Australians at War Film Archive

Thomas Smith - Transcript of interview

Date of interview: 25th March 2004

http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/1697

Tape 1

00:30 If you could start off by telling us a bit about where you were born and where you grew up?

I was born in Glen Huon. I was born in a little cottage in the middle of an apple orchard. In those days there was no doctor in attendance, because

01:00 the nearest doctor would be four miles away. A midwife did all the deliveries in the district. My parents had come out from England in about 1920, and they were sponsored by this fruit grower, apple orchardist, by the name of Herb Browns. It was his little cottage

01:30 in the middle of the apple orchard. That’s where I was born. We were there, I suppose, twelve months, two years, before my father was settled onto a soldiers’ settlement orchard. In those days there was orchards all up the main roads, either side of the road was

02:00 just apple orchards. There was barely a bare space between all the orchards. You can imagine it was quite a sight in the spring with all the orchards out in flower. It was a wonderful sight, and smell. But then he went on this orchard. In those days, that was in 1922

02:30 when I was born, things were starting to get pretty bad, during the Depression. My early childhood, I got rheumatic fever, which I didn’t know about until well after the war years, they hadn’t told me about this. Of course, consequently, I had a lot trouble in the early years, school years.

03:00 But on the apple orchard, they persevered for quite some time during the Depression but it was pretty tough. Because they had to buy the sprays to spray the apples, and there was all the fertiliser to buy, and they couldn’t really make ends meet on it. I remember when I was about six or seven years old,

03:30 I was standing there with the mail, the mail used to be delivered from Huonville. The mail, he used to come around in a cart or a car or something, and delivered any bread or letters, he was the mailman. And I can remember them standing there with an awful look on their faces as they get a bill back for their apples instead of a cheque. So things were pretty tough. Although, even though it was tough,

04:00 our childhood was pretty good, considering the circumstances against the city boys. Because we grew our own vegetables, we had our own fruit, plenty of fruit, we had our own cows so we had plenty of milk and butter and cream. I can remember going to school sometimes. Most of the time Dad would milk the cow, but we’d have to

04:30 separate the milk. And I can remember getting half a cup of fresh milk and putting it under the cream spout and drinking that, it was quite nice. It probably wouldn’t have helped my cholesterol, but I haven’t been too worried about it. I’ve reached eighty two. Things have caught up a bit now. But in those days there was plenty of cream and cheese

05:00 and milk. So we had plenty to eat. We had no money, but we were healthy. We didn’t have empty tummies. The city boys were a lot worse off. I think this, in itself, helped me during the prisoner of war days, because I had that grounding as a child, the good food. I’m sure that did help me, because while others were

05:30 going down with different diseases, ulcers and that, I was getting over them. So it helped…

So you think some of the country boys that grew up on a farm were…

Sure. They had more initiative as well. I’m not running the city boys down, but in the country you learned to do things, you worked things out. If one thing doesn’t work, you think, “Well, how am I going to fix that?” And you go on and you use a bit of…

06:03 You're closer to nature and so forth, and you're able to work things out better. You look for ways and things to get out of difficulties. Which did help in later years. I think I survived where others wouldn’t have survived, because of my initial grounding. When I was a little kiddy, we didn’t have toys. I was very 06:30 interested in natural things, nature. I’d go out bush, there was plenty of bush about, and I would study the birds and the bees and the ants and insects and flowers. I just really studied them all, and you could tell when the weather was going to change, you didn’t need a barometer or anything. The swallows would be low…We lived near the Huon River, and when the atmosphere was heavy, and there was a change coming down, the swallows would be

07:00 low on the water, because that would drive the insects down, and when there was fine weather the insects would go up because the insects go up and they follow…There’s a lot of little things. The ants would build their nests up high, and you’d say, “Hello, there’s a change coming.” And all those sort of things, you studied them, because as I say there was nothing else to do. But in the summer we would spend a big part of our time swimming, in the Huon River. And

07:30 it was quite a big river. We taught ourselves to swim in a fashion. I know our mother told us in the early days, “You are not to go near that river until you learn to swim.” Little did she know that’s where we learned to swim. I didn’t know how we were going to learn to swim if we didn’t go in the water. But anyway, we got over that one all right and we learned to swim. We used to spend a lot of the time there,

08:01 in the summer days. The earliest we ever got into the river was in October, and believe me it was cold. Because that was right down south of Hobart. It was thirty miles away from Hobart, down south. And where we were, we could see into the south west wilderness, so it was pretty cold in the winter.

08:30 During the winter, our mother, she came from the old country and she was pretty strict that we had to be brought up the right way. We had to learn to make our own beds before we went to school. And in the winter months we had to learn how to sew and knit and mend socks.

09:02 This is what she taught us. She would buy these aprons with the flowers on them, and we’d have to cross-stitch and long stitch and make these aprons, different things like that, and also these mats. There was a lot of knitting down in those days, so there was a lot of waste wool. They would use this pattern on a plain carpet sort of thing,

09:33 and you’d use a long needle with the wool and push it through, and it would disengage and leave it to about that thick, and it would be cut after you were finished so you were left with a woollen mat about that thick, with roses and all sorts of different patterns on it. Which was quite nice, but it filled in the winter months, because you couldn’t get outside much because of the weather.

10:01 It was pretty cold and sometimes the snow was down. It was only in the fine weather, on a Sunday, that we used to have a bit of a cricket match between a lot of the local boys, they’d come down, and in the paddock we’d set up and have a game of cricket. We’d enjoy ourselves that way. Usually there was a bit Sunday roast on. It was our day out, sort of thing.

10:34 The nearest neighbours would be a kilometre away. You can imagine what it was like of a night. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this saying of it being pitch black, well that originates I think from Tassie because it does get pitch black. You can’t see your hand in front of your face. We were quite isolated there. Of a night you could hear these

11:00 Tasmanian Devils in the distance, screaming and hollering. And also the native cats, with the spots on them. You’d hear them screaming a bit, too. And of course, it was an eerie of a night, too. There was no inside toilet. The outside toilet was way up in the orchard, and you can imagine what it was like going up there of a night. You didn’t hang around too long.

11:34 Not with that screeching going on out in the bush. And it was the days when the Tasmanian Tigers were still about. Not that they were in our vicinity. I don’t recall them being close to us there. But every year, we would have to go back in the hills, on Christmas holidays, school holidays, we would go back in the hills where mainly these fruit growers, they’d have these blocks of ground

12:02 on the sides of hills, and they’d face it east. They clear the eastern side of the hills, which was the best… they would get the morning sun, and the afternoon sun, which was pretty hot, wouldn’t affect their fruit. And they had these pickers huts, made out of rough-hewn timber, or split timber it was in those days.

12:30 And those huts…of course we had no lights, it was only candles back in those days, and I often wonder now what was hiding under those bunks. All the year there would be nothing in them, and then we’d go up there in the picking season, which was over the Christmas, and there could be spiders and scorpions and goodness knows what there. Luckily, we only had candles, we wouldn’t see them. But in the hills there, Tigers were about,

13:00 because they would see their paw marks around the huts, as they would dig around for food. There was no wild dogs. They had domestic dogs, but in those days there was no wild dogs about at all. The experts reckon they were the Tasmanian Tiger.

13:30 We picked raspberries and strawberries and all that, and all the money we got from that picking went into the home kitty. We never saw any of that. It was just natural, we never thought anything about it, because what you don’t have, you don’t miss. That was just a natural thing, anyway, that the money went into the house. 14:00 I can remember one chap we used to pick for…The raspberries, we’d send them away in punnets, they’d have them in a wooden crate, and it would hold about six or eight rows in wooden crates like that, and the timber would be about half an inch thick on them. And they would allow about eight pound on each creek, when they were all weighed,

14:30 with the layer upon layer of these raspberries. When they went into the factory – it was Jones & Co then, IXL, which is no longer under their….It’s still IXL. Anyway, this bloke had got a bit cunning, so he had a big dam there and he’d put all these wooden crates in the dam to get them water-logged. And then when they sent them in, instead of being eight pound, they might weigh

15:00 twelve or sixteen pound. So he was cribbing a bit. So I thought “If he can do that, I’ll do that with the punnets.” These little pine punnets. So I soaked these…But it wasn’t long before he caught up with me. So that was the end of my ambition of trying to rob him. Anyway, it wasn’t a bad life. We weren’t forced into…We more or less

15:30 picked under our own…It wasn’t like slave labour. We didn’t have to do it. But we did it because our parents did it and we were expected to do it, so we did it. It wasn’t a bad life, really. When I look back now, it was a good life.

16:02 Can we find out a bit about your folks? You said they came out from England in 1920?

Well, my father was in the First World War, he was wounded on Gallipoli, sent back to England, he recovered and then he was sent to France, where he had a pretty torrid time. So I think they decided after the war finished that they would

16:30 migrate out here. I think they’d had enough of the war years. He lost a brother, he was just blown to smithereens, they never found anything of him. So they migrated out here. My mother had a brother, too, in France, he was wounded. But they came out here…

17:00 He had an uncle, my great uncle at Rorke’s Drift in Africa, in the Zulu War [1879]. Of course, he didn’t get back either. And prior to that, in 1870-something, he was a captain in the navy. But that’s why he came out here, he was sick of all

17:31 the bloodshed and turmoil and so forth. So they came out here…Mum came from London, she was a London girl, and they lobbed out here and they finished up within a few days of landing in Melbourne, they finished up way down the south in the bush, in Tasmania. So you can imagine…My father was all right, because he came from a farming family.

18:00 They go right back, they can trace their ancestors right back through the Earl Delaworth. They had their own kingdoms. I think we came from the Arrowsmiths, they made the arrows. I don’t know whether they fired them or not. But anyway, they finished up way down in Tasmania in this apple orchard.

18:33 Dad was pretty badly shaken up and he got a bit of gas in France, which didn’t help him. Of course he was a big fellow, but he took the orchard in pretty well. But Mum had a bit of difficulty, with the boiling up all the clothes in a kerosene tin.

19:00 Although we did have electricity, even in those days. On the main road, which was only a gravel road, but it was the main road, they had electric light. I’ll tell you a little story about the electricity there. They had their transformers in the…Every few hundred metres, there would be a transformer

19:30 sitting up on a pole. Of course, being kids, with the insulating cups with the power going through… there was plenty of stones about, we’d see who could hit one of the cups on the way to and from school. There used to be three roads leading to the Glen Huon State School. And of course when we came out of school, there was always a bit of a donnybrook [brawl] between the three different roads.

20:00 Although we were all cobbers [mates] at school, when we came out of school there was always a bit of a punch-up and so forth. Anyway, this night coming home from school…Of course the boys all walked together and the girls all went in a heap, they sort of…I don’t know why, but they did, we were all in a group. Anyway, this night coming home from school

20:30 there was this dog, this little dog, it didn’t belong to us, he came from one of the farms. He raced out in front of us and tore along and he cocked his leg up on the power pole. On the power pole from this transformer, there was this wire coming down into a pipe, to earth. He cocked his leg and the next thing he was tearing off down the road, yelping. So we said, “Well, what happened there?” So us boys all got around, and muggins [foolish] me, I was always

21:00 the stupid one, I said, “Well, I’ll try and find out what he was doing.” So I did the same thing, and I soon found out. There was a leakage in the wire, so I went off howling down the road. I was a bit careful of electricity after that.

So electricity always ran through there when you were growing up?

Yeah, all the time. It was there in the early days.

21:30 That was way back in 1922, and it was old stuff then. It had been there a long while. Do you want to go back to my father?

Please.

As I say, when they came out and my mother, she was very, rather, distraught about it all, because she had to bring the little tin bath in to bathe us kids.

22:00 The eldest brother was born in England, he was six months old. My younger brother and myself used to call him a Pom, and we used to get in strife for that. Dad settled into it pretty well. Coming from a farming family, he took to the farm life pretty well.

22:30 Of course, Mum pitched in and helped where she could. But it was pretty tough for them.

You’ve told us a bit about your dad’s experience in the First World War. Did he ever talk much about that?

23:00 No, he didn’t. Unfortunately in those days it wasn’t talked about much. We were, I suppose, frightened to ask him too many questions. Once or twice he mentioned in Gallipoli about having to prise the logs off the Turks. Their trenches, they had the logs over the top, so they were pretty had to get at. He didn’t say much about it at all.

23:33 Unfortunately, as we got older, we didn’t ask him about much about it. Otherwise, we would have had a lot of information. He did say once coming out of France, they were in there for quite some time, and I think there was only thirty eight of them came out of the battalion. When they were relieved, and they came out, the Scottish

24:00 Bagpipes were playing Amazing Grace. So that would have been something. It really would have been… Even now, when I hear Amazing Grace, I can picture what they went through, as they staggered out to the rest period. But they lost pretty heavily, they did as well as the Australians.

24:30 They lost pretty heavy on Gallipoli, they were up further. Salonika. Whether they sailed from there… Anyway, it was on the Gallipoli Peninsula where they were. Of course, not at Anzac Cove, that was where the Australians landed. But no, he had a pretty torrid time.

And how was his health?

Every now and then he would have

25:01 an attack of some sort. I can’t remember. But he would go for the olive oil, and drink half a bottle of olive oil and it would fix him up. I think it was the gas that was playing up on him. In fact, they tried to get him into the local football team, and he decided to go. One of the opposite team had the ball

25:30 and was racing down towards the goal, and they said, “Get him, Bill! Get him!” And he only knew what rugby was like, so he tackled him. And that was the end of his football career I think. They weren’t very pleased with him. They played a bit of cricket and that sort of thing, on the local teams. The farmers would come in…

26:00 But we used to go swimming, and of course where we used to go swimming was called the Horseshoe Bend, and it was quite a bit high above the river. Maybe a hundred feet looking down on the water. There was a cave underneath it, there would not be too many who know about it, but there was a quite a big cave. And flat rocks, that was our jumping off point.

26:30 To get down there, we had to go down this steep bank. There would be little trees growing, and we’d slide, hit one tree then grab the next one…If we had missed a tree we would have been gone. So we’d get down there for a swim. Of course there was no swimming togs in those days, we’d just go in the nuddy [naked] . There was no-one about much. But when we’d go of a Sunday, we’d wonder why there was these big families of Mormons, and they’d go to church

27:00 on Sundays, and they’d have about a four mile walk to go to church. When they’d be coming home, we’d be swimming on our backs and they’d be up there waving to us. We’d think, “They can’t see us.” Little did we know that they could. We didn’t realise until later years why they used to stand up on the road there and wave to us. But that was a long time ago

27:30 and we were young and innocent in those days. We used to have a lot of fun in the river, though. I remember we saved our old dog. We had a border collie, he grew up with us kids. It was in flood time, and down below us there was these big rapids. They’d be going over, four or five feet high, the waves going over the rocks.

28:01 So this day, our poor old dog swum across, and he got caught up in this clematis vine, on the other side, and he couldn’t get out of it. And all we had, we didn’t have a boat, we had 44-gallon drums tied together as a little bit of a platform. So we raced home and told Dad, so he came down. We had to go way up the side of the river, because the current was that strong to try and get across.

28:30 Anyway, we were paddling like mad and we got across, and right on the Quorner…We just managed to grab a branch as we were going past the Quorner. If we had gone past that, we would have been down over the rapids. Anyway, we pulled ourselves up to where the poor old dog was. He was just about gone. We pulled him up onto the platform, then we had to pull ourselves way up the river again to get back home again. But it was well worthwhile to save our dog.

What was the dog’s name?

Skipper.

29:16 He was named after some person. Anyway, we saved our dog. With this dog, we would make a cart

29:30 and put a harness on him, with the little billycart, and get poor old Skipper going and he would pull us along, for a while anyway. This day I suppose he got sick of it, and he saw a cat way down the end of the road and took off. That was the end of our cart. He smashed the billycart to pieces, so we didn’t try it again. But we decided to do it with a little young yearling bull,

30:01 a half bull. So we made a sledge up, made a harness up for him, and got him up the top end of the orchard. There was a track down through the trees, where you could cart the apples. All the apples were carted on a sledge…Anyway, the

30:31 younger brother decided to sit on the sledge for the bull to pull him along. He went into a gallop, which was all right until he got to the bend, then he slammed into one of the apple trees. That was the end of the bull and the sledge. But we used to make our own little sledge up, about this long, and we used to go up on the steep slopes, and grease them up with a bit of candle grease and away we’d go.

31:02 That was great fun. There would be a drop at the bottom and we would be airborne. You would leave a little bit on the centre so you could get a little bit of a grip on your bottom. Anyway, that was all right until mine steered off-course and went over a rock, sitting up like that. It left me with minus a bit out of my bottom. We gave that away after a while as well. But all these sort of things you did.

31:30 As I said, you made your own fun, and made up a lot of games and things, and they weren’t all successful.

What about in the snow, through winter?

Oh yeah, we’d get out on the snow and get on a big bank, and we’d have these raincoats and get on our backs, because our raincoats were nice and slippery, and away we’d go. That was all right until you went off the track…

32:02 Another great thing was get an old tank, an old water tank, those great big ones, and we’d all get up on top of that and roll it around and run on it as it was rolling around. Get inside the big old tyres off the truck, get inside one of them on a slope. You’d get one of the boys to hold it as you curled yourself up inside and let her go. I don’t know why we weren’t killed.

32:30 But we got away with it. As I say, you made up your own fun. This all helped us in later life, I think, to be able to adapt. To do things that you weren’t used to. To help us on our way. I used to see beauty in…We were talking about where we used to go picking. The eldest boy, Ron Brown, he’d made a path down through this

33:00 very heavy bush, like jungle it was, big man ferns, and there was a little stream trickling down and he had made a path of steps over these great big logs, and on a hot day it was this beautiful place, like a Garden of Eden. And I could always remember, it was so peaceful. And even up in the jungles, I could still see the beauty of the jungle, in places where it was beautiful spots.

33:30 But some couldn’t see it. I’d say, “Isn’t that beautiful?” “What’s beautiful about that?” I’d look for things that I knew as a kid…I could look back on that as a sort of escape. But it was quite nice, you know.

Your knowledge of the bush – you were saying you’d know when the rain was coming with the birds flying low, was that self-taught?

34:00 Oh yes. There was no teaching or anything. It was just…working things out, watching the birds and where they were nesting and how…You could spot a nest, not that you would disturb it. And bees. “Now, all right, where is their hive?” You’d watch them until they got all the pollen

34:30 on their wings and that, and then you’d see which direction they took off in. And you’d finally find out where their hive was. They might be wild bees. All sorts of things like that…As I say, I think that did help a lot. That grounding

35:00 of using your own initiative to work things out. And of course, up in the jungles…You had to be careful of what you ate…There was a lot of the Javanese in the Dutch army, in from Java, and quite a few of them were with us, so we would ask them

35:30 if those leaves were edible? And they’d say, “Yes,” or, “No.” Oh, bitter as gall, but you would eat anything, grass. As I say, I’d eat anything, and I think that was what saved me. Anything that had any vitamins in it, I’d eat it.

So did you know anything about bush tucker as a kid? 36:03 No. What we used to eat in the bush were like cranberries. They grow wild. Little cranberries, they grow wild. The wild raspberry, as we called them. The wild cherry. They had a nut and we used to eat them.

36:30 Very much like she-oak to look at, with the long leaves on them. We’d eat them when they were ripe. There wasn’t much other bush tucker around in Tassie. We’d eat the cranberries and the wild cherries, whatever they were. It was quite interesting.

37:07 Was there much of an Aboriginal presence in that part of Tassie?

No, I never ever saw one. The only person I saw was a Maori, who was coming through during the Depression, and Dad gave him a few days work. Not that he could have paid him or anything. I think he just fed him and that was about all. He was a big fellow, and he frightened me.

37:35 He looked at us, and us little kids, we took off. Evidently he was quite a nice fellow, but we’d never seen one before. He was quite a shock. But no, we’d never seen any Aboriginals at all. Getting back to that picking in the hills,

38:00 over the Christmas. My mother, on Christmas Eve, gave us threepence each to go and buy something, a present for her and Dad. We just wanted to buy her something. So we wandered into the local village, which only had one shop, Glen Huon, and messed around there all day. They had a big apple factory, it was two or three stories high, and it’s still there, still standing, where they used to automatically peel the apples

38:32 and core them, and then cut them in slices. And that was all laid out on chicken wire, and burning sulphur underneath them and that is what preserved them. Then they were canned and sent away. So we used to wander through there, because that belonged to the same chap that nominated my father onto this

39:00 farm, this Herb Brown. Nice fellow. He had quite a big orchard, and he had the raspberries up on the hill. It was quite a big property that he had. And he had this apple factory, which is still standing. We hung around all day, of course. That sulphur smell would nearly choke you

39:30 when you were walking up through the catwalk, through the place. Anyway, we messed around until dark, and of course there were no streetlights, and it was this windy old road, and then when it went up, it had this little road winding way up into the hills. It seemed to be miles and miles away to us kids. Anyway, it was dark before we left the township, trying to find our way. We finally found the road leading up to where our hut was,

40:00 where our parents were, and of course they were in a panic. Anyway, as we were going up this track, there was a lot of crashing through the bush. We’d stop, and the crashing would stop. We’d go, and again it would go. I still reckon it was Tasmanian Tiger. They were never known to attack anyone, but they would track you. I think if you were disabled, they might have a go at you.

40:30 But when you were able, I don’t think they would. They were never known to attack any human beings. But I still reckon it had to be something big, and there were no wild dogs there, so it had to be big to crash through the bush like it did. Anyway, this was where I first – and I think my father must have found out, too, with the “Cooee!” and it would travel. He was way up on the hill, and we finally heard this, “Cooee!” Of course we were quite relieved to finally get home again.

41:02 It was dark. You had quite a job to find your way along in the dark.

Tape 2

00:34 What about school?

As I said, I had a lot of ill health through this rheumatic fever, and I lost a bit of time in the early days, but yeah, we went to school. I left in the sixth grade, I had to leave school at thirteen, because Father had to walk off the farm. There was no money coming in,

01:00 couldn’t pay the payments on it. They were going to repossess it, but he got that fed up with it he just walked off. He went around to the west coast, Queenstown, to the copper mine and that was one of the only few places he could earn money. So him and at that time the eldest brother, they went around there. So I left school at thirteen to look after the farm, to go to work for the farm next door.

01:31 So you stayed in Glen Huon?

Yes, we stayed in that house. By that time, we had a sister and the younger brother. So I had to earn enough money to keep us going. Well, I worked for this chap every day, for eight shillings a day, which was a man’s wage. It was good money. I think he was he a good fellow to work for. 02:00 But in the apple season I worked for him all day, for eight shillings a day, then at night I would go straight on. It wasn’t far away, so my brother would bring something to eat, and I’d work up to twelve o' clock at night making these apple cases. You had to bang the nails all down both sides and the ends, then trim them.

02:30 They had to be pretty good because they were exported. The best I made was, I think, up to a hundred, at night, up to twelve o' clock at night, which was another eight shillings. I got a penny a case. That was another eight shillings. Which was pretty good money. And that all went into the kitty. So that went on. My parents had sold

03:00 the apples to this neighbour, just sorted the good from the bad. Not graded, just the good from the bad. And of course mother had to sit up all night and sort these out. And often when I’d go home from making these cases, I would have to help to get the quota out. It didn’t leave me with much sleep. But prior to this, going back to the schooldays,

03:32 this chap that I went working for, he owned quite a few pigs. He had this sow, and every time a litter came along, when they got a decent size, he would kill them and dress them. And he got me to go and help them kill these pigs. I was only eleven at this time. You want to know how he’d kill them?

04:00 He’d turn them over onto their backs, I’d sit on them holding their front legs, and he had this long sharp knife, it was a old way, and he’d just slit their fat, and they didn’t even feel it, then he’d drive the knife around the windpipe and down into the heart. It was over and done with, and the pig wouldn’t even know it had been stuck. Anyway, he’d let it up and

04:30 then I’d catch some of the blood in this tin. And he’d have this old enamel bath there, with so much cold water in it, and he’d have boiling water in a copper and he’d put so many tins of that in. And this blood, he didn’t have thermometers, so he’d get this blood that I caught in the tin and splash it through the water like that. And it if shimmered away too quick, the water was too hot.

05:01 so he’d add cold water until it…He knew exactly. Because if it was too hot, when the pig was dumped into it, you couldn’t scrape the hair off. So I used to help him like that. And I used to do a bit of part- time work for him after school. We had these triangular scrapers,

05:31 with sharp edges all around, on a little handle. And he’d pay me a penny a tree to scrape off the old bark. You know how dead bark sits on the apple trees? And the codling moth used to breed under this bark, the cocoons. So I would get a penny a tree. So this was all right. With these pigs, I thought, “Well, he’s making money out of those pigs.”

06:00 So I thought I would go into the pig business. I was only about eleven at the time. And so I earned enough money off him, ten shillings, and I wagged school and trotted off down to Huon. They had a market every fortnight I think it was, at Huon, that was the main centre of the district. They had all these cattle and pigs and sheep for sale, they were auctioned off. I didn’t know anything about auctioning.

06:30 So this litter of pigs, I had my eye on, they were passed in because he wanted more money for them. There was an old chap standing next to me and he said, “You wanted one of them, didn’t you?” And I said, “Yeah.” So he went and talked to the owner and he said, “You can have one for nine shillings.” So I had a shilling change out of my ten shillings, so I put it in my bag and I had four mile get back home again. And I’d already made a sty over in the bush,

07:00 out of logs out of the bush. So I thought, “This is all right,” and I took it home. We had plenty of windfall apples and this sort of thing, so I’d boil them up, grab a handful of Dad’s pollen that he used to give to the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s, and I’d mix that all up with cow’s milk. Then another neighbour had a lot of potatoes growing, so I made a deal with him. He dug them all, and I made a deal with him. He said that if I bagged them all,

07:34 I could have the chats, the small ones, and I did that and got all the chats and boiled them up for the pig, too. Anyway, it didn’t take long for the pig…it really grew. Anyway, it came time to kill it, and I couldn’t sort of help him kill it. So he came and did the job and took it down to the local butcher, and he got two pound ten back. I thought, “Well, that’s a fortune.” So I thought ‘that’s all right, I’ll get two.

08:01 And what I’ll do is grow my own potatoes and peas and beans and if there’s a good market down there, I will send them down to the market, and if not I’ll feed them to the pigs. With two, I might get three.” But my father wouldn’t let me. He said, “No, that’s it.” But I never saw that two pound ten from that day to this. So I lost out all ways. So that was my pig business, gone down the drain. I might have been a big piggery man.

