Australians at War Film Archive

Richard Middleton (Sticks) - Transcript of interview

Date of interview: 4th September 2003

http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/803

Tape 1

00:38 Well, good morning. My name’s Richard Middleton and I was born in 1932 in Brisbane, Queensland. I started off life a very confused little fellow and I’m at the age of 71 now and I’m still confused, but that’s not the point. I had a lot of happy memories as a child, but then again, when I got to the age

01:00 of about nine, my mother died and I was left in a situation where I believed I had a father and a sister and brother, which only turned out to be a father but a stepsister and stepbrother who…and I was then in the situation where I wasn’t needed around the place - I was surplus to requirements and my father, who was a very brutal man and drinking man, I had some…no one to fall back on to so

01:30 I had a lot of problems and I decided at a very early age that any other place was far better for my health than where I was so I persisted with it until I was old enough to get out of it and I did. I went to school. I liked school but my brother was much smarter than I because my father sort of doted on him. My sister wasn’t allowed to help much because she was only a female and in those days females had to keep their

02:00 place and know their place in life. Lorna to me was more like a sister and a mother after my mother died. So school and I sort of didn’t agree much. So I must admit history and geography were my favourite subjects. drawing, acting the fool was the best, but being in school wasn’t very funny. After my mother died I was sent to Toowoomba to my Aunt Alice’s place,

02:30 who was a sister of my father, and I sort of got out of the fire into the frying pan because she was a very religious lady and she tried to impound her knowledge on the hereafter on me and I sort of rejected this in large lumps so I gave her merry hell in my own inevitable way as a nine year old possibly can, and a Scorpio I might add, so I was shipped back to my father who in the meantime had married

03:00 again and this lady came into my life. Even though I didn’t know her, she was my godmother, I sort of vowed and declared that I wouldn’t let anyone take my mother’s place but over the years as things went by I learnt to love this woman very deeply. She was a very genuine and honest person and even to this day I miss her very much, but transgressing there a bit.

03:30 I got to the age of 14 and I was at Ashgrove State School then and there was a Mr Wink there who was I think he was an offshoot from some Gestapo organisation because he did not like me and I did not like him, and I read or heard somewhere that the day you were 14 you could walk out of school, and in the middle of a mathematics examination, of which I was not doing terribly good at, I put my hand up and asked is that true you can leave school the day you’re

04:00 14 and he said that is correct. I said, “You can just walk out?” He said, “That’s correct.” I started packing my gear up and he said, “Where are you going?” I said, “I’m leaving school. I’m 14. I’m out of here.” So I walked out the door and I went home. I never thought of the consequences, because even at 14, I was a big lump of a lad. My father was still big and he could hit hard and I went home and when I told my stepmother about this, she freaked out. “What in God’s name are you going to tell your father?” Well, I hadn’t even got that far,

04:30 but I told him at dinner that night and he said, “Well you’re not going to bludge on me, boy. You’d better get yourself a job. So what do you want to do?” Well getting away from home was the best thing I could do getting away from him so I said, “Well, I’d like to I’d like to go and work in cattle stations and do things like that.” Why I don’t know because I’d never been away from home before apart from Aunt Alice’s place and going onto a cattle station was beyond my wildest

05:00 imagination because I didn’t know what the heck it was all about. So I went out to a place out at Chinchilla fellow by the name of Green, and Mr Green was one of the old tough old schools, because if anyone knows what an old tin milking shed is, like, it’s about 12-by-12 and there was an army cot in there - an iron wire cot, a dirty old mattress that I think the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s used to lay eggs on, but

05:30 it was cleaned down and one pillow and two blankets. No floorboards, no curtains, no nothing, and a kerosene lamp, and that’s where I stayed, and Mr Green told me that I would be working from sunup until sundown and he wasn’t joking, and he also told me at night when he whistled I was to come over to the house and get my meals, but he didn’t tell me that when he whistled that the dog turned up at the same time and that dog beat me twice to meals at night

06:00 and ate both meals and I didn’t get any, and course when I saw Mr Green about it, he said, “Well, you’ve got to smarten your footwork boy.” Shut the door in my face and I had to wait till breakfast. Things were tough. I worked for the pricey sum of, today’s money, $1.25 for a six-day week, swinging a nine-pound short shaft Kelly axe, ringbarking. Now I had never done that in my life before, and within a couple of days I

06:30 had blisters all over my hands and a couple of days after that I had blisters on those blisters, and when I said to him, “What can I do?” and I…he said, “Peel them, boy. That’ll make them strong and hard.” And that’s the only medication he gave me and I still had to swing that axe and there was no messing’ around with Mr Green. Mr Green and I parted company after three weeks because one of his cows…we

07:00 had to had to run them one day in a bit of a storm, and they were Amber and Angus, they were Black Polls and one of them puffed up and died because we ran them too fast and they’re not used to that sort of thing, and it lay there for a day before he went out and butchered it and I wouldn’t eat the meat. I didn’t think it was good because I’d never seen cattle butchered before, and I’d never didn’t think it was a good idea so I didn’t have terribly much to eat for a couple of days so I said to myself,

