20:00 or these happy people’s point of view – whichever way you like, but certainly not the average person’s point of view. So this bloke made a few suggestions to me which were overt, and I said, “Look, forget about it, get out.” He was a pretty strong man, and I knew that sometimes these people were driven by passions to do things. There had

20:30 been a murder on the cruiser Australia by two young sailors who had been abused by a petty officer who was a homosexual. In the end they couldn’t stand it anymore so they attacked him, threw him over the side – this is the story I heard, it may not be word perfect. On the deck at night at sea, this man came to these two boys and they decided to have done with him.

21:00 They picked him up and threw him over the side, and as he went over he was strong and he clung onto the rail, and they hacked his fingers off with their knives – awful business. So I knew that there was violence, so this particular evening I had a lot of bookwork to do, we were taking on guns and stores and we were getting close to sailing. All the sailors had gone ashore, everybody had gone ashore. I was alone on the ship, it was getting dark.

21:30 I had about another half hours work to do, all the dockyard workers had gone, the whistle had gone and he was a dockyard worker. I worked till about six o'clock and I locked the ship up because we weren't commissioned, we weren't sort of active, and I began to walk back to the Garden Island gates. You had to go through a long tunnel, and this tunnel was dimly lit, and I was alone,

22:00 and as I entered the tunnel there he was coming towards me from the other end. He had waited, he had not gone home and we were going to have a confrontation. Well, always for me when things had happened like this when in was flying, and the Sydney to Hobart race, or at war, there comes a time when adrenaline pumps and you think, ‘Oh, what the hell, we’ll go through with this and

22:30 take it as it comes, you’ve got to face it.’ I knew this was going to be difficult, and lying all around were bits of broken boats, bit of timber – they were refitting whalers and just near the entrance there was a big hunk of wood about three feet long with a nail sticking out of it. I picked it up and held it in front of me, he began walking towards me. When he was about twice as far away as you are away from me now,

23:00 I held it up and I said, “If you come a step closer to me I’ll sink this into your head.” And I thought, ‘He’s going to rush me’ but instead he gave a funny little smile and a skip and he said, “Ooh, you naughty boy!” and he went tripping away running for his life down the thing. Never saw him again. Unbelieveble, that’s absolutely – I said,

23:30 “Come a step closer to me and I’ll sink this into your head.” I expected warfare and he suddenly danced, and waved his hands and said, “Ooh, you naughty boy” and ran away. What makes these poor fellas work? You asked me about experience, there’s one of them.

Just with that experience, given that you're an officer, was there anything that you could do in respect to charges?

Of course, but I wouldn’t dream of it. It was happening all the time. if you start laying charges the next thing, nobody was a witness to that.

24:00 I would have said, “This man was offensive” and they’d say, “Who says, Hordern? It’s your word against his, forget about it.” You just forget about those things and move on. You’re fighting the Japanese, you're not wanting to fight the bureaucracy as well.

Was there much of a culture of this within the navy at the time?

Not on my ship that I knew. That was a dockyard labourer at me. I never came across it ever,

24:30 and I think it would have been so hard and cruel for any of these people who were this way inclined, to try to live with sailors, people that were naked all the time, crude jokes, course language. How far would you get, if you were one among sixteen? In the mess deck of a patrol boat in the tropics? So I think probably they didn’t, I never saw them.

25:00 I never saw homosexuality on a Fairmile in my life. But of course it existed in the bigger ships where there were more people, and I told you it existed in the dockyard.

Thanks so much for sharing that.

Well I did pursue it, it was unpleasant to talk about it, but I am conscious of the fact that this is oral history. If I stopped to think, was I going to tell you that, and I thought, well I wont because it’s not nice 25:30 and people that are homosexuals are going to see this probably. If they’re researching for a PhD [Doctorate of Philosophy] in fifty years time, they're trying to look back over these things, and one of them maybe a homosexual and he might look and he might feel wounded. But I’m not wanting to wound him, although it will probably hurt, so I debated with myself whether to tell that story but I decided the historical record was more important that personal preference.

Well the archive appreciates that, so thankyou. Now just moving on again, we’ve touched

26:00 on already the Fairmile and a little bit on it, but the opportunity – did you know when you were on board HMAS Abraham Crijnssen that you were going to towards the Fairmile?

No, on this particular afternoon when Chapman had told me that his balls were not black, we came into our mooring and as we came up the harbour to our mooring, the light on

26:30 Garden Island began to flash. Take on fuel, take on depth charges, you are off on another convoy. A boat then came along side with a lot of signals and one of them was for me. “Sub-lieutenant MC Hordern, RANVR [Royal Australian Navy Volunteer Reserve] on probation has been appointed additional officer on HMAML [His Majesty’s Australian Motor Launch] 814. The ship is about to leave for the war in the North,

27:00 go aboard forthwith.” A boat came along side, the kit bag and sea bag and clothes went into it, and within twenty four hours, or thirty six hours I was on my war to war in a Fairmile, in a completely new environment with completely different people.

Can you share with us what it was like breaking into a new environment with new people, on a new ship?

Well by this time, I’d

27:30 been in the university regiment, I’d been in the light anti-aircraft regiment, I had been in three or four naval colleges or navigation courses at Balmoral, or gunnery courses at Woolloomooloo, and I was continually entering new environments, meeting new people, looking at people saying, “I’ve got to live with him, he’s got to live with me. What do you do, what do you like” and you begin to learn what their mum did or their dad did, if

28:00 they had sisters or brothers. What were their hopes, what were their fears. And so it is warfare, particularly a mobile warfare such as mine was, was a continual business of changing relationships and changing conditions – a continual readjustment to stimuli.

Ok. Well this first journey up North, what happened up there?

Well we went up the

28:30 east coast of Australia, along palm fringed shores, through the Whitsunday Passage. Up to Thursday Island, which was then called Bomb Alley, because the Japanese had float planes in the Kai, Tanimbar and Aru Islands [Arafura Sea]. We crossed the Gulf of Carpentaria along the Arnhem Land coast, and we went into Darwin and we became part of Darwin’s Navy. Darwin was at this time under considerable air

29:00 attack by the Japanese. They had powerful air forces in Timor and they had control over the sky and sea over those seas. We were not yet completely on the defensive – although the Spitfires were in Darwin, and the Beaufighters, 30 Squadron I think were there, and we had American Liberators flying out of Fenton Airfield [Northern Territory] which was about sixty miles down the territory, and they were pounding

29:30 places like Palembang and Sumatra and the oil wells. By air we were aggressively carrying the war to the Japanese and smashing them up, but they were also giving us a lot to think about.

Your role on board?

Additional third officer – I wasn't the captain, I wasn't the first lieutenant, I was the junior officer. I corrected charts, I kept signal, I made

30:00 reports, I kept a watch, I saw the guns were cleaned, and had my duties, my watch keeping places to go to, and my responsibilities. Every man on a small ship like that had his responsibilities.

When you arrived at Darwin the first time, what did you see?

I was amazed at the extent of the damage. Blasted smashed houses, smashed walls,

30:30 wrecks of ships all over the Darwin Harbour – their masts sticking out. The Neptuna, which had been a ship along side the main wharf which had four hundred depth charges on it, and had been hit and exploded with an enormous explosion. She’d blown herself out from the wharf and she was lying at low tide like a half stranded whale, with her side sticking out a bit. The crocodiles were swimming around in the water,

31:00 and brown kites were circling over the harbour, and thermals – it was may I think and the dry season – beautiful weather. The Japanese were bombing fairly regularly, and there was a camaraderie among the soldiers there. We went ashore, and I had always as a parson’s son, I had been 31:30 brought up to consider Sunday special. Sunday was the day for reflection and for going to church and to thinking about the messages that we had been brought up with, and the significance of the Christian culture. Just think today, if there were no Christian schools or Christian hospitals in the world, or hospices or welfare things, or Anglicares, or

32:00 Roman Catholic this, or Seventh Day Adventists that – just think of the impact on culture Christianity has had on the world. Materially – forget about the spiritual aspect of it. So I had been taught to try and go to church, to try and take Holy Communion – I hadn't been to church for months, so I went ashore because we were allowed to go ashore, and I found the naval chaplain whose name was

32:30 Cyril Alcorn. He came out on the ship to welcome us, and he didn’t even want to know what your religion was, or even that you had a religion, he just loved you all. He was just a wonderful man, he used to get bits of chocolate from the comfort fund, and if you had some time off you could go and have a shower at the barracks. He said, “And come to church. Come to church.” So I said, “Alright.”

33:00 So the next Sunday there was no air raid alarm, we were not at immediate notice for duty – you could be at four hours notice, you could be standby – so we were standby. Up to two officers and half the crew were allowed off, and they went ashore, they got a boat ashore and they got a truck, looked around. There were no shops or no civilians there but you could go and have a shower in the soldiers’ club or whatever it was. You got off the ship, you could have a

33:30 fresh shower on the wharf in the harbour master’s shower – that was fresh water and you could wash your clothes. So I went to church and I’ll never forget it, I went up to this little chapel, the time of church was advertised as nine o'clock or something, and I looked in – I was the only naval person, there must have been about a hundred and fifty soldiers there all with their tin hats. Everybody had their tin hats and I think most of them had their rifles, because the Japanese

34:00 in certain – in Timor the Japanese had used paratroops. I know that when we were in Thursday Island, the Japanese flew over with their reconnaissance plane, and every soldier I saw walking around Thursday Island had a Tommy gun or a rifle with them. I had nothing, so I went in and I sat down, and there was soldier playing the organ – just playing the organ very softly. It was so

34:30 quiet and peaceful here in this little chapel on this hot morning, and after at about eleven o'clock, in came Cyril Alcorn with his robes on. He looked nice – I think he was a Methodist, he might have been a congregation or a Presbyterian – it didn’t matter, after all, Jesus wasn't an Anglican was he? Jesus wasn't a Catholic – if you’d asked Jesus was he a Christian, he wouldn’t know what you were talking about, because he wasn't called a Christian.

35:00 The Bible doesn’t refer to Christians until about forty years after his death, in Antioch, if I remember correctly. So Christianity is only a word that humans have coined for a certain type of behaviour. So in he came and you could see that the men loved him, could see the men really loved him. He made a little joke or two and welcomed us all, told us the amenities that were available.

35:30 Then he preached such a wonderful sermon, that I took notes of it, and there’s my father far away south – sermons were his forte – I sent Dad the notes I had made immediately after this service, and this was the burden of Cyril Alcorn’s sermon. “We are engaged

36:00 in this dreadful war. It’s a terrible war, it’s a fight for decency in humanity, against the Nazis and the Japanese. We’ve got to pursue this war relentlessly – relentlessly.” He used the word twice I think. “But” he said with no hate, “In our hearts for the people we’re fighting, it’s pretty hard, when they’re torturing people”

36:30 and doing these sort of things, here is the enigma, the mystery of this whole thought process. And he said, “When we win, we must have forgiveness in our hearts, and no hatred and no resentment because if you call yourself Christians, and I suppose

37:00 you do or you wouldn’t be here this morning. If you call yourself Christians you're denying the principals as you are intending to espouse.” Then he called for the hymn, and it was that wonderful hymn about Sabbath rest by Galilee, “The Calm of Hills Above” – do you know that hymn? It’s a wonderful hymn.

37:30 And as we were singing that hymn, which I knew quite well about Sabbath rest and quietness and spiritual peace, just over our heads was a roar, a powerful roar of heavy aircraft engines. It was a squadron of flights of American Liberators, and they had taken off from Fenton Field south of

38:00 Darwin, and those aircraft were heavily laden with lethal bombs. All their machine gun belts were full, they were expecting to fight a battle with the Zeros that would be there to stop them. They were roaring their way North to bring death and destruction, and fire and pain, to some place occupied by the Japanese – there might have been people there that were natives, and here we were singing about calm and peace

38:30 on Galilee, and all mayhem was going on up above. I went away quite disturbed and confused from that service. But it gave you things to think about, better than television. We’re coming towards the end of the tape, but just a question in respect to faith, was there ever a time during the war that you ever doubted faith, or doubted your God?

No, there wasn't

39:00 because probably people would say it’s blind, ignorant faith. Was it? I don't know, I was brought up never to doubt, and if you see things happening that you see that are not right, and you’ve had this other philosophy put into you that things don’t always go right for people who profess this particular idea or thought,

39:30 but you’ve got to see behind it a greater life experience – perhaps a greater wisdom beyond your comprehension. See, your mind and my mind are little things. We can't even begin to touch on – how do you define infinity? How can you, with a finite mind, try to imagine something that is endless?

