THE ANNUAL HISTORY LECTURE HISTORY COUNCIL OF NEW SOUTH WALES

Shaping History through Personal Stories

By Tim Bowden

Sydney, 2002

Journalists sometimes profess to be historians, but I suspect fewer historians head the other way. They both, however, share a love of good stories. There is nothing like a compelling anecdote to cut through a fog of worthy generalisation AND to concentrate the mind of the reader or listener, trying to make sense of a complex topic.. By the way we know there is an audience of one – at a time anyway – famously identified by Phillip Adams as ‘Gladys’, the listener to whom he speaks every night on Radio National’s Late Night Live. Gladys likes something that she can relate to, a vivid personal story with resonances to the topic that she will remember to pass on to someone later. Like, ‘Did you hear about that doctor who took out his own appendix in Antarctica…’ No matter how earnestly or lyrically the historian or broadcaster might have been trying to stress the absolute isolation of those wintering at a polar station, that particular incident certainly grabbed Gladys’s attention.

It also has the merit of being true. I heard of this story and sourced it through an English translation of a Russian medical journal, while I was writing the history of Australians in Antarctica recently. On 30 April 1961, Dr L I Rogazov, isolated on a Russian base on the coast of Queen Maud Land, diagnosed himself with a possibly perforated appendix with local peritonitis and decided to operate on himself under local anaesthetic. He instructed his comrades how to revive him if he passed out during the operation, and a fellow expeditioner held a mirror to help him see what he was doing. He wrote later that he found the bottom of the wound a bit difficult to see. The resourceful medico was back on duty two weeks later. What was not mentioned in the formal prose of the medical journal article was that Rogazov had fortified himself for the ordeal with a couple of generous shots of vodka before he picked up a scalpel. Under the circumstances who could blame him.

Journalists traditionally make their living from stealing other people’s words and phrases and stories. It is therefore appropriate that my next example is purloined – with permission – from Professor Hank Nelson, a historian at the Australian National University. It is a splendid illustration of the old saw that truth is stranger than fiction. No novelist would dare to invent what actually happened to an Australian bomber pilot on a night mission over Germany in November 1944. The incident is described in Hank’s book Chased by the Sun recently published by ABC Books. Hank Nelson acknowledges that one of the advantages historians have over other scholars is that they gather great stories. These can be the historians’ great asset – when they are properly verified of course – and indeed the historian’s evidence and art as well as the reader’s seduction.

Joe Herman was the pilot of a Halifax bomber with a six man crew that took off from Driffield in Yorkshire in November 1944 to bomb the Ruhr in Germany. He flew as part of a 700 bomber force through the night. Having bombed and set course for home, Herman felt something thud into the Halifax. In his windscreen he could see the reflection of flames behind him. Suddenly the Halifax was hit again and Herman told the crew to bale out. He tried to hold the plane steady for the men to leave and when he saw the mid-upper gunner, a fellow Australian, John (Irish) Vivash dragging his wounded leg along the fuselage to the hatch, he thought he and Irish were the last of the crew still on board. Herman stood up and went to grab his parachute. Just then the plane rolled, spun and exploded. Herman found himself in the air with all sorts of bits and pieces from his Halifax. In the distorting light of the part moon, search lights and flares he thought that he and all the objects were stationary. Then he recognised that they were all falling together towards earth. He even thought he might find his parachute in the debris around him. He fell for a long time. Perhaps through two miles. Suddenly he crashed into something and grabbed it. In his dazed state he heard ‘Irish’ Vivash say, 'Is there anybody around?' Joe then realised Irish had been swinging under his canopy, and Joe falling faster, had hit Irish's legs and grabbed one. With the confusion of plunging through the night and with one leg injured, Irish, quite reasonably, was not quick to grasp that he had his pilot hanging on to him

The two descending air men did not talk much – Hank told me - but as they came close to the earth, Irish suggested that just before they hit the ground, it might be best if Joe 'dropped off'. But Joe was noncommittal. 'Maybe', he said. As it was, the ground seemed to rush at them, they brushed a tree, Joe hit the earth first, and Irish landed on him and cracked a couple of Joe's ribs. Battered and bruised, Joe and Irish walked towards Holland for five nights, were captured and became prisoners of war.

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Paul Brickhill, a Sydney journalist, shot down in North Africa was in the same prison camp. He heard Herman's story, and included it in his first book, Escape to Danger. That experience helped convince Brickhill that he might be the writer of the air war. He then wrote The Great Escape, The Dam Busters and Reach For the Sky, all of which became best-sellers and successful films.