07:30 “Mrs Middleton’s little boy Richard should be in another place,” and I, I got the hell out of it. Now, the show was on at the time Chinchilla show and he said he wasn’t going to take me into town on a special trip so I had to wait till they went to the show, which was Saturday and he paid me by cheque right for my three odd weeks, which I couldn’t get cashed, and here I was, 14 years old at Chinchilla. Could have been the other side of the moon

08:00 for all I knew, and I did not have a clue how the hell to get to Brisbane or which direction it was in. With my little trusty port [bag] and my little hat on my head, I thought, “Well, what the hell am I going to do?” and I ran into this bloke who wanted to know a lot about me and he looked like he was a soldier was in khaki with his hat turned up on the left hand side, but he turned out to be a copper. And I’d never seen a country copper before, and he wanted to know what I was doing, and by that time I was pretty close to tears because I was not impressed

08:30 with the country people in general, and Mr Green in particular, so I told him the story and he said, “That mongrel.” “Alright son,” he said, “what’s the cheque for?” So he pulled the money out of his pocket and he said, “I’ll fix Green up,” and he rode me down to town down to the railway station in his - what was it? Was a motorbike with a sidecar, which I thought was a good idea because I’d never ridden on a motorbike before, nor a sidecar, and I had to wait about five hours for the train to come, so a 14-year- old boy

09:00 from the city sitting on a railway station with a thousand flies waiting for a train to come was more than I could cop and thinking all the time, “What the hell’s my father going to do when I front up?” Anyhow, I got to Brisbane safely and I went down there and I got home and he was not impressed, and I ended up getting another job out at Winton. Keeping the distance between me and my father was the greatest achievement of my young life ‘cause that way I didn’t get bashed or thumped or whatever

09:30 you like to say in today’s society, so I worked out there for about 12 months and I was a companion for a rich boy and they were ‘cattle barons’. I won’t mention names, but he owns about three or four cattle stations, or did, and every time one of his children got to 21 he brought them a cattle station for a 21st birthday present. Wish he was my father. But anyhow, the rains were coming, the wet season was setting in and I was sent south.

10:00 This fellow again is a miserable sod because one of my jobs was looking after the garden. I had to have fresh produce, the house had to have fresh produce. We ate corned meat brownie, which is a sort of a rich Christmas cake, damper and baked tea and treacle. Now that’s what you lived on, plus spuds plus pumpkin. That was all down

10:30 in this garden, which was very, very good, and you had all the horse manure and cow manure in God’s creation and I loved gardening. Anyhow, there’s three or four big orange trees down there and they were loaded and some of them were rotting on the ground dropping off so I picked one and ate it and I shouldn’t have done that because this fellow quizzed me about this orange peel and that and he kicked my backside until my nose bled virtually because I had the audacity to steal an orange off

11:00 him. Things were tough in those days. So this character and I, we sort of kept apart though he was the boss, and the lady of the house was a really nice lady, but I learnt a hell of a lot out there. I liked the country but I had to come back home so from the age of 14/15 and things weren’t really getting any better at home. I was getting bigger and this man was still hitting as hard when he got drunk, and I decided,

11:30 “It’s the French Foreign Legion or not.” So at 17, and I couldn’t find the phone number of the French Foreign Legion, I really couldn’t, but I found the one of the navy, and they said, “Right, come down and we’ll see how good you are.” So I went down there at 17, down to Alice Street in Brisbane and the bloke said, “How old are you?” I said, “17.” He said, “You’re still wet behind the ears, boy. Go home and come back when you’re 17 and a half.” And I did. 17 and a half, I was there at eight o’clock in the morning and they didn’t open till nine,

12:00 that’s how keen I was had to get into this goddamn navy, and I did I did my exams. I went out to a military place establishment at Indooroopilly where I did my medical and I came back in and with another fellow from North Queensland, Slim Newman, and I, we were in the navy and going south. Well, there was no one happier than me to be going south. I didn’t know what a New South Welshman was, and I didn’t know what a Victorian was,

12:30 and I didn’t know where they lived or how they lived, but I was sure going to find out because I was heading south to a place called Flinders Naval Depot. So at the bright age of 17 and a half, I was in the navy. This was in 1950, and it was May 1950 I joined and in June 1950 they started the Korean war, and I was in like Flynn whether I liked it or not, so that was it. Going through recruit

13:00 school was one of the most traumatic times of my life. Not knowing what they expected of you and having a flippant sort of an attitude. Not so much flippant, but maybe a devil-may-care attitude, I didn’t give the right answers at the right time for these ‘yo-ho’ men of your…and they had lots of rules and regulations that made people like me come to attention. The first day I was there,