40:00 When you look starry night sky, how can you comprehend the immensity of space? I can't, I’m not up to – maybe someone can but not me.

Given that’s you, was there ever a time where someone else you knew lost their faith or gained faith?

Well, gained faith, certainly. But I never deeply

40:30 questioned or inquired into the spiritual state of my companions. You gathered it from conversations, you sensed it in danger. You perhaps pondered it afterwards when you'd escaped from almost certain and sudden death, and it’s all over – you get a feeling. We were all young, we

41:00 all had mums and dads back home. The day was enough, just to get through the day.

Tape 7

00:42 On the ML-814 – it’s quite an impersonal name to call a ship by, how did you refer to it yourselves?

We always called it 814, and a book has been written by a friend of mine called Peter Evans.

01:00 Peter died in January, I was responsible for a motion at the Fairmile association for the book being written, and I cooperated greatly with him and helped him with it, and he gave me a handsome mention in the preface – I’ve got it in the library out there. It tells the story of the Fairmile, I could lend it to you if you wanted to find out what Fairmiles are on, but you’ve got to move on to other things. They did not have the dignity of a name. There were four or

01:30 five hundred I suppose in the Royal Navy, they were in the Canadian Navy and the New Zealand Navy. So they just gave them names. At least the corvettes were the Warrnambool and Cessnock and Junee, they had names. The destroyers all had names, the frigates had names, the cruisers had names. The submarines had names if we had, we didn’t have any then – we just had numbers. It has been a matter

02:00 of regret for old Fairmiles. We’ve got a Fairmile Association now, and it is a matter of regret we never had names, and suggestions are now being made to call patrol boats, so they do now, they call them after things. But we were just anonymous, we just had numbers.

You were patrolling in the Timor area?

From Darwin North to the Aru and Kai Islands [Arafura Sea south of West Papua], east to Milingimbi [Northern Territory],

02:30 there was a big Spitfire airstrip there to combat the Japanese and Beaufighters worked out of it. West to Timor, we did a run across the Timor Sea to rescue people from the Japanese there at night, which was a very hazardous fare, the whole thing took about eight days because we had to refuel at Bathurst Island. West to along the coast to Wyndham, Napier

03:00 Broome Bay and to the Drysdale River mission [far north of Western Australia], where another airstrip was carved out of the country to allow our strike aircraft to get closer to the Japanese, or if they were wounded in the air to get back to some place that was a bit closer than Darwin was.

We’ll come to this rescue operation in just a moment, generally, you were no longer doing convoys, what was you general duties?

03:30 We didn’t do convoys at all in 814, they were major haul work, they were fast, they were heavily armed, and what had been happening, our commandos had been cut off in Timor – you know the story of the Sparrow Force [code for the Australian, Portugese and local forces defending Timor Island, 1942], it’s all there. I wont go into it. And they had found this wireless, which was called Winnie the war winner – it’s in the Australian War Memorial, and along side it is a Japanese flag which I

04:00 presented to the War Memorial. It’s in the same exhibit in the Australian War Memorial with a caption there, and I saved that flag and presented it about five or six years ago with a few old survivors of that trip. So we were called upon to do a very dangerous run to Timor. The history of the attempts to

04:30 provide succour to our men on Timor or get them off had been disastrous. The destroyer Voyager had been lost on Timor. The Armidale had been sunk with dreadful loss of life, including a young fellow called Buckland, sub-lieutenant Buckland who had been an undergraduate friend of mine in Arts 1 at Sydney University. You know the story of the Armidale? You know the story

05:00 of the Voyager? And suddenly the Fairmiles arrived, and the naval officer in charge of Darwin who was responsible for these things had been wanting to the Fairmiles to come. There were two Fairmiles in Darwin, there was 815, commanded by Charles Inman, and the first lieutenant was Harold Sturt, and the third officer was JP Morrison, Jimmy Morrison who died six weeks ago – lovely man, a devout Catholic,

05:30 a good fella and a friend of mine. We were instructed to run across the Timor Sea, three hundred miles of sea dominated by the Japanese. They had four or five powerful airfields on the east coast of Timor. A lot of Portuguese

06:00 civilians escaped from the Japs and they had met up with our men in Timor, and they'd taken to the hills with them. These – some were women and children, not many children – were hampering our men and they were endangering the lives of our men in Timor. They were pretty well starving, they didn’t have proper food.

06:30 So ML’s 814 and 815 were chosen to go across the Timor sea and bring off these Portuguese and take food and weapons to our men. A big skid was built on the back of 814 and 815, and on that huge big

07:00 canvas boat with a wooden frame was put, very heavy, that was the thing we were going to go ashore in because we had to anchor off the open beach in Timor at night, and go in. All our depth charges were taken off, four tonnes of them, so we would go faster and we weren't going to need depth charges on this attack, on this operation. All our secret books were taken ashore.

07:30 Just before we left dear Cyril Alcorn, he knew what had happened – the Armidale had sunk, all those boys had died. The Voyager had been sunk, and I don’t mind telling you there were butterflies in our stomaches. We had to go from Darwin up to Melville Island, Kings Cove in Melville Island.

08:00 There a ship had been sent up with more drums of petrol. The hundred and thirty miles or whatever it was up to Melville Island we would have used up all of the petrol. There we had to replenish our tanks from this ship that was waiting for us, then we had to do the dash to Darwin. We had to go slow to conserve petrol for the high speed dash that we’d need to get away with the Japs possibly after us.

08:30 So that meant crawling across the Timor Sea at ten knots, ten knots in a sea with a brilliant clear sky and the Japanese aeroplanes looking for us – just thinking about the Armidale was enough to put you off. Anyhow, Alcorn came down just before we left – he knew all about it –

09:00 and he gathered us around the gun, the whole ships company around the gun. He offered to take letters to our parents, which some of us had written if we were killed or didn’t come back. He took a lot letters – he took one from me that I’d written to my mother and father, telling them that when they got this letter, I’d be dead and not to worry because things will be alright.

09:30 So some of us gave him these letters, he said, “I’m taking these letters, boys, but I’m not going to post them. I’m going to give them to you back in ten days time.” And he did. I kept mine for about forty years, and then I found it and I reread it and I was so embarrassed about what I’d written, I tore it up, but I’ve still got the envelope.

What did it say?

It was very

10:00 emotional. I told my parents that they were very good parents. I think it disturbs me to think about it. I don’t want to probe it.

Obviously, if you wrote the letter it was something you considered at the time, that you weren't necessarily immortal, that you might well be on your last voyage.

We expected we were, but we weren't and we made the crossing.

Just one more question before you left,

10:30 how were you briefed on this whole operation? Was it secretive, was the crew all told by the captain?

It was probably about the middle of July, 1943, a beautiful dry season day. I was standing after a meagre breakfast on the bridge of ML-814, and our buoy lying about two hundred yards from the wrecked hull

11:00 of the Neptuna, D’Arcy Kelly – a wonderful man, one of my best friends, died three years ago but he’s in that picture in Canberra giving that flag. He and I were standing there, he was the signalman, there was an enormous lamp on the thing. Suddenly the signal station ashore in Darwin began flashing, and this flash was – and you can read Morse Code figures, “814,

11:30 814, 814, 814”. D’Arcy picked up the Aldis lamp and went, “K”. K means, ‘Carry on’. The Morse comes through, “Captain” – and he’s writing it down, he’s translating the dots and dashes into a pad, or I am – we all knew Morse, we could all turn it into writing. “Captain to report to operations forthwith.”

12:00 At that moment I went down to Reg Lewis, was the captain – Lieutenant RR Lewis – and I said, “Sir” – Oh, no I said Reg, I always called him Reg. After Abraham Crijnssen we were Christian names except one captain I still called Sir. I was called Tony Hordern or Hordern – all Horderns were called Tony because of Anthony Horderns. It doesn’t matter, all my brothers and cousins whether they were in the army, air force – every Hordern was Tony, because of Anthony. You couldn’t remember their names but you could remember Tony.

12:30 So this boat came out and took Reg, Chips Wood – all Wood’s were Chips in the navy, all Evans’s were Good, and you had these funny little names – if your name was Evans well you were nicknamed Good for a start, so you were Good Evans, you see, very funny. But it was sort of a lighter form of naval life. Reg went shore, Chips and D’Arcy and I

13:00 are saying, “Something’s on.” About half an hour or an hour went past, and a jeep was seen speeding down Fort Hill from Darwin to the waterfront, with dust flying from its wheels, a big hurry. The boat is waiting, Reg jumps into the boat, and he comes out. “Everybody’s – what’s on?” you know, was it a crashed aircraft down in the sea?

13:30 Do we have to go up and do a dangerous sea rescue job right under the noses of the Jap's? Had a ship been bombed and sunk? We didn’t know. Had no idea about Timor, that would have been the worst of our thoughts probably. Reg came up along side looking pretty worried. Reg had a capacity to look worried. He gave a curt nod of his head to Chips and me, “Down to the wardroom.”

14:00 We went down to the wardroom, just Reg, Chips and me. He flopped himself into the chair, he took his naval cap off and flung it over the wardroom, it landed on his bunk, and he called the name of the man who took on human form two thousand years ago,

14:30 and said, “Jesus Christ, what a job they’ve got for us. We’re off to bloody Timor. I’ll miss the nurses dance.” And he always – there were hospital nurses in Darwin and they had a dance about once every two or three weeks, and they would send an invitation down to the ship. Reg always,

15:00 we always drew the short straws, and it was Reg always. He said, “I’m the lucky one.” He arranged it because he was the captain, and he was really looking forward to this nurses – he was a married man but he was a nice man. But it was nice, you heard women’s voices, you sort of heard women’s laugh, and you listened to the softer aspect of their speech. There were no blasphemies from their voices,

15:30 there were no cursings, there were no obscene gestures, there were no funny rough, loving jokes. There was no male companionship such as that kept us all going and bonded us together. But there was this soft, gentle presence, this female presence, and good food and music.

So how long after Reg announcing that did you set off?

16:00 About three days, three or four days. We got to Timor – when we got to Timor we had a Portuguese pilot on us and we nearly made a mistake and we ran into a place where there were Japanese post waiting. Be they were looking, they knew that transit had been – they’d bombed a lot of the ships that were going. There were two little ships called the Karu and the Vigilant – one of them had been bombed for fourteen hours, but it had missed it. So the Jap's knew that we were succouring our

16:30 men on Timor and they were out to get us, and we were out to. So it was night. We anchored off the Timor Beach in a low surf, you could just hear the swish of the waves breaking, it was on a lea shore. The big boat was launched, brought along side and Chips Wood went ashore first I think, just to reconnaissance, came back.

17:00 Power, anything could happen – the Jap's were near, we weren't quite sure what the situation was, and then he said to me, “Would you like to go, Tony?” I thought, ‘Well, here’s a challenge. If I don’t do this, I’ll never do anything.’ I said, “I’d love to.” So the next thing, I’m in command of the boat laden down with food, kerosene tins full of two shilling pieces – Australian two shilling pieces to pay the Timor natives in silver,

17:30 to keep them loyal to us. They were sick of the Japanese paper money. Bully beef, Tommy guns, wireless equipment, food and medicines. Four sailors on big sweep oar, big oars and I’m on the sweep oar. When we pushed off from 814 it looked very big, very safe, just riding on the swell outside the first breaker. I’d never taken a boat through the open

18:00 surf before, and there’s so many hopes and fears dependant on us getting in. As we went in the first wave picked us up and pushed us forward a bit, and the next one a bit bigger, then the third one picked us up and we were on broken water. Then suddenly – that was nine o'clock at night and dark, you could see in the starlight, you're eyes get dark adapted. A whole lot of naked figures raced into the water, grabbed the sides of the boat and pulled it up 18:30 onto the shore. There were handshakes and good Australian accents saying, “Thank God you’ve come.” We were among countrymen not Japanese.

How did you know that you'd landed in the right place?