The story is a good one, but its selection also signals something beyond just that story – the extreme dangers faced by bomber crews night after night and the raw courage of young Australians risking their lives with the statistical odds stacked against them. Their chances of survival were at best, forty per cent. Five times as many were killed as became prisoners. Pilots, with an obligation to hold the plane steady and like the captain of a sinking ship, be the last to leave, had the lowest chance of surviving by baling out. Joe Herman’s story is one of the extreme cases of survival by chance.

What makes a nation is the common past it believes it holds. When I went to school, history was tidily laid out. We learned about the discovery of Australia by Captain Cook, the arrival of the first fleet, overland exploration, gold rushes, squatters, federation – it was the ‘no worries’ Anglo Celtic approach. In the 1940s and 50s it was possible to construct a linear and sequential outline of our history. The Australian Aborigines were practically invisible in this But no more. Today we are aware that our history is far more complex. Historians like Henry Reynolds have unearthed aspects of Aboriginal history – there all the time, but not dealt with. We have had the histories of other nationalities, many of them residents of Australia for many generations, Chinese, Greek, Italian, and more recently Vietnamese and Middle Eastern migrants. Let us not forget that Afghans and their camel trains helped open up the outback and their descendants are as Australian as billy tea.

In my lifetime the old cosy approach to history has been demolished. Interestingly, the writing of Australian history has never been dominated by universities. There is a strong tradition of historians writing from outside academe. This is particularly evident in the recording of war, with the war correspondents turned historians, C E W Bean in World War I, and Gavin Long in World II were with the Sydney Morning Herald. Mercifully Australian history has not all been written by historians for other historians. There has been room for the knowledgeable and well informed outsider. Australian historians have felt an obligation to write accessible history.

One of the relatively modern developments in the chronicling of our past has been the rise of oral history, which began to flourish with the advent of magnetic tape in the 1950s and the ability

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to record voices in a relatively inexpensive way with portable equipment which could be easily taken out into the field. Before that war correspondents such as Chester Wilmot had to venture into combat with cumbersome disk cutting equipment so large it had to be transported in a van and operated by a technician. I have been fortunate to enter broadcast journalism at a time when portable recorders, and the ability to edit speech recorded on magnetic tape with a splicing block, sticky tape and a razor blade was first available. It was an enduring technology and lasted me for forty years, long after journalists on newspapers had forsaken their typewriters, copy paper and hot-metal presses for computers. Reporters were gazing glassily into the green screens of primitive monitors by the late 1970s. As we head into the 21st century with the digital revolution well established, Robyn Williams still constructs his Science Show on a rusty reel-to- reel Tandberg tape recorder. His office floor is littered with varying lengths of magnetic tape sliced from his analogue interviews – my friend Hank Nelson once dubbed this audio detritus as ‘the confetti of stumbling lips’ - recorded on a Nagra battery-operated tape recorder so heavy and strongly constructed as to be almost indestructible. Not for Robyn the feather-light digital recorders the size of a cigarette packet with their in-built hard disks. Robyn and I share a craft- like pleasure in cutting and splicing tape on an editing block that does not – in my view – extend to the digital wave-forms displayed on a computer screen. But I digress.

I began in journalism as a cub reporter on the The Mercury newspaper in Hobart, and I recorded my first freelance interview for the ABC on a wind-up, clockwork-driven tape recorder in 1958. The interview was a colour piece with a wool buyer, recorded in the Hobart Town Hall against the background of the yips and yelps of an auction. I was instantly hooked on ‘actuality’ – the ability to take the listener (Gladys was younger then but so was I) into a situation where the natural sounds were more evocative than any descriptive words I could ever write. Combined with that was the personality of interviewees revealed through their voices and layered with emotion, humour, cynicism, sadness, or excitement. It was an instant love affair with the tape recorder as I instinctively grasped its potential as a superb vehicle for the power of anecdote. First in journalism, and later in documentaries and oral history. On reflection any recorded interview is technically ‘oral history’. I resigned from The Mercury and headed enthusiastically, but financially precariously, into this brave new audio world.

Although I worked as a radio reporter for the BBC and the ABC in the early 1960s, I cannot claim to have been aware of oral history as a genre, even though I knew what a powerful instrument radio was in featuring the voices of so called ‘ordinary’ people who had extraordinary stories to tell. Both the BBC and the ABC regarded straight talks by scholars, scientists, historians – and to a lesser extent politicians – as the way to ‘do’ serious topics. There were current affairs and general magazine programs, of course, featuring short interviews, but the golden age of oral history on radio was yet to be explored. The written scripted word held sway.