13:30 first day, it was the afternoon of the first day I was there, we were taken from where we were down and we had to walk down half a mile through all these big sheds and huts and everything like that where the clothing store was so we got issued with clothing. Stuff I never even thought existed I now owned. I had a big seabag that all sailors seem to throw over their shoulder and go all over the world and that was jam-packed

14:00 through with stuff. I was asked what size boots I wore and I hardly ever wore shoes or boots before I joined the navy, and I said, “Nine,” and he said, “Right, try these,” and they were nines and they were too small, but tough teddy [tough luck], I had to fit my feet in there, simple as that. Now I had all this stuff. I had a hammock which I had to sling and I had to be shown how to do it. I had all this. I had…one person couldn’t carry…I doubt if a mule could carry it. Anyhow my class of…about

14:30 30 fellows were there and I was with them and I was tailing Charlie because you know I’d never carried so much in my life. We had to cross a place called the Quarter Deck, and it’s a parade ground where all the recruits have to go, and when you get to this place you have to double - you do not walk across it. It is called ‘the sacred acre’. This is where all the captains and commodores give their speeches and all the parades are held and that and recruits being the lowest form of human life, as we were told a thousand times,

15:00 “You are not a sailor, you’re the lowest form of human life.” So we had to double everywhere. Now, I am walking across this place. Now all my fellows are up ahead and I just saw them all start to gallop, you know, not gallop, run with all their stuff, and I didn’t know how they could do it, so I thought well I’ll walk and I’m walking across there, and I heard a whistle which I ignored, and then I heard another whistle which I ignored again, and then the next whistle came with a “Hey you!”

15:30 so I stopped and I looked around and here’s a fellow all dressed up like the doorman at The Ritz waddling over to me and his face was all red and he got within six feet of me and said, “What’s your name?” and I put my stuff down and put my hand out and I said, “I’m Dick Middleton, what’s yours?” and he happened to be the Chief Gunnery Instructor of the recruit station. “Well, pick your gear up,” and other words, and I hadn’t quite comprehended what they meant then, but I

16:00 put the stuff on my shoulder and at the double galloped up to this place called the Police Office, now I met a very unsavoury character called the Master at Arms who is the Chief Policeman in the navy. The Chief Gunnery Instructor told the Master in Arms what how I had been quite remiss in doing what I did, and I was to be charged with same, and the Master at Arms said to me that in all his experience

16:30 in the navy, that I was the first person ever in his experience ever been charged the same day that he joined the navy and I had set a record, which I wasn’t impressed about, which meant after that I had to get up at a quarter to five of a morning - and in Melbourne in May that is not amusing because I had never been in cold as cold as that. It was a shocking place and I don’t know how people can live down there, but anyhow I had to get up at quarter to five, get booted up and spurred and double up and down

17:00 like an idiot in the dark and the fog with this instructor who didn’t like me being there because he had to get up at the same damn time, so he made it as awkward for me as he could. Then after that, I went and had my breakfast and that was it. I was caught, called men under punishment, or WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s, so I became a criminal the first day I joined the navy and I thought, “I’m not impressed with this bloody navy to be quite honest, if they do things like this to you.” But anyhow,

17:30 I really liked the navy because the navy was giving me a discipline that I never really had. I had been… like with my father, the only time he ever put his hand on me was to hit me or to pick me up to hit me again, because you know he didn’t like bending down to hit me because it might hurt his back or something, so the navy were different. They made you realise that you had to work in a team be part of a team and I really didn’t understand

18:00 at the time, but I did later on in years to come because the discipline they imparted on me was to save, not so much to save my life, but save a ship’s life. Collectively, we saved a ship from a typhoon, but that’s transgressing a little. So anyhow, we had to go through the bullring [training grounds]. They fed us, goddamn it, they fed us. I’d never seen food like it in all my life. They gave us anything we wanted to eat, but what we ever put on that tin plate, like that they have in M*A*S*H, you had to eat it. You

18:30 wasted anything - there was a sentry there - you were on a charge. You ate if you could pile it up six foot high, which…you ate it. They didn’t care, but you had to eat it - waste nothing. So then the bullring and being a recruit, as I said, you’re the lowest form of navy life so you have to double everyone. You salute anything that moves, and we had an expression in the navy, was, “if it’s still, paint it, if it moves, salute it, and you’ll go a long way in this navy,” and that was true. So you get down to the bullring. They teach you

19:00 to march, they teach you to stand in line. They teach you all the silly things that you don’t you really don’t think are really necessary. Meanwhile, your size nine boots are hurting like hell, all the clothing is not feeling right. Other classes who’ve been in a month or two months ahead of you are yelling out, “Macka, you’ll be sorry. Serve you right, shouldn’t have joined!” And making you feel completely miserable because they had come from that section to where they are now and they were old hands at it. But anyhow, I remember one time,

19:30 this feller by the name of McGowan, he was a leading seaman. Mr McGowan and I didn’t rightly see eye to eye. I was much bigger than Mr McGowan and he was a Scottish fellow and he didn’t seem to like me much, and he made me - he pounded hell into me. I remember one time I gave some remark which I shouldn’t have given, and he said, “Right up to the store get all the webbing - get a grenade-throwing rifle.” Now in those days