Well the first boat in found that out. If it didn’t, they wouldn’t come back. But what had happened, there had been secret messages from the commandos in Darwin to Timor, and there was a code,

19:00 and we were supposed to arrive off a certain latitude and longitude just after dark, if we were not sighted. We were, there were adventures coming over, we were supported by a Beaufighter – I won’t go in to talk about them because I’ll be here for hours. We had some pretty traumatic experiences on the way over, but we had escaped death there, and we were now at Timor. The arrangement had

19:30 been that we were to come to a certain place, and our navigation had to be spot on. At a certain time, three fires would be lit on the beach fifty yards apart by the commandos. Then we would send a secret letter in a shaded Morse lamp – I forget what, it might have been L – and they would send back K,

20:00 or some other. But, as had happened later with Jim Elwin – we had Jim Elwin with us, he was captured by the Japanese and tortured – and as happened later, the Japanese sought to capture and torture any of our men that landed, to wring out of them these secret letters. How did we know that we weren't going in to get ambushed? We didn’t. Anyway, I had a great big knife in my belt, a revolver, a

20:30 Smith and Wesson 645 revolver. Swing boots, in case something happened and I had to take to the hills with the army, forget about the navy and suddenly become a commander. So here it was, and they pulled the ship up on the sand.

It must have been a tremendous relief to hear those Australian voices there?

Oh, “Jesus, mate!” they said, you know. They don’t mean it in a blasphemous way, I’d been

21:00 told that was taking the name of the Lord in vain, but Jesus himself wouldn’t have thought it because they weren't really. It was a colloquialism, they weren't, in my very strict upbringing, they weren't committing a sin.

Do you remember what they said when you first arrived on the beach?

I’m not going to tell you because it’s a four letter word. If people see this they might be shocked. But then I saw an amazing thing happen, and I have

21:30 written about this in the manuscript that I’ve mentioned to you – these men stopped, they pulled the food and the guns and the ammunition, and the stores out onto the sand. They were naked, big hairy bushy beards. Tough, hardened men, skinny ribs showing through. They’d been

22:00 hunted and hunted for months. They picked up tins of bully beef and they opened them with knives and they wolfed that meat down like starving dogs. It really made an enormous – here was I reasonably well fed with margarine and bread, and here were these, my own countrymen – they came from Wollongong, they came from Blacktown, from North Sydney, Pyrmont. Here were these boys that could have been in school, half starved,

22:30 eating tinned food on the beach like dogs. Well, backwards and forwards the ship went. The yacht went two or three times, and on the last trip, suddenly down through the bush at the back came ponies – Timor ponies. These were the ponies that were going to carry the loads, we’d brought in the ammunition and the food with our commandos back into the hills.

23:00 Timor ponies played an amazing part in that campaign. Now, I was standing there up to my waste in water, with waves lifting it up, didn’t want to let it get grounded, and suddenly down came these people. Men and women, and I think there were some children, and these were the Portuguese – probably some Indonesian Portuguese or Portuguese Timor people – and some white

23:30 people. They were the ones that we had to get away, get back to Australia so that our fellas could move freely in the mountains. They began rushing the boat, they were panic stricken. They began jumping in and finally the boat was getting lower and lower, and there were about twenty of them in this boat. I only had four sailors to row and I was on the sweep oar.

24:00 Eventually I thought, ‘I’m responsible here. I’ve got to leave some of these people. I've got to leave some of these people, probably to leave them to die.’ I was twenty, or twenty one, and this is what responsibility is about, this is where war makes you grow up quickly. I had to make a decision which could have been life or death. That woman, that man. Who am I to say that you live

24:30 and you die? You don’t think of it like that, it’s just the sea, overloading the boat. If we overload the boat and it is sunk in deep water out there, we’re all going to drown clutching each other’s throats, dragging each other down, me with heavy boots on and an (auger all UNCLEAR) on my back. So I said, “No more” and the commandos were there and they said, “Get back.” Some tried to get, so they pushed them back, quite violently because there

25:00 is not much gentility in this sort of warfare. Anyway, they cowered back, these poor wretched people. I could see the sadness in their eyes, almost terror. We were fully – I hadn't got, the sailors were on the four oars and I was still standing beside the boat, and just before I gave the order to push off I looked back and there, standing about forty yards

25:30 away up to his knees in water, was an old man with a white panama hat and a white panama suit. Just standing there looking at me. He was obviously authoritative, he was probably a Portuguese leader of governor or something. He wasn't asking me to call into him and asking to save me, help me, I want to come too. He was there like a father of his flock,

26:00 watching his people go to safety. Something sort of snapped in my mind, although I had just refused others to get in, I suddenly could not leave that man. I staggered back through the waves, hampered by my soaking clothes and my weapons, and I came up to him – I was four or five inches from him, and I looked at him. I said nothing

26:30 to him because there was nothing to say. I grabbed him by the shoulder and he was thin and frail, and I dragged him, he walked sort of shuffled up to our backsides in water, through the surf, pushed him over the side into the stern sheets of the boat beside

27:00 where I was, and gave the commandos sign to push off. About six or seven of them got us and ran us right out into the water, until they were up to their waists, and they gave us a great big heave. I said, “Give way” and the four sailors heaved and heaved. Slowly we began to move out over the waves and we were out in the deep water. Once we were clear of the surf, and we were over the surf and there was the dark shape

27:30 of ML-814 lying at anchor, just rocking with her anchor. We’d anchored with a rope, not a chain because if the Jap's had sprung us there was an axe beside the rope, we were going to cut the rope and go. If that had have happened when I’d been ashore, bad luck for us. The ship came before the ones that were ashore. The old man looked back at the island and the starlight for a long time.

28:00 Then he turned – he was possibly an old Portuguese family with probably centuries of service to the east, and here was his whole world going. He looked back and then he took something from his hand, in the boat and he gave it to me. He spoke in elegant English and he said, “If you ever go to Portugal, show this.” It was a silver signet

28:30 ring with a golden lion on a green jade background, the armorial bearings perhaps of some ancient Portuguese family. I took it, put it in my pocket, didn’t even ask his name, got back to the ship, clambered aboard and then the rest of the mayhem of the night went on, I forgot about it. That ring is in a cupboard

29:00 just over there now, I’ve never been to Portugal and I didn’t even know his name, but what a romance.

Just a few more questions about that night, were you able to take any news of the commandos back with you?

I wasn't aware of any because I think the name of this operation was called ‘Le Garto’.

29:30 There was a man called Pires and he was a Portuguese guerrilla leader, and I think he was the one that masterminded it. But there is a book that Peter Evans wrote call The Fairmile Ships in World War 2, it’s in my library there and it’s got practically a chapter, practically the whole story of it, and quotations from me and Chips Wood and others

30:00 on the memories of that night. It was only just published recently. But I remember I think that the commandos in Timor, probably Pires was talking to people in Darwin in code, but they were communicating so therefore we didn’t take any news back when we saw them. But I know Jim Elwin who was one who we landed, he was later captured and tortured by the Japanese. He lived through the most horrific thing.

30:30 That man was noble, many bad things have been said about Jim – Jim may still be alive but about fifteen years ago Jim came here and he bought a flower for Lesley, and we had lunch together, we talked it over and I've got a photograph of that occasion, it was only taken – and Jim was an old man then.

Sorry, just in a bit more detail, what did you bring them? Food?

We took them Tommy guns,

31:00 ammunition, food – tinned food – medicines, and silver money to pay the Timorese natives.

You didn’t, apart from noticing how ravenously hungry they were, did you take back any other images of these men?

That’s about the only images I saw of them, the rest of the time they were helping me with the boat, the ones that were in the water. I had little to do with the ones that were further back up the hill

31:30 getting the ponies down.

Was there any consideration that you might go back for the remaining Portuguese? We got – see there were two ships. There was 815 and 814 and I think between the two we got them all off. It might have been seventy or so, but in Peter Evans’ book it tells you how many we got out. It tells you the whole story – I’ve just given you my personal view of it. But it’s well

32:00 documented in that book, this operation.

So what happened once you got back on board?

Once we got back on board ferrying went on until pretty late in the night. Reg Lewis was dead anxious to get away and so was I, because the Japs were just up the coast. We might have been betrayed at any moment by a native in the Japanese pay, and lots of the natives worked for the Japanese. The word

32:30 travels pretty quickly if there are ships unloading in enemy territory. What we dreaded was that the word had got out, and at dawn Japanese aircraft would be taking off and they would know where we were because all our footprints were on the sand and everything. Or they could have found out, all they had to do was line up that place to Darwin, because they knew where we were going, and send their aeroplanes out just looking

33:00 on that. Then we were all the Armidale all over again, but women and children too, all of us we would have been absolutely helpless. So eventually somewhere about eleven o'clock at night the last boat was back from the shore, and we couldn’t hoist the big heavy canvas boat in because it was too heavy, we didn’t have any

33:30 hoisting gear. But, look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves, and the Australian Government Navy had decreed that we were not to abandon the boat, but we were to tow it back, and that would slow us up and put all of our lives in jeopardy. War is an amazing series of misjudgements and ridiculous things. When you think of men and women’s lives, the hundreds of millions

34:00 of dollars that go up in war, cities like Dresden [Germany], ancient, wonderful cities like Dresden reduced to rubble by the Royal Air force or by the American Navy in this ghastly war.

Is that what you did? The boat was towed back?

We came roaring back using ninety gallons of petrol an hour, full throttle, speeding along at about seventeen knots instead of eighteen knots.

34:30 With the big boat bouncing behind us on the waves, and with the towline bar taut, and scanning the western sky for those dreadful black blots in the sky, which never came. As we got closer and closer, suddenly there was this black spot in the sky, all binoculars, it was an aircraft. Women and children are all lying around

35:00 the guns vomiting, defecating, urinating, in their own filth and stink. We have them hot tea in chipped mugs, and we tried to wipe their faces with rags. The poor things were desperately sick, lying all over the deck everywhere, all around the guns, all around the depth charge rack. Here came this aeroplane, closer and closer, and all eyes were on it. What sort is it? You know what

35:30 a Japanese Betty bomber looked like, you know what a Japanese Zero looked like – glory be, this had two great big heavy engines and stubby nose – it was a Beaufighter, from 30 Squadron Darwin, sent out to cover us and shepherd us home. We began flashing him saying, “Hello and thankyou, and they said “Good luck, follow me” or something. They were flying around us, so that was support.

36:00 So they shepherded us, we felt at least we had one Beaufighter going around – what we would have done if fifteen Japs had come in, I don't know. Then late in the afternoon, a dark low blur on the eastern horizon – Darwin, Arnhem Land, the low coast of the Northern Territory. We sped through the huge boom gate at Darwin, came along

36:30 side the wharf at Darwin, ambulances were waiting on the wharf. Some of the poor sick people, some of them wounded, were lifted up in stretches and hoisted up and off they went. We went back to our buoy, mission over, what job have they got for us next? That’s the sort of thing that wen on for months and months in Darwin. If it wasn't that it was something else. Some of them just as adventurous, just as dangerous –

37:00 it was quite an exciting time.

Exciting I imagine, but also very physically and mentally stressful?

It was but then, you're young. I don't know.

What sort of toll did it take on you, that adventure?

I don't know, I was developing beri beri at the time and it was diagnosed later, and eventually I was flown down south and hospitalised down here in 1944, but that was the next year. I don't know what sort of a toll, you can't really access

37:30 from the age of eighty two, what sort of high adventure and drama and horror took of you when you were twenty. If you ask me to go back sixty two years and present to you a mental image of what I thought happened then, I can't do it. But we survived. Are there any other examples of crew members for whom it was too much, who went troppo or couldn’t take it any more?

There were. That night, off Timor

38:00 one of our young crew had a nervous breakdown. He began sobbing and crying – I won’t mention his name because I know it, but he was a nice young man. He began sobbing and crying and he said, “They’ll win this war, we’re finished, we’re done. I’ll never see my mother again.” It unnerves the rest of you a bit, however we dealt with him as

38:30 best we could and as kindly as we could. But we got back.

How do you deal with someone like that in that situation?

There are various ways you can do it. It’s not a case of physically assaulting them and knocking them out, but danger, a situation like that can become extremely infectious. There were maybe, there were boys eighteen on that ship, or seventeen, eighteen

39:00 or perhaps seventeen. At twenty I was quite old, and you’ve got no experience to deal with these sorts of things. I was not a permanent militarist, I wasn't a permanent member of the armed forces. I hadn't been trained from the age of thirteen or fourteen at the naval college or Duntroon. How you behave in war and what you’ve got to do, and how you’ve got to maintain morale – you just make it up as you go along.

39:30 I think what they did – I think, I know on a couple of occasions, it may have been the captain, they gave him an enormous slug of rum. He went all woozy and passed out. They made him drink it, you know, hold your nose and tip it down. He would have been almost comatose, but it stopped him screaming and yelling.

Alright, we’ll just have to stop there because we’re out of tape again.