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When Daniel Snowman joined the BBC’s Third Program in 1967 as a producer (he was previously a lecturer at the University of Sussex) he began by producing scripted talks delivered by informed and intelligent speakers. ‘Dons talking to dons’, scoffed the critics, Daniel remembers. However some historians were also beginning to record the reminiscences of elderly people as they looked back over events experienced in their lifetimes. Those historians who did so were dismissed by their peers as adding little useful information to the sum of human knowledge. Daniel Snowman remembers visiting the so-called oral history archive at an American university only to discover that they had proudly transcribed their recordings and destroyed the tapes. ‘It’s so much faster to work from a text than a recording’, explained the librarian.

Snowman was one of the producers of an ambitious BBC radio series called The Long March of Everyman, a 26 part epic of 45 minute documentaries covering ‘themes and variations in the history of the people in Britain’ first broadcast on Radio Four in 1971. This was social history par excellence, but because it spanned a period from Roman times to the latter half of the 20th century, its producers had to reach beyond the grave. It did feature the actual voices of Britain’s leading historians, but the series’ producers wanted to tell the story through the words and voices of ‘the people’. Excerpts from authentic documents were featured, letters, diaries, official pronouncements, court proceedings, gravestone inscriptions, graffiti, popular rhymes, lyrics or jokes – but read by someone who, through accent or profession, was today’s nearest equivalent. Charles Parker, one of the producers, Snowman said, criss- crossed the country, tape recorder in hand, heading a team that recorded some 800 historical documents in voices and accents that corresponded ‘as far as possible to those of the people originally responsible for them’. For more recent times, new and archival recordings were used. The BBC’s radiophonic workshop produced specially created music and ‘historical’ sound effects. A narrator was used where appropriate, but whole programs were sustained by the intrinsic material in a new free-flowing, radiophonic, style of production. This would not have been technically achievable before the advent of magnetic tape, allowing not only words to be crafted, but layers of sound to be woven in.

The dons were no longer speaking to the dons, but the producers to the listening public through many voices and accents. Snowman recently wrote:

Looking back, some claim to see today’s ‘sound-bite’ culture as having been preceded – heralded – by the Goons, Monty Python and the telly commercial with their rapid edits,

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dissolves, striking juxtapositions and highly economic foreshortenings of sound, speech and meaning. I would be sorry to think that The Long March contributed to a diminution of the nation’s attention span. But as an exploration of the possibilities of radio montage I believe it covered new ground. Perhaps that it why, on sampling the programs once again, I find them less ‘dated’ than I had anticipated.

One of key architects of The Long March of Everyman was the brilliant BBC radio producer, Michael Mason. He went on to produce ground-breaking social history radio series of epic scale. They included The Bayeux Tapestry, The British Seafarer and the documentary series which would have a seminal influence on my own work, the incomparable Plain Tales from the Raj, a lyrical evocation of life in British India.

The ABC broadcast Plain Tales from the Raj in the late 1970s, and I was not the only listener to be utterly captivated by this rich blend of reminiscence and nostalgia as those wonderfully fruity English upper class accents related a lost era of servants, punkah wallahs, whisky and sodas on the terrace, dressing for dinner, polo, tiger shooting from elephants, and indeed some of the less attractive side of colonial life like famine, disease and death under a hot copper coloured sky. Through these evocative tapes, Indian music shimmered and sustained the narrative. A description of the utterly stifling mid-summer heat on the Indian lowland plains would be underscored by a single ululating note from a sitar, slowly fading in the heat haze and mirage of one’s own imagination.

In 1985 I met Michael Mason in England. He had just retired from the BBC and I sought him out because I wanted to thank him for the inspiration and joy he had given me not only as a listener, but in my professional life. I was fascinated to learn that he began editing each episode of Plain Tales, not from excerpts of edited interviews, but by laying down a musical score. Then, and only then, he placed the voices within the music. But I am jumping ahead.

In 1979 I was working for the Department of Radio Drama and Features in Sydney. I had been allowed to develop an interest in oral history-based documentaries. The first took up an entire Sunday evening, on what was then called Sunday Night Radio Two. Titled The Top End - It’s Different Up There it combined interviews with Territory old-timers with anecdotes and songs – sung live in the studio by Ted Egan accompanying himself on his trademark percussion instrument, a Fosters’ beer carton. A more traditional offering was The West Coasters, another entire Sunday evening devoted to the miners and Huon Pine-getters of the wild west coast of Tasmania. The Director of the Radio Drama and Features Department at the time was Richard

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Connolly, a classicist, who had as much personal interest in the style of programs I was producing as a dog might evince in a plate of lettuce. But Dick was a small as well as a big C catholic (he had once been a trainee priest) and understood that the programs I made were popular with a wide spectrum of what is now Radio National listeners. He walked into my William Street office one day and showed me a listener’s letter. I wish I’d kept a copy of it now, but it went back in the system. It was virtually a one-liner. The writer asked why the ABC didn’t do a documentary series on Papua New Guinea like the BBC had done on India with Plain Tales from the Raj? It seemed like a good idea to me and I said so.