20:00 they were 303s, Lee Enfields made of wood quite heavy, but these ones because they fired grenades instead of bullets. They were bound by copper wire which made them twice as heavy. Now what Mr McGowan wanted me to do all these military canvas packs that you had you had big ones in the front and a big haversack at the back, and I stood there while my fellows were told to fill it up with sand. All these packs and a big haversack on the back

20:30 and when this was done Mr McGowan said, “Right, now fill it with water, which made it about four times heavier.” Then he showed me how to put a rifle at the high point, ‘high port’ with a bayonet at the front of it. Now I had to do that and he said right now the bullring is a place where it breaks hearts and makes men, right, “It takes little boys and makes them men.” Mr McGowan said

21:00 to me, “I want you now at the high port, like you were, to double around this whole arena.” Do not slacken off because all instructors along the way will bring you to attention and their way of bringing you to attention was to get their thumb like that and thump you under the small rib as you went past and that got your attention. So the bullring was about two football fields long and about as wide

21:30 and it was covered in sort of…not asphalt. I think it was blood from previous sailors mixed in with the dirt but anyhow, it’s a long story so I galloped around this thing and I was absolutely buggered by the time I got back to McGowan. He said, “Stand to attention when you talk to me.” Sweat’s pouring out of me and I thought, “I’m not going to give in to you, you little sod.” He said, “How was that Middleton?” and I said it was a piece of cake and he says, “Well do it again.”

22:00 So I did it again and I came back and of course this took this took me good couple of hours to do this. By the time I got back in it’s just getting pretty dark and Mr McGowan’s still standing there and he said, “How was it now smart alec?” I said, “Ready to proceed with any punishment you so desire Leading Seaman.” He said, “Good, you’ve learnt a lesson my boy. Keep your trap

22:30 shut,” and I said, “Right.” So I took this thing off and I had blisters and I was cut from this weight of all this wet sand in the packs and everything like that but a lesson learnt. I learnt when to open my mouth and when to shut it. I vowed and declared that day if I lived to be 250 I would get that individual. I would make his life so miserable in later life

23:00 for doing what he did to me and I had to wait quite a few years until I ran into Mr McGowan and I ran into him ashore and by then I was a…I had a badge, which is four years of what they call undetected crime, but it’s not it’s a good conduct badge and of course I had one and I’m ashore in Hong Kong at the China Fleet Club and there sitting on a stool was Mr McGowan and I am going to rip him limb from limb

23:30 for what he did to my miserable life, so I went up and I said do you remember me and he said, “How could I ever bloody forget you,” and he said, “How are you Able Seaman Middleton?” ‘Cause you know it’s obvious, in years you get to know the ranks and everything, and I said, “I don’t like you McGowan,” and he said, “I don’t wonder why.” He said, “Would you like a beer,” and I mean, I really didn’t want a beer with the bugger. I just sort of wanted to kill him and get back to me mates

24:00 so I decided, “OK, I’ll have a beer with him and we’ll talk about this,” so he said, I said, “Just answer me a question will you?” I said, “Why did you make our lives so damn miserable?” He said, “We had to.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Well, because if we were nice and soft on you guys we wouldn’t have achieved anything.” He said, “We were told to make them hate your guts. Do anything but break them but make them hate your guts cause

24:30 that way you’re going to turn out men, not boys, and if they break they’re not worth being in the navy anyway, we get rid of them. If they don’t break you’ve got something to work with,” and I looked at him. Of course, four years is a lot of time, it’s a lot of years and a lot of water goes under a hull, and I said, “Are you for real?” He said, “That’s right,” and by that time, after a couple of beers, I was starting to warm to this fellow because what he said was pretty fair dinkum, you know, because there’d been lots of times when I had to

25:00 move and move fast and it was only through discipline that I learnt this. Anyhow, we parted company shook hands and that and I really didn’t hold a grudge against him anymore. I had no one to hate then, so I was back to square one. but anyhow, I went back and boarded my ship, which was the carrier Sydney and low and behold a couple of days later Mr McGowan’s there, Leading Seaman, and he and I become good friends, going ashore mates, and we had many, many an enjoyable beers and he was

25:30 one hell of a man, and I think he’s dead now but I certainly would like to meet him because he was one hell of a bloke and he taught me a lot. So anyhow, we go, we’re back at recruit school and recruit school’s over and we get sent out to our first ship. Now it’s a training ship. It’s a corvette from the Second World War and it was HMAS [His/Her Majesty’s Australian Ship] Gladstone. She was what they call a ‘four inch’ and in gunnery circles, a ship,

26:00 any ship is known by the size of its guns. Now the size of the gun on this thing was four inches, that’s the size of the slug bullet or whatever you like to call the shell that comes out of it. So, she was only a four inch and she had a couple of Oerlikons, ‘back breakers’ as we call them because they strap you in into the things and you bend backwards, and this thing’s pumping out at a hundred and twenty [rounds] a minute or 200 a minute and every vertebrae every bone in your backbone is screaming out, and I tell you what,