08:33 But I used to help him, do a bit of work for him at a penny a tree, and it used to earn a bit of money, but it all went into the kitty. We didn’t mind, because it was all part of life in those days. In this orchard, too, when I went working in peacetime, when Dad went around to Queenstown, he only had carbide lights [acetylene gas lamp].

09:00 This old carbide boiler out the back…like a big gasometer. And it would drip into the carbide and make the gas. And he had all these gas lights all around the apple house, which weren’t very good lights to work with. A couple of times the thing blew up on him. Getting back to Dad and my brother going around to Queenstown, all the money they earned,

09:32 Dad bought a block, which was pretty cheap, and all the money he kept after he’d paid his board and lodgings, he put into timber. And with neighbours and friends, it didn’t take long to build a house, and got it up to the block up stage, where it was liveable. Then I had the job of selling what machinery he had, which was pretty poor quality, and the plough.

10:02 I used to do the ploughing, too, even after school. When I come from school I’d hitch the horse up and go out and pick apples and cart them in. Just automatically you’d do it all. Go up to the bush with the horse and drag great big logs in. And then you had to saw them with the great big six-foot crosscut saw. You can imagine that in the winter you’d use a lot of wood. We had a big wood heap,

10:30 as big as this backyard. I’d go up there and hitch the horse up and drag these logs in. So I sold the old cow and the horse and what machinery I could down at the sales, and we packed up and we went around….And the chap that took us around there, he used to cart our apples. He came from Huonville.

11:01 And he had a fairly new Leyland Cub truck. It was a real dashy job then, in those days. There wasn’t much in trucks around at all. He used cart the apples down to Port Huon, where the boats would come in…The old Zealandia used to come in. She was sunk in Darwin Harbour during the war, on the raids on Darwin. The Zealandia. She used to cart the apples over to England.

11:30 Anyway, he took us. We loaded up what furniture we had and we took off, Dad I. Mum and sister went around, they didn’t go on the truck, they must have gone on a bus or something. Talking about buses… Schooldays. The first picture that I ever went to was at Huonville.

12:00 I think it was a silent film. Dad and Dave, On Our Selection. And the only way that we could get there was this local bloke by the name of Gus Brown, and he had this bus service. And the bus was this big sedan car, with fairly big seats, and it had the dicky seat behind the front seats, that faced…They folded out, what they called the dicky seat, and then they had about three passengers, a couple of kids, and a couple in the front with the driver.

12:30 He would take the passengers to Hobart and stay there. He had a couple of sisters who had a fruit shop there, that was his depot. And so through the day, he’d be in the pub. He was a returned soldier, so he’d be in the pub having a few beers. So you can imagine what he was like on the way home. Anyway, he took us all down to the pictures. And I think he’d had a few beers in, too. But the only place he could put all us kids was up on top on the luggage racks.

13:00 So there’s about a dozen kids, hanging like grim death, going around the Quorners, legs flying out over the side, going around the Quorners. It was a pretty winding old road, going down to see this ‘On Our Selection’, Dad and Dave, it was the first one that I’d seen. So that was our initiation to the pictures. I think it cost us threepence to get in. But it was a hairy ride, I can tell you. I can still remember hanging on, going around the Quorners.

13:30 Anyway, we were down at Queenstown, weren’t we? So we moved down to Queenstown. You wind down about 99 bends in four miles, down, down, and you're looking down…

14:00 We slept in this chap’s car in his garage, overnight, when he picked up our furniture, when we went to Huonville. We had to sleep in his little old car. It was pretty cold and we didn’t sleep much. The next morning we headed off, we got to Queenstown. It seemed to take years to get there. We’d never travelled much before. We get to Queenstown, and

14:30 going down this road frightened the daylights out of me, because you're looking way down hundreds of feet into the gully. We got around to the home and that was all right, we unloaded and that was the start of us at Queenstown. My first job was on a delivery truck. They were putting the road through to Strahan, I think it was.

15:00 It was pretty rough going, and he used to take their weekly groceries out, as well as other cart wood. And he used to have one of those tipper trucks, but you had to wind it. And I tell you for a young fellow, it was pretty hard work. Then we used to load the trucks with these great long green sleepers that would come in. He would sit in the truck while I loaded it with these green sleepers. That wasn’t very light work either.

15:30 But I stayed with him for a while, about six months or so, until I got a job in the smelters, in the mines. The first job I got was on what they called the nipper, on the furnaces. That was on the second floor. What happened was the ore would come through like wet cement, through these pipes.

16:00 It would come through from the flotation plant, where all the rubbish was floated off and left a percentage of copper in the residue, and that was then pumped over to the third highest point in the smelters, and they had a big drum where it went in with a suction.

16:34 It had all these pipes going around it, and they had this canvas or something around it, with all this suction coming into a centre pipe which took all the moisture out of it. It left a mixture something like wet cement. And that was dropped down to the next floor. It was pretty heavy because it was loaded with a lot of copper, 17:00 which is pretty heavy. A bit of gold in it, too, all mixed up in it. That was loaded into what they called banana carts, and they were a ton weight when they were loaded, and two big iron wheels with shafts in them. You loaded them up with great big stainless steel shovels. Load them up and drag them down to the furnace.

17:30 They would take them onto what they called the plates, and there was two furnace men there, digging this out, one either side, to even it out. And the nipper, on the lever, there was water pressure that pushed the lever and it pushed this frame, it pushed all this stuff into the furnace. It was joined to the other side, so as this one went in, the other side would open.

18:00 So the next lot would probably be a cartload of coke, or silica, or lime, or what they called slag. What I went onto after. It was all the residue that came off the converters, it was poured off molten metal and it went down into paddocks and it was broken up, and put back into the furnace again.

18:31 They alternated that with the coke, which was to keep it hot, and the silica was to make it run, to make it flow pretty even. And of course, with the nipper all he did was sit on this seat and push this lever backwards and forwards. On shift work, too, it was a pretty monotonous job. They used to play a few tricks on us. This one night there,

19:00 I must have nearly been asleep and the head bloke came along and he put a hose and turned a hose on down there, and that woke me up pretty quick. We had another bloke down there, he used to like playing jokes on people, but he couldn’t take a joke himself. So I thought, “Well, I’ll get you.” He’d played one or two on me. So on the furnace part, on the stairs at the end, you go along…because it was all open,

19:32 the rail track came along, but it was open sides. You could look down to where they were loading the banana carts. They had a few minutes before they’d have to move the lever. So this night shift, I shot up and around, and he here is slugging away, loading it up, he was a big fellow, he was bent over like this and I dropped a whole handful of this stuff down on his back,

20:02 and then raced down and I was sitting there when he came out, and he was fuming. He would have killed me only if he had caught me. He never knew to this day who did it, but he was one of those blokes who could give a joke but he couldn’t take. But we used to get up to all sorts of tricks. But then I went from the nipper down to the slag heap. And that was swinging a big 18-pound hammer. And you had to have these…

20:30 It was old conveyor belts stuck onto your boots, because it was that hot, and it was sharp. And you’d have pads on your hands to throw it into these big boats. And that went back into the furnaces. It went back upstairs and back down again and went into the furnace. Anyway, I went on that for a while, then onto the banana carts. That was pretty hard work.

21:04 I went from there down onto the bottom. What they called the forehalf, where the molten stuff came out onto all covered brick – bricks that would stand heat. And it was quite a big thing. And they would build it up,

21:32 and the slag off that, the waste, would come to the top. The copper would keep to the lower part until it built up, until they got to what they called about 45% copper. And then they had two outlets, with a great big steel rod going in, and on that they had a round plate on the end with what they called pug clay, and that would go in, they would push that in, and the steel rod through that.

22:02 That would go right into the inside to where the molten stuff was, or close to it. The clay would help to….But when it was ready to tap, as they called, they would put a dog on the steel bar, and the steel bar was about an inch diameter, and they would put wedges in that, and then one either side of the 18- pound hammer and knock it out. Because once they got the rod out, it would pour down onto the ground

22:30 into a great big steel pot. When it got full, they would plug the hole up again, and the crane would come down with two great big lugs on it, pick it up and then put it into what they called the converters. They were great big vessels on two wheels, and they would turn over and they were all done by air, molten by air pressure from the back.

23:03 That was a job and a half, too, I was on that for a while. Because you would have to keep them clear….When you hit them with the rod, they went up into a cavity and the rod went through to clear the path through. Of course, the sparks would fly back and you would have to have a shield all over you. It was a pretty tough job.

23:30 But now and again, with this slag that was running off, it ran into a drain with water pressure coming through, and when this molten slag hit the water it would disintegrate into granules. They used to have a big slag heap there, and even a light plane could land on it. It was that big. Every now and again they would have trouble, and they wouldn’t be able to get their bar out in time, and the mat, as they called it, would get up higher

24:00 and some of that would come out with the slag into the water. And of course as soon as that hit the water, it would explode. You can imagine the panic on there when that would come out, and it would go off with a mighty bang, too. As soon as it hit the water. Anyway, they overcame that eventually. Then the afternoon shift, they used to have visitors coming through, they’d have a tour guide come through. 24:30 They had two great big doors on this furnace, where you could look down into the molten metal. So they would wait until the visitors were coming up the stairs and just about there, and they would throw old bits of this asbestos sheeting. Of course, as soon as it hit the metal it would explode. Go off with a mighty bang.

25:00 Sometimes they used to do overdo it a bit and create a bit of trouble. But on the converters, too, they used to bring them over. When they got to a certain thing, you used to have to turn the air off, but you couldn’t turn it off too soon or else the metal would run back into what they called the twee holes, where the air was coming through. And they’d get it over a certain…and gradually ease the air off until it was over, and then turn it right off.

25:30 Then they load it up from this great big crane, load it up with ore, raw stuff, to tip back into the molten…Well, the crane driver was looking into all this molten metal, and of course, what they’d do some of them, they’d wet it, when the visitors were there, they’d throw a bit of water over this ore that was going into this…As soon as that wet metal hit that molten metal in the converters

26:01 there would be this mighty explosion, and they set the crane alight. They had to send men up to get the crane driver down, one day, he was just too blinded to come down. It set the building alight, where it would fly. It was a bit hairy. They wouldn’t do it all the time. But now and again someone would go overboard.

26:45 I think we’ve got a great description of the mine and so on. What years were you working there?

I was about fifteen when I started working there. And I was there until I was nineteen. I was there for about four years.

What about when the war started?

27:03 I was seventeen when the war started, and my father was working there, and my two brothers. When war was declared, both my father and I were on afternoon shift, and we had just knocked off. In what they called the change house…You would come to work in your good clothes,

27:30 and you had a locker each, with a rope on it, and it went on a swivel…and coat hangers on it. And it was locked. It went through a little box, the rope, and it had a lock on it, so you could put what you had, any money or whatever, it would be safe up there. And when you knocked off…

You were saying you were setting up…That at the declaration of war your dad and yourself were on the afternoon shift.

We had just finished work, and I mentioned the clothing, you changed back…And they had showers, like a communal showers.

28:31 Just downstairs, and there would be four showers on each side, and you would go down and have your shower. It was only men there, it didn’t matter. So we were under the shower when word came through that war had been declared. Of course, it wasn’t a very nice feeling at all. Everything just went dead quiet.

29:02 So that was our initiation into the war starting. But prior to this…These showers, there was a little bit of a thing with them, too, because you’d go down in the middle of winter, and you can imagine what it was like on the west coast of Tassie, and you’d have your shower and the bloke next to you would be covered in soap and that, going like that, and as you went

29:30 you’d turn his hot water off and tear off. He wouldn’t know who it was because he was covered in soap. There was a lot of those sort of things that went on. But anyway, war was declared. I know Dad was a bit disturbed about it all. Things went on though, and a lot of fellows went away and joined up. I was only seventeen

30:00 and I knew Mum wouldn’t sign the papers. She was a bit religious and she wouldn’t sign the papers. We came to be a restricted area, couldn’t get away, being a copper mine, you couldn’t get away. And finally I wanted to go. They wouldn’t transfer you into a job. I was doing three men’s work on this

30:30 converter. When it was got to the copper part, nearly 100% copper, it was poured into a pot and that was taken up onto a decking where it was put on a stand, and you had a lever there to tip it, and they had this endless chain going around, and it was into moulds.

31:02 At the end of it, they had provisions to put copper lugs. So that the molten copper would cover that about halfway down, so they would have two lugs when it came out the other end. It was poured, and when it went along to the end, they went down over a wheel, and they had to be barred out because they would stick, and then down a chute,

31:32 and picked up with a little air crane with tongs on it. As soon as you pressed the trigger, that would click, pick them up and run it around and put the cold water on them to cool it down. Well, I had to do the three jobs. By the time I would get the three parts of the copper out, it would be cold, then it would have to go back again and I would be in trouble for not pouring all the copper. This went on and on and on, 32:00 and I wanted to get away, and I couldn’t get a transfer out of the place. I don’t quite know how I got out of it, but I got into another job that wasn’t controlled by the…Down the silica quarry. That was on the side of a very steep hill, and you had to tie yourself by a peg, hammer a bar in and tie yourself on, and you were drilling holes in the hill, then you would fire them and then nap the silica into smaller pieces

32:30 and load them into these trucks, so they could go back up into the smelters. So I got down there and I was there for about six months, and I decided that things were going pretty bad in Europe. Dad had done his share in the First War, it was time I did mine. Things didn’t look too good at all. So I decided to join. My mother only signed the papers

33:00 because she didn’t think I would pass. And I did.

Why did she think that?

Well, I had had a lot of illness when I was a kid, you see. I was left with a leaking valve in the heart, which I’ve still got. I’ve had it all my life. It can’t be too bad. But it does leak a bit. She signed them when I was nineteen. I passed a local doctor,

33:30 and I was sent down to Hobart, and this is where I met all my mates – were to be – down there. There was about a hundred of us all joined up at the same time, from all parts of Tassie. We’d just taken the Oath of Allegiance on Armistice Day, the 11th of the 11th it was, 1941. And we’d just taken the oath,

34:00 as we come out the doors the guns fired, the salute. Joining up on Armistice Day…When we went into camp we could have our pick of what we went into. Transport or whatever. There was only two of us decided to go into the Australian Infantry.

34:30 All the others said, “You’ll be sorry.” My father was in the infantry during the first war. And I thought, “Well, I’ll do the same.”

Where was the camp?

Hobart. Brighton. Brighton was the army camp.

What about the recruiting office? Was that back in Queenstown?

Queenstown, yeah. That was where I signed the papers. From there I had to see the local doctor and he passed me. And this is where I then got called up to Brighton, in Hobart.

35:03 What about your dad? What was his reaction?

Well, he was a bit resigned to the fact that, I suppose…He didn’t say much at all, really. All he said was, “It’s not a piece of cake.” He didn’t say much more. He knew what was coming, or he had a fair idea. Anyway, they all decided to go into different units,

35:31 and this other chap and myself decided…He was fairly tall, the same as me, and all the others laughed at us. We had our needles and vaccinations and all that sort of thing and dental. And I had a big molar back here which was decaying and I wanted it out. And the dentist…

36:00 He hadn’t been long in the job, I don’t think. He said, “I’ll fill it.” I said, “I’d sooner have it out because I don’t know where I’m going to finish it.” He wanted to play around with it, so he filled it. All right, I had to have it done. We got all our needles and a bit of training, not a great lot of training. Then word came through that we could go home on leave.

36:33 We didn’t have any other leave than that. It took me two days to get home by train, up to Burnie, then right around to the west coast. I had to stay overnight in Burnie. I had only had two days leave I think it was. I was all brand spanking new, new uniform and very self-conscious of

37:00 being in uniform. And I was walking home to where we lived in Queenstown, walking down the main thoroughfare, it was a main street, and here’s all these ladies out the front gates talking with all their kids. And one of them was a Down syndrome girl, but she wasn’t too bad, and as I got near them she swung around said,

37:30 “Look, Mum, here comes a soldier.” Well, I had to walk past all these people, all these kids and they were giggling and laughing. Anyway, I got home and the time went pretty quick, and it was time to come back to camp again. Anyway, I got back to camp and they told us we had pre-embarkation leave, another two days,

38:00 but they wouldn’t let us out again. Those that had come home, we didn’t get word until too late, so they wouldn’t let us out again. So we dug slip trenches and did a bit of training and that. I joined in November, and that was early December, and they sent us over to here to Darley in Victoria, out from Bacchus Marsh. And we all lobbed there.

38:30 And when we got there…There was snow on the mountains in Tassie, this was in December, and when we got to Darley here, there was a heatwave on. It was 108 in the shade. Anyway, these two sergeants, they were from the First World War, they thought, “We’ll have a bit of fun with these Tassies.” We had to get in our full gear, overcoats and pack and everything, the whole lot, and they marched us around and around the parade ground.

39:01 He had a bit of fun.

Was that your first time on the mainland, was it?

Yeah, yeah. I had been over here prior, when I was a kid. I had come over and had my tonsils out. My mother brought me over to have my tonsils out.

How distant did the mainland seem in those days?

Oh, it was the other side of the world. See, everything was so slow. Over there, nothing was done in a hurry. You were very laidback.

39:32 Not like it is, the hustle and bustle today. A day seemed like eternity. One day was a long time. But we came over twice. And the three brothers came with me. My brother had a shop in Smith Street, Collingwood. And that’s where I saw Dam Mellie Melba’s funeral. I went out and watched that go past,

40:03 before it went out to Lilydale. It went down Victoria Parade. I watched that as a kid. I can still remember the great big heart of flowers on the car. A flower heart, and two carloads of flowers. I still remember the old-fashioned hearse. Twice we came over.

40:33 The first time we came over to Melbourne, we had to walk from the boat to wherever we were, I think. And going through the streets, Mum knew where we were going, and we come to this shop. We passed this shop, and they had this miniature tiger, a rag one I suppose, about this high, and it had an electric train running around and around and around it. Of course, we had never seen anything like that before.

41:00 So when we got to the shop, we wanted to go back and have a look at it, because it was only just around the Quorner we reckoned. So away we went. And I think we found it, and wandered around a bit, and the next thing we were lost. We didn’t know the name of the street he was in, the name of the shop. We didn’t know where we were. Anyway, we wandered around and it got dark. My elder brother got a bit panicked, and of course my younger brother and I, we weren’t too worried. We weren’t aware that we were lost too much. It didn’t worry us too much.

41:32 The elder bloke was a bit worried. Anyway, this chap sitting in the doorway – it was pretty hot weather – he was sitting in a doorway and wanted to know what was wrong. The elder brother said, “We're lost.” We didn’t know where we come from. Anyway another younger chap, he put us onto another younger chap, and he finally took us home. We got home just as they were about to announce on the radio, and Dad would have been listening to it over in Tasmania, that these three kids were lost from Tassie.

Tape 3

00:31 …got you over to the mainland and into your first camp at Darley, in Victoria.

We were there about a fortnight, I think it was. We were allowed into Bacchus Marsh a couple of times on leave, that was about all. And while we were there, some of us, our vaccinations didn’t take, in Tassie, when we had it done.

01:00 Milking cows and that sort of thing, it often didn’t. Because that vaccination was taken from cows, somehow or other. If you were mixed up with cows, often it wouldn’t take. Anyway, when we got there they gave us the option of having it redone, if we wanted to. We didn’t have to. I said to my mate, Viv Jackson – his didn’t take either –

01:30 I said, “Come on, go and get it done again.” He said, “You're mad. We don’t have to do it.” I said, “Yeah, but you don’t know where we are going to finish.” So up we trots and get it done again. They just scratch it like that, and put this vaccination on it, and it comes out in a great big scab.

What was the vaccination for?

Smallpox, I think it was.

And how did they know it didn’t take?

It didn’t fester up.

02:01 It had to fester into a scab, a real festery sore. Real nasty. That’s how they know it didn’t take. So we had it done. That was just before we left Darley. We had to travel then to Adelaide, by train. We stopped overnight

02:30 in Adelaide. Then off we headed. That was coming up to Christmas Eve, 1941. On the way through, there were different places we were allowed off for the train for an hour, then back on again.

03:00 Some of them went straight to the pub and got a few bottles. Anyway, when we got to Bordertown, I think it was, we were allowed off for an hour. And when we came back they had all the provos [Provosts – Military Police] on the gates. They weren’t letting them back on with the beer. No bottles of beer. So my mate Georgie Andrews, Viv Jackson and myself, we had bottles of cordial.

03:31 We weren’t drinkers you see, we had these bottles of cordial. Anyway, they made sure that’s what it was, it was cordial. Anyway, we went back to the carriage and they were taking the bottles of beer off them. We were standing there and the provo sergeant came up and said, “I want you two.” And we said, “What do you want us for?” “Never mind. Come with me.” We started following, “What do you want us for?” “Well, two of your mates over here won’t give up their beer. We're going to put them under close arrest,

04:04 and we want you as escorts.” “Ha, go to blazes.” We walked back again, we wouldn’t do it. We could have been charged ourselves. Anyway, the captain, he got a bit ratty in the finish. There was a whole lot on the platform by that time, a lot had given up their beer and they weren’t very happy about it. There was a roar started, and he said, “Troops in train.”

04:31 Well, I won’t tell you the words that were said to him, and a big roar went up. He said that two or three times, “Troops in train,” and they told him what to do. So they had a bit of a talk, the officers, and they decided that if they gave up their beer and put it into the guard van,

05:00 it would all be given out Christmas Day at Terowie. So they compromised, said, “All right,” and did that. So he headed off and the next place we got to, it was just on dark, was a place called Quorn. We had never been away from home before, and we were all a bit homesick and that…Oh, Christmas Day, when we went into Terowie,

05:30 we spent Christmas Day there, and it was Christmas afternoon when we left. Christmas Day they turned on a stew for breakfast, and the same stew for lunch, and an ice-cream. And we told the cooks what to do with that, for Christmas dinner. So we weren’t very happy. Christmas afternoon they put us on the train, and we came to Quorn. That’s right, it was not…Christmas Eve was at Terowie. We had Christmas dinner there and in the afternoon we went off…

06:00 Although we didn’t have any dinner. We got to Quorn. And I’d written a sob letter home, about how hard we were being done by. We weren’t allowed off the platform, we couldn’t get outside. This little chap standing in the dusk, I walked up to him and said, “Would you mind posting this for me?” I said, “We're not allowed outside.” He said, “No, I don’t' mind.” He said, “Would you like this?”

06:30 He handed me a box. He said it’s a bit of a Christmas gift from my wife, my kids and myself. So I got back to the carriage, there was only eleven of us in the carriage, and I opened it up and here’s a Christmas cake and chocolates and a packet of Bex headache powders. They’ll never know what that did to us. We split it all up into eleven…There wasn’t much each, but it was the thought behind it.

07:00 They will never know how grateful we were for that. We did write to them, and they sent us papers and magazines. But then their planes got shot down, so I lost touch with them. Their name was either Hall or Hill. I’m sorry I never got in touch with them earlier. Jack Hall or Jack Hill. That was at Quorn.

07:30 Your training began at Darley, you did two weeks…

We didn’t do much at all. Very little training at all. We hadn’t even fired a shot then. A little bit of bayonet practise and drill. Left right, left right, right turn. That was all we’d done. It was mainly taken up with medical parts. Going through the medical and needles and all this sort of thing. So we didn’t have much training at all.

08:03 As I was saying, we got this Christmas, and away we went. We split the Christmas present up. We finally got to Alice Springs. By that time, our vaccinations were really working. From when I left Adelaide, my nose started to bleed and it wouldn’t stop. It kept on. And they had a little tank of water up in the corner of the carriage and a little washbasin down below it.

08:31 That was hot. And I was trying to…you can just imagine the mess I was in. It just wouldn’t stop bleeding. We got to Alice Springs and I went on sick parade with it. And of course they kept quite a few of us back, who had had the vaccination and were too ill to go on with the rest of the gang. So I went on sick parade as soon as I got there, and he said, “Oh, nature will take its course.”

09:00 And I thought, “Yeah? It hasn’t taken its course so far.” So I got under the shower, and I’m having my shower and this great big clot came out, and it stopped bleeding and it hasn’t bled from that day to this. Whatever it was, it must have sealed up again. So that’s my sob story up to there. But that was our first initiation into the wet season. We were in this tent, and the flaps were tied back, so the air would run through.

09:32 We’d had our lunch and the four of us who were in this tent were asleep, it was so hot. We were all dozing and the next thing we were drenched. This blanket of cloud had come up like that and over, and Shoom! she came, straight through the tent.

This is in Alice?

Yes, Alice Springs. Where did you camp in Alice?

I couldn’t remember. I can’t remember now

10:00 where the camp was there. It was an army camp. Anyway, we were there for a week, then we joined another convoy going by train, by the Ghan and we went up to…Larrimah, was it? Where the train line started. There was no road, going down these creek beds,

10:31 it was pretty rough. You’d be sitting there and trying to ease yourself, and you’d stand up, or half stand up because there was only hard seats down the sides, and a tarp over the top. This bull dust was coming in all the time. It was no good changing your clothes, we couldn’t change our clothes, because two minutes later they’d be wet and dusty again. So we just wore what we had on. We got to a place called Banka Banka

11:01 one evening in the dark, and they put on this stew. We had that. And the next morning, in the dark, we reveilled out early – they kept us on the move. And I was a bit sluggish getting out there, because they had it all under the trees, these trestles set up to feed off of, and we had the same stew again the next morning, and it was cold. My mate, who had just about finished, Viv Jackson…

11:30 I couldn’t find my spoon. So I lit a match to find it, and here’s all these maggots in it. Poor old Viv had eaten his. Anyway, on the trucks and away we went. And we got to the train line and they had all these old cattle trucks. And they just had a canopy over the top. And they still had the

12:00 cattle manure in the trucks, it was deep. Where the cattle had been carried, it hadn’t been cleaned out, but it was dry. We got in the canopy, on the top. It wasn’t bad, it was beautiful, because with the rainy season, the grass had grown and there was great mobs of kangaroos each side as you went up. A great green swathe of grass. It was nice, even though we were stuck up on top.

12:30 Anyway, I think it was about three days to get to Darwin. When we got there, there was hell to pay. The rest of the crew had gone in front of us, they’d gone into town and they wouldn’t serve them a beer, as the story went, and they wrecked the place. Two of them were put under close arrest. I’ve got their photos there. Joey Doonan and

13:00 Jackie Arnold. Joey was an ex-amateur boxer in Tassie. And they’d put them under close arrest. We weren’t allowed back in town. So what we did, a few of us – it was that hot and you couldn’t sleep – some of the old fellows, they ran a swy school. Have you seen swy? With the dice?

