Australians at War Film Archive

Robert Douglas (Bob) - Transcript of interview

Date of interview: 8th March 2004

http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/1609

Tape 1

00:36 Rolling now. OK Bob, I’ll just ask you to explain to us in ten minutes, what’s happened in your life.

Well I suppose if you want to know what’s happened in my life, I would like to go back to really the very, early the beginning which involves my parents. And to understand my life perhaps, an understanding of my

01:00 parents would be useful. I’ll start with my mother, who was a magnificent woman. And she was born in London in 1878. And she was born, as she used to tell me, in the sound of Bow Bells, which made her a Cockney, really, from the Soho area.

01:30 She told me stories of, in her childhood, listening to the bell toll 80 times for each year of Queen Victoria’s life, and so it went on. Her family did tailoring for London tailors, Saville Row tailors. My maternal grandmother, whom

02:00 I don’t think I ever met, I may have done when I was very young, she made hand-pearled gentlemen’s jackets and waistcoats, that is invisible stitching, and that’s how they made their living. My mother found employment in a London hotel as a housemaid, and she was evidently very good at that. And she

02:30 progressed and became Housekeeper of a major hotel, which was a very important position in the hotel running. That progressed, and then, I understand mainly from my eldest brother Jack, who was 13 years older than me. That during this period in the hotel, she became romantically

03:00 involved with the head waiter, who was an Austrian, and a child ensued, so, and that was Jack, so really he was my half brother. So that went on, and obviously this birth of a child in those days, caused some concern, and she resigned. And therefore she

03:30 had nothing to do. Her older brother Sid, was a solicitor in the City in London, and I think with his assistance and perhaps other members of the family, she opened a boarding house for gentlemen. And the boarding house for gentlemen provided temporary boarding really, for gentlemen, in those days, in transit. They were moving from country to country, and

04:00 so on. And according to her stories to me, she can recall she had one of Ghandi’s disciples staying with her, Doctor Ray, and on one occasion Mr Ghandi actually visited her establishment to see to, to talk to Doctor Ray, that’s just one of the little comments she used to make. Now during this period, she must have met a

04:30 Scottish gentleman who was travelling widely, and that was my father, William Douglas. It’s interesting to note that William Douglas, who was born in a place, a village called Leyton, L-E-Y-T-O-N [Letham] in Scotland, which was very close to Glamas Castle, where Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was born as a princess, she became the

05:00 wife of the King George VI, and eventually the Queen Mother as she was known. So he, his only claim to fame was that he was born near the castle. However, my knowledge of his early life is very sketchy. I believe his parents ran a bakery, and they, at some stage, may have moved to Brecon, which is another

05:30 place that perhaps we’ll come back to later. But he being a young fellow was restless in Scotland at the time, opportunities were virtually nil, and at 15 he took ship. His parents had died and he was virtually an orphan at 15 years old. And he had read of the great gold strikes in Townsville, or in Charters Towers in Queensland,

06:00 North Queensland in Australia. So he took ship on a giant sailing ship to Australia, and according to the story, 16 weeks before the mast, he arrived in Townsville. I’m not sure of my facts on this, but it would appear that if he went straight to Townsville rather than coming around the coast, pardon me, coast of Australia, that the ship that he was on, would have taken passage down the 06:30 East Coast of the America’s and around Cape Horn, and across the Pacific, which would have given them a direct access to Townsville. Arriving in Townsville, he was paid off, and he then invested in some mining equipment, which he carried, and he walked the 60 odd miles to Charters Towers. Apart from a few rough bullock tracks, there was no, no way of,

07:00 no roads or footpaths or anything of that nature. So he arrived in Charters Towers, and spent a few years there. There were stories that there was a romantic arrangements there, but nothing really came of them, obviously. He was unsuccessful in, in finding gold, so he got a job with a, a drover’s

07:30 camp, and twice assisted in driving cattle from the North Queensland to Sydney overland. That took months, because you had to go with the pace of the cattle, so as they could feed and retain their condition until they’d get to the destination. He did that twice, and being restless he moved down the coast, and finished in Melbourne. And there he worked for a short time, with

08:00 some people called White, who ran the early theatres in those days, White’s Theatres. And then, the detail here I just don’t know, but he moved to Geelong, and there he met a Mr Dalton, who was the Manager of Cobb and Co in, in Geelong. And when he was

08:30 there, he Mr Dalton gave him a job with Cobb and Co. And I have here a letter which gives him his original mail time instructions, dated the September 24th, 1889. And he drove the coach from Mortlake in Victoria to Hamilton and back, and there was quite a story related to that,

09:00 which we may possibly come to later. Then the railways came and the coaches died, so he took ship again and went to Western Australia, because they were finding gold over there. He worked there and didn’t do too well, so he took ship again to South Africa. And he went over Africa, and he went to Kenya,

09:30 and he was terribly impressed with Kenya, and he thought it was the finest country he had ever seen. So, obviously he wasn’t satisfied with that, and he took ship again to America, all on sailing ships. And he went across America, and I’m not too sure what his activities were. I know that I inherited eventually,

10:00 a, a railway type watch, a fob watch which he owned, which was obviously related to his days on the coaching days. And another, a beautiful gold Elgin watch, with filigree hands and gold embossed figures, and it must have, he must have purchased that in America, when he’d had a bit of luck. And I treasured those for many years, but then they were stolen.

10:30 The other thing that I inherited from him later on, was his silver spurs, which he would, and I used those. But he must have met my mother as he came back, passed through England. His history says that he did nine trips between England and Australia in his lifetime, plus all of the other travels he did around the world,

11:00 he was a real traveller.

So he enjoyed the life of an adventurer?

Yes, it was very much so, because there are many stories in his lifetime, which I don’t recall him telling me, but I do recall my mother telling me, because she was fooled with the history and law of my father, and she obviously was very, very fond of my father,

11:30 because she just never spoke of anything but good.

Did your mother marry the Austrian man?

No, no, that’s why she had to leave the hotel. So during my father’s, I’ll come to that now. During my father’s travels, he must have taken Ursel to stay in my mother’s boarding

12:00 house for want of a better word, which was in Sandwich Street in London. And she told stories there, under, of Sandwich Street. And my father must have married her there at some stage, because further children arrived. George was the next one, and he was ten years older than me. And then three years after that,

12:30 Bill arrived. And then the story goes, that some time, my father was still travelling extensively and I have one of his passports here, which show some of his travels around the world and around the South Sea Islands, and he was an, an inveterate traveller.

Can I just ask you Bob,

13:00 who helped your mother look after her child, her first child, that she had when she wasn’t married?

I have no idea, I have no idea. I think she probably just did it herself, because that’s why she went, she was in a home situation running the boarding house, so she had Jack and then George, and then later Bill. George was born in 1911,

13:30 and Bill was born in 1914. Did she ever describe what the social implications were for her becoming pregnant out of wedlock at that time?

I, I have no idea, no recollection of it, because I was too small. And so Bill was born in 1914, so. And then there’s the stories, that in those days the Zeppelins came and we were at war, or the Great War, or what is known as the World War 1.

14:00 And the Zeppelins [airships] used to come across at night, and.

Can you explain the Zeppelins to me?

Zeppelins were great airships, inflatables, which came across, they were gigantic things like a long cigar, with a small cage underneath, which had a motor in it, which had propellers and it drove the Zeppelins and it drifted across the, the sky, subject to violent winds and so forth. And it dropped

14:30 bombs, so it dropped bombs on London. And the searchlights used to go up, and this is in the Great War 1914-18, and then Mother would find Jack and George sitting on the window sills enjoying the display, until she pulled them inside.

Did your mother have any relatives that went to

15:00 the Great War?

Not to my knowledge, I have no idea. And well, they were all getting too old. You see my father was too old, cause he was 50 by the time the Great War started. And, and his, his passport that I’ll show you later, shows his movements. And it’s liberally stamped with, “Not for the zones of the Army.” So that he wasn’t

15:30 allowed to travel in the areas where conflict was, were military control. So, no my mother. Then the story goes, one day there was a knock on the door at Sandwich Street, and she went on and Bill ran up to the, he would have been about six or so, ran to the door, and came back to Mother and said,

16:00 “Mummy, there’s a man at the door.” So she went to the door to let him in, and then she turned around to Bill and introduced him to his Father. First time he’d seen him, he’d just come back after birth. He was absent so much. So then on the 5th of December 1921, I was born. But by that time, Dad must have had some success in his

16:30 life, and he took Mother out of the boarding house in Sandwich Street, and bought her quite palatial, in those days, house, in a place called Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, which was about, oh, I don’t know, 30 or 40 miles from London.

What sort of a town would Essex have been back then?

Essex was a very,

17:00 Essex is a beautiful county, I’ve only visited it once in later years, beautiful county. Leigh-on-Sea was very, very nice, it’s on the estuary of the Thames, and it’s other claim to fame it’s just a few miles up river from the Southend Pier. Southend and Southend Pier is world famous, it’s a mile and a half long, because the tide goes in and out very

17:30 substantially at that time. So we were close to Southend. I have very little memory, I look at the photographs and I, I went back and I could see what they looked like in the flesh. It was a rather stately area, and the house fronted onto Leigh Avenue, 59 Leigh Avenue. And it fronted onto Leigh Avenue, and judging by the photographs,

18:00 it went straight through to the next street on the back. So I, in subsequent years, when I went there in 1964, it had been subdivided and there were houses facing the other street. The nature of the place had been, had changed of course, because, with the all immigration and the mixed type of races, with interchange

18:30 and so forth, Leigh-on Sea and that area down there had been taken over largely by an Indian population. I did think when I went there in later years, I did think about asking to gain access, but I decided against it, and just looked at the front of the house, and went away.

So given that they had a good life in Essex at that time, what made them immigrate to Australia?

My Father with four boys then,

19:00 Jack, George, Bill and myself, he felt that opportunity in England was going to be limited for them. And he wanted to.

Why did he feel that opportunity was going to be?

Well because of the nature of the society at the time, very, very strict social barriers in England at that time. And if you weren’t in the aristocracy, 19:30 things were middle class operations, or lower class operations were very, very doubtful, as far as future of people concerned. I suppose we would be classified as middle class.

Would you describe your father as a liberal thinking man?

I can’t answer that question, I think he was, I think he must have been because of the way he travelled. But I’ll come to the point, I didn’t have much opportunity to talk to

20:00 my father. I can remember odd instances, but again, I was so small, I, I have doubts in my mind, whether I got information by speaking to him, or I’ve picked it up from stories told to me by other members of the family. So that’s a difficulty for me, so I have to be cautious there. Then

20:30 Jack tells me, or told me that before they came, there was a suggestion that they would go and leave England, and go to either Australia where at that time he owned a gold mine, or to Kenya and grow coffee, because he really fell in love with Kenya on his earlier travels. Jack tells me that the, or told me, that the kitchen table was

21:00 covered with maps and brochures and everything else, while Dad discussed and described the various situations to my mother. However, in the short term, the decision was made that we were going to come to Australia, so we sold everything up in, in England, and I’m told that we loaded about 70 trunks onto the Royal Mail Steamer Naldera, which was the pride of the P&O [Pacific & Orient] line at the time.

21:30 And we travelled out first class, which must have been a stark difference to some of my father’s earlier travels on various ships. So we travelled out first class and called at all the necessary ports to deliver the mail. And so, that’s where the difference between a liner and a tramp steamer came in. The tramp steamer went wherever there was business for it to pick up,

22:00 a liner went on pre-scheduled stops so they could deliver the mail. And so we called all these places. But before we left, Jack had become a very, very knowledgeable young man, by that time, what was he, about 19 or 20. And he had been a, a leader in the Scouting movement, Boy Scouts. He’d got to the job of Rover Scout,

22:30 which was about as high as you could go. And then before we left England, he had an honour bestowed on him, which very few Scouts got, and that was he was appointed a King’s Scout, and that meant that he had a special letter from the King, appointing him a Scout. And George was also a Scout, and we had photographs on the wall before we left England, George was a Scout and Bill was a Wharf Cub, I was on a little

23:00 tricycle.

What year did you arrive in Australia?

In, we arrived here on Australia Day, which would have been very, very hot, 26th of January 1926, and I was four years old. I must have had my birthday on the ship coming out. And we landed at Port Melbourne, which of course my father was familiar with Port Melbourne, having been there many times before.

23:30 And he quickly organised everything for us, and we went ashore and we stayed in the Victoria Coffee Palace in, which was a Temperance Hotel, not that my father was a Temperance [movement against alcohol] man. And he, we, we stayed there for a few nights while we got things sorted out. Then I have faint memories of real estate agents and motor cars. And I think we went down

24:00 into the Western Districts of Victoria, I’m pretty sure that’s where we would have gone, because it was down where my father had been in his coaching days, and he was familiar with the territory. And we looked at properties and, just Mum and Dad and myself were doing that. The boys, arrangements were being made for the other boys, either work or school, I just can’t remember.

24:30 And I think Mum must have been deterred by the distances involved, because you’ve got to understand that she lived all her life in London, right in the middle of London. And then when she did make the big step out of London, she’d only gone a couple of miles down the track, about six station stops I believe, down to Lee-on Sea. So.

Australia must have been a tremendous shock to her?

25:00 I would have imagined so, I would have imagined so. On that point, my mother was not very tall, about 5”4, but before she left, she had long auburn hair, which went down below her knees. And she used to wear it in buns, on the top of her head, which gave her quite a height and stature. And I think perhaps because of my father’s comments, she had all of that

25:30 cut off and she had a short bob. But the hair was saved for the future, and it was all coiled up and placed in tissue, and I can still remember it in white boxes, flat white boxes. And they remained in her, in her dressing table drawers until the day she died.

So the family decided to set up a

26:00 poultry farm, is that correct? Yes, we came out, and we, we went to Box Hill for a start, and we rented a place in Box Hill, it was a beautiful, very old place, it had a turret on top, as some places did in those days, they were lookouts for the coaches in the early days.

Was Box Hill a rural area then?

No, it was a pretty good, it was on the fringe of rural country, but it was,

26:30 it was pretty much suburban, but you only had to travel a mile or two to be in rural area. So I was taken up to Box Hill State School, and I was enlisted in Box Hill State School at the age of four. And I remember my mother being shocked, because a teacher came out to speak to her outside the classroom, and when he left, the classroom

27:00 erupted into uproar. And my mother said, “He turned around and opened the door and said ‘cut it out’.” She was shocked. It was a rude introduction to Australia. So I attended Box Hill State School. Everything went well, we were in Station Street.

What was your father doing for work then?

Oh he, he had substantial funds

27:30 available to himself, he was of independent means to a degree, because he was going to go up to the gold mine. The gold mine was situated at a place called Bonny Doon, which is well known today. And it was Dry Creek via Bonny Doon, I’ll come to that shortly. However, we, in Melbourne, then I had a bit of a problem with

28:00 my throat, so I was taken to a Doctor. It had to be pretty serious to go to a doctor in those days, you didn’t go to doctors. If you had something wrong with you, you went to the chemist. And we went to the doctor, and the doctor said, “Oh his tonsils are bad there, they’ve got to come out,” so he performed the operation in his waiting room, his surgery attached to his interviewing room, no hospitals. And so he got my mother to be a,

28:30 a stiff bottle brush that you use cleaning bottles and put a bend in it, and he gave her a dilute solution of iodine, and she painted my throat until it got better. And then we moved to another house in Box Hill temporarily, and my father had been accumulating furniture and so forth. He was a devotee of

29:00 what was called Beecham’s Auction Rooms in Bourke Street in the city. And, so we were starting to acquire furnishings, we didn’t bring furniture out with us, but we brought all the household chattels, linen, cutlery, crockery, you name it. And so, we moved there for a short while, and then for some reason, we went to Mount Albert, which was only a short distance away. So that

29:30 was the second school I went to. And we stayed there only briefly, and then Dad must have gone to Tunstall, the place that’s now called Nunawading. But Tunstall was the centre of the Nunawading Shire. The Nunawading Shire Council buildings were in Tunstall. As I say, they’ve since named that area Nunawading, and Tunstall

30:00 has gone. So we moved out and Dad had acquired a property of several acres, bounded on two sides by Lucky Street and Bridge Street, so it was quite a wide property, it went from street to street, and it extended a long way down. The roads were completely unmade with deep ruts and things like that. And Dad started organising things.

30:30 And we started to build a poultry farm, he thought he’d get into, the boys would be independent with a poultry farm. He didn’t want them working for other people.

So the idea was that this would be the family business, and everyone would?

That’s right, that’s right, everybody would work at it, and we would make a success of it, and the family would all be together. So Jack

31:00 the King Scout who, when he arrived in Australia was reputed to be the 13th King Scout in Australia, was in, Jack became the mainstay of the family, because he was so, so clever at everything, and so dedicated. So the, we built this giant, which was a giant

31:30 in those days, not just old shanties knocked together or anything. I can remember great white, that was the name, diesel trucks coming down with solid tyres, loaded with tonnes of galvanised iron, corrugated galvanised iron, timber and what have you. And here.

Were there many buildings helping with the farm, or was it just the family?

No, no, we got a couple of local people, Mr Noone was one,

32:00 across the way, and I think others came in as required to help it, but Jack was the guiding principal. Helped by my father I would say, but he didn’t do any work in those days, he was too, he was busy going to, off up to the mine all the time and coming back again. And Jack was running everything, which wasn’t bad for a 20 year old

What sort of other farms were in the area at the time? Not very much at all,

32:30 they were just small, small patches, little patches of stuff where people were eking out a living for themselves on a small patch. But not far away, only a mile or so away, was a place called Park Orchards in Doncaster, which are big suburbs in Melbourne today, but in those days they were all orchards, that’s where Park Orchards got it’s name. And they grew apples and pears and

33:00 it was just resplendent with trees. But the area that we had, Dad must have got cheaply, it wasn’t very good as far as growing was concerned, that’s why he decided to go into the poultry business. So we built the big shed and then we built feed sheds, and then later, we built an incubator room, in which we installed a kerosene fired incubator, so that we could produce

33:30 our own chicks.

Where did the family acquire the knowledge of poultry farming from?

God knows. I don’t know, as I said my brother was just fantastic, he could turn his hand to anything. So they went, we went to work there, and first of all we got the house into order, it was a big, old ramshackle house, but it was

34:00 a great house. But we took out petitions and Jack and George took out petitions and made different rooms and so forth. We finished up with, with a big long dining room in the front, and long bedrooms for Mum and Dad on the side, a sleep-out across the back, which the three boys, George, Bill and I slept in. Jack had a

34:30 private bedroom up on the front veranda. And on the other side, we enlarged the kitchen and with, there were two rooms there, so we left one as a spare room and turned one into a bathroom, cause there was no bathroom. But we finished up with a little room right in the middle, which had only light coming through from the back sleep-out, which was fly wired, and had pull up canvas blinds on the outside, when the

35:00 weather was bad. And so we settled in.

What, sorry Bob, what year were you actually able to start farming?

Oh we started, we were doing farming by 1927, we got straight into it. And we put in all sorts of innovations, you see. Most people went in and had to scrabble around inside the pens for their eggs.

35:30 But Jack designed laying boxes outside the hens, outside the pens, and the birds had access to it, and we walked down and lifted the lids and collected the eggs from outside. Didn’t take long to train the birds to go into the boxes to lay their eggs, once you had a few of them going in, they all went in. And, so, that was the other thing. We had stacks and stacks of straw which had to be stored, and then

36:00 scattered over the, over the floors. And then over a period of time, that became embedded with the droppings of the birds, so we had to dig all that out and bag it and sell it as chicken manure. And then of course, the birds claws got clogged with the droppings, so we had to clean those up.

36:30 It was a back breaking and tiresome job. And then we, then they, we started to breed the chickens, and Jack built a brooder house, which was a long brooder house, divided into very long pens. And he put on perches and everything else, inside was divided with the pens and the chicks could just stay inside. But there was a trap door,

37:00 and they could go out through the trap door, out on suitable days and they could run on the outside. But in addition to that, Melbourne winters can be very, very cold. So the chicks had to be looked after. So we installed a, a boiler, coke fired boiler at the one end, and ran steam pipes right through the brooder house, so that in cold weather the,

37:30 the brooder could be heated and keep the young chicks going. So we had a constant supply of chicks coming forward. And the eggs used to be packed in giant wooden boxes which were returnable. And with cardboard dividers and so on. And we acquired a cart with two wheels and a bar across the shaft, and Jack used to pull that down to the local station, and

38:00 load the eggs onto the electric train, we had electric train service, 20 minutes into Melbourne. And it, he’d send them into market, into Spencer Street, you see, where they’d be picked up and go across into the markets.

Was the farm making good money at this stage?

I think it was progressing all right. But then we got to the stage of 1928, and

38:30 in 1928, the dark clouds of the Depression started to fall and come across. America was going bad, the world was going bad, and things were getting very, very difficult. Gold had fallen to three pounds an ounce, and eggs went down to sixpence a dozen. So it was becoming very difficult. But to when we got to this,

39:00 Dad, I had learnt to ride a horse at a very young age, about five or six. Because I went across Bridge Street and climbed the hill up to the local blacksmith and farrier, he, he did all the blacksmithing, and he shot all the horses for the, and he had quite a large family. And I befriended the blacksmith as a little fellow, I think

39:30 he was a bit interested in this fellow, little fellow with a funny Pommy [English] accent as they said in those days. And he, he had a giant set of bellows in his forge, and the top handle was so high, that he had a rope attached to it to pull on it. And he let me pull on it every now and again, and I got rewarded with tea and cakes when his wife came out. But in addition to that, he had a number of children, they all had horses.

40:00 So he got them to teach me to ride, and I learnt to ride bareback. Then just with a sack across, and then with a saddle, and I was doing pretty well for a young fellow. I could canter around the paddock and so on, I was doing all right. So one day, Dad decided he was going to go up to the mine, and he was going to take me with him. So I went with him, and we went in a serviced coach, in those days the serviced coaches were not like coaches that we use today, they

40:30 were a long wheel base and they had bench seats across with doors on each side, to each bench seat. So there was a series of doors. And we went up, and I was always fascinated when we went over the Black Spur, and the Black Spur, I used to weave stories about the Black Spur in my youth. And, and we went to the, went up to the mine. And when we got there, we went into the, the base of the, the mine

41:00 was on what was called ‘The Golden Mountain’.

Tape 2

00:36 OK Bob, we might get you to just follow on with that story, you said you’d ridden to the mine?

Right, yes. We went to the mines, and we went and saw Fred Folkes who had a property at the foot of the mine, the mountain. And Fred acted as, as his mine manger, because he was running a small property,

01:00 and it wasn’t very, very good and the extra income of course, from working on gold mine, was very useful to them. So we went and stayed a day or so with Fred and Emily Folkes. Then he got Fred to give us a couple of horses, and we saddled up and Dad mounted and I mounted,

01:30 and then Dad strapped on his .32 Savage revolver with a cartridge belt, which obviously he’d obtained in America in his previous travels. And he wore that whenever he was in the country, because we weren’t far out of. When he first came here, he wasn’t far out of, was really in the period of the Ned Kelly days, and so forth. And he’d had a

02:00 fair bit of experience, so I was very impressed with Dad with his revolver on his hip, and riding up to the top of the mountain. And I was absolutely flabbergasted when I got up there, it was a village, you had houses for people working up there. It had a giant headquarters, office building for the management of the mine. I was terribly impressed with this big glass case inside, which held this pair of scales,

02:30 had to be in the glass case so it wasn’t affected by atmosphere outside, on which they weighed the gold, before parcelling it up. Then he took me down, and it was an old volcanic depression on the top of a mountain, so we took, went down inside on these slopes, and off each, off the sides were tunnels, were bored in.

03:00 And they were at different levels, and they had little railways going into them, with trucks on it, to bring the ore out, and they were on different levels. And when we got, we went into the tunnels a short distance, and then he showed me the stokes where you, where you had an inter, inter-connecting vertical shaft with ladders on it, and we climbed down to the next tunnel. And we explored all this, and I was fascinated by the whole thing.

03:30 And Jack used to go up there and work quite often. We came back. I might go back a, trace, retrace a bit, come back to Tunstall, the Tunstall house. When we took it over, we had no electricity, no sewerage, no water, nothing at all. We worked with, with kerosene lamps, we had beautiful gold kerosene

04:00 lamp, lanterns on gold chains which went up and down. And we, they could be put out of the way when, we held, we became a social centre there. Dad went out and had, canvassed all the people in the street, to see if they’d join with him to bring the water down Bridge Street, and they all declined. So Dad

04:30 had it brought down at his own expense. Then all the other people joined in, tapped into the water supply, that’s by the by. And so that gave us water, we had to have water for the poultry farm. And we were, previous to that, we had been living off tanks and a well, and the well had choked up and Jack was lowered down on a rope with a bucket and a shovel, and he cleaned up the well and got the water flowing in the well. So we had the well.

05:00 And then we fixed up all the situation in the house, and Jack put a, paid particular attention to the kitchen. He made Mum a beautiful plate rack where she could just put the plates up to have them drain above the sink, which we put in, and the plumbing was all done. So that was making things, we were trying to make everything as comfortable as possible for Mum. And she of course, was doing great work and cooking and so

05:30 forth, maintaining the house. And we had laid out nice lawns around the house. We used to hold garden parties for people, and local charities, the church and the school and that sort of thing. Jack built a mini golf course on one of the lawns, and that was a great attraction when, when we held fetes. And

06:00 then we, communication was bad, there were no telephones of course. And no radio, Jack built a 14 valve radio set, a gigantic thing. And we had no electricity, so he acquired a large number of glass jars which were positioned all around the wall in the main living room, dining room, lounge room combined,

06:30 you see. And from that, he, he put in various chemicals in each of the jars, don’t ask me, and lead plates, and wired those up to his 14 valve wireless set. And this evidently produced enough electricity to power the wireless set, and he was able to tune into London. We had great aerials outside on

07:00 poles, go running here there and everywhere, he knew exactly what he was doing. We’d been fiddling around with crystal sets before that, we had, get the cat’s whiskers [name for early form of radio] on and so forth, that was all right when local things came. And we were able to turn in, tune in to the initial broadcasts of the, the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] in Australia. We’d been getting BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] broadcasts before that, so that was a big innovation, a big help.

07:30 We had hand wound gramophone, and old 78s. And we had a lot of good music on that, that’s where I first learnt my bit of appreciation of some good music, so life was pretty comfortable. And then, as I went back, the Depression started to come. So Dad took stock of everything, and by the end of 1928, he

08:00 decided that he needed more capital, he couldn’t get it over here. There were all sorts of things going on around Australia, headlines in the paper were saying ‘South Sea Bubble Bursts’. And there was a gentleman by the name of Hatrey who was alleged to have been a great swindler, and he took people down for many hundreds of thousand of pounds in those days. And it

08:30 drove people away from investing in Australia, they just didn’t want to. So Dad assessed the situation and said, “Well there’s only one thing I can do,” he said, “I’ll have to go back to England to, to see if I can raise more capital.” And I’ll never forget, he had a wonderful leather trunk, big heavy trunk, not very big, it stood about that tall. And it opened up

09:00 into a wardrobe, and he was able to carry all of his things in that. And he accumulated a reasonable amount of personal belongings at this time, because somewhere along his life, he’d become a member of the Masonic Lodge, and he had progressed through the years. He belonged to a Lodge in London, and he belonged to a Lodge in Melbourne at Essendon. Why in Essendon I don’t know, it must have been

09:30 when he was there at some stage. And I have photographs of him in his Masonic regalia, and he became very high up. Well, he’d had very little education, he taught, he said to my mother that he taught himself to read and write with the Bible. Well of course, his access to the Bible was through the Masonic Lodge, and that’s where he had to learn his rituals and so forth. So he had to learn to read and he had to learn to write. And so

10:00 he accomplished all that. So however, he took ship back, he went back on a ship called the Steamship SS Berrima, B-E-R-R-I-M-A, which was a far cry from the Naldera that we’d come out on with his leather trunk, and away he went. And we all went down to see him off at Station Pier, and in those days, the train used to go straight out onto

10:30 Station Pier, and people used to get off the train and onto the gangway and onto the, onto the ship. And I think we all went aboard, and we came ashore when they said, “All visitors ashore,” and we all trooped down below. And as the ship parted with all the streamers, my, my mother

11:00 turned around and said to all of us, “I’ll never see him again.” So we went home to Tunstall. Then things got worse and worse. There was Mum, she was absolutely no relatives available. She had one brother who’d come out ahead of us, but he was in Perth, and we visited him on the way out, and he was doing well

11:30 as a master builder out there. And we came onto Melbourne. So there was Mum and things were getting bad.

And your father, what happened to your father?

He was on his way back to England, and he then contacted all his old associates over there, solicitors and so forth, and people with money, and trying to raise capital, and

12:00 unsuccessful. And then it transpired that the situation, we were in desperate straights back in Australia with Mother. And we, we couldn’t send any money, he didn’t have any money, and so he was trapped, he had to stay there until things, he could find a way to get back. So Jack and

12:30 Mum were running the farm with George. Bill had a job with the local dairy delivering milk around to the customers. And then I was still going to school. I would prevail on Mum to let me get up on a Saturday morning and go around with Bill on the milk round, so she had to get up early and rug me up, and

13:00 put me on the milk cart which was great fun as far as I was concerned, because I could hold the reins of the horse and drive the horse. Didn’t take much driving because it knew the round, and it used to go around and stop at all the customers anyway. That, I was enjoying myself, while Bill run around with his pails and his measures and delivered the milk into the billy cans waiting on the doorsteps of the various houses. So then things got worse

13:30 and worse, so then there was a council of war, and it was decided that George and Bill would have to “go bush,” which was the term in those days. You could go into Melbourne and there were shops in there which were advertised, there was very little work, there was virtually no work available. And the only work available, was to go bush, and work for a farmer. So they each got a job at ten shillings a week,

14:00 50 cents. 10 shillings a week and their keep. Bill went to Tocumwal, which was closer to Melbourne on the Murray River, and George went to Lake Cargelligo, out in the far west of New South Wales, really a long way out, and very bad country, but on the shores of his giant

14:30 lake which was part of the Lachlan River. Then, that meant that they were off, they didn’t have to be looked after at home, Mum and Jack. So the farm collapsed, we had to walk out on the farm, walked out with a few belongings. And we owed a lot of money to Mr Plant, who was the local grocer and post office, and also produce merchant.