Tape 8

00:46 Just now picking up the story, you did mention earlier about getting involved in some of the attacks upon Darwin with the Japanese aircraft. Can you talk me through some of the those?

I can talk you through

01:00 them yes. The Japanese were still attacking Darwin and the Beaufighter strip at Comalie Creek, and the American Liberator strip down at Fenton, down towards Katherine. The Japanese used to generally come over with about thirty or forty planes,

01:30 bombers, and sometimes flying as low as ten thousand feet. Up above them their beautiful, fast, lethal Zeros would be weaving and turning and waiting to pounce on our Spitfires. The first thing that we would generally know about it, because we had very little warning – I’ll give you an indication, D’Arcy Kelly comes in again on another beautiful dry

02:00 season morning. We’re on lay day, we haven't got a job on, we’re lying at the buoy, just of the sunken Neptuna, near the shattered wharf there. Suddenly there's a roaring sound, absolute roaring sound over the trees, over the rooftops of Darwin. Suddenly we see Spitfires

02:30 roaring into the sky at the RAAF Airbase at Darwin, dust going up. Ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty Spitfires with these Rolls Royce Merlin engines roaring, and the sound came right across the town to us. They knew the Japanese were on their way, and here was Darwin’s air defence going out. The next thing that happens, up goes the big yellow flag on the signal station,

03:00 which means that Japanese enemy aircraft approaching. Our job then was to immediately to slip the buoy, throw off the wire pennant, and go lickety split at full speed out to see and get away from Darwin, and we would wait in a place somewhere near a place called Cape Fourcroy on Bathurst Island I think it is. We would wait in a designated air/sea rescue position.

03:30 Then the battle which was joined by the Spitfires and the Zeros above, in that battle if our fellas were shot down, they’d give a “Mayday, mayday” call and they’d plunge into the sea, or they parachute out, and they would hopefully give some indication of where they were abandoning their aircraft into the sea. Then we were switched into Darwin wireless telegraphy, they would tell

04:00 us, “Pilot down in the sea, such and such a position.” And ML-815 rescued three of our boys in one day. So that would be the job, we would get out to sea as quickly as we could, and we might have to be out there for two days waiting because a pilot could survive in a dinghy or in a life jacket, even under the fierce tropical sun. But sometimes the Japanese were over pretty quickly, before we got 04:30 out, and on one occasion – that painting in the library there, that was ML-814 under bombing attack is one example. We were going past Emery Point doing eighteen knots, Chips and Reg were up on the bridge, all our guns were loaded and I was controlling the gun down aft. Then we see these Japanese planes coming over, and you could see through the binoculars close enough to see

05:00 the big rising suns on the underneath of their wings. I was watching it fascinated, thinking, ‘Up there are a whole lot of little eyed Orientals looking down trying to kill Mrs. Hordern’s little boy Marsden. What cheek of them!’ That was my first thing of them, ‘What cheek have these people got to come into Australia and try to kill us!’ How one-sided a young man can be, but I felt sort of angry with them for presuming to come and attack this country.

05:30 All sort of ethics are gone, you're confused in the moment – I suppose adrenalin is pumping in. I’m watching them, Reg is looking at this thing – I’m talking to Reg on my little microphone that I’ve got, like this sort of thing. I’m watching, and as I watched these formations of bombers, you could see them quite clearly. Underneath I saw their bomb bays all swing out and open, and out of it came tumbling black things. At first they all

06:00 tumbled like that, and then ‘Wshhh’ and they were over some part of Darwin and there were these great big explosions. Earth and debris and flame and fire hurling up into the air. All the time around the aircraft were puffs of brown anti-aircraft smoke, because all our guns were firing at them. Not the guns on ML-814 because they were out of range, but the anti-aircraft guns on all the ships in the

06:30 harbour, ‘Boom, boom, boom’ and every now and then a Japanese aeroplane would begin to smoke, and it would drop out, and then suddenly the gunfire stopped. Down from the sky came the Spitfires, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. They came plummeting like hawks, roaring down. Then the Zeros are into the Spitfires and the guns are going, and over the sound of our

07:00 engines you could hear the chatter of the canons and the machine guns of these aircraft boys fighting these Japanese, our fellas. The bombers then turned and began to come straight out over us, straight for us, and they weren't very high. I thought, ‘God, this is it.’ So I as calculating and watching, and bombs were falling in the water

07:30 around us, there were splashes in the water, and of course all those hundreds and hundred of spent bullets that the Jap's are firing at our bloke, they’re all coming down the earth. Everyone of them can kill you, it doesn’t matter if it was made in Japan or Newcastle. So these things were going on, and then I thought, ‘Well, here it is.’ Then another journey mercy, as these fighter bombers, they all had machine gunners

08:00 in their tails, they were all close enough to machine gun anything on the ground, and there were probably thirty or forty powerful machine gunners there. We had nothing to return fire and they were coming straight over us, and then suddenly the flight leader tipped his starboard wing, did a slow turn out to sea and they all followed him. They went ahead of us and then they cleared out, the Spitfires and the

08:30 Zeros continued their battle out over the sea, as the Zeros were doing their best to protect their bombers. It was over, so Reg on the microphone says, “Tony, you can secure the gun now and come up.” So I walked up and I went up and there’s Chips Wood, a really good man – Chips is ninety six now, he lives in Mackay, he was mayor of Mackay

09:00 at one stage. He was on the phone to me the other day, he can't walk but his mind is still as clear. We talk about these things. There was Chips standing on the deck, blood running down all over his face into his eye, holding his hand over his eye. I said, “What’s wrong, Chips?” “Oh, Tony, just a bit of a nick.” A bullet, or a bit of a shrapnel or something had hit him just above the eye, and he was just holding it with his handkerchief. I said, “I’ll go down and get the medicine

09:30 chest” because we didn’t have a doctor, we all did these things ourselves. “I’ll go down and get the medicine chest.” “Oh, don’t do that, it’s nothing” he said. So he just held it and after a while it stopped bleeding, his handkerchief was soaked with blood. He must have had a hell of a headache, and he stood there – people get purple hearts for that sort of thing, and he didn’t even report sick.

So with the Japanese bombers, were they too high for you to use your guns?

We had a range of a thousand

10:00 yards with the Oerlikon, a bit more with the Roll Royce but it was only a single shot. We didn’t have Bofors fitted then, Bofors would go, ‘Boop, boop, boop’. The Rolls Royce would go, ‘Boop’ and you’d look around while you got another one out of the box and put it in. By that time they’d gone half a mile. It was just a single shot thing, so we had very antiquated guns on ML-814, but later on in the Fairmiles as we got more material, we were all armed

10:30 better, and all the other ships were armoured better than the 814.

During this particular attack on Darwin, what was your role?

My role was to be director of the after gun, to bring the after gun to bear on any Japanese aircraft that came within range. Given they were too high, that wasn't called for?

Well you would have only been wasting your ammunition, and if you used all your ammunition up and somebody else comes at you, you're finished.

You also mentioned a bit earlier

11:00 about a time where you saved three airmen at one time.

That was the 815.

The 815? Can you talk me through that story?

It’s full covered in The Fairmile Ships of the Royal Australian Navy by Peter Evans with pictures, and I’ve got a picture. They went out there…

This wasn't your ship?

No, it wasn't my ship, so I won’t talk about it, but it was a gallant of Charles Inman, Harold Sturt and James Morrison, and their fine men on the 815.

11:30 While you were aboard the 814 there was times where you did go out and rescue airmen?

We went out and looked for them, we only found pathetic remains, bits of wreckage. Just the seabirds crying, we never picked one up alive.

Did you ever come across Japanese crashes or Zeros?

No we didn’t, they did crash around the place but we didn’t come across a Japanese crash.

12:00 While you were at Darwin I understand that you also took doctors out to ships?

Yes, the Macumber was a freighter full of stores, including ten thousand bottles of beer. It was coming up from the south to the troops in Darwin. She was being escorted by

12:30 a corvette, it might have been the Fremantle, I can't remember. She was coming from Thursday Island across towards Wessel Island, which was called E-boat Alley. She was attacked somewhere along that Arnhem Land coast. The bomb hit, exploded, the ship was sunk

13:00 and bad burns, people were rescued. We went out and took a doctor out to the corvette that had been escorting the Macumber, which apparently had shot a piece off the Japanese aeroplane, but the Japanese aeroplane got away. We carried a doctor out to tend to some of the hideous burns. But the dead were just

13:30 lying – dead sailors – were just lying on the deck of the corvette. When it later came back into Darwin with us that afternoon, we were along side it, there were all these boys just lying dead there on the deck. The captain of the Macumber pacing up and down, looking like a distraught man. He lost his ship and he lost his men, and I made a note that night in my journal, it was such a

14:00 beautiful afternoon. I said, “I don’t suppose their parents even know they’re dead yet. Such a beautiful afternoon – too beautiful for them to die like this.” That was the note I wrote then.

What was your involvement in taking the doctors out?

Well the corvette didn’t have a doctor. There were doctors ashore in Darwin, we didn’t have a doctor. The corvette was a hundred miles or so along the Arnhem Land coast, with people dying of burns

14:30 and wounds, and all they had on the corvette was a sick berth attendant, the sort of bloke that stitched up this finger of mine in 1942. He wasn't a doctor, he didn’t have sophisticated material, saving what to do with terrible burns. So doctors, army doctors or navy doctors I’m not quite sure which, they were put on ML-814 with medicines and

15:00 materials to treat these things. We went flat out and we met them a day later up off the Arnhem Land coast. Went along side the corvette, transferred the doctors over and came back.

You came back with the corvette or you just came back anyway?

I think we came back faster, because we were faster than the corvette.

While you were on 814 was there any other interesting stories?

There was a terrible story of a raid by Beaufighters on the Aru Islands.

15:30 Somewhere up in the Aru Islands the Japanese were building new airstrips, so it was decided that Vultee Vengeance dive bombers, Australian manned, would do a raid on this island. The Aru, the Kai and the Tanimbar, and the Aru Islands are a couple of hundred miles north of – it’s all Indonesia now, you probably know where it is.

16:00 So it was arranged that some of our dive bomber people flying Vultee Vengeance aircraft, and some Beaufighters, take off early in the morning and they'd attack these Japanese airstrips and beat it up, because the Japanese were getting very bold and they were causing

16:30 us severe losses like the Macumber. So once again, another dramatic thing, captain called ashore, jeeps rushing them down. “What a job they’ve got for us.” We had to leave – this is 814, on its own – we had to leave a day before and we had to go right up, right into Japanese waters, all on our own,

17:00 nobody with us, just completely on our own. Then we had to sit like a sitting duck just over the horizon from the Japanese place they were going to attack, in case that any of our aeroplanes that were going to attack them tomorrow morning got shot down, we’d pick them up. Eighteen of us, one of them in an aeroplane. There was two Australians, we were all pals then anyhow, it was part of the job. So we left

17:30 early, the day before. We got up there biting our fingernails, dreadfully beautiful clear weather, unlimited visibility, deep in Japanese waters. None of our planes around, their planes patrolled all that area. Just hoping to hope that they wouldn’t appear in the sky because it would be the Japanese and that would be the end of us. About nine o'clock the next morning black dots in the sky,

18:00 butterflies in the stomach, apprehension, and there they are. But they're coming from the south, we looked at them, they were our planes on the way to attack the Japanese. We watched them go over, all our friends up there, all young men, some of them soon to die, going over. They went over the horizon to the north.

18:30 We sat there and sat there dreading that the buzzer would go and it would be Darwin and say, “Go in” off this point or look for a fella in the water. Anyhow, at about eleven o'clock, ‘Buzz, buzz, buzz’ our call code number. In code from Darwin on the radio. What is it? “Operation concluded, return to port.” No one was shot down, everything

19:00 was marvellous, so at full speed back to Darwin, still far from being out of trouble – a roving reconnaissance plane picked up us, we could have had all their planes out. Anyhow, we’re heading back towards Darwin, everything’s going alright, every turn of the screw takes us a bit closer, and every bit we get south we’re safer. It must have been two

19:30 o'clock in the afternoon, I’m on watch, I’m sitting there with a hat on, shorts, no shirt, a pair of binoculars idly scanning the sea and sky. Suddenly looking through the binoculars my stomach turned over, that awful frightened feeling I always get when imminent death seemed close, or great danger suddenly confronts you.