13:30 It was in the cool store. So that was all right. We went in there, a few of us, and we played sly all night. If we had been caught, we would have court-martialled. But they had a cockatoo out at the door. So we spent a few nights doing that. But they wouldn’t let us back into Darwin. There was hell to pay. They wrecked the place.

Why wouldn’t they serve them…

I don’t know what it was over.

14:00 I’ve just forgotten the cause. But they were refused. So they said, “Well, we’ll take it.” By force.

So you’d joined the infantry at this point. And the two Taswegians, were these the guys you joined up with?

Oh, I didn’t finish that story. When the embarkation came, when they’d finished leave, they all came back into camp, the hundred of us,

14:31 and they were all put into infantry. And we were there waiting for them. “Hello, fellows.” All the truck drivers, the cooks, they’d all been bunged straight back into the infantry, and off they went with us. So we were the first ones in there and they caught up with us. So we had the laugh on them, then. That’s how they come to get in the infantry. So that was hell to pay then. We were there in Darwin about a fortnight, I think.

15:00 And then we packed our gear and we were put on a boat. It finished up, it took us to Timor, some to Java and some to Malaya. And some of those poor fellows, I know one or two here down at Rye, they didn’t have rifles. They were taken prisoner. They just got there as

15:30 as the war was finished. Anyway, these two, Joey Doonan and Jacky Arnold, they were going to be court- martialled, because they were the ringleaders, so that’s what happened. All our gear was put in these rope slings, all the gear was put in that, so what we did, we put them in kit bags and put them in with the gear

16:04 and they lobbed on the boat with the gear, and they couldn’t catch them again after that. They never ever got caught up with, when they came back. They wouldn’t have wanted to really. But anyway, they got on board. I don’t know if Bill told you the story about the slings? The wharfies were on a go-slow?

He did mention that, but can you tell us?

16:30 Yeah, well, this is in our book. This is only hearsay from what they’ve told me and what I’ve seen myself. They were on a go-slow, and when all the equipment was put in these slings over the holds, they just let it drop. Of course, the radio equipment and that was smashed. When the blue came, when the Japs landed,

17:00 all the equipment broke down, it was unworkable, because they couldn’t fix it. And we couldn’t keep in touch with different sections. There was a section here, a section say a few hundred yards away. This was after the Japanese landed. And they, like, they were spread up all over the place. You didn’t know where Joe Blow was or how he was going. There was Japs up in the palm trees and they were sniping all the time.

17:30 And all this sort of thing. So these slings, that’s how we got Joey and Jacky onto the boat.

So they didn’t drop the sling?

No, they didn’t. It was just as well. I think it was all over by then. That was the first lot. We were reinforcements to the 2/40th.

18:00 They were all right. I can’t complain about that. Going across there, they had a couple of lady stewardesses on. And we were all jammed in these little tiny cabins. You can imagine what those little coastal ships were like. Little cabins, and it was stinking hot. We were all racing around, you see, looking for our mates. Anyway, one of them, I’ve forgotten his name now,

18:30 he raced into this cabin, and here’s one these stewardesses in the nuddie. She said, “What do you want?” He said, “I’m looking for my mates!” He slammed the door and took off. He got a bigger surprise than she did. It was so hot, they just stripped off. They were pretty innocent sort of fellows, in those days. We were all a bit innocent and so forth.

19:06 Were they navy stewardesses?

No, Australian.

But the ship that you went on, it was an Australian navy vessel?

It wasn’t a navy vessel, it was an Australian ship. It had a little swimming pool on it.

19:31 About as big as this room, and about as deep. Of course, we threw one of the fellows in it. Frankie his name was. He should never have been in the army, Frankie Jarvis. He wasn’t quite the full two bob [mentally disadvantaged]. He should never have been there. When we got to Darwin, we jumped out

20:00 under these showers, and just let our clothes drop off. It was that hot. We had to get all the sweat and that off us and wash our clothes. Poor old Frankie, he never washed. So when we got on the boat, he was on the nose. So they got him and threw him in the swimming pool, and the poor fellow couldn’t swim. Muggins me, I went and saved him.

20:30 I was a bit soft hearted, so I went and pulled old Frankie out. Someone said, “Leave him there!” Later, after we were taken prisoner, he was in the hut I was in, he got a bag of green peanuts. Ever eaten green peanuts? You’ve eaten roasted peanuts, and you know what happens when you eat too many of them. Well, he was eating green ones and it was ten times worse. He sat there…

21:00 Oh dear. Still not washing, he wouldn’t wash. You could smell him a mile off. Anyway, that was poor old Frankie and that’s a different story again. Anyway, we got over there and when we landed on Timor…I think Bill told you the same thing. They put down ropes over the side of the boat, the ship couldn’t get in too close to the shore. They let ropes over the side and we climbed down there and into these boats. And when we got into the shore, the natives carried our guns and that.

21:31 We weren’t sure. We thought we might lose them. We got them all back again. Then they took us up by truck to Penfui. This was the aerodrome at Penfui and this was the place we were supposed to be guarding. That’s what we were there for, so the planes could keep coming through. We got there,

22:00 and they put us in barracks overnight on the aerodrome, until they allocated us out to different sections. A platoon here and a platoon somewhere else. They could take their pick of who came to their platoon. Anyway, the next morning we were all out there on the aerodrome watching these Lockheed Hudsons take off. They were fully loaded with bombs. They were fully laden with bombs and they had a few Australians on board, too.

22:30 Coming from Tassie, you never saw a plane. If you saw a Tiger Moth, once in a blue moon, well that was something. So of course we were all out admiring these Lockheed Hudsons taking off. So the first one took off, and away it went, and the second one, yeah, it charged up, the dust coming out from the motors and away she went and she took off. And the third one…And a chap next to me, his name was Corporal Dick,

23:00 he said, “I would love to be on that plane.” This was the third one. “I would love to be on that plane.” It took off like that, went up like that and then she came down right like that, down on the end of the aerodrome. And that was it. And you can imagine us, standing there, never thinking that anything like that was going to happen. The bombs went off, the ammunition went off. Of course, Bill Coventry was stationed there. He saw it all, too. 23:40 This is what I saw. And this corporal next to me saying, “I would love to be on that plane.” And the same fellow went troppo later on. He went troppo, and he had cigarettes hanging around in the hut, everywhere. He had malaria. There were packets of cigarettes hanging around in the hut.

24:07 I don’t know what was wrong with him. He might have had malaria, because you have delusions. I had plenty of them later. But that was the end of the plane. It went off. I can still see it, as it took off. It went like that and it looked like it was going to try to get down again. But it went up like that, then down on its back. It was too low, you see, it couldn’t…

24:31 They reckoned all the gear in it moved to the tail and made the tail heavy, so when it went up, it sort of pickled down. So that was our initiation to the destruction. Then after that, we were sent down to a place called Oesapa-Besar.

25:01 Oesapa-Besar was our 8 Platoon, 2/8 Platoon…And some of them there…They didn’t know us from a bar of soap, but seeing as we came from the same district…I did and Viv Jackson, he came from Queenstown. Well, the sergeant came from Queenstown. Sergeant 'Chocko' Smith. The corporal, Sandy Matragen, he came from Queenstown.

25:32 Or he worked there. He married a Queenstown girl, and he worked there, I know. They decided that they had to take some, so…Lofty was my name, anyway. They always called me Lofty. Nobody knew what my name was. “We’ll take him, and Viv Jackson, he’s from Queenstown.”

26:00 And Georgie Andrews. It was only us four they took into 8 Platoon, A Company. Section 11, I still remember the section. And Paddy Martin, he was from Queenstown. Another story with Paddy.

26:30 So they decided to take us into 8 Platoon. That was down in Oesapa-Besar, right on the beach. Lovely, a sea view and everything. But they didn’t have any tents for us. So they took the fly off one of the other… This Maxie Smith, his father had an orchard about two miles away from us, towards Huonville, a bigger place than us. His name was Smith, no relation. He was only a little fellow.

27:00 And here he is, we joined up together, and I didn’t know him from a bar of soap, and he lived about two mile away. Anyway, we went down there. And when we got lobbed there, of course we were snow white. They used to get this native brew. It was about a 100% proof, too, it was pretty strong stuff. They would have a tipple of this and then chase it down with a glass of water or something.

27:33 Anyway, they were sitting around the trestle table, under the palm trees, when we lobbed off there. And Jimmy turned around and said, “Look at this! Brand spanking new!” Because we were snow white. Brand spanking new, and we were, too. They put us through a bit of training there, straight away. A bit of bayonet practice and rifle shooting. Not a great lot, because we had to build

28:01 fire lanes for the machine-guns to be set up, through the jungle, in different points, so they could cover, say, this lane and that lane. And we had to cut those lanes in the jungle. And coming back off these trips, when we’d finished, we had to go through this little village. There was only a few huts in it, right on the beach.

28:31 And after we had been coming through there for about a week or a fortnight, I said to Sandy, the corporal, I said, “I bet he’s a spy.” Because he was different, he was a different colour. He was squatting down there, next to the hut, and there were some of the other natives there, around, but they were a little bit coppery colour, he was a more yellow. And I hadn’t seen him before. And yet night after night he was there, just sitting there.

29:00 And I said to Sandy…And he said, “Don’t be silly.” I was only a recruit. A raw recruit. They wouldn’t take any notice of me. But I still reckon to this day … They knew where everyone was. They had the island tabbed pretty well. They had their spies in there before. But see, coming from the country and that, you pick up a lot of things that these others probably wouldn’t notice.

29:32 Right from an early age, I taught myself to observe in the bush. Observe different things, and how things worked out, and I still reckon he was a spy. Hadn’t seen him there before, just for these few days he was there, and then he was gone. And they saw lights out in a canoe out in the bay from where we were, and they shouldn’t have been. Anyway, that’s a part of history.

30:07 So it wasn’t followed up?

No, and I couldn’t push it anyway. We had to make up this hut out of bush timber. And of course being old bushies…We had to make our beds up out of bush timber and bags. We had mosquito nets, and you needed them there, too.

30:36 There was a thunderstorm, it was getting into the wet season, and this thundery night, it pelted down. My bed broke, my feet were sticking out in the rain. It wasn’t cold, it was quite warm. So I wasn’t going to get out in the rain and try and fix it. These Hudsons took off on patrol again, this was about two o' clock in the morning, and I heard them take off.

31:00 I was wide awake because I was in the wet. I think the second or third one took off, and the next thing I could hear it whining, a real scream, whine, then Crump! They reckoned it was struck by lightning. So that was another one we had go down, unexpected. Anyway, time went on there. And the Americans were coming through, landing at Penfui

31:30 and refuelling and going onto Java with these Kittyhawks, the fighter planes. They were quite a smart looking fighter. And word came through that there would be no more planes, that was it. A week later…I was pretty crook at the time. The doctor said it was dengue fever and I was in a pretty bad way.

32:00 Anyway, this day, over come these planes. “Hey! I thought there were no more fighters coming through, look at these! Jeez, they're good.” Next thing, Rrrrrr! Down they come, strafing the ‘drome. They were the Jap fighter planes. Of course we all took into the slit trenches, we had our slit trenches dug. And they kept coming over every day. I was that crook in the finish, I couldn’t be bothered going into the slit. They didn’t strafe us,

32:30 but they did the aerodrome, they kept on strafing that. So I was pretty safe anyway. I was that bad with dengue fever, I couldn’t care less.

So how many planes were there at the ‘drome?

Oh, a few Lockheed Hudsons. I don’t know how many…Half a dozen I suppose there would be, of these bombers. You know the Lockheed Hudsons, like the old DC3 or DC2. I think they had a home,

33:00 they used to go out and patrol. I don’t know how far they used to go out. They’d go out day and night, pick up, refuel and go out again.

So the purpose of the strafing was to damage the ‘drome?

Yes. And they shot up a lot of enemy planes that were there. I don’t know really what damage they did there, but Bill would have known more about that, because he was stationed up there. He didn’t realise that on our second day, we were moved back.

33:30 Anyway, of the nineteen…word came through of a patrol…They’d sent American officers over to have a look at the place, American Artillery Regiment, they were, for reinforcements and the 2/3rd Pioneers were going to come and reinforce us as well. And these officers were there at

34:00 Penfui, and they were going to site up the place to see where they could put their artillery and so forth, because we had none. Anyway, one of the patrol planes came back and announced…this was the word that we got, that there were thirteen enemy transports coming into Kupang Harbour. So they picked up all the officers and that and took them back to Darwin. It was too late.

34:30 The reinforcements were on the way from the Darwin, and that’s when the Japanese bombed Darwin, on the 19th, and the [USS] Houston was escorting them, the American cruiser the Houston. I don’t know whether the [HMAS] Perth was in it or not, I don’t think so, but the Houston was, and I remember them saying, the sailors, that they had a go at the bombers with open sights on their big six inch guns, but they got turned back.

35:03 The Zealandia that I was talking about before, that got sunk there, and quite a few other ships were sunk when they bombed….And the 2/3rd Pioneers and the American Artillery got sent back. So I think they lost a lot of men off those ships, if I remember rightly.

So why were the Pioneers sent back?

35:30 They couldn’t get to Timor, because the bombing had started and they were turned back. There was too much opposition, they couldn’t get through. It would have been hopeless anyway, they would have gone…The American artillery might have done a bit more damage, but they just didn’t have the…They landed 23,000, the Japanese…

36:03 They wouldn’t have been any…A battalion of 1,000 men and however many artillery they had, it wouldn’t have been a great lot, in the regiment. Anyway, they got turned back. And that was the start. We got word that they were coming through, these transports, so we had to man our gun pits on the beachfront, all night.

36:33 There was nothing happening much, but I was too scared to go to sleep or anything. And the mate in my trench with me, Bluey Bolton, he just laid out on the bank and just snored away. He couldn’t have cared less. I was too frightened to go to sleep. My eyes were going, I was hearing every little noise in the jungle behind us. And nothing happened. The next morning

37:00 they pulled us back to the aerodrome, Penfui, to guard that. And we hadn’t been back there long when they started to blow the ‘drome up. Our own people, they started to blow it up, making big craters in it so the Japanese couldn’t land there.

37:31 I don’t know what their idea was because that was the reason we were there for. Anyway, we were right under the canopy of the palm trees, and we got word not to fire and these Zeroes were coming just over the treetops. You could see it like somebody going past in a car. You could see the pilots in there. We had orders not to shoot because it would give away our position. I don’t know what we were there for.

38:00 Anyway, Jimmy Honey, he was on the Lewis gun, Jimmy was from Geeveston. Jimmy said, “Bugger this,” he said. And he let go. An officer came around and said, “Who fired those shots?” Of course nobody let on who fired the shots. Anyway, from there on we moved to the next position. The Japanese paratroopers were coming down, and we were pegging away at them.

38:30 And then we got orders not to shoot. I still can’t understand why. We probably wouldn’t have hit any of them, but we were trying to. And they landed on this open field. That was the second day. The 20th. Well, then we went on. That night we had to go and retake a place called Babo,

39:00 where Japs had already been in. And they caught, I think it was, five or seven of our chaps and tied them to a tree…and cut their throats. Of course, that really got our backs up, them doing that. We got very nasty about it. I know as we were coming into Babo, they had snipers up in the palm trees.

39:30 And I’m standing…We knew they were firing, there were bullets whizzing around. And this little chap next to me, he was a lot older than me, Pop Taylor, he said to the bloke next to him with the Tommy gun, “Give us the Tommy gun, I can see him.” He didn’t take his eyes off him, he could see the blue smoke curling up out of the top of the palm tree. He grabbed the Tommy gun and let go…Did you ever see The Sullivans, that serial?

40:01 Did you see that fellow coming out of the palm tree? The exact same thing happened. You would reckon it was a picture taken of the exact same episode. Not that I watched that much, but I happened to be taking my daughter to music lessons and they had it on and that’s how I come to see it. He did the exact same thing, he dropped onto the ground, and the same thing happened in The Sullivans.

40:32 It was like a picture taken of the exact same thing. This Pop Taylor, he comes into the picture again. Anyway, we went in there and we retook…There wasn’t much….There was a bit of a skirmish on here and there, and we got a few of the snipers out and a few pockets of Japs. That night we had to…We took over Babo, we stayed there overnight, I think, in the hospital.

41:02 We slept there, and we had to go on duty every two hours, on a little bit of a veranda, as well as two had to go out to a listening post out further. I know my first two hours on the veranda…Because you get little wild pigs and things running through the jungle. And you're listening there, because you know the Japs are all around.

41:31 And you heard twigs break, and it was a bright moonlit night, and you see a shadow. “Is it a Jap?” And you didn’t fire unless you were sure, because the whole camp would wake up in a panic. It would anyway. But I got through that two hours, and later I had to do two hours on the listening post. And I had Georgie Andrews, you know the one I said had died three months before the war ended. I had Georgie with me on this listening post, way out, and that was worse still because it was right out in the jungle…

Tape 4

00:35 …We landed in Kupang Harbour but we couldn’t get right ashore. That’s where they let us off by these small boats. They had the ropes hanging down over the side of the boats, and we jumped into these little rowboats and they took us into the shore, and the natives took all our gear

01:01 until we got on practically dry feet. So, we were a bit lucky. We were taken by trucks up to Penfui, at the aerodrome, and stationed there overnight, and then we were allotted to these platoons, spread around the island. My platoon was 8 Platoon, down on the beach, at Oesapa-Besar.

01:33 We lobbed there on the 16th, it would have been about the 17th or the 18th we went down there, of January. What we did was, we cut fire lanes for the machine-guns to keep in touch down there, and they laid their telephone wires, which were useless. They couldn’t use them anywhere, they kept breaking down.

02:02 What else we did was, we had to patrol the beach of a night, do our two hourly patrols each. There would be two in each group. We would go around and patrol the beach. We had gun pits dug around the beachfront, as well as barbed wire entanglements, all around the beachfront.

02:32 What else did we do? Oh, we put out in the bay pontoons made out of coconut palm trees. We wired them all together so the boats couldn’t come in over the logs. We had them wired around the perimeter of the bay. That’s the sort of things that we did, and unloading the boats at Kupang.

03:02 Food stuffs and our own gear. What we did, I know it was illegal, but any cases that happened to get broken, like milk or tins of fruit, we brought back to the camp and it was all put in the sergeant’s tent. So the meals that we were getting from Camplong, I think it was, were pretty basic.

03:32 A bit of tough meat, like from an old buffalo, you could sole your shoe with it. You couldn’t eat it. And maybe a bit of a potato and so forth. It was pretty basic food. So we supplemented it by all this stuff that got broken down on the wharves. When we come home into the camp, it would all go into the sergeant’s tent, 04:00 and then it would be laid out for everyone, so everyone in that platoon got a feed. I wouldn’t say they were broken on purpose, but they sort of got dropped now and again. We had condensed milk and tins of peaches and pears and what have you.

Was that an official policy that anything that got damaged went to…

No, no. It was very unofficial. That was just between our platoon.

04:32 Who was your sergeant?

Chocko Smith. He will come up again, too, Chocko. He was from Queenstown. Yeah, Chocko. He was very dark, and he was a pretty wild sort of fellow, too, so he put us through the paces. We got a bit of training down on the beach there. He did put us through it, pretty solid, what training we could get. But it was only short and sweet.

05:00 He was a good fellow.

Can you talk a little bit about the training that you got and the weapons that you had?

Well, we were issued with .303 rifles, and I think there was five bullets in a magazine. We were issued with five of them each. We had our bayonets.

05:30 He’d take us doing bayonet practise. Which was pretty solid, and a bit of rifle fire. We didn’t do much because we didn’t have the ammunition. We only fired our guns once, I think, and then he wouldn’t let us clean…Because they were all greased up, for travelling…They knew what they were doing. They were having a joke at us, you see. And they wouldn’t let us clean the barrels and all the

06:00 gum out of the grease, so we had to fire them as they were, and you can imagine the back wallop we got from the gun. That was just their little joke, but it wasn’t much of a joke for us. Then we had a go on the Lewis gun. We had to take it to pieces and then put it together again. That Lewis gun was an old 1914 gun, mind you. And the Tommy gun, we had a burst on that, too.

06:32 But as I say, they couldn’t give us much practice on that because they didn’t have the ammo. We only had what we carried. We had a gas mask. What ammunition they issued we had to carry. They had what they called a pan, from the Lewis gun. They were a round pan on the Lewis gun,

07:00 I don’t know how many bullets were in it. They had spare ones of them. What else? When the Japs landed, they supplied us with what ammunition they had. So there was quite a few magazines. Most of us threw our gas masks out and filled that with ammunition,

07:30 our little bag that had our…If they had’ve used gas, we would have been gone. That’s what we did.

So the purpose of not getting you to clean your gun, and to give you only five bullets, was so you wouldn’t go firing it off…

No, it was to see the result. They did it as a joke on that. Because the grease in the gun wouldn’t let the gas…You see, there was little portholes in it where the gas

08:01 escapes more than it fires the bullet. If the whole amount was to go through, it would probably blow the thing to pieces. So it has to let some of the gas escape. Well, that was partly blocked with grease, so when we fired it, there was such a kickback to it. They kickback at any time, but with not being cleaned out, it was double the…It was just their means of having a go at us rookies.

08:30 See, we were only reinforcements. Being a reinforcement, you were not like being one of the old school, I can tell you. And that goes right through life, too. In many things, in Lions Clubs and Rotary, all these sorts of things, if you're in on the ground floor, in the initiation, then you're one of the mob. When you come in later, you're accepted, but you're not really one of the originals.

09:00 And it does make a difference. And I’ve seen it happen, time and time again, in different organisations. Where there’s just that little – not much – but just that little bit of difference where if you're an original, you're one of the boys, if you come in later…I joined the Lions Club, I was in that. We were in the foundation members and I know others that have come in and they have felt that little bit

09:30 of being on the outer. We have tried to make them feel welcome, but they still felt that they weren’t quite one of the boys. And that goes into a lot of the different organisations. I think you will find right through life, if you're not on the ground floor, then you're just that little bit out in the cold.

So how did it show up?

Well, they treated us like boys. We were younger

10:00 and they were quite a few years older. Most of that crew there were about eighteen or nineteen. One was sixteen, one was fifteen. When we joined up with these others, we were sort of…I will give you an instance. When we were first taken…Now, I don’t know why,

10:31 or how I got away with it, but I used to go out of the camp every day and buy food. Because we pooled our money, what money we had left, it was all in Dutch currency, we pooled it all, and I used to go out past the guardhouse, out onto the road, up to the native villages. It was miles away. Japanese trucks would pass me, fully loaded with Japs. They’d look at me, and I would just keep trotting along. And I did this, I suppose,

11:00 for two or three weeks until they got organised. Then they clamped down on it, of course. Because one day they had a tanko, [‘Number’ in Japanese] as they called it, a count, and one was missing. He hadn’t come back to camp. Then they counted them every night. I did come back, but he stayed away so they knew there was one missing. Well, that’s when they started to clamp down on it. You were shot if you were caught out. So that put the finish on it. But being a tall fellow, too, I couldn’t get away as a native,

11:30 because they were all shorter. But that’s one of those things that happened. Now, in there, my two mates, Viv Jackson…When we were first taken, we had nothing. We just had our packs with nothing in it, no mosquito, no nothing. And we were lying there and there was this horrible smell. Prior to the Japs coming,

12:00 he’d had this little sore on his leg, and the doctor put a bandage around it. It had been like that for about five or six days by then. And he wasn’t too well. He said, “See if it’s coming from that.” I bent down and had a sniff, and ohh…And he had a great ulcer like that, one of these tropical ulcers had formed. Then he had to go over in the hospital.

12:30 Now the stuff that we were getting, we were unloading boats from the Japanese side, rice and a lot of their comforts funds stuff and that. It would take two men to lift a bag of rice on their back, it was a 100 kilo bag, which was over 200 pound, and it would take two men to put it on your shoulders and you had to walk up this sea wall and into the Kupang village or township,

13:00 and put it into some of the shops up there. And you couldn’t stop, because if you put it down, you couldn’t get it up again, and you had to struggle with it all that way. It was pretty nasty….

You just lost me. There was the ulcer and you were going to get something to fix the ulcer…

We were filtering food,

13:30 put it that way, from the Japs. It all went in our section to make stuff with it. A bit of milk and flour and a bit of sugar. When they were in hospital, they made a pudding, and they all had a piece and I said, “What about Viv and George over there?” “Oh, they're not with us.” You see? Although they were in our section, they discarded them as

14:00 not being in our section. Because they were in the hospital, so they didn’t count. I said, “Well, they're one of us,” and they wouldn’t have it. So I took mine over and shared it with them, because they were my mates. If it had been one of the older group, they would have done, they would have shared it with them. That was one of the little things. Now,

14:30 after a few weeks they started up a vegetable farm at a place called Tarus, a few kilometres away, and they had to have so many from each section to go up and work on it. I was the only one that went from our section, and that’s when I first went down with malaria. They sent me back to camp because I was pretty crook. We had no mosquito nets and the mosquitoes just went wild. I was pretty crook.

15:01 I had a high temperature and that, and I was vomiting all the time. They didn’t want to know me. It was only another mate, in his garden at Railton he was in the next section, he was in the section next to me, he looked after me, and my own ones didn’t want to know me. See, I was one of the new ones.

15:30 If it had been one of the older ones, he would have come back into that group.

So how many of the new ones went to your section?

Three, yeah three. Viv Jackson, Georgie Andrews and myself, yeah, into that section. But they both went into hospital

16:01 and I was there. I was just saying this was one of the little things where you're sort of not one of the boys, and how it happens. But anyway, little Kirk they called him, he looked after me, but he was in the next section. We were involved before that, too, but I didn’t know him at that time, in the battle that I will come to in a minute.

16:31 So this is getting back to how we were situated when we first got there. We were the new boys in the plot. It does have its bearing on it, right through, I think.

So, how much did you know of what had been going on, prior to you arriving?

Nothing. Didn’t know a thing.

17:00 The only words we got was that they had entered the war, and everyone thought, “Oh, they're only little fellows, they’ll be easy meat.” They let us think that it would be a walkover. We went in there thinking that they were, and they weren’t. They were fully equipped. Some of these had been fighting in Manchuria, against the Chinese. They’d gone through China and all those places. They were well- trained, frontline troops. 17:30 They knew what they were doing, and of course, we were untried. This is one of the bad mistakes. We didn’t know anything about them at all. The only thing we found out is that they would sometimes come out on a patrol, and shone a torch in their face. If you got a torch shone in your face, it would blind you. And this is how…They would speak English, English speaking Japanese.