‘How long do you think it might take’, asked my boss? I thought it would take at least a year – thinking that would be the end of the matter. To my utter surprise Dick Connolly said he thought that would be fine, but I might need more time. He was right. Two-and-a-half years later, after 350 hours of raw oral history recording, Taim Bilong Masta – The Australian Involvement With Papua New Guinea went to air. With 24 programs of 45 minutes duration it was broadcast in three lots of eight, with a rest period of three weeks in between each batch. I had become the Blue Hills of radio documentary makers. Cassettes of the series sold in their thousands, and the series spawned a book of the same name written by Hank Nelson, then and now a historian with the Australian National University, who had collaborated in preparing the series right from the start.

To my surprise I found another ABC producer, Daniel Connell, who had been seconded to the NBC in Papua New Guinea, had beaten me to the idea and had started recording key figures in Port Moresby including Dame Rachel Cleland, wife of a former Administrator, Sir John Guise, Sir Maori Kiki, Bernard Narakobi and many others. We agreed to cooperate on the project and set to work.

Although the word colony was seldom used, Papua New Guinea was effectively a colony of Australia. Generations of Australians had lived and served there since the turn of the century. Yet many Australians were unaware of the role their fellow countrymen and women had played in this exotic, tropical, often violent land – violent in a geographical sense, with tidal waves on the coast and exploding volcanoes, as well as tribal conflicts. Patrol officers, or kiaps as they were called, of my own age, had had first contact experiences with Papua New Guineans. They often had to juggle personal survival with war-like and suspicious warriors with their responsibilities of bringing a European imposed regime or law and order – as well as medical help – to newly located communities in the Highlands where hundreds of thousands of people had lived undisturbed and undiscovered by Europeans until the 1920s and 30s. Fortunately for our project some of the pioneers, the miners who had first stumbled on these Highland

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communities like Dan Leahy, brother of Mick Leahy, were still alive and able to give first hand testimony of this extraordinary period in history.

Although Mick and Dan were practical men with little formal education, searching for gold not anthropological fame, they realised the significance and importance of their first contact journeys. Mick equipped himself with a 16mm movie camera, the best Leica still camera money could buy, and kept detailed journals of their journeys that have been invaluable to scholars, historians and indeed film makers. Although Mick was dead by the time I began recording for Taim Bilong Masta – which is pidgin for ‘Time of the White Man’ by the way – he had been recorded by the ABC’s Tony Morphett in the 1960s and the tapes survived. But this was only one aspect of the broad sweep of inquiry during which we interviewed planters, entrepreneurs, patrol officers, administrators, Australian women and children who had lived in remote locations, missionaries, money makers and misfits. Although the programs were principally about the Australian colonial experience, we also talked to a cross section of Papua New Guineans about their perspective on the Australians who had administered their mountainous and culturally diverse country, and who had brought them rather belatedly and hastily to independence in 1975.

I did not do all the interviews, although I recorded the bulk of them. There was no shortage of good stories or pointed anecdotes. Sometimes the best had to be discarded if they made points already dealt with. But were they true? We were fortunate to have historian Hank Nelson on board who had not only lived and worked in Papua New Guinea, and he had written a couple of books on goldmining in Papua and a Pelican special on contemporary Papua New Guinea. Hank was our reality check. To ensure continuity in interviews, and to make sure we covered all the proposed topics, briefing notes were prepared, headed: ‘For the perusal of interviewers with hangovers who fear that inspiration will not strike with the turning on of the tape recorder’. When we got to the ‘final cut’ situation, everything was passed through the Hank screen. For example the working lingua franca of Papua New Guinea was pidgin English, easy to pick up, and essential to bridge the insuperable communication gap caused by more than 700 languages. Several people told us amusing examples of its literal approach. The pidgin for helicopter was said to be, Mixmaster bilong Jesus Christ. A piano, big black bokis fightim teeth all the time cry out. It was highly likely, said Hank, that these colourful examples were not true pidgin. But they represented how the language worked, and so we ran with them.

People spoke to us with remarkable frankness. In a frontier society where the controlling Europeans were in a minority, we knew that violence was often used on plantation workers’ lines despite the efforts of patrol officers to ensure the strict labour laws were not breached. Hank and

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I were unsure whether we would get any oral testimony to reflect this. One cold morning on the Atherton Tablelands I was interviewing a former saw-mill owner, Rod Collins, who worked in Goroka in the 1950s and 60s. Not only did I have a hangover, but I was getting a cold. For reasons I can’t recall, I was interviewing outdoors. A bitter wind was flapping a loose sheet of corrugated iron against the milking shed as I fired up my tape recorder and began talking about how workers were treated at his Goroka mill. What about discipline?