20:00 Two miles astern was a periscope, it was cutting through the water leaving a big plume of water behind it. I pressed the alarm button and everybody climbed on deck, captain, Chips, all the sailors. “Look! A submarine” I said. And as we all looked in amazement, it rose out of the sea, a great big black conning tower

20:30 with water cascading off it and it turned on its engines. Now on the surface, the Japanese I-Class submarine can do twenty two, twenty three, twenty four knots. On the surface we could do eighteen. It had seen us and we had seen it, and then it put on its diesel things, cut off its electric motors, smoke poured out from the side of it and a great big

21:00 bow wave started and it came charging after us. Much faster – Reg rang down for eighteen hundred revs, Jock Livingston was the chief mechanic. He pushed the throttles of the Fairmile forward and we got twenty three hundred revs and we were tearing along, bouncing over the waves with the bow wave out to the stern. This thing came closer and closer, and Jock

21:30 Livingston then came up onto deck – he was an engineer and he said, “Sir?” to Reg. “If you don’t reduce revs the engines are going to blow their tops. I cannot maintain this dreadful number of revolutions without them blowing a gasket, we’re done. I can't keep it up for more than another five minutes.” So Reg – we’re all scared, terrified now -

22:00 we had decided that this Japanese submarine had seen us, we were a small patrol boat, we weren't worth a torpedo. It had a great black gun on the bow, on the foredeck and that gun was pointing straight at us. We had a thing like this, we had a little pot gun. We decided probably that we weren't even worth a shot, that they would probably just come along and ram us, turn us over and then shoot us all in the water and just leave us to the sharks. Whatever happened it was pretty desperate.

22:30 Livingston went back and slightly slacked off engines, we were probably doing seventeen knots. This thing was gaining on us at about five knots, closer and closer – sinister. Absolutely nothing, and then I had a bright idea. I used to have these mad bright ideas, I thought, ‘We’re done, what we should now do’ – and I suggested it to Reg and Chips.

23:00 I said, “We’re done, we can't do anything about it. Let us now set all our depth charges” – four tonnes of the them – enormous explosive power. “Set all of our depth charges to fifty feet” which explode almost as soon as they go over, “and when it’s nearly onto us, suddenly turn around a hundred and eighty degrees, charge into it, let all the depth charges go and we’ll all go up together.”

23:30 Deathly silence. Nobody thought it was a good idea, I thought it was a brilliant idea, very clever I thought. What did you have to lose? You wouldn’t be pulled aboard and tortured or beheaded or anything like this. So D’Arcy Kelly who was a signalman, were all our stomachs were all turning over, it was like an alligator was coming after you and your legs were

24:00 tied, and this alligator was catching up on you. So D’Arcy I think said, “Let’s challenge them.” He had a challenge with the Aldis lamp, and it was “Di da, da, di da, da, di da” or whatever it was. “W-h-a-t ship ‘dit, dit, dit,

24:30 dit, dit, dit da, da’” – I think, I’ve pretty well forgotten the Morse Code now, but it was, “What ship” – in English was the international challenge. So D’Arcy flashes, “What ship” to the conning tower. A light flashes, “USS Albacore” – it was an American submarine returning from sinking ships in the sea of Japan. It was also going back to Darwin to

25:00 get more torpedoes. It had seen us and then said, “Well, there's a Royal Australian Navy patrol boat” because they had a periscope and they’d seen the white ensign, “He’ll know the channel into Darwin, we’ll just follow them.” Oh, the relief. So Reg then said – oh, you’ve got no idea, when you think you're facing certain death, suddenly you're alive again. You just can't understand the

25:30 feeling of euphoria. So Reg said, we were all, sort of happy go lucky, said to D’Arcy Kelly, “Send him another signal, ‘Welcome to Darwin, the gateway to the north.’” Darwin was the gateway to the North for us, even though he happened to be coming out of Japan. So we sent him, “Welcome to Darwin, the gateway to the north.” Back came the flash, “Thanks,

26:00 but we have already been welcomed with bullets by your boys.” They had been coming back on the surface, the Beaufighters had been coming back from the raid and they’d gone down and beaten him up, you see. Because they didn’t know that it was an American submarine there, they could have killed anybody if they dropped a bomb, they could have dropped a bomb on it. So he submerged then to come in underwater, and then he spotted us. What a story, what did I tell you, it was pretty traumatic.

26:30 Absolutely.

Put yourself in my place, you're twenty, it gives you something to think about.

You spoke earlier of receiving a code, obviously while you were waiting there that you could return home. How did the code system actually operate?

You had a secret call sign, I can't remember what it was, it might have been ‘UVK’ in Morse, and then if you heard

27:00 that secret call sign, our telegraphist – and it was sophisticated wireless thing – got onto the Darwin frequency and they sent us a message in code. That code and the telegraphist, who we used to call Sparks – all naval telegraphist were called Sparks – the telegraphist had a code book and you

27:30 had the code changed every four hours in case it was captured by the enemy and they could send you false instructions, or lure you into dangerous situations. So then he decoded the letter, which just said, “Return to port” that was the plain language.

So the code came through the Morse Code system?

Yes, in Morse Code and when you put it out it meant

28:00 nothing, but when you got he code system and said, “For this read that”, and “For that and read this”, you had a plain English language code.

Excellent, before we move on to other boats, the crocodiles in Darwin, did they cause any problems for you?

They nearly finished me on one occasion. There were lots of crocodiles, these big saltwater crocodiles are predatory and powerful, and after

28:30 when your grandfather was up in Darwin and the Japs bombed Darwin, there were hundred of bodies floating around in Darwin Harbour. Although I wasn't there at that time, I spoke to people who were and there were lots of crocodiles around, big saltwater saurians. They said for days you could hear the crocodiles tearing at the bodies along the shore. But when it nearly got me –

29:00 you occasionally hear about some person in an outboard motor and a crocodile is attracted to the outboard motor and loses its teeth or take the propeller off. Crocodiles are enormously powerful and predatory and swift killers. One beautiful afternoon in Darwin, I got the dinghy over the side and just went for a row, and I was rowing along and I decided to just stop and drift. We had an hour off, the

29:30 ship was just over there, the water was clear and I was drifting, probably about four or five hundred yards from the ship, and I was reading a book. I was just reading this book and suddenly I had an uneasy feeling – you know sometimes you have a premonition, you can't base it on any fact. I turned around and there, about fifteen feet away

30:00 coming up on me steadily was an enormous salt water crocodile. It’s coming along behind me, the dinghy was only about four or five inches above the water. What would have happened if he’d gone up and gone chomp? Why was he coming up? Was he just curious? Had he smelt a feed? I don't know, but I don’t mind telling you I've never rowed faster in my life.

Did the sailors and the army fellas shoot

30:30 crocs, was there culling?

Oh yes, they shot them. We shot fish, we dynamited them, we threw mills bombs over the side to get fish. We used to swim from the ship despite the sharks and things in the water, but always when we swam from the ship there was a man on the bridge with a Tommy gun or a rifle, and if a shark or a crocodile showed up anywhere near us they'd fire at it. Everybody would swim back madly and climb up the Jacobs

31:00 ladder.

So you swam in Darwin Harbour as well?

Yeah, all the time from the ship.

Ok, after ML-814 you went to 823? What was the circumstance of changing then?

Well, I developed beri beri, I was losing the sight of my eye and I was losing my sense of balance. Colonel Lorimer Dods, who was a famous medico [later Sir Lorimer Dods], he was

31:30 at the Katherine hospital I think it at the AGH down. I was sent down by the naval doctor in Darwin down to Katherine to be diagnosed, and he did tests on me. He looked at my tongue and my teeth and my eyes, stuck needles into my leg and said, “Look away” so I looked away. He said, “Can you feel that?” and I said, “Ouch!” and he said, “Alright, can you feel that?” “Ouch!”

32:00 as soon as he touched me with a needle. Then he said, “Can you feel that?” and I said, “No.” He said, “Have a look.” I looked around and he had a needle about an inch and a half into the calf of my leg and I couldn’t feel it. Loss of sensory reactions can be, I was told – and I’m not a doctor, and anybody who looks at this might say this old man’s lost the plot – can be the beginning of vitamin B

32:30 deficiency leading to beriberi. Because we’d had very poor food, no milk, no butter, no fruit for months. We were suffering from skin diseases, tinea and in and out of Darwin hospital, no showers. So I was sent down, flown to Sydney. I was put into Canonbury Naval Hospital at Darling Point. I was given a bottle of stout to

33:00 drink a day, which I hated, absolutely hated but was supposed to be full of vitamin B, and injections of a thing called Betamin into my backside. I weighed seven and a half stone, a bit over seven stone – I’m now eleven. After a few weeks there I was fit again, but I was prohibited from going back into the tropics for six months. So I was appointed

33:30 first lieutenant officer of ML-823 and she was based on the east coast of Australia doing convoy work, anti-submarine work, patrol work, intercepting ships, questing ships. We worked from Coffs Harbour [NSW] down to Smokey Cape and up to Danger Point, and backwards and forwards up and down that coast through the winter of ’44. Bad gales, they were very interesting, I enjoyed it. Coffs Harbour was a sleepy little hollow and there was a

34:00 wharf that went out, and we lay the buoy inside there when we weren't on patrol. If the navy wanted to send us a telegram, they sent a telegram to the post office. The postman walked along the jetty and hollered out, and one of the sailors went in a rowing boat and went over and got it and came back. No wonder the Jap's didn’t win the war, you know – the technology there, the Coffs Harbour postmaster coming along the wharf and saying, “Hey you beggars, are you going to send a boat?”

34:30 And we send a boat and here are our instructions to go out and look for a submarine. (UNCLEAR)

You were aboard this 823 in September ’44, did you realise that the war was coming to an end, or at what stage did you think the war was at?

Well it wasn't coming to an end, the Germans didn’t capitulate until May ’45. This was midwinter ’44,

35:00 this was over twelve months. The Japanese were fanatics and they didn’t care about losing people, they could lose millions. The Germans, Hitler was a fanatic, they were working on rockets and things that they were going to destroy England with. Thousands of rockets, they were trying to work on heavy water or whatever it was, people were working to try and split the atom. There was a race for the destruction of the other persons advance

35:30 of technology. We didn’t feel the war was over. The war we were thought might have gone on until 1947.

Your role on board 823?

First lieutenant, the same sort of thing I did, but I had more responsibility there.

Can you talk us through some of the responsibilities that you had?

36:00 Well when you went on patrol you had to prepare your patrol, you had to challenge ships. If you see a mast come up over the horizon and you get closer and closer to it, you wouldn’t know what it was, and when you get close enough you'd start flashing it up, saying, “What ship, what ship, what ship?” and they all had signals on board and they'd write back.

36:30 You had to arrange all these things, and on one occasion we flashed up a ship, and we said, “What ship, what ship, what ship?” and it said back, “VSIS Merca” – Victualing Issue and Supply Ship Merca. It was carrying food and stores to our soldiers in New Guinea.

37:00 My mother had written and said, “Do you know that your younger brother John had just been sent to be a supply assistant on the Merca?” Now I’m first lieutenant on this ship, and I can do what I like on my watch, so I rang down for high speed on the engines, and 823, you’ve taken a photo of her. The black band around her funnel means she was a flotilla leader, and we sped

37:30 towards the Merca. I came closer and closer and I said, “Is supply assistant John Hordern there?” We were right out on the Pacific, we were two lonely ships at war, at sea. Back comes the signal, “Yes.” We come closer and closer and I brought the ship right in.

38:00 I said, “It’s his brother, I’m his brother sub-lieutenant M. Hordern here, I’d like to wave to him.” All this on Morse Code. The signalman was very good, he was flashing straight back, and when I said sub- lieutenant M. Hordern, back came a signal, “Tony, this is D’Arcy Kelly.”

38:30 And D’Arcy Kelly was the signalman from the 814 had been to Timor with us, who had suggested that we challenge that thing. D’Arcy Kelly, unknown to me had been sent from Darwin, he got sick or something, and he got drafted as a signalman to the Merca. So here was my brother and one of my really close lovely friends, a wonderful sailor D’Arcy – he later became a doctor and he won about two or three

39:00 civil awards for bravery in Cyclone Tracy [Darwin, 1974] and other things. Dear D’Arcy had gone to his rest now, he used to come and stay here, wonderful family, they lived in Brisbane. So D’Arcy and my brother John came out and stood on the deck of the Merca and was right behind us, and through megaphones, these things that amplify your voice, we chatted to each other, talked about life and then it was my duty to get back onto patrol. So we gave a wave

39:30 and I said, “Starboard ten” and the Fairmile turned away with a bow wave creaming from its bow. We disappeared south on our anti-submarine patrol while John and D’Arcy and the Merca, stacked full of war materials went on to succour our men in New Guinea. The meeting of two brothers on the sea, the lonely sea, quite poignant really. I wrote it up.