18:00 This is how they got around it. One of our chaps got shot like that. He was on patrol. One of the new ones coming to relieve him – you’ve got to give a password, of course – and he came up and instead of giving the password he shone a torch. And the bloke opened up with his Tommy gun, Bang! Shot him. And all through this, we got word that this was what the Japanese were doing. And that’s about all the information that we got. We thought it would be a walkover.

18:32 But then we found out different.

So you went from the beach to the ‘drome…

Then we moved on further inland to Babo. And then we were moving…going to the…As I say,

19:00 the paratroopers dropped down and we spent that day around Babo, in that area, and then the following day, the 22nd, we had to advance and we come up to a place called Oesape Ridge, where the Japanese

19:30 were dug in around this hill. They were on this bare hill, dug in round the top, the Japs. And down on the side, where the road ran around, there was a small river. Only a creek really, but it was fairly deep. It ran around and they had machine-guns set up along next to the road,

20:00 and it was in behind that prickly pear, which we didn’t know at the time. And they had them spread in groups, the Japanese in slit trenches all around the perimeter, the other side of this little creek. So we tried to advance, they tried advancing over the hill and got knocked back. Lieutenant Tanner, he was wounded there. And Lieutenant Fine,

20:30 our lieutenant, he was out of commission. Lieutenant Fine was there all day, we couldn’t get to him because it was just bare hill and they had their machine-guns lined up on it all. And so the colonel, Colonel Leggatt, decided the only way to advance was to put on a bayonet charge. I was in A Company. There was a bridge going over this little river,

21:00 and we had one Bren carrier. I don’t know if you’ve heard…Anyway, he was in the heavy battery, but he was on the Bren gun in the Bren carrier. And that was the signal to…Five o' clock, so we were all lined up,

21:30 on this side of the little creek, waiting. B Company, A Company, C Company, all around. There was only about five hundred of us there, to go on this bayonet charge, and they were all dug in. That was one of the worst times in my life, just standing there waiting to go on a bayonet charge, knowing full well that you were going into…The others were skirmishes.

22:00 You would see one, Bang! But this one was a straight out, you were going face-to-face with the enemy, and you knew they had their guns lined up on where you were advancing. I don’t know why, but when I left the camp I put a tin of bully beef in my shirt pocket, and I had a hand grenade sitting on that, as I went in on this. That bully beef did all our section later. That’s all we had to eat. I don’t know what made me put it in there.

22:30 We were all lined up and I thought – this is the exact thoughts that went through my mind: “Why am I here? Why can’t I be somewhere else? Can I go somewhere else? No, I can’t.” If I turned tail – which one or two… If I turn tail, I would be a traitor.

23:00 And I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t humiliate my family. That’s what kept me going. The thought of my family and the repercussions that would be on them if I didn’t go in with the rest of them. Because it was a horrific thought to go, to face straight into them. Anyway, five o' clock came

23:30 and the covering fire, we had a company that opened up fire on the Japanese positions. And we had to go in under it. And as we're going, we had to come out onto this road, there was a culvert, a steep culvert. We couldn’t…it was too deep, it wasn’t very wide, but it was fairly deep, about six or eight feet deep and you couldn’t get in and out. So we had to go around it onto this road

24:00 where this machine-gun had it under fire. Going around that, a chap by the name of Tom Kelly – we called him Ned Kelly of course – he got it in the elbow. I remember saying, “You all right, Ned?” He said, “Yeah, I’m all right.” He’d had his elbow shot out. We got to it and then there was some more Japanese there, and the corporal, Sandy, he shot one and bayoneted the other one sitting there. Somebody said, “Don’t shoot them, they're our own men!”

24:33 He got them. They weren’t, they were Japs. We were coming up on this knoll, and there was a big…it looked like a mango tree with this stand of prickly pear, like an L shape on this small rise, with slit trenches around it. Well, we cleaned them out as they came up, we were all firing. We don’t know who got who.

25:00 And we were held up with this machine-gun. We knew it was there, but we couldn’t get at it. We could hear them jabbering amongst themselves. Down to their left about 50 feet was a hut, and there were Japs in that, and this Sergeant 'Chocko' Smith, he said, “I know where they're coming from.” And he grabbed a Tommy gun and raced down towards the hut, and

25:30 they shot him in the back and he died two days later. And the corporal, not my corporal, not Sandy, he was around a little bit further…Corporal Billy Milne, he was in the next section, he said, “Follow me.” So this is where that Alan Kirkham, the one that looked after me in the prison camp, there was him, there was Billy Milne, he was a corporal, he said, “Follow me,” to run around the edge of the prickly pear,

26:01 because he realised where it was coming from. There was him, and then there was Bluey Berwick, I think his name was, he was in the middle, and this was little Pop Taylor, the one that dropped the Jap out of the palm tree I was telling you about before, the one next to me. He was only little, but he was a lot older. That’s why they called him Pop. And on my left was Viv Jackson and this

26:30 Alan Kirkham, I didn’t know it was him until a lot later, and there was me. As we raced around – because we raced straight round in the machine-gun and he opened up – he caught Billy Milner through the chest, killed him, missed this next bloke and hit Pop Taylor in the head and he came back over me, as I was squatting. I was carrying two of these big pans for the Lewis gun, as well as all the other gear, and I was bent over coming around…

27:00 Poor old Pop, he copped it in the head. Viv got a piece taken out of his chin, and the other bloke in front, yeah…I didn’t get a mark, and two of them got wounded and there was two killed and two of us got out of it without a scratch. I don’t know….There was three Japs there, a sergeant and two of his offsiders. I don’t know who got them, we all fired. It was such a…

27:31 It was not very clear who got what, because…I tell you what, I was in shock. When I came out of that, came out and around again, and I’m standing on this knoll and the Japanese are down in the valley, just down below us, and I’m standing there still in shock, and I can hear this Crack! Crack! It was bullets going past.

28:00 So I dropped on the ground, and as I dropped the young fellow from the heavy battery, a red-headed young chap, I’ve forgotten his name now, he dropped on my feet. I dropped and he got it. This is how lucky I was. I’ve been lucky all my life. That brings to mind another one, when I was I kid. I got shot when I was a kid. On this farm that we had,

28:32 the next door neighbour he grew quite a few loganberries. Rows and rows and rows of loganberries. It was quite close to home, this was in the later days, and it was only just across the road from us. And there was a creek running between him and his neighbour. There wasn’t much water, it wasn’t only about two feet or about three feet deep, this channel of water….

29:00 Over the years it had channelled down and it was about this high up to the top of the bank. And of course being a cheeky fellow, I used to take the gun down there, the little .22 and have a ping at the blackbirds, because they were taking all his fruit. I don’t think I ever shot one. But I used to play around, bang, bang. But this night I went down right on dusk. I thought I’ll go down and

29:30 see if I can see any. I saw some, but they were gone, they saw me coming. Anyway, I saw a bird’s nest in a tree, growing up in this prickly hawthorn and there was a nest up there. I thought, “Well, I won’t be beaten. I’ll come up from the bottom of the creek.” So instead of leaving the rifle up on the top,

30:00 there was another ledge lower down, I left the rifle down there, and I was climbing up this tree to get to the nest, out through the hawthorn bush. And it went through my mind that Arnold, Arnold Roberts his name was, he might come down and being dark he might think, “There’s birds in there,” and blast away. No sooner thought than he did it. He let go with his double barrels. Only one barrel. I’ve still pellets in my hand.

30:30 They're still there. See that? I’ve got two in there, one in there, another one in there…And I dropped, and I got a couple in the head. What saved me was the hawthorn bush. It scattered it and took a lot of the force out of it. I was picking myself up out of the creek.

31:00 The thing that frightened me, I knew he had a double barrel. I said, “Don’t shoot, it’s me!” Well, he got the shock of his life, too. I thought he would let go with the other barrel. He says, “Are you hurt?” I said, “I’m shot!” He said, “Can you make your way up to the road?” I said, “I think so.” It wasn’t far away. He went up to get his car. It wasn’t a bad car at the time, that was in 1930, '31.

31:31 Anyway, what went through my mind was, I thought he wouldn’t be down because my father was going down to help him with some water pipes. I thought, “No, he’ll be up there with Arnold doing the water pipes.” What happened was he came in, he had a lovely cherry tree near his shed, his apple house, and Dad had diverted in there and he had a handful of cherries. The next thing, Arnold is tearing up there…

32:03 And he said, “Come quick! Fred’s been shot!” He said, “Well, where are you going?” He went to get the car. So we got in the car and the nearest doctor was four miles away at Huonville. Of course, going around these corners, Dad said, “Don’t kill the lot of us!” He nearly had it tipped over. Anyway, we got down to the doctor there and he was having a whiskey with one of his mates. He was a real old time doctor. He came out, had a look, “All right, I’ll be with you.” 32:31 And he came back about an hour later. They just meshed my hand and that was it. I had it in a sling for a few weeks and my hand was stiff… I diverge again.

We better get back to the war…

I had a little war of my own…Anyway, this Bren carrier

33:01 had got through, and it got stuck on this little side road. The captain said, “Get down there and help push it out.” And this Alan Kirkham went down with me and we were trying to…Have you ever seen a Bren carrier? We were trying to push that and he nearly run over the top of us. He got going in the finish, I don’t know where he went. But I continued, and then I was in front of my own section, they were following up behind me.

33:30 I nearly got clobbered again, this Sandy McFadyen…There was a Jap lying in a trench. I didn’t take any notice of him. I thought he was dead. And he had a gun lined up, a revolver, and Sandy got him before he got me. And I said, “I won’t be caught again!” There was another one lying down, and I pulled him over and Sandy said, “Don’t touch!” But it was too late, I pulled him over and a great cloud of smoke went up. He had been booby-trapped. It missed me…

34:00 Anyway, we went on from there…

Had you had any training in bayonet charges or patrolling?

A little bit, not much.

When you arrived in Timor did you have that training?

A little bit of training, yeah. Chocko Smith gave us a little bit, but not a great lot. We didn’t have time. But we had to sort of try and pick up. We knew how to fire the rifle and how to use the bayonet and so forth,

34:30 but that was about all. So our training was very limited. And the 2/40, the Sparrow Force, they had been trained to fight in the deserts, in the Middle East. They were trained for that sort of thing, and there they were over fighting in the jungle, which is totally different warfare altogether. So it was a bit under the hammer right from the start.

35:00 And the same on Ambon, they were the same. The exact same thing happened on Ambon, and Rabaul, in the 23rd Brigade. So that was our initiation into the…

So the upshot of the battle at…

Oesape Ridge. It’s got to be a ridge or a hill…So when we got through that,

35:32 we went a few mile further on to a place called Airkom. That was at night time then. We were going to stay there overnight, because all the wounded chaps were in trucks, in the lorries, lined up in the convoys. We had about 130-odd or something wounded, in these trucks, plus what was killed. The killed ones were left where they were because we couldn’t move them. It was too quick to do anything about them.

36:03 We were going to retake Camplong the next morning. This was where the people let us down, the wharfies, by breaking our equipment, because we had no communication. Camplong was supposed to have been in the hands of the Japanese. We were going to re-take it, and that’s where all our supplies were. Our hospital, our food supplies and ammunition was at this Camplong, and we were going to retake it the next morning. We regrouped what was left,

36:31 and there wasn’t a great lot left because there was still a lot split up everywhere. So the next morning at eight o' clock, a whole stream of Japanese tanks, with white flags, pulled up on the back end of our convoy. And the word came through that the Yanks have landed and the Japanese want to surrender. They said send down the anti-tank gun. They had one little two inch anti-tank gun.

37:00 Oh dear. They sent that down there. But what it was, they gave them, the Japs gave us the ultimatum of surrendering, we were practically out of ammunition, we didn’t have much left, no food, we hadn’t had food for four days and no sleep. And mainly the ammunition, we had very little ammunition left. So they took a count, and they said we would be bombed from nine o' clock on. See, we didn’t have one single plane, not one, there in Timor.

37:30 They said we would be bombed from nine o' clock on. So Colonel Leggatt got his officers together and they took a count. They said, “If we decide to carry on, we will be all slaughtered out of hand.” We had nothing to fight with, and they had 23,000 all around us. So what could we do? So they decided, well, that was it.

38:01 So they made our convoy, our trucks, move on one side of the road – the roads weren’t very wide – and they drove their convoy alongside it. So they had two loads of trucks. And all theirs were loaded with Japanese soldiers. Nine o' clock came and over came their planes and let them go. Down come the bombs, and they bombed their own men as well. I think they got more of their own than they did of us. But I remember, I dived into a little bit of a shallow on the side of the road, with Viv Jackson. And I went crook at him. 38:35 These bombs came so close, one of them landed I suppose about five feet. A string of them. I could hear them coming closer, as they come through. And these ones got louder and louder, in that fraction of a second, and the last one was about five feet away and it went over us. And it got George Bushman, he got it right through the tummy.

39:00 He was on the bank just above us, and he copped it. He died just after. They tied him up with his belt there, the First Aid blokes, but it was hopeless. He was a big man, too. I remember going crook at Viv, because I reckoned he was trying to push me out of the little hollow. But it was the bombs going off. They had a couple of runs, they bombed us, and they were running around with little flags and so forth. No communication,

39:30 between the Japs and their own planes.

But you had officially surrendered…

Yeah, by then we had. So they marched us back to this Oesapa-Besar where we were first stationed, down on the beach. That was to be our prison camp. And that was about two days march away. Still with no food and no water. You couldn’t drink the water. There was dead people in it. Dead Japs and our own blokes in the water.

40:02 And the next day on the way back, because there was Japanese soldiers lined up in their thousands on both sides of the road, we marched along there, pretty down. One of these soldiers, he had found some of our beer. They had issued us with this Ballarat Bertie. It had a little man on the front,

40:30 a blue label, Ballarat Bertie, and I didn’t drink much anyway, and I didn’t like it so I used to give it my mates. Anyway, he had this bottle of Ballarat Bertie, he had knocked the top off it and he was holding it up like that to say, “I’ve got your beer.” And I didn’t hesitate. He was about from here to that door away. I raced over, grabbed that beer and down. I reckon I drank about two thirds.

41:00 It was so unexpected and they started to curse and carry on, yelling out and carrying on. He grabbed it back again and I took off. I got my drink of beer. But I didn’t even think that he could have shot me or stuck a bayonet in me or anything. They got such a surprise that they didn’t even do anything about it.

Tape 5

00:43 You also mentioned off camera some of the grim, some of the shocking realities of war, the boots. Do you want to tell us about that?

Yes, that was at that machine-gun post, where we had just cleaned out…

01:00 Although we lost two men there, and two wounded, and two of us came out with out a scratch. And I walked around the corner again, and I felt something sluggish, like my feet were a bit… Something was wrong, and I looked down and there was a Japanese soldier’s brains on my left boot. Which rather horrified me. But at the time, you don’t realise

01:30 the horror of it until later. But it left this stain on the tan boots, army boots, and it really got to me later, six months later, and I sold them. Because I had no money and I thought, “Well, that would be a bit.” And as I say, it played on my mind a bit, so I got rid of them.

02:05 I might add, when I was so terrified, I think they all was, as we were lined up, that moment was a terrible time when we were lining up for the bayonet charge, but once we started it’s a lot different because you are not in your own mind, really. You just go and everything is different.

02:30 It’s totally different to when you're waiting. When you're waiting, it’s the unknown. And when you get into it, well…It’s like a boxer when he’s dancing in the corner, he doesn’t know what he’s going to strike, but once he gets out there it’s a different thing altogether. But the aftershocks, too, are just as bad. But during it, that is part of the horror. But that’s war.

So you told us that great story how that Jap soldier held up the bottle of…

03:03 Ballarat Bertie…

…and you grabbed it off him. What was that time like? When you realised that that decision had been made and you had come all that way for this?

Well, we were stunned into disbelievement, or…our minds seemed to be blank, really. We were going into the unknown,

03:31 we didn’t know what was going to happen. And as I say, we had been four or five days without food, except for that little tin of bully beef. And I remember on the march back, grabbing a couple of little old dry sweet corn that was growing on the side of the road, and I ate even the hard core, and tried to chew that, get a bit of nourishment out of that. 04:01 But our minds were very nearly blank, of what we had been through, and then the realisation that we were prisoners. So it was a big shock to the system. It took a lot of getting over.

Where did they have you camped, first of all?

Well, they took us back to where I originally started from,

04:30 Oesapa-Besar, down by the beach. And we had to build a wire fence around. At that stage, we had no water. There was only a dirty lagoon there, which was…Most of the chaps that drank it got dysentery and diarrhoea and that out of it, because it was polluted water, until they got latrines dug. Except the latrines were right next to the lagoon.

05:02 Which wasn’t very nice. They had these thunderboxes, as we called them. Luckily we had the beach, the sea, right near us, which we could go in. But the thunderboxes got invaded with maggots. You sat on the box and you got them all over you and you had to race to the water to clean off again.

05:30 As I say, we were lucky the water was there so we could get clean again. But it was not a very nice time. It was pretty disorganised. Then they made us build our own huts, and bunks and all that, out of bamboo. Everything was made out of bamboo and atap, what they called atap, the thin leaves. That was our quarters, then, for six months. As I say, we were mainly unloading their ships.

06:04 We would pilfer what we could and take it back to camp and split up in our section. I know one time there, we were unloading and one of the chaps got onto some of their beer, and the guard caught him. And he was in one of the little shops and the guard caught him, and this chap hit him and knocked him out.

06:32 And of course he went back into the line again. But when lunchtime came, they put a great big tarp in the centre of the town, in the square, where all the crossroads met, in Kupang, and made them tip all their…what they’d pilfered, tip it all out, and that was all right. And they didn’t get belted for it, and that shift went home. And a mate said to me, he said, “I’m going to get rid of mine now.”

07:01 He said, “They’ll take it off us.” I said, “Well, I’m not crossing the bridges until I come to them.” You know, smart. I had a knapsack full of stuff, and I had a little bag of sugar sitting in my shirt pocket, with a few peanuts sitting on top of that. Night time came and they lined us all up in the centre, and they got the guard who was knocked out,

07:30 they got him to pick out the chap that had hit him. And him and a couple of mates had knuckle dusters, and they got stuck into him. And of course our Major Campbell, who was in charge of us, he stood up to the officer and said, “What’s all this about? Stop it!” And the officer said, “Your men have been pilfering our comforts.”

08:07 And Major Campbell said, “My men would not do that.” And the officer whacked him, and he had one of those peaked officer’s caps on and out fell some toothbrushes and toothpaste, so of course he got done over. And of course everyone started to murmur then, everyone started to get riled up, you know, “You can’t hit one of our officers.” And it was a little bit on. Anyway, they had machine-guns on the corners,

08:30 and the officer pulled his revolver out and fired shots over our heads, and then they ordered us to tip out our stuff, you see. And as we were going forward, the guards came through and belted everyone, bash, bash, but I got smart and as they were belting the bloke next to me, I slipped behind him. I got up to the tarp, and at that time Joey Doonan, the ex-boxer bloke I pointed out,

09:00 he had a cast iron pot, he had that full of stuff, and the officer had his revolver at his head. So I tipped all my stuff out and I thought, “This is it, I’m off.” I tipped it all out on the big tarp, and headed back towards the truck. And there was these two guards. One was a little one and one was a big one. They were coming towards me and I was trying to head for the truck. And he must have spotted the little bag on me, and he let out a curse and felt that in there,

09:32 and he whacked me over one way and the other fellow whacked me up, and I took off, and I got back to the truck. But I got back to the camp with my little bag of sugar. So that was that episode of not crossing your bridges until you come to them. My bridges, I think, crashed underneath me. Anyway, that was one of the episodes of what happened. But we used to pilfer what we could. That’s how we lived.

10:00 It wasn’t very eventful, except for unloading these boats, carrying these heavy loads. Their rice bags, they were 100 kilo bags, they were fairly heavy. And we were in fairly good condition then, because we hadn’t struck any hardships. Although I was still getting malaria and that was when I got that dose down at Tarus. Then after about six months orders came through to pick out a group to go to Java, about a hundred men.

10:30 About those six months. What were you guys surviving on? Apart from the pilfered stuff, what were your rations?

They brought rice in. That was about all they did supply, was rice. It was pretty unpolished stuff, it was pretty dirty stuff. Later, our doctors wouldn’t let them wash it because they had grubs and grub nests in them, and if you washed them out,

11:00 you’ve washed all the vitamins out. So when you're eating your rice, you’d see little brown heads looking at you. It’s surprising what you can make out of a bowl of rice. When you’ve been on it for so long, you can think of roast dinners and…you can really imagine a nice roast dinner and roast potatoes…but you come back to the real world, after a while.

11:30 If we could get any sweet corn and that, the hard stuff, we would crush it up, we’d have one of those – you’ve seen those natives pounding the – and we’d make a porridge out of it. If we had a little bit of money, we could buy stuff off the natives, such as what was called ‘goolamalaka’. It was in brown slabs, about that thick and about that long. And it was real sugar, real sweet. It was made out of the tapioca palm.

12:02 They used to tap the…It was a big tapioca, this big black fruit on it like that, and they used to tap into it and get the sap out of the tree. One way they cooked it could be potent, make you drunk. Or it could make them, but we never got to that stage. There was three different processes, and I think the sugar was the last one. It was very sweet.

12:30 Which was quite nice to eat. That helped the rice a bit along. But we could make porridge out of the sweet corn. It was hardened, it wasn’t the soft stuff. We lived reasonably well, I suppose. But it doesn’t matter how well you eat, you're still a captive.

So once a sort of a routine had set in, what was the morale and the spirit like?

13:03 Well, not real bad. We didn’t think it was going to last. We thought, “Oh yes, the Americans will be in and we’ll be released in six months.” But we were sadly mistaken.

And what about your treatment at the hands of the Japanese at that point?

It wasn’t too bad, really. They were frontline soldiers, most of them, and they weren’t too bad, I must say.

13:30 There weren’t too many bashings, there were some. I said that bloke didn’t come back into camp, that he stayed out overnight, and they brought us out on parade, and we didn’t know anything about it. They lined us all up. Each hut had to stand outside their own hut in ranks and so forth. And this Alan Kirkham, the one that was with me when we got that machine-gun, Alan, he was a bit of…His brother was a sergeant, and all spick and span,

14:00 and Alan was the just the opposite. He was a real ragamuffin. He was just the opposite to his brother. And he was down the bottom end of the camp and he came back and saw us all lined up, and he said, “What’s going on here?” And I said, “We don’t know.” “Oh,” he said, “I’ll have a bucketful of this.” So he stepped in line and he got belted for it. Because they came along then and they belted all of us. We all got a belting. “I’ll have a bucketful of this,” he said.

14:30 Well Alan got a bucketful all right. The conditions weren’t too bad; the only thing is we didn’t have our freedom. It was when we moved on further, when we got to Java, they were trigger-happy there, the guards. They would walk around with their finger on the trigger all the time. The guards before them had told them that we were knocking them off.

15:01 And they put the wind up them. Their own guards put the wind up them. But the trip across, that wasn’t too bad either, on the ship. They tried to make an escape, the officer Colonel Leggatt and Jack McAllister. He lives up at Red Hill, Jack.

15:30 And he was a pilot shot down over Timor, after we were taken. We didn’t have any planes there, and a fortnight after we were taken over they came. So anyway, we saw the plane come down. We saw it going over the hill when it was on its way down, and he survived. Anyway, they decided that they wanted to pinch a plane, one of the Lockheeds that were up on the ‘drome. They killed a guard, but they couldn’t get the plane going because the battery was flat.

16:04 Nothing was said about the guard. If they had got away though, I reckon the rest of us would have been slaughtered. They didn’t like that at all.

So there was no retribution for the killing of that guard?

No, no. And I can’t make out why, because they were usually… What I think the reason was that they thought it was from…See, the independents were still loose,

16:33 and they were knocking them off in different places. They would hit and run, which we should have been. We should have had our supplies like they did, and it should have been guerrilla warfare on there. One battalion couldn’t… With a section here, a section there…it was hopeless. The only way you could hold them up a bit was by hit and run, and you had to know the island, you had to know where your supplies were, and all this sort of thing.

17:01 But that was part and parcel of that set up.

How did they manage to escape? Was security not as tight as it might have been later?

It wasn’t very tight for a start. As I said, for a few weeks I’d walk straight out of the camp. It was when that bloke didn’t come back at night, that’s when they tightened up. It was like all our camps. You could walk out there, practically any time, into the jungle. 17:32 But where could you go? Especially a white person in a native country. You would stand out like… Yeah, but that’s the way it was. Nearly everyone had malaria and reoccurrence. I had three different types of malaria. I had ST, MT and BT, whatever they stood for. And I could practically run a slide,

18:00 a positive slide, any time they took a slide I’d have some results. And you worked with it all the time. I reckon I had 80 or 90 – at least – bad attacks. And you would have to go to work with it. And half the time your head was going around. It was very nice.

One or two more questions about Timor. You already had malaria at that point. What sort of medical attention was available there?

18:31 We had our own doctors. We had quinine there. That was good. Quinine helped to knock the fever. And we had a couple of Dutch doctors; they were in the Dutch Army with us. And they were pretty good. But I don’t think our doctors took much notice of them, because with these bad ulcers, our own doctors

19:00 reckoned that was the same germ, or whatever you call it, that you got from syphilis. So they reckoned that these boys had been playing around the girls, these native people, which was pretty rife there. And it wasn’t until a similar thing, but it wasn’t caused by… Because I know Viv, he had bad ulcers, and I know jolly well he didn’t bloody well, he didn’t…

19:30 When we first lobbed on Timor, we were down in Oesapa, and they issued us with condoms, at the time. I never used them. I’m playing innocent, aren’t I? Anyway, this bloke came around wanting to buy them. I had half a dozen in a pack somewhere. He wanted to buy them, and I said, “You can have them. I don’t want money for them.”

20:00 He said, “You better keep a couple.” I said, “I don’t want them. I don’t want anything to do with them.” I just didn’t want to do anything. So he took them, and he was all right. Some of the other fellows, they went out. When they came back, “Oh, they were lovely girls.” Three days later, they had a compound down at the camp. Three days they got caught up…

So what venereal diseases were prevalent?

Oh, syphilis I think, mainly.

20:30 Quite a few of them got it.

So this was in the early stages, when you were setting up?

Yeah, that was before we were taken. When we first got there. They went out on a ran-tan and they got caught. So that was a little side effect. They weren’t as good as they thought they were.

Were you given lectures on the use of the prophylactics and so on?