‘Oh if they stepped out of line we used to thump ‘em.’ I was jolted into a higher level of awareness.

‘How did you thump them?’ My subject warmed to his theme. ‘Interesting you should ask that. Always with an open hand across the face. It made more noise. You never used a clenched fist because surprisingly they had very sensitive skins and they bruised rather easily.’ He went on to say that it was risky to hit anyone in the body, particularly if they had had malaria. They were likely to have enlarged spleens, which could rupture.

I heard a faint flapping noise from my recorder and looked down TO be horrified by what I saw. In my semi-stupor and amazement at what I was hearing I had neglected to check how much tape I had left on the reel. The sound I heard was the end of the tape whipping around against the empty spool. I hadn’t recorded the vital words. Throwing on another tape and cursing myself inwardly I went back over the same ground. To my surprise – and I didn’t deserve it – I not only got the same again, but with richer detail. Rod said that his workers were far harder to control from 1962, when laws came in allowing Papua New Guineans to drink alcohol.

‘You warned them, and if they didn’t take any notice, well, you had to take the law into your own hands and give them a good thumping. This was an example you’d have to set in front of the whole line… I used to have to belt them for pinching another bloke’s meri [woman]. But I gave that away after a while, too, because it became too common. I’ve never had much trouble knowing when to thump them and when not to.’

I was talking to a practical man who was telling me without any bullshit how things used to be. There was no nonsense or subterfuge about this. He certainly knew he was being recorded, and said what he said twice!

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Although I had been triggered by Plain Tales from the Raj, Taim Bilong Masta was no carbon copy. There was a harder edge to the programs, which attempted to cover historical and political issues, race relations, the uneasy co-existence between missionaries and patrol officers, legal, medical and the accelerated route to independence. Papua New Guinea had varying styles of music, from Jews' harps to drums and flutes, useful as bridges and brief atmospheric moments, but could not be used as Michael Mason had so beautifully done with Indian music in Plain Tales. There was no shortage of telling anecdotes, but I also risked combining linking narration with occasional editorial comments from Hank Nelson to add context and interpretation to the oral testimony.

It soon became evident, as the tapes came in, that we were exploring areas of history not covered in the existing literature. Children of Australians living in remote areas of Papua New Guinea grew up speaking pidgin and playing with local kids. But eventually they had to fly to Queensland and boarding school. These students spoke movingly of their cross-cultural experience, and their mothers detailed the anguish of separation – and their extraordinary experiences in isolation, like coping with medical emergencies not limited to their own families. There were no documents, as far as we could tell, detailing the pain of the returning patrol officer to an Australia that was unfamiliar to him, and trying to settle into a community which knew nothing, and cared little about the pioneering exploration and frontier experiences that had quickly made mature men of boys of 19 and 20. Let me quickly give a cross section of quotes from the tapes summing up the role of the patrol officer:

District Commissioner Sir Horace Niall: ‘You sort of had a bit of feeling, well, you know, the white man’s burden and things like that. Extend colonial influence. Doing some good for Australia, doing some good for the people at the same time.

Government officer Malcolm ‘Chips’ Mackellar: ‘You had to be dedicated. I mean no amount of money is going to compensate you for being stung by mosquitos night after night building a road through a swamp or something. You did it because you were dedicated. You were fired with a missionary zeal.’

John Murphy: ‘A stern father, but a loving father, this is what we liked to think of ourselves anyway.’

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David Marsh: ‘I think individual officers varied a lot. I am quite sure some thought they were God. Others thought of themselves as being very humble people.’

Gordon Linsley: ‘There are of course some people who will say that the kiap was a dictatorial, authoritarian, black-bashing autocrat. I won’t deny that I personally know some that were that; but they were the very rare exceptions.’

The role of the government officer, the kiap was so pivotal to the Australian administration of Papua New Guinea that we allocated three of the 24 programs to them. One, I called The Loneliness and the Glory. I remember having a great recording session in Queensland with a former kiap called Denys Faithful, who as a young man, had worked in the Highlands, had had first contact experiences and enough adventures to sustain a whole book. I hope that he got around to writing it. He walked down to his front gate to farewell me. Getting in to my car, I wound down the driver’s window for a final goodbye and I shall never forget what Denys said just before I drove away.

‘Make sure you tell it properly because for many of us the memories are all we’ve got.’

By the time we finished Taim Bilong Masta my two young sons had almost forgotten they had a father. There were no short cuts to the grind of ploughing through 350 hours of tape to assess not only content but to quarry compelling anecdotes. Editing followed me home, and I crouched over a Tandberg tape recorder to exclusion of normal life, the carpet littered with the confetti of stumbling lips. My wife Ros said it was like living with a cranky lodger and Jan Nelson commented to Hank on the difficulty of having a relationship with a typewriter.