Tape 9

00:54 We’ll just go back to that question about operating in general on the Fairmiles. You always

01:00 worked out of a home base, or would you resupply from ships, or how would that work?

We never resupplied from ships, we worked out from Darwin or the ones in New Guinea, Madang or Milne Bay or Wewak. Or if they were on the east coast of Australia Cairns, Sydney, Twofold Bay. In Western Australia it was Fremantle.

Alright then, moving on to the 823 based at Coffs Harbour,

01:30 where were you posted to after that?

Then I came back and the six months were up from my prohibition from tropical service, and I wanted to get back into the fighting. I knew that if I could survive this, it was going to be a great adventure, horrible, but

02:00 I knew it was there and there was still fighting to do. So I pestered Lieutenant Commander Peter Anthill – lovely man, and he was the officer at HMAS Rushcutter and they control the movements of Fairmile personnel. I pestered Peter to send me to a Fairmile in New Guinea. After the six months were up I was appointed first lieutenant

02:30 of ML-817 in New Guinea. I went in a train to Brisbane, no sleeper this time, I slept in a luggage rack, crowded troop train, some of the people drunk. From Brisbane I flew in an American Douglas twin engine aircraft that took of at

03:00 four o'clock in the morning for New Guinea. About an hour out the starboard engine burst into fire, it shut down. I thought, ‘This is the end.’ One engine out over the sea and the pilot did a very, very low turn. We got back and landed at Archerfield Airport about five o'clock in the morning. Five thirty in the morning I was on my way back to New Guinea in another aeroplane.

03:30 We got there, I joined ML-817, commanded by Captain John Doyle. I was relieving Frank Horner who later became Doctor Frank Horner – he remained a lifelong friend of mine, he’s still alive in Canberra. He became a statistician with the public service in Canberra. 04:00 I took over from his as first lieutenant and shortly after that 817, which was in very bad condition – it had months and months of tropical ware and it had been knocked about. It was recalled to Sydney for a refit, so we sailed down through China Strait, out of Milne Bay across the Coral Sea to Townsville all the way down to Sydney. I was left on board to get rid of all the guns

04:30 and things, and ML-817 went to Poole and Steel’s Dockyard at Balmain, or somewhere close to Balmain for a complete refit, which was going to take three months. Then, the penny dropped just before Christmas, promotions came through and Sub-Lieutenant Hordern had been promoted to Lieutenant Hordern. There was a dark cloud in the sky,

05:00 and that dark cloud was lieutenants commanded patrol boats generally, not sub-lieutenants. The next thing, which seemed almost impossible to me, was that I might get appointed to command a ship, and I was irresponsible, I did not want to command a ship, because the first lieutenant could sleep at night where the captain worried. It wasn't my responsibility

05:30 what happened, I just did not want responsibility , I just wanted life to be free and easy. You have to take responsibility if you have to say who comes off in a boat in a thing, but that’s momentary responsibility. I didn’t want permanent responsibility for men’s lives and ships and operations and making decisions. My fears were realised. Just before Christmas, 1944

06:00 a naval appointment came through appointing Lieutenant MC Hordern, commanding officer of ML- 1347. It’s picture is out in the library there, it’s an oil painting painted by one of the sailors. I was a smart Alec, I was a sea lawyer, and I just didn’t want to do this. So I talked it over with a couple of other smart Alecs and sea lawyers, and one of them said

06:30 to me, “Tony, you don’t have to take command of a ship if you don’t want to.” I said, “Why?” He said, “There’s a thing called KR and AI, that’s the navy’s bible.” That’s a great big fat tome of King’s Rules and Admiralty Instructions, and there it’s down it said what is to happen in every circumstance you could possible imagine. Running a ship ashore

07:00 to having a madman on the mess deck. He said, “I think there's a provision, number one thousand and fifty two or two hundred and ninety, where it says, ‘If an officer is appointed by the admiralty to take command of a ship and he knows any reason why he is not fit to take command of that ship, it is his duty to

07:30 represent it to the senior officer.’” Duty. Commander Newcombe was the captain in charge of all this. I decided to go and see Commander Newcombe and refuse to accept command on the grounds that I was incompetent, unreliable, feckless and irresponsible, and in no way fit to

08:00 command one of His Majesty’s ships to sea and at war. I put in a request to see Commander Newcomb – World War 1 man, gold oak leaf, Royal Navy, straight stripe, august and powerful. I was perhaps cheeky I suppose – some people might have been frightened but I thought, ‘I’ll be nice to him, I don't know what he’s going to say to me, but here’s the decision I can make.’

08:30 So I put in a request to see him and the request came back from his secretary saying that the commander would see me ten o'clock Tuesday morning. It was down in Rushcutter’s Bay, he had an office up creeky stairs up near the old drill hall, which is now a heritage item at Rushcutter’s Bay. Knocked on the door, “Come in.” I walked in and there was the commander sitting with his gold cap on his desk,

09:00 World War 1 ribbons and looking at me. He said, “Hordern, why have you come to see me?” I said, “Well, Sir, as you know I have been appointed to command His Majesty’s Motor Launch – 1347. He said, “Yes, I recommended you.” I said, “Well, Sir, I have come to refuse to accept command.”

09:30 “Really? Sit down, Hordern.” I sat down, he said, “How old are you?” I said, “Twenty three.” He said, “What do you hope to achieve in life, provided we win the war and we survive?” “I don't know, I haven't thought much about it.” He said, “Hordern,

10:00 we” – these were his exact words – “We are but servants of the State, it is not ours to question orders. I am not going to make a decision about this today, nor should you. You are at a crossroads in your life. If you refuse to

10:30 accept this command, this responsibility, you’ll go on all your life running away from challenges, and you will be a very second rate person. Come and see me tomorrow.” “Thankyou, Sir.” Suddenly, Commander Newcombe, this fearsome figure, instead of being and august authoritarian officer, had taken the role

11:00 of a kindly uncle, a gentle wise, compassionate man giving a silly, young beggar a push, sparking him to think. I walked down the stairs, walked out through the drill hall and sat on the stone sea wall of Rushcutter’s Navy Depot, overlooking the harbour where all those yachts are now. Newcombe was right, I was twenty three, I had

11:30 to grow up. I had to realise that if I was going to run away from this, what kind of things when I came to other major decisions if we did win the war, if I did survive the war, and I would be ashamed of myself. I went back up the stairs, they creaked again, I knocked on the door. “Come in.” There he was, I said, “Sir” he said, “Yes, Hordern?”

12:00 I said, “Thankyou, Sir, for giving me a push along life’s road. I accept the command.” He gave me a lovely warm smile, shook my hand and said, “Thankyou, my boy. You have my complete confidence.” But as an old man, he died about ten years ago, and when I was over seventy we met again. He reminded me of this and he said, “There were lots of young fellas like you

12:30 who wanted to run away from things. Had to give them a bit of a push now and then.” What that man did for me.

So you were given command of a patrol, an American style patrol boat?

Yes.

Can you explain how that differed from the Fairmile?

It was seventy two feet long, it had diesel engines instead of petrol engines. It had different guns, and glory of glory, it had a little fresh water shower,

13:00 where you could actually get fresh water run over your stinking, sweaty body in the tropics. You could rub soap under your armpits and wash it off with fresh water, dust yourself down with Johnson’s baby power, and felt like you’d walked out of a beauty parlour.

What was the compliment of crew?

About twelve. Two officers – one officer, Cliff Wilkinson was my first lieutenant and we were together for a year without a cross word. Only two officers couped up in a tiny

13:30 small wardroom, eating, sleeping, exchanging thoughts, hearing snores, et cetera.

Where were the other ten men accommodated?

Up forehead in the mess decks in accommodation which was something like Fairmiles.

After it was fitted out in Garden Island, which you’ve spoken a little about before, you sailed where and what were your orders?

Well we were ordered to Madang first so we sailed in company with

14:00 another couple of MLs, right up the whole of the east coast of Australia to Torres Strait, to Thursday Island, across the Gulf of Papua to Port Moresby, inside the reef on my own with a native pilot from Port Moresby round east to East Cape and China, straight into Milne Bay. From Milne Bay out

14:30 up to Madang and then to Wewak where the fighting was still going on, the guns were going in the hills, and to Hollandia. But on the way to Madang we very, very nearly all died in what was probably the closest shave of my life.

What happened there?

I had

15:00 to get to a place called Tufi and there were lights or leads at Tufi, and you had to go through reefs, and I wanted to get there in daylight because it was a dangerous place. So after I got out of Milne Bay I was in complete control of all this, I made all the plans, I was responsible for the failure or success of the operation, and the peoples’ lives. I anchored off a village called Ibulai -

15:30 I think it’s I-b-u-l-a-i. We went ashore there, played with the natives, got coconuts for them, swam with the kids in the water. I left Ibulai, it was a very dramatic coast, Mount Trafalgar dominates the coast of New Guinea, and Goodenough Island, the Peak Nimodao, a 7,700 foot peak of a volcano just was etched against the sky.

16:00 We had to go up through Goodenough Bay, which is a big wide bay, and we were going to go up there at night. I was going to run through Goodenough Bay at night, and then at dawn we would come to this place and it would be daylight. Cliff Wilkinson and I worked four hours on and four hours off at sea – this means that you never get more than three and a half hours sleep, ever, because you're woken

16:30 up ten minutes or a quarter of an hour before you go on watch, and you don’t go to sleep immediately you go off. For days we’d be running, three and a half hours was the maximum amount of sleep we’d had continuous, and we were worn out, but everybody was worn out. We were on passage, I had the middle watch – middle watch is from eight to midnight. I had heard some

17:00 nasty stories about the enterprising Japanese aviators on New Britain, they had Rabaul and some powerful forces there, and forces in New Britain which were just on our starboard hand. Some of these had been going out at night, and they’d be flying along and they’d be looking down and they’d see the phosphorus of the propellers, the sea has a highly phosphorescent light.

17:30 We all were blacked out, we had no navigation lights or anything. They would see the phosphorus of the ship and they’d fly down and the ship would hear them because of its engines, and they’d come right down low and ‘buh, buh, buh, buh’, just get them all. So I was worried about aeroplanes at night, so we were blacked out. At about a quarter to eleven

18:00 I began to feel extremely drowsy, I was nodding off, I was watching the helmsman on the wheel turning the spokes of the wheel, and the light glow from the binnacle shone on his face and that was the only light. I was very tired, I’d tried all the things that you generally do – pinching and face slapping and stamping up and down. But they must have failed because I nodded off standing up, and my head fell forward

18:30 and I woke up and I was standing up. I had about five minutes to go before I did the eleven o'clock entry in the log, how far we’d run, what our course was, what our speed was. So I thought I’d spend the next five minutes looking at the stars and constellations. So I began looking at the brilliant sky, and we were just lightly rolling and we were going along at about thirteen knots. Suddenly over there, there’s a strange planet with a strange light in the sky.

19:00 I knew a bit about the stars, I loved my astronomical navigation, I knew about the constellations, I knew what planets. I looked at it, it looked like a planet but it shouldn’t have been there, there was no planet. Planets gleam with a steady light, stars have a sparkle, they are burning fires. Planets just reflect the sun’s light. I began

19:30 worrying about it and looking at it, and suddenly I noticed that it began to move against the fixed stars. As I looked at it, it began to move faster and faster, and then I looked and then I had this dreadful feeling in my stomach again – when I first saw that submarine, and it always happened to me in great danger. I looked and to my horror I saw way

20:00 out there was a glaring red light, way out here was a glaring green light, and up above was this white light moving rapidly across the fixed stars. My heart nearly froze, it was an enormous ship with it’s navigation lights, that was the red one,

20:30 that was the green one, the planet I’d been looking at was its mast head steaming light which you can only see from ahead. It was rushing towards me at probably about twenty knots, I was doing twelve, we were coming together at thirty five miles an hour. Above me, no further away from that gate rose its enormous steel cutwater,

21:00 it probably could have been about twenty thousand tonnes, we were sixty tonnes of wood. A huge bow wave plumed from each side of its bow, and we were seconds from disaster. It would have just cut straight through us like a hot knife through butter, all bits and pieces – it probably wouldn’t have even known that it hit us. We’d all be left, if we weren't killed. I can

21:30 still see the coxswain’s shocked face, no time to say, “Hard to starboard” I grabbed the wheel and I spun the wheel, hard to starboard. We were going fast. Before in front of these great big ships there's a mound of displaced water, not just the cut water that moves, and this great big serge actually picked up bodily, and as I turned it just pushed us

22:00 about ten feet that side, and this huge wall of steel flashed down and disappeared into the night. I just felt so weak, I went down and I wrote it in the book, “Passed a ship, very close, nearly rammed.” I’ve still got the log entry of that. At that moment, because of my negligence, because I’d been tired, because I wasn't watchful – we had no radar.