26:30 it’s hurt a lot of blokes in later years. They don’t have them anymore because they were just absolutely super-duper vibrating machines if you were bent backwards, but anyhow, we went down we’re going to Hobart. Boy, this is something, “Hey, we’re going to sea, we’re going to be real sailors after all this rubbish ashore and we’re going to sea,” and everyone’s excited and of course in the class that we had there was cooks and stewards and all sorts of things ‘cause we were still a mass

27:00 of humanity which had come from the lowest form to an acceptable lower form of naval life and that was ordinary seamen so we go to sea we go down to Hobart and across Bass Strait. Going down was good, Hobart was good. We looked, what we were brand new. The uniforms weren’t even bent or dirty or anything. There were

27:30 no distinctive marks over them, no badges, no nothing. We were raw as eggs. Anyhow, people at Hobart were wonderful but coming back there was a storm. Now Bass Strait is noted as one of the most worst tormented piece of sea anywhere in the world, and this little corvette, to this day I will say and a lot of others say too, that corvettes would roll in a wet handkerchief in a dry dock and that’s exactly what

28:00 this bloody thing did. It nearly rolled over, it did everything and it’s the first time in my life I ever got seasick, but that was because I ate about four or five cottage pies that night. The navy cooks made them in these huge big dixies, no one was eating them and I wasn’t going to pass this up. This was real food and I had about four great helpings of this stuff and that was a little more than my stomach can handle and I fed the fish on the way back and they reckon when they sold it to the Chinese

28:30 yonks, years later, my footprints were still up on the ceiling, which in the navy is called a deck head, and they reckon my footprints were on there and I don’t wonder, because that thing, I thought was going to sink and I thought, “If I can get out of this navy, I’m out of here, I am really out of here, because they can’t do this to me,” but we went back and we did more training, we did, we went to advanced gunnery courses and everything like that and this huge big dome, big white dome which you see everywhere now was

29:00 a gunnery place. Now they put you inside. They have an electric, electrically controlled Oerlikon [anti- aircraft gun], right this gun I was telling you about, and inside it, the whole big dome, which has to be 50-60 feet in circumference, it’s a projection screen and anywhere from any angle they can put on there any aircraft

29:30 known to the services at any time be it Japanese, Italian, French, German, Australian, English, American, anything and you have to identify it, let it go or fire at it straight away. Well, I’m strapped in ready to roll, crash hot. I can hit a rabbit running anywhere, boy am I going to have fun with this lot. Anyway, it all goes dark and next thing, “zzzzm” I missed that one, but anyhow I got the next one and

30:00 nothing was said to me then I got two after that, then I missed a couple of others and I think I got four out of about seven, and they said good shooting you are a good gunner, but thank Christ you’re not on their side because every one you hit was one of ours, and so my IFF [Identification Friend or Foe] wasn’t terribly good, so I had a couple of days instruction on that until I could let them know that I knew a Japanese plane from

30:30 and American plane and vice versa, but as far as hitting them I was pretty good, so we’d been there for some time. This is at Crib Point in Melbourne, this is the recruit station where we were, but by now we were ordinary seamen and we were a cut above these other little irks and Turks that were coming in and we used to go down when the buses brought these poor unfortunate sods out of Civvy Street [civilian life] and there’d be grey-blue navy buses and they’d got their little ports and looking far from

31:00 the lost little lambs they were. You know some of them had tears ‘cause the first time they’d been away from their mummies, and that you know and we rubbished the hell out of them. “You’ll be sorry you shouldn’t have joined,” we give them hell cause we copped the same damn thing. Anyhow, our time’s finished, it’s getting June, July, it’s about August of 1950, and we’d done a lot. We’d, we had done a lot. We had become

31:30 men. We weren’t boys any more, we weren’t little boys. We had hard muscles. We ran, we jumped, we fitted into the system. We knew what it was all about. We put up with the Melbourne cold. For Queenslanders, that’s not a bad trick. It’s a rotten place on a good day. And then our postings came up for ships. Stewards went here and then somebody went somewhere else and the gunnery blokes,

32:00 now there’s a war on. People like us are cannon fodder, simple. You’ve got to have people to shoot guns to shoot other people that are shooting at you, so this is the whole story, so I was put onto an aircraft carrier with some of my mates and I was a gunner, and I go to this aircraft carrier and guess where we’re going? We’re going to Korea. Where the hell is Korea? We didn’t even know where the place was, but we were to find out. So we got on board this thing where

32:30 we have running up exercises to do. We’re down to Western Port Bay. We’re, as the navy calls it, “We’re playing silly buggers,” which means we’re doing anything out there at sea. We’re stopping in the middle of the ocean. We’d abandon ship with fires and everything. We’re doing all the training that sailors have to know and have to do on board ships in case of emergency, and this is where this discipline I was telling you about comes in handy because you learn to do it without question, right?