Yet before the series had even gone to air, Hank rang from Canberra. ‘Digger’, he said firmly ‘We simply have to do the prisoners-of-war of the Japanese next’. This was not so much an invitation to discuss the project but a command. In 1983 it was forty years since the fall of Singapore when 22 000 Australians were marched to the Changi peninsula to begin three-and- a-half long and catastrophic years in captivity. By the time the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki abruptly ended the war, only 14 000 survived.

Although there had been books by individuals on this experience – Rowan Rivett’s Behind Bamboo was one of the first as early as 1946 – but the POW story was not well known. Military

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historians were only interested in campaigns and battles. Hank and I thought it passing strange that the traumatic years of captivity that had killed 8000 Australians were covered only in an appendix to the official history.

Although THE Eighth Division had fought bravely and well in the Malayan campaign many soldiers, quite wrongly, were ashamed of having been prisoners of war. As Hank and I were to discover, many had not ever spoken of their experiences to their wives and families. In 1983, young men who had served in their early twenties were in their early sixties and contemplating retirement. It was a good time for them to look back and reflect on their lives and their captivity. Australians, despite losing one in three of their number in captivity, had survived better than any other nationality. Without spelling it out, national identity was at the root of these exercises. The exploration of what it means to be an Australian, albeit in exotic locations. We would be first into a serious examination of this topic, Hank said, and would again break new ground. For the first time we would record the experiences of Australian prisoners-of-war in every camp from Timor to Manchuria.

Fortunately my boss Dick Connolly was pleased with Taim Bilong Masta and did not flinch when I asked to take on yet another two year plus oral history project.

We were right in thinking that the Australian POWs were ready to talk. The greatest difficulty was steering them past their brief but heroic action in Malaya and on Singapore island to discuss their longer term survival over the next three and more years, including the slave labour projects like building the Thai-Burma Railway, aerodromes in Borneo before the death marches there, the perils of transportation to Japan by tramp ships – many were tragically sunk by American submarines – and working in Japanese steel yards and coal mines in 1944 and 45. Australian POWs turned up in Timor, Java, Vietnam, New Guinea, Ambon, Manchuria and even Hainan. Service life has been described as 99 per cent boredom and 1 per cent flashes of stark terror. Allied prisoners-of-war lived with the imminent prospect of sudden death at any moment for more than three years. Death could come by execution, atrocities like the Sandakan death marches, a random act of brutality by a guard, or malnutrition, dysentery, malaria, cholera, beri- beri or even obscure skin diseases like pellagra not often seen outside medical text books.

Captured soldiers, in the thinking of the Imperial Japanese Army, should have committed suicide. They could not understand why the Allied soldiers could tolerate the dishonour of being captured and being alive. Many POW deaths were caused by neglect and could have been prevented by the provision by the Japanese of basic medicines and vitamins – and of course

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more adequate rations. Special Forces commando, John Murphy, a former Papua New Guinea kiap who was captured in New Britain, was one of seven survivors out of 63 in a Rabaul prison camp – most of them American airmen shot down over New Britain. Surprisingly there was no organised brutality. Murphy summed it up this way:

They just allowed us to die from starvation, disease and things like that; they didn't hurry death with brutal kickings or bashings. They had no work for us so they couldn't push a program like the Burma Railway. The guards were with us all the time and they would sort of get to know us. It was like having a herd of fowls. You know the fowls individually, but you don't worry about them. That seemed to be the guards' attitude to us. It was their superiors who denied us the food and medical treatment that caused the death of fifty-six out of our group of sixty-three. Fifty-six died from plain disease and starvation.

We wondered why Australians had survived better than any other nationality. Would the old stereotypes of - say - mateship be broken down?

To our surprise the stereotypes were not only evident, but magnified. Australians tended to work in small groups of mates, from three to five, sharing their meagre food and medicines and supporting each other through illness. Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson would have been proud of them. Many of the AIF were in fact bush boys or had an association with the bush, and had useful practical skills. They could erect jungle shelters, boil a billy in torrential rain, and in the case of Ringer Edwards, kill a stray yak, butcher it, bury the carcase, and have the meat in the cooking pots in minutes while the Japanese and Korean guards were running around shouting trying to find out what had happen. Good old fashioned mateship saved many Australian lives – undoubtedly assisted by an unquenchable sense of laconic often black humour.