22:30 In these days you’d pick that ship up miles away. I nearly killed every person on that ship, and I still remember all those young men might have died. Lots of them have had rich lives, I hope. But that was an experience.

Is it lonely in command of a ship?

The loneliness of command is something that you cannot contemplate. There is no-one to whom you can appeal except God,

23:00 or your intelligence. You are absolutely on your own because ultimately you have to make the decision of life or death, and every person expects you to, and is not there unless you are mad or crazy or demented when people take over – as has happened many times in mutinies and things like that. But the loneliness of command is something very difficult, and I have written about that in “Mariners are Warned”,

23:30 about Captain Wickham and experiencing the loneliness of command, pacing the deck on the HMAS Beagle up the Kimberley Coast.

Was it something you had to develop a style for, or a way of doing? How did you approach it?

I never developed a style, I jumped from crisis to crisis.

I assume that there were other crises of sorts on ship?

There were but we could talk about it for six hours.

24:00 Where were you when the fighting stopped in New Guinea? I was in Hollandia carrying out anti-submarine patrols for the big American port because the American had been expecting Japanese suicide midget submarine. The Japanese had an enormous number of midget submarines, they still had one or two submarine that could carry them down with another couple of other small Australian ships, and two American SCs,

24:30 which were called Sub Chasers, which were bigger than us and steel. We maintained a constant patrol up and down outside Hollandia, until the war’s end.

At this point, I think Rob asked you before, could you sense the end of the war. Did it still seem a long way off at that time?

As the commanding officer of one of His Majesty’s Australian ships, I received confidential briefing,

25:00 and probably about June or July these things used to come in, in confidential packets. I sat down and read them and there was a very, very appalling and sombre prognosis of the war about June. The Germans had packed up and it said that His Majesty’s forces have got to realise that, “These are completely fanatic. The Kamikaze attacks prove this,

25:30 the Japanese do not consider life, they are expected to defend their homeland fanatically. It is expected that we will not subdue Japan until we actually land on our home land and beat them.” All around Japan were hundreds and hundreds of motor boats with

26:00 depth charges in the front of them and one man, suicide boats. As the fleet and all of us were possible going to be involved in this, came in there and all these fellas wanted to do is get one their boats along side one of ours and blow it up, and themselves too. If you got ashore, apart from the fanatical military people, there were dedicated Japanese with sharpened bamboo stakes – this is what was all said. It was expected that the war could

26:30 go on until 1947. It was 1945, that was a long way ahead. I’d been in it since ’40, in the services since ’40, that’s seven years of your life. It could go on till1947, and could cost one million Allied casualties. Now I didn’t care about the Japanese casualties, you could forget about them. But Mrs. Hordern’s little boy, Marsden,

27:00 was more important to him than all the Japanese.

Obviously the Japanese were getting a little desperate in their tactics at this stage.

Well as soon as the Kamikaze, the “divine wind” came in, they did it because they have this fanaticism which Westerners don’t seem to have. Oriental seem capable of – it’s a difficult culture. The writer Rudyard Kipling said, “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.”

27:30 But they do meet, with different ideas.

How did you greet the news of the atomic bomb, when that came through to you?

We were poised perhaps to have to go up there and suppose – we were a little ship. I thanked God for the atomic bomb, it meant that I was going to live. It meant that hundreds of us were going to live, don’t worry about the Japanese. They’d started this thing, they’d stormed out on the

28:00 7th of December, ’41, killing and murdering and burning and raping, and smashing. And we – I should have been a lawyer by now, getting money for being a barrister. Yet I was up there, I should have been sailing boats, taking girls out, perhaps getting married and having a family, with my mum and dad down here. John Small, Guy Roberts were dead, my cousin Peter Hordern – amiable cousin, was the first Knox old boy to die for his country in battle.

28:30 His name’s on the war memorial at Knox. So many of my friends were dead or maimed because those of us that left in 1939 went straight to war in an unprepared society, and out casualties were heavier. I had now survived until 1945, suddenly this jubilant American voice comes over the radio, “A bomb of enormous power, no bigger than a parcel” it said, actually it was quite a big thing, “Has been dropped

29:00 on the city of Hiroshima. It is equal to all the bombs that have been dropped on Germany in the last five years. It can pulverise steel metal.” I thought, ‘Good, I hope they’ve got five more of them.’ The more they get of them the better. People who now, with hindsight being safe sitting beside their suburban fires, say what a dreadful thing it was of the

29:30 Americans to have dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, should have been there. It’s all very well for them to have the wisdom of removal from violence – you can preach a lot but it’s pretty different when you're in it. And, the irony of it is that I think that the atomic bomb was devised by Jews who had fled from Hitler’s

30:00 regime and were Germans. There’s a great irony in all this, what would you have done? Would you have said, “What a cruel thing to kill Japanese and make it easier for us to win the war”?

The Japanese surrender followed shortly after that.

Yes, some days after. Russia then came into the war, Russia was in the war to get her pound of flesh [The USSR had been in the war since June 1941] . It had been agreed at the Yalta Conference [held Yalta, Ukraine in February 1945 between Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin] that Russia would come into the war,

30:30 and the Japanese surrendered in the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on the 2nd of September 1945. But the Japanese garrisons in Bougainville and Wewak and the Sepik River, and remote places were still full of well armed men who’d gone to die for their Emperor and didn’t mind still doing it.

Given that you were still in a dangerous place and the

31:00 was had taken a great toll on you, what sort of celebrations or contemplation – what did the end of the war …

I was asked to write a story on this some years ago, ‘Where were you on VP [Victory in the Pacific] Day?’ We were in Hollandia, just below the equator, this jubilant voice came over, “We’ve won!” Then Hollandia was full of ships, fifty or sixty ships there. A big American base, thousands of American troops all around the place,

31:30 guns everywhere, stores. A few Australians, and I was one of the very few Australians, it was a very interesting place to be – now I look back on it in history. That night a most amazing scene happened. As soon as it fell dark all along the water front and from ships in the harbour, gunfire erupted. Star shells,

32:00 exploding shells, rockets, veary lights. We were tuned into the American radio at Hollandia, the “Star Spangled Banner”, “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli” the Marines’ battle song, “Fight our country’s battles in the land by the sea”. It was the most amazing thing. The night

32:30 was absolutely loud with wild celebrations, and during these celebrations we were told the next morning, two or three young Americans were killed by exploding shells and bits of shells coming down and hitting them on the head – died in the moment of victory and never saw their mums and dads again. Anyhow, we joined in the general jubilations, firing rockets from

33:00 ML-1347, honking the ship’s horn. I made a beer issue to the crew and when they came and said, “Can I have more?” I doubled it, because I had the power to make a beer issue and celebrate. Sitting up there, I was just like them, all talking and drinking beer, and saying, “Oh, we’re going home to our girlfriends and out mothers and fathers” – some of them hadn't seen them for years.

33:30 Suddenly, with all this gunfire going on, there was this huge splash, and an unexploded American shell that had been fired up, dropped into the water about two feet away from us, and suddenly I thought, ‘I’m captain of this ship, I have the responsibility’ – here am I joining in the most foolish thing. We’re still thousands of miles from home,

34:00 we’ve got a dangerous navigation, we’re not expert navigators, we’ve got all the dangers of the sea and reefs and tides to get us home. I ordered all the men below, I went down below myself and I put my tin hat on, my steel helmet on – it’s out there and now it’s got a dent in it. I put my steel helmet on and I sat on my bunk and read a book until I went asleep.

34:30 That’s how we celebrated VP Day, VJ [Victory over Japan] Day.

After that you still had some work to do up at the Sepik River rounding up Japanese?

Then it became a business of soldiering on, because Australia was responsible for the surrender of all these Japanese. We were told that members of the Japanese and some of the Islanders couldn’t believe that the Emperor had capitulated, because he was God and he had sent them to war.

35:00 How does God suddenly say, “I didn’t want to write the first Book of Genesis, I’ll tear it up and write something else.”? So the Japanese King Emperor, divine, had been manipulated by his military people like [General Hideki] Tojo and the others, to go to war. Now, had to tell them to make peace. But all those hundreds of thousands of young Japanese soldiers, a lot of them simple, not well-educated peasants,

35:30 some of them militarists, they had gone to war to fight for their God, their King Emperor, the divine Mikado. They were up the Sepik River with swords and knives and guns, and motorised barges and tank guns. Who’s going to tell them to stop fighting? So we received signals all the time and

36:00 members of the Japanese Royal family were to be flown in Japanese aircraft with Japanese markings on it, to certain island outposts to see the commanders and say that, “I am Prince Whatever, it’s over.” I’ve still got out there, the communication I received from the navy, “It’s a dangerous situation,

36:30 although everybody says the war’s over, it’s not. These aircraft are going to various places in the South Pacific baring members of the Royal family, or influential Japanese people, to show their presence and say it’s over. They will each be flying streamers from their tail planes, so many meters long to identify them. Don’t shoot them down

37:00 unless they show obvious hostile intent.” We were all still armed and I was going to shoot down any Japanese aeroplane that came near me, because they'd been Kamikaze’d, our fellas, all the time. But none came, I probably would have missed anyhow. What was your plan for communicating to the Japanese in your area at the end of the war?

Well I didn’t have to, I was working with the army under General Robertson, the 6th Division at Wewak [Lieutenant General H.C.H. Robertson]. I remained there as naval suppose, myself and

37:30 one other small patrol boat exactly the same size as I – the 1356 I think its number was, I was 1347. We worked for the army, we went and got fruit from the islands for the hospital at Wewak, we patrolled Muschu Island on which there were twenty thousand Japanese prisoners there, and some of them were trying to escape and get back on logs to the island and escape and get away into the mountains. Some of them

38:00 you had to patrol around, and stop any of them. A man called Monk, Lieutenant Monk, took a very, very dangerous patrol up the Sepik River and he found, sixty or seventy miles up the Sepik River at a place called Angoram, he found twelve pathetic scarecrows,

38:30 Indian soldiers who had been captured. They were British – the Indians were part of the Empire – they’d been captured at Singapore and about three thousand of them had refused to fight in the Japanese- Indian army against the King, because they'd taken an oath. One of them, whose name was Jemada [junior lieutenant] Chint Singh, whose photograph is there

39:00 on the library wall, he was one of the two or three thousand who were shipped to New Guinea as slave labour by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore. They were beaten, they were murdered, they were tortured, they were starved to death, they were eaten by the Japanese, and a very few scarecrows were still

39:30 found by Monk. I went up and got them, and Chint Singh and his men came back on my ship, well Chint Singh and his other officers and we were towing barges. But that is a story that I have fully written up in this manuscript, and to try to tell you a bit of the horror of it. But that Japanese sword that is hanging above the fireplace in the library came from one of the arrogant Japanese officers we

40:00 encountered up the Sepik River.

Tape 10

00:45 Could you go into the subject of the role of disarming the Japanese and what you did during that time?