15:00 He was very, very understanding, and I remember he took me for a ride in his motorcar once, and I remember it, we went down a hill and got to 60 miles an hour, I was thrilled to bits. And but anyway, we moved to Springvale, and we found an awful place in Springvale to live in, and I started at Springvale State School, which was my fourth school,

15:30 in my short career. And so we went from Springvale, we got a better house in Springvale, and Jack got a job across the railway line at Kelly and Lewis, the big founders, foundry and engineering. So that helped us a bit, we were able to survive. I grew vegetables in the back garden,

16:00 under Mum’s tutelage, and we had those on the. On Saturdays, if we had spare vegetables, I’d put them in a little cart that Jack had made for me, and trundle them around the local people and sell them, and bring the money home. And I got a job in the theatre, I was about eight, I was a lolly boy. And, and the doorman watched me for a little while and he called me over, and he said, “You’re never going to sell any lollies and ice creams like

16:30 that, son.” He said, “You’re going down the, the aisles at a rate of knots, and you can’t see the customers.” I said, “Oh.” He said, “Yes, you’ve got to go slowly, you’ve got to turn around go backwards, and then you can see the customers when they call out to you, and you’ll make some sales.” I said, “Thank you,” and I did, and that was my first introduction to being a salesman, and so I was reasonably successful at that. Same time, I was helping a

17:00 paper boy on the railway line, on the station. And he gave me a few Heralds [newspapers] to sell, and the Herald was a penny ha’p’ny [halfpenny], and there was a fellow leaning out of the train and waving to me for a paper, and I dashed up and he only had two shillings, and I had no change. I gave him the paper and I was looking

17:30 around, and I looked around, and I ran with the two, two shillings, I was running back to my boss to get change. And so the fellow was getting very disturbed and screaming and yelling, with his head stuck out the window wanting his change, when the train moved off. And of course, I had no chance of getting the change, so I took it back and gave it to my boss, and he put it in his pocket and said, “Thanks very much,”

18:00 I didn’t get any of it, so that was another lesson I learnt. So we stayed in Springvale for some time, then somehow or other, Dad must have been able to send us some money. So she made investigations and we moved to a shop in Lygon Street, East Brunswick, that’s right down over, past the South Brunswick Railway Gates.

18:30 So the shop was quite good, it was a little mixed business. We cleaned it up and polished it up, and then a young man called on us, he was from a dairy, they had a big dairy in Carlton, which today is difficult to imagine, but it was, it was not from Princess Oval where the Carlton Football Club is. And all that area was dairying. And he wanted us to sell his milk

19:00 and cream. So we had to, Jack had to turn around then, go out and buy all the material, and he made a big bench counter sized ice-chest, no refrigeration, ice-chest. And he had to bring in all the cork and so forth, and pack it all, and all, line it with galvanised metal and he did a very, very good job. And so we

19:30 started, we were in business with the milk. Then we started to sell malted milks, single container with a lid and a spiral thing on it, which meant that as you pressed down on it, it whirled around in the bottom of the glass, and mixed up the malted milk so we sold those. Then Mr Payoff came to us, and said he’d like us to try a new product he’d just 20:00 developed, which was called scalded cream. He’d scalded the cream, heated it up not boiled it. And it meant the cream, instead of running like liquid cream, came out in big thick clots, and that was extremely popular. And young Mr Payoff came along and wrote all the signs on the windows, promoting the scalded cream, and we used to get a lot of custom with that, particularly at weekends. And Saturdays, I used

20:30 to be sent to the Henry Adams Cake Factory with a big pillowslip. And I’d walk down there to, it wasn’t that far away, but it seemed a long way away for a little fellow. And I’d buy slabs of cake and so forth for the shop, and Mum always gave me an extra penny, so that I could buy a big slab of cake for myself, which the people who, the girls in the cake factory made sure it was pretty substantial for the penny. And then also

21:00 on Sundays, I would be sent up, and I had to walk because there was no trams available on Sunday mornings, trams didn’t run until lunchtime. And I had to walk up to Nicholson Street in, in Fitzroy, where there were lots of shops, especially Jewish shops and so forth, and I used to buy up all the bread that I could find there, and bring it back to Mum. And she’d damp it down and put it in the oven,

21:30 and we had hot bread for sale on Sundays, which was unique, plus our scalded cream. The business was doing pretty well, we weren’t doing too bad. Earlier in the piece, back in Box Hill when we first came out, Dad have given me a nice black and white kelpie, whom I called Tiger, and he was great. When I came home from school one time, and he was all frothing at the mouth and everything else, and he was snapping and snarling at me.

22:00 I didn’t understand, and I called out and came out, the dog had distemper [a viral infection], which was fatal, and so they, he had to be put down. While we were at Tunstall, Dad had bought me another one, a brown kelpie, and he was Brownie, he was a lovely dog, he was my greatest mate at that time. During the time at Tunstall, he had been unbeknown to us, run over on

22:30 White Horse Road, and he lying on the side of the road, he couldn’t walk, he was injured, his leg was injured. And a neighbour had walked by and seen the dog, recognised it as ours, good Samaritan, picked it up in his arms and carried it all the way home to our place, and knocked on the door, and of course, consternation at our place, with poor old Brownie being. So we poured, we put a big laundry, or wash house there,

23:00 so we scattered stacks of straw around for Brownie and he lived there, until he recovered and then he was as right as rain [fine]. And he went with us everywhere, he came to us, came with us to Brunswick. And he used to lie out in the middle of the tramlines, and the trams had to dong him, to get him to move off, and he’d saunter off and come back inside. But he was a great friend of mine, great mates.

23:30 And then one night, we were asleep and we heard some knocking on the, there was a side lane up beside our bedroom. I used to sleep in the same room as Mum, because there was only two bedrooms, and Mum and I slept in one, and Jack in the other one, in between those there was a kitchen. This side lane that ran up to a back door into the shop. And we could hear

24:00 this knocking, and I looked out the window and I couldn’t see anything. Next morning I went out and called for Brownie and he didn’t come along. Went out on the street, Jack came out with me, no Brownie. And then Jack went around to do something, and opened the back door from the shop and there was Brownie, he’d died. And he’d been trying, knocking on the door, trying to let us know something about he wasn’t well or something or other, so he was dead. So he had to buried with due ceremony, in the back garden. And

24:30 so then, we got a, I was on a trip to Yallourn, a school trip to Yallourn, and, to see the brickettes being made at the brown coal mine, which was terribly interesting. And on the way back I’d stuck my head out the window and got a bit of coal dust in from the steam engine. So when I got home, I was full of complaints about my eye, and so forth, and

25:00 bubbling over to tell people about everything. And Jack and Mum were very quiet. So we had dinner and when dinner was finished, Mum handed me a cable she’d received from her brothers in London. It said, “Poor old Douglas passed away yesterday,” that’s all.

25:30 And of course, Mother was quite distraught. So we sent for the boys, they were up in the bush, and they came back post haste, and we got together and we had a council of war. And the aftermath of this was somewhat disturbing, because Dad and Mum corresponded regularly

26:00 every week. And Dad’s letter arrived on the mail steamer, it was delivered to us every Monday, without fail. And after we got the cablegram, for the next five weeks, we got Dad’s letter. Then we sent for the boys, and Jack, George and Bill came back. And Bill had moved from

26:30 Tocumwal and gone up closer to where George was out in the west out at Lake Cargelligo. Bill had been on a, on a property where he had to get up very early in the morning, and harness all the horses for the harvesters and that sort of thing. He had to get 48 horses and harvesters before breakfast. So he had his ten bob [shillings],

27:00 and they used to be fed by the local farmer, giving them a tin plate of food, and they had to sleep on the hay stack or on the wheat stack and eat outside, they were never invited inside, they were just the help, lower class. So they both came home. So, council of war. And George had moved, had been working in Lake Cargelligo, with

27:30 a family by the name of Mr and Mrs Harris. And they had a son who was about a year younger than me, Harry. And so, George described the situation, he said Mrs Harris had left her husband and gone onto a property that was owned by Mr McGuiness.

28:00 And Mr McGuinness owned the property and he had let us have a section of it, as a share farmer. In other words, we were going to give half the profits to the owner of the property. And we’d gone, and they’d gone into dairy farming, which was the craziest idea ever, because it wasn’t dairy farm country. However, it was decided that we’d all go together, and Mum was rather pleased about that, because it brought the whole family,

28:30 it brought her four sons together with her. So we decided to go up to Lake Cargelligo, so we had to sell the shop, and then pack up all the gear and Downards of Carnegie were the carriers that came. And they loaded it all onto a truck, and I convinced Mum to let me go with the truck. And

29:00 after much discussion with the Downard’s people, I was permitted to go. So we went across from the shop with the gear, and it was repacked into a larger truck for the trip to Lake Cargelligo, which was a considerable distance. And we came out, left Victoria behind and crossed to Albury and up to Wyalong and out through the west, it’s about

29:30 six or seven hundred miles away by road, and away I went. We arrived and then Mum and Jack came up by train. And we were met, they were met at Lake Cargelligo, and brought us out. I’m sure my mother must have just about had a heart attack when she saw the place, it was a little rough hut on the edge of the lake, the lake was quite pretty.

30:00 And it was made from the off-cuts of pine when they were saw milling. And the bark on the pieces of, strips that had been cut off, was placed on the outside of the house, and the plain surface of the timber was on the inside, and it consisted of four rooms and a little sleep-out of air.

30:30 And inside it was lined with bituminous paper, tacked onto the frame, so there was no privacy as far as spoken word was concerned. And then it became apparent that the relationship between George and Mrs Harris, was more than employer and employee, and my mother was a bit startled at this. And

31:00 she had a room, and Arthur, Arthur was his name, not Harry, Arthur Harris and I shared a bed, double bed out the back and the boys had a room. And so we started work, and they, it was the worst, 1931, was the worst drought ever to hit the country, at that stage anyway.

31:30 Everything was shocking, there was no feed on the ground, Mr McGuinness had to stand there and watch his sheep die, couldn’t get anymore than six pence a head for them, even if there was a buyer. So they just died. We had a problem, we didn’t have feed for the cattle. But then bigger problem was, with the drought, the lake receded.

32:00 And as the lake receded, it left a boggy mass to the water’s edge. And of course the cattle went down to get their drink, and got bogged. No way in the world could we get them out, so we had to bring the horses down, and put ropes around their horns and pull them out. With that, the cattle were wrecked, so we only had one alternative, and that was

32:30 cut their throats and skin them and treat their hides, so that we got some money from the hides. And I didn’t go to school at all, because we were too far away from anything. We went in one day to Lake Cargelligo, Mrs Harris had to go in, Eva, Eva Harris. She had to go in, and so she took the two boys with her, just for a day out.

33:00 And we trotted in, we had two horses and Tango, he had cancer in one eye, and Leggett the other one. So we put Leggett in the sulky, and away we went to Lake Cargelligo, it took us some time to drive in. And it was market day. And during the day, Eva must have met her husband, and they

33:30 had a discussion, but it didn’t worry us. So when she finished her business, we hopped into the sulky and then we started coming home. And it was dark by this time, and suddenly Mr Harris came up in a Ford motorcar, canvas hood and so forth. And he pulled up in front of us, and grabbed the horse’s head, whilst he had an argument with Eva,

34:00 probably their marital situation was causing that. And she would have nothing of him, and she took to him with the buggy wood. And of course while she was lashing at him while he was holding the horse’s head, she was also hitting the horse, which the horse didn’t particularly like. And it was rearing on its hind legs and pouring out in front, and we were lying back in this, on the back seat of the, on the seat of this sulky, but the back of the seat the only

34:30 thing keeping us from falling over the outside, it was quite a frightening experience for all of us. Anyway, she beat him off and he gave up and drove away, and we continued home. And it was very apparent that things were hopeless. And so we got to the stage that, a hearing, a clearing sale was called, and we sold everything that we possessed.

35:00 And we got enough, small amount of money out of that, and went in, and the boys went into town, and at Mum’s behest, they purchased some pushbikes, fixed wheel pushbikes, not free wheel, fixed wheel. And then we were all preparing to go back to Melbourne to see what we could do there. But then

35:30 there was a bombshell. George and Eva announced that they weren’t going to Melbourne, they were taking the buggy and the horse, the one Tango, the one with the cancer in its eye, we had to shoot, because it couldn’t carry on, so they killed him and got his hide and sold that. And they took Leggett and the sulky, and they were going to go to Swan Hill, which was a considerable

36:00 distance away in those days, unmade roads, no towns. And they set off and drove to Swan Hill. Mum and I were taken into Lake Cargelligo, where we went down by train to Tallarook, which was just out of Seymour, just north of Melbourne. There we changed trains, spent a night in a little boarding house, and then went out to Dry Creek, to Bonny Doon, where Fred Folkes picked us up and

36:30 took us into, into Dry Creek, where we stayed with the Folkes. In the meantime Jack brought a tent from, had always held onto a tent from our scouting, from his scouting days. So they loaded the tent and all their gear, Jack and Bill, on these two bicycles. And as I said they were fixed wheel.

What do you mean by fixed wheel?

37:00 You couldn’t just free wheel on it, it didn’t have a ratchet which engaged to free wheel. So that every time, circle, every revolution of the bicycle wheel, had to be accompanied with the motion of your legs going around on the, on the pedals. So there was no giving up. And they had to push, they finished up doing something like 700 miles, back to Melbourne.

37:30 But before that, we’d arranged that we’d all meet at Bonny Doon, because we wanted to talk to Fred Folkes, Mum wanted to talk to Fred Folkes, about the gold mine. So we all congregated at Bonny Doon and went out to Fred Folkes’ place at Dry Creek, and the boys met us there. And then the council of war there. Mum had power of attorney on everything of Dad’s,

38:00 naturally. And, but then she was the beneficial owner of the gold mine, and she discussed the situation with Fred, and he said, “No, there was no point in trying to continue with the Depression on us really, in full, in full swing then.” So it was decided that Mum could see, would see what she could do to sell the mine, and she was in

38:30 correspondence with a lot of the people that Dad had known in England, and nothing was working very well. So we, Jack and Bill went on, down to Melbourne with instructions from Mum to find somewhere to live. And I don’t know the basis of the communication, probably they sent a telegram to her. Anyway we went down and joined them.

39:00 Jack had found a little tiny terrace in a place called Mary Street in Brunswick, just off Victoria Road, right across the road from the liquorice factory, which fronted onto the railway line and Brunswick Station. So we installed ourselves there, and Mum was horrified, it was said that a burglar lived next door, and she was horrified. And I think she was starting to wonder what had

39:30 happened to her coming to Australia. So she quickly got to work, first of all we had to, we had no money at that stage, nothing. So she had to work out what we were going to do. So she went down Sydney Road and she found a grocer, no supermarkets in those days. And Mr Thompson was a grocer. And I can remember going into Mr Thompson’s shop. I was getting along now, I get getting older,

40:00 I was ten or eleven. And she sat on the high stool, and she said quite frankly to Mr Thompson, she said, “Look, I’ve got three boys with me and I have no money, I’m living in a little hovel, and I,” she said, “I need food.” And Mr Thompson looked at her and said, “Yes, alright.” “Well,” he said, “Would your sons be

40:30 prepared to work?” She said, “They’re prepared to do anything.” And he said, “Oh right.” “Well,” he said, “My sister has a corsetry shop in Coburg, Sydney Road, Coburg. I’ll speak to her to see, I think she needs somebody to deliver hand bills, advertising her shop.” So that was agreed and he supplied us with the necessary groceries,

41:00 no charge, at that stage, to be paid for later. So Mum got to work, and then she couldn’t stand living in Mary Street, and she discovered a place at eleven shillings a week in Goodman Street in Brunswick, it was a terrace, a few grades above the terrace we’d had in Mary Street, but still no sewerage or anything like that. And the only water was a tap over the gully trap

41:30 in the backyard, and a, a tap in a lean-to laundry, which we turned into something of a kitchen, because it had a gas ring in it. So we moved there. Mr Thompson looked after us.

Tape 3

00:37 Bob, can you tell me what year it was by this stage, when you moved to your second house in Brunswick? It would have been about 1933.

Can you describe Brunswick for me, what sort of a suburb was it then?

It was a working class suburb, it had long strip shopping along the

01:00 length of Sydney Road, concentrated mainly around the junction of Victoria Road and Sydney Road. Whilst we were living in Mary Street, I got a job as a paper boy, and I used to get up at five o’clock in the morning, and go up to the corner of Hope Street and Sydney Road, and sell papers. The cable trams were running Sydney Road at that stage. And I would sell cables,

01:30 sell papers standing on the corner of Hope Street, which was one block up from Victoria Road, and then I would work the trams. I’d hop on a tram, leave my stack of papers, hop on a tram sell papers on the tram, catch a tram back selling papers again, and back off to my stand. A boy used to leave a bike there at one stage, and I very gingerly put one foot on one pedal, and went down the hill, and walked back up again,

02:00 it took me a long while before I had the courage enough to cock my leg over to the other side. So that was. So then I, that was an income which went to Mum, because all money went into Mum. Jack by this time, had got a job with the Victor Plaster Mills up in Coburg, which he used to ride on his bike up to. Bill got a job with Claude Neon, a fledgling set-up of neon

02:30 signs. And he studied and became quite a capable tinsmith, and he studied again at night time at tech [technical school], and became a pattern maker, which lifted his standing quite a bit, so that he was able to design patterns for the neon signs, and cut them and construct them. So they, we were starting to look up, we were starting to see a bit of income coming in.

03:00 What sort of food shortages had you experienced at this time?

None, really.

What sort of food did you eat at home?

Well, generally speaking, we had a good diet. We had no trouble at all, ‘cause in the farm we used to live extremely well. We were restricted, but we seemed to get by. The dole was available, or sustenance it was called, and Mum said, “Never,

03:30 never in my lifetime will I accept sustenance, we will be independent.” And, and so it was. But we, well back it would be, I know that on Jack’s 21st birthday, Mum was very upset that all we had was bread and cheese. So, but no, we, we were never starving.

And what about at Christmas?

Always tried, I think from memory, to do something. There was no great

04:00 present giving or anything like that. Just wasn’t there, you know. So anyway, we moved to Goodman Street, and, and it was time for me, I was, by that time I was in Central Brunswick [School], I had been going to Central Brunswick when I was on the, when I was doing the papers in the morning and the evening on the corner of Victoria Road, working the trams again. I

04:30 went to school in between times, and so, but all the money went to Mum, there were no private incomes, and she managed everything. And then a Mr Hodgkiss and a Mr Bush appeared on the scene. Mr Bush ran Bush’s Furniture Emporiums, and Mr

05:00 Hodgkiss was an American associate of his. And they had somehow got wind of the gold mine in Bonny Doon and Dry Creek. And they made contact with Mum about the gold mine, and I can recall there were lots of discussions going on, which really passed over my head at that time. But it must have transpired that a deal was done,

05:30 certainly to the benefit of the buyers. But sufficient money came forward for us to move, for Mum to buy a small house in Cornwall Street, West Brunswick, which was further up Sydney Road towards Cowan, Campbell, Coburg. And you got off at the station North Brunswick, on Albion Street. And from Sydney Road you walked

06:00 quite a considerable distance up to Cornwall Street.

What sort of money would have been required to purchase that property?

I think my mother had to pay 650 pounds for it, which she would have had to pay cash, because we didn’t have any recourse for borrowing money, and so forth, so she must have got something. Which improved our lives considerably, this was a place.

06:30 And then Jack, of course was working, but immediately set to work on the Cornwall Street place. It was four rooms with a fuel stove in the kitchen and a back, back veranda which was open, and had a bit of a laundry on one side. It had steps which Mum found difficult to negotiate, and we had sewerage, and that was a gigantic plus. Was sewerage considered a luxury

07:00 at that stage?

Oh yes, yes, very much so. Up til that time, we’d been largely. Well in the country of course, we were on self-made sewerage, digging great holes and constructing seats and so forth. In Mary Street and Goodman Street, the night carts used to come around and lift the lids and take the pans and put a new pan under there. But sewerage was a great advance on our lifestyle. And it was really

07:30 Rolls Royce [‘high-class’] stuff. So Mum found it difficult to negotiate the two or three steps at the back. She was starting to become a little bit difficult, finding it difficult to get around, although she didn’t complain.

How old was she at this stage?

She was getting on towards her late 50s, it must have been 57, 58 or something like that. And.

Did she ever during these

08:00 difficult years, demonstrate any stress, or?

No, she was like the Rock of Gibraltar. She, no, she was, she was the main, main spring in the family ,very ably assisted by Jack. I don’t think she would have got through if Jack hadn’t been there.

08:30 So we were, all of us, very thankful for that.

You sounded like you were a very close knit family.

Yes, until George went away, which distressed Mother terribly. And so we got to Cornwall Street, and Jack went on a great over the period, first of all he put a ramp at the back, so that Mum could walk down, without having to negotiate the steps. She was getting,

09:00 she seemed to be getting a little stouter and she was getting more and more difficult to walk, and. So.

Now at 13 you went to get a different job, didn’t you?

Yes, well, what happened then was. When I, when we were living in Goodman Street, I had got to the stage where I’d passed my Merit Certificate,

09:30 which was my highest scholastic achievement at school. Which meant that I could leave the primary school, and either go to Intermediate do two years before going onto Leaving to go to university. Or go to technical school to learn something. Now I had no aptitude, no desire to learn anything about doing things with my hands,

10:00 I just wasn’t interested. So we’re back in Goodman Street for a moment, and I passed my exams with the, some pride I say, with some distinction, I topped the class. But I wasn’t quite, I was still only 12, and it was normal for a person to be 14 when they did this. So there was great discussion

10:30 about what we were going to do, repeat the 8th Grade or whether I’d go to tech. Anyway, I solved the problem, I went around the corner into Union Street, and I went up the road to a Gordon Brothers’ Refrigeration. And I spoke to them, and I got a job as office boy. So I came back and told Mum, 17 and six a week, fabulous, money. So we made a hurried

11:00 visit to the school, so that we could get special dispensation from Mr Dawes the Headmaster, to leave school early. And he stretched the point I think, because the fact that I had a job, was in those days, vital. So I was given permission to leave school, and I started work at Gordon Brothers’ on my 13th birthday, 5th of December 1934. I lasted there about eight

11:30 or nine weeks. I was following my mother’s instructions to the, to listen carefully and do exactly what you’re told, yes Mum. And I did to the extent that when I was sent out to get some penny hapenny stamps, which was the postage rate at the time, the people told me that they didn’t have any penny hapennys, but they had plenty of happeny stamps, would they be any good. And I said, “No thank you, no, I need penny ha’p’ny stamps.” So when I went back and I told my boss

12:00 back there who was the son of one of the partners, one of the original Gordon brothers, he was a bit annoyed, and sent me back to get the ha’p’ny sheets. And so I, but I was given a rather difficult job, because apart from other things that I had to do, I had to price invoices. And they made things that were called keys, and these were shaped pieces of metal that slipped into machines,

12:30 and they were milled on the leys and so forth. And they, you see them today everywhere, where they slip in and they lock a, two components of the machine together, and they join. And so, they, there was a multiplicity of these various measurements and so forth. And they all were in big flip-up card holders,

13:00 just like this, this photo album, so that each one overlapped and the description was on the exposed edge. And trying to work out, there was minute differences in some of them. And I had two problems, first of all was identifying, the second was they’d given me an indelible pencil which, when I was cogitating [thinking], I used to put in my mouth,

13:30 and of course the indelible ink, I don’t whether you’ve had indelible pencils, comes out purple all over you. And I used to use this pencil to flip up the various set-ups I made, I made a hell of a mess of everything. So after six weeks, they gave me a beautiful reference which I’ve got there, and said that, “Master Robert Douglas was employed by us from to, he proved a willing and conscientious lad, but proved to be too

14:00 young for the nature of his duties,” which I thought was a very gracious dismissal notice.

Now, Bob, I know you had another job after that, but I’d just like to take you forward to when you were 15.

Yes. Well when I was 15, we were in Cornwall Street, I’d gone on. And in Cornwall Street, I still had some friends whom I’d made friends with,

14:30 when we were down in Goodman Street. There was Charlie Maizey, Laurie Anderson and Harry Scanlon. Harry Scanlon, we had detonators on the railway lines for, telling people when workmen were on the line or when it was foggy. And he’d prised one of these off the railway line and took it home, to see what would happen when he hit it with a hammer. And his experiment was highly successful, he

15:00 blew his right arm off. But he was still pretty good at cricket and football and so forth. But then Charlie became a trainee motor mechanic, and while he was working for his boss, he had access to a Dodge, what you’d call a utility now, but a little bit larger than that with a tray back and so forth. He was able to borrow that, and they went out

15:30 shooting with .22 rifles. I was green with envy, and I got Mum, I said, I convinced Mum that I’d be very careful, would I, would she buy me .22 rifle, and she did. We used to go out camping, shooting rabbits and so forth, getting permission from the owners before we went on their property. So that got us together, and we were still good mates, they were a bit older than me. Then

16:00 one day they told me that they had joined, they’d joined the militia. So that they got into an artillery unit, which had horses, drawn by horses, six horses to a team for guns, four horses and so on, there was horses everywhere, you see. Oh, I wanted to get back to riding horses.

What year was this, Bob?

That was in

16:30 1935. But prior to that, I’d had a dramatic change in my lifestyle. I had got another job in the Victoria Markets in Melbourne, where I had to go in, get up at two o’clock every morning and start work at three o’clock, as cashier on the potato stand. And I used to use Bill’s bike and ride in. Anyway, I was working on the

17:00 potato stand, and I used to take up to, a man’s wages were three pound a week, I was getting 12 and six a week. Mr Payoff had got me the job, because his uncles were the owners of the potato stand, Silk Brothers, and they were big in the Victoria Markets. And I got the job, and I had to record all the sales of the potatoes and pumpkins, and take all the cash. And I used to take anything up to three hundred pounds in a morning,

17:30 so much weight with all the coins and pennies and hapennys and everything else, it used to make a big red mark around my neck. And then I had to go back and, and balance all the money and pay it in. But on my way in one morning after I’d been there for some little time, I crashed with my bike at Royal Parade. And on Royal Parade, they have a central situation, with

18:00 the tram lines running down it, and commercial vehicles use that. Then they had plantations either side, with another road which private vehicles used. And plantations are now concrete edges, but then they had giant blue stone edging all round. And I crashed, and I bent the bike pretty seriously. And I hurt my ankle a bit,

18:30 so I went off into work. Anyway a couple of days later, I was very sick, I believed there was something very much wrong with me. And Mum used to put my ankle under a tap at the back in Cornwall, in Goodman Street, and bind it up with a crepe bandage, so that I could push my way into work. I got so sick in there one day, that the, Mr Abey Silk came out and said,

19:00 “OK, you’d better go home, son,” so I did. When I got home, I was very, very feverish and very sick. Mum grabbed her hat, put her hat pin through it, and we walked down to the cable tram, and went up Lonsdale Street and we had to go to the Children’s Hospital, which was way up near the Exhibition. But on the way we passed Royal Melbourne on the corner of Londsale and Swanson Street. So she

19:30 wheeled me in there, and we sat there until about four o’clock in the afternoon, before we could see the doctor. She had put my age up to 14, I was only 13.

What was the reason for that?

Because you had to go to the Children’s Hospital if you were under 14. So she said, “No, I’m not going too much about with this.” So, I caught her on a guilty conscience I think.

20:00 But anyway, I bowled in and I met Mr King, he was a surgeon, he’d just come back from London. He sent for all his students and so forth, and they examined my leg, and he pronounced that I had osteomyelitis, which was a shocking disease.

Did you know what it was?

No, didn’t have any idea.

What did they explain to you it meant?

It meant that I had, had an

20:30 abrasion on my skin, which I’d had when I came off my bike. And that a germ had entered that, and then it gets into the marrow of the bone. And if it is left untreated, the bone, bone disintegrates and starts, splinters of the bone start to force their way out through the flesh, and then it’s amputation. And as soon as they touch it to do something, it goes to

21:00 another part of the body. I walked in and he diagnosed me with osteomyelitis before it had got to that shocking stage of breaking up the bone. And he had seen the first operation of its kind in London at Guy’s Hospital, and he came out, back and I walked in. I was reputed to be the second, the first in Australia, and the second such operation

21:30 in the world. And he opened up my leg and see, on my leg, the great scar that goes right down below my ankle with all the criss crosses and everything else. And he opened it up, and originally I thought he’d taken my fibula out, but he hadn’t. What had happened, he’d seen this, he opened it up and he exposed the area that was infected, and he did it, a

22:00 a sort of partial ectomy [removal] on this and scraped off all the mess, and disinfected it. And it put me back in hospital, I was hanging, my mother spent three days in the hospital, three days and nights waiting for me to die, which I didn’t. And then I was put into hospital, I was in hospital for many, many months, and my leg was suspended in a cradle and then it became infected and it turned septic,

22:30 and then they had to open it again and put rubber tubes in to drain it, it was a hell of a mess. But the morning, the, the moment I came out of the hospital, out of the anaesthetic, I had osteomyelitis in my left shoulder, and I couldn’t move my left arm. And what with the pain in my right leg, and the pain in my left shoulder, I was nearly berserk and they kept dosing me with all sorts of, of

23:00 pain killers, and they finished up, they were injecting me with morphine. And, which is a, a bit, a drug, but it didn’t make much difference to me, it eased the pain somewhat. But they finished up, they were injecting me in the arms, and then they injecting me in the quadriceps, and then they were injecting me in the buttocks, they injected me everywhere. Because I was

23:30 in such shocking pain, and I screamed with the pain too, and so did the boys next to me, because they were amputations and some of the boys were on their third and fourth amputation.

So, Bob, by the time you joined the militia –

Yes.

– after the recovery from that operation –

That’s right.

– what, what sort of, were you physically mobile by the time you – ?

Oh yes, yes, I’d, my leg was. When I came out of hospital, my leg was in a problem, my foot dropped,

24:00 and I couldn’t use it, but I overcame that by, my brother brought me some toe clips for my bike, and I rode all around Melbourne on my bike, and I. That was physiotherapy before it came into being, and I pushed everywhere around Melbourne on my, with my left leg. And by the time I joined the militia, my leg was working perfectly.

Can you describe the process then, of joining the militia?

Yes. The fellows got onto me and said, “Look, you’re big enough, you’re 15,

24:30 but you’re big enough, you’ll past for 18,” no birth certificates required in those days, not even with the AIF [Australian Imperial Force]. And so I told Mum, they said, “We’re having a game of basketball, when we were waiting sort of thing.” So I said to Mum, “Could I go and play basketball with the guys?” And she said, “Oh yes, that sounds like a good idea.” So we used to come into Melbourne on the train,

25:00 and out down Batman Avenue to the Anderson Street Bridge. And there was a, a giant spire of parkland there on the river end was the artillery training hall, and on the other end was the signallers, in between there was a gigantic parade ground. So I went down and had a look at this and everything else. And after a few days and a few visits, they said, “Come on, you, you’re.” I said, “Oh yeah, I’m keen, 25:30 talking about horses,” that sold me. So I went up and enlisted. That was all right, went on for some weeks. But then, used to go up once a week, Mother thought it was great, going into play basketball. Then I got issued with all my gear.