Not all nationalities behaved as well. The Americans often did not work as a team. In Japan, Americans in POW camps ran futures market on food, selling meals ahead. A man could go bankrupt and choose to die of starvation. There were many instances of fighting and sometimes murder in the cramped conditions of the ‘hell ships’ transporting thousands of POWs below decks, where it came down to the survival of the fittest. Americans, it seemed, exhibited raw characteristics of individualism and capitalism. The Australians did not behave like that, an attitude summed up by POW Hugh Clarke:

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I can’t recall any Australian that was ever in a position where there was just himself. But I can recall plenty of occasions with, say, the Dutch and the British where a man would be dying and he wouldn’t seem to have any mates. I don’t recall a single Australian dying without somebody to look after him in some way.

Not everyone behaved well. The official history of the Eighth Division was written entirely from the testimony of officers. Yet being an officer in captivity in Asia was ALMOST a ticket home. They were not forced to do the hard physical labour that wore down so many privates and NCOs, and they had modest extra privileges. Some continued to fight for better conditions for their troops, enduring bashings and humiliation. Others did not, choosing personal survival. Soldiers like Snow Peat were forthright in their comments, but not judgemental:

They got a bloody hiding and they didn’t come back for the next one and get bashed. They were right out of the firing line. Cringed like a mongrel dog. Just like some of the men couldn’t take it.

A few officers were known as White Japs by the Australian troops. They deliberately toadied to the Japanese, even turning over their own men for punishment. One officer actually came back from the Burma Railway fatter than when he left Changi. Incredibly he was awarded an OBE after the war. These officers do not attend any POW reunions for obvious reasons. Yet many others, like Major ‘Roaring Reggie’ Newton of 2/19TH Battalion were fiercely protective of their men all the way through, and the Australian doctors were universally admired and respected as they performed medical miracles with no medicines and little equipment.

On brutal projects like the Burma Railway, with the Japanese making it clear all prisoners were expendable, the men knew that it was only a matter of time before they all died. Dr ‘Weary’ Dunlop told me on tape:

It was a matter of ultimate pride to me that the Australians outworked, outsuffered and outlives every other national group on the Burma-Thailand railway.. and the Japanese recognised it. But the trouble was that if you were sinewy, indestructible, if you were a good workman, you got sent back and back and back on these terrible tasks with utterly inadequate food. You could see these magnificently strong men with great hearts who slowly went to pieces and died.

This was enduring courage on an epic scale. Historian Hank Nelson put it like this:

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Courage on the battlefield is measured by a scale of medals, but there are no awards and little popular acclaim for the men who swung a hammer against a rock drill all day then turned to help others finish their set tasks. And kept doing it, day after day, knowing that exhaustion was killing them. It was sustained and calculated bravery.

Until the 1980s there was little public awareness of the Australian prisoner of war experience in Asia. Since Australians Under Nippon went to air, there has been a re-evaluation of what the surviving 14 000 Australian servicemen and army nurses endured. The production of John Doyle’s six-part Changi drama series is an example of how the Australian POW experience in Asia has now entered the mainstream of our popular culture. Today it is commonplace for Australian prime ministers to travel to Hellfire Pass on the Thai-Burma railway to celebrate Anzac Day. This would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.

Prisoners of War – Australians Under Nippon was the last major oral history project I produced for the ABC. There were several reasons for this. In 1985 I managed to start the Social History Unit, in which a three like-minded producers and some freelance broadcasters combined their talents to produce a weekly history magazine program, Talking History, a 15 minute showcase for good interviews, Word of Mouth, and The Feature, a half-hour documentary slot which was sometimes used for multi-part series like Siobhan McHugh’s The Snowy – The People Behind the Power, Bill Bunbury’s re-visiting of Cyclone Tracy, I Still Don’t Like High Winds, and Ros Bowden’s award winning Being Aboriginal. There was no way I could head off for two years on a major project while these and other regular commitments had to be sustained. Besides, the ABC had begun its period of funding attrition which has continued to this day. By the early nineties it was barely possible to assign a producer to a project for two weeks, let alone years. Two days was probably more like it.

In 2002 I am delighted to report that the Radio National’s Social History Unit survives. But that once powerful patron of the arts, the Department of Radio Drama and Features, is long gone, survived only by the Radio Eye unit in Radio National. Harried RN producers are forced to bring speakers into studios to generate good talk to fill up the airwaves. There is less and less time to record, edit, evaluate and construct documentaries where the truth and veracity of pre-recorded anecdote can be checked. Live broadcasting is cheaper. Edited, finely produced programs, are becoming more scarce as the national broadcaster struggles to fulfil its charter with less and less funding.