They gave us lectures in Darwin. They brought an Aboriginal through with gonorrhoea,

21:01 and showed us the effects of… And I tell you what, that frightened the daylights out of me. It hadn’t done before, and that was it. Sex was no part of my life here. And it was just as well, too. It was pretty rife in those places. And in those days, there was no control over it much. And of course the natives… It wasn’t so bad with them.

21:33 It’s in them all the time. It doesn’t affect them. Yet some of them from the other side mix with them, and bang.

So apart from that sort of fraternisation, was there much to do with the locals?

Not a great lot. I had a chap, I called him George. I don’t know what his name was. This was when we were down at Oesapa, when we first got there, and he used to do my washing.

22:01 I used to pay him for it. He was a nice little fellow. Anyway, I had a green pullover, a sleeveless one, and I gave him that. He kept me in bananas; he did my washing until we were taken. Just for that one jumper. He didn’t want any money. That must have been worth a lot of money to him. When we moved back to our second position

22:31 near the aerodrome at Penfui, Captain Murray he was, I think he was in the sigs [signals]. He wanted volunteers to go back to Oesapa to try and find any of the radio equipment. I said to Viv, “Come on.” He said, “Nah, don’t volunteer. You don’t volunteer for anything.” I said, “Somebody’s got to do it, come on.” Away we went, in this little jeep, there was no roads,

23:00 it was all over the open ground, and by that time we thought the Japs were in there. In fact, they had come through, in part of it. But when we got back to the camp – this was a few hours later – the camp had been cleaned. There wasn’t a thing left, no huts, no tents, not a thing left. I reckon the natives came in and cleaned the lot out, they didn’t waste any time. So we didn’t find anything, but we didn’t find any Japs anyway.

23:31 That was my fault. I kept on volunteering, but I kept my mates volunteering, too. They weren’t too happy about that. So in the camp there, how were the Japanese communicating with you? Did they have speakers of English there? Did they have interpreters?

No, we had to by…sort of sign language. Now and again, you would strike a Japanese who could speak English. That was where I lost my watch,

24:01 in the first couple of days. The colonel of the outfit came riding through every morning on this Timorese pony, and I had this watch that had been given to me before I left home, and we're all sitting…This is a couple of days after and we're all pretty wacky, and he looked at my watch and he said, “You, presento.” I said, “Presento, me.” You try to put over a little bit…try to get out of it.

24:32 He said, “You presento, me.” I said, “No, no. Presento, me.” And he pulled out his great long sword and he said, “You presento me.” “All right.” So he got my watch. That watch would have got me a lot of food later, up in Burma, I could have sold it and got quite a few…If you had money, you could buy an egg or a few bananas or things like that. There was a little bit of trade going on.

25:02 And a few of them used to get out at night and trade with the natives. I had nothing to trade. I only had a g-string. When my shirt and my shorts wore out, that was it. As I say, I had no boots; I was barefooted most of the time. It wasn’t too good climbing over sharp rocks. In the heat, you couldn’t stand in the one spot for too long. After a couple of seconds you were hopping up and down like a cat on a hot tin roof.

25:31 But that was the consequences. I must have looked strange. Just a g-string, ribs poking out, bones poking out everywhere, my hair shaved off, they made us shave our hair off, front teeth missing, they knocked them out. I must have looked a sight.

26:00 Looking back…I must have looked funny.

Maybe you can get us to Java?

Yeah, we went from Kupang to Java.

So did you have any idea where you were headed?

26:30 No, we didn’t know. They just piled us on, about 100 of us, all by section. The section I was in, that was about eleven men, and some of the other platoons and that. About 100 of us went in that first lot. The Americans subs were about, too, so they had to island hop. You would hear the motors shut down, and think, 'Hello.' Of course we were jammed down in the hold. And it wasn’t too bad. They were pretty lenient with us going across there

27:03 because it was early days. Yeah, the conditions weren’t too bad. We only had two feeds a day, that wasn’t too bad. It took quite a few days to get to Java. The first port we called into there was Surabaya. There were boats turned upside down, sunken ships everywhere. So anyway, we weren’t there long,

27:30 then they took us on to what they called a 'Bicycle Camp.' It was a clean camp. It was well run. I think it had been a Dutch… The Dutch were in charge of Java then, they had one of their colonies. They had these… I think they were their barracks.

28:03 They had all cubicles, although where I was, we were last in, they only had what looked like an old blacksmith’s shop, a great big old shed. And this Maxie Smith and Jimmy Honey and myself, we had to make up our own bunks. As soon as the bugle went for lights out, you had to be lying on your bunk. If they caught you standing up still, you got belted.

28:30 As I say, they walked around with their finger on the trigger. They were very toey. You couldn’t sit down at all throughout the day. There was nothing to do, we didn’t have any work to do, we were just confined in this camp. We were only in there for a short time, then they moved us into these cubicles. But while we were there, I think it was the second or third night, all we had was candles for a light. And this Maxie was a little bit of a tinsmith.

29:00 And he made up a little pack of cards, and he and Jimmy were squatting down on the floor, with a candle between them, playing cards. This was before lights out. And there was a thunderstorm on, a real dinky-di thunderstorm. I thought, “Ah, the guards won’t be around now.” So I stretched out on my bunk. I don’t know what made me wake up, but I looked up and there’s this… He seemed to be about ten foot high, this guard, with one of those drizabone coats on,

29:31 this great big sou’wester, standing there looking over me. Because every time you saw a guard, you had had to stand to attention and salute. You had to scream out “Schichou” [Attention], which was “attention” or “salute” or whatever, and “Nori” was stand at ease. I schichoud straight away, I got that big a fright, and Maxie and Jim, they got a big fright, too.

30:00 And the guard wanted to know what they were doing, so they showed him what they were doing, “Oh, okay,” and he walked off. Any other time you would have got belted to death with the rifle butt. So that’s what they were like, some of the times. Anyway, we did get shifted into other bunks, better bunks, and that was about the only time I ever saw Red Cross stuff come through, and we got a tin of Hemlock ready rub tobacco

30:31 between twelve men. And nobody wanted to divide it. So silly me, volunteered again. You nearly count the strands of tobacco to make it into twelve lots. And as I say, you weren’t allowed to sit down, so I sat down on this bunk to sort it all out, and the door in the middle was behind me, and the next thing right in the back of the shoulder blades, the sergeant had come in and caught me sitting down, and whack.

31:00 Anyway, I got over that. This funny story…When the Dutch were there they didn’t use toilet paper when they went to the toilet. What they had was a channel running about that wide, and about that deep, and they had cubicles like this, and the channel came underneath the whole lot,

31:30 and they had a big cistern up this end. So every two minutes, they would have it timed; about every two minutes a flush of water would come and take the lot out. But they used to use water to wash their bottoms, they never used toilet paper. We didn’t have toilet paper anyway. We did have toilet paper there, plenty of newspaper. So this bloke said, “I’ll get them Dutchies,” he said. So he piles a great pile of paper down next to the cistern, you see.

32:02 He waited until there was a whole heap of Dutchmen there, squatting over the channels, and just before it was set to go off, he lit it. And you can imagine the screams that went up as the paper went through, alight, because a big flush of water would take it through in a hurry. The bloke cleared off pretty quick.

So there were quite a lot of Dutch there still?

32:30 Yes, there was, because Java was one of their colonies. And they didn’t want to see that knocked around.

So what was the mix? The Dutch, the Aussies. Who else was there?

That was where we first ran into the Dutch. And we ran into the survivors off the [HMAS] Perth. I’m still mates with some of them. There’s not many of them left now. You know the Perth? The cruiser that was sunk

33:00 in Sunda Straits with the [USS] Houston, the American cruiser. We had them with us, we had Dutch, we had Javanese Dutch, in their army, and we had the British as well as us. Incidentally, we knew what those Javanese Dutch were going to do, while they were prisoners. They said, “This war finish, we start another one with the Dutch.”

33:32 And they did, too, that came about. They told us that was going to happen, and it did, it came to pass. Yeah, we had quite a mixture of nationalities. We were there in the Cycle Camp for about a month. That was a clean camp, we didn’t have anything to do, but if you saw a guard even a hundred yards away,

34:00 you had to yell out and salute. It was salute mad. And bash,bash,bash, if they caught you doing the wrong thing. And the food wasn’t too bad. I couldn’t growl about the food, compared to what we were to get later.

And medically, were people suffering more from malaria or dysentery?

Yeah, we were getting more of the malaria at that time. Dysentery not so much…

34:31 We had quite a lot of cases of dysentery and diarrhoea and that with the change of food in the early stages where we were drinking that rotten water. That didn’t do us any good at all. So we did have quite a lot of…We had a lot of wounded and the ulcers had started then. And they were pretty bad, those ulcers.

What chance did those wounded have? Were they being looked after?

35:01 Some survived. I knew one chap, Nobby Hughes, from Tassie. I think Nobby’s still alive….He got a bullet, a bullet went right through his forearm and it was all stiff. The doctor said, “You will never use that again. You will always have a stiff arm.” He said, “Don’t you worry about that.” But by gee, you’d never know…I think they helped him when he come back.

35:30 But he would get a broom and he would force himself to use that arm. Perseverance, and he got over it. We had another chap with us. During that bayonet charge, we had a Bill Harper. He got shot through the jaw here with a machine-gun burst. It shot his jaw off. And Dr Brown said, when they were coming through,

36:02 “Oh, leave him. He won’t last long, I’ll got and find someone else who’s better off.” And old Bill said, “I’ll live to drink more bloody beer than you will!” And he did, too. Poor old Brownie went down on the boat, the doctor, he got sunk on the way to Japan. But Bill got over that. He was still alive two days later, and the orderlies poked a tube down his throat and fed him on coconut juice, so they could get a bit of nourishment into him.

36:31 Anyway, the maggots got into it and cleaned it out. That’s what saved him; they ate all the rotten stuff. He got over that. Of course, he went up to Burma with the rest of us. And he had his leg off, right up here. Colonel Coates, I think he was knighted later…Right up here high. It was the highest one they tackled. They put him out in the hut, where most of them were dying anyway,

37:00 they were expecting him to die. An hour later, Coatesy went out there, and Bill said, “What about a feed, Doc?” And he said, “My man, if you can eat something, I’ll soon scrounge an egg.” And he survived that, and I think he got back home again, too. You couldn’t kill him. He was a tough old man. But this Dr Brown, I believe he was torpedoed…Now this came from an American,

37:30 that was on the way to…He used to come out to our reunions in Tassie. I don’t know whether he’s still alive, he’s probably dead now. But he said he was with Dr Brown when the boat was sunk. He said, “Come on, Doc, get out of there. Save yourself.” He said, “My place is here with the men.” And he told me that himself. His own words, this American. This Dr Brown, he should have got a medal, but there was no-one…who could give him a medal.

38:00 But he decided…This American swore black and blue that this is what happened, and I can only go on what he said. He said, “Come on, Doc, it’s time to get out.” He said, “My place is here with the men.” So there you are. You can’t go any higher than that, can you? But there was no recognition, because you’ve got to have an officer or someone to see these things. So that was Dr Brown. He stuttered. When he was in Darwin, he…Oh, forget that one.

38:37 There’s only a few minutes left, so maybe you can tell us that one before…

I think I can remember it….So we were Java, weren’t we?

A month at Bicycle Camp you said….By this stage, were you with any of the 2/40 fellows or had they all been…

No, there was still this small section of us.

39:01 There would be only about a dozen of us, in that section, in that group. The rest were all split up. You see the next lot, the main lot, I think they were put on…The same boat came back and got them. They were up in Dili, and our planes came over and bombed them. Didn’t do any damage. They bombed Dili or the harbour. And a big part of them went to Sumatra, on this other railway line.

39:30 Some went to Japan from there. Some went way up into Saigon. A big part of them stayed in Java, or went to Sumatra. But we were just this small group. This hundred of us, we got split up again. So you had to make mates, over and over again, because you couldn’t be on your own. If you were on your own, you were gone.

40:02 You’d sort of pal up with someone, or maybe two or three, and you would stick together and help one another. And that’s the way we went. But then you’d get split up again and you’d have to…But some had mates all the way through. They were better off, I suppose, by having their constant mates with them. But that was the way we were, and we had to put up with it. But coming from the country

40:32 I could adapt myself pretty well to making friends and that sort of thing, and sharing. I was always good at sharing. That’s the way it went.

Were your friends generally Aussies or were you able to pal up with guys from other places?

I palled up with others, at different times. I was mainly pals with Australians, but

41:00 I got friendly with Americans. We had one there with us in Java there, and he went with us up to….he was the son of a chieftain, an Indian chieftain, and his name was Snake. He had a flattened nose, a horse had kicked him, and it really flattened his nose. He was a nice fellow, too, Snake. There was quite a few of the Indian tribes there in the American artillery.

41:32 I’d talk to them and make friends amongst them. Not too much with the Dutch. They were a different sort altogether. You see, those colonial Dutch, they were sent out…They were much like the ones in Singapore, the colonial Poms. A lot of them were sent out for the good life. They played up back home and they were sent out there under…

Tape 6

00:32 Tell us that little aside, the doctor in Darwin?

The doctor. Well, this is only hearsay, mind you, and I think it was pretty right. He was caught with a nurse, enjoying himself. They were both enjoying themselves. And when he got caught, they questioned him and he said, “Well, a m-m-man’s got to b-b-bloody well enjoy himself somehow.” There was a bit more to it than that,

01:02 but he did, old Brown, he stuttered.

We were talking earlier about palling up, having to make new friends constantly.

01:33 We were talking about the Dutch, the colonials…

Yeah, they weren’t…Well, they went right through to Burma with us. They caught one of the officers….We’d line up of a morning. It was what they called a ‘pap’. It was boiled rice, boiled and boiled and boiled, until it was just a liquid, a rice liquid. 02:00 You would have two pees and it was gone, that was how much nourishment was in it. Beside that, every time you got your frangetta [?], and you’d have to line up in the camp, and this Dutch officer… Sometimes they’d give us a bit of melon, pig melon we’d called it, like watermelon. There was nothing in it. Anyway, if he could find anything in it,

02:30 “One for you and one for me,” as he went past. He made sure he got plenty. Anyway, one of them caught him doing it and they kicked him out of it. One of the Australians said, “If you don’t stop doing it, we’ll get you anyway.” He didn’t do it anymore, but that is what they were like. One fellow, he was the banker fellow, he said, “I’ve got to get to back to Java.” He said, “Java can’t run without me.”

03:00 The Japs were running it all right then without him. But that was their attitude, though. They didn’t want anything to happen with Java, because they were going to be able to take over again when it was all over. And we knew jolly well that the natives were going to have a go. They said straight out…Not only once, but time and time again, “This war finished? We start another one with the Dutch.” They were fair dinkum, too. But their attitude was,

03:30 they had to live, regardless of who…if their lower ranks died, well, that was too bad. So that’s why we didn’t like them. They were dirty to us. Offal eaters, as we called them. We struck a lot of good ones, mind you. I don’t brand the whole lot of them like that. It sounds awful…But there were a few that made it bad for the rest of them.

04:01 A lot of them were nice people, very nice people. You couldn’t wish for nicer people. But I suppose you strike that with ours, too. There were some very nasty Australians. They would do anything to survive. And you couldn’t blame us, the whole lot, for what a few did. I suppose I was a little bit out of line saying most…

04:30 Most of them on the whole were pretty good. We used to try and talk their lingo. They’d teach us how to speak Dutch. In the end, we would be speaking a bit of Dutch, a bit of English, a bit of Japanese and whatever. It was a real mixture of words, and we could understand each other. Then of course the Americans, we had the Texans with their drawl.

05:00 Mainly the Texans were from the artillery. And then the hands going, too. It was a real mixture….There was a few of the Poms like that, too. The old school type, in Singapore. They still wanted to carry on the same way as before the war.

05:36 But you know what the Aussies are like. They can’t stand pomp and all that sort of thing.

Did you see the Dutch, the Yanks, the Aussies…Were they dealing with the hardships in different ways?

Yes. Our sense of humour carried us through,

06:00 and it carried them through a lot. They used to like to get with us, because when things used to get really bad, our spirits would come forward. Our morale would lift. And we’d start singing or whistling, someone would say something silly, crack a joke, and everyone would start roaring laughing. And of course even the guards were dumbfounded. They couldn’t make out why we were laughing. What were we singing about? But this was it.

06:30 Someone would always crack a joke or start singing, and all this sort of thing. Really, the tougher things got, the more they would come to the fore. Well, the other countries, sort of, couldn’t do that, but they would join in with us. That’s why they liked to come and join in our work parties. Because the more we sang and joked,

07:00 the better the morale. So it did rub off on them. And the English…You can understand it, coming from a cold country like they did, their hygiene was nothing like ours. See, we came from a hot country, and our doctors made us…We weren’t allowed to have any food put in our Dixie, unless we put in the boiling water first. We wouldn’t get served unless we dipped it in the boiling water. But the others didn’t worry about that, and they lost them in droves.

07:31 The hygiene wasn’t up to…But they weren’t used to the hot climates, and the diseases, cholera and all that sort of thing. It wiped out some camps altogether, mainly through the lack of hygiene. Whereas we didn’t suffer too bad. We did have one there in the hut that I was in, went down with cholera, and they isolated us. We had to all move out.

08:00 We had to go and build another hut out in the jungle.

After the Bicycle Camp, where were you taken to next?

To Singapore. We went from Java. They fitted out this boat with a double deck, in the hold. So it meant you couldn’t stand up straight in the hold, because they had men in the top deck and the bottom deck.

08:32 By that time, there was a lot of dysentery about and ulcers and that, through lack of medication. There was no medication, it was very poor. And the food was getting…We weren’t getting the really nourishing food that we needed to combat all that sort of thing. We went over the Equator jammed in these holds. And it was pretty sweaty and smelly.

09:00 My feet would be dangling over someone else’s shoulders. You were just entangled everywhere. But it was a pretty long trip, too, to Singapore. They had to keep stopping because of the submarines. I forget how many days it took, but as I say, we went over the Equator. But we didn’t strike King Neptune on the way. You know how they usually have a party or something? We had no party.

09:30 We finally got to Singapore, and we to the Selerang Barracks. It was a concrete building, three stories high. I think Changi Prison was next to us. We missed the train again…

That was the train to Kuala Lumpur…

Yeah, we went on that one, too.

10:00 We were in these barracks, cold concrete. On the way over, I developed a nasty dose of tinea, around the private parts. And believe me; if you’ve had tinea around there, you know what it is. It was weeping…and it would weep and the cracks would start bleeding.

10:31 You couldn’t scratch it, but you couldn’t quite keep your hands away from it, it was so terrible. Anyway, when we got to Singapore, the First Aid bloke was up on the third storey. He said, “Come up, I’ll fix it for you.” So I went up and he painted on this liquid stuff. He said, “It will go icy-cold for about thirty seconds.” I said, “Oh yeah? Well, that will be better than the nasty itch.” Because you couldn’t sleep with it or anything…

11:04 After about thirty seconds it got hot, then it got hotter and hotter and I don’t think I touched one of the stairs on the way down. He said, “Come back tomorrow.” I haven’t seen him from that day to this. But it did clear it up. It was hot, it was burning. I just about flew down those stairs. But I think it killed it all. It disappeared on the way up to Burma.

11:31 I don’t know whether it was the salt water, or a combination of the acid he put onto it. I think it was nitric acid, battery acid. Some were worse than me, though. Some had it all over their bodies. What they called the ringworm tinea, it was shocking. And there wasn’t much…they couldn’t do much about it. Anyway, we were over in Singapore. When we went there…

12:04 It was a good camp to me, because we had Sikh guards…The Sikhs, they turned turtle and went with the Japanese, and they were our guards inside the camp. All around the camp, inside the camp, were Sikh guards. They went over, but the Ghurkhas didn’t, they wouldn’t. So they gave them a pretty hard time, until it was over and then the Ghurkhas that came into the camp,

12:30 they got revenge. They knocked a lot of the Ghurkhas off, because they wouldn’t bow to the Japs at all. But the Sikhs did, they went for the easy way out. They did during the fighting, too, I believe. Our blokes were coming down through Malaya and they were falling back, and our blokes got surrounded, the Japs came around behind them and put them in a bad position.

13:01 I think their English officers got knocked out, and without an officer they weren’t any good. But with an officer, they were all right. But once they were gone…They had no leaders, and without a leader apparently…this is only hearsay. And that’s what happened. But when we went in there, they had vegetable gardens outside the camp. They had trucks there to go out on,

13:30 to bring the veggies in. It was only a steering wheel. I don’t think they had brakes on them, or a foot pedal, it was all man power, and coming down hills there was no way of stopping the truck. But we used to get back to camp with all these veggies on. And the food was pretty good. It was reasonably good. And it was only the guards that were a bit nasty. As I say, we went out on these working parties to the gardens. I was there for about three months. And the Christmas…

14:00 I was there for Christmas, '43, and they even had chilled lamb, that had been there for years in the cool stores that the English had. In fact, I saw them carrying these snow white lambs across to the cookhouse on Christmas Day. That was my group, that I was with. I don’t know about any other group that had tougher times or what.

14:30 But that’s how I saw it, and that’s how I remember it. It was one of the good camps. We were there for three months, and then we were sent to this lovely place of relaxation, as they called it, by train. And we were shut in these steel carriages all the way up through Malaya. We called in at Kuala Lumpur, K.L. as they called it, on the way up to Penang.

15:00 I forget how many days it took us to get up there…We were there three months, nothing startling happened.

I guess Singapore was a big town, did you see much of the local community, what was going on?

No, we only marched in and marched out again. And that’s all we saw of it. [Hotel] Raffles wasn’t like it is today.

15:30 We went past Raffles as we went in and I think on the way out again. We didn’t see anything…You see, they had the working parties down on the wharf. But I never ever went on one, so I don’t know how others fared in Singapore, I’m just talking about how I fared in my group. I can only speak of what I ran into and what my visions were of the place. To me, it was all right.

16:00 So it was mainly these Sikh guards at that point, was it?

Yeah, they were a bit nasty, because they had to prove themselves to the Japs, that they could look after us. So they were a bit cocky and used to hand out a few bashings. On the whole it wasn’t bad, from my point of view, from where I was.

16:30 Then we headed north onto this “lovely camp” as they called it. We were going to enjoy things up there, plenty of food and all that sort of thing. We got to Penang, and they took us out from Penang and loaded us onto a ship. Two ships. A gunboat. We loaded it all up….

17:00 On the other ship there was a lot of Dutch, and quite a few Japanese and a lot of equipment. I was in the second ship, I was in the stern hold, and it was nearly all Australians and Americans and Dutch and English, all that mixture from Java, we all went over there together. And they loaded us onboard, I think it was the Toyohasi Maru, at that time, I think it had come up from Timor then. By that time it was a rusty old bucket.

17:31 And conditions were pretty crook on that. It wasn’t very nice. They could only feed us a cup of rice twice a day, I think, and that was about it. Conditions weren’t too good. The only toilet they had on board, you had to go…They only let you up in groups of say half a dozen men, or twelve men and you had to hang over the side.

18:04 If the waves were high and the sharks were jumping, it was bad luck. As I say, I was in the stern hold and away we went. We were a few days out…Within a day or two days from Moulmein. It was the 15th of January. It must have been a day out from Moulmein, because we landed there on the 16th of January.

18:34 Anyway, it was my turn up on deck this day. And you hung around as long as you could, because it was pretty putrid down in the holds with everyone. There was no room to stretch or lay about. A lot had dysentery at that time, they were pretty crook, a lot of them. As I say I was up on deck for the toilet. If you wanted to go or not,

19:00 you made out that you did. I was sort of lazing around there, hoping I could stay longer. The next thing I heard this drone, and over came three aeroplanes. Big fellows, [B-17 Flying] Fortresses or [B-24] Liberators. Four engine planes they were, and a…Catalina, flying boat, came over.

19:30 It was the one that spotted us and these two bombers came over. Well, they came over. While I was there they let their bombs go and they sunk the first boat. The bombs must have gone straight down the hold and sunk it. I watched the thing go down. You could see the old propeller as she went down. It was so quick. By that time, a lot of the chaps in the hold were trying to get up the ladder. It was only a little narrow thing coming up out of the hold.

20:01 Of course, the Japs had set up their machine-guns so no-one could take over. And the Perth blokes were going to try and take over the boat, the little gunboat, but that cleared. If they had of got the gunboat, the first blokes were there with mirrors to…And some of them had got friendly with the engine crew, the Perth blokes, they went down in the engine room to learn how it was run.

20:30 And they were going to take over, only for that little gunboat. You see, we couldn’t do any…If that had gone, we would have been safe. They could have flashed the message to the planes. We were only a couple of days from…India, or within range of protection. That didn’t happen. The little gunboat cleared off. And I thought, “Gee, my water bottle is down there and that boat is sunk, they're going to have a go at us for sure.” And I looked like going over the side with no water.

21:02 That was my biggest worry, my water bottle. So I’m trying to get down this ladder to get to a water bottle, and they were trying to push up, which they couldn’t do because they had the machine-guns on them. Anyway, I finally got down the ladder, weaving my way through to where my water bottle was, and these chaps, with a captain…I think it was 500,

21:30 they didn’t know what was going on. They were down below. He said, “I’ll go alone.” And somebody else besides me says, “Like hell you will, you’ll go with the rest of us.” He came down because he knew we were going to get bombed. I got to my water bottle and somebody had snitched the water. It was empty; it was useless coming down anyway. It was just as well, because those who that had stayed up,

22:00 quite a few of them were killed, because they came back and had two goes at us. And the bombs went off either side of…they straddled the ship and lifted her up out of the water. All the upper decks were shot to pieces. And these blokes, one of them was from the Perth…he was killed, he was wounded and he died later.

22:30 But quite a few of them were killed…To top it off, they had a little gun out on the stern, right next to our hold, and they fired a shot and knocked out their own mast with the gun. And of course the explosions from the bombs set their magazine alight, and their shells were going off right above us. They were coming in and spinning around the hold, bits of shrap.

23:04 So we was in a bit of bother. But I think the ship sank later as it was coming out of port. They got us into Moulmein, and there we were put into jail. In fact, I got a jarred stomach out of it, because lying on the steel deck and the sudden crunch of the bombs going off…I had to sneak around on my tiptoes for about a fortnight, it wasn’t very nice.

23:30 So when you were talking about the guys from the Perth, trying to send like a Morse signal to the Catalina. Was that the idea?

Yeah. They didn’t know it was prisoners. They would have known then and probably sent escorts to take us back to India. We might have got back…

24:00 But we couldn’t, because of the little gunboat. See, that was still free. We couldn’t do anything about it.

And the other ship that went down, were there POWs on that ship?