So what were you doing when you went in there each week, what was actually happening?

Well I was attending parades, learning to be a solider,

26:00 learning to march and learning about horses, and learning about harness and all that sort of thing, I was going to be a driver. So, and –

Did you find it exciting?

Very, very, and just waiting with my ears back, waiting until I get on a horse. So then I was issued with all this gear, and –

What gear?

A big kit bag, and I had riding breeches, and

26:30 leggings and boots and spurs, and blue tunics with gold piping and scarlet collars. Dress pants with great red stripes down the side, stovepipe pants.

You must have thought you looked pretty dashing?

Oh yes, I thought this was going to be good. But that was all right, I packed it all in and I put it all on my shoulder, and started to get up to Flinders Street Station to catch the train home. And then the realisation hit me, I had to go home with all this

27:00 gear, “What was I going to do about Mum?”

Can I just ask you Bob, at that stage, being in the militia meant what?

Meant that I had enlisted to serve within Australia, and the Mandated Territories of Papua and New Guinea. I’d volunteered to do that, but in the event of anything happening in those areas, I could be called up and sent to those areas.

27:30 And see, it seemed extremely remote.

Can I just ask you then, what did you know of international conflict at that time?

Oh I’d heard stories at home about the First World War, the Great War. And at that stage, also we were starting to see newsreels in the theatres for the rise of Mr Hitler, we sort of learnt his name for a start. And so but that was

28:00 interesting, but the thought of war at that stage, was furthest from my mind.

Was there much talk at home at that stage about Hitler, or what was happening in Europe?

I can’t recall. I think mainly the talk was how we were going to progress and live with this. Anyhow, I got home and I, I, and I was sprung by Mum with all this gear, and she broke down and cried,

28:30 and I explained to her it was all about horses and so forth. So my brothers came out and then she sent everybody to bed, she said, “I’ll speak to Bob in the morning.”

What was she so angry about?

She wasn’t angry, she was upset, she was upset, she didn’t want war, she didn’t want her little boy with, being involved with a war. But there was no war at the time. But it, it weighed her. She’d been through the Great War in London and known the bombing, and seen the carnage of the men going across,

29:00 to the First World War and coming back. She’d been involved in it all, she was horrified of it, she thought she was out of it, coming to Australia. And, so she was very upset. So she came to me the next morning, and she said. “Well now young man, you’ve made this decision yourself, so now you’ve got to live with it. Now you may continue under certain conditions,” and I said, “Yes Mum.”

29:30 She said, “You can continue providing you make sure that you are the best soldier there it.” “Yes Mum,” I said. “And,” she said “Furthermore, you’ve got a white lanyard there, and you’ve got a white neckband inside your tunic collar which comes right up the top, that’s got to be in the laundry every Monday morning, so that I can boil it, and get it clean for you.” I said “Yes Mum,” that sounded a bit more hopeful. So

30:00 away I went and started going to, going to do militia. And the first camp we did was a drive, ride to Seymour, 60 miles. And on the morning of that camp, I reported to the artillery depot in Batman Avenue.

How did you get to the camp?

Well, I’ll show you that, tell you that now. And when I got there, this giant parade ground between the 30:30 artillery and the signallers, was taken up and it was covered with horses, horses everywhere, about 700 of them. And they were all on breast line and leg lines, and they were all tied up and so forth. And we were introduced to the horses, and then we had the Australian Staff Corps, which was a cadre of permanent soldiers, who were

31:00 allotted to each unit, mine was a brigade in those days, 15th Field Brigade. And they made sure that things went along. One particular warrant officer was our Brigade Quartermaster Bluey Bell, whom I later became very, very friendly with, and he was a tower of strength and so forth. And then we had a regimental sergeant major who lived on the quarters on the other side, Mr Guyatt,

31:30 but he was a bit of a martinet, I didn’t get on real well with him. So we were each allotted horses, and we brought the horses up and put them into, where some woman got out the harness from the harness room. But I’d had a fair bit of experience with the harness, cleaning it and scrubbing it and polishing it and so forth, and

32:00 emery paper on the metal factors, so I was familiar with all the harness. And so we harnessed up all the horses. Prior to this, of course, we had gone out on occasional weekends up to Broadmeadows, which was, which typified its name, because it was broad acres of clear, and that was a big remount depot for the army, so we’d had riding practice up there, riding things. So then we, we were allotted

32:30 our horses, I was given two horses, and I had to take them up and, and harness them. And then I had to bring them down, and we were assembled into teams, six horses, each driver had two horses. Then we had to put on our big leg iron, we had our ordinary leggings on, but this big leg iron went over everything, and it had a big piece of broad steel running down, which

33:00 protected our leg, and particularly for me with my, I still hadn’t properly recovered I don’t think, from my operation. And so thank God, I was allotted to a centre driver, I’d said I didn’t have enough experience for being a lead driver, which required some knowledge. And I didn’t want to be a wheel driver, because when you’re on the wheel drivers, you, when you wanted to halt you had to

33:30 scream out for the brake, and the gunner on, on the two gunners on the limber, one of them had to jump off over the swiftly turning wheel, run around at the back and turn on the brake. And at the same time, the wheel driver had to lay back on his horses, put them back in their britches, that’s the straps that went around their bum, and pull the horses to stop the thing. And in the process the pole between the two

34:00 horses went right up into the air, and when the horses surged forward, it came crashing down and the wheel driver had to lay his short handled whip there, and catch the, and fend it off. Anyway, coming quickly to the point, one of the drivers there, we were assembling out in Batman Avenue with the guns, and this happened. And one of the drivers got caught, and the wheel crashed into his leg, and shattered his leg,

34:30 and then he got, he was, had to be replaced, taken off to hospital, and later we learned he had gangrene, and he died, and that was my first casualty during the war, in the army. So then we went down Batman Avenue and around through the city, and I had great feelings for the cleaners in the city, because 700 horses, what we left behind was unreal. And we went up, and we manoeuvred

35:00 all the way up through Whittlesea and so forth, manoeuvred all the way up to Seymour, old Seymour camp, which was 60 miles north of Melbourne. And so it was terribly interesting, very wearying, and I thought, “Oh God,” when I got there, “There’s got to be a better life than this.” Because I had to look after two horses, I had to groom them, feed them, water them, and

35:30 do everything for the horses, before you did anything for yourself, horses were the first priority.

And what was the accommodation like for you?

Accommodation, we just slept on the ground. Slept on the ground. And so that was, that was that. Then we got to Seymour, and we were sent back by train. And the AIC, the Australian instructional corps warrant officers, took command of all the horses,

36:00 and disposed of them as per usual.

How long did you spend in Seymour?

In Seymour, only, only a day or two. We virtually handed in all the gear, the guns and the horses to the instructors, and then we caught the train home, and I went back to work, I was working for Servix Electrics then, they were electrical contractors. And I’d got to the stage where I had done various work, I’d been selling ladies lingerie

36:30 around the offices, silk stockings were a big factor in those days, and we used to sell them for four [shillings] and 11 a pair, 11 pence as a deposit and a shilling a week. And then we used to pick them up and have them invisibly repaired, because they got ladders in their silk stockings, and all this.

Can you tell me Bob then, when was the next time you had military training? Well the, we did all of our military training with our, we were required to go to Batman

37:00 Avenue every fortnight, I was every week, and I studied. But when we got back, a group of us got together, and we said, “There’s got to be a better life than riding on teams.” Charlie Maizey was my lead driver, he was a mate of mine. So we all got in a gang together, and we got hold of all the books and everything else, and we went down, as I said, and we put in extra parades we went every week, and we studied and studied and studied. And we learnt the gun drill

37:30 off by heart, out to operate a gun. We learnt all the points of a horse and its common ailments, and we learnt all the bits and pieces of the harness and its maintenance, we learnt everything. And we studied and studied, and it was our whole life, apart from going to work. And at the end of the first year, they called for people to step forward for examinations for promotion. And

38:00 Laurie and another good friend of mine, a Jewish boy Johnny Simons and I, we stepped forward. And we did the exam, and we qualified as bombardiers, that’s two stripes and we were very proud of ourselves with our stripes, gold stripes on our blue uniform. So then, that was fine, and things were starting to get a little bit messier then, we were hearing more about Mr Hitler. When we went to the newsreel theatres,

38:30 we were seeing all those things that you see now on the old films, of Germans marching with shovels over their shoulder, because the restrictions that are being placed after them after the Great War, were very onerous and drove Germany into despair.

Did it seem threatening at the time?

It started to seem and sound threatening, when I was a bombardier. And then, the Munich

39:00 Agreement [agreement between Britain and Germany, intended to prevent another war] broke down in 19, that was 1938. And suddenly, we, we were faced with an avalanche of young men coming into the drill hall, it was happening everywhere. And they were all been looking at this problem of Mr Hitler rising, and they all wanted to get in to the militia to get some training, and that was, and they weren’t chased to go there, or anything,

39:30 they came into it. So then I had an extra couple of nights every week, because I was appointed as a recruiting bombardier. I used to go down with a trestle table and a couple of chairs, and these guys would come in, and I’d sit down there, and ask them all questions, fill in the main things and.

What were your impressions of the men who would come in for recruitment?

They were great, they were all far, far better educated than me, many of them were studying

40:00 law and you know, they were young men of varying ages, and unlike me, I was still only 16. And they were, they ranged in age up to their 30s.

And did you feel that they were men who genuinely believed that there was a war to fight in?

Well I think everybody at that stage felt that it was a possibility, a distinct possibility. And these men came unbidden into the militia, as though.

40:30 That finished that. So then, at the end of that year, 1938, they held further exams. And several of us put ourselves up again, and Charlie Maizey and me, we went and we passed, and we got three stripes, we were sergeants.

Tape 4

If I could just ask you to explain what the, what your process was in terms of moving from the militia into the regular Army?

Well we became sergeants in the militia in January of 1939, and then obviously things were deteriorating, and we could see that from the newspapers, and from the

01:00 situation of the, on the newsreels and so forth. And then we watched that very carefully, and then on the 3rd of September 1939, I was at home with my brother Jack and Mum, and Bill had left the family by this time, he’d found a girlfriend and got married and was living a different life. And

01:30 Jack never left Mum for, until she died, he was with her ‘til he was 31. However, I, the war, I was listening to the Lux radio play on the evening, Sunday evening. The Lux radio play was the most popular entertainment in those days, came on at 8pm on the radio. And at 20 past 8, the Lux radio play was

02:00 interrupted by an announcement, and Robert Gordon Menzies came on with his deep voice, and said that, that “An ultimatum issued by the British Government to Mr Hitler that he should, that had already invaded Poland on the 1st of November, on the 1st of September,” sorry, 1st of September, that “if they did not withdraw from Poland by 12 o’clock 02:30 midday on the 3rd of September, a state of war would exist between England and Germany.” And Mr Menzies said in consequence of that, with the time difference, 12 o’clock, 11 o’clock it was that he said, “11 o’clock, that they had to withdraw.” So with the time difference that made it 8 o’clock that night in Australia. So

03:00 Mr Menzies came on and made the announcement of what the British Government had done. And he said, “As a consequence of that, we are also at war.” Stunned me, and I thought about it for a moment, and I said to Mum and Jack, “Look, I think I’ll hop on my bike and go down and see Charlie Maizey,” which I did. And I got down there with him, and he’d heard the same announcement, and I said, “What do you think we’ll do?” and he said “I don’t know.”

03:30 I said, “Well what about we, we might as well ride into Batman Avenue and have a talk to John Bell,” Bluey Bell as he was named, because all Bells were Blue, because of bluebells. And we go in and see Bluey Bell. So we got in there, it must have been about half past nine that night, and we knocked on his door and he came out, and he said, “Yeah, what are you guys up to?.” And we told him, we said, “War’s started, what do we do?”

04:00 And he said, “Well the first thing you do, is go home and go to bed.” Which rather took the wind out of our sails. And I reckon we must have been about the first volunteers. And so, that’s what we did. Shortly after, it was announced that Colonel Cremor, Colonel Cremor had been the Headmaster of Caulfield Grammar, and he’d been in the militia, was going to form the what was called, the 2/2nd Field

04:30 Artillery Regiment for the 6th Division. And the reason it was called the 2/2nd, is that the distinguished, we were distinguished from the 1st AIF by the insertion of the 2nd AIF, to distinguish from the 1st AIF. Whereas the First World War men had had an initial of the state from which they came, a ‘V’ or an ‘N’,

05:00 we had an ‘X’, a ‘VX’ and an ‘NX’. And we also had the same colour patches as the men of the Great War, but to distinguish us, it had a grey background, just a small grey background around the colour patch. So I said, “OK,” so I said to Colonel Cremor, “Yes, I’ll put my hand up,” and discussed it

05:30 with Mum, but I said, “Yes, I’ll be right.” And he said, “OK,” and he said, “But I’m not going to give you three stripes,” he said, “You’ve only just recently become a sergeant, but I’ll give you two stripes, go back to a bombardier.” And I said, “That’s OK, Sir.” And he said, “With the obvious chance of early promotion,” and I said, “That’s fine.” So I left as happy as Larry, hadn’t said anything, because I hadn’t actually enlisted. Then I was contacted and they said,

06:00 “Now, there’s a bit of a problem.” Even though I’d put my age up three years, I was still only 18 in the Army. No where was I, I was, no I was 20 in the Army, but I was 17 when I was a Sergeant, and I was 20 in my Army age. And he said, “You can’t go overseas,

06:30 before you are 21, without your parents’ consent. “Oh,” I said, that meant going and asking Mum, and I just wasn’t game to do that. So I said, I didn’t continue. So then we were called up for a one month camp at Mount Martha, still in the militia. And we got home, we came home for Christmas and Mum was obviously

07:00 terribly unwell, and we prevailed upon her, to go to hospital. And when we got her into hospital, they discovered that she had a prolapse of the uterus, and this was caused by me, because I was a 13 and a half pound baby, which was rather ouch. And she had been damaged with my birth, but nobody

07:30 at that stage, in those days had picked it up, and so nothing had been done. So there was Mum, virtually unable to walk and in dreadful pain, she had been for some time, we were all observing it, but she never gave in. She used to walk up and down the street hanging onto the fence, and battling her way along. So she went into hospital and they operated,

08:00 and things didn’t look good, so I sent a telegram to George, who was at that stage doing very well with the property with Mrs Harris, they weren’t married at that stage, I don’t think, but anyway. And I sent a telegram for him to come urgently, and I, we bought an old Studebaker, I’ve got an illustration of it, similar

08:30 to the one that Reg Ansett [founder of Ansett Airlines] used before, when he started his transport business carrying passengers in a 1928 Studebaker. And we’d bought that, and Jack and Tig and Willie had got it running reasonably well. I had obtained my license because I was legally 18 by that stage, approaching 21 in the army. And so I went in, George, Jack with Mum being in,

09:00 Jack collapsed, he was a mess, he couldn’t think of anything, they’d been very close. And, so I went in and picked up George, and George was very annoyed at being sent for, he said, “I’ve left Eva and Arthur up there,” he said, “Milking 80 cows a day by hand,” and he said, “This had better be serious, or I’ll be very annoyed.” So then George,

09:30 we went in and saw Mum, and we were there when she died. I heard her last breath, and I woke up on the bed next to her, I’d evidently fainted. So then we went through various domestic squabbles and so forth amongst the boys, which I sorted out. And I said, “Well the house and everything, as far as I’m concerned, all goes to Jack, because Jack’s been the mainstay of the family,” and so it was agreed. And then 10:00 I was called up then for a three month camp, and while we were in three month camp. Enlistments in the AIF had been suspended because they didn’t have facilities to carry on after the 6th Division. So we were in a three month camp at Mount Martha. And then at the beginning of May, the 1st of May, we were in camp, and they came down and said,

10:30 “Now, enlistments have been reopened again for the 2nd AIF, all those wishing to enlist, step forward.” So a large percent of us stepped forward, and we were all immediately sent to Caulfield Racecourse, which was an enlistment centre, and we were accommodated with straw palliasses up in the stands, and we slept on the benches in the stand. And we were there for, ‘til

11:00 the morning of the 3rd of May, when our enlistment procedure was fixed. Then I ran into a problem. I was going through the enlistment procedure perfectly. And then I’m standing there naked with the doctor, and he got down to my leg and he looked at my leg, and he said, “Oh God, no, we don’t need you son, you can go home.” My life was shattered. And I said,

11:30 I didn’t know what to say. Then he started to get interested, and he said, “What was that operation done for?” and I told him. And he said, “Who did it?” and I said, “Mr King, Mr Edgar King.” And he said, “Did he?” And then I had a brainwave, and I said, “Yes, I saw Mr King about a week ago and he told me that I was OK to go into the AIF.” He looked at me for a moment, and he said, “Did he?” and I said, “Yes.”

12:00 And I hadn’t realised at that time that Mr King was no longer Mr King at that time, he was Lieutenant Colonel King, a leading doctor in the AIF and this young fellow’s boss. And so he looked at me for a while, and he said, “OK, son,” he said, “If Mr King said you’re OK, you’re in.” And so I marched in and became lance sergeant, which was three stripes

12:30 without a gun above it, which was the insignia of a sergeant. Which meant that I was a sergeant with bombardier’s pay, so instead of getting ten shillings a day, I was going to get nine shillings a day. Whilst the gunners got five shillings a day. I thought that was a pretty good deal, so I enlisted.

Can you explain the scene at Caulfield Racecourse that day, with how many people there were and what, what the system was?

Oh there were hundreds of us, and we were

13:00 all going through various rooms down below, going through enlistment procedures, going through medical inspections and so forth, and everything was being ticked off as we went. And when we got to the end with everything approved and ticked off, we handed them in and we were issued with a number, and mine was VX14008. And I was very annoyed that I hadn’t got into the 6th Division one, because I would have been looking

13:30 at a three figure number. However, that was not to be, so I became VX14008 Lance Sergeant Douglas. And they whacked us on a train straight away, and up to Puckapunyal. Puckapunyal was a new camp which was being built out of Seymour, on the opposite side of the line, there was no station at Puckapunyal, so we were taken into Seymour, and then trucked out to

14:00 Puckapunyal. And we went out, and they were still digging drains and putting in sewerage and water and so forth. And so into the AIF. So we were the cadre avenge officers [?UNCLEAR] and NCOs [non commissioned officers]. Some of the officers I knew because they’d come from the 15th Field Brigade, quite a few of the sergeants I knew. Charlie Maizey didn’t come, because he ran into problems with his parents,

14:30 and they wouldn’t sign his, he still needed signatures, they wouldn’t sign. Now I learnt afterwards, when I came back from the Middle East that he had enlisted and he’d gone in the 8th Division, and he had finished up on the Burma Railway, and that he had died up there. Now I’ve got access on the internet at the moment to all of the records of all of these people, but Charlie Maizey I cannot find,

15:00 I’ve tried every known spelling of it, way of spelling his name, but I can’t find it. But there’s only one thing I can produce, deduce. And that is he went and enlisted again, but he changed his name, which was a common practice at that stage. But if you were getting any objections from you parents, you changed your name. But when you did that, you lost your rank, and he would have lost his rank as sergeant, and just enlisted as an ordinary

15:30 gunner or private to whichever he’d been allocated. However we started receiving great droves of recruits coming in, people straight off Civvy Street [from civilian life], who didn’t know their left foot from their right foot, and we had to start training them. And so from May ‘til November we were flat out in Puckapunyal training, going on long treks around Victoria to condition the drivers, because we, we were

16:00 issued men with old 18 pounder World War 1 guns with pneumatic tyres on them. And we had big Marmon Herrington, what are referred to as tractors, they were big four wheel trucks, with five forward gears and double reduction, so that you could go into the lower ratio, so that gave you ten forward and two reverse gears, so that they were very, very powerful brutes indeed, get you

16:30 out of all sorts of trouble. And they had a winch on the front bumper bar, and if you got into a situation where you were bogged or anything else, and there was a tree or something, you could put the winch onto the tree and haul yourself out, oh it was all very sophisticated in those days. What was the day to day training at Puckapunyal?

Gun drill, how to work the gun, training people, route marches getting, getting

17:00 your, over. We, we lost all our puppy fat, we, I was. As a young fellow I was 15 stone. And when I, then after I’d been in the, before I got into the AIF with the work I’d been doing with the militia and so forth, I was down to 13 stone 8. So my enlistment weight was 13 stone 8. Now it’s 14 stone,

17:30 but a lot of variations in between which I’ll come to. So we were all pretty fit, we were getting pretty fit, and we were able to do all sorts of things. And I kept training and training, and I was, I found I was a fairly good instructors, even if I say so myself, I could get through to people and explain things in simple terms.

18:00 So I got all, I had six men to a gun crew which I was the boss, I was the sergeant in charge, and I had a bombardier, two stripes as my second in command, and I had four gunners. Of those gunners, one of them came in with a one stripe, a lance bombardier, unpaid, they used to be referred to as an unpaid blank file. So

18:30 I had these people and I started work on them. And at five shillings a day, if they qualified as a gunner, they got an extra shilling a day. Well that was an incentive for them, but my incentive was that I wanted to get all of them trained up, so that in the event of us going into action, I had to start thinking about this, the chances of being killed and so forth, you know. And so I

19:00 was, I was then going on 19. So I trained them all up, and I got all of my gunners qualified as a gun layer. One of them, Gunner Pretty, was a little fellow at 5 feet, he enlisted the day they dropped the height limit to five foot, and he was in like a flash, and he came onto my

19:30 gun, and I still meet with him occasionally. We’ll both be down together on Anzac Day in Melbourne next month. And Gunner Pretty was there, little fellow, and we had left and right dial signs, and you had to be careful how you put the angles on. And to put on a right angle, you had to, I always remembered the tram constructor saying right away, because you had to turn the knob on the dial site away, which was put on

20:00 a right angle, and left towards you for the other one. He got mixed up with his rights and lefts, and he was, had the, he was a 180 degrees out on his setting, and he was waving madly to me to move, and I just refused. I knew what it had to be, and I had it all plonked roughly where it should be. And then the examining officer came up, and when he came up, I walked up

20:30 and I got to the dial site before he did, and I slipped my finger under the quick release, the lever on the dial site, and I lurched and spun it round. And I said, “Oh, I’m terribly – Sir, I mucked that, we’ll have to do that again.” And he said, “All right,” and he was nasty, a bit nasty about it. And I said to Gunner Pretty, “You silly bastard, you put it on the wrong way, now be careful, put it on right this time,” which he did and got his shilling a day.

21:00 So then came November, and we were on embarkation leave, so I went out and I saw Jack, and I went up to Benjeroop where George was, and I visited them up there. Bill was living somewhere around Fitzroy, I think, and he had a young family,

21:30 but he had been called up, and so had Jack. So I, they were in the militia you see, and they were subject to call up, because that was the situation. And so I went up and saw George, and saw Jack. And Jack, and Rose Gutteridge had been a forelady in the company that I’d worked in, and I had introduced

22:00 Jack to her. And they, they told me later, that they came down to Port Melbourne, to wave us off but they weren’t allowed anywhere near us, they were way back, they were part off. We set sail and stopped the night in the, in the middle of Port Philip Bay, landed on a sand bank and waited for the tide the next morning, and then go off. And then we went off through the rip, through the heads at Port Melbourne,

22:30 and we met coming around, a ship called the Orion, these, we were on Strathmore, one of the leading lights of, the Strathmore. And it had 600, carried 600 passengers, and we had about 2,500 troops on it, the cabins had been modified. I’d originally acquired with another sergeant

23:00 a two berth cabin which we thought was very satisfactory, but we were quickly kicked out of that by an officer, and we finished up in a four berth cabin, which had been converted to an eight berth, and that was still pretty comfortable. Whilst the troops were on H Deck which they quickly christened ‘Torpedo Flats’, and they reckoned they’d be the first to go. So we went out, and we found that we were joining up with the Orion, Her Majesty’s troop ship Orion,

23:30 which was coming around from Sydney. And then the, the SS Batory, which had come from New Zealand, it was actually a Polish ship and it had New Zealanders on board. So then we set sail as a three ship convoy, and then we were joined by HMAS Adelaide, which was an old four stacker of

24:00 pre-World War 1 vintage, and it was battling along. And then we got off Adelaide, and out of Adelaide sailed, out of the Adelaide River, sailed His Majesty’s transport Stratheden, a sister ship of the Strathmore. And so we had four ships together, and 10,000 troops on board the four ships. And so we sailed along, and then we were

24:30 joined by our very latest battle cruiser, HMAS Perth. So that, we sailed across then, and we pulled into the river in Perth. And lined up on the wharf, and we were standing, watching the leave party from the Perth marching off the wharf, when suddenly the Perth cast off, and screamed

25:00 out of the river at full pelt, didn’t bother to pick up its leave complement, just left them. And then we learnt that it had to go, because there was a German raider off the course, and it had already sunk the steamship Maimo, I think it was, out there, and it was on the prowl. And of course, we couldn’t take our convoy out, because it was far too dangerous, and Perth had gone off to hunt it.

25:30 So instead of staying on our ship we were offloaded, and we stayed in Perth for a week, which wreaked havoc with Perth, with 7,000 virile young men unleashed. Girls left right and centre. But we had to do a lot of training, marching around and so forth, but we still had a lot of recreation, and lots of

26:00 assignations took place and so forth, as happens. And 10,000 men was a lot for poor old sleepy Perth to accommodate all in one hit.

What were the troops doing during that time in Perth?

Oh we were going on route marches and we were going on swimming parties, and we were doing everything just to keep fit, you know, but we had a lot of leave too.

And what were you doing on leave?

Hmm?

What kinds of things did you do on leave?

Mainly route marches, we had no equipment or anything else, it was route marches

26:30 to keep us fit, you know. And on some of the units had, were infantry units that had bands, so they used to strike up and we’d go on big route marches around, it was just a matter of keeping us fit after the inaction of the ship. So at the end of the week we were due to go. Well then, that was the most magnificent thing I’ve ever seen, I’ve never, so emotional. We, all, all

27:00 on board, Perth had come back and we were ready to leave. Four big ships were lined up, Perth, Adelaide was still with us. And we all, unlike Melbourne where nobody had been allowed on the wharf, in Fremantle, everybody was allowed on the wharf. And they had local bands down on the wharf playing, and we had some of the bands on the ships playing,

27:30 and there were streamers going. They played The Maori’s Farewell, I memorised, I start to cry, and a lot of others did to. It was just so emotional, you know, leaving, it was the first big send-off we’d ever seen. So we pulled away and sailed away. Shortly after Perth,

28:00 the old Adelaide gave up, and dipped their colours and so forth, and went back to Australia. And Perth continued on with us across the Indian Ocean for a week or two, and we were approaching Colombo. Before that we saw all these dots on the horizon and Italy had just come into the war. And we thought, “Oh good God, that’s the Italian

28:30 Navy, there’s going to be trouble here.” And, but, when the dots appeared, Perth took off and left us, and we thought, “Oh God, it’s going to go into action up there, and we’re here alone.” But it wasn’t that at all. And then Perth came back, and it was great ceremony, there was dipping of colours and bugle calls and everything else. And Perth, all the,

29:00 all the crew on Perth were in their number one uniforms and all salute and so forth, and she left us, and away she went. And we were surrounded by a British battle fleet, HMS Ramillies, a giant battleship and all its attendant cruisers and destroyers, they surrounded us and just took us into Colombo. And we, back at Puckapunyal,

29:30 fellows had been going down with the mumps, and they were being taken down to Melbourne, and they came back after recovering from the mumps, telling us great stories down there, because they were put into convalescent homes, and they said, “Oh the girls, and the nurses, terrific.” And we were all very keen. And I remember, I used to, anybody that was suspected of having the mumps, I used to go down and commiserate with him, I thought a trip to Melbourne would be pretty good under those

30:00 circumstances, but it didn’t happen. And just as we were getting into Colombo, I got the mumps, and I was confined to the hospital on ship.

Could I, could I just ask you what the conditions were like on the ship in that journey over?

Oh first class, I mean the troops were, had to file around and get a, we were living in first class conditions, I thought it was a

30:30 wonderful way to go to the war. The officers had the first saloon as their officers’ mess, and the sergeants had the verandah café aft as our, as the sergeants’ mess. The sergeants dined first in the first saloon dining room, and the officers’ dined second in the first saloon dining room. And the pageboy used to come around and want to know what wine we wanted for dinner, and make sure that it was available for our table at

31:00 dinner time, it was a magnificent war, and we thought it was great. Spirits were about thruppence [three pence] a nip, and there were no taxes or anything at all, and beer was dead cheap, and we said, “Oh, this will do us for a war.” That quickly changed. But anyway, we were in Colombo and I lost my wallet, it came back to me later. I broke, I shouldn’t have gone, I took a chance and went

31:30 ashore, and I reported back to the hospital afterwards. Then we went off from Colombo, and my wallet got returned minus all my money, and that was all right. Because we’d been over at the Gallface Hotel, which was the most magnificent place, real British Raj [colonial rule of India], you know.

What were your impressions of Colombo?

Oh, it was just so different and strange and so forth, you know.

32:00 I’d had faint memories of being in Aden on the way over when I was coming out as a little fellow, with all the Lascars and black boys and the, in the boats selling things and so forth. And I think we’d gone ashore in King Solomons’ Tanks there, I’ve got a faint memory of remembering those, and the people, the fellows down there calling for baksheesh [a tip] and so on. However, we took off

32:30 and we sailed up the Red Sea, and then we got into the canal [Suez Canal], and of course, the Perth had left us. And Perth, the battle fleet got us up to the entrance to the canal, and then we sailed through the canal, and then we pulled into port called Ismailia, on the coast.

33:00 And we were told to be ready for three o’clock, 3am disembarkation. And of course, like in the army, it was 4pm before we disembarked. Then we got on what we called square wheeled trains, and clanked our way up into Palestine.

Could I just ask you to go back to that port, I just wanted you to explain in as much detail as you can, what you actually and what the impression was?

Well we saw, we saw lots of Arabs,

33:30 and they were chanting the chant that we were to hear for the next couple of years, wherever we went. “Eggs a cook, eggs a cook,” and they had boiled eggs, and they sold boiled eggs to the troops, and we paid a few ackas for boiled eggs. But we were, not much was on there, it was portside. But portside was actually on the other side of the canal to what we were disembarking on, and we got straight onto the train. And we went up to

34:00 a place called Kilo 89, which was our first, where we got off and our first camp was in amongst all the orange groves, Jaffa oranges, beautiful, we thought this was great. We weren’t allowed to eat them, unless they’d first been washed in Condy’s Crystals.

Why was that?

Because of infection. We were very hygienic in the army.