33:00 You can question it but you still do it and you see the sense in it. I could hit targets, I could do this. We were still in those days in 1950, we were still trying to clear the oceans from mines from the Second World War - things of that nature. Very much, we were very much still, we were using the equipment that was used in the Second World War, we were to find out too. So we did all the running

33:30 up exercises. The aircraft were brought in, we’d go to sea and we - aeroplanes coming in and landing on 696 feet long, that’s how big this aircraft carrier is. It’s a little toy in comparison to some of the American carriers today. You can put two of these things on board one of these things on their flight decks. That’s how big these new ones are, but to us it was awesome. There was 1600 sailors on that thing 696 feet long, and you had to be packed

34:00 in there somewhere. All the equipment’s onboard, the fuel’s onboard, the ammunition’s on board, the planes are onboard and we’re ready to roll. So one day, we up anchor from Sydney. Well, not up anchor, we were alongside in Sydney Harbour by the big 200 crane and all the girls are down there waving “ta ta” to us, and we all thought that was great, and it’s great when you’re leaving port and there’s people there to see you off because all my mob come from Queensland, and you do tend to meet a few friends when you’re in Sydney,

34:30 so we off and we took a ship called the Tobruk. She was a brand new 4.7 destroyer [destroyer with 4.7 inch guns], a very fast vessel who was to gain a lot of fame in Korea because of its speed, its accuracy, its gunnery and the fact that it was a damn good ship. Anyhow, away we go and we’re sailing north, and all the time we’re sailing north we’re being instructed on all sorts of things. We’re being

35:00 instructed on fires, we’re being instructed on torpedo attacks, mine attacks. If we ever mixed with the indigenous people up north, which we weren’t supposed to do, we were instructed by the medical staff on venereal diseases and things of that nature, which - we it was pumped into us. Japan had just come out of a very horrendous war.

35:30 people were doing anything to make food, not just to make money, but to make food. The place had been bombed and burnt and everything like that, and I was going to a place where I really didn’t like the people because it had killed one of my relatives during the war, and I wasn’t rapped, but anyhow we get there and we get to a place called Guam, and Guam is just off Japan, and we, as I found out later on

36:00 through some of my friends, were supposed to go into Guam. The Americans had shifted out a couple of cruisers and a couple of destroyers so we could go alongside and have leave that night or as the Yanks call it liberty, but our captain, Captain Harries, who I’ll tell you a little more about shortly, decided “no” so we sailed around Guam all night, much to the bitching and whinging of the sailors, because we’d been at sea nearly a fortnight and, which was no big deal, but you know, 1600 soldiers crammed up in

36:30 696 feet, you know, you tend to get a bit toey [edgy]. So we sailed off next day and we went to a place called Ukoska or Yokosuka [the latter]Japan so when we get there we’re all getting’ ready to go ashore and there was no leave and we thought this is a bit rough, so we’ve got to restore or store. This is wartime stores now. This comes from the Americans and all the type of stuff that we need to fight a war and

37:00 next thing the captain’s gig [boat] is brought in and the captain goes down with his sword and everything like that. Now when a navy ship goes into a strange port the captain has to give his credentials to the governing body wherever, where foreign ports, as they are he has to give his credentials to them and find out what the rules laws and regulations are and what he’s supposed to do as a foreign ship. Anyhow,

37:30 he was back very shortly and there was leave piped for half the crew. Now when you’re getting ready for war, of the 1600, 800 of us went ashore and 800 stayed onboard to store the ship and to do all the things that you’ve got to do. The other fellers went ashore and mixed with the indigenous people so… but the 11 o’clock curfew was on in those days because it was still under curfew so we came back 38:00 full of sake and all sorts of bloody things and of course Japan being a foreign place and an exotic place and up until just a few years ago it had been a place of our enemy a home of our enemy and of course we’re on board next day doing what we’ve got to do with the storing process and the other 800 go ashore, so after that we sailed and then I had a friend in the signals section communications section and he said the skipper got a bollocking which means

38:30 he got roasted. What for? He said because the Yanks took out heavy cruiser about three or four destroyers and we were supposed to go alongside them, refused to do it and he was told by the Admiral American Admiral when he shifts ships around, and says, “You come in, you come in and you will give your men liberty.” Now, he said, “Whenever you come into my port again, you will immediately give your men liberty.” Now Captain Harries was not a very nice man. He was a mongrel. He was British. He

39:00 was only interested in promotion which he got in later life, but he was very cold, uncaring, very calculating man and he drank a lot. So anyhow, when the liberty was over we choofed off and we went up to Korea. I just forget where the heck we went first, was east or west coast, but wherever it was it was fair dinkum where we were and these fellers we weren’t inside any dome now. We could be attacked, hit, anything.