Yeah, a lot of Dutch. A lot of them were drowned. A big amount was drowned.

So did the Toyohasi Maru pick up survivors?

Yeah, I will give him that. He stopped until he could pick up everyone that he could find.

24:30 We had a little Pom, an ex-navy bloke on the ship with us. When the ship was stopped, you see, and there was all the Japs and Dutch in the water, he dived over and made out he was saving the Japs, but he was pushing them down and standing on them in the water. He got a few. He made out he was saving them, but he wasn’t. He was disposing of them. But no-one knew what was going on, you see.

25:01 It was every man for himself. He picked up quite a few. I will give him that, the captain stopped and waited. He could have kept going, because it was mainly prisoners in the water, there was quite a few Japanese. But life to them didn’t mean much at all. They could lose 1,000 men and it didn’t worry them. They had plenty of back-up. That was our sea journey.

So did you work out who nicked your water?

25:31 No.

What would have happened if you found out who it was?

I don’t know. I probably wouldn’t have done much to him. It was sort of one of those things. I might have whacked him one. I don’t think I would have done anything drastic. It might have been two or three who had a go at it.

26:00 But it was empty. I didn’t have time to get angry. You could see the bombs coming down at the ship, through the holes. You could see them when they left the planes and stringing off on their way down. It wasn’t very nice. And then the crunch as they went off against the steel sides. They put holes in the sides of the boats. You could see through them out to the water,

26:30 above the water line. That was a trip. I didn’t want any more sea trips.

When you were in the hold and you had these men with dysentery and ill, how do you maintain your own personal hygiene? How do you look after yourself?

Well, you couldn’t really. You tried hard as best you could to keep clean, and wash your hands. I will say this much,

27:00 with a lot of the times on the railway line, when things were really tough, especially in the hot weather….When we first started it was really cold and chilly in the morning, and we would get out right on daylight, and nothing on except a little bit of a cloth and bare feet. And you’d go out there and it was cold.

27:30 Then within about two or three hours it would be that hot that you wouldn’t be able to stand it. It was like a ball of fire had come up. And all day out in that and toiling away, they’d stand over you at that time. You got belted if you slackened off at all. When you got back to camp, if you could get…There were no buckets, but we used to get bamboo, big pieces of bamboo,

28:00 and if you could get near the water, it seemed to wash away a lot of the strain and the stresses of the day, being clean, getting the sweat off you. And that seemed to wash away a lot of tension, too. But we couldn’t always get water. I know at that that first camp, the 18 Kilo, the only water they had there was a big spring, backed by big rocks. It was a fairly deep spring.

28:36 But they made the elephants go in first, the Japs, to wash them all off. And of course they’d excrete in there, and that would be all churned up, and that was all the water we had to wash in. It was not a very nice bath. But that’s how they were. The elephants had to go in first. We couldn’t go in until the elephants had messed it all up.

29:04 They weren’t all like that. Some camps we had running water. At 100 Kilo, we had it running through our camps, and in the wet season it was like a torrent running through. You got off your bunk, we had three tiers of bamboo slats, for bunks, and I happened to be on the top bunk, and you’d climb over someone, nearly put your foot on their head to get up to your bunk, well when you got off you were standing in mud. 29:30 Well, when you got up to your bunk again, you had to try and get the mud off your legs and feet and that, so you wouldn’t put it over everyone else. Everyone would go crook if you dropped a bit of mud on them. We had plenty of water there. Too much.

You’ve got us to Moulmein. What happened there?

We were there for about a fortnight, in the jail.

30:00 It was pretty rough, because we were pretty shook up. And they wouldn’t let them bury our chaps that were killed, by the bombing, because they had a headless…One of the chaps got his head blown off and it must have gone overboard, because they wouldn’t let them bury them because there was a part missing. The Japs wouldn’t bury them unless it was whole.

30:32 They had to have the head with it, I don’t know why. But they held them up for a day or two, and of course the only place they could bury them was in the jail grounds and it was as hard as rock. And the blokes had a terrible job trying to dig a hole. But I think they finally laid them to rest. I think the nuns helped them a lot, those that were digging the grave.

31:01 I think they helped them with food and water, with water anyway. We were still in a lot of shock at that place. Then we moved out to the 18 Kilo. That’s where we started from.

When you were at Moulmein, did you have any idea where you would be heading and what sort of work you would be doing?

No, none at all. We didn’t know what was in front of us.

31:30 Did you manage to somehow get any news outside of your situation, what was happening in the islands, in the war?

No. They had radios, but they wouldn’t let everyone know what was going on, because it caused… Maybe someone would speak in front of a guard. So they had to keep it very quiet. All we got was the furphies [rumours], what we called the furphies. And we got that many of them, that the war was over, that the Americans were coming,

32:00 all this sort of thing, that we never got our hopes up at all, because we got that disappointed so many times. Someone would start a furphy and away they would go. But they did get news through at different times for certain people, but not for the general troops, because as I say, they had to have their radios planted, in bits of bamboo and all sorts of things, so the Japs wouldn’t find them.

32:34 If you were caught with one, you were shot. So they had to keep it pretty quiet. The officers, I think, would have known quite a bit of what was going on. But then they split the officers up from us, and we didn’t have anything over a warrant officer over us. That was the highest. They put all the officers

33:01 on their own. So we didn’t get much news at all.

So if they split up other ranks from the officers, how did you maintain order within your particular groups.

We had what they called a kumi. It was about thirty men…

33:30 We did have officers up on the line, on the Burma. It was after that, that’s right. We had a captain and a lieutenant with us, in charge of a kumi, up in Burma. Yeah, it was after the railway line was through that they split all the officers up. We had a Captain Wilson and a Lieutenant Schofield,

34:00 they were my two officers. One would go out with the work party one week, while the other stayed home and probably had camp duties. The next week, the other officer would go out and he would stay home. He was the go-between between the Jap engineers or guards and us.

34:30 He used to be the go-between, to try and save us from beltings. It didn’t always work. He probably got belted after. They didn’t go for them so much as they did go for us. We were a bit lucky, I suppose, having the officers there. Discipline wasn’t harsh because things were too harsh without it, but most of the men responded to their own responsibilities.

35:00 In as much as they… We didn’t have to salute officers and keep up that tradition. We had to do that with the Japs, so they reckoned that it was… Except the English in Singapore, they wanted a salute from everyone. A few of ours got into trouble for not saluting the Poms. But they tried to keep up the old tradition.

35:37 So how did they get you from Moulmein up to the 18 Kilo?

By trucks. And they kept the supply up for a while, the food supply. Up to about the 35 or 40 Kilo, then it was fine weather and they could get up.

36:02 But then when the wet season came in, the trucks couldn’t get through. There were no roads and it was all bogged down. And then it all had to be carted by different sections. One section would cart it to one camp, until they got it right up to the end. And they did the same from the other side. Which is pretty hard work. And the Japs didn’t have any supplies either. What supplies did come up, they took

36:30 the best part of it, and left us with what was left. And mind you, they had their comfort girls up there in all that bad weather. This is what the Korean girls are going crook about now. They were slaves, like commissioned into their comfort girls. We used to rub our hands together, because one week it would be the engineers’ turn, where the comfort girls would come up.

37:00 And the next week it would be the guard, the Korean guard, and they used to have a box on now and again between the guards and the engineers. So we would rub our hands with glee, “Carry on, box on.” They took them right up into the worst part of it. And I pitied those girls. They had to do it. They were made like slaves and they had to do it. It wasn’t very nice for them there.

37:32 Not very nice at all. It was bad enough for us, but I reckoned it was worse for them. But this was how the food was, you see, because they couldn’t get the food up to us. No medication, none at all. I know one there…No, before the 100 Kilo, we were driving through a cutting, of solid rock, and my experience back home,

38:05 drilling holes with the hammer and tap…Because I was on it there, too, on this cutting. And I got a bit of steel, a little fine piece of steel in there. It just went in there. Within about four hours I couldn’t put my foot to the ground, and it all swelled up, it was poison. A great poison foot, swelled up. I couldn’t get out to work, so they kept me in camp.

38:36 And the only thing they had to treat it with was hot salty water. Within a fortnight I was back in work again. With anyone else, it would have turned into a great ulcer and lost the leg and probably died. There it was. Just hot salty water. So I’m a believer in hot salty water. It was massive. I couldn’t get near it,

39:00 but it just took it down, and took the poison out. Everything went bad so quick. I had little ulcers in the toes, because having no boots on, you’d get scars and that. I was so lucky. Blokes all around me got these ulcers. The 100 Kilo Camp, not one man lived that had his leg off. There was quite a few who had amputations,

39:30 and they all died of poisoning. We lost our doctor there, the doctor off the Houston, and he died of…I think it was cholera. And he gave the symptoms right up until he went unconscious, until he went into a coma. So that left us without a doctor, for quite some time. But they couldn’t do much really, anyway, because we had no medication.

40:02 But they shifted us back. They jumped us over one camp and then they’d sometimes bring us back, it depended how the work was going. We had to walk all the way there because there was no trucks. We had to walk all night, and you had to keep close formation. If you strayed a bit, they’d line you up because they reckoned you were trying to escape.

40:30 It was not very nice. We were there for several months until we finished the railway.

So we’ll just take you back to 18 Kilo. Do you remember what you thought when they told you this was the work that you would be doing? That there was this massive railway line…

They didn’t really tell us what it was about, just that there was this railway line. So we didn’t take much notice of what…

41:00 There we were mainly filling in cuttings. Filling in, not building bridges, and making the ramps to go over and then they’d put the bridge in. We’d have to, say, a square metre per person per day, we’d have to dig that out and carry that up to where the filling was wanted. That metre a day got into about two metres a day, per man,

41:32 because what happened was they would only feed on what went out to work. Say 500 men went out to work, and there might be 500 men incapable of going out, they would only give you enough food for 500. So we had to split that food up between the whole lot. It wasn’t fair that they should starve to death, and just the workers get the food. So it was split up like that, but you still had to do the same amount of work. That wasn’t taken into consideration…

Tape 7

00:41 The importance of mateship?

Well, being a loner, you would nine times out of ten die, because

01:00 you needed a mate. If you weren’t well, he could go and get your ration of rice. If you were on your own, you wouldn’t be able to do it. And you could give each other moral support. You could go anywhere and meet an ex-POW, it doesn’t matter who he was, even if you’ve never met him before, you were mates straightaway,

01:30 because he knows where you’ve been and what you went through. It’s a great thing, I think, having… We were a bit unlucky in a way, that we were split up. That we had to make friends quite frequently in different camps. And this goes back to earlier, when I mentioned about the 40th, when I first came over to Timor,

02:00 and you weren’t one of the originals. Even up in the 100 Kilo, we had about half a dozen of my group, but I still wasn’t really one of them. Maxie, in fact, worked in the kitchen, which was a good job, and two or three of them worked in the kitchen, but I was still on the outer, sort of thing. I was still friends with them, but not complete, like they were.

02:31 So I had to make my own friends, which I did. Mainly my age, in my age group, which was easy. They were about four or five years older than me, which in those days was a fair difference. Because going through the Depression, too, they were used to knocking about more than I was, I was only a young…

03:00 During the Depression, it didn’t worry me too much because I was only a youngster and I always had a full tummy. No money, but plenty to eat. And these others, they didn’t. They had to go out looking for work. They were a few years older, and this is why, I think, there was the difference between having the older ones as mates and being on the same footing.

03:30 They still treated us as one of the young ‘uns.

Can you give some idea of who was with you of the original people by the time you got to Burma? Who had been with you most of the way through the camp?

None that I joined up were with me,

04:01 we all got split up. Some went to Thailand, they both died up in Thailand. We were split up. So I only had those who were in the section I was in. There was quite a few of them. There was Paddy, there was Maxie, Freddie Sennier, Jim Honey, Ronnie Black… six or seven I suppose there would have been, who I was with in Timor.

04:31 They were in different jobs than I was in. Three of them had jobs in the kitchens. Which was a pretty good job, then. You sort of drifted apart in a lot of ways. So I had to make up my own friends. I was quite friendly with them, but real bosom pals,

05:02 put it that way, being a lot younger. I think that was the main thing. They had been together in the first place, and I hadn’t. So I just sort of came along later. As I said before, I think you will find that in a lot of groups, that that happens. Whereas as those that come later are not quite as accepted as much as the original foundation members.

05:33 I know I had in the Lions Club. We had one chap, he was going to resign many times because he reckoned he wasn’t an original. And TPIs [Totally and Permanently Incapacitated] Club, the same thing. Our president one time said, “I don’t think I’m accepted because I wasn’t one of the first members.” I said, “Well, I wasn’t either.” I was president for four years, and I was pretty well accepted there.

06:03 But in a lot of cases that is the case. They're not quite accepted like the old foundation members. And that went right through the war years, too, I think. See, a lot of those went up cane cutting the Depression, they went all over the country. They were more…

06:30 world wise than I was, because I had never left home before. Most of the other chaps were the same, they had never been away from home. That made a big difference because the others had.

I’d like to get it back into the context of the war years, and Burma.

07:02 The camp there, the first camp that you were at, the 18 Kilo. I know you’ve already talked a bit about that, but we’ll pick the story up…

About the mateship there, and all that sort of thing? Yeah, well, it’s a bit…See, a lot of…

07:30 What would you say? It was sort of stick to your own age, like they do even now, nowadays. I suppose it was much my fault as the others. I would look to someone my own age, 19 or 20, against someone who was 25 or 26. As I say, they had been around longer than I and had pretty tough times during the Depression.

08:00 Whereas I hadn’t. And the same with the rest of my crew, they hadn’t felt the full brunt of the Depression.

So who were you working with on a day to day basis in Burma?

Well, different ones, actually. In a kumi of, say, thirty men, in that thirty men you would be broken up into groups of, say, three tens.

08:30 Three lots of ten. So one day you might be working with Joe Blow, and the next with Charlie… Different ones each time. So you couldn’t really stick together with each one, too much. Unless, as you say, you were working in the kitchens then yes, you were there all the time with the same people. But out there… Some days two or three might be sick, they couldn’t make it out on the work party, so you were with somebody else. 09:01 So you weren’t really grouped into a certain group all the time. You had to go where you were told. As the line progressed, these sick blokes, they would put a blitz on them. The main party would go out, and then they might want another 50 or 100 men, so they would bring all the sick parade out

09:31 and go through them, and send them out, too. So you would be split up anyway. It was only when you were back in camp that you had your real mates to stick together with. You probably had your bunks one after another, close together. And that was where you sort of looked after each other. But out on the job, you could be with anyone.

10:00 You might be detailed to go out cutting the piles out of the jungle for the bridges. This is where I had my back go on me for the first time, because I was six foot three and you’d go with a group or eight or ten, carrying a big pole, that has just been cut down, and you might have two or three chaps in your group about five foot six tall.

10:33 And when they go down a little bit of a hollow, because it was all in the jungle, what happens? I get caught carrying the load. Of course, I had my back put out very badly then. I nearly got killed over it, because I couldn’t straighten up. Those on the bridge said,

11:00 “Look, you stay down the bottom in the water, and you make out you're lifting the off cuts,” that they cut off the pile. Make out you were working. You had to make out you were working. But prior to that, we had a young guard with us, we called him the Boy Soldier, and he tried to hurry us up, and we reneged on him. Because we knew he couldn’t go back and tell his own guards

11:30 what we were doing. Because they would get into him then for letting us stand over him. We told him we would cut his throat if he didn’t shut up. Not so pleasant words as that. He kept on, “Speedo, speedo.” “We’ll cut your throat.” Finally we got back to the bridge work, but as I said, he couldn’t do much about it because if he had

12:00 paid out on us, then his own guards would have got into him because he was one of the lowest on the rank. It was only a little bit later when my back went on me that I was down there and he happened to be guard on the bridge part. This day, I was trying to lift an off cut and my back was that bad, and I got it halfway up and it went back into the mud and splashed him.

12:30 And of course he went berserk. He wasn’t in front of his own guards, then, he could do what he wanted to. He got stuck into me with a lot of wood. He knocked me out into the mud, and my own mates grabbed me and pulled me out of it. But it didn’t do my head any good. That was a bit of payback. But I asked for a lot myself. I did get into a lot of trouble at times, but I did ask for a lot of it. I was cantankerous and I tried to get my own back on them,

13:02 to boost my own morale a bit. Without saluting them or something like that, and I’d get belted for it. I would turn away from them. All that sort of thing…

So you were defiant?

Yes, I was, to a certain extent.

Were you ever really angry?

Oh yes, yes. Very, very angry. This is going on a bit further, after the railway was through.

13:30 We went up to Penfui for another wet season, come back and we went out to this…three pagodas on a hill, can’t remember the name of the place. We were building an apron for an aerodrome with bricks. And they were very strict on us. And we were in these kumis of thirty. We had a sergeant off the Perth with us.

14:00 Nice fellow, he was all tattooed. We had another boy soldier, as our guard. If you wanted to go to the toilet, you had to go and salute your guard. “Benjo,” was toilet. “Benjo Nippo.” Okay, you just went in off the perimeter. And then when you came back you had to salute, “Benjo, finished.”

14:30 This particular day, the day before one of the big guards had shot a native who was prowling around the perimeter. He was trying to do a bit of trading, you see, with us. And he shot him. So he was in the next kumi. So I thought, “Well, my boy soldier is not very dangerous. And he’s just shot a bloke, so I will go and make sure he will not shoot.” So I go and salute him, and trot off. My bloke is sitting down there, I just walked past him, I ignored him,

15:02 and when I came out again I walked past him, I was going to get the okay off the other guard. And he let out a yell and a “Kura!” and I thought, “I’m in for it.” Anyway, he couldn’t reach my chin, he was too small. So he got his bayonet out and made me get down into a hollow, then he got stuck into me. I was that wild I just about brought the skin off my palm. The other fellow was standing there with a grin on his face with his finger on the trigger.

15:30 If I had let go, he would have shot me. I was really wild. But to make it worse, my own mates thought it was a great joke. Making me get down into a hollow so he could reach me. It didn’t hurt. I didn’t feel. I was that uptight that I didn’t feel the punches at all. But he was really swinging.

He just beat you with his fists? Yeah. He put his rifle down so he could left and right, left and right.

16:01 But he vented his spleen out on me. And I went back and they reckoned it was a great joke. I see the funny side of it now, but I didn’t then. A lot of that went on.

What did you say to the fellows when you got the chance?

I went crook at them. I was nearly howling with rage, I was that wild. I was humiliated. That’s the word. Humiliation was one of the bad things with it, too.

16:32 It was so humiliating to have to bow and scrape and all that. It was really humiliating, all the way through, and it bugged us so much. We had to bow and scrape and I still don’t like that. We’d bring it on ourselves a lot.

17:03 Driving these piles for the bridges, they’d have to put it up in a frame, we’d have to build the framework. We had four poles, all wired together, twitched with wire, maybe 50 feet high, and they’d put the pile up through it, into the centre, and then have a big long steel rod on top of that with a big iron monkey.

17:31 And on the top of the frame there would be a pulley. We had ropes coming each side of it, and on the end of each rope there was like a cat o' nine tails, another lot of ropes, so you’d put a person on the end of each rope. This big steel block, it was heavy, and we’d pull it up and then that would be the pile driver. We used to sing a tune to it.

18:02 What we started with was, “Itchy knees and savvv,”[Ichi, ni, san, shi] that was one, two, three, four. So after we got sick of that we’d sing, “You little yellow bastards! You little yellow bastards!” Until someone put them wise to what we were saying. Then we’d all get done over. But it was worth it.

18:30 We’d vent our spleen out with words like that.

Who in the group would have dobbed you in?

Now and again you would find someone who would do it for a smoke. He’d get with the Japs and get chummy with them, and they’d want to know what it meant, and he’d tell them. “Give me a smoke and I’ll tell you.” Now and again, not that often. But it did happen. And of course

19:00 going to work and that, we’d pull the same stunt. Going to work you would be pretty down hearted, and one guard would be going along beside you, “Nippon, okay?” “Nippon okay…you little yellow bastard.”

19:31 You’d say that, “Nippon okay?” But they pipped out what else I’d say. They’d want the actual words you’d say, but you’d pip it out. And we’d say that to them. And now and again you would strike one that could speak English. “What did you say?” But you’d say, “Nippon, Boom! Boom! Sydney.” “Sydney finished.”

20:00 “Nippon Boom! Boom! Melbourne?” “Nippon Boom! Boom! Melbourne. Melbourne finished.” “Nippon Boom! Boom! Bulldust?” “Yeah, Nippon Boom! Boom! Bulldust.” It would sort of make our day, when you could carry on whatever you said.

How did they feel about you talking to each other in English?

All right, yeah.

You were allowed to have conversations?

20:31 Yeah, but we had to talk to them. We had to count in Japanese, when we were counting off. We had to say any information in Japanese. This one place, specially in the 100 Kilo, our huts were a couple of hundred feet long. And they had fires either end, and one in the middle, that was to keep the tigers away. There were Bengal tigers up there. I saw one, when I was up at Hindato,

21:01 jumping through the grass, and they were dead scared of them. They guards would come round and we’d have to have one of our guards on duty every hour and we’d change them. And he’d come through. And there might be half a dozen in the toilet, you’d have to speak in Japanese how many were in the…

21:30 [speaks in Japanese] 100 men, and some benjo, maybe six. You had to say how many was at benjo and how many were in the hut. The easiest way

22:00 to remember that was [Phonetically]”Fishbones” and “there goes Harry Mason. So this night the chap was on duty, the guard came along and saluted him and he couldn’t remember the words in Japanese, so he said, “Fishbones, there goes Harry Mason.” The guard said, “What did you say?” And he got belted, but we couldn’t help laughing, it sounded so funny.

22:41 In the bad times as well as the good, we had a bit of fun and the good times would boost our morale a bit. But things were very, very… It was like a black tunnel, we can laugh about it now, but it was so depressing, this dark tunnel and there was no light at the end of it.

23:00 We had no news. Day after day we lived on our nerves. We didn’t know whether we would be alive tomorrow, or the next day or the next day. Because they shoot you for nothing, or belt you for nothing, so we were living on our nerves day by day. This was the darker side of it. I mean, I can laugh about it now, but it was very depressing and very humiliating. Chaps with dysentery

23:31 and these horrible ulcers and there was nothing they could do. It must have been worse for the doctors because they couldn’t do a thing about it. They used to scrape those ulcers out with a sharpened silver spoon, scrape the rotting flesh out, and they had to hold some down. You can imagine how painful it was. Luckily I didn’t suffer that. And as I say, I was luckier than a lot.

24:02 Were they given any supplies, the doctors?

No. Now and again, I saw one, Jack Whitty I think his name was, he was a fairly old orderly, he sold his watch and he brought this… The Japs had some supplies in their own camp, some medical supplies, because they didn’t carry a doctor either, but they did carry some medical supplies. And he sold his watch to get some of this…

24:30 what they called “gold dust”, which was iodoform, and that helped to cure ulcers. He sold his watch to buy medication for these fellows, where he could have bought food for himself. But he sacrificed the watch to help these sick fellows.

25:00 He deserved a medal for it. He could have survived. I don’t know whether he survived or not. Another case, I was telling you about the officers, one would go out one week and one would be in camp and they would put on a blitz with the sick blokes, this was at the 100 Kilo Camp. I happened to be on the sick parade, and I had to go out on work of course, and one of the officers had to go out. I know the captain was ill,

25:30 but the other one had already been out that week, so the captain pulled a sergeant out of the ranks. Sergeant Johnny Salter. Now Johnny Salter used to live over the Huon River from me, I didn’t know him then. He was a sergeant in the air force and brought Johnny out to take charge of the kumi, and he refused. He said, “No sir, if I take charge of the kumi, another sick bloke has got to come out to take my place.” Which would happen,

26:00 because they made up the number, so he refused. But he did get someone else to take the place. But poor old Johnny, it wasn’t long before he died, he had dysentery. Now there’s a man with principles, he refused to go out, he could have had an easy time, he wouldn’t had to work, he knocked it back and then he died a few weeks later from dysentery. Men like that, there’s no mention of them, and that’s the sad part about it.

26:30 They more or less gave their lives for their fellow men and that’s what happened. I will never forget Johnny. They used to call him 'Boxhead.' I think he made a bomb aimer for the planes. You’d ask Johnny a question and it would take him about an hour to answer it. He would go into every minute detail. He knew what he was talking about. He was, he was a very clever man,

27:00 and it would take him an hour to explain a five minute question. Everything he read, he could remember. But poor old Johnny died, he was big hearted. This went on quite a lot…

It sounds like you to be very selfless…

You did. I know one chap, and he was a big fellow, too, he sold his watch and he said, “I’m alone. I’m a loner.”

27:30 He didn’t want to share with anyone. So all right, we said, “You’ll need friends.” “No,” he said, “I’m on my own.” He had dysentery and he had ulcers. That was all right, he couldn’t get off his bunk, he had to get someone to carry him down to the toilets, which was just a bamboo platform with little slots in it, over a great big hole.

28:00 Which was pretty nosey. That was all right, while he had the money to buy food. But when he ran out, who was going to take him out to the toilet? No-one would bother. He was there stuck. Of course muggings, me, carried him down, but that was me, I was soft-hearted, but I couldn’t see him stuck. But that was his manner. Most would have left him go, because he wanted to be a loner and share with no- one.

28:31 That was his attitude. I couldn’t let him go. But I suppose, then, coming from the country…those things, you bypassed a lot. Anyway, as I say, he was a pretty heavy bloke. When you come home from a day on the railway line and you have to carry him down to the toilet, it wasn’t very nice.

Did he change at all, over the time?

I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to him.

29:00 But that was only a few times I did that. He went, I don’t know whether he died or what happened. He was near me. I wasn’t far away from him. We got cholera in that camp, in the 100 Kilo, and they sent us out, they isolated us and made us build a hut for about 100 men on our own, out from the main camp. The guards wouldn’t even come near us, and to get the food, they would bring the rice in baskets, 29:31 leave it near our camp. We weren’t allowed near it until they were gone. No guards or anything. We could have just walked off, but where to? We were in the middle of Burma. So this was all right. We had these monkeys, the Siamese apes, baboons they are. They're a fair size.

30:00 They would be singing out all day long, this noise…We would get wild a bit because they were free, swinging around the trees, and we weren’t. Anyway, this camp that we were isolated in…We could walk off anywhere. And I said to this fellow, I knew him pretty well, I said, “I’m going to have a look at these monkeys.” They were up on the hill further. And there was an elephant track, an elephant walk

30:31 down this hill. And I said, “I’m going to go up there and have a look at these apes.” I said, “Are you coming up?” He said, “I’m not going up there.” So all right, I go up, it was about two or three hundred yards I suppose, and there was this great big teak tree on the top, and there was these smaller branches down below, and the monkeys were virtually behind there somewhere.

