Interview Transcript As

Australians at War Film Archive Don Charlwood - Transcript of interview Date of interview: 19th April 2002 http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/666 Tape 1 00:29 Okay, Don, let’s just begin with your childhood. I was born in Melbourne in September 1915 and I think one of my earliest memories is hearing of the Great War, as we refer to the First World War, 01:00 and being very much afraid of what was happening. Even thinking I could see the war reflected on the night sky from our front gate and hearing what I thought were the sounds of war and my mother telling me they were only 01:30 traffic sounds. And then I saw the Victorian contingents of original ANZACs [Australia and New Zealand Army Corps] returning to Melbourne. My aunt was a journalist on the old magazine called Table Talk, and they had an office somewhere in Collins Street and I was taken to a high window there and watched these long columns of men 02:00 coming up Collins Street from Spencer Street with the sun flashing on their bayonets and these were the men that I had been reading about and there seemed to be so many of them that I couldn’t imagine that huge numbers had been left behind but I did have an abhorrence of war even from those early 02:30 days and one of my aunts who told me I’d make a great soldier. I told her that I didn’t want to be a soldier and she assured me that all men were soldiers and I said I’d be a diver and hide under the sea and she said, “They’d find 03:00 you. They’d find you even there,” and I remember being quite chilled by that, quite afraid. Nothing much was said by the men who returned from that war. My father wasn’t at that war, by the way, he was very deaf but the men who did come back, it wasn’t the done thing to talk about what they’d been 03:30 through in front of children or even women and I think some of the deep family upsets that must have occurred between husbands and wives were in part a result of this bottling up and the men could only be understood by 04:00 other men who had been through the same sort of experiences as they had been. I started my school days in Camberwell but when I was 8 years old we moved down to Frankston, down on Port Phillip Bay which was my mother’s 04:30 home town and had a really idyllic upbringing down there for the next ten years of my life. They’re the years I based my novel All The Green Year on although it’s not by any means autobiographical. But that took us up to 05:00 the depression and I was at Frankston High School and one of our masters there, the history master, set us the project of writing the history of our local town – a man well before his time I think because this was a most unusual thing to do. And it wasn’t that everyone was writing about Frankston 05:30 because it was Frankston and District High School, and the pupils were coming from as far afield as Sorrento, and Flinders so that they were writing about those places. And I went home moaning to my mother about having to write this history and she said you get yourself a notebook and pencil and I’ll 06:00 give you a list of the pioneers – they weren’t so much the actual pioneers, they were really their children. My mother, having been brought up there, was of that generation herself so she was able to lead me to a number of people. Now in those days no interest was expressed in the pioneers so that 06:30 this became a bit of a scoop without my realising it and I found that these people were quite happy to speak to me. Of course they began contradicting each other and 07:00 one would say, “Old Joe McCoomb told you that did he? Well he would. Now the truth is,” and of course you get another version of the same story. But I began to enjoy this very much and I kept on writing this history to the neglect of almost everything else in the curriculum. And when I handed it in I could see the astonishment of this history master and the next I heard he’d take it to our principal and it was passed on to the local paper so at The Age of – I think I was about 13 – writing it, I was 14 when it was published in instalments in the Frankston Standard. So from that point on I wanted to earn my living writing and my mother told me that I’d never earn my living writing unless I worked for a newspaper and so she required me to go to Keith Murdoch’s Langwarrin home, on a Sunday of all days, and ask him for a job. Well it was a pretty tall order for a – how old was I then? I was 16 and interrupt this lion of the press in his den on a Sunday and ask for a job 08:00 and it was quite a walk. I think it was about three miles out to his place. The first time I walked out there I didn’t see him. He just wasn’t available. So I had to do it again the next Sunday and this time the great man came – this incidentally was before he was knighted. Before he was Sir Keith – and I remember he came in looking 08:30 rather irritably at me, slapping his riding boots with his stock and I asked him for a job and he was able to get me an interview with the chief of staff of the Herald and that individual interviewed me one day in the following week. I viewed his face between the soles of his boots because he had his feet up on 09:00 his desk and sort of looking at me between his feet and he said I was too young. I could possibly start off as a messenger, that he would call me if the opportunity arose. Well there never was any call. I got a much more sympathetic hearing at The Age. The editor was a Mr Austin – a well known 09:30 name there – and he was trying to get his son onto The Age and not having much luck at that stage although I believe his son did go onto The Age later on. And although he was sympathetic there was very little he could do. The 10:00 upshot of all this was that I completely failed to get a job on the press but a job came up when I was on my 17th birthday, when I was in my leaving year which was the matriculation year, a local job for 15 shillings a week at an 10:30 auctioneers and estate agents. So I started on that at 15 shillings a week and one of my tasks was going round collecting rent from unfortunate people who could hardly spare the money to pay it and I just viewed them 11:00 sometimes from behind curtains. I’d see them look out to see who it was. All I’d hear was a barking dog. I had to on Wednesdays pencil for an auctioneer with a very short temper. The people from Mornington Peninsular used to bring their produce into Frankston market and things like a case of Jonathan apples would go for one and sixpence which was very very little but of course we were all earning very little. My 15 shillings a week allowed me to buy a suit for 30 shillings after two weeks so that gives some idea of the buying power. 11:32 This is 1930 is it? This was 1932. Yes. Now when I came up to my 18th birthday I found myself training someone else and I didn’t realise I was training my own 12:05 replacement because my pay was due to go up to 22 and sixpence once I turned 18 so I was given a holiday and my boss had the idea that in the busy season when he was letting out a lot of Frankston houses – because Frankston then in those days was like a holiday resort and he had a lot of holiday houses 12:30 on his books and he wanted to call me in then and in fact he did call me and my father told him I wasn’t available. In the mean time I’d been offered a job in the country at a little place called Nareen, where years later Malcolm 13:00 Fraser lived – a Prime Minister. I’d been offered a job for the shearing and the harvesting of 1933. So I went up there and much to my parents’ dismay, I remained for over 7 years and most kindly relatives, they were my mother’s 13:30 distant cousins by the name of Riddoch, and they were most kind to me. I think I was a most inefficient farm hand but I did learn to write there. I did do leaving English just by correspondence with Frankston High School and I became the Nareen representative of a few of the local papers – only one of them could afford to pay me.

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