39:30 The morning we were going into Korea or our planes were flying for the first time, five o’clock, all battles start at five o’clock. I don’t know why. It’s just one of those things in the navy. It’s been happening since Nelson’s time, but five o’clock seems to be a good time for the navy cause it’s cold and it’s miserable and it’s the best time to annoy sailors. I think so the planes are there they’re all bombed up, rockets up, ammunition up, everyone’s churned up.

40:00 The night before everyone sort of…if they want to go to church, and the ministers have a great time because they’ve got a collective audience that really want to be there, not have to be there, and you have to write your Will, your last Will and everything like that and give it to the writers and that, which always amazed me because if the ship got sunk, they weren’t going anywhere, so that was it, but you had to do it and that was it and we’re closed up on the guns and it’s freezing

40:30 and half past five, first plane’s off and of course we’re sitting about six feet from the flight deck where the planes are coming in and they come in and they hit and they land. They take off and these big bursts of flame coming out of their exhaust, because they’re all propeller aircraft. In those days the Australian navy had no jets, they had no helicopters, no nothing, so they took off and we sat there. Nothing attacked us

41:00 nothing hit us. We didn’t see any submarines and all those things they’d taught us, but we were on our wits end. We were ready to defend the country and defend the faith and we were all fired up and nothing happened. We were also 100 miles from the Korean coast and that’s about the story on that one.

Tape 2

00:34 Korea wasn’t a funny place. Japan wasn’t a funny place, but was a very exciting place Japan. I said I went there to hate the Japanese simply because I had lost a relative during the war, but the Japanese were fanatics. They did everything with the utmost

01:00 of speed and they did everything correct. When they built things, they built them to stay. In Kure harbour for argument’s sake, we tied up alongside this wharf, but it wasn’t a wharf as I knew it. It seemed to be a floating wharf. In actual fact it was a big heavy cruiser. The Japanese had taken all the superstructure off it to the deck, chopped the bow and the stern off and left the engine room department in there, so when ships

01:30 big ships come alongside they just tied up to this thing and they had electrical power, they had everything. Now that’s clever, and we didn’t do anything like that because we didn’t know how. As I said before, when we got to Yokosuka Japan we left from there. We went up and did what we had to do, and being a capital ship we were surrounded by six destroyers at all times, and the idea for this is being a capital ship you take they take the torpedoes and

02:00 whatever that’s meant for the carrier, because the carrier is a capital ship and must be protected at all times, so they’re the sacrificial lambs but we never ever went back to Yokosuka because Harries, Captain Harries had the authority to go to Kure, Sasebo or Yokosuka and because he got such a bollocking off the admiral, the Yankee Admiral and because he was an SOB [Son Of a Bitch], which is an American expression,

02:30 he wouldn’t go back so we then used to go to Sasebo or Kure and then we never went back to Yokosuka again. Yokosuka was a big naval base during the war and so was Sasebo it was bigger. Being a carrier we were about a hundred miles at sea simply because we couldn’t be put in a position where we could be bombarded with shore establishments and things like that, like

03:00 in China, and I’ll tell you more about that later, but so we had the destroyer escort. We had a Canadian, we had an American, we had a British, we had a Dutchman and we had an Australian and I forget who the heck was there as well. We were two weeks at sea. Our pilots were flying on and off at all times. Two weeks at sea and then back in for two days. Now restore, re-ammunition in two days, 1600 men, then out again and this is how it happened. Sometimes we

03:30 went up as far as the 38th parallel on the eastern side, then we’d come back and we’d go back up, we’d go to the western side Chinampo and all these places were up there, Panmunjom which was further inland. This is at the 38th parallel. We didn’t know much about that then but we stayed ashore we stayed a hundred miles off the shore. One day this huge massive

04:00 thing came up on radar, and my mates called me up to the radar shack to have a look at that and they said, “Whatever the hell it was, it had to be big” and it turned out to be a battleship, an American battleship, the New Jersey, and it was a couple of miles off us and it was still big and it had 16-inch guns. Now again I say the circumference of the size of the barrels is 16-inches and it throws a projectile

04:30 weighing about the same weight as a Volkswagen, and it throws it about 14, 15 miles. With high explosive like that coming in you really don’t want to be around. But anyhow, to get more accuracy, our planes were spotting for the New Jersey. Now this thing was about two, three miles off us when it started its bombardment, and the concussion onboard our ship was awesome, you could feel it hit your ears when these things went off. It,

05:00 to see and be near a battleship when it fires is, well, no one in today’s navy would ever know what I’m talking about because it just it was awesome, and of course the biggest battleship ever built was Japanese and it had 18-inch guns and that was, and it never fired a shot in anger because the Yanks sunk it, it was unreal, and Yumota, the Armata or something [actually Yamato] but anyway that’s another

05:30 story but anyhow we worked with the Americans and of course we refuelled. The British were there to refuel us and then we’d go backwards and forwards then we’d go to Sasebo and we’d refuel, restore then we’d go out from there and from Sasebo we’d go round to the west coast. Now that’s getting up near China and that’s getting up near Indian territory [danger zone] so you kept away from that. Now we were shadowed by submarines while we were up there. Australia had no submarines.