Well, the first expedition that I undertook

01:00 up the Sepik River the Japanese had mined the entrance to the Sepik River and a man called Keith Inglett – a lovely man – he was captain of ML-1342. He was there before I went up, he had gone up to bring out some sick, not the Indians at this stage, and as he was leading barges into the

01:30 Sepik River, some of the Japanese mines exploded under one of the barges in the muddy water, and wrecked it but it didn’t sink it. They had to tow the barges up, so then I was sent up with four barges and another ML and our job was to go to Marienberg first, which had been a German mission up the Sepik River, and find out where the Indians were. Were the

02:00 Indians still alive? They’d been by this patrol who couldn’t help them or give them any food because it was a patrol of one or two white men and four or five native things. He had gone through to tell the Japanese that the war was over. So I went and we got to Marienberg and there were some army barges that we would take, and some of these army barges had Papuan native police, they looked like boy’s own paper Fuzzy Wuzzies

02:30 with bandoliers, it was quite romantic in a way, to look at it. This stinking great river, with crocodiles in it, and palm trees and sago swamps. Mysterious, it goes for eight hundred miles into the heart of New Guinea, and there were we plugging up it. Floating islands coming down and huge logs that one of these floating islands which was part of a bank washed away, as big as a tennis court, if it got around your bows you were done. Well we got to

03:00 Marienberg and there were two or three army officers, Peterson was one of them, and man called Peterson, and they spoke Pidgin English pretty well. The Japanese spoke Pidgin English because they’d been in New Guinea for about two or three years, and there were also some people in the army that were Japanese interpreters. So an army sergeant, and I’ve a photograph of him involved in this thing,

03:30 he went ashore to try and find out if the Indians were still alive and where they were. He had with him two soldiers, and I was with him, all fully armed and all our guns loaded. The Japanese were there and they were fully armed, there must have been three hundred, four hundred of them, five hundred of them. If they had wanted to, although it was highly unlikely,

04:00 and they had been suicidal, and they’d gone for us, what would happen? We still would have won the war but we might not be around, so it was a bit delicate. There was no question, we thought, that they would back us, because they’d been told the war was over, but they still had swords, knives, revolvers, rifles, guns and bayonets, and there were a hell of a lot more of them than of us – although to me it was unthinkable

04:30 that they would now do that, but you don’t know what goes on in the Oriental mind, certainly I didn’t – or anybody’s mind. So this was a very dramatic incident. The sergeant was a big, strong man, much bigger than me, and we walked ashore and Japanese soldiers were walking around. There was equipment all over the place, generators and things like that.

05:00 The Japanese soldiers just walked past and pretended not to notice us, they were all on edge too, they didn’t know what was happening. The sergeant shouted out at them, “Come here.” A soldier came up and sort of bowed, sort of, “Ah so”, so they knew that they weren't going to attack us, but it was still nasty. He said through the interpreter, “Go and get your commanding officer and bring him here.”

05:30 He went away and after about five minutes, a very arrogant, haughty Japanese officer with stars on his collars and on his peak, full uniform, wearing his sword, not disarmed. Who has the power – if a man has a sword and he wants to do something? You would have thought that after they had been told that they

06:00 were beaten and the Emperor had capitulated, they at least wouldn’t flaunt their swords, they’d leave them somewhere or other. This man came along and he looked at us with distain. I had a beard, I was scruffy and sallow, and had malaria. We were all sort of stinking in dirty clothes. He looked down at us and through the interpreter the sergeant said,

06:30 “Where are the Indians?” And this man said, “I don't know anything about any Indians.” The sergeant said, “Lieutenant Monk came through here a couple of weeks ago and he found some Indian prisoners which you had under your control.” And he said, “I don't know where the Indians are.”

07:00 Then it sort of possible that they might have killed them, all the Indians, because the Japanese had a policy at the end of the war that when they were going to be defeated that they kill all their prisoners, so their prisoners would not be able to give evidence against them in the War Crimes trials. So this man said, “I don't know where the Indians are.” The sergeant

07:30 had his gun and he turned to the interpreter and he said, “Tell him that if he doesn’t know where the Indians are, I’ll kill him now.” So, here’s an experience in life. How did I get into this sort of thing? Imagine seeing the

08:00 blood spurting out of his chest, gasping, choking. This was sort of a horror story. A strange look of enlightenment came over the Oriental face, and he said, “Ah, perhaps there are some Indians at Angoram.” Angoram’s way up the river. Night is coming on,

08:30 he said, “I will send one of our Japanese barges” – they had motorised barges that could do ten knots, diesel and everything. “I will send one of our barges up to get them.” I give the sergeant top marks, the man was probably a major or a colonel, he said to him, “You will do nothing, we are giving the orders here.” At first light – it’s now getting dark, to go up that river in the dark with the floating

09:00 islands coming down, you’d be lost. I wasn't going to navigate 1347 on that river at night, sand bank, crocodiles, everything. It was a highly dangerous situation. At first light we all took off and we went twenty miles up river to Angoram. We came along side and there drawn up on the bank were two officers and nine men, Indian soldiers. Their legs were like

09:30 scarecrow’s, their legs were covered with sores, and Jebedar Chint Singh later came to this house – after the war we made friends for twenty five years, I went back to see him in India – he died several years ago, cancer of the throat. A wonderful man, his son still comes and sees me here. Chint Singh drew those scarecrows up on the bank and he said,

10:00 “Three cheers for the King, Emperor of India and the rescuing Australians”, it brought tears to my eyes, and nearly weep when I think of it now. We had days in his company, we gradually brought them back to life. We let them have a bit of sugar, we introduced them to fresh water, and fixed their wounds. We brought them back and we made lifelong friends, we got them back. That’s only a fraction of the story

10:30 of the Indians. I went again up the Sepik River, much further up on another expedition, which was fascinating, but no time to talk about that – we’ve been talking for five hours, and I’m getting a bit hoarse.

Could you just finish off the side of the story for us in what happened to the Japanese officer?

Lieutenant General Adachi who commanded the Japanese 18th Army in the

11:00 Torricelli Mountains behind Wewak, eventually surrendered weeks after the declaration of war they capitulated. He was brought down – they had defence spaces and they could have stayed there for a long time – General H.C.H. Robertson [CO 6th Division] was, some said, an arrogant Australian officer,

11:30 I don't know, I had a difference of opinion with him but them I was a reserve lieutenant in the navy and he was a general in the army. Who am I to question the wisdom of a senior army officer? But what your role to transport the Japanese?

They came back in the barges you see. In the end, you asked about the surrender? General Adachi surrendered on Wom Airstrip, which is near Wewak and he was made by General Robertson – and we

12:00 all liked this – he was a little man, to walk right up the airstrip lined with six foot Australians, all the biggest Australians they could get, tough men who’d fought through there. General Adachi and his aide de camp had to walk right up that airstrip, take his sword off and lay it on the table. The table he laid it on was one of the Fairmiles that had fought in that

12:30 campaign, and they’d taken it out for that purpose. It’s now with my flag in the Australian War Memorial – I think it was ML-805, I’m not sure. And General Adachi laid his sword, he was then accused of war crime trials and he was not committed to be executed, but he was put into prison for so long.

13:00 Sorry, just aside from the history though, just your role?

Oh, my role, I was not there at the surrender. I was still in Hollandia when he actually surrendered, which was a few weeks after the end of the war. I had no part in the surrender of the Japanese at Wewak.

Did you have any part in transporting the Japanese?

Yes, we did. We escorted Australian Army barges full of Japanese prisoners,

13:30 some of them very sick and dying. We brought them right down that Sepik River, and then from the mouth of the Sepik River all the way up to Wewak. They were in appalling condition, the poor wretches, your heart went out to them. They were just simple soldiers, just like us – it could have been us. The terrible thing about it was, we were towing one of these Australian Army barges because it had broken down, and as we

14:00 came down the Sepik River in the hot, stinking, fetid atmosphere there, the wind blew from astern and the stink of those dead and dying and disease ridden Japanese blew from the barge – pity the poor Australian crew of that barge, the soldiers that were there – blew over ML-1347’s deck and nearly made us sick. Thank God once we got out of the

14:30 Sepik River and into the blue of the Bismarck Sea, we altered coarse and the wind blew away. So we took them back, they were all landed on Muschu Island, which became the prisoner island for Japan, the Japanese prisoners that were being brought in from the Sepik River and the Torricelli Mountains and Aitape, or wherever they were.

Last few questions, what were your first impressions when you came face to face with your enemy?

15:00 Complete distaste, almost anger that they had caused all this. Because looking backwards it’s humanity that causes it. There are just as many bad people of every race and clime. If you were a young man and your homeland is attacked, your mother and father and sisters are threatened, and your

15:30 King is threatened, and you’ve been brought up, you don’t suddenly say, “What decent people these wretched Germans or wretched Japanese are.” They are the horror people, they are the people that are trying to kill you. You didn’t have much time to think, ‘What lovely lads.’ So I just looked at them with distaste and distain and revulsion.

16:00 I suppose if I – and actually it wasn't very Christian of me, but I wasn't very charitable.

Can you give me an example of that?

Yes, a Japanese cruiser call the Kashima was – this is some weeks after

16:30 the capitulation – all her guns were removed, the bridge box of guns. She was sent down to Wewak to repatriate some of their soldiers back to Japan, these soldiers were on Muschu Island. I was still there and we had to go around Muschu Island. I was ordered to go alongside the cruiser Kashima, go aboard

17:00 and confront her captain and her officers, and give him his instructions to follow me to the anchorage. I went alone on that great ship, I went down into their wardroom and there was a beautiful woodcut of Mount Fujiyama. One of the things that the Japanese captain, was a balding man of about forty, his first lieutenant was an extremely

17:30 unlovely lieutenant commander. I had a black beard, green army clothes, a loaded revolver strapped to my belt and I was alone in this cruiser full of hundreds of Japanese, but the war was over and there was no chance that they were going to do anything bad to me. As I walked in he tinkled a little bell, and the Japanese

18:00 soldier came in with two little bowls of beautiful tea. We drank it in absolute silence. Through an interpreter I gave him his orders that he was to follow me here and what he was to do. All the time while I was talking to this captain, a man whose life was ruined, his navy was sunk, his career gone, and it had all been because 18:30 of people like me. I was looking at him and his first lieutenant who was sitting next to him, was staring with an almost baleful look straight into my eyes. I was trying to give him his instructions to the thing and trying to behave, and this man was trying to disconcert me. He obviously despised me, here was a

19:00 scruffy reserve lieutenant with wavy stripes and a beard and a gun telling him, professional Imperial Japanese Navy officer, what to do – how humiliating. This went on for a long time, we got it all over, the Japanese captain rang a little bell and back came in again two more bowls of tea. He was extremely courteous, and then we sat there

19:30 and I had an interpreter there. He was a Japanese that spoke with a very American accent, he’d been in American and got back to Japan. Spoke just as I’m speaking to you now, every idiom, every inflection, every innuendo of a voice or a conversation was understood. So I sat there and it was up to me to say that the interview was over.

20:00 Now I was young, but it flashed across my mind, here was a moment to show some charity to this man. How many of his friends were dead, his house was gone, Tokyo had been torched, Hiroshima was blown up. Through that interpreter I could have said, “Well, hasn’t it been a dreadful period of humankind? We’re all one really,

20:30 we’re all humans stumbling towards the light, stumbling on in the darkness. Awful things have happened, we are all part of the brotherhood of man.” And I was thinking about it even then, and I could not bring myself to say it. I failed that man, that is an example of my feeling towards the Japanese. I hope it answers your question.

Yes, thankyou. Three

21:00 more question and then we’ll finish. The first is, you made a few comments about Anzac Day before World War II when you were a boy, what does Anzac Day mean to you now?

It means to me almost a celebration of the stupidity and the utter waste and the horror and the loss and the sadness of war. As I

21:30 get older I am more and more a pacifist, but still I don’t know what I would have done if I had had to confront Hitler and what he was doing there. You haven't got the opportunity of being a pacifist or not being a pacifist when somebody attacks your country and doesn’t declare war on you. What the Japanese did on the 7th December 1941 [the attack on Pearl Harbor], even thought they might not have declared war by default, they didn’t declare war.

22:00 So you didn’t have the opportunity to be a pacifist. But most of us looked upon people who after we were involved in this bloody struggle for survival, of your home and your way of life, there were still pacifists walking around saying, “No war, no war.” What – if you’ll excuse my French – what

22:30 in the bloody hell did they think was going to happen? Everybody says that we’re all pacifists, the Rising Sun would be flying over the Sydney Town Hall now. I wouldn’t be talking to you in this house. You have to fight sometimes, but I don't know whether there is anything such as a just war. I think the First War was ridiculous, obscene. The Second War was necessary but also obscene – fifteen

23:00 million people died in it. It was the most horrible thing that had ever happened in history.

You’ve sort of answered my second question, being what would you like to say to your grandkids and great grandkids about war?

Well I’d just say, if you’ve got any say in it eschew it, resist it, but if it’s your brother or your mother or your sister or your homeland, be in it because you’ve

23:30 lost anything anyway. You're a person with nothing to lose if you don’t fight and someone attacks you, where’s your dignity? Where’s the dignity of man?

Final question is, do you have anything else you’d like to add to your story today?

Only that I think that you and Chris, you have been very sensitive questioners.

24:00 You’ve been very patient, it’s taken a very long time. How many hours has it been?

I’m not sure off the top of my head.

Well, it’s a long time, and I hope I haven't disappointed you.

No, you’ve done a great job, so thankyou for your time today, we appreciate it. Thankyou.

INTERVIEW ENDS