31:00 So I got behind the tree as I came up, and as I stepped around there was one hanging in the tree. I think I got as big a shock as he did. We were looking at each other, he was only about from here to the door away, hanging in the tree like that, and the next thing…grab! This fellow had followed me up, unbeknown to me, and…I nearly had heart failure. I won’t tell you what I called him. I got a good look at the monkeys, all right.

31:30 Yeah, big and yellow with brown faces and brown hands. He was a great big fellow. If you were on your own, they reckoned they might attack you. I was a bit jumpy. We were there for a while…

Did you have cholera?

No, I didn’t. But the hut I was in had it. There were only two or three, so they isolated the lot straight away so the rest of the camp wouldn’t get it.

32:01 We were all right, so they brought us back into the camp later. We were only out there three or four weeks, I suppose. They took us to work…but they wouldn’t come near us. They sent us off to work, and that was it. They’d stand a long way away.

And the men that had it, did they survive it?

No, they died. But it only just struck the camp, and then they controlled it. I think that’s what our doctor died of, he died in the same camp.

32:32 He was an American off the Houston. So we had no-one. They had two doctors at the 105 Kilo, the one above us, he was off the Houston, too, and they sent him down. In the meantime, this chap…Redfern, I think his name was, he was going to have his leg off. He had these ulcers bad. As I say, not one of them lived

33:00 that had his leg off there, they all died. And it looked like he would be the same. In the meantime, the doctor died that was going to do it, and it took two or three weeks for this other doctor to come down, and in that time his ulcer started to mend, and he didn’t have to have his leg off. And he survived. If the other doctor hadn’t died, he would have probably died, too, with his leg off.

33:31 So it was just fate that happened. We had guards there that were just sadistic. I saw one guard, Mucken we called him, he was mad. Mucken with food – he was always eating, and he was mad as a rat and he’d belt everyone. I saw him make one of the chaps who had dysentery, make him get down and lick it up again. He couldn’t hold it in. All that sort of thing…rather nasty. The nasty parts.

34:02 We don’t like to remember them too much, but that’s what they did. If you came out on the sick parade, when they brought the sick ones out on the line, the interpreter would come along, “What’s wrong?” “Dysentery.” Bang, in the tummy. “Ulcers.” With a cane he would whack them across the ulcers. That sort of thing. Sadistic. Really nasty. A lot of that went on, which is pretty cruel.

34:34 You said before that occasionally fellows would make friends with guards to get a cigarette. Did the guards set out to cultivate those…

Not really. They were this way, one could give you a cigarette, he would start talking to you and give you a cigarette, all right, and then he’d go away

35:00 and then the orders would be that there was a bashing blitz on, and then he’d come back and belt you for nothing. It wouldn’t phase him out. After giving you a cigarette, he could come back and give you a belting and walk off as if nothing had happened. They would boil up big drums of water for their bath, the Japs, and they would have other big tubs

35:30 and they would have these blokes pouring the water over them, while they were having a bath in the this tub. And some of our blokes would volunteer to do it because they would get a bit of food and a smoke and all that sort of thing. But there was only a certain few that would do it. We hated them that much that we wouldn’t go near them. But there was those who were, “Well, I’ll get a free feed out of this, a bit better food. I will do it.” I don’t think they had very high characters.

36:00 They would do anything to sort of get out of work. But to wash them, that was…no, no. That was… shudder. But some of them would, they’d have half a dozen there that would do it. But on the whole, there wasn’t that money that would do that sort of thing. I got put into the kitchen once, up at Hindato. 36:31 The Jap kitchen. We were flooded in. The floods came, the wet season. We finished up on this island, no- one could get in or out. I suppose there would be a couple of hundred metres from where we were to the shore, either side of the river. That’s where we saw the Bengal tiger going through the grass. They were dead scared of them, the Japs, of the tigers.

37:00 Anyway, in the finish, we had to make bamboo rafts and we’d take a guard each time and swim with it, back to the shore, so we could get some supplies. Everyone was down with malaria. Blokes back in civil life that had been farmers, they were stoking hay and rounding up sheep and cattle, “Get up there, dobbin,” they were delirious with malaria, because we had no quinine. I know my mate,

37:30 Bluey Dunnon, he took me up to sick parade, he said, “You better get up there.” Not that the doctor could do anything, he went down with malaria, too. I said, “You’ve already taken me up there.” He thought he had taken half of me up to see the doctor, and he thought the rest of me was lying in the bunk. One bloke was trying to put his boot on back to front, he couldn’t get his foot in because he was trying to put it in the heel, and all this sort of thing. “Get up there, get up there! Gee back!” All this sort of thing they were doing in civil life

38:00 they were doing in their delirium. If anyone had a movie camera it would have really been something. Anyway, we had to build these rafts for them and a guard would go over. Well, we’d start off all right, and he would be standing in the middle of the raft, and then one would push it down one side a little. “Hey, even it up.” So we’d push down on here and this bloke would keep his hand on it. He’d go down and that bloke on that corner…

38:30 and we’d start screaming at each other and it would get lower and lower, and we’d finally get him over there and he would be up to his chest in water. And then he’d turn around, “Oh, number one!” He would be that pleased to get to the other side that he reckoned we were number one. But it took its toll on me. I had malaria, I think, and my heart nearly stopped. I said to one of my mates, little Titchy McLaughlin, he was out of the 10th Engineers. I said, “Titchy, listen to that.” And he put his head on my chest…

39:02 “There’s nothing there.” It would just give a little beat like that and it would stop. Luckily…The Red Cross, they sent in some tablets and they had that…Petabyte pills, and the doctor said, “You are not to move off your back. Not even to go to the toilet.

39:30 He said, “You're there for six weeks. You're not allowed to move.” Because my old ticker would have stopped. He had these Petabyte tablets that came in with the medicine, what little medicine they got, I don’t know he got them from. Anyway, he gave them all to me, day after day. Within a fortnight I was on my feet, and I wanted to get out with my…I didn’t want to stay there. Because if you stayed there too long, you went under.

40:01 You were better off working, because while you were working you were alive, and you were with your mates. And I said to the doctor, “I want to get back out, I don’t want to stay here.” And he said, “I won’t let you go.” I said, “I want to go, I’m well enough.” He said, “Look, I’ve got a big Dutchman down in the Jap kitchen.” This great big fellow, he was living like a king. He said, “I want to get him out to work.” He said, “I will let you go to work on one condition.

40:32 That you go into that kitchen. You can take his place and he can go out to work.” I ummed and ahhed, and I thought, “Well, I want to get off my back.” So I said, “All right.” I lasted a week I think. I got belted. I was pinching their food and taking it back to my mates. Cigarettes and all. I was taking it all back to my mates, of a night-time. I lasted about a week.

41:00 And back out in the line, and the big Dutchman came back into the kitchen. I was happy. I hated them, with what they were doing. That was my stint in the kitchen. It would have been a good job. Plenty of food, because you pinch all their food, but I pinched too much of it.

How did you get caught?

They could see the supply. They knew the supply was going. They would count everything, and if something was missing…there was only one person who could take it. I’d get caught. But never mind.

41:35 And how did they punish you for that?

Oh, you know, belting. Bash, bash, bash, bash. They thought nothing of it, because they would get bashed sometimes themselves. There was a priority thing with them. The captain would belt his lieutenant. The lieutenant would belt his sergeant. The sergeant would belt his corporal. The corporal would beat his top private. There were three lots of privates, second private, bottom private…

Tape 8

00:32 …well, according to the book, the Yanks used to raid the Poms chicken yard. They had their own little pens and all, while they were prisoners. I never saw any of that, but according to writing, it’s written by a Benjamin…Cap. He was an ex-boxer, and then when he went back he was a teacher. And he wrote the book. 01:00 I went through Burma with him, he was one of the Americans, and I bought his book and in that…After Tamarkan, after we went through, we got split up. He went to Singapore, or wherever it was. And he said they used to have great old fights with the Poms, because they would pinch their stuff. And they had chicken runs and all. I don’t know. It makes you wonder what they did have there.

01:30 But I’m only talking on his book. They used to have fights and all, according to him, over them pinching the stock.

You’ve mentioned a couple of times trading with the local people, the natives. How would that happen when you were at the camp?

We couldn’t do it out of the camp, but I believe every week or fortnight they might let one of the native traders in

02:01 with eggs and bananas and do it through the Japanese quarters. Of course, they would buy stuff, too. You see, we were supposed to be paid ten cents a day or something, and most of the time we didn’t get anything. We were supposed to get one day off every ten days, and we’d work right through. There was no one day off at all. But they had it like a canteen. Our officers, if they had the money,

02:30 they could buy a certain amount of eggs or bananas or peanuts, they were good vitamins. They were the main things they could buy. Eggs, bananas, peanuts were very essential if they could get hold of them. They fed themselves on them, because they had a better pay than we did, but half the time we never saw any money.

So how did they get the money to buy…

They were paid.

03:00 We were supposed to have been paid a certain amount each day, but very seldom we got it.

But the officers, they were paid?

Yes, they probably did get paid. They were looked after a little bit better. Our officers were good; I can’t complain about them, they did a pretty good job. But going back to some of the other English and Dutch officers, they treated their men a lot worse.

03:34 There was so much rank difference. Our officers mingled with the men. Everyone was on an even keel. Everyone was a POW whether they were a colonel or a private. So they didn’t worry about saluting and all this sort of thing, as long as they behaved themselves. Which most of them did. They respected the officers. They didn’t go in for all this regimental stuff.

04:03 But the other officers did. And they were treated a lot worse than we were. Our officers were pretty good. When we got bombed out of this Tamarkan, the bridge on the River Kwai…This is after the line was put through, they took us all down to Tamarkan, and we were pretty crook, most of us.

04:30 Pretty sick. I was in the fourth hut, and they were about 300 feet long, all these huts, and there were slit trenches dug either side. And where I was, I was down the bottom end, right near the railway line. On the other side was all their anti-aircraft guns and then the steel bridge. Well, I was down the bottom end, as I say,

05:00 in this hut. And this evening, about five o' clock, I heard this drone. And I thought, “Hello.” And I said to this…He was an Aboriginal boy, he was black, Glass his name was. And I said, “I’m going to have a look at these. I don’t like the sound of them.” The ack-ack [anti-aircraft guns] used to come down about this far off the ground, so I went down and bobbed down and had a look up.

05:32 And here’s these three lots of nine, these Fortresses [B-17 Flying Fortress] coming in. I said to him, “They're not coming to tea, I’m off.” So by that time, everyone was into the slit trenches, and there was no room for anyone else. I went right up the middle of the hut and out onto the parade ground. They were still coming towards us. The officers are shouting,”Get down! Get down!” And I thought to myself, ‘Get down be blowed!

06:00 I’m getting as far away from that railway line and the ack-ack guns as I can!’ So I dived down to… Near the parade ground was a paddy field where they used to grow their rice. And I dived down next to one of…built up about this high, this ridge, where they used to have their little paddocks, where they make it wet and put their rice in. I dived down alongside of that. And there was a Javanese Dutch soldier, he dived down the other side, and he was shaking. I wasn’t much better, of course.

06:31 I looked up and these nine planes…I said, “It’s all right, Dutchie, they're gone.” Because once the planes are over you, you know the bombs from there would be…they would go out further, they come down and they go out on an angle. I said, “She’s right, Dutchie, they're gone.” And the next thing, Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! The second lot of nine had dropped their nine. That hut that I was in was blown to smithereens. They dropped these thousand pounders right in

07:00 the camp, and these four rows of huts were just gone. So I got out of that one. They used to come back every night and bomb the bridge. But of course, we were right next to it. And the planes used to come over there low, these big Fortresses, you could see the chaps, they wouldn’t have any tops on, because it would be hot in the planes, you can imagine how hot in the hot weather, and at the guns, in the waist of the ship

07:30 and the tail gunner, and you could see them as plain as I can see you, or anyone going past in a car. And you could see their guns. And they were that low going over these huts that the exhaust from the motors were kicking up dust pockets as they went over. They were just above the huts. You would look up and you could see…I think they carried about two thousand pounders,

08:01 then all these little ones. They were massive. To see that just going over the top of your head…

Do you think they were making any effort to try and avoid the camp?

Well, they couldn’t, because the bridge was the main object. I think they knew we were there. But a lot of men got killed because they had their heavy machine-guns up on the hill behind us, the Japs, and they were firing at the planes and the bullets were coming into our camp as well.

08:30 The anti-aircraft guns, they had them on open sights, and they were exploding everywhere. There was this Pommy officer, I’d take my hat off to him, we were all cowering in the trenches, and he was walking around strolling a cane. “You all right, fellows? You all right?” The bombs and everything were exploding around him. A little story, it might be a bit wet…

09:02 We had these trenches about that deep, and they would hold about half a dozen fellows, squatting down, so your head was just below the ground level. So if there was any shrapnel coming around it would go over you. Well, when there was a raid on, it took people in different ways. The stress of it all…you’d want to go to the toilet, others would

09:30 just about wet their pants. Well, I used to nearly wet my pants every time they came over. And this time, this plane came down the railway line, down so low behind the ack-ack guns, and the ack-ack were facing that way. He came down and he came straight at us like that, and of course, I wanted to pee, didn’t I? And I’m standing there, I was at the end of the trench,

10:00 peeing away, and he came straight down like this and I’m still going as he’s floating past my eyes like that. If they had a camera in the plane it would have looked funny. But I couldn’t stop. I know it sounds a bit wacky, but this happened. I’ve often thought about it later. I had to go…

10:30 It affected people different ways. In the first raid, there was six who went to the toilet. They finished up dead on the roof. Not a stitch on them, they only had G-strings anyway, but not a mark on them. The concussion got them. They were just bang, dead. It caught different ones different ways.

They were blown onto the roof?

Yes.

11:00 The explosion. They weren’t hit with anything but the explosion, and it killed them. A lot were buried alive in the slit trenches. Then we were shifted… After a while, they had that many raids that they shifted us up to a place called Chungkai. We had to walk across this bridge after all the time. That was where Weary Dunlop was, I believe. I never ever saw him.

11:30 I believe he was there, or Colonel Coates. But it was a Pommy camp and it was right on the river. This was where we had to dig trenches between the huts, about fifteen or twenty feet deep. We had to have stages to throw the dirt up, and there would be someone on the stages to throw the dirt the rest of the way up. And they put all their 44-gallon drums of aeroplane fuel

12:00 in between our huts. Rows and rows of it. If they had raided the place it would have been goodnight Charlie. They came over, we were going towards Tamarkan, as I say it was only a few kilometres away, we all went in different ways. There was this big drain in the centre of the camp, in the parade ground. During the wet season it would channel out a fair size trench. I was standing there

12:30 and a Korean guard got in there, too. As the planes were going over he was saying, “Oh, for Nippon, oh, for Nippon, boom! Boom!” He didn’t like them, I don’t think. I looked at him and I thought that was funny. He was on our side. I don’t know whether he was on anyone’s side, but he didn’t like the Japs or the bombs. But there, some artist or sketcher, he had sketched a sketch about that big,

13:03 and pinned it to one of the palm trees, and I saw it there myself, it only lasted a day. I’m sorry I didn’t snitch it, it would be worth a fortune today. On it was a troop ship, sailing up the Thames, and all these officers lined along the rail of the ship, and there’s Churchill on the wharf and it shows

13:30 the voice projection, he said, “But where are all the men?” And the voice comes back from the officers, “They died that we may live.” I tell you what, there was a lot of officers in that camp who didn’t laugh. They tried to find out who did it. They never found out who did it, but they would have court-martialled him. I had sketches…

14:01 One of our mates, Donny McCulloch, he died at the 100 Kilo, I helped bury him, poor old Donny, and he had sketches before the war. Over in Zeehan he came from, and he was going to do the township after, but he never got back. Poor old Donny. He sort of gave up the ghost. He got dysentery and he went down. I used to try and talk to him, to encourage him, but he just lost the will to live. He faded away and he died.

14:32 I know he was crook, but he just seemed to give up…

Keeping paper and pencils, how did he do that?

He only had a couple in the camp…no, he didn’t have any in the camp. This was before, Zeehan, he’d done it all before. But this artist, I don’t where he got the paper from because they were selling the paper for cigarette paper, and you could split paper.

15:00 We got the way that we could split it, a thin piece of paper we split it in half, and you got twice as much…Blokes used to make a racket out of it. Sell so many papers for ten cents. Oh yeah, there was all sorts of rackets. But that’s when I went from there up to Hindato, up the second cutting all the firewood.

15:30 It was pretty tough because there were eight men in a group and we had to cut at least a metre each, so there would be eight metres of timber logs we had to cut for the steam trains. And half of them went down with malaria, and half of them wouldn’t know how to swing an axe. They came from the towns and they wouldn’t know an axe from a piece of soap.

16:00 They wouldn’t know how to sharpen…It may have been coming from the country; I knew how to sharpen an axe and a saw, a cross-cut, because we used to do that when we were kids. So it fell back on those who knew how to do it. Most of the work fell onto them. If we couldn’t manage the quota, what would happen…You see, the Jap engineers couldn’t touch us unless they got the guards’ okay. So getting late in the day, the guards would say,

16:33 “You let them take it off that heap,” that had been cut a week ago, “And put it on that heap, make up the quota, and we’ll let you bash them.” So they’d say “Okay.” So we’d do that, we’d make up our quota for the day, then they’d line us up…and guess who they would start on? Yeah. Being tall, they liked the tall fellows, the big ones. By the time they’d got to the end of the line

17:00 they’d just about run out of steam. But we were just as glad to get out of it, too. Because what was a few belts around the face? Humiliating, yes. But we got back to camp quicker, otherwise we would be there all night and then back again the next morning. We’d be belted and belted and belted. So one belt once a day was probably better than two or three.

So you got hardened to the belting?

You did, yes.

17:35 Your fury was that bad that you wouldn’t feel it. You know how you get that wild that something doesn’t hurt you? You can smash something, probably, and you wouldn’t feel it. Well, that’s how we used to get. The humiliation used to make us that savage…They could belt us and we wouldn’t feel it.

18:01 You’d have a little bit more hate for them, that was all. That’s the way it went.

What happened when people were dying in the camps? Did you have burials for them?

Yeah, we were allowed to bury them. At the 100, we had an American, a bugler, off the Houston…

18:31 Because we come from the same place, Maxie Smith, Jimmy Honey and myself, we carried Donny up on a platter. He was only just wrapped in rice cloth, rice bag, wrapped up in this bag. And we carried him up…It was the wet season and it was pouring rain and we had to get him through the creek.

19:00 We had to hold poor Donny on the stretcher, too, so he wouldn’t roll off. Anyway, we stood to and he played the bugle. It went on all the time. Yeah, it was rather sad when you think of them dying away from home, with no loved ones about…it’s a terrible way to go. With no support… They couldn’t get much support from their mates because they were out working, see, so they just died a slow and miserable death.

19:30 Which is sad. Because if you’ve got loved ones near you when you're going, it makes it easier. But they died. You’d hear them moaning, you’d hear the death rattles through the night and in the morning you would see so many dead. You’d come back of a night, and there would be so many gone again, some of your mates, maybe, it was very sad.

And they all got a burial?

Yes, of a sort, yes.

20:00 Just wrapped up in a bit of rice bag…

You were given time out to do that?

After work, yeah, after work. Sometimes they’d make the sick do it, who were back in camp, they would pick out the strongest ones of them to do it. Of course, the graves had to be dug and they might put someone who wasn’t well enough to go out, but strong enough to dig a hole in the ground. 20:30 But each one got taken up, every time it was filled…Graves were dug, and they would always be filled, it didn’t matter who it was for. We had one on Timor. He had a hole in his back like that. No, he didn’t die…and he had an ulcer on his back and you could see his lungs, you could see the bubbles coming out of his lungs and all.

21:02 And every night they’d put him outside the hut to die, the next morning he would be sitting up there waiting for a feed. He survived. Every time they dug his grave, someone else would fill it, but he survived. I think he got back home even. I don’t know what happened to him. But it was that big, right across his back. You wouldn’t think it was possible. And another one of our chaps, going back to Timor,

21:30 he had a piece taken out of his skull, about that long and about that wide. The bone was taken completely out and you could see his brains, you could see the bubbles coming up out of…The only thing he was worried about was something getting in his head. He was walking around.

So who was keeping a record of the people who died?

I think they tried to keep a record, the officers, of each kumi,

22:00 tried to keep a record of who they were in charge of, how many died. And they did get a fair record, but I don’t think they got them all. I think a lot were missed back in those jungles. As we left camps, the jungle would reclaim the camps and reclaim the burial sites, because it would grow so quick. And I know one chap, he was on the burial party, like retrieving after the war and he said the same thing, he didn’t think they got everyone.

22:32 They got their names and that was the main thing. It would be nice to think that they were back in a decent place, but that was the way it went.

23:12 What was the final camp you were in?

Went up to Hindato, went back to Tamarkan, then we went to building this aerodrome, only building this apron with bricks. And that’s where I got belted for going to the benjo and not saluting.

23:31 And then they sent us into Bangkok, by truck I think it was, and then we had to march from there right out to place called Nakami, three hundred kilometres away. The guards wanted to break the record to get there. And all the skin pulled off the soles of my feet. As it peels off, it doesn’t come off in layers

24:00 as it goes back, it goes in deeper and deeper. I was walking on bloody feet by the time I got there, because it was all gravel roads and that sort of thing. So my feet were in a bit of a mess. We couldn’t drink the water. They marched us day and night until we got to this Nakami. That was a transit camp for the Japs…

24:44 And there we were digging tunnels in the hills. We’d ask them what the tunnels are for and they said that when England or America invades

25:00 Burma, or Thailand, when they come from India, all prisoners of war, “All you will be put in there and shot.” These are the guard’s words. And I’ve got papers there that… One lot of papers were found that said we were to be disposed of by any means at that their disposal, be it beheading, gassing, drowning or what.

25:32 No POWs were to be left alive to tell the tale. And that atom bomb in Hiroshima saved us by two days. Two days the invasion was going to be on from India and in the event of that invasion we were going to be annihilated. We can thank the bomb. That saved us.

26:03 So we dug these… And coming from a mine, lucky again I suppose… I knew how to put the headers and all the struts and so forth in. I knew how to go about constructing a tunnel. There wasn’t that many that knew anything about it. You laid your bed logs and your uprights and then your headers and you went in

26:30 bit by bit with your head timbers over the top. So you carved it out and you went forward bit by bit, so that you always had something solid behind you. There the guards used to walk around the roads, to keep guard from the top, they wouldn’t come down where we were working. So we could sneak away and try to get a bit of food off the wild bananas, something to eat. In the meantime,

27:00 all this time on the Burma Railway and so forth, we had very little paper, and what paper we had went into cigarette paper. So we had to get leaves, that was our toilet paper. So all the fellows that went out to work had to get enough leaves for the fellows back at camp. And it’s not very nice with some of those leaves. If we had a downer on someone, we would pick leaves with a bit of prickles on it.

27:33 That’s a bit of a nasty one, but that happened now and again. But out there where we were, anything that these Javanese Dutch soldiers, we would ask them what was safe to eat and was not. Like violet leaves, you would eat them to try and get a bit of vitamins.

28:01 In fact, at that camp where we were building the aerodrome, I passed a worm that long and almost as round as my finger and oyster pink, shiny pink. I couldn’t take it back to camp and show the doctor,

28:30 so when I went back I explained, and he reckoned what happened was I had eaten a bit of grass of leaf with a worm egg, just an ordinary earth worm, and it had hatched inside and fed off what I was eating. It was all curled up, but it was that long and real shiny pink. So I got rid of him. One of the chaps, the story goes,

29:00 and it’s pretty true I think, some said they actually saw it, that this bloke had a tapeworm – you know how long they can go – and the chap was starving and so was the tapeworm, so it come up out of his mouth, so they grabbed a bit of old something to coax it right out, because if you broke it off, it would regenerate it, so they kept teasing it with this bit of food, the doctor, and they reckon it was a yard long. This great big tapeworm…I don’t know,

29:31 but that’s a story that is supposed to be true. This one of mine is true, I can vouch for that. I wasn’t very happy about him feeding off what I was eating.

Did you notice that you felt a bit odd? Something wriggling around?

No, because you’ve got malaria and…you're crook all the time. Another starving pain

30:01 didn’t make much difference. But a lot of them had worms and that sort of thing. But that’s what the doctor reckoned, it hatched inside me and it grew, the rotten thing. But that was at that aerodrome we were building, but then we were building these tunnels. And one of us used to sneak away…

30:31 You had to be very careful parting the trees and the vines that you didn’t wriggle them, because they were keeping watch on the road, and they would just shoot. So this day it was my turn to go out and look around, see if I could find something, and I was sneaking through so quietly and all of a sudden this snake, right in front of my eyes like that, he’s curling around a limb,

31:00 he was ten feet long by the time of… He would have been good eating, but I got that much of a shock that I let him go out of sight. I snuck back to work without getting anything. It shook me up that much; he was a great big fellow. Right in front of my eyes, he was curled around. We did catch a python at that 100 Kilo, this big python, and he went in the stew. We had him, mixed up with the rice.

31:30 It was all right. Snake tastes much like rabbit. The flesh was good, he was a big fellow. Yeah, right along inside the hut. He didn’t last long, I’ll tell you. In our camp, this bullock got loose off one of the natives, driving his stock along close to the camp, this bullock came tearing into the camp,

32:00 and it wasn’t long before one of our blokes knocked him off. I think the Japs were in on it, too, because they were short of meat. Anyway, this native came in looking for his bullock and he couldn’t find it, it was gone. Yeah, we disposed of it. Now, we're up to the tunnels, and we were there several months I suppose,

32:33 three or four months, the time is a bit forgotten now, and we used to have to walk five or six kilometres to out where we were working, from the camp. One morning we walked out and there was this native squatting on the side of the road,

33:02 and he said to some of the fellows, “America, boom boom, Japan. Japan finished.” Then he disappeared. The next day he was there again, and he said the same thing. And we started to wonder, because we’d heard all these furphies. Anyway, the third day we went out, then the next thing the guards all disappeared. We thought, “Hello, what’s going on?” We were frightened

33:30 to believe that things had happened our way. So next thing we got orders to go back to camp, so we all marched back to camp, went into our huts. Next thing we were out on roll call, all out on the parade ground. And this sergeant major, an Englishman he was, he had a big voice, and he said, “The war is over.”