What were the crystals?

Condes crystals were a famous thing, they were,

34:30 when you put them in water, they turned purple. And they were used for all sorts of things as a disinfectant. And we’ll come to it later, they were also used as a repellent for venereal diseases, and so forth. But you know, it was there. So, and we, across the line from the, the camp was known as Kylo 89. But across the way, was Gaza.

35:00 And you see Gaza on the TV today, with the news programmes and so forth. Gaza was nothing like that, it was a collection of mud huts, that’s what it was. It had no sewerage, all the effluent ran down the main street, and so on, and it was all Arabs in standard dress. And our Battery Commander Roy Johnstone went across and had dinner with the Sheikh, just to

35:30 establish relationships, and he came back with a story. “The Sheikh said to me, how many zigger, zig every night,” and he said, “I thought I’d be a bit boastful, and I’d say about four.” “Oh,” he said, “Me, about 12.” So that was one incident. So, so we had the Condy’s Crystals washing the oranges that was fine. And Bruce Wilks,

36:00 one of our sergeants got, was a bit of a practical joker, he got hold of a boy that came around, with a pallet, selling the Palestine Post. “Palestine Post, he pay, Palestine Post.” Our MO [medical officer] at the time, was a fellow by the name of Hellings, who’d been a gynaecologist in private practice. And he’d given us great lectures on VD [venereal disease] before we’d left Australia. To such a degree that most of us were horrified of the thought of

36:30 sexual intercourse. He had the strangest way of lecturing about it. So Wilkes organised this Palestinian boy to go round the camp saying, “Palestini Post, Palestini Post, great news, great news, Doc Hellings got pox, Doc Hellings got pox.” And so, that was right. 37:00 So we were in Kylo 89 for a while, and then we were moved to a camp called Qastina, el Qastina, which was further up the coast. And that was a, we said, “Well, surely we’re going to get some equipment now.” No, in Qastina, we got one old World War 1, 18 pounder with iron wheels, like we’d had with the horses back in Australia. And no optical equipment

37:30 at all, we constructed stuff, we made a wooden dial with nails driven in about every ten degrees roughly. And we went on training, and training and training with the troops, getting them up to pitch. Then we got movement orders to go to Alexandria. So we moved down on the bay, and on the train again, back to Ismailia, and across

38:00 the Canal where they had a, a bailey bridge which was a floating bridge that opened and closed when the ships came through, it was a military bridge. And its where we, vehicles could go across. And then we, in Alexandria, we were then taken down to the wharves in Alexandria, because

38:30 just at that moment, the 6th Division which had been fighting in the desert, had gone up to Benghazi and back, had then been taken out of the desert fighting, unfortunately. If they’d been left, we’d have been into Tunis within weeks, but it was going to take us another couple of years. They’d been pulled out and put into Greece, and of course Greece was an absolute debacle, they were chased out of Greece by the overpowering German

39:00 events, and then they moved to Crete. And then they got out of Crete, and they came ashore in Alexandria, and all sorts of craft, some came out by submarine, some came out on fishing boats, any boat at all, it was like Dunkirk [mass evacuation of troops from occupied France] all over again. And we were, we were given on the wharf to receive these poor fellows back, and help them in every way and get them back into a

39:30 camp in Alexandria, so they could get rehabilitated, some of them had great beards, all that sort of thing. And fine.

What condition were the men in?

Oh pretty good, pretty good. But pretty distraught too, you know, I mean frightful action they’d been in. They’d been in action in the, in the desert before, but it’d been fairly much a push-over because they were battling the Italians,

40:00 but the Italians were giving in. And that’s where you saw film of lines and lines and thousands and thousands of Italians, marching down on their own with one soldier with a fixed bayonet on his rifle, escorting perhaps five thousand men, and they were all going back into prison camp. But Germans were a different kettle of fish altogether, and they went into through private – the people in the 2/2nd Field Regiment, they had to dismantle their guns on the

40:30 beach and go out, wade out to sea and toss the breach blocks in the, into the sea, so that they couldn’t be found hopefully, and the Germans couldn’t use the captured weapons against us. And so we got that through then, we were shifted up to a place called Ismailia, which was a little village on the way up the desert towards, where they, towards, in succession, Mersa Matruh,

41:00 which was a port, and Tobruk was the next port, and Benghazi was the next port. And then it went on up to Tunis, and so on. So whilst we were in Ismailia, the regiment was warned that we were going to go to Tobruk.

Tape 5

00:37 Right.

You mentioned, Bob, that on the way over, you were instructed about venereal disease, can you just elaborate a bit more on what sort of?

Yes, well, when we were back with our doctor, he was quite explicit about venereal disease. He said, “That when you get to the situation

01:00 that you’re approaching intercourse with a female,” he said, “You could cover yourself equipped with two teaspoons and a torch.” He said, “Well the procedure is, that you wipe the woman’s vagina with the teaspoons and shine in the torch, and if there’s a yellow discharge, don’t.” So I tried to nut out in my own mind how you handle all these instruments at the same time, which was a bit

01:30 mind boggling. However, when we were in Alexandria before we went up to Ishmalea, I was placed as, I was instructed to, to take charge of the brothel picket. Now the brothel picket was designed to keep the men in order, keep them in queue, as they were going into the brothels. And we had no part in going inside the brothels.

What did the brothels look like from the outside?

Just ordinary places, yes. 02:00 Just ordinary places, and there was all sorts of things available. You could either, you go into brothels for sex, or you could go in for, for, they were happy to give exhibitions as they called them, where sex was performed in front of you. The Arabs and, and, so that was all, we all partook of that.

02:30 And but most of us were, I certainly wasn’t game to even think about.

What did the women look like?

Oh some of them were very, very attractive. Arab women are nice, I’ll tell you some stories on it later. But Arab women are very, very attractive indeed, very attractive. The fact that you can’t see them and so on, is another matter.

What was the level of sexual experiences of the men?

Oh, it depends on our age, I suppose. But for the younger ones, virtually, very little. We didn’t have much opportunity in Australia, because in those days it was not only frowned upon, but it was damn dangerous. Because you finished up with a pregnancy and nobody wanted that, well not many right thinking people didn’t want to be trapped with a child,

03:30 when they were 18 or something like that. And there wasn’t the opportunity, you didn’t have any way of meeting girls, and didn’t have way of, didn’t have any money to spend, so girls weren’t very interested.

So for many of these men, this was their first sexual experience?

Would have been, we used to meet girls, we had back in the old day with the drill hall in Batman Avenue, we used to hold dances and balls and so forth, especially when we were in the sergeants’ mess, because then we could

04:00 take the girls in for a drink. But it didn’t give us much opportunity, and places were always floodlit all around the place. You know, I suppose there were opportunities, but somehow or other, there always seemed to be something else to do.

So can you explain to me, how these picket lines worked?

Well, yes, well all we had to do was keep the troops in order, while they were waiting for their turn at the brothel, just a matter of

04:30 maintaining order really. And we were sort of a surrogate military policeman for that job, you know. However, that was by the by. So we were, we were in Ismailia, and preparing to go to Tobruk, and the morning we got up to go to Tobruk, we were called on and we were told that, “That’s been cancelled.” That the 2/2nd Mediums,

05:00 who had been next door to us in Puckapunyal had been selected to go, “Because the men that are going to Tobruk,” General Moreshead was the Australian general in charge of Tobruk, had sufficient artillery there. I’ll come in a second to a brief description of how Tobruk came into being. And he only wanted another unit of artillery to come in, without guns, because there was a lot of

05:30 captured Italian and German, mainly Italian material. And the men of the 2/2nd Mediums had more experience with the larger guns than we had. We were pretty annoyed about it, but anyway that was the case.

Can you describe these large guns for me?

Well 60 pounder gun was a big, very big gun. It, we, we hadn’t even seen a 25 pounder at this stage, we were still getting a,

06:00 we’d heard that there was a thing called a 25 pounder, but the only thing, gun we knew really at that stage, was the old World War 1 gun, the 18 pounder. So the Italian guns, which we saw plenty of later, were big, bigger guns, big bore, bigger shells, such as the 60 pounder. The 18 pounder

06:30 and the 25 pounder were both about the same bore, that was 3-1/2 inch, and the 60 pounder, I think was about five inch. So you can see the shell was much bigger, much heavier, travelled greater distances and created more damage.

How far would it travel?

Well our travel was, when we eventually got the 25 pounders, we could fire up to 13,000

07:00 yards. And the 60 pounder could probably go, I’m not too sure of my facts on that, probably 20, 25,000. So it had a much greater [distance]. It was usually situated further back, because it was harder to move and it provided support onto the front line, along with the field, we were field artillery, and they were medium artillery. So the 2/2nd Mediums were

07:30 transferred to Tobruk, so we missed out. So we carried on up to Mersa Matruh, which was the first port that I mentioned from Alexandria. Mersa Matruh was an idyllic spot, a beautiful Harbour, and it was the place where the wealthy of Cairo went, used to go for their holidays. It was even said that Prince, King Edward VIII, as 08:00 as Prince Edward was, used to holiday out there. I don’t know whether he went out there with Mrs Simpson [divorcee for whom Edward VIII abdicated to marry] or not. But anyway, that was the situation there.

What did you do once you got to Mersa Matruh?

Well Mersa Matruh, we arrived there in the middle of a blinding Khamsin. A Khamsin is a, is a sandstorm, and you have to be in one to understand it,

08:30 you can’t see your hand there, it’s just stifling heat and sand. It was about 120 degrees [Fahrenheit] when we got to Mersa Matruh. Mersa Matruh is the end of the railway line, and the end of the water pipe line from Alexandria, so it was a very important port. And we took over form a unit of the 7th Division, which had been sent up to

09:00 Syria. So I, I was told to go into a particular gun pit and meet a Sergeant Maxwell over there, the 7th Division, I’ll never forget him.

Can you explain to me what a gun pit is?

Yes, it was a large hole which was dug, dug down into the ground and it had suitable embankments around it to protect the people in it. But it had to have a field of

09:30 fire, so it had to had a wide arc open in the front. Gun pits were all the rage in those days. So we took over this prepared gun pit, and it actually hadn’t been prepared by the 7th Division, it had been prepared by previous occupants, who were British Army. So I was sent across, and I took my number three, he was the gun layer. Number

10:00 one was the controller, number two was the man who put on the range, and the number three was the gun layer, four five and six were ammunition numbers, bringing the ammunition up to the guns.

Bob was your job to supervise?

Supervise everything. Control everything, give all the orders, nothing happened without me giving an order. So I went across and I had,

10:30 it was 120 degree heat, I had a woollen balaclava on, I’d taken the gas goggles we had, or gas respirators on our chest, and they had plastic gas goggles, I’d taken those out of there, and put them on to protect my eyes. I had a scarf around me, great coat and gloves. And 120 degrees. But you had to have it, because you were getting cut to ribbons by the force of the sand,

11:00 in this violent sandstorm, which explains why Arabs wear all these swathes of clothing around them. And you see an Arab on a horse, and the only thing showing is his eyes, and that’s the way you’ve got to dress when these, these winds things are blowing. I bowled over and Sergeant Keith Maxwell, he was a big fellow, he met me and he said, “Good day, how are you, I’m Keith Maxwell,” “And Bob Douglas.” And he said, “Right, this is a 25 pounder gun, have you seen one before?” I said, “No, this is the first time

11:30 I’ve seen one.” “Good,” he said, “Well it’s pretty easy, this is a 25 pounder gun, breech handle works there, like it did, different style of breach, shell goes up there, fellow with a ram rod, rams it in, you ram it in at this stage.” We changed that, number two rammed it later. And, “Your gun layers there, he’s laying the gun, when he gets on target, he says ready, you check everything,

12:00 and you say fire, and he puts his hand on, he’s got his hand on the firing lever, when you say fire, he pulls the firing lever, the gun goes bang, goodbye, we’re off.” That was our training on 25 pounder guns, so we took off from there, we learnt on the job. And it wasn’t very onerous, we weren’t being attacked. Except we, on the, and our gun position in Mersa Matruh,

12:30 we had a three point seven ack-ack [anti-aircraft], that’s the three point seven inch wide anti-aircraft gun battery on one side of us. On the other side of us, we had an RAF, Royal Air Force radio station base then, and it was very handy for us, at evening to stand-to, after every stand-to at evening at dusk, nothing was happening. Some of us could go over and listen to the BBC news, see, find out how

13:00 the war was going, because no newspaper, no information locally, so that was the only opportunity we had, so we found that very good. But then we were being bombed, and we were being bombed every single night they came over. And every night the planes would come over, and every night the searchlights would go up and weave around, and fix a plane in its crossbeams, and you

13:30 could see these big silver planes. And the guns would be, ack-ack guns would open up, that was tin hat [army issue helmet] time, because you had to protect yourself mainly from the shrapnel falling from our own fire. So, and they bombed the living hell out of us, and we couldn’t understand why, we were such an attraction. And they came over night after night after night. I think we counted 32 nights without let- up, just

14:00 bombing all night long.

Bob can you describe the camp to me, where that was being bombed?

Oh it wasn’t a camp, it was a series of guns with, all in their gun pits, we slept beside the guns. And I’d had the forethought, before I left after receiving some advice, I bought a sleeping bag, just a simple canvas tube. The Officers, some of them had more elaborate ones, with little hoods

14:30 that folded over their heads, and so forth. And we got up, we wore, wore underclothes too, and we, I took pyjamas for a while.

Where would you get your water from?

Well we had a good supply of water there, because it was the end of the pipeline. And the water truck used to come around every day and fill up all your containers, and we weren’t really short of water there. And the destroyers, which were called later the ‘scrap iron flotilla’,

15:00 the HMAS Vampire, the HMAS Vendetta and, oh I forget the other one. They were running up at night, every night, from Mersa Matruh to Tobruk, taking up rations, ammunition and reinforcements, all loaded on at Mersa Matruh, and getting into Tobruk at dark. And unloading, loading back wounded and other people, other personnel, and bringing them back to

15:30 Mersa Matruh, where they were assisted off the ships, and onto the hospital trains, you know, going down to Alexandria. So, we, we were having hell bombed out of us, but in addition to that, we used to go out on forays. We had two regiments of artillery there, the 7th Regiment and the 8th Regiment. Originally the AIF had been formed

16:00 into a Corp. They said after the experience in the Great War, the First World War, they were going to be a unit, they were going to operate as an independent Australian force, and a Corps was, Corps Headquarters and three Divisions of troops. And in amongst Corps Headquarters, there were to be Corps Troops. And we were originally Corps Artillery,

16:30 the 7th and 8th Regiment were corps artillery, and the 1st and the 2nd Mediums were also corps artillery. And the idea of that was that they were held in reserve, and the theory was that any division that were having trouble, corps troops, corps technical troops would be brought up to assist. The only troops in corps were technical troops, and they were classified such as the artillery, and

17:00 Engineers and things like that. So, but then, after we’d left Australia, the 8th Division was being formed, but then suddenly things started to look bad in the Far East. And so the 8th Division were sent to Malaya, which rather disrupted the idea of the corps set-up.

17:30 So when we arrived, we didn’t know where we were, we were wearing a triangular colour patch, which was corps. Then when we got into the Middle East, they didn’t know what to do with us, so they put us into 6th Division for a time. Because the 2/3rd Field Regiment of the 6th Division, has been sent to England, the brigade had been sent to England, and they had to be brought

18:00 back. And whilst we’d formed the units with nice orderly numbers going right through, so that everything was traced, and everything looked good on paper, it was completely destroyed, so that everything started to get mixed up. Because the troops that were coming back from England, finished up in Tobruk. And we, we had already been taken out of 6th Division at that stage, and put in

18:30 to 9th Division, which was the original 4th Division, which, we went back to a round colour patch which I’d worn in the militia, so we’d had a fair amount of transition at that stage. But then in Tobruk, General Moreshead, the Australian general, was concerned about the fact that all of these odds and sods from different units, with

19:00 different colour patches, were, were not melding together very well, there was no sort of esprit de corps [spirit of the group, camaraderie]. The biggest factor in a, in an army, is that the soldiers have to have an identity. Their first identity of the battery as far as we were concerned, the major identity was the regiment, the regiment of the division, and you’ve got to have a line of identity, otherwise you’re just a mob of nobodies.

Was this various

19:30 transitions that your regiment had, was that common in the desert, or?

Well no, because the 6th and 7th Divisions had been established, and they were right. But they had some mixing, but not a great deal. But we, but the 9th Division. So General Morsehead in Tobruk said, “I’ve got to do something about this, I’ve got to get this force that I’m commanding into a cohesive command,” and he quite rightly said to himself, “The first thing

20:00 I’ve got to do is make them into a cohesive unit with an identity,” which became the 9th Division. Because the 9th Division was formed in the Middle East, not in Australia. And so he made it into the 9th Division, and we had a round colour patch of the original 4th Division. And then he went one thing further than that, and he said, “They need a real identity.” And he said, “He looked at all the colour patches,” and he said, “The 6th Division

20:30 had an oblong, the 7th Division had a diamond, the 8th Division had an oval, eggs are cooked over score [?UNCLEAR], and there was no real shape around that he could use, and he didn’t think the circular shape was good.” So he said, “He took two rectangles and put them together, with tongue in cheek, and he formed a ‘T’,” which was the T-colour patch. And of course everybody 21:00 said it was done because of Tobruk, so we all had a T-colour patch. So we were starting to get to be a cohesive force. We also were attached, when we were in Mersa Matruh, we had a, a 2nd Battalion of the Scots Guards, and a 1st Battalion of the Royal East Kents, which, both British battalions. And the Royal East Kents were up the bus, that was their power drive.

21:30 And they were very good regiments. But the Royal East Kents had been serving in India, and they were just going back on home leave, to be discharged and so forth. They’d done their, when they got caught with the war, so they stayed. And we also had a battalion of I-tanks, they were the first original tanks [World War I tanks], they only had a 2-pound guns, they were a bit of pea shooters [toy guns]. But then we were sent out regularly on forays into the

22:00 desert, and we would move up to a place called Halfaya Pass, H-A-L-F-A-Y-A, which quickly became known as Hellfire Pass. And it was a winding pass up the escarpment, the escarpment is a series of deserts, caused back in geriatric, Jurassic times, or whatever, sheer cliffs where the plates of the

22:30 earth had shifted, and they hadn’t settled back in again. So just sheer cliffs, which meant there was a river, stream, a wadi in – formed at the bottom. And then that sheer cliff, you gradually went off to the west, decreasing, until it hit another sheer cliff and there was a succession of those. But the biggest one was at

23:00 Halfaya Pass. And the Germans commanded the top, the Germans had come into the war by this time, and into the desert. Well, they, they’d been in the war all the time but they came into the desert for the first time, under General Rommel [German commander of the North Africa Campaign]. And they had commanded the top of the, the pass, and we used to go up and play silly buggers [a foolish task] down below and shell them up the top and so forth,

23:30 and be a bit of a nuisance, and then withdraw, they couldn’t do much at all. Then we were sent out on forays to try and get around. If we went deep into the desert, deep south into the desert, it was possible to get round the, the cliff face petered off, and we tried to get around to get back up, perhaps with the

24:00 hope of getting in the back door into Tobruk, to relieve Tobruk. We were never successful. In these columns, and we went out with each column, we, contained usually a regiment of artillery, a battalion of infantry and a squadron of I-tanks. And we’d go on these forays and then come back again, and maybe put a few shells into Halfaya Pass.

How many, how was the artillery transported?

24:30 Well the artillery was on wheels, the guns were on wheels on pneumatic tyres, and the big Marmon Herrington tanks, were, big Marmon Herrington tractors, every vehicle was called a tractor because it was pulling something, not a tractor like caterpillar tractor. And so the Marmon Herrington’s were the tractors which pulled the guns, they had wheels the height of a man, you know, and as I told you

25:00 about the various gears, they were very powerful brutes indeed. Room for the driver in the front and the sergeant, and the other four gunners sat on the ammunition lockers under a canopy, if necessary, on the back.

So all this time that you were trying to get around the Germans, were they, were they firing back?

Oh yes, and then on our trip to Halfaya Pass,

25:30 we had what we called “Machine Gun Alley.” Because we were travelling into the, into the east and that meant that when we were going up there in the mornings, we had the sun behind us. But when we were coming back in the afternoons, we had the sun behind us again. And then that was

26:00 open slather [an easy opportunity] from the Germans, because they used to come down with their Stukas, out of the sun, and we couldn’t see them. And the other thing of course that was interesting at that time, we didn’t have any air force. No air force. We had three old, we had one old Sopwith Gladiator which was a, with a propeller behind it, which pushed it forward and was a flying boat. And a guy in goggles and

26:30 leather helmet used to lean out and wave to us as he went across. And we had three early bi-planes, I’ve forgotten just off hand their make, and they were called, we called them Faith, Hope and Charity. Because on the, on the ground, we had three columns, Faith, Hope and Charity.

Why didn’t you have air cover?

There was not enough aeroplanes, they were all in Britain

27:00 trying, with the Battle of Britain going on, and trying to defend Britain against the Germans in Europe. So the desert was a, a sort of, an appendage at that stage.

And what did you know of what was happening at Tobruk at that stage?

Very little, very little. How could you receive news?

Well about the only way we could receive news, was from, if we could get a radio.

27:30 We had radios also, but they weren’t powerful enough for us to pick up the. We, we carried radios and that was in the signals truck, and that was a one ton vehicle, and that was loaded with great batteries, batteries that size. And we had motors, we had little two-stroke motors to re, recharge the batteries, and they made a hell of a racket. And they had to be

28:00 stopped, everything stopped while you recharged the batteries. We were extremely primitive, it wasn’t anything like the equipment that goes today, it was entirely different war. It’s like bows and arrows compared to what it is today. But all of these were impediments, but they were mod cons [modern conveniences] as far as we were concerned, so we just accepted it as being the way of things. And so that was the situation. And we,

28:30 we were coming back on one occasion from the Halfaya Pass, when my gun tractor broke a spring. Of course, that was disaster, because the Jerries [Germans] were coming over and the Stukas were coming over and dropping bombs on us, as well as ordinary fighters coming over. And the Stukas were horrifying, because the noise they made as they came down, was absolutely mind shattering.

Can you explain to me what a Stuka is?

A Stuka was a, the latest

29:00 invention of the Germans with a strip backed wings, single pilot in it, which carried an array of heavy machine guns and cannons, and also racks of bombs, smaller bombs. And it was great for strafing [bombing or harassing with shells] people on the ground. And it would dive from a great height, with this, and they had special streamers fitted to it, to make the

29:30 sound, the, more obvious. And that would dive down, screeching and screaming. And with the machine guns going, and the cannon going, and you’re on, you’re on the ground, you’re dodging for cover, and then drops bombs. So there I was stuck with my gun and my crew, with a broken spring, and we couldn’t move, and it was afternoon, and we were

30:00 expecting the. So I immediately dispersed all my gun crew, myself included, we left the gun and we scattered around the desert, and laid low. The desert is not all sand, it’s basically rock with a sand covering, and lots of little rocks on the top of the sand, and stunted style of salt bush growing all over it. It’s not

30:30 just sand. That’s in the Sinai Desert, which I’ll mention. So we just scattered and made ourselves as inconspicuous as possible, and hoped the other guy got it, and not you. And so, then we had to wait until the end of the convoy and we, we were travelling at about half mile intervals, because of this, so it took a long while for the convoy to come through.

31:00 And the end of the convoy was the LAD truck, that was the Light Aid Detachment, and they were mechanics. And they came along and they didn’t have a spare spring. But anyway, they rigged up with some wire and other stuff that they had, with a jury spring, so we were able to limp back into Mersa Matruh to go into our gun pit. And when we got to our gun pit, we couldn’t get in it. Because whilst we’d

31:30 been away, a 2,000 pound bomb which was a gigantic thing beyond conception, had dropped right at the entrance to my gun pit, and it had a hole you couldn’t believe. It was, the, I couldn’t reach the top of it. And if we’d been there when that bomb had dropped, well, at least we all would have been bomb happy,

32:00 was the, was the favourite phrase of people you know, getting nervous shock.

Can you explain bomb happy to me?

You went a bit ga-ga [mentally defective], you were with the fairies. And we had, two of our fellows, we used to dig trenches, slip trenches in Mersa Matruh, and sometimes it was a double bunker. So we’d dig down and give a shelf for two people, one on either side,

32:30 with a little gutter in the middle to put your feet in . No trouble about water or anything like that, there was no rain. And on this night, these two people, as true as I sit here, a bomb had dropped between them, and blown them both out, on a cushion of sand and rock from their slip trench, and they were ga- ga when they got out of that, they were just shocked to their brain and everything. Except most people recover, but

33:00 some had to be evacuated, because of it, they were just useless, but that’s just one of the side issues. We had lots of casualties in, in Mersa Matruh from bombs and machine gunning and cannon fire, and that sort of thing. So then we were withdrawn from there, and sent back up to Palestine. And we went back into our old camp at El Qistina. And I didn’t even get out of my truck, I was immediately contacted

33:30 when we got to El Qastina, and told to report with all my gear to the battery office. So I went across there, that was the last I’d seen of my gun troop for some time. Because I’d been seconded to the artillery training regiment. Now the artillery training regiment had been formed when we first went to the Middle East, but then nobody had seen action, and

34:00 a lot of the units decided that, OK, one way to get rid of all the useless bods they had, officers, NCOs and others that they didn’t want, “Send them off to the artillery training area, to get rid of them, so we can get some other guys in.” And so that in the initial stages, the reinforcements coming up to us when we were in action, were hopeless, they hadn’t been properly trained, and they were in a dreadful state.

Can you explain to me?

Well they just hadn’t been

34:30 shown how to. We had to train them as soon as they came up, and we had to start training them on the gun. And when they should have had the knowledge, before they got there. See the Artillery Training Regiment had guns and everything else, and was there to train them before they joined the regiment, “Give them elementary training,” and sure they’d be knocked into shape by the officers and NCOs of the unit they went to. So I was selected amongst others, our adjutant

35:00 was a Duntroon man, Captain Mackay. And he was a very regimental soldier and he’d come through Duntroon, he was a permanent officer, he finished up lieutenant, lieutenant general in Vietnam, so he was a very competent officer.

Can you explain to me Bob, what you think it was that made you such a good instructor?

I don’t know really how it came about,

35:30 I was always a keen student when I was at school, even though I didn’t have much education. I always used to get impatient with the teachers, because they didn’t see my arm waving in the air, and ask me to answer the question, because I knew the answer and that sort of thing, I’m being very boastful. But it’s the truth. And I had all this, because after all, I did get through my education after six different schools and still qualified at 12 years old really. So,

36:00 oh just before I was 13. I just seemed to have a knack of talking to people, and getting it down so that they understood it. I had to understand it first myself, and when I worked it out, I was able to, I was just sort of able to impart that knowledge to other people. And it came up repeatedly. Then I, so I was sent down to the Training Regiment,

36:30 and several of us, I wasn’t the only one, a number of sergeants were sent down. There was Sergeant Hogarth from the 16th Battery in my regiment, Sergeant Williams and there was Sergeant Whitehead, and there was a whole stack of sergeants sent down, and a whole stack of officers, and led by Captain Mackay, who was an absolute martinet, and he was a really, there to train people, you know. He said,

37:00 he called me in one day, with a, he had a batch of reinforcement officers at his camp at Nieuserrat, and that was down below Gaza. And we went down to that set-up, and he said, “I’ve been talking to these gentlemen, these officers just out from Australia, and they are telling me they know, how much they know about gun drill, sergeant.” I said, “Sir –” He said, “Sergeant, I want you to

37:30 take these gentlemen on gun parade, gun drill.” I said, “Sir –” He said, “I want you to tell these gentlemen, that they know stuff all about gun drill,” he said, he didn’t use stuff all. And he said, “I want you to take them and teach them what gun drill is all about.” So I had this batch of officers, it gave me great pleasure. And some of them turned out very, very

38:00 good officers, quite frankly.

How did they respond to being trained by a sergeant?

Well they, if they’d gone through an OUT [officer training unit], they would have been trained by senior NCOs at OTU. Senior NCOs, were, without being boastful, the backbone of the army and they were the ones that had the down to earth knowledge. And the officer class, had lots of, some of them were very highly competent officers, don’t misunderstand me. Some of them

38:30 were highly competent, others were not so much so. And often they, I had been listed for officer in the militia. But when I joined the AIF, there was four of us were being listed. When we joined the AIF, two of the gunners they used to be on my horse-drawn gun in the first time, Donaldson and Coggins. They went to OTU, and came out and went into

39:00 the 2/4th Anti-Aircraft, and they went to Greece and Crete. And Donaldson lost his life over there, so this is, I’ve been so near death so many times, Coggin finished up as a captain, he got through the war. And, but I didn’t, when I joined the AIF, they didn’t think I had enough social background for a, an officer class, you see, because of my

39:30 schooling, and so forth. So I was missed out. However, subsequently, certain things took place.

Yes, you ended up being an invaluable instructor?

Yes, yes, because I knew my drill. I’d studied it, I knew it by heart, I’d trained in the militia all those years before I joined the AIF, and I knew everything about a gun, I knew what made it all work, I knew all about the buffer and recuperating system, system and how it worked, it was quite complicated 40:00 if you didn’t understand it. I knew how, how to pull it apart and do things, you know. So I was very confident, extremely confident. In fact I was so damn confident, that gave rise to an amusing story, later in the time. Because during, when we were in Ikingi Mariut, we were sitting in a tent, big EPIP – English Patent Indian Pattern – it was a giant tent,

40:30 that accommodated oh, eight men comfortably. But it was a, it was sunk, it had been done before we got there, we took over an existing camp. And we were sitting in there playing cards one night, and we’d had an issue of beer, so we were passing the beer around. And I reached behind to get a bottle of beer, and I picked it up and gurgled it down, and, “Ahhhh,”

41:00 it was.

Tape 6

00:37 I just wanted to go back a little bit in terms of the conditions in the desert, and talk to you about what you ate when you were in the desert?