06:00 The Yanks had them but we were shadowed and we were always told, “Oh, it’s an American submarine,” but no we could never find out and the officers wouldn’t tell you anything. In the days, in the ‘50s, the navy, the Australian navy was still ruled and run by the Royal Navy. Up until the mid ‘50s, late ‘50s, then it came under Australian control, which meant

06:30 that we were an off-shoot of the British Navy. The Australian Army and the Australian Air Force were Australian, but the navy was not. We were run by officers, British officers, who really in some instances didn’t like being there and didn’t like the Australians in the first place. Anyhow, and as soon as they could get this war over and done with and get back home to England, they were happier. So they gave us hell. We really didn’t like them much

07:00 either, so this was it. I remember we went way up north some time, one time, and I since found out about it but when we came back we had to sign this declaration, and I forget the wording of it now, but we had not crossed the 38th parallel and we had to sign it and the wording on the top was, “I, Richard Bass Middleton,” which I had to fill in being a British subject

07:30 blah blah blah blah blah and I resented being called a British subject. I was an Australia, so I scrubbed it out and put Australian and this British officer said to me, “Why did you do that for?” and I said, “Because I’m not a British subject, I am an Australian,” and he said, “Well, change that again to Australian, that’s a direct order,” and in the navy you cannot refuse a direct order. You are a British subject, and it wasn’t until the late ‘50s, like ‘56 or something like that, that I find out that we

08:00 were under British rule. We were part of the British navy because when we got there the Americans didn’t like limeys, British, they called them limeys. We wore the same uniform as the British navy and our blokes used to give them a lot of trouble. Our blokes used to get knifed, chopped up, cut about. I myself got a hell of a hiding one night in Sasebo by four Americans, southern Americans who got me in a toilet when my back was turned and belted the living hell out of me

08:30 and were kicking hell out of me till these Negroes come in and then sorted them out, and all the time they were kicking me to pieces they were calling me ‘you limey son of a bitch’ because they just did not like the British, but they when a petition was put to the officers that we could wear an Australian flash on our shoulder to denote we were Australians, it was denied because we were British, but we used to make up for it when we met British sailors off British ships and

09:00 that, you know, they become sport for us and we give them hell and we had a lot of fun doing it, so that was it. This thing I refer to about not crossing the 38th Parallel, it is something, I don’t know if this will even go any further, but we went 200 miles south of Vladivostok in Russia and for three/four days we were followed by a submarine. I had a friend who was in radar sonar and everything, and he told me we were being

09:30 followed. We weren’t told a thing about this at all, but when we got to a certain point we just turned around and came back down. Soon as we turned around and came back down, submarine disappeared. Years later, when I wrote my small book called Goodbye Tomorrow about the near sinking of the Sydney when I got this information from them, I thought then I would do another story about the time we went passed the 38th parallel, and I was told when I

10:00 wrote there, and told them where we were at the time, they said, “You must have been mistaken, the Sydney was never there,” and I wrote back later and I told them the day, the time, the day and the date and the position, and they wrote back and they said to me, “You were never there, and it would be in your best interests not to pursue the matter any further,” so until this conversation I have not, but anyhow, that’s par for the course. Korea was a very exciting place. We went one time there within

10:30 about, in a very safe place, about 50 miles off the Korean coast. Korea is a huge mountain. It is the biggest mountain in the world, it has to be, and behind that one’s another one which is bigger and behind that’s another one bigger. I’ve never seen a place with so many mountains in my life, and we took onboard some British sailors off the Belfast, which was a six-inch cruiser. Now the Belfast, these fellows wanted to join the

11:00 Royal Australian Navy because Australian Navy was trying very hard to get people to join up, so they came off the Belfast, we ferried them over in their ships their boats and our boats, took them onboard and passed pleasantries and everything like that, and when we got them all onboard, the moment they stepped onboard our ship they became able seamen, which isn’t a bad promotion in one day, but anyhow we had to sort them out because we regarded the Poms

11:30 as we called them, as not very clean sort of fellows and they didn’t bath as much as we did, and this became a problem, and I remember one little fellow there, his hammock had turned grey green and his white blanket was grey green and you know he used a lot of talcum powder and god knows what, and when one person lives in the mess with 90 other men and you sleep in a hammock which is touching the hammock beside you and when 20 when the ship rolls, 20 hammocks

12:00 go one way and 20 hammocks go the other way, you don’t want someone smelling like last week’s porridge, so it was decided that we should take this fellow down below and scrub him, which is the navy’s way of telling him that you know he’s offending, so they got his hammock, no matter what was in it, it went straight out the scuttle into the sea just straight out. We’d let the leading hands, leading seamen know what was going on and they

12:30 in turn told the petty officers, petty officers told the chiefs [chief petty officers]. They thought it was a good idea and as long as we didn’t really, really hurt him, “