34:00 Well, we didn’t…Cold shivers went right through me. It was as if an electric shock had gone through. Some cheered, some cried, it was such an emotional thing, it would be hard to describe anyone’s feeling, how they felt. We could hardly believe it finally happened after all the traumas we’d been in,

34:31 that it was over. Then we were a bit worried because the Jap transit camp around us, there were 20,000 Japs there and they didn’t want to surrender, and we thought they might turn on us. It was a bit dicey there for a while. But they didn’t. And the surrender was on. The funny thing there, too,

35:00 the Japanese colonel had a real fancy push bike that he used to get around on. And two or three days after the release…the first we saw was two or three English officers parachuted into the camp, and one went right through our hut. It didn’t hurt him. And then they dropped parachutes

35:30 with our food, the Biscuit Bombers [Douglas DC3 Dakota]. Anyway, these two Poms decided to sell the colonel’s bike, they pinched it, and they sold it to a native outside the camp. We had a bamboo fence. Inside the fence, was what they called the 'bund', so there was a big channel dug around

36:00 and a big mound. Channel then the bamboo fence. There was no water in it. The mound and the fence were supposed to stop us. Anyway, this Pommy was outside the fence with the native, he’d already passed over his money for this bike, and they’d made a bit of a hole in the fence to push it through, and the Jap officer races down screaming he wants his bike back. The war’s over, mind you, but he wants his bike back. 36:30 And anyway, he’s screaming and hollering in Japanese, the native outside there, he’s passed his money over, he wants his bike, and the Pommy inside panicked in the finish and he helped the colonel pull it back inside. So there’s the native jumping up and down, the other fellow, he’s helping the colonel pull the bike, so he comes back in and whacks his mate for helping the colonel…And we were all up the bund there, it was a bit of fun, a great joke.

37:04 The colonel got his bike back again, not for long I think. Then they supplied us with dropped clothing, of course, and the first thing, they gave us a dozen to kill off as we wanted. They wanted volunteers to look after them and take them out to feed, along the roads, these buffaloes.

37:30 No-one would volunteer. If it had been during the prison days, yes, they would have got plenty of volunteers to go out, because it would be a good job. Anyway, I was one, they detailed me to go on duty and look after these cattle. About three or four of us. So all these shorts and shirts and that were being dropped in, and we were being issued with them, it finished up two or three each,

38:02 and we’d go out there on this cattle party, and we’d meet the natives and sell them, and bring stuff back in. A lot of the fellows wanted the native whiskey. I’d take all their water bottles out and fill them up with native whiskey and bring them back to camp. And then I’d go out again. And I got caught. This English colonel finally came and took over this camp.

38:30 I’m marching back, with water luckily, I’d already brought the bottles in with the whiskey, sold some clothes for it, and given it to the fellows and filled the bottles up with water again. I had half a dozen hanging over me as I’m walking back with the cattle, we were miles away. And he was in a little old truck, and he pulled up and said, “Where are you going?” Real savage like. I had to stand to attention, and I’d had a nip of this whiskey, too,

39:01 and I’m trying to hold my breath. “I’m taking water to the cattle party, sir.” He couldn’t see the cattle. I said, “They're just up around that corner, about three or four kilometres up the road.” He still couldn’t see them. I said, “If you don’t believe me, sir, I’ll hop on the truck and you can drop me off there.” He took off, so I had to walk. I’d tried to hold my breath so he couldn’t smell the whiskey. You couldn’t drink much of it because….

39:30 Spider Mountain, we called it. Some of them had too much and they went right off. One bloke jumped down the well. Spider Mountain it was called, because it would send them haywire. Spider Mountain they called it. Two or three of them died of alcoholic poisoning. It was pretty wild stuff. So I didn’t have any more.

How did the cattle…Did they come from the local village?

40:05 Yeah, the local village. The natives did well out of it. They paid them for this water buffalo, there was twelve of them. They still reckon, my mates reckon, one of the natives knocked one off while they weren’t looking. They still reckon I took it and flogged it back off to the natives.

40:30 But I didn’t. But I still get blamed for it. I would have done it if I could have done it, probably, but there wasn’t much chance.

And what other supplies were being dropped in?

Medical and food. They had to be a bit careful with food, because we couldn’t eat much. They built us up a bit on soft foods. We were there for three weeks. I think the first white lady we saw

41:04 was Lady Mountbatten. She took a risk, coming through all the hostile country. Some of the Japs were still pretty hostile, and they hadn’t laid their guns down then. But there was two truckloads of guards, and she was in a jeep, and she came out to see us, that far out. And she went along everyone, and went through the sick hospital,

41:31 and she said to one chap who had dysentery pretty bad, she said to him, “How does that affect you?” What a question to ask anyone. But he was pretty quick on the uptake, he said, “Well, I travel a greater distance quicker than I normally would.” She was a great old stick, though…

Tape 9

00:40 You were telling us about the two chaps who dropped in by parachute, and you got a piece of it…

Yes, this is one of the first parachutes that came into our camp. It’s a bit of silk, it’s pretty dilapidated…

01:07 This is a piece of the first parachute that dropped into our camp, at a place called Nakami, the last camp we were in after the release. They dropped food and clothing and whatever to us. It was cut up and given to anyone who wanted it,

01:32 and I’ve hung onto it for sixty years. That’s the parachute that helped us revive, put it that way. And this dixie came into my possession about two years into the captivity. It belonged to three other chaps…

02:06 On it it’s got Burma, 1943, Pagoda, 1943, sub park 2X2409….

02:30 GW Atherton, these all had it before me, before they went to a better life. My daughter has held onto this grimly, in her safekeeping. Prior to this, when we were first taken prisoner, all I had to eat out of was half a coconut shell.

03:02 And that had to do me until I could find an old tin plate, I think it was, and that wasn’t very…It couldn’t hold much rice, so that wasn’t very good. And finally I got a decent piece of thing to hang onto. I have an idea it was an American Dixie, but maybe not.

03:30 There’s Siam… It used to be called Siam, Thailand. It’s had a bit of a rough life since it came home. It’s been lost and found by our youngest daughter. Our neighbour was feeding his WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s with it when she found it, so she retrieved it.

What sort of memories does it evoke when you hold it?

Well, I can remember hanging it on my belt.

04:03 On a bit of rope or string, I used to carry it out to work with me. Of course, I was always pleased to see how much rice I could get into it. In the wet season, you used to have to bend or squat down over it, to try and eat your rice so it wouldn’t fill up with water. It was as bad enough as it was. You had all the little brown heads of the grubs looking at you.

04:31 Now and again, we would get little white bait, and they’d be full of sand, and they were all eyes and heads. They weren’t very nice to look at either. But you shut your eyes and scoffed it down and hoped for the best. There were a few vitamins in them. It could tell a lot of stories, and probably will never tell many more, but you never know, do you?

05:00 But it served its purpose, and that’s about all…

Can I ask how it actually came into your hands?

Yes, this Atherton, I think it was him…or it was one of the orderlies. I was getting stuck for something to eat out of…it was a scooped bit of tin. It wasn’t very good at all, and it was wearing out.

05:36 Being an orderly, he was there where the fellows were dying, and of course all their implements were left over, and that’s how he came to get it, and gave it to me. So I got it about third hand. So I thank the ones before me and really, it’s a sad way for it to come into my hands. But,

06:00 it did help me a lot.

So rice was the staple. When you came home, were you still able to eat rice?

Oh yes. I can. I still like my rice.

You were telling us about Lady Mountbatten…

Well, she came out to see us. And then we were there

06:30 for about three weeks, and then we were transported into Bangkok. We were there for about a week, and then we were transported by plane, these biscuit bombers, during a storm, we went through a storm…We left Bangkok and we flew to Singapore. We were there a couple of days and they brought us all out on parade,

07:01 in front of these little tents, with a desk and a young fellow behind the desk with a pencil or pen and a notepad. As we went past, in our turn, he’d ask us what disabilities we had during the war. We were like zombies then, we were still in shock with the release, and we didn’t know what that was for,

07:30 or most of us didn’t, some of them were pretty cluey, I wasn’t amongst the cluey ones…”Oh, malaria.” “How many times?” “Oh, eighty or ninety times, I suppose.” “Are you sure?” “At least.” I had three types of malaria nearly all the time. “All right, what other disabilities? Any others?” “Oh, no.” I’d had dysentery and beri-beri, and this sort of thing.

08:00 But we weren’t aware of what it was really about. He went through asking questions, and of course, that’s all that went down on my history. And I’d copped everything else that everyone else had…except the bad ulcers, I didn’t have the bad ulcers. I’d had just about everything else. And the pellagra, which makes the white stuff come out of your mouth, it’s like ulceration…

08:30 through lack of vitamins. But that’s all I had put down on my medical. Malaria. We were there for about two or three weeks, and then we boarded the [MV] Highland Chieftain.

09:00 It came down very slowly from Singapore, and they fed us on milk arrowroot biscuits and condensed milk, to put a bit of fat on us. It fattened us up pretty quick. Because we laid around the decks all day. It was a very…exciting time when the captain said, 09:30 “You can now see the first point of Australia. You're home.” And there wasn’t much said, but we were back, we were home. They brought us down the channel, down through the Coral Sea, down through all the coral reefs. Being close, it looked like you were going to hit a cliff, but they went slowly, and wended their way around, until we came to Brisbane.

10:01 And that was a very exciting time, in a way, coming up the river. All the tugboats were firing their water cannons, and there were bands out there playing on these boats, and people cheering. We were just standing still, like zombies, all lined up along the side of the boat.

10:31 It was really overwhelming to get this welcome home. We weren’t allowed off the boat there, but the welcome was tremendous. Then we set sail for Sydney. We sailed into Sydney and we were stationed out at Ingleburn. They put on a trip, by coaches…

11:08 And they paraded us through Sydney. Well, you’ve never seen anything like it. All the ticker tape was coming down from all the buildings in the main street. And the buses had a job getting through the crowds. There was a lot holding up placards, “Have you seen so and so?” And “Do you know so and so?”

11:32 People were anxiously waiting to find information of their husbands and fathers and that sort of thing. It was very, very exciting. We went through that and out to Ingleburn. We were allowed to come into Sydney in the afternoon and stay overnight if we wanted to. We were only there for a couple of days.

12:05 Coming in the train from Ingleburn, I got talking to a chappie there that was just in civilian clothes, and he happened to be a Tasmanian that had been wounded on the [HMAS] Canberra. He’d been wounded and shipped home. And I was talking to him, an old person from Tassie.

12:30 And he was living in Sydney, out at Bondi. So he took a few of us to his place, and he arranged to have a party for us the next night. In the meantime, we got word that we were wanted back at Ingleburn. The train was about to leave for Melbourne. We raced back there, and our mates that were already back there grabbed our kit bags. I had a kit bag full of cigarettes. I got them off the boat, you see, it was duty free.

13:00 So I had all sorts of cigarettes, I had a kit bag full. So they grabbed that and another bag of my clothing, and put it on the train for me. The train was just about to pull out when we got there. And it was an overnighter and we got down to Melbourne, and it was a wet drizzly morning. It was a real drab morning. They took us out to Royal Park, near the zoo. And some of their wives

13:30 had come over from Tassie to meet them there, and we were there for a few days. For a week, or a fortnight. We did a bit of rehabilitation and medical and so forth. Those who had wives there were allowed to stay with their wives. Then we boarded the old Taroona.

14:00 The flat bottomed boat that used to travel between here and Tassie. It would roll that way, then it would roll that way, and it did both going back. And I was trying to look after two chappies, Bill Bell and… They’d had their legs off. I was supposed to be looking after them, and they finished up looking after me. They opened this bottle of warm beer and gave me a drink. Well, I was as sick as a dog.

14:30 And it was that rough, I’m trying to make my way to the washrooms, and it was a tiled floor, and they had hand basins all around the walls, and I had the big hob-nailed army boots on with the horse shoe on the heel. You can imagine what that was like on the tiles. So as the boat would heave one way, I would slide one way and heave into that wash basin, then back the other way. And forward and back until…

15:01 They finished up looking after me, it wasn’t a very good trip. But then we arrived in Georgetown. It was flat bottomed to get down the Tamar River. That was the idea of it. It was all mud banks and that, it used to slide over the mud banks. We got off there and we were taken into Launceston.

15:30 The parents were there, and my younger brother and sister, were there to meet me. That was our reunion. Because they didn’t know where I was for two years. They didn’t know whether I was alive. They only received one card back from me that I was allowed to send. That was two years later after they found out where I was. And that was up in the 18 Kilo camp, when I was allowed to send that.

16:02 That was quite a way into it.

So that was pretty much when you first got into Burma that you were allowed to send that?

That was the first time. That was arranged through the French Red Cross, or something like that. They told us what we had to write.

16:30 “I’m with friends. I’m being well looked after,” and so forth. Yeah, real good. Some of them wrote on theirs, “I wish I was with Jack” or “I wish I was with Tom.” They knew was dead, back home, so their parents would know they were having a hard time. I think it was a bit rough for the parents, for them to send a thing like that.

17:02 When we first went up there to Burma, they wanted to find out what people did in civil life, so they sent a questionnaire around. “What were you in civil life?” “Lorry driver or…” They had some of our blokes who were lorry drivers, trying to get their trucks up to feed us with the rations, on the railway line. And one bloke put down 17:30 he was a boundary rider on a bee farm and brothel keeper, and all this sort of…anything to distract them, and put them on the wrong track. So yeah, that’s when I first met my parents and my brother and my sister.

18:00 We were going to travel around to Queenstown where we were living by bus, but the younger brother had got a V8 coupe car. During the war, they couldn’t buy tyres or tubes, they were pretty hard to get hold of, they were rationed. So the tyres and tubes he had in there weren’t very good.

18:30 And there was about five or six of us in this little coupe, to try and get back to Queenstown. We got halfway back and the jolly tubes blew up. We finished up having to jam the tyres full of dry grass, build them up with dry grass, jam that in. So we got home about four o' clock the next morning. The people next door got their house ready for a welcome home,

19:00 they had the “Welcome Home” up, but it was about four o' clock in the morning, so it all fizzled out. We had a welcome home the next day. That night, I went into this nice soft bed, I couldn’t sleep in it. I had to pull the blankets onto the floor to sleep. I was used to the hard bed. On the soft bed, I just felt like I was floating and that was no good.

19:31 So I pulled it onto the floor. The first meal, Mum dished up a nice hot roast dinner, roast potatoes, carrots, all the sides, lovely. And I cut up a bit of meat, and I went to put it in my mouth…and I couldn’t eat it. Couldn’t get it past my lips. My tummy seemed to revolt against it. I suppose it was the smell or…

20:00 It took me quite a while before I could back into eating anything.

What did your mum have to say about that?

Well, she wasn’t very happy. She couldn’t understand why I couldn’t eat. But my Dad knew, he knew what was going on, because he’d had pretty tough times himself. Probably tougher than I had, in Gallipoli and France.

20:30 So that was it. The rationing was on then, of course, it was still on. But when the butchers knew who we were, they would give us a little bit of meat. But as I say, it took a little before we could get back into solid food.

Do you remember the first things your parents said when you got back?

I know Mum said, “Oh, son.”

21:01 That’s all I can remember. And she gave me a big cuddle. I can’t remember what my father said. “Welcome back,” or something like that. There wasn’t much said, because we were too emotional I think, to say much at all. But the emotion was there.

21:32 It was a very emotional reunion after all that time. As I said, they didn’t know whether I was dead or alive, and to find me coming back, it was quite a…To make it worse, during the war, before they got that card, I was called up for training duties, to train for home guard.

22:02 And they got a nasty letter saying that if I didn’t turn up I would be prosecuted. So my mother took the letter up to the inspector of police, and he said, “I’ll fix this.” because he had just lost his son in the air force over in Europe, he was shot down. So he said, “Let me fix this up.” I don’t know what he did. But yeah…

22:30 they were going to send me to jail or something. I was already in jail. Yeah, rather a hectic time…

And you said there was a welcome home party?

Yes, this Mrs Coulthard her name was. She was a tremendous worker during the war.

23:00 Organising parcels for the boys, and all this sort of thing, doing welcome homes and doing everything she could. She was a real hard worker. She had organised this welcome home, and there was about two other POWs and the others were returned soldiers. She put us up on this stage, which I didn’t want. But I only went because she had done so much. So I went up there,

23:30 and all the bigwigs got up there and said how much they should help us and all this big talk. And I wasn’t very much impressed with it. And of course, then, when I did start work, I couldn’t settle down very well at all. You can imagine being…all those years, those three and a half years, living on a knife edge. Four years away from home, living amongst all those people, then coming back to a dull job.

24:00 Up there your life expectancy was any time, and coming back to a job like that, it was just nothing. I couldn’t settle down at all. So I got a job, a transfer…I’d already got this job off this foreman, I thought I could do this truck driving, in the mines. I thought that would be better than what I was doing.

24:32 So I had to go to the general office, to the manager, to get this transfer, and he was one of the bigwigs that had said about, “We’ve got to help these boys all we can, because they’ve had a tough life.” So when I approached him about the transfer he said, “No, we're not transferring anyone, you’ve got to stay where you are.” He wiped me off like a dirty rag, I thought, “Well, that’s it.” So we moved over to Melbourne, and that’s where Daph and I were married. 25:00 We set up in West Melbourne, in Hawk Street, in a little dry cleaning agency, only a little shop, and we set up a library. That was all right if I went out to work, there wasn’t much money in it. I got a job in a tinsmith’s place. I’d get malaria, still, and I was pretty crook. And stayed there about six months

25:30 and decided to sell that. My parents came over from Queenstown to Victoria, and the brother and I bought a fruit shop out in Ripponlea. And that was in about 1947, got into this shop, in the main street. And we’d go into market early in the morning and buy our stuff, and we had a nice little shop there.

26:00 But it was too much for me, because my brother was delivering, he had all the deliveries, and being young, he wasn’t very conscientious, and when I finished the shop work, I had to go out and help him deliver, and quite often on the Saturday afternoon, I would be pretty worn out. Anyway, I started getting the malaria again, so I was getting pretty crook. So I went to the doctor,

26:30 and they took a slide, and I drew a positive. They put me on this paludrine, I think it was, a six months’ course, and they said, “You’ll never have malaria again, after.” So I took it for about two months, but every time I took the tablet, the old heart would really race. So instead of going back to the doctor, I just threw the tablets away and carried on. And finally I had to walk out of the shop. I sold my share to my uncle, who took over,

27:02 and we went back to Queenstown, where Daph’s father was. Her mother died early, when she was only thirteen. I got a job back there again, and that was no good. We bought a house, and were there for twelve months or so, I suppose, and decided to go over to Kalgoorlie. So I went over there. And I had to go through a medical, and I had to tell them everything I’d had

27:30 and they wouldn’t give me a job in or about the mines because of my disabilities I had, hookworm and everything. So they knocked me back. And I tore the paper up instead of keeping it for further reference, for a pension. But I got a job as a barman at the Boulder City Hotel. And that was all right. I’d never poured beer before, but I got around that all right.

28:02 I struck another chap… They used to have the big beer gardens there, lovely gardens they had. And this day this Pommy started to sing a song, and straight away I knew he was an ex-POW because it was a song that one of my chappies had written up in Malaya. I knew straight away…

28:31 His name was Barrett, and I went over and shook hands with him. I got my photo in the West Australian paper, of me shaking hand with him, this Barrett. We got talking. He’d worked on the Burma, too, in the same area that I had. Of course, in those days they reckoned I looked like Chips Rafferty, so they called me Chips. I used to bring a bit of custom

29:00 to the younger generation. They would come along to the lounge…They put me down the lounge especially, so they’d come up, and be signing autographs and everything. Yeah, he did all right out of the place. That went on and on, we were there for twelve months.

What was the song that he was singing?

The Moon Over Malaya.

29:39 The words were,

\n[Verse follows]\n “The moon is shining all over Malaya,\n And the stars shine down from up above.\n The girls in their sarongs and kabayas.\n Sing their songs of love…\n

30:01 From Penang to Ebo and Malaka,\n

You can hear those enchanting lullabies,\n It was there we kissed and said goodbye…”\n

It’s got a tune to it. I think I missed a couple of lines there…

30:31 Yeah, that was it. If I had a good voice I could sing it. And he sang it. There was a little bit of an introduction to it.

So when would this have been sung? Was this when you were on the line?

No, I heard it… Yeah, maybe, I’m not quite sure.

31:00 In between Singapore and the railway line and back to Singapore…I think it was when we came back to Singapore, on the way home.

Are there other songs from that period that stuck with you? That remind you of that period?

Oh, there was all sorts of songs that really brought home to us…They sound a bit ratty now, but…’there’s No Place Like Home,' 'Home Sweet Home,' and all those songs, they meant something…

31:30 But to sing it now, they wouldn’t really mean much to anyone. They're old songs. But they all had a meaning. We used to sing them marching off to work…It’s A Long Way To Tipperary, and Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye. 32:00 White Cliffs Of Dover….I’ve forgotten myself. I can hear them all. Anyway, all those old army songs we used to sing going to work. And this is why a lot of the other nationalities wanted to be with us, because we could turn misery into a little bit of sanity. It saved us a lot of… And the guards, most of the time they went along with it, but sometimes they would try to shut us up.

32:31 But they didn’t get very far, because they would shut one lot up, and the next one would start. They couldn’t bash everyone at once. And some used to sing 'Good Old Melbourne Town.' All the Victorians used to sing that. Of course, there always used to be a lot of ribbing going on with us.

33:00 With New South Wales and the bigger states, with Tasmania and Queensland and South Australia. They used to have us on a bit. The only way to overcome that was to go along with it. With our two heads and all that sort of thing. Oh yeah, I’ve got a scar here… We used to go along with it, but you would get in first. “Oh, where do you come from?”

33:30 “Can’t you see? Can’t you see the scar?” “Oh, Tassie.” It went over all right. Once you bit a bit, once you started to bite about it, you were in trouble, because that’s when you got more. And you get a whole lot back. But if you treat it as a joke, you get by. You turn the joke on yourself. Then they wouldn’t bother you,

34:00 because they weren’t taking the mickey out of you. But yes, all those old songs meant a lot to us… As I said, we had twelve months over there, then Daphne’s father died back in Queenstown, so we decided to come back this side again. We had Peter, our son, he was about three years old. So we came back. My father had a farm, then, out at Sylvan, and he was working on the Board Of Works.

34:33 So I got a job driving the coaches, all around the countryside, down from Mount Elven [?], Sylvan, Burley, down to Lilydale, all the passengers catching the trains. And it was a pretty big run there, because there was no other transport. We always had full coach loads. It was a pretty busy time…

Where did you meet Daphne? In Tassie?

35:00 Yes, I met her not long after I came back. She was friends with my eldest brother’s wife and kids. They grew up and they still treat Auntie Daphne…She shines in their eyes. She was always Auntie Daph to them. They still love and think of her and keep meeting up with her. That’s where I first met her, and

35:30 things went from there, and away we went. We met fifty eight, fifty nine years ago…Peter was born when we were in the shop. Then we had a break of about six years, then we had the eldest girl. She was in the navy, now she’s up in Cairns. She’d been up there quite a few years now.

36:00 Daphne goes up there every year. I stay home and play my golf. But I’ve been up twice, I drove up twice. So I stay home and get jobs done while she’s out of the place, because if she’s here, I’ve got to clean them up every night. So that’s a bit of cunning with that.

36:35 What sort of assistance were you getting from the army when you came back?

Nothing. There was no assistance. The only form of assistance was when I was being discharged, you go in front of a panel…And of course all you want to do is get home, and the two doctors, or whatever, and they said,

37:02 “Do you want to go for a pension?” “No, all I want to do is go home.” Because going for a pension meant that you were stuck in there, going for more tests. And they said, “You’ll be back.” Not if I can help it, and I was, two years later. And the local doctor, Dr Stretton, they supplied their own doctor over there. The workers paid for their own doctor and hospital and everything.

37:30 They put in, say, two bob of pay and it ran perfectly. And he was the son of Judge Stretton, and he was a wonderful doctor and he was the one that got me a small pension to start off with, two years later. He filled forms in and I signed them and he sent them away. There was no help at all. But what I would like to say, before we finish, that is

38:00 through the family, my wife and family, that helped me survive all these years. I was in a big black spot and I could never have done it without them. I love them all dearly and they’ve been a big help and I wouldn’t part with them for the world. And all the friends I’ve had, too.

38:30 I’ve had a lot of friends during my life and I regard them as true friends. You know your true friends. When you're in a position like that, you get to know peoples' character and who you can trust and who you can’t. My family, I love them. When I’m gone, they can look back and say, “He did his best.”

39:00 Which we’ve both done, we both worked hard. With five kiddies, you’ve got to keep your nose to the grindstone. We’ve worked hard, both of us, and we’ve both done it together. When I’d come home from work, the meal would be cooked, and when we’d all had our meal, I’d either do the dishes while Daphne put the kids through the baths and cleaned up, into their nighties or pyjamas, then we could all sit down together.

39:30 And this went through the years, we’ve always done it. And we still do it. If there’s anything to be done, one of us will jump up and do it. I’ll go and do the dishes, I don’t have to be asked. Or she will hop and do something. And we’ve always done it together, that’s what marriage is all about. We’ve had our hard times, it’s not all easy. But we’ve stuck through it, and we're still here. And I think after 58 or 59 years…

40:03 We’ve had our hard times, we’ve had our good times. Now we're having our good times. We can sit back and have a lot of fun. There was quite a lot of bad times with all the stitching up and so forth. But you’ve got to look ahead, think positive, and keep mixing with younger people. It’s a big must, is to keep in touch with the young people,

40:32 and you find that you can see their side of things plainer than if you try to shut off. Things are going on now that we never dreamed of when we were younger. But you can’t think of when we were younger and say, “Oh, we did this, we didn’t do that.” You can’t compare today with our day, because it is totally different. And you’ve got to see the younger peoples' version of how life is going on.

41:06 I suppose our parents would have had a fit if we did what our grandchildren are doing today, but that’s life, and it’s progress and it changes. When you're a grandparent they will probably be flying to the moon or somewhere and you won’t know what is going on. But that’s the way things go, and that’s the way it’s got to go.

41:30 But as long as the old people can see what the younger people are up against today…I think they’ve got a very hard road to travel, because there is a lot more temptation, there is a lot more stress, there’s a lot more pressure. Everything has got to be done yesterday. They're under a lot more pressure. They’ve got to do better at school, they’ve got to have certificates…

INTERVIEW ENDS