Yes, well it depended on whether we had a cookhouse with us, or whether we were messing off the gun. Quite often, if we were messing off the gun, we’d be issued with a packet of dog biscuits, as

01:00 we called them, army issue biscuits, big square ones, and a tin of bully beef [canned meat], which sufficed for one meal amongst the six. If we could hold of some onions, it would be a red letter day [a special day], and sometimes we were able to get some tinned butter or margarine or something like that, which meant that we could cook up a little braise. We all had on each gun, had

01:30 a little Primus stove, which we boiled our billy, and then interminable cups of tea with the water always available. When we were out of area of cookhouse, we messed on the gun, and it was much more stringent. The other thing about it is, that our water ration was sensibly a quart a day, which is 1200 mils [millilitres]. That was for all purposes, ablutions and,

02:00 and drinking. And on the ablution frontier, if we were in Mersa Matruh, we weren’t too bad, we had, we could get a bucket of water and we would be a bit more lavish. But we didn’t have stacks of it, we couldn’t have a shower or anything like that, because there just was not enough water for it. So my procedure and many of the others were the same, is I had an old pannikin [metal drinking vessel],

02:30 and I’d fill that with water, usually cold, and lather up my face and put my shaving brush aside, and get out my safety razor and shave, and put that aside. Then get out my toothbrush and clean, clean my teeth, rinse my toothbrush in the remaining water, take a small amount of water to swirl around my mouth,

03:00 and spit it out. Then very carefully with a flannel which was getting pretty dirty, we would wash our feet which were important. Wash, wash around our groin area and backside, also very important, under our armpits, and what was

03:30 left, we would then use to wash our face, with the shaving soap still on it. So that was bath time. And that went on day after day after day. We had to be regimental all the time, and if it was possible, we had to make sure our boots were polished. The whole principle of it, was that we weren’t just a disorganised rabble, we still had pride in our unit and we still had pride in ourselves. We were issued with, we’d been issued with a gator, which, a canvas

04:00 gator at the edge of our service dress, but when we went into the desert, we were mainly in shorts, there are some photographs there that I’ll show you, we’re stripped to the waist. And that meant that we have very little clothing. We soon realised that when we were in the desert, under garments, underclothing was passé [not required], we just couldn’t handle underclothing.

04:30 Pyjamas went out too, they all became very useful for cleaning cloths. So our garb [outfit] was socks, boots and short gators, which we had to put on quite regimentally, and a pair of shorts and a shirt. The situation with our shirt was such, that with the perspiration that we were getting up, we used to take off our shirt,

05:00 and it would stand up, because it was stiff with salt. And we were issued with salt tablets to counteract that situation, but we’d rub it out and get it pliable, then put it back again. And our constant companions everywhere we went, was flies. We couldn’t even eat from the dixie [mess tin], we’d try and hold the dixie and put our hand over the food, and get a

05:30 spoonful and try and get it in our mouth, without a mouthful of flies. And some of them were big ones, especially if we’d been in action and there were bodies around, and they, flies were in hordes. You couldn’t see our backs for, for flies, because they all settled on our backs, because our backs were wet with perspiration. That’s one of the reasons, of course, why we stopped using shirts and getting around naked 06:00 from the shorts up. So when we were really working, we were in shorts, socks, we didn’t wear long socks, we had had long socks, but they were a failure. And then we got people at home, mothers and sweethearts and so for, coming up in the comfort fund to knit, provide us with ordinary socks, and then we had sock extenders which went on over them. So that if we had to be regimental and have long socks,

06:30 which had to come up to the point of our knee with our shorts just above, so that we only exposed only about that much knee, that was for regimental parades and so forth, few and far between. So that was that. The other problem came was washing our socks. Well, we gave them a good rub every night and if we were in them all day long, we tried to take our boots off during the day and change socks, put them on the reverse foot, which

07:00 helped us a bit, because it gets into the different formation of the sock. So that was life in the desert. Flies, bugs, there’s a ditty [song] talking about, “Flea-bound, bug-bound holes in Matruh,” and we used to wake up in the morning and we’d just be covered in bites from bugs and fleas, crawling in them. And then we had to be careful about lice,

07:30 and it’s a constant set-up. The guy, the barbers, we all had people in the, in each unit who had some knowledge of barbering, they used to do quite very well, because they used to charge us a shilling each for a haircut, and we had to have one about every week, so they did, they let their pay accrue in their pay book, and living off their ill-gotten gains.

Were there

08:00 diseases in the desert, illnesses?

Yes, scorpions were the major problem, they were shocking. One of our guys got bitten on his lip in the sleep, and the screech he put on, it was quite unnerving, it was a hell of a shock to him, and oh, his face came up like you wouldn’t believe. Cockroaches, and what we called dung beetles, and they rolled up any manure and offsets that

08:30 they could get, and they rolled that up and put it down their holes for food, they cleaned up the desert floor. So that was another aspect. The other thing that happened to me in the desert, very early in the piece before I left Australia, somehow picked up an infection in my ears, and my ears were discharging. And I used to wake up of a morning, and the discharge would be caked all down my neck, and

09:00 I used to have to scrape it off with my fingernails, it was shocking, but, and the ears were quite painful. I’d go, went to the RAP [regimental aid post] regularly, and they would pack it with a short plank of one inch bandage and soaked in glycerine and exiol, a treatment my Doctor recently told me was still used. And they would pack it down into my ear, and leave it there, and then I’d go back,

09:30 and they’d take that out, and my ears were red raw. Then they’d swab them out with methylated spirits, which was quite an interesting job and reaction, with raw methylated spirits on raw flesh. Then when we were up at the, below Halfaya Pass on one occasion, I was in great distress, I was in agony with my ear, it was just unbearable. So I was evacuated to the

10:00 casualty area, the casualty clearing station, and they couldn’t treat me, so they evacuated me back to Mersa Matruh, I was put on a hospital train and sent down to Alexandria. Well I was admitted to the 8th British General Army Hospital. And I went into the hospital and they examined me, and they discovered an old packing which had been left in my ear for some months,

10:30 and it was deep inside my ear, the other packings had been put in on top, and they had great difficulty in getting it out, because all the hairs in my ear had grown through the packing, and it was firm, firmly anchored. Anyway the doctors got in and released it and got it out, that improved it, but I still suffered until after the war, with this discharge from both ears, it was so annoying, it was not only painful, but so

11:00 annoying all the time. And what with the gunfire and this other problem, I’ve now lost most of the hearing in my left issue.

With that issue of, of gunfire, could you explain the kinds of sounds and what it was like to be in the middle of a battle?

Well the gunfire is extremely sharp and it is very close to you, because you, I, I was standing or kneeling just behind the

11:30 man in front of me who was number two, he opened and closed the breech. Originally I was required as a sergeant, to ram the shell into the gun, but that was changed and number two took that over, so I was left free to supervise everything else. Number three man was sitting there with the dial site and the range finders and so forth, and he controlled the direction of the gun, and he had adjustment of a few degrees either side.

12:00 And when he wanted bigger adjustments, he used to signal by waving behind, and I would pick up the trail of the gun, and take it across. That was all very easy on parade ground, but when you were in action, we had a shoe on the tail, on the spade of the gun when it wasn’t in use, but when we were in action, we’d tuck it up. And then the gun used to dig in, and we had all sorts of troubles. We had all sorts of troubles with the, 12:30 we had a round turntable which fitted up underneath the trail of the gun, and we dropped that and pulled the gun back onto it, so that it had a smooth surface to work on. But then the rods had worked well on parade grounds, but they weren’t strong enough, so we had to get the artificer [responsible for upkeep of weapons], Danny Heffernan, big sergeant, he’d been a plumber beforehand, he knew what he was doing, and he had to put reinforcing rods and so forth onto it. And,

13:00 so, we all had all those problems. But it’s a very sharp crack, and I would always, whenever I gave the order to fire, I got into the habit of ducking my head, so that I took the blast of the gun on the top of my head, rather than going past my ears, it still affected my left ear. That was the situation there.

What was it like at night?

Well at nights, we,

13:30 in, in that area that I’ve just described, very seldom shot although quite often we’d just have a ranging gun shooting at the enemy, which tended to keep them awake, also it kept all our troops awake. But if, I missed the Battle of El Alamein, but that was a gigantic thing, when, at 10.20 on the 23rd of October,

14:00 the signal, the searchlight went up and a thousand guns went off in one bang from end to end, it was just spectacular. And our regiment was on the right of the line, which was a very prestigious spot to be, but they were covering the, they were covering the road and the railway line and the pipeline. So that was very important.

14:30 And the battles that you, you were in, what was that like?

Well I wasn’t in any real battles in the Middle East, they were skirmishes principally. My battles didn’t come until I got home into Australia, and then went up into the islands. We suffered a lot of bad luck, because we weren’t in action enough, and everybody was really upset about that, because we joined, joined the army to be in action. However.

15:00 We got through all that, and then we, when the training regiment, I’ll come back there. And then the next thing we knew was Japan was in the war. That was on the 7th of December, 1941. And that shocked me.

How did you hear about that?

How did we hear? Well it came out. We were back in the training regiment, and there were radios available,

15:30 and also we had a, a unit paper which was distributed, news sheet really. But we got the message pretty quickly, about 7th of December. I was secretary of the sergeants’ mess down there at the time, so my first thought was that we were going to be in trouble. The local beer was undrinkable, Stella, an Arab beer, and we were getting on occasions, cases of beer

16:00 from Australia, over the 26 ounce bottle, referred to these days, I believe, as long necks. And they came four dozen to a case, wooden case, each bottle wrapped in a raffia surround, some were broken when they arrived, but generally speaking they got through all right. So I immediately thought, “Goodness me, going to be an impact on shipping.” Shipping was a big problem, because communications were the mainstay. So

16:30 I canvassed all the other members of the mess, and I got from them money and comforts fund vouchers that their families had sent them, everything I could lay my hands on in the way of money. And I went and saw the comforts fund sergeant who ran the set-up, so I said, “How much beer have you got?” and he told me. So I added up all the money, I said, “I think I’ve got enough money here to buy just about all of it,” and he said, “That’s all right with me, I’m

17:00 happy to get rid out it out of my place.” So we did, and we put it in the sergeants’ mess. The sergeants’ mess was a big tent, big long marquee. That had another effect, because shortly afterwards an officer came down, the secretary of the officers’ mess came to see me. And he said, “Sergeant, I believe that you’ve cornered the beer market?” I said, “I think you could say that, Sir.” And he said, “Yes, well I presume you will invite the,

17:30 the officers will be able to partake in the mess.” And I said, “Certainly, Sir, but only on invitation.” So he was taken aback by that. That meant if they didn’t get on with the sergeant’s, they didn’t get invited to get a drink, and they couldn’t do anything about it. So that was interesting.

When, when you were training the, the officers, could you explain what you actually had to teach them?

Well I was

18:00 teaching them gun drill, which was how to handle the gun, how to fire the gun, how to load it and so forth. How to effect simple repairs to the gun. One of the things, the big buffer and recuperator system, which worked on a combination of oil and compressed air. And it had a very magic contrivance inside, which allowed

18:30 the air to be, to go to the back when the gun was recoiling, where it was compressed, which assisted it when it was travelling back to its home position, to be ready to be re-fired again, and the ports opened on a, on rods which were specially shaped to do all this. And then sometimes there would be a leakage in there, and the gun would build up too much pressure inside,

19:00 the buffer and recuperator. The buffer system would have too much pressure, and you’d have to go round the front and use the snifter valve and release some of the pressure, not too much, just to get it home. So all of those things had to be taught to these officers, plus the fact that they had to understand that gun drill wasn’t something that you did in your own time, it was something you did very, very smartly and very, very regimentally, and you had to be damn quick. And one of the favourite orders I liked to

19:30 instil into people, that I had to give, was an order called “Stand fast.” I was there observing everything that went on, and it was my duty not only to make sure the gun was firing and that all the people were doing their jobs correctly, but if I saw something go wrong, I had to stop everything. And I had to train people for ages, that when I gave the stand order, “Stand fast,” they froze, if their hand

20:00 was in mid-air, they didn’t move. Took a long while to get through to people, especially the young officers that I, and I put it to them continuously and roared at them continuously for not doing what I told them. But you had to freeze, because any movement you did, they didn’t know, they couldn’t see the whole picture like I could, any movement, any involuntary movement, may have caused a catastrophe, could have caused a premature explosion in the gun barrel which is a shocking thing. And

20:30 all of that sort of thing, so it was a very important order, and I was very, very meticulous on training everybody in this one. So that was virtually the end. Then.

The, the accommodation at the training facility, where were people accommodated?

Oh in tents, in tents everywhere, which was a luxury, because when we were outside in the desert, we just slept on the ground, except for when we were in this gun pit that I had. That was under a bit of cover, but it was not,

21:00 no cover that was safe, it was just a bit of cover that we had a, a dug out. And the previous had left in a 24, four gallon petrol tin and they’d taken the bottom out, and put fly, flywire over it, which made a ventilator in it. And I sort of got that, pre-empted that, being the boss, as mine, because I would be under the air ventilator.

21:30 But retribution came to me, because when things were quiet, the sand used to settle on the fly wire, and if the gun was firing the reverberations, or the bombs were falling, the reverberations on the ground sifted the sand down into my eyes, so I got my comeuppance [what I deserved] on that. So that

22:00 virtually describes what conditions were, we were, and the Tobruk Rats were the same. We were similar to them, because they were living in holes in the side of the hillsides, and Lord Haw Haw [William Joyce, German propaganda broadcaster] came on, and said, you know, “You’re like rats in your holes and that’s where you’ll die!” And so forth. And so we, we weren’t too pleased about that.

What was the, what was the view on, on people like General Blamey [General Thomas Blamey Commander-in-Chief, Australian Military Forces], what was

22:30 the kind of gossip amongst?

Well, I’m glad you asked me that, because I have a particular interest in that. General Blamey was our General Officer Commanding, VX1, he finished up a Field Marshal. We went across, before that, he was Victorian Police Commissioner, and he had a reputation for being a drunkard and a womaniser, as police commissioner. He had a wife. We had two gunners, and I can recall going down on leave from Puckapunyal,

23:00 on one occasion, and I was in the Hotel Australia, drinking with a fellow who, Freddy Rowlands. And he was a gunner and he’d been promoted to bombardier, and I couldn’t understand why at the time. There was another one, Keith Batiste, two of them. And they both got promoted to bombardier, and I really, because I felt there were other men that could have been promoted to bombardier before them, but so be it. I was down in the basement bar of the

23:30 Hotel Australia in Collins Street in Melbourne, and Freddy was drinking with me, and he said, “I’ve got to go upstairs and meet my mother, she’s up in the lounge.” So I went upstairs with him, and there was a large party of women, civilians, and we were the only soldiers there you see. So Freddy came around, and he said to his Mother, “Oh Mum,” he said, “I want you to meet Sergeant Douglas, my mother

24:00 Mrs Rowlands,” and “How do you do?” And he said, “My aunt, Lady Blamey.” And so on it went round. And I was a bit taken aback. And so they all sat us down, and drinks were ordered around, it came round to my turn, so I heaved a big sigh so I’d be OK, so I ordered a round with my time, and it came to three pounds.

24:30 That was the end of my leave, that was the total amount of money I had with me. So Keith Batiste and, and my friend Fred Rowlands, were both nephews of General Blamey, no wonder they eventually became commissioned in the Middle East. And Keith Batiste was very good, Geoffrey Rowlands, Rowlands wasn’t too hot.

25:00 And, so, that was my education into the hierarchy. We’ll hear more of General Blamey when we came home, because he caused a real problem when he became Field Marshal. But that virtually wraps up what was in the Middle East.

And so when, if we could talk about when you heard that the Japanese had come into the war, what, what happened then, after you left the training regiment, could you explain?

25:30 No, I hadn’t left the training regiment, I was still with the training regiment, and the Japanese came into the war. And the 6th and 7th Divisions, were immediately sent home. But then the 9th Division couldn’t be sent home, because there wasn’t enough shipping. Shipping was at a premium, because we’d, you’ve all heard of the thousands, and tens of thousands of tonnes of shipping that we lost during the war, not only warships, but merchant ships,

26:00 going from America across to England, and in the North Sea, ships were tuppence a dozen, they were going down everywhere. And so there was no transport, so the 9th Division was left behind. The 7th Division, which we relieved in Mersa Matruh, had gone to Syria, because we were concerned about the Germans coming through Russia and coming down for the oil fields in the Middle East, and then they would have joined up and had a complete circle.

26:30 So the 7th Division was sent home, and the 9th Division was sent up into Syria, where they were engaged in building gun pits and so forth, and training. So then we were sent home, we were sent home along with the 7th Division. But we didn’t go home in any glory, like we’d come across on the Strathmore, it was an entirely different circumstance. We

27:00 drove what guns and motor transport we had to Port Taufiq, which was at the other end of the Suez Canal from portside. And there we were, there were stacks and stacks of ships lined up, small ships, and most of them were Liberty ships. Liberty ships had been constructed, it was an American invention, and they, they had a multi-millionaire in America, who

27:30 conceived the idea of these small ships, four and five thousand tonne weight, whereas the Strathmore we’d come over on was 24,000 tonnes. And the HMS Queen Mary of course, and the HMS Queen Elizabeth, were much, much bigger. And they were lined up, so we were on the wharf, and we’d put our material, the guns and

28:00 trucks into a carpark, into a park where they waited, and then they were distributed later on by an independent body. We had Tommy troops, there was a British Captain came along with us, and we were walking along with him in a, as he was there with his fly whisk, and going past these ships, and he would say, “Well OK, six men on this ship, and four men on that ship,” and in my case,

28:30 there were four of us went aboard, there was two other sergeants and myself from the same regiment, and another guy from somewhere. And we went aboard, and there was a conglomeration of men from all the various units. And when we got onboard, nobody knew who was who or anything at all, and there was a major in charge, who I’d never seen before, I don’t know where he came from. He was in charge, he was commanding officer,

29:00 officer in command of the ship, nothing to do with the captain of the ship or so forth, but he was in command of the troops. So it came, when they’d searched through, he found that I was the senior sergeant on board, and so he appointed me the ship’s sergeant major sort of thing. And I had to compile a nominal roll of all the people on the ship, and where they’d come from, which I did and handed it over to him.

29:30 And then we set off and we were loaded with guns and trucks down in the holds, and we had the hatch covers on, and then loaded on every hatch cover, we had more guns and trucks, mainly trucks on top. And on the aft end of the ship, on one side we had a big motorcar packing case welded on, that was the galley,

30:00 and on the other side, a similar packing case welded, and they were the latrines. And the latrines consisted of a bench with about eight holes cut in it, and underneath a bowed piece of galvanised iron, corrugated galvanised iron. And from there, they’d soldered on a pipe which went over the side, which continually got blocked.

30:30 So being in charge, I had to detail a gunner or a private, whatever his rank was, because we were assorted people, and he had to be there with a broom handle and make sure he kept the effluent going through the pipe going over the side. And in addition to that, the fresh water was in a hand pump up in the fore peak and we had dixies with covers, with lids, but even they tended to

31:00 leak a bit if they were sloshing around with the ship rolling. And this ship rolled, because we were in harbour, I noticed we were high out of the water, the propeller was half out. Because although the ship was loaded full, it had no great weight in it, there was no density because of vehicles, the size of the vehicles and the guns and so forth. So when we got into roll, and boy did it roll, it rolled from one side to the other, with the rails,

31:30 the ship’s rails going under. And across all the deck, was the ropes lashing this gear onto the hatch covers. And I had to have a detail going up to the fore peak, right up in the bowers of the ship, and hand pumping the water into the dixies, clamping the lids on, and then they had to come, stepping over all these ropes, carrying these dixies, trying to counteract the role of the ship and hanging onto the rails

32:00 for dear life. Getting back to the cookhouse, and we lost quite a, and on occasions, quite a lot of water. So that was very difficult. So we were proceeding across the Indian Ocean, and we had to keep a very sharp lookout, because we had less than 240 troops on board, and as such, it was deemed that we did not require an escort, we were on our own.

32:30 And we were looking for Japanese submarines and Japanese warships and Japanese aeroplanes, because we had very little back in Australia, and we weren’t close enough to Australia. So we proceeded gaily across the Indian Ocean in a much less gracious way than we’d gone across there on the Strathmore. And then we ran into some troubles. One of the ship, one of the trucks

33:00 down below broke loose, and it was bad weather, and it was thumping against the side. I’ve never seen a braver act, the chief officer of the ship came down, and he was able to release one, the hatch covers are a series of plank covers that clip together, and then with a cover lashed over to make it waterproof. We were able to open the cover, and get one of the planks off, which gave, one or two of the planks off, which gave him enough room to get in.

33:30 And then he dropped a rope ladder down, and went down the rope ladder. Can you imagine this? The ship rolling from side to side and him going down with a rope ladder with a torch, and this blasted truck on the loose, he didn’t know where it was, or what it was doing down there. And he got down and he found the truck, and he lassoed it somehow or other, and secured it, and came back up the, up the rope ladder, it was just amazing. We all cheered him and clapped

34:00 him, we said he was tremendous. Then, so we carried on, and then shortly after that, we had a big tall, well he was elderly to us, he was probably in his 50s, a very laconic, Scottish engineer on board, he was the engineer on the ship, and he was a wonderful guy, very nice, very humorous. And so we’d stopped

34:30 unexplained. And then we were advised that we’d blown one of boilers, one of the tubes in one of the boilers. And the engineer came out and explained to us, that it was going to take three days for him, for the boiler to cool down sufficiently, as he had to crawl inside to get to the pipe, to effect repairs. So there we were,

35:00 wallowing around in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Our armament was, I think, a small, about five pounder or six pounder gun, on the, on the front which the crew manned. And we had Bren guns mounted on tripods up on the bridge, for anti-aircraft work. And I had to post our troops around, as well as the

35:30 Merchant Navy guys who were also keeping a very clear eye on things, so we were watching for these three days with fingers crossed, while we wallowed in the middle of the Pacific, thankfully the weather was fairly calm. And, not in the Pacific, sorry, in the Indian Ocean. And so, we got through that OK. And then, as we approached Australia,

36:00 we were, we were directed to go into Java. So we turned left and started to proceed toward Java, and then we got an urgent signal to the ship, to tell us to turn about and come back to Australia, that the Japanese had just taken Java. That gives rise to an interesting story, which I’ll tell you about later. So

36:30 we came out of Java. This time we were starting to run very short on water on the ship, very short on rations, but more particularly, we were starting to run short on coal. And to assist the firemen on the ship, I sent a body of troops down, they weren’t going to stoke the fires of a craft in itself, being a stoker feeding the fires of a steam engine.

37:00 But my troops went, because it was getting a long way for them to walk in the scuppers for the holds, the holds of the, where the coal was, I got the, our troops shovelling the coal forward all the time, bringing it up closer to them, to the face of the furnace, so that they could handle it more easily, which they were thankful. And we staggered on this like down the coast of Australia, and then we came inside at Fremantle, and we turned up into

37:30 the Fremantle. And we pulled up and started to tie up at the wharf at Fremantle, and then we got the information, “Stiff shit boys, you can’t get anything here, the wharf labourers are on strike.”

What were they on strike over?

God knows, what were they on strike over? That soured me against unions for life. And I thought, “Oh, God almighty.” So then we had to pull out of Fremantle,

38:00 and we staggered around to Albany, which is around the corner on, and back through the, and we went through King George Sound, which is a great experience in itself. It is the most magnificent sight you’ve ever seen if you haven’t been there. And we sailed through this place, and we gradually got there, but then the ship was drawing too much water for us to get into

38:30 the harbour. So we had to lighten, bring out the lighter the coal, load it into baskets, big cane baskets which the ship lowered down and bring it up on board that way, and pour it down into the stoke hole. In the meantime, the major gave us a day’s leave, but we’d only, he’d gone ashore and got money, but he’d only give us a pound, and we 39:00 had a limited number of hours leave, to go ashore.

Tape 7

00:36 So Bob, I’ll just ask, ask you to describe your first impressions of the Americans?

Well we got ashore, we went ashore at Albany, and we ran into a group of Americans, they were much older than us. They were naval fellows, and they had these beautiful uniforms, blue uniforms,

01:00 reminded us of the militia. And they had all these hash stripes [service stripes] down their arms, which indicated years of service and various other things. And like all Americans, they had great arrays of ribbons for medals, Americans love medals. Anyway, Max and I went ashore, Bob Hogarth didn’t come ashore with us anyway. And Max and I were in a bar with, having a drink,

01:30 and they came over and spoke to us, you see. They had just come out of Corregidor, where they’d bought General Macarthur [American Commander-In-Chief of the Pacific] out by submarine, and they had their submarines out in the harbour, in the, in the King George Sound. They were really enjoying themselves. So we really started talking to each other, and eventually we started drinking together as you do. And it was going on,

02:00 and we were drinking like nobody’s business. And then I said to Max, I said, “Look, I’m running low on money, how are you?” He said, “I’m just about out,” I said, “So am I.” I said, “I think we’ll have to make a break for it, because we can’t carry on here, we won’t have enough money.” So we indicated to the Americans that we were about to, to leave and they said, “Oh why?” and we said, “We’ve got to get back to the ship,”

02:30 and so made all sorts of excuses. And they were very pressing on very hard, and I said, “Well look, quite frankly, we’ve run out of money,” and this big sergeant, petty officer, and gold stripes as I said everywhere, he put his hand in his pocket and he pulled out a roll of Australian pound notes. He said, “Look buddy, we’ve been here for weeks, and they keep on paying us this stuff, and they keep on paying us this stuff,

03:00 and we keep on spending, and it keeps on a-gaining on us.” He said, “There’s no way you’re going back to the ship, you just relax, it’s on us, right here.” So eventually I said to Max, I said, “We’ve got to get, we’ll be in deep shit, otherwise we’ll be late back on shore, on the ship.” So we went, had the goodbye, they were great guys,

03:30 been long term serving soldiers and servicemen, and they’d had some pretty drastic experiences. And we wended our way back to the wharf, and got a boat to take us out, and when we got out, got back out there, there was, we had to come down a rope ladder. We’d come down the rope ladder originally, but when I looked at it from the water line, it seemed to go

04:00 forever. So I had a fellow in front of me, where he’d come from, but he was on the ship, but nothing to do with my unit. And he was drunk, he was paralytic, and he was on the ladder, so I was trying to urge him to get along, and I got up behind. And then I finished up, I finished up with my, trying to push him along, and climb on the ladder. I finished up with my head between his legs, and he was really,

04:30 truly sitting on my shoulders. And I’m pushing him up the ladder saying, “Give me your hand to get you up,” battling our way up the ladder, and his trousers fell off and engulfed my head, and I couldn’t see a damn thing. So we got up to the, got to the, going on board, and the bloody major, he was out to catch everybody, he was a nasty piece of work. And he had an officer stationed there,

05:00 booking anybody who was over, overstayed the leave limit, and I was one of them of course. And I could see this was going to be a problem, not that he could do anything to me, because I was a confirmed rank. And so, I tried to get this guy over the rail, I’ve got up and I was, I had my foot on the, my feet on the ship itself, and hanging onto the rail, and he’s still there, and I just pushed off my shoulders and he just

05:30 fell in a great heap on the deck. And in the surrounding kerfuffle [confusion], I hopped over the rail and Max was not far behind me, and we just disappeared, we washed our hands of the whole affair, so we avoided the major.

Can I ask you Bob, just to take you back to when you were drinking with the Americans, can you recall what you spoke about?

Well they wanted to know what it was like in the Middle East, and we gave them a short description of that.

06:00 We asked them what it was like in a submarine, and they told us all about that. And they told us about the Japanese coming down to Corregidor and the Philippines and so on.

So you’d been, you mentioned that you’d been in Java? No we didn’t go in, we approached it.

Approached it. What did you know, at that time, of, of what the Japanese had been up to?

Very little. We knew that they were coming down. Darwin had been bombed while we were away.

How did you

06:30 hear of Darwin being bombed?

I think when we got back into Australia.

And how did you react to the news that Australia had actually been bombed?

Well, there was two things, which I’ll come to. Perhaps if I just clarify this other one. We got back into Adelaide, and then we left the Glen Park. And in Adelaide, there was no provision for troops coming home, at that stage, so they were being put into

07:00 billets, and we were met by billeting officers. And we were sent up to a place in Little Hampton, I think this is remains of the story, up to Little Hampton for a while, that’s up in the foothills of Adelaide, pretty little place, up beyond Hahndorf. And we were there for a while, with a, a lovely lady, Mrs Choat, and her rather irascible, very elderly husband, who didn’t think much of having three young soldiers in his house, but she was

07:30 just like Mum to us, you know. Oh it was just heaven to smell the beautiful clean sheets and pillows, and all the rest of it, and lovely cooking, she, oh she fed us like nobody’s business. And they got a small stipend, but boy, I reckon we’d out eat that. Then the people up in, we were doing very little there, just a bit of running around with the gun, and doing some training. And then we were called up,

08:00 and two sergeants, of which I was one, two officers and a batman [officer’s servant], were detailed to go to Port Pirie, in South Australia. So off we set, and we became railway transport officers. Well actually the officers were railway transport officers, but lowly sergeants were assistant railway transport officers, but we did all the work. And we were on the railway station, and Port Pirie

08:30 station in those days, had four gauges of railway line at the station. It had the 5 [foot] 3 inch rail coming in from Victoria. It had the 4”8-1/2 the international standard, which was New South Wales standard, that’s going across to Kalgoorlie. And it had a local 3 [foot] 6 line, which was the South Australian gauge. And it had a very local 2 [foot] 6 inch gauge railway, just for around Port Pirie.

09:00 And they had shifted large numbers of troops to the West Coast, after Darwin had been bombed. And then, by that time, we were getting home, the threat seemed to be coming through from the other side, down. Of course, the Coral Sea battle was just about to take place. So they were pushing to get the troops back again, from the west. And we had to sort the troops out,

09:30 on Port Pirie Railway station, to get them into the trains going further east. And that was quite a job, and we had the assistance of a local MP [military police] force, which was recruited from dear old fellows from the First World War, and they were great, we got on with them very, very well. But the two officers were ensconced in the Central Hotel with their batman, and the two sergeants were put into the Barrier Hotel. And Mr Calman,

10:00 who ran the Barrier Hotel, was the president of the local RSL [Returned and Services League], which was again, was a plus for us. And we went there, and we had to pay our own way, but I was getting then 10 shillings a day, still, and I got 10 and 10 a day, travelling allowance, which was pretty good. And, and I think we got, I can’t remember whether Calman charged us for when he there, but I know we, we had a lot of free booze, and things like that,

10:30 and people were very anxious to come in and talk to us, and buy us a drink and so on, we weren’t averse to accepting it. And there I met a young lady who was working in the hotel, her name was Ruby. And we formed up a relationship, and she came from a large family in a place called Crystal Brook, which was just across from Port Pirie, just a short distance away, and she was number seven in a family of ten.

11:00 And anyway, we established a relationship and away I went to, and we left there.

Can I just ask you Bob, you’d been away two years,

Yes.

And in that time Australia had become quite seriously threatened.

It had.

What changes had you noticed upon coming back to Australia in terms of, you’d spent time with Mrs Choat and you’d met a young woman, how had people changed?