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I retired from the ABC in 1993, to begin my last major oral history related project outside its aegis – not for broadcast this time, but to prepare a written history of Australians in Antarctica from 1947–97, commissioned by the Australian Antarctic Division. The tape recorder played a major part in recording the memories of Australians who had explored and pushed back the frontiers of geography and science in the last half of the twentieth century. I was acutely aware of parallels with the oral history I had recorded with Australians in exotic locations, like Papua New Guinea and South-east Asia. Many of the early expeditioners were ex-servicemen seeking the challenge of polar adventure. Many of the same qualities that sustained prisoners of war in adverse conditions were present in expeditioners during the pioneering years of the late 1940s and early 50s. A reliance on mateship, ability to improvise, cheerful acceptance of lousy food and equipment, a healthy disregard of pomposity and a robust and often wicked sense of humour.

The first prefabricated huts sent to Heard Island in 1947 were constructed for the Pacific war in the tropics. They had louvered windows near their ceilings ‘to let in the cool evening breezes’. There were plenty of those on Heard Island. Bored with the four-hour watches that the weather men inflicted on their colleagues, radio operator George ‘Swampy’ Compton decided to boost one day’s rainfall by peeing in the rain gauge. He then radioed the artificially enhanced results to Sydney which had to be corrected later by the unimpressed meteorologists. There is no time available to explore Australians’ wider experiences in Antarctica on this occasion. But mindful of my topic, Shaping History By Personal Stories, I cannot resist passing on a comment I recorded from Trevior Boyd, a weather observer on Macquarie Island in 1950 that strikes a chord with many Antarctic expeditioners: ‘Every bastard is mad down here except me.’

Nearly all of the books I have written spring from a bed of oral history. Two of them – a biography of the war cine-cameraman Neil Davis,One Crowded Hour, and The Way My Father Tells It, are essentially accumulated interviews with just one person – although in the case of Neil Davis, other voices are included. This is, if you like, biography by dialogue. In these two cases the anecdotes had to illuminate whole lives – and Neil’s incredible life was a succession of such anecdotes so that any two would satisfy, and any five exhaust, most of us. In the book about my father, the best anecdotes were often personal and domestic. Because of my close personal relationship with, and detailed knowledge of, both lives I had a particular obligation to get the anecdotes right. Fortunately, both Davis and my father had a capacity to word and shape their own stories. My task was to select, locate and link; and that was both subtle and complex. I also had to ensure that the total of the anecdotes was consistent with my perception of their whole lives.

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I am well aware that the clock – or ‘the old enemy on the wall’ as Dame Edna Everedge once said – is against me. There are a few final things I would like to say. Before I left the ABC a colleague was agitating to change the name of the Social History Unit’s magazine program Talking History. I always liked the title and asked why? ‘The word ‘history’ is a turn off for people’ was the answer. Well the program’s name was changed, but ten years on I am happy to say that the word ‘history’ is alive, well and flourishing.

It has even moved into the forefront of political debate and is even part of the front-line agenda of the major political parties.

Both the present Prime Minister John Howard and his predecessor Paul Keating have used selective elements of our history to buttress their political agendas.

Contemporary topics like reconciliation, the stolen generation and Aboriginal land rights are based on historical debates. John Howard picked up historian Geoffrey Blainey’s phrase ‘black arm-band’ history to assuage the guilt he felt was unfairly attached to the early European settlers and their treatment of indigenous Australians. On the other hand proponents of Aboriginal rights contend the original research of Professor Henry Reynolds on the brutal treatment of Australian blacks represents a more realistic assessment.

Even the opening of the National Museum of Australia sparked a vigorous national debate on how the history of the treatment of Australian Aborigines since European settlement was presented.

Earlier this year John cut short an official overseas visit to hurry back to Australia to attend the funeral of the last Anzac, Alec Campbell.

Both Paul Keating and John Howard have been aggressive users of history.

On Anzac Day 1992, Paul Keating kissed the ground at Kokoda, where Australian troops had died successfully defending their homeland against the Japanese advance in 1942. The Prime Minister was deliberately signalling a shift in the traditional notion that the emergence of

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Australia’s national consciousness was forged only during our participation in British empire- related conflicts, like Gallipoli and the carnage in France during World War I.

John Howard’s embracing of the Anzac tradition – and he too turned up recently at the opening of the Isavura Monument on the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea – is something he clearly feels personally passionate about. It is also a highly political move to capitalise on that deep wellspring of nationalism, and national identity that he would like to have associated with him, and by implication, Coalition politics.

Thirty years ago, history was never thought of as a political issue. But today history is at the forefront of the debate about our national aspirations – about who we are and what we might be. It is also about Australians’ perception of their place in our region – and what is distinctive about the notion of ‘Australianness’.

A last word of caution on the craft of history – particularly oral history. Practitioners must be mindful of the words of Samuel Langhorne Clemens – Mark Twain - who once said: ‘The further back I go, the better I remember things – whether they happened or not!

Thank you for having me.

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