Oh, not a great deal,

11:30 not a great deal really. They weren’t conscious, really, of the threat. We were still a long way away. They did get on later, when we got across on to the East Coast ourselves, and the midget submarines came in to Sydney Harbour, and also a submarine, mother submarine stood off the coast at Bondi, and, and shelled. Jill can tell you the story there, because she was living in Sydney at the time, she was one

12:00 of the little girls evacuated from Sydney. And where do you think she was evacuated to? Wales Meadow just out of Burrawang, I couldn’t believe it when she told me about it.

So where were you when the submarines entered Sydney Harbour?

I would have been down in Albury at that stage.

Can you tell me what you were doing in Albury?

Yes, I can. We had come back and we were, the work in Port Pirie was finishing,

12:30 so then we took all our stuff down to Oakbank, the race course out of Adelaide. And there we, a train of flat tops was there, and they were all interconnected with metal plates, and we started at the end and we loaded all our trucks and guns onto the flat tops, so we could go. We had no facilities for the troops.

13:00 Of course, being a sergeant I claimed a spot in a front cab, and we lived and slept there. The troops had to find room under, under the vehicles and so forth, it was freezing cold, it was midwinter. And out on those, on the flat taps with the swiftly moving train, it was murder, we were living in, drivers had greatcoats and scarves and

13:30 balaclavas all the time. And then the CO’s [commanding officer] batman, he got nice and drunk on the lemon cordial and things like that, and he was swinging like a monkey from truck to truck, we all thought he was going to kill himself, but he survived. And we got into Albury, and then they, we bypassed Melbourne to a degree,

14:00 didn’t come into the city, and then we got up to Albury. And of course, we de-trained in Albury, and then we went out to a camp called Albury camp, which had been set up. And that was another, an adjunct to the training regiment, and it was training troops in Australia before they went overseas. So we were brought into that, and we had to straighten that out quite a bit.

14:30 What do you mean straighten it out?

Well get it up to scratch, because it was pretty lackadaisical, and so forth.

What were the men like that you were training?

Some of them were very, very good. One of them was Donald Friend, who later became a great artist. Truthfully. And he was all right. And we also had

15:00 other various people. But then I got detailed off, there was a squad of cadets that had just come through Duntroon, the military college, and they had graduated as second lieutenants from Duntroon, and they were sent down to Albury. And here again I had a squad of officers to train. And in Albury it was freezing cold, you could see Mt Buffalo from where we were.

15:30 And I had to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning, and shower and shave and get spick and span [clean and neat] and so forth, so that I could take parade, all these young gentlemen, at 6 o’clock. And then I would put them through all their paces. Well I’d had a bit of experience at this, so I showed them no mercy. But many of them went on, I’m sure to great heights in the military, because that’s the entry into

16:00 command, going through the staff college.

You were still a young man yourself though?

Just 20. I was 20. I had a lot of experience. And so, we got all those fellows into shape, I had no trouble with them, they were thorough gentlemen as far as I was concerned. They appreciated the job I had to do and they understood it, and they took it quite readily. They’d been in Duntroon Military College, where warrant officers and sergeants have been

16:30 training them right through the whole four years of their tenure there, so they were quite used to it, to a sergeant barking orders to them and so on, and they’d respond very well. They were very, very good to get on with, I had no complaints there, thorough gentlemen. And, so then that finished, and we were then transported up to, we were going to go north. But then in the meantime,

17:00 my ears had given me trouble, tremendous trouble. So I was sent to Sydney, and I was sent out to the Prince of Wales Hospital, out in Randwick way, isn’t it. And they put me into a soldiers’ convalescent home, at that stage, all around Australia, they’d taken over grand old homes. Sir Sidney Snow used to run Snow’s Emporium in Sydney, which is now the Law

17:30 Courts, it’s a beautiful old building down in Goulburn Street, on the corner of Goulburn Street and George Street. That was Snow’s Emporium, and he had a magnificent home out in Gordon, beautiful rooms and everything else, that was turned into a soldier’s, soldier’s rehabilitation area. So, I was sent out to Bondi, then I came, I used to go back there

18:00 every night, after getting treatment on my ears. And then one night, the sister came in, or one morning, i should say, sister came in. And she looked at me, and held up her hands in horror, and said, “You’ve got chickenpox.” I said, “Have I?” “Oh,” she said, “Keep away, keep away.” So I was immediately packed off from there, and sent out to Prince Henry, the infectious disease hospital out at

18:30 Long Bay. And there a specialist came to see me, he was a very nice gentlemen. And he looked at me, and he said, oh I’d stripped off for him to see me. He said, “You’re a real front row forward,” and I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, because I’d only been interested in Australian Rules Football, down in Melbourne, and he was talking about a rugby front row forward. And I, I didn’t get the message until much later. And I was covered in chickenpox

19:00 everywhere. And he warned me not to scratch, not to do anything, the only pox that I’ve got is underneath where I was wearing my wrist watch, and you can see little white patches, perhaps a couple of others here and there, but generally I was pretty good, I abstained.

So you, once you had recovered from the chickenpox, how did you return back to service?

Well I went back to have my

19:30 ears checked out, and then they sent me up to a, another convalescence place up in Wahroonga on the north shore, and it was called Naringa, it’s now a hospital, Naringa Hospital – Private Hospital, I think. And that was another convalescence area. And the reason I got sent there, I started, I had broken out in tinea. Not just tinea between my toes, I had tinea all over my body. I was losing,

20:00 I’d lost great, I was raw, all over my body, an aftermath, I believe, of the chickenpox. So there I was lying again, not prepared to scratch anything else, until this recovered. And at the same time, I had all these poor men coming back from New Guinea, and some of them were in dreadful condition where they’d been shot up.

Can you describe, can you describe those men that you?

Well, one in particular, he was telling me, he had been

20:30 isolated between the Japanese and his own lines, and he was out there for several days. And he had his tin helmet and his other stuff, but he couldn’t move, he’d been badly wounded and he didn’t like calling out, because if he called out, the Japanese would know where he was. So he laid there, he urinated in his tin helmet, and drank that to keep his thirst down, and of course, it was wet in New Guinea,

21:00 and he was able probably to reach out and get leaves with water on them, and suck them and so forth. And he survived out there for a week without tucker, badly wounded, and he was in the next bed to me at Naringa. And it was frightful, I thought, “That’s shocking,” you know. Anyway, with those experiences, I, they took us down then to the old Lindfield Theatre, which is now a big Coles Supermarket. We went

21:30 to the Lindfield Theatre and I saw Bing Crosby in White Christmas. And that was a, that was great, we enjoyed that.

And how did you find the medical staff during your period of convalescence?

Very, very good indeed, very good indeed, the medical staff were great. Well we didn’t come in contact with many at that stage. We were mainly with the regimental aid posts, and we knew

22:00 these guys as well as we knew our own brothers, you know. They were good and they were caring and they were helpful, and the medical officers we had were good, so I had no complaints about that. And then when we got back into this other area that I just described, everybody was very considerate and very helpful and so forth, all appreciated the service we’d already done in the Middle East. So I

22:30 eventually recovered, and we were then put on draft to go back and re-join my regiment at last.

Bob can I just ask you, during that period of convalescence, there was a lot of action in the Pacific.

Yes.

What were your feelings at the time?

I just wanted to get back to the unit, that’s all, we were all. We, we had previous to this, I omitted to you, the young lady and I, we carried on from Port Pirie, and previous

23:00 to this period that I’ve just described. We were put on final leave again, we had been agitating it for some time, put on final leave to return to the Middle East. And as it transpired, the, the contingent which had gone before us, were the last to go to the Middle East. So when we, I went back, I was given pre-embarkation leave again to go back to the Middle East. And when I went back, I,

23:30 I met Ruby again, and she was very anxious to do something, and we all got, so I married her, and that was a, we were down in the Napoleon Hotel in Adelaide, and we got married. I didn’t have anybody, no family or anything about, both parents dead. Where were your brothers at this stage?

I wasn’t too sure, because I hadn’t been able to get

24:00 back to them, you see. And the only contact I’d had with them, was through Rose Gutteridge who I’d known at Servix Electrics, and she used to write me fairly regularly letters, letting me know what was going on, but that was all. My brothers never wrote to me, they had their own problems, I didn’t know anything about those. So we were, I got out of Naringa, and we were en route

24:30 to go back to the regiment. So then I was, being a sergeant, they would, in all the transit camps, they would grab me if they had a detail going somewhere, they would then hand me their routine, the orders, their movement orders, which I would hold, and I would be responsible for a batch of men who were moving. And I held the movement orders of all of them.

25:00 And so we were travelling up to North Queensland, and then we got to around, I think it was Bundaberg, it might have been a bit further up. There, no it was further up, it must have been Mackay, and, because we went on. No, I know where it was now, Bowen.

25:30 And I met a young pilot officer, and he had a Catalina flying boat there. And so we were staged there for a day, waiting for another train, so I palled up with [befriended] him, and I didn’t know any of the guys on the draft, you know, they were from different units. So they all had no interest in me, other than I was responsible for them. And so the pilot officer and

26:00 I went down to the pub and had a few jugs, and talked together, and he said, “Oh God, I told him I had to go up to Redlands,” that was my next point of call, just out of Cairns, with another staging camp before we were distributed again, to go up onto the Atherton Tablelands. So I told him where I was going there, he said, “Why don’t you get off the train here” he said, “There’s a damn good dance on tonight, and there’s stacks of girls here,”

26:30 and I said, “Well that makes it very enticing, but,” I said, “I’m responsible for this bloody draft, I can’t leave them on their own, I’ll be in deep trouble myself.” So he said, “Don’t worry about that,” he said, “I’m going up to Cairns tomorrow,” and he said, “And I’ve got the old bus down there, I can fly you up before the train gets there, and you can cool your heels in Cairns for a day or two until the train gets in, and pick it up and go out to Redlands.” I said,

27:00 “That sounds like a good idea,” and the idea of going to the dance at night was a good idea, so I did. We did, he flew me up to, he put me in the bomb aimer’s nose, the bubble out in the front, right out the front of the Catalina, it frightened the life out of me doing dive-bombing activities up the Babinda Valley and so on, the cane fields and so on. But it was quite an experience to be lying out there and watching it all. And I’d previously had

27:30 my first, back in South Australia, I’d had my first flight, I’d taken my new wife across to Kangaroo Island for a couple of days honeymoon, you know. And coming back, I’d found there was a plane coming back, it was a little Dragon Rapide, with bat wings and pointy wings, and they were fairly popular, and we got on that.

28:00 And flew back to Adelaide, and we were all in, there was five passengers in with the pilot in the one thing, and I remember him pumping up, to get the plane right before we took off. We took off, an uneventful flight to Adelaide. And then we got off, and another crew and people got on to go to Renmark, and it crashed and killed the lot. And, so we’d just been on the plane, so I tell you what, I’ve been avoiding being killed all my life.

Bob, I’d like to talk to you now about the preparations for going to Borneo.

Yes. Well then we were up in Queensland, North Queensland, and we’d been cooling our heels [waiting] for ages. We were left out of the New Guinea Campaign, they only took the 2nd/12th Field Regiment there. And then we were told we were going to Borneo. So that meant a major reconstruction, because they’d evidently

29:00 planned it very well ahead, and of course, they knew about all these things, because British maritime charts of seas and harbours around the world, was pre-eminent in the world, they knew everything, everybody relied on those. And so, they, we didn’t know at the time, but they had known that we were going to go into a place called Brunei Bay, and land on Brunei,

29:30 which was the Sultanate of the Sultan of Brunei, still very wealthy, he’s still one of the wealthiest men in the world, the current one.

What briefing were you given about those operations?

Well we were sent, I was sent down as an instructor, I only discovered recently when I got my Freedom of Information [procured documents under the Freedom of Information Act], that I became a qualified waterproofing instructor, I didn’t know that

30:00 before. So I was sent down, along with our Motor Transport Sergeant, and when we got down to Trinity Bay, just out of Adelaide, out of Cairns I should say, we I had a gun issued to me, and Motor Transport Guy had a TD-9 Caterpillar Tractor. We thought this was interesting. Then I was instructed 30:30 on how to waterproof a gun, which was quite a complicated procedure and involved a lot of Vaseline type stuff, and bindings and so on, so that the gun could travel underwater without damage. And the same thing with the motor transport sergeant, he had to waterproof the TD-9 tractor, so that it could travel underwater with only the exhaust pipe

31:00 and the driver’s head sticking out. So we completed our training and put it to trial off the beach at Trinity Bay, it was quite interesting standing on the beach, seeing this fellow’s head and the smoke stack going around the bay, and nothing else.

Did you think during this training, something’s up?

Yes, my word I did, I thought, “This is going to interesting, we’re, we’re going to make a landing against very hostile forces.” So

31:30 again the regiment had been sent on by ship, up into the Halmaheras, islands just off the end of New Guinea, and, with a harbour in there called Morotai. I was left behind as sergeant of the rear guard, as was the motor transport sergeant, and we supervised the loading of the guns and the trucks onto a big American merchant band,

32:00 and we ran up against trouble with the unions again. The guns weren’t positioned correctly, they couldn’t be put on the slings, and they were having trouble with one Jeep. I went up and I put the bloke off the Jeep, and I put my finger under the bumper bar and I pulled it into position, and I said, “That’s now ready for you,” so it added to my hatred of unions.

32:30 So eventually we got the thing loaded, and the Americans on the ship, it was a civilian ship, not a merchant one, and they were fantastic to us, you know, I’d never eaten so much ice cream in my life, like running out of my ears, food I hadn’t seen anything like it for years, it was everything. So we sailed up to Morotai, and we disgorged all our trucks and TD-9 tractors, and

33:00 guns. And waiting for us there, was some LSTs, landing ship tanks, which had been designed for the channel, English Channel crossing, just a short run. But we were going to be on this for about seven days.

Can you describe what they looked like?

Yes, they had a sharp nose but it was, fell away and went straight down into the sea.

33:30 We loaded the guns on, there was no room, the guns were backed on, hooked to their tractors, these TD-9 tractors, so that they were ready just to drive straight out, and disembarking. So that was all in place there. And then we went aboard. And on my LSTs, there was several LSTs,

34:00 I was again was the senior sergeant, and I didn’t have any responsibilities for a gun at this time, because a new system had come into being for the, that quite often four guns to a troop with a gun position officer, were not manoeuvrable, and so they split it down to what they called sections, two guns in a section. And I was the gun position officer, the lieutenant was the gun position officer for one section, and

34:30 I being the senior sergeant was the gun position officer for the other section. I never actually came into the position where I functioned as it, but that was the arrangement. So we stood off, after we’d been about seven days on the sea, we stood up, stood off the entrance to Brunei Bay, and as we went in,

35:00 the Australian Navy and the US [United States] Navy, and there was British ships there, they stood off behind us, and such a cannonade, it came across over us, it was quite frightening really, but oh, it was impressive. And then the aircraft, the Americans and the Australians came in, and they were bombing the area that we were going to, so we had tremendous support as we sailed in,

35:30 on these LSTs.

What had you been told to do?

Well we knew what we were going to do, we were going to, first of all we were going to, in my LST we were going to an island called Maru Island, which was just off Brunei. And then the, we were going to approach the island and go in as far as we could, and at that stage then, the bows of the ship would open, the ramps would drop down, and the vehicles would drive off, the tractors would drive off,

36:00 with the guns and their drivers, their head and exhaust sticking out of the ground, out of the water, and we would wade ashore. Then when we got onto the island, we immediately removed all the waterproofing material, and brought the guns into action to lend a hand from the island, onto the mainland. And the infantry went in, and secured the port. And then when the infantry had secured the port,

36:30 we were picked up again, didn’t have to go through the waterproofing procedures again, from the island and transported across to Brunei and then we bowled into Brunei town.

What were you told of what, what you would encounter in terms of the Japanese occupation? Well we expected resistance, we were told to expect quite serious resistance, and we had to get the infantry was clearing the way. Understand that the guns are so important in war, that the

37:00 infantry is always there, to clear away for the guns. You never go in, or very rarely go in cold, with the guns, because they’re too valuable and they’re too important, it’s a matter of support, we’re to support the infantry. So we went in.

Can I just ask you before that Bob, can you just describe the atmosphere to me, on that LST before you landed?

Oh it was pretty

37:30 tense, because we were very, very cramped for space, the weather was foul, some of the troops were very, very ill. A couple of brothers I had they got, they were shockingly ill, how they were able to go into action after such a shocking trip, they were violently ill.

Was there talking?

Yes, people were, but we slept in

38:00 three tiered bunks, you had to get yourself horizontal to get into them. And I had a particularly onerous job, because I had to force troops through, past the galley, and they came past with their, we all had to go through, and there was no distinction of rank, I got the same as everybody else, and so did the officers. But we had to keep the troops moving, through there and there was nowhere, they had to find somewhere to sit amongst the guns and the transport,

38:30 it was a shambles on board, there was, there was line-ups for the toilets, you know, it was very, very difficult trip.

How many men on that one, on one LST?

On the LST, that’s something I hadn’t thought about, about, 180 to 200, I suppose.

And how many LSTs would there have been involved?

Oh, I’m not sure, I can’t remember now, there must have been several

39:00 to bring us ashore with all the other stuff. But probably it required about two LST to bring the four guns.

Can you describe the noise of when. All right.

Tape 8

00:36 Do you want that out of the film, or?

I think it might be, yes it’s out of the screen, so that’s OK. OK, Bob, I’ll just ask you the same question that Vanessa [interviewer] was going to ask you, which was what was the noise as you were coming out?

Quite horrendous when we, as I described, the, the bombardment from the navy and the air force, it was

01:00 really something tremendous. Some of the naval ships had quite big guns, and when you hear those shells going overhead. As one of my friends said when we in the Middle East, it was like a gentle breeze wafting over you. So it was extremely loud and frightening and so forth.

01:30 But you’re also busy at the time, it doesn’t make much difference, you know, after all, by that time we were used to explosions and bangs and so forth. And when we got ashore at Brunei, there wasn’t, there wasn’t a great deal of excitement at all, because the Japanese had largely departed from there. And we took up a gun position some little way out of the township, and

02:00 we had a few incidents, we booby-trapped all around the gun position, and we had a few, few scares with the noises and so forth, whether it was Japanese or not, I’m not too sure. But certain gunfire took place at the time, and so on, but things were pretty quiet, because the Japanese had retreated from the, I don’t think there were that many there

02:30 by that time, it had been a long war for the Japanese too.

What did you use for the booby-traps?

Well booby-traps, well they were endemic everywhere. In the desert, one of the first casualties was a fellow by the name of Jimmy Myrams, he was a lance bombardier, he was a fantastic guy, great looking guy, great stature, and good hard working, an intelligent man. And he saw a pen on the, a fountain pen on the, 03:00 on the deck in the desert and picked it up and blew his arm off. You had to be careful, so you were educating people to not move. In fact, I had a man came up to me at a reunion after the war, and he said, “Geez, I’m thankful for you” he said, “You saved my life.” And I said, “When did I save your life?” He said, “Well I was going to kick an unexploded shell, and you stopped me,

03:30 screamed to stand-fast.” So he said, “I did.”

And what were the booby-traps that you were setting for the Japanese?

Oh no, they were only just, not so much booby-traps of that nature, but more warning signs, you know, something that would jangle in an old can tin, trip wires and so forth, so if they were creeping up on our position, we got audible warning. So we,

04:00 we didn’t, we weren’t issued with booby traps like the others were. So carrying on then, we went into a gun position just outside of Brunei, nothing much was happening, the troops were getting bored. And two of the troops, Gunner Hagan and Gunner Sissen, they’d been in front of my gun

04:30 during the desert, on an anti-aircraft Bren, I knew them, they were both absolute rascals. And they got into the Royal Palace at Brunei, and they came out and came to see me, and said, “Have a look at what we’ve got,” and they had the Crown Jewels. It was a beautiful filigree crown adorned with precious stones,

05:00 and they had squashed it flat to get it in their haversack. I said, “You’re a pair of crazy bastards,” I said, “You’ll never get away with that, there’ll be hell to pay once the Sultan reports that his crown jewels have disappeared, they’ll go through us like a fine tooth comb.” Right. I said, “Now you’ve got to get rid of it, unload it, get rid of it immediately.” And I didn’t want to put them in, because they’d have gone to court martial [military court] and everything else,

05:30 and that was no way after nearly six years at war, I wasn’t going to say anything about that sort of nonsense. And so they did get rid of it, I didn’t ask, but they got rid of it. Whether they put it back where it, cause I said, “If you can get it back to where it came from, that will lessen the thing.” So anyway, but there was no great hoo-haa [problem] about it, so they must have done what I told them. Then we got news that the natives they’d brought in, the local Malays

06:00 brought in news that there were Japanese in the area. And we sent out patrol after patrol, I went out several times leading a patrol, and we weren’t trained in infantry tactics, which was silly really, sending us out, because infantry tactics are a craft unto themselves, the same as gunfire and gunnery is to artillery. As an artillery

06:30 man, you rely on the infantry to take over that role and protect us, because we were always being protected by the gun, because of the guns. So we went out on our own, and I had a smattering, naturally, of infantry tactics, all part of the game, especially by that time. And I went out with several patrols, and we found nothing. Then we got another warning that

07:00 a large, larger group of Japanese had been sighted some distance out of town. So it was decided that a Peter Wharton, who’d originally been a bombardier and gone to OTU in Cairo and become a lieutenant, he was in charge, and I was his second in command, and I had two bombardiers, I think, and six men each to them. And so we went out,

07:30 and where they took us out by truck some miles out of Brunei, and offloaded us, and we were met then by local guides, Malays who very carefully let us in through the jungle, and through the paddy fields and rice fields and so forth. And we went some distance going and he was,

08:00 the guide was going ahead, and bringing back, there’s Japanese, they get up in the tree and they weave from leaves, hats and things, so they look like the trees, master of disguise, you see. He said, “And they’ve seen us coming, but they’ve gone well away.” So we were travelling all right quietly, and I had stepped back from being in the lead, and I put a man in

08:30 point, because I shouldn’t have been in the lead in the first place, because I had to be available to command the troops, if necessary. So I put a man out in point, in front, and we came on a clearing, and he held up his hand, and I came up with him. And there before us were about 20 or 30 Japanese, squatting around in a circle, having lunch. And I was just about to deploy my troops to

09:00 spread them out, so as we’d get a decent front and make a concerted attack, when somebody in excitement at the back, unleashed with his Bren gun. Of course, the Japanese jumped from their haunches, dropped their food and immediately went up the hill, and started to fire back on us. So I then ordered my troops to take cover behind a ridge that was there, and then Peter Wharton

09:30 crawled up to me and said he was going to take a small detachment and try and circle around the back, so he left me in charge at the bottom of the hill. So we were moving up the hill, and then I noticed in front of me, all the saplings in front of me, for some reason all the bark was jumping off the saplings, and I was quite amazed for a moment. And then suddenly the penny dropped in my silly old head, and I realised

10:00 it was the bullets that were coming towards us, was taking the bark off the trees. However, we had spread out and we were engaging the Japanese at close quarters. The only time members of the regiment were in close quarter fighting, were the enemy, even in the Middle East right through, that was the only time. That’s how it transpired.

What was the vegetation like that you were?

Well it was varied, it was very dense

10:30 where’s we come through, it was very dense jungle. But now it was more like an Australian countryside with scattered light forest on it, but plenty of, plenty of light cover, and it’s going up the hillside. And the Japanese had taken the advantage on us, by being higher than us, and they were firing down on us. So I had the fellows lined out, and we were engaging them fairly heavily and fairly fiercely.

11:00 And then I got news, I could hear somebody calling out, and it transpired it was one of our signallers, George Trewin, who was an original in the Regiment, so he’d been there nearly six years, and I knew George well, he was a great guy, just a signalman, still a five bob [shillings] a day man, but a hell of a good bloke.

11:30 So I called out to him, and I said, “Quieten down, and I’ll come out and see what I can do.” So I crawled out along through the grass, the grass was fairly high and the enemy were firing, they could see the grass moving, and they were moving the grass above my head, it was quite daunting. But I kept going, and I found George and he was in a bad way, he’d been

12:00 stitched from head to foot with a machine gun fire, he was bleeding profusely from everywhere, but he wasn’t putting on any performance. And I said, “OK old boy, just hang on, come on George, just take it steady, grit the teeth and I’ll get you back in.” So I hooked my arm around him, and I crawled back with him, and I got him into our position. And then I called on everybody for field dressings, and

12:30 we dressed him as much as we could and got him right, and got him into a comfortable position. And then from another direction, I heard another fellow calling out, and he transpired, he was a new reinforcement, I think his name’s inside the book, but I think his name was Hayman or something like that. And I got out to him, and he was in a bad way also. But he was making a hell of a noise. And I got to him, and I found that a bullet had gone through his eye,

13:00 and had come out under his, through his right eye and come out under his left ear. But he was still conscious and everything else, and hadn’t hit anything else, but he was in a dreadful state, and he, I put field dressings on him, I gathered more field dressings, I put field dressings on him, and I brought him back into our position. And we were pinned down there, with two men wounded and we were running short of ammunition,

13:30 because we weren’t like infantry, where they carried bandoliers, bandoliers of ammunition with them all the time, we were running short. And fortunately then, a platoon from the 17, 2/15th Battalion chanced by, and they heard the commotion that we were all making with the gunfire. So they came along, and sighted us and assessed the situation, and they came down and

14:00 properly, quite properly, they, the platoon spread out and they just fired, not necessarily at any target, but they put down such a blanket of covering fire, that their men could get out and get to us, and that’s the way it should have been done, you see. But they came in, and the remaining Japanese beat a very hasty retreat. We had a look around afterwards, and we didn’t see

14:30 any casualties, where there may have been, because they may have taken them with them. But then we had to get out. So we had to construct a makeshift stretcher to get George through and out, and fellows carried him up to the road, which was very hard, it was through jungle and across the paddy fields, and sinking to their knees in mud in the paddy fields, carrying this poor fellow. And the other fellow with the

15:00 injuries, he’d, he’d been screaming like hell, and I threatened to knock his block off if he didn’t shut up, which quietened him down. ‘Cause he hadn’t not much experience, he’d only joined us a little while before in Australia, he was too green [inexperienced]. And so he walked out, and he survived and he was repatriated out and I lost sight of him, he came from Western Australia, so I’ve never had any further.

15:30 George Trewin, they got him and they had an ambulance at the point by this time, we were able to get messages back to our headquarters, and they took George in. But they got him into the casualty clearing station, but he died the next morning, unfortunately, which was very sad. I’ve lost two men, Stuey Moore and George Trewin, both of them originals, both of them been with me for six years, and it was heartbreaking.

16:00 So we hadn’t been able to recover Stuey Moore’s body, and the platoon, the 2/15th that searched for him, and they couldn’t find him. So there was some discussion back at our gun position, I said to the battery, the troop commander, “Look” I said, “I’m sure I know where he is, so with your permission, I’ll take a party and go out and see if I can find him.”

16:30 So I went back in, and we found him, I knew the way to the position and we found this body and we had one of our troop, men, was a fellow by the name of Alf Geyer, he’d come from the western districts in Victoria, where his Father was the local undertaker, and he’d been helping with the local undertaking business. And he knew what to do, poor old Stuey was all hunched up.

17:00 So he just stamped him out, and the noise of the, of the bones creaking after a person is dead, is just horrifying, it was stomach churning, you know. Anyway, he got him straightened out and we got his body out, rigged up a stretcher and carried his body out, he was sent off and he was buried somewhere in the location.

17:30 So then we went back and we saw down south, a great pall of smoke come up in the sky. And the, the attraction for Borneo was the big oil fields and Miri, not Miri, Seria, the first one, Seria, S-E-R-I-A, was the sight of the oil fields. And so we went screaming down the road,

18:00 we had our vehicles with us now, our Marmon Herringtons were back, we’d discarded our TD-9 tractors in Brunei. And we went down the road and we caught up to the degree that we got to the Seria oil fields, but they were laid out like in square, like city streets, blocks. And they were all ablaze,

18:30 they just turned them on and lit them. And then there was dozens of them. And I positioned myself on the road, and I had to get the, all the vehicles through, so I’d watch, so I stood there and watched the wind and where the flames were going. And when I deemed it expedient, I would wave a truck through or two trucks, or three trucks, depending on how many I could get through

19:00 and past it, and then hold the rest until the wind settled down. And we were on, we took up a position on the beach, and we weren’t too concerned about the nips at this stage, they had largely cleared out, and, because we were starting to have overwhelming force, and they didn’t want it, and they were in on odd patches. So then we had

19:30 this fellow who was quite world famous at the time Red Adair, he came in with his team of fire fighters and surveyed the situation, it was his business was fighting oil-well fires.

Was he Australian?

No American. He was a world renowned figure for fighting oil-well fires before the war and during, and I think after. He may well have been in, in the Gulf and so on, fighting the original fires when

20:00 Saddam put the oil wells, the oil wells alight, or his company would have been there, they were highly skilled. So Adair came in, and he found there was an old Zero, an old Japanese aeroplane there, and they were able to tinkle [fiddle] with it, and get the engine working, get the propeller turning. So they set that up so that the draft of the propellers was going towards the oil fires.

20:30 Then they got hold of one of the tractors that we’d had, and they put a long boom arm on it, and on the end of that boom, they put a perpendicular appliance, with, which carried an oil pipe, the same style and circumference as the existing pipes, and it had a tapered end, and up above it, a valve,

21:00 it was quite intricate. And they had all this prepared and ready, and then they came to us and they said, “Do you think with your 25 pounder guns, you could shoot the tops off the oil wells?” and we said, “Yes.” Of course, we had lots of anti-tank shots, which was solid shot in our limbers. We said, “Yes, we could do that.” So we also had telescopic sights, which we’d used against

21:30 tanks in the desert. So we put the telescopic sights on, and sighted onto the oil well and set the thing up, and shot and we were able to take the old top of the oil well with the old valve on it, which was welded solid because of the heat, take it off. And then they had a man in a complete asbestos suit, visors over his face, and they had a pump on the beach, pumping

22:00 gallons, thousands of gallons of sea water through various hoses, and they had men with hoses everywhere onto this man who went forward, and directed the tapered shot, shaft into the oil well, which was jagged and it was, fire coming out all round, but they kept dousing the fire with gallons and gallons of sea water. And then as it

22:30 cooled off, the man in the asbestos suit went in again, and he put packing around the join, so that the flames were going straight up through the extended pipe, and then with a tong, long tong, he turned the valve off, it was quite intricate.

That was starving oxygen, was it?

Yes, well it just turned off the flow of oil, because we’d sealed the connection. We’d made it, well he had made it a single pipe coming up,

23:00 and the valve above was free, so turned off. So we stayed there for some time doing this work, we got the, they got the whole of the oil field out, which was a great effort. So we were, we were having a great time, because for the first time in our life, they had plenty of water, pipe water, apart from the sea water, and we had gas laid on

23:30 into our, where we were sleeping. We didn’t have a camp, we were just camping on the ground, and so on. But we had old cans and so forth, and we could fill them up with water, and we could boil our clothes for a change, it was great, we were living in luxury, these clean clothes. And then the, we finished there and we went down to Miri. Before you go down to Miri, I might just take you back to the battle that you mentioned earlier –

Yes.

24:00 – and just talk to you in a bit more detail about the conditions that you were fighting under. What were you carrying and what were you wearing when you were in the jungle?

We were wearing jungle greens by that time, we’d lost our khaki, they’d issued us with jungle green. We had a Bombay bloomer which was our shorts, but they had long legs which buttoned up beside our leg. And at night time

24:30 we had to tuck into our, we had to wear long socks there, to tuck into our long socks for mosquito protection. And we had a long sleeve shirt, so it buttoned down there, and we had our hats, we didn’t have much use for our tin hats there, although we still had them. But the situation, the war was starting to change, the enemy was on the run and somewhere about this time, the European front caved in,

25:00 and we were still working on the, on the Eastern Front, with Japan. So yes, we were, mosquito repellent, and we were given a daily tablet of Atebrin, which was bright yellow and it turned all of us into bright yellow beings, we were all yellow, quite bright. And somebody said we looked like a mob of Chinamen.

What was

25:30 that for?

That was, the Atebrin was to combat malaria. We were, malaria was rife in that area, and we certainly didn’t need, or desire to have a malarial rampage in the, in the army. Some people did get malaria, but generally speaking because they didn’t observe the regulations. And the regulations were there to be observed. In fact when we took our Atebrin,

26:00 to make sure that the Atebrin was taken, an officer was in attendance as the Atebrin was handed out, and he saw each man take it, and it had to be done.

What did it taste like?

I can’t remember now, it was not, not terribly unpleasant, and it was such a small tablet, it was gone down in no time. And so, no, we took it quite regularly, and took it for a little while until we got home.

And what did you carry into battle,

26:30 how difficult was it in the, in the jungle?

Well apart from our guns, we just had our back haversacks on, and our backpacks, and our side haversacks and our water bottle, to which was, I’d laced all my emergency rations, if I got caught somewhere. And that was about it.

27:00 Bayonet on that side and your rifle, and that was it, it was fairly skimpy. In the Middle East, we’d all been issued with, before we went there, big kit bags, but they told us to put them into store, then make sure we were clearly marked with our number, and we would collect them when we came out of whatever we were going to do in the desert, but we never saw them again, nobody ever saw them again. And the Arabs in the war, after the war, had big

27:30 sight unseen for warehouses full of all nations’ mens haversacks, all their personal gear that they never saw again. I had a lot of books on army law and rituals and gun drills and so forth, that I’d carried with me, they’d all disappeared, we never saw that again. So we were, we travelled very light in Borneo. So then having been sent to Muri,

28:00 I befriended a Malay couple when I went over, and they spoke a bit of English and they were a charming couple, they had a couple of little children. And then when we were about to leave, the lady said to me, the wife, “I want to do something for you, sergeant,” and I said, “What’s that?” And, the Malay man wore a string around his neck, and

28:30 on it was a pad of stuff, which had been sewn together, it was, had been through their religious observances, and it was supposed to protect his life. And she very carefully cut a small portion of that off, and sewed it onto the thong that I wore around my neck, with my, what we used to call our ‘dead meat tickets’ [dog tag]. That was our identification tickets, we were issued with those before we left Australia, immediately we enlisted.

29:00 And that was a leather thong which went through a hole in a fibre disk about the size of a, slightly larger than a 20 cent piece. And on that was inscribed, our name, punched in, our name, our regimental number and our blood group, which is when I first discovered my blood group, I’m A2. And, which is a bit of an unusual one I think. And so that’s

29:30 your blood group. And I had that, and the idea was that if you were killed in action, the men that found you, the men that recovered the bodies, that was usually the job of the pioneers, would snip the bottom disc off, and that went back with the report of your death, so that you could be identified in the records offices, and

30:00 family and so forth. And the other important thing, you got taken off the rations list, so you weren’t be, they weren’t providing food for you when you were dead. And the other disc remained with the body, so that it could be identified when they were going to bury it, so it was all very efficient. And so then we went to Miri, which was a gigantic operation, it was the refinery and it was all machinery

30:30 everywhere, and so on. Nothing very much was happening down there, it was pretty much of an anti- climax, after the excitement we’d had coming down, the, down through the situation. And then we got news that a bomb had dropped. A single bomb, it had stopped the war, and we couldn’t believe it, none of us,

31:00 none of us, couldn’t comprehend that old rubbish, a single bomb, what sort of a single bomb could do that. We said it must have been a massive air raid. Anyway the news came filtering through, yes, my goodness, it was a single bomb. In fact it was two of them and one had dropped on a place called Hiroshima in Japan, and the other one had dropped on Nagasaki. And the Japanese had surrendered, and it was

31:30 all finished. And I thought, “Oh God, here we are stranded in bloody Borneo, we’ll be here for months,” because we had to have transport to get us back, and I knew what sea transport was like, it was at a premium. And I said, “God knows when we’ll get home.” Well that happened in what the, June I think, I’ll have to check, I’ve forgotten now, but somewhere about there. And I thought, “Oh, we’re going to be here for a long, long while.”

32:00 What were your thoughts, did you know anything about, what an atomic bomb was?

No, not a clue, not a clue. We had, when the ship coming back, the Glen Park, the radio operator had lectured us, and he had cleaned up a thing that I couldn’t understand, about the wireless station in Mersa Matruh. And I learnt then for the first time on the ship coming home, that was actually radar,

32:30 which was the, and they were trying to knock that radar out, because it was warning the people in Alexandria and Cairo, of the approach of Japanese planes, and were, not Japanese, German and Italian planes, or mainly German by that time, because Italy had collapsed and gone out of the war, and German planes. And no wonder they were trying to knock it out, and they were giving us hell, because it was radar. And then on the way home,

33:00 this same radio wireless operator on the ship, had pointed out to us that they were working on something which was top secret, which was going to be able to produce a massive explosion, but he couldn’t explain it any better than that. So I linked that eventually to the report of an

33:30 atomic bomb, but it took a lot of reason to work that out. So anyway, I thought, “Oh God, we’re going to be here polishing bloody guns, ‘til Timbuktu. And then I noticed in routine orders, that I’d never seen it before, and they asked for a senior sergeant to apply for a job as quartermaster in 16th Battery, one of our sister batteries, all part of the same regiment. So I put in

34:00 an application, and as I said before, being a very senior sergeant after this time, after six years, I got the job. So I was immediately transported across to Labuan Island.

How did you travel?

I went across on a boat. And I was put on board a, a corvette called the Bundaberg, HMAS Bundaberg.

34:30 And the only time in my life that I’ve ever been seasick, with all the voyages that I’ve made, I went down into the petty officers, they told me to go down and sit in the, have a stretch out on the petty officers’ mess onboard the corvette, and the smell of the oil and everything down there got to me, and in no time at all, I was finding the heads, and retching my heart out, you know. And the ship wasn’t even moving. And then the 16th Battery came on board, I knew a fellow, mostly sergeants, I didn’t know

35:00 any of the troops. So I was their new quartermaster sergeant, and I thought that was better than sitting up around the oil fields. And so they shot us down to a place called Sarawak. And Sarawak was the home of the ‘White Rajah’, Charles Vyner Brook. And James Brook many years before,

35:30 had done something or other wonderful for Queen Victoria, and she’d granted him a Sultanate in Borneo, of this area of Sarawak. And he had a castle or near castle on the banks of the Kuching River in the town of Kuching, which is a fairly primitive town. We sailed up the river for about 27 miles,

36:00 before we got to the port. And there was a 30 foot rise and fall in tide up there. So when we tied up, we looked up and we saw armed Japanese guards marching up and down the wharf. So the officer said “no, that’s all right, we’ll go ashore and speak to the local Japanese chief, and have a talk,” and that went on for about three days, before we were allowed to go ashore. And that was, of course,

36:30 there was the major general, the principle generals were up in Labuan, and the general down in Kuching was trying to confirm whether, he was short on news too, trying to confirm whether the war had ended or not. So when the, it was confirmed that the war had ended, we came ashore and opened up the prison camps, and put the Nips [Japanese] under guard, made them build their own prison camp. I might just, because we’re near the end of the tape,

37:00 so we might save that story for the next tape, but I will just ask you, how did you celebrate when you heard that the war had finished, when you heard the news that the atomic bomb had, had fallen?

I suppose once it had sunk in, we said, “Hurray!” How long was it going to take us to get home?

Did you have any particular celebration amongst the men?

Nothing available, nowhere to celebrate, we were out in the middle of nowhere, and no way to celebrate, no, we didn’t have any booze or

37:30 to have a drink to it, or anything like that. No, no. So.

What were your feelings at that time?

Oh, I think like all of us, we were mixed. We were, the thought of coming back to civilian life after six years. And we didn’t quite know what it was going to be like. And but we were all anxious to get home, especially those with families, and I had a new wife.

38:00 So I really, I suppose that was about the feeling, “Yes, I’d like to get home now, and have my wife beside me,” and fine. So we went down to Kuching, so that it meant I was kept.

Tape 9

00:37 Bob, before we talk about Kuching, I’d just like you to describe to me what the Japanese looked like who were on the jetty, what did they look like?

We thought they all looked like monkeys, they were very active and very agile, and squirreling up trees like nobody’s business [easily], they were very difficult, and they were masters of camouflage

01:00 and disguise, and they made them very difficult to detect in the greenery of the jungle. And but they were not very nice people when we found them. It was quite different to what I discovered many years later when I was in Japan, and they were very lovely people, really.

Did they seem malnourished?

Yes, because they were, they were

01:30 very short of rations by that time, they were living off the land, because we had, the general advance had choked off the, choked off the line of supply for them. This was one of the sad situations for the war, there was no need for us to go to New Guinea and Borneo. The problem was that when we came back, General Blamey had been promoted through the

02:00 Federal Government, to the rank of Field Marshal, which gave him, in military terms, superiority over General Macarthur who was only a general. But we’re talking about two different cultures, the American culture and we were operating under a British culture. And, and so Blamey wanted to command the Australian troops, and so Macarthur said, “Yes, fine,

02:30 I’m pleased for you to control the Australian troops.” But then Blamey said, “No, I want to be land Commander, you’re the supreme commander, you’re commanding everything, the navy and the air force and so on, as supreme commander. I want to be, I’m a field marshal, I want to be commander of all land forces, Australian and American.” And Macarthur promptly told him to go

03:00 to hell. Otherwise we would have joined the AIF as their long-held desire would have, with three divisions, operated as an Australian Corp, and we would have gone, not into New Guinea and into Borneo, because they were side shows. If we’d gone straight up through the Philippines as Macarthur did, through the Marianas and up there, bloody fighting as it was, but cutting off

03:30 supply lines. Macarthur had the right idea, “Cut off the blood, cut off the jugular vein, and the rest of it dies,” and he wanted to do that, as far as supply was concerned. And it would have reduced the time of the war, and stopped many, many casualties, both in New Guinea and in Borneo, of many fine young Australian men, and saved all of that. But no, because of

04:00 Blamey’s pig headedness, that’s what happened. And he was the cause of a lot of trouble at that point. However, the dye was caste [situation was set], we were there. So when we got into Kuching, I took over the school as the quartermaster store, I became responsible then, something I had no experience of, I had to feed all our own troops, and I had to feed about six or

04:30 seven thousand Nips, that were put under our control.

How far was Kuching from the jetty? Oh very short distance, half a mile, something like that. The, the town was really on, on the jetty and just across the river on the other side, was the erstwhile home of the White Rajah, Vyner Brook, it was quite a palatial home, not a castle, but a

05:00 palatial home, much better than anything in the district. And he lived a life of fair splendour and grandeur. And but we went in, and I, I took the school, and then we had a situations that I had to get out and about. We had to get the, our own prison camp undone. Now when we went into the prison camp, we found

05:30 we had American and Britain, not American, Australian and British soldiers, in the prison camp. We had the entire civilian population of the Raja’s civil service, all of the civil servants, because he ran a business there ala the British law and British system of civil servants and so forth. So we had all the men and women and

06:00 their children, in the prison camp.

Can you describe what the camp looked like from the outside as you approached?

Well it was just rough terrain, and it was laced with barbed wire around our prisoners, and we were in the business of getting the Japanese to construct the wire around their camp, which was a little further away. And it was, it had some huts in it, a few huts,

06:30 and it was pretty primitive, very primitive.

Can you recall the first time you saw an Allied prisoner of war in that camp?

Yes, I was absolutely shocked, I was absolutely shocked, I was nearly crying. And I just looked at these people, they were skin and bone, their ribs were standing out everywhere, they were in shocking condition, and they were just skeletons. You’ve seen

07:00 pictures of it, it doesn’t even do it justice, they were just living skeletons, you could see every bone and every movement they made, no matter how laboured. And they were feeding on filth, they, the Japanese had cut their rations right back. I had three British colonels, I can never forget them, they were lying there on their makeshift beds, stretchers, and very weak.

07:30 And they used to get this foul rotten, I said rotten, fish patty, and they were given three of those. And they had a system, that each one in turn had first choice, so that he could examine the three and select the largest one, and then the other two, went down in that order, and that order changed each day, which they observed scrupulously. So my first job was to get supplies in,

08:00 and I made contact with a little Chinese trader in the town, dapper [smartly presented] little guy, I’ve forgotten his name. And I made an assessment of the set-up, we had, I sent urgently for more supplies, I sent out requisitions back to Labuan for more supplies. We had brought some down on the corvette, but not that many. And so, I took off

08:30 with the, with a couple of troops and this Chinaman, and we had a small landing barge, just a tiny one. So we went down the river on the tide, it’s the only way you could go, was go with the tide on the Kuching River. So we shot down the river on the tide, it was very swift on the tide, when a 30 foot tide is going out. And then we turned north and went to the next river system,

09:00 and we drove up that, and we started coming into all the native villages. And of course with this Chinaman with us, he had contacts right through, they were expecting us, and they had unfurled Union Jacks and put them up on poles, and somebody had a rusty old bugle on one, and tried to blow the national anthem, and that sort of thing. And everybody was very quite overjoyed. So we went along, and oh,

09:30 boiled eggs again, everywhere we went in the war, it was boiled eggs, boiled eggs again, we had so many of them, we had to walk away from each other, digesting so many boiled eggs. And so, went up and we got up, quite up the river, and he stopped there and he took us into his own home up there, where his family were. And he had three or four beautiful daughters and we thought this is all right, a bit of good.

10:00 So, but they were very gracious and looked after us very well and served us very well, that was as near as we got to the daughters. And so we stayed there for a while, and ate sugar cane and all this sorts of things. And they served us very good meals, and then we came back down the river again, and as we pulled into all these villages, they came out

10:30 with all the produce that they could supply and spare to us, you see. So they, and we loaded that onto the LS, the landing [ship] craft, the LCT [landing craft, tank], and that, and we took a record of that, and I hope they did get paid, but we assured them that we would pay them. It was my job to send the records back through the channels in the

11:00 army, and point out that these people had to be paid for the merchandise. And we got back and we started to try and improve the diet for our people in the camp, I wasn’t too concerned about the Nips, they hadn’t been concerned about ours. In fact, I was overdrawn on our rations for one day, I realised I was a day overdrawn, so I just let them go hungry for a day. 11:30 Where were the Japanese prisoners at this stage, where were they being kept?

Just down the road from where the, our prisoners had been kept. There was just a bit of a flat clearing area there. And we had all the local Dyaks [indigenous people] there, they were magnificent, you talk about Dyaks now, you see them in your travel and in Indonesia today, and they’re a rubbish race. But when we knew them, they were still in their prime, big men, gleaming

12:00 skin, and they all wore long hair, beautiful long hair, which they attended to very carefully and curled it up into delightful buns on the back of their head.

And what was their role?

Well, the Dyaks were the local natives, they were the men with the blow-guns, and they could kill prey, or kill a man at a great distance, just by putting a poisoned dart into their blow gun, and giving it a huff, and they were deadly.

12:30 And I’ll tell you a story about that in just a second. So we knew they, we got to know them very well, and they were very, very pleased to see us after the Japanese. And in fact, they were head hunters also. And they came into our quarters one time, and rolled a bag load of heads out in front of us, Japanese heads, I think from memory I counted seven, to prove to us their loyalty

13:00 to, to Big King overseas.

Speaking of that, what, what do you think the natives’ experience was during the Japanese occupation?

Horrifying, horrifying, for those that resisted. For those that succumbed and co-operated, it wasn’t a, wasn’t plush existence, but perhaps slightly better. But still, very substandard. The

13:30 treat, the Japanese treated everybody as an animal, when they were the animals, and I couldn’t stand the thought of them. And I was very, very terse and rude with all of the Japanese prisoners, and as I say, we couldn’t abide by them.

How did you communicate with them?

Mainly by sign language, and we, I don’t think we had any interpreters there

14:00 at that stage, we weren’t that sophisticated, they came later. We only had the 180 troops when we first landed, but then we started getting reinforcements. And then, of course, the de-mob [demobilisation] procedures were taking place amongst the AIF, because we’d enlisted for the duration of the war, and six months after. And I was using up my six months after, but I had stacks of points, because of my long service. But I couldn’t use them,

14:30 because they wouldn’t let me go, because I was in this important position looking after this prison camp, and getting our people out. And we were getting them out by boat, and then we were getting them out by Catalina flying boat, which were coming in. And we even had some Sunderlands came in, and we were getting them out to Singapore, which was the closest place where they could get proper medical attention. And while we were there, a Catalina

15:00 came in, and I had my gun crew when we first, Gunner Pretty, the little short fellow you know, five foot, that I mentioned earlier in the piece, and he mucked up the gun settings, and so forth. He had suffered at Alamein, a, not an injury, a war injury, he was a very keen Australian Rules footballer. And he’d suffered a knee injury, and they boarded him B-class, so it meant he could sit out the war in a desk job somewhere, or

15:30 take his discharge. So he took his discharge, and immediately turned around and went to the air force to enlist in the air force. And after some discussion about his height, he was enlisted, but they wouldn’t make him a pilot, so he turned out to be a navigator. And he was a very capable navigator, clever little fellow, he’s 88 now, he’s about five or six years older than me, such a little fellow, we still see each other. And

16:00 he flew in, and I turned around and saw him there, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. So we had a few of the local, bit of the local hooch [alcohol] and had a bit of a reunion, and of course then, he loaded up his plane with some of our ex prisoners.

What was the local hooch?

Well, horrifying, horrible, it gave

16:30 me nightmares. I concocted a drink which was, I’ve forgotten what it was that I put into it, I think it was the local stuff, and I tried to improve upon it, I had lots of tins, large tins of blackcurrant juice in the store, so I tried to leven it up with blackcurrant juice, it even made it worse, and it was shocking stuff. And I remember one night,

17:00 two of us, Max Williams and I, we’d got on it, and we were hallucinating in the night, we could hear people attacking the blasted place we were, we were looking for our rifles to repeal bullets, set us off our rocker. Bob, can I, can we just talk about the, the actual POW [prisoner of war] camp.

Yes.

When you arrived there, were there still Japanese in charge?

Oh yes. I told you there was Japanese marching up and down the wharf

17:30 for three days, before we were allowed off the ship.

So were their people still running the camps inside?

Oh yes, yes, but we took them off, and we started putting them in the other camp. And we, and I took over the, the problem of supplying the food to all of our inmates, and the Japanese as well.

Did you keep the, did you keep the Allies who were in the camp, did they stay in the camp or did you take them somewhere else?

No, no, they remained in the camp,

18:00 there was nowhere to take them. So we repatriated them out of the camp as soon as we could get transport, and depending on their state of health. We had a doctor down there, and they were in dreadful, dreadful condition, there was no doubt of that. But we evacuated most of them fairly quickly, before I had left. And then eventually I got marching orders, and I went back up to Labuan. But during the time we were there, we had all these

18:30 problems. And then again we had a civil disobedience problem in Kuching. Because like all wars, after that, the local population is split down the middle between quizzlings and others, or those that supported the Japanese while they were there, and those that hadn’t. And they was, it was payback time for them, and they were after the ones, the ones that hadn’t supported the Japanese, were out to kill their own folk as quickly as possible,

19:00 because they had supported the Japanese and had a better life than they’d had, and they were very, very outraged about that. So then we had great civil unrest, and we had to move in and try and control that, it was all very involved.

How did you do that?

Well, just by sending in troops, armed troops, and pointing out that they had to stop, and firing shots over their heads and so on, by even killing some of them if it was necessary.

19:30 But getting, pointing out who was in control. It’s like anything like that. You see the same thing in Iraq now, but on a much, much larger scale. It was on a small scale down there, but it was still very frightening to see the people screaming around the place, and bashing people up and killing them. Especially the women, the women never co-operated for the same as what they’re treated in France. The women that co-operated with the enemy, really got savaged.

20:00 So what was the demeanour of the Japanese prisoners at this stage?

Oh, craven. Instead of being lords and masters, they were craven. Very, very, very, very courteous, very very quiet.

Were you aware of anyone who was in charge of the camp?

Yes, we had the local General, Bruce Wilks was looking after him in the golf clubhouse.

How were you able to identify him?

20:30 I don’t know, I didn’t, I wasn’t involved there, Bruce was. But he had all his regalia, and they, you know, the Japanese Officers loved to dress up with their swords and their hats with all the trimmings on board. They strutted around in beautiful uniforms all the time, while the Japanese troops were living like, well worse than dogs. And they treated the troops shockingly, with continuous

21:00 beatings by the senior officers, nobody could raise a hand in our army against a senior or a junior officer or anybody without grave. If I was to strike a junior officer, I’d be in grave trouble, I’d be court martialled. And similarly, if an ordinary, if I’d been, if I’d struck a senior officer. When I was in Palestine, a warrant officer in my unit, we were having a bit of a party in one of the tents, and he walked in,

21:30 everything was going well we were having a party, and suddenly he walked up, and walked right in front of me, and punched me and broke my nose, my nose is a bit twisted now. Broke my nose, hurt like hell, I can tell you. And I, I brushed him off, got him out. And the next day, some of his fellow sergeants came down, “God, what are we going to do with so-and-so, you know, are you going to take action?” I said

22:00 “No,” I said, “I’m not going to charge him, if I charge him he’ll be court martialled and lose his rank.” And I said, “I’m not going to do that to him,” I said, “Tell him to forget it, just but it down to a bad experience.” And he was eternally grateful, but oh no, you were, our army was very strict rules on that.

Was there a burial ground in Kuching? Yes, I’m

22:30 sure there must have been, I don’t remember visiting it, it’s so long ago now, 60 odd years ago now. And I don’t recall it, don’t recall it, there must have been. There was a park, I remember a park, and I remember all the women in their long gowns and so forth, some of them of course, were Muslim I think. And some, a bit like Bali, some of them could have been Hindu.

Was there a burial ground in

23:00 the prison camp?

There must have been surely, because there were so many deaths. I do not recall it, frankly, I’m sure I went to see it. But I do not recall it.

Can you remember any children in the camp?

Oh yes, lots and lots of children. In fact I got very concerned about them, and then, one, we went out to get

23:30 lots of gear for them. I learnt that two of the children were having a birthday party, were having a birthday, and I decided to put on a birthday party for them. And I didn’t have much available, but I got two army jack knives, and we had our hat badges, which were black from the war, because they’d all been blackened, we used to have them brass when I was in the militia, all gleaming. But during

24:00 the war, they were always black, so they didn’t reflect night at light, because that would have given our positions away. And, same as there was no brass buttons or anything. So I got a collection of hat badges together, and I took the two jack knives and the hat badges down to the artitheser on the Bundaberg, and asked him if he’d polish them up for me, explaining what I wanted. And he said, “Oh yes, yes, sure,” he said “I’ll fix that up for you.”

24:30 And then I went to see the catering man on the ship, and I told him I was going to have this party for these kids, and I said well, I was going to take a party out and we were going to go up the river again, and buy fruits and that sort of thing, so that I can make it a nice party for the kid. And I said, “Have you got any tins of reduced cream?” so sometimes we had these tiny tins of

25:00 Nestle’s reduced cream [condensed milk]. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve got stacks of them.” And I said, “What about it?” and he said, “Yes, you can have those, what else,” so he gave me everything out of his larders as he could, that would be suitable for this party. And we got all the fruits and so forth in, made up gigantic bowls of fruit salad, lashed over with this tinned cream, and we had a party and games for the kids,

25:30 and I gave the two main kids their prizes. And then I gave a hat badge to everybody. I’ve often been going to write a letter to, in London if there are people who have a Jack knife or a polished Australian hat badge, and wondered what, some of the story behind it.

So they were British children?

Oh yes, yes, but they’d been living

26:00 in Kuching, because they were, they were the children of the British people who were the public servants for the Rajah, so it was all British there. And before the war, they’d been on a cycle of change- over and so forth. So we had a marvellous party, and the parents came to watch. And then we had so much stuff left over, and I said to the parents, “why don’t you come in, and partake

26:30 of it,” you know, and they were, “Oh, no, no, no, that’s for the children.” I said, “There’s far too much for the children, they’re getting away, they were going to bust open, they’d eaten so much,” so they came in and took very small helpings of fruit salad, which they enjoyed immensely, so that was that.

Given that these people had been living in starvation circumstances, how difficult was it to work out how much food to give them?

Very difficult, but we

27:00 just let them make their own decisions really, as to how they got on. And we purchased a lot of stuff locally, and sent the bills to higher command. And so that added to it, but we, we did everything we could. But then we found, that most of the prisoners who’d been in there for some time, couldn’t handle our food, it was too, too rich for them, and too strong. I told you about the three colonels,

27:30 with their putrid fish cakes, they refused the food I offered, and they continued with the fish cakes, that’s what they got used to, they couldn’t stomach, their stomachs were so shrunken they couldn’t handle food. So they didn’t come out and say, “Oh goodie, goodie, food, let’s hop into it,” most of them couldn’t face it, couldn’t face it. They’d been on starvation rates, they had to come back very, very slowly. So

28:00 it wasn’t a great deal of problem feeding our people, in fact I was overloaded with food, because I couldn’t get across them. You know, and I had stacks of tinned stuff, tinned fruit and tinned beef and my favourite hate, McConachie’s fish and tomatoes, mackerels and tomato sauce. Was that called goldfish?

Goldfish. We used to get that in the desert, I used to abhor it,

28:30 it was shocking, especially in the hot conditions there and it’s oily mess, and you open up a tin of it and, oh, it turned me right off, I never got back to tinned fish of that nature again in my life.

So how long did you spend in Kuching?

I suppose I must have spent four or five months, about then. And then I got movement orders, and I was told to move up to, we had more reinforcements coming in, had other sergeants coming in,

29:00 and I got movement orders to go back to Labuan. And then after a short stay in Labuan, I was put onboard the troop ship Manoora, which had been a coastal passenger ship in Australia, before the war. And now Manoora is a naval ship, they’ve taken the name because it was running as His Majesty’s Transport, Manoora.

29:30 And as I came home, and dumped in, in Brisbane. And of course going up to Borneo and coming back, I had the opportunity of sailing through all the beautiful islands around the north of Australia, and between the north coast of Australia and the Halmaheras. And it was quite a dramatic sailing around the tip of Australian, in the North, and between New Guinea and Australia,

30:00 observing all the islands and things, and coming down the coast, down through the Whitsundays and so on, down to Brisbane.

Given that the war was over and you were on your way home, can you describe the atmosphere on the boat?

Oh very, everybody was very relaxed, discipline was reasonable, but very relaxed, very relaxed. Troops wouldn’t have taken too much, and I wasn’t too interested. And so we got off in,

30:30 in Brisbane.

How long did that trip take?

Oh, I can’t remember now, it must have taken from where we were in Kuching going up to Labuan, and then from there, several weeks to get us down to Brisbane, because ships don’t move that fast. And then on train from Brisbane to, with all the changes again,

31:00 around to Adelaide and up to Crystal Brook. And then of course we had to go on the line to Port Pirie and then stop on the side again, and catch a bus across to Crystal Brook, now the main line goes through Crystal Brook, but it didn’t then. And I got there on Christmas Eve in 1945, and resumed married life. But I hadn’t been discharged at that stage, I had to go back to Adelaide to get that done. So I didn’t get discharged until, I’ve got it over there,

31:30 I’ll give it to you later, but sometime early in 1946.

Can you recall the moment you were reunited with your wife for the first time?

Yes, up in Crystal Brook with her family, her mother and father, it was great.

Was she waiting for you at the train station?

No, there wasn’t a train station, we came over by bus, and she wouldn’t have known, she must have had a rough idea. So

32:00 it was quite nice, a nice reunion, and we got going alright. And we came back to Adelaide, and I had to go through Keswick Barracks in Adelaide for my discharge, and that took place, and I was issued with all the necessary coupons and clothing coupons and so forth. And I had to go back and buy, buy clothes, which was quite strange.

What were the coupons for, can you explain?

Clothing, food, cigarettes, petrol,

32:30 if you had a car. Clothing, coupons for everything, everything was rationed in Australia, had been for some years. Because anything surplus we had we were trying to get across to our troops, and also trying to help Great Britain, because they were in parlous states with food. So we did everything, Australia did everything possible in that regard. So eventually I got,

33:00 then I had to face civilian life, and my wife had got a flat out at Henley Beach, which was costing three guineas a week, which was obviously unsustainable. So I waited there, and then I had to get a job. The repatriation commission came in, it’s now called Veteran’s Affairs, repatriation commission came in and they sent me out to a job.

Were you happy to be leaving the army?

33:30 I actually tried to re-enlist at one stage, because I wasn’t happy about the work I was doing. I thought, if I hadn’t been married, I would have not taken my discharge, I would have gone with the Occupation Force up into Japan.

So you had a choice whether or not to leave the army?

Yes, at that stage. But then when I came down, I was going to leave the army. But then I thought, I went back and discussed it with them,

34:00 and then, Keswick, but I said I wouldn’t take up a rank less than warrant officer if I did come back. And anyway, there was nothing. In the meantime, I got a job and in the meantime, I had a wife and a baby on the way. And the job the Repatriation sent me out to, was to go out to General Motors Holden in Woodville, which was some distance from where we were eventually living.

34:30 And six pounds eight a week, and I was issued with a ball pain hammer and a dye, and put on the production line for Vauxhalls. I made a hell of a mess of it, I hated it.

Why did you hate it?

I’m not a, I didn’t have any aptitude with my hands. I’d gone through that, I told you I didn’t want to go to technical school, I didn’t, I wanted to use my brain, and not my hands. Although you’ve got to use your brains if you use

35:00 your hands, but I wasn’t a man that wanted to make things, not like my brother. And so I wanted to get a more clerical job perhaps, as I’d had with, before the war.

Had you become re-acquainted with your brothers at this stage?

No, no, no it’s too far away, couldn’t get across there, didn’t have any money to get from Melbourne to Adelaide, from Adelaide to Melbourne. I didn’t

35:30 see some of them for 22 years.

Did you know what had happened to them?

No, I did when I got across to Melbourne. I discovered that Jack had married Rose. Bill had married Elvie, and George had married Eva, so they were all independent.

Had they gone to war?

Jack and Bill did. Bill was in, when I got to

36:00 Melbourne eventually, just before my discharge, he was in military prison, he’d been AWL [absent without leave]. And the reason he’d been AWL is he had a three kids I think at that stage, and things had been very, very tough for them, and they’d been, they were out on the street, they’d been ejected from where they were living. So he couldn’t get leave from where he was in Western Australia, so he broke camp and, and

36:30 went back to Melbourne. And then, the Military Police came down and caught him, and threw him into the jail in Royal Park. I went to try and see him, but they wouldn’t let me see him. And Jack had joined an ambulance group, had been called up and gone to an ambulance group, and whilst he was in New Guinea, he transferred to the AIF, so he had a VX number, and he went further up, and I think he was parachuted into the Ramu Valley, and so

37:00 he had a fair bit of experience at it, he didn’t like it too much. George didn’t go to the war, he was, claimed to be a protected industry, and many of my comrades in the unit had come from that Kerang District, large numbers, and they all knew my brother, and they were all a bit caustic about him. And they knew me, of course, and they used to ask me how my brother George was, you know, being very, very nasty about it.

37:30 And so anyway, I went out and got the job with, with General Motors Holden, and I hated it. And when I came home one day, I’d been applying for jobs, I applied to the National Cash Registers, and Mr Walton, later Walton’s stores in Sydney, was the general sales manager in Sydney. And he came down to Adelaide to interview me, and he told me I was one of two final.

38:00 And he said, he told me in the end that his objection to me was, I had to send a photograph and I had a little narrow rimmed hat, and I’d been wearing a big broad rim, bigger hat for years. And I always used to wear it at a fairly rakish angle on our head, it’s always supposed to be square, but we didn’t, we didn’t do it that way. And when I got this little narrow brimmed hat, it was, this

38:30 fashion it was narrower than the hats I used to wear in civilian life before the war. So I popped this little pimple on my head, on an angle, and he, Walton said, “When I looked at the photograph, you looked like a bit of a larrikin to me, so” he said, “The other guy won out.” So I didn’t get the job at National Cash Registers, which was a bit sad. But anyway, I played, made another job and I came home one day, we’d left the place at Henley Beach, and I’d found a little terrace house with

39:00 Mrs Ellis, Mrs Ellis and her dog, a terrier, the blasted thing. And she had a friend who used to visit, and he was very good with knots. And Mrs Ellis was prepared to let us a room in this three roomed terrace, for 30 shillings a week, which was an advance on three guineas, so I took it. And then 39:30 she started saying, she wanted really to go back out, to go with the family in the country. So I encouraged this thinking, and I had another ulterior motive, because she was a rent protected tenant. In those days, a rent protected tenant, you couldn’t put the rent up, and there’s still some of them, it’s all rent protected, where they’re living in places which are pretty rundown now,

40:00 because they were rent protected, because the landlord won’t do any, won’t do any work. So I said to her, “Well look, I’ve got 100 pounds,” as a gift from the government, we all did, and I put into a government bond, for safe keeping. And I had this bond. And I said to Mrs Ellis, I said, “Well now Mrs Ellis, if you’d like to go back and join your family,

40:30 I will buy all your furniture, providing you give me your rent book, which is a protected rent book, and if anybody makes any enquiries before you leave, you can tell them I’m your nephew or something like that, and I’m a member of the family who is living in it, while you are absent.” So that was all right.

Tape 10

Bob I might just ask you to go back a little to Kuching, before you actually arrived there. I understand there were rumours that a death march was about to start?

True, true. The Sandakan Death March in the north of Borneo had already taken place, and only three survivors came out, and some hundreds and hundreds of men were

01:00 killed by the rigours of the march, and the Japanese slaughtering them on the way. And we anticipated that the Kuching Death March was about to take place, that’s why we were sent down in such a hurry, and we got there in time to stop the Kuching Death March.

What kind of rumours were there, about what the Japanese would do?

Well the rumours had come out, that they were beheading people, many of our people were beheaded.

01:30 We knew a man from before the war, who was a Tasmanian, called Newton, he was a flying, he was in the air force, and he was captured and beheaded. And so you know, we had first hand information. And they were very fond of beheading, and that’s why we were very pleased with the Dyaks when they came in with the, pardon me, the Japanese heads. So that was the situation there.

02:00 And when you got to Kuching and the Japanese were on the wharves, how, how difficult was it for them to surrender?

Well I don’t know, I didn’t have any discussion with them, I didn’t see them, I’m sure they didn’t like it. But, and they didn’t do it for three days, because they had to communicate with the General in Labuan, before they found out that it was OK for them to

02:30 surrender, so they weren’t very anxious about surrendering.

Were there any suicides amongst the Japanese?

Yes, yes there were. And the general down in, in Kuching where Bruce Wilks was looking after him, he was sawing away at his wrists with a blunt table knife, and he couldn’t get through far enough before he was stopped. But lots of them hung themselves, or committed hari-kiri [suicide]

03:00 with their beautiful sword, and drove it in to themselves, and it was all over, because of the disgrace of surrendering and disgrace in the eyes of their Holy Emperor. So yes, there were, there were suicides. Not that I came, I didn’t come personally into contact with it, but some of my fellow sergeants did.

The men in the POW camp at Kuching, what did they tell you about their

03:30 experiences at the hands of the Japanese?

Oh generally they were all horror stories about the way they were treated, that sort of thing. I don’t think they actually went into a great deal of detail about it, and I think we weren’t terribly interested in enquiring of them, because we felt it was only going to sort of imprint bad memories on their mind, we were trying to talk to them in a very encouraging way, that everything

04:00 was alright, and things were going to be different from here on, and we were trying to talk it up all the time, rather than ask them question about. We could see, we had the evidence before our eyes, of how they’d been treated, so we didn’t want to put them through the duress of, of talking about it.

How many POW’s were there?

Of the – on our side? I’m not too sure.

04:30 It would have numbered three or four hundred.

And the conditions under which they were housed? Shocking, and they were just like native huts with open sides and very, very little shelter from the elements and so on. And very uncomfortable benches to sleep on, it was shocking stuff.

And the weather

05:00 at Kuching, what had that been like? The weather, the climate?

It was fairly mild while we were there. We used to get rain, pretty heavy rain about four o’clock every afternoon, it used to come in, the monsoon rains came in, they were pretty regular. But apart from that, it was pretty mild weather.

What kind of medical assistance were you able to provide the POWs, aside from the food that you provided?

05:30 Well, we brought in medical teams, but they, our, our main aim was to get them out of there to Singapore, because medical facilities. The army had got into Singapore, and they’d set up better medical circumstances in Singapore, so Singapore was the hub, and our biggest thing was to get them out as quickly as possible, depending on their condition to Singapore. Some went out

06:00 by boat, others we sent out by Catalina flying boat. We couldn’t get land based aircraft in, because there was no suitable aerodrome within sight.

Were there any deaths amongst the POWs while you were there?

I’m sure there must have been, my mind’s a blank on that.

Arriving home, so I’ll move away from the camp now, when the trip, when the ship arrived,

06:30 Brisbane was the first port?

Yes.

Could you describe to me the scene of arriving home in Brisbane? Were there people there to welcome the ship?

Yes, there were people, not that many, because everybody was busy with their things. And we were coming back in dribs and drabs, it wasn’t like an organised big welcome home, you know, with parades and that sort of thing, there were no parades when we came home. We just hit home, got home to our home towns as quickly as possible, and we disappeared into the community.

07:00 But there were no welcome home parades. There had been welcome home parades for many when we first came back from the Middle East, before we went up to the islands. But at the end of the war, all that pageantry and all that was gone, there was none of that, we just disappeared into, into the normal populus.

Did your family know, did your wife know that you were coming home and when you were coming home?

I can’t recall, no, I doubt it. ‘Cause you weren’t allowed to

07:30 comment on troop movements in letters home.

Could you describe to me the process of the repatriation system that was set up? What did you have to do in order to qualify for the various pieces of assistance?

Well, we didn’t have to, we were all due for our coupons and so forth, they had to come out. And we had to get all that, that was

08:00 straightforward. The hundred pound was straightforward, it was a fairly orderly, I’ve, I’ve still got my de-mob books and things inside, showing where everything was ticked off. We had books issued to us with tear-off bits in it, so that that went back into rehabilitation, and we kept a record and our medical condition when we came back, that was all recorded.

08:30 And it was all recorded, and even now it’s in Vet [Veterans’] Affairs, they can look up what my conditions were, what’s happened to me, where I’d been, and they’ve got, everything’s tabulated.

So where did you have to go for these books, and for these medical check-ups?

I think we went into Keswick Barracks in Adelaide, and that was the main barracks for the army in Adelaide. And we did the final discharge procedures

09:00 there. And oh, we went out to, no, Keswick Barracks was the set-up. No, we went out for our de-mob, we went out to the Wayville Showgrounds, and we were de-mobbed through the showgrounds.

Was that a similar process to enlistment?

Very similar in reverse. They had all our, all our history and we were advised to not to forget to nominate any 09:30 illnesses or injuries that we had, so it was recorded for what would eventually become Veterans’ Affairs, cause it affected your pension rights and so forth, when you eventually came to the crunch.

What was the feeling for you after so many years at war, to, to no longer be a part of the Aarmy?

Well because I took my discharge in Adelaide, where I knew no-one, not like going home to

10:00 Melbourne, where I’d have known a lot of people, I didn’t know a soul, apart from my, I had my wife and eventually the young baby. And I was a bit alone. I had two friends in Adelaide, Ralph Fairweather and Des Sweeney, and they’d both been with the Tatts troop, they’d both been with the 9th Div [Division] Sigs [Signallers], which were attached to us, they were part of our regiment, but not identified. They belonged to the signallers,

10:30 and they handled the communications between regimental headquarters and divisional headquarters, that’s where the flow of orders came down. And then from regional headquarters, they diversified to the batteries and the troops, so there was a specific chain of command, and they were there. So I didn’t see much of Des Sweeney, he went about his own thing, but Ralph Fairweather was married, and he and his wife, and my wife

11:00 and I, we became quite good friends. And I, Ralph used to come up and see me in Adelaide, from Adelaide, even when I was up in Brisbane and Sydney, because he used to travel with the Rehab [Rehabilitation] Department’s Bowls Team, and travel around, bowls was his passion. And we remained in contact, up until he died.

11:30 How did you find it settling back into civilian life?

Very daunting to start, it took a while back to shake in. But then when I got out of the, I got very quickly out of General Motors Holden because I didn’t like it for a number of reasons. Because I was going to be required to join a union, which was obnoxious, and I couldn’t understand why they all had to knock off right on the spot, because it

12:00 was foreign to me, because even working before the war, I’d never watched a clock. And so I came home one night, and I discovered there was a telegram there waiting for me, Ruby gave it to me. And it was a job, I’ve forgotten that I’d applied for it actually, from a company called the Coca-Cola Company, signed by Bryce Halls, who was the manager, asking me to come in and see him. So I went in and saw him,

12:30 and I got the job as a route salesman, as they called it. Bryce Halls told me some years later, that when I turned up, I wasn’t the man he’d sent for, but he took me on anyway, because he needed someone, so I was second best again, you see. And so that was all right, and I joined Coca-Cola, and I had two very good instructors, I had Ed Randall, who was a route salesman.

13:00 And I had to go back into uniform again, and I got a lot of chiacking [teasing] from my mates on that, ‘cause we were issued with a grey uniform, with big Coca, we were the first ones in Australia to wear a branded uniform, with Coca-Cola. And we had an officer’s style hat with Coca-Cola badge on the front, and these special grey uniforms, thickly padded on the thighs, because the cases we had to carry

13:30 were rubbing on our thighs, so that gave us extra protection. So I started out with Ed, and they put me on the city route, because Ed had it and they were going to promote him. So I went on the city route, and that was the toughest route that they had, difficult to drive, difficult to park, and, but I worked at it, and I worked very, very hard. And I was highly successful, I listened to everything I was told about,

14:00 I absorbed all the law of the Coca-Cola Company, I could keep you occupied for an hour giving you the history of the Coca-Cola Company, I still know it all off by heart. And so I went through all of that, and I was a very successful, and we had to find new customers. We got paid six pound eight a week, and a farthing a case commission on each case of Coca-Cola of two dozen bottles. And we sold only Coca-Cola,

14:30 only in a six ounce bottle. We were the only company in the world that sold a single product in a single size, in a one size package. ‘Cause you can only buy Coca-Cola bottled, anywhere in the world at that stage, in a six ounce bottle. And it all had to be at the equivalent of five cents American, so we sold it at three cents a bottle, it was sold to the retailer. Not the retailer.

15:00 The public paid three cents, we sold it to the retailer for two cents, the contents. Two cents for the contents, tuppence deposit on the bottle and a shilling on the shell, which was the case in which the two dozen bottles were carried. And we’d walk into a shop with a case in each hand, put it down, and I used to believe that I could only, I wanted to expand the business, because I wanted more money, I wanted

15:30 to get an increase somehow in my salary, and I wanted to get more commission. And I got through selling several hundred cases a day, so a farthing a case, it was starting to add up into a fair few pennies which were added to my commission, you know what I mean, which were added to my salary each week. So that was good. And I, for instance, I had one shop outside the South Australian Hotel, was a little shop

16:00 and there was a young girl in it, running it on her own, somebody else owned it. And she had all the local soft drink people, Woodruff’s and Marchant’s and people like that calling on her. And they came around and fellows with their big leather aprons and their horse wagons, backed up at the back, and threw all the cases in the backyard, and she had to lug them in from the backyard. So I called on her, I went in through the front door in a

16:30 bright red truck, didn’t have any horses to worry about, and a bright red truck. And I dashed in with my cases, and I found out that if I worked hard it, there was a fridge that she had, holds seven cases. So I was selling about one case a visit, and, which wasn’t very useful. So I talked to this girl, she was only a youngster, and I

17:00 convinced her, I said, “Now you let me look after things for you, it’ll make life much easier for yourself, now I’ll come and I’ll put all the Coca-Cola in the fridge while I’m here, so you won’t have to go out in the back yard and drag all those other bottles in.” So over time, I convinced her, she was very pleased about the fact that she didn’t have to go out and lug these big ugly cases of heavy bottles in. So she left the stuff out the back,

17:30 and I finished up, I occupied the whole of her fridge, so that was seven cases instead of one. So any rate, I got an even better set up, I found that they were selling quite well, because people were getting to know about Coca-Cola. I was responsible for tacking up all the signs inside and outside the signs, the shops, advertising Coca-Cola, so I was very successful at that. And by the end of my period in Adelaide, which was about 15 months, I was selling 35 cases a week

18:00 through that case, because I used to, it was close by where we operated from, and I just had to go round the corner and call on her daily, and put seven cases in, and I had 35 cases a week, where I was getting one case.

Was there a lot of influence of American culture in Australia after the war, was this a result of the war?

Oh yes, yes, that’s when America really came, because when we were in the Middle East, the fellows started getting what we used to call ‘Dear John’ [informing the end of a relationship] letters,

18:30 their girlfriends and their wives used to be writing, “Dear John, I’ve met an American, and I’m marrying him, or I’m going to leave with him, and I’m going to America,” and so forth. And when we came back from the Middle East at the start, we were just disgusted. As we said, there was only three things wrong with the Americans, they were over paid, over sexed and over here.

19:00 And oh, marriages broke up left, right and centre, many of them in my regiment too. I knew of many people who came back and their wives had flown, or their girlfriends had gone, and they were just attracted by the Americans, because they had stacks more money than we had, we were the underdogs. We used to be in the Middle East, we were the top dogs, because we had more money than the Tommies [English]. And the girls were attracted by money, and they were attracted by sunglasses, which

19:30 nobody had ever bothered about, and they were attracted by nylons, and so, you know, the Americans didn’t have to have very much winning ways to win the girl, when they had all this on them. And they could provide, they could provide chocolates and all sorts of things from their PXs [American canteen units], their sort of comforts fund places, that were never accessible by us, because we were still under all the

20:00 rationing and so forth.

Now after the war ended and you were selling Coca-Cola, did you notice that there was a big change in Australia because of the American influence?

Yes there had been a big American influence on, on Australia at that stage, it was developing, nowhere near as bad as it is at the moment, but it was developing. And of course, Coca-Cola was one of the things that led it. Anyway, I finished my 15 months, and

20:30 Bryce Halls, the manager, was transferred to Brisbane, because there was problems. When Coca-Cola came to Australia in 1937, and they opened factories in Sydney and Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. And, but they only, never built outside the city, didn’t get very far out at all, just the closest suburbs. For a start, they didn’t have,

21:00 they had rationing of bottles, they had rationing of sugar, they were hamstrung, they couldn’t do much. And then when the Americans came, all those bottling plants we had around Australia, closed down, as far as civilian set up was concerned, and everything that those plants made, was channelled into American forces. And so the, by the time I got home, people had lost the taste for Coca-Cola and many people didn’t know what it was, certainly in the

21:30 outer districts. So by the time I’d finished in Adelaide for the first 15 months, the area that I’d started servicing as one truck, now needed three trucks to service it, because I had developed so many new customers, I was constantly going out, looking for new customers, and I developed the attitude. And then we were moving out into the industrial areas, and when I got up to Brisbane, I went into one big industry, Hancock and Gore,

22:00 which were a big timber merchants and so forth. And I bowled into the office of this gigantic organization, and I told the girl in my uniform, that I wanted to see the managing director, I always started at the top, I learnt that very early. And she said, “Have you got your card?” and I gave her a bottle of Coca-Cola, that’s my card. She looked quite shock, and turned around and took it into the boss.

22:30 And the boss sent for me. And he said, “The only reason I saw you, is,” he said, “I thought it was quite innovative for you to give me a bottle of Coca-Cola as your calling card.” And I entered my spiel, and I got him to stock Coca-Cola for his staff, and the way I sold it to them, “OK, you start, give your staff an amenity, they will appreciate, they will work better for you, and the thing to do is to put it in, in such a way, that you let the social club

23:00 run it, you’re not involved with it, you don’t have to manage it, you don’t have to do a thing. Your social club can run it, for the benefits of the workers, any profits they make in their social club, can go to their workers.”

So Bob, how long were you at Coca-Cola for, and what other jobs did you do after the war?

Well I was with Coca-Cola, I came to Brisbane, and I was with Coca-Cola from 1946 til 1953. And by that time in Brisbane, I was sales manager at Coca-Cola

23:30 and we were expanding out left, right and centre. And by that time, I had been working for the Coca- Cola Export Corporation, but the Coca-Cola Export Corporation at that time, worked on home town folks for home town business. And they used to sell franchises to local people. And so they sold a franchise in Queensland to a consortium,

24:00 which included Lance Jones who was the president of the Brisbane Stock Exchange, Charlie Russell who was a member, Country Party Member of Parliament, and a very wealthy grazier. General Cannon who was the retired quartermaster general of the AIF, and Dudley Summerson, who was a leading firm of accountants, Clarke and Company, he was the boss of that.

24:30 And they were the consortium that put their money in and bought the Coca-Cola business to run, and we went on and we expanded and expanded, and we built a new factory in the valley, and big, much bigger factory, and we expanded and we were doing very well, and we were expanding very well. And I wasn’t getting any more money. And then we decided to put in a garage to run our own vehicles, and then I discovered that we were paying the motor mechanic more money than I was getting,

25:00 and I was the Sales Manager. And I drew this to the attention of Geoffrey Arnott, Lance Auburn Jones, and he was very, used to puff up and get very spluttery, and get very upset. So I told him, you know, that I really needed an increase, it wasn’t good enough. And then I spoke to, I met Clair Kouse who was in charge of Melbourne, he was an American, and I asked him if he’d like me to go down,

25:30 because I thought it might be a good idea if I went, transferred to Melbourne for the 1956 Olympic Games. And he said, “No, he’d love to have me,” he told me on the phone, “Love to have me, but Charlie Ayres is the boss, so no, no poaching.” And then Charlie Ayres got wind of the fact that I was trying to get out, so he contacted Bob Jamieson who’d been my mentor in Adelaide, he was now sales manager in Adelaide, and manager actually in Adelaide.

26:00 So he asked Bob Jamieson to come up to Brisbane and see me and have a talk to me. And I told him, quite frankly, that I just wasn’t getting paid enough. But in the meantime, I’d been making a number of applications, and one of them came good, and I started negotiations with a company called Arnott’s Biscuits, which I hadn’t heard of. It was a Sydney based company, and they didn’t sell Arnott’s Biscuits in Victoria, which is the only influence that I’d have. And there was very few Arnott’s Biscuits in Brisbane, that I’d noticed, there was other biscuits,

26:30 not that I was terribly interested in biscuits. So anyway, this Arnott’s Biscuits people came, and negotiations ensued and it started to progress very favourably, but I was insistent that I wasn’t going to be caught short with anything this time. I’d never had a car supplied to me by Coca-Cola, and I stipulated that I wanted this, this, this and this.

So what, what year did you start with Arnott’s?

That was in 1953.

27:00 Could I just interrupt you there for one second, and just ask you to reflect on why you found it difficult to adjust to civilian life after the war, what were those initial difficulties that you had?

Well it came down to the fact that you’ve got to understand, that we’d been conditioned to do what we were told. Everything was planned for us, we didn’t have to make a decision. And when you came back into civilian life, there was

27:30 no-one to lead you on, no-one to give you a situation where you were told where to go and what to do. So you were out on your own, which I enjoyed greatly, but just at the initial period, it was a little frightening, just a little frightening, that you had to make decisions for yourself. That’s what I found, but that didn’t last too long.

Did you have any side effects of the war, in terms of nightmares, or?

28:00 No, no nightmares, I was a pretty balanced sort of a guy. I had problems with my, that was the only thing really, that I had wrong with me. So then I eventually got the job, and I was tidying up, they were offering 1,500 pounds a year, which was an unheard of salary in those days, nearly 30 pounds a week, I was on six pounds. And then Lance Jones

28:30 came down one day, and very blustery and so forth, and in the final stages I was at, with Arnotts. And he said, “I’ve been talking to Charlie Ayres and he feels we should give you a bit more money,” so he said, “I’m going to raise your salary to 1,250 pounds a year.” I said, “That’s extremely nice of you Mr Jones, thank you very, very much.” And he went away, and he gave me a lecture about what I had to do, and how good I had to be to earn this money. But I was within weeks

29:00 of making my final decision and tidying up the loose ends, because I was determined I wasn’t going to go to Arnott’s until I had indicated everything I wanted for myself, such as a motorcar, and private and company use, and an expense account, it was necessary for me in this position to entertain people. And it was batted backwards and forward, and I was dealing with a guy by the name of Ernie Nownes, he became a great friend, and he was

29:30 secretary of the company. Anyway he wrote me a letter in the end, and he said, “We would like to bring this matter to a conclusion, would you please indicate definitely within seven days whether you are going to accept this position or not.” So I thought, “I’ve got everything,” so I called Lance Jones and said that I needed him to come down. And he was blustering, come down to the factory office.

30:00 And he arrived in a foul humour, having just given me 1,250, and here I was insisting that he come down and see me. And he walked into my office in a very, very aggressive and very brusque. And I said, “OK Mr Jones, sit down. I just wanted to inform you Sir, that I’ve decided to resign from your employ, I have taken up a much more lucrative position with Arnott’s,

30:30 in Coronation Drive.” He nearly exploded, I thought he was going to burst all over the office. So I marched out and joined Arnott’s, and I went on and on from there. In Arnott’s, I very quickly re- organised everything in Arnott’s, with the sales staff I found, the sales staff had been long term people, and they were all good people and they hadn’t been properly led. They had a sales manager, Eric

31:00 Morton, was a nice gentlemen, but he only sat behind a desk, and I was appointed over his head, which upset him initially.

Bob we’re probably going to be running out of time shortly, so I just wanted to interrupt you there and ask you to reflect on what you felt you carried away with you, from the war personally, in terms of your skills, and what the experience taught you?

Well I’d learnt how to command and

31:30 direct people, that was one big factor, I was very confident about leading people, and in my positions that I took up after the war, that’s all it was, was leading people, and instructing them into things I wanted, instructing them on the way I wanted them to perform. In fact I had one very good recommendation on that, I’d employed an ex-lieutenant colonel to manage my despatch store at one stage.

32:00 And then he got the call of God, and wanted to go up to New Guinea and rescue all the natives. And so he came to me, and very apologetically said that he had to resign, and explained the reason why. But he said, “Before I go” he said, “I want to just congratulate you,” he said, “You are the finest instructor I have ever heard in my life, in all my years in the army, nobody has impressed me so much.”

32:30 I’m being very ‘I am’ now. But that was his very words, “Nobody has impressed me as much as you have impressed me, on your ability to get your story across to people, as to what you want them to do.” And I said, “Well that’s very encouraging, thank you.” So I carried on with Arnott’s, and I built the Arnott’s set-up from one, two little tiny pan ovens, until we had four giant travelling ovens going,

33:00 oh ten times the production from when I’d joined. And then I’d been at Geoffrey Arnott all the time, that we should go to Melbourne because, and he said, “No, no, we’ve had a handshake agreement with the Melbourne manufacturers, we’re not going.” Then one day he called me and said, “You and Alan Morrow come down to Melbourne, Sydney immediately.” When we got there, he said “Swallows have just broken the agreement, and they have come to Sydney. What’s more, opened

33:30 a warehouse next door to our factory in George Street, Homebush.”

Were Swallows the main competition?

Well Swallows was one of the three in Melbourne, Guests, Brockoffs and Swallows, Swallows was the only public company. So I was sent to Melbourne on my own, and I had to start Arnott’s in Victoria. And I started by buying, I researched the area, and I started by buying

34:00 53 motorcars, 28 trucks and I just blanketed everything. I hired all the necessary staff, over 100 staff, and found premises out at Fairfield in Melbourne. And I started operations ten weeks after I’d been sent down to Melbourne, and I was importing biscuits from Homebush in Sydney, coming in

34:30 on, on trains and motor transport in big pantechnicans, and I had one warehouse to store all the trucks in, and I had another warehouse to store all the biscuits. I built the business up so quickly, that I had to empty the warehouse each day, loading the trucks in the evening, so that I could accommodate the biscuits that came in off the rail and off the road, the next day.

35:00 And actually I was carrying all my stock in transit, so it was highly successful.

How long were you at Arnott’s for?

Overall, 14 years. So I finished I was in Melbourne for 12 months, and then, we were very successful, we acquired all the, by that time, we’d acquired Brockhoff’s, Guests and Swallows and Aerials, on a big share market raid on the open market. And because we were doing it on the open market,

35:30 we bought Swallows and Aerials, and that caused later, the present takeover regulations for companies, because at the time when we were buying Swallows shares on the market, the customer, the shareholder only got the price that was paid on that day.

I might interrupt you again, Bob, because we’ve probably only got five more minutes on the tape, so I want to ask you a final thing. And I wanted to ask you what your thoughts are on war, and also the, the process of war?

I think it’s abhorrent, I think it’s quite wrong. I was involved with my oldest son who was of the age to go to Vietnam, and I remember watching on television the chocolate wheel going around to pick the birth dates of people that were going, that’s how the men went to Vietnam. And they were sent to Vietnam, they didn’t volunteer. And I, I was just so elated

36:30 when I saw it go past his number, his birth date. And I rang him up immediately, and he didn’t know, and I said, “Oh God, thank God, I’m so pleased,” because I didn’t agree with the Vietnam War at all. I think they had a dreadful bloody time, the troops in Vietnam. And it’s like all of this, because we’ve been led by the nose by America now for all these years, and there’s at least, at least America has produced since the end of the Second World War,

37:00 at least 18 wars they’ve created, at least 18. And I mean, here we are currently, following like sheep in the wake of George Bush, John Howard agrees to everything he says, he worships him. And I’m a Liberal voter, but I’m fed up with John Howard, and he can go as soon as he likes, as far as I’m concerned. Because we’re not independent any more, we’re just a, a person, a group of people

37:30 reliant on America, we might as well be the 51st State, the way we’re behaving at the moment, we’ve sacrificed our independence to America, for war. And America has become the new Hitler in the war, in the world, it is now trying to dominate the world by its force of arms. And it’s manipulation of people in South America and everywhere else, it puts in, it gets rid of people who are dictators, and puts its own dictator, and they fail

38:00 and they’ve got to come back. So I’m dead opposed to war, deadly opposed to war.

The shifting balances of power after the Second World War, did you predict what would happen, when the Second World War finished, and how the world would change in those first ten, 20 years?

No, no I didn’t, I couldn’t see it. But when I started to see the British Empire disintegrate, I then thought, “This is not going to be

38:30 good,” because the Americans had no negotiating skill. British diplomats were great negotiators, and they would negotiate and negotiate before they fired a gun. But Americans fire the gun first and talk after.

Australia’s involvement, Australia’s involvement in the Second World War, from your point of view, was that always necessary?

Oh without a doubt. If we hadn’t opposed

39:00 dear old Mr Adolf, he would have ruled the world, and it would have been a sorrier place, he was not only anti-Semitic, but his treatment of all the people, and the Russians at the same time, they were shocking, Stalin was shocking. Goodness me, I was just watching a programme the other night which reminded me, that before they got involved with Germany, Stalin had eliminated all his top generals,

39:30 every one of them, and the next step down in his command, because he didn’t trust them, they thought they might rise against them, so he just had them all killed. And Hitler was doing the same thing. And I, in my movements around the world afterwards, I was in Frankfurt, and I was being hosted by a lovely couple, von Spiegelman’s. And

40:00 he was the head of the Nielsen Research Company, and I had been introduced to him through Nielsen Research, because I had made Arnott’s the biggest Australian customer for Nielsen Research. And I used to find that very interesting, and I spoke with him, and his Father, Field Marshall von Spiegelman, one of Hitler’s generals. And this young man, I had some discussions with he, and he,

40:30 was concerned that his father had been involved in that situation. And I know his, his wife, Frauline von Spiegelman, I had our advertising manager with me, Frank Andrews, and she said, “Oh, how delightful,” she said, “To be able to speak English, instead of American, with all my other husband’s contacts from America.” I think we might leave it there Bob, thank you very much for being involved. It’s been a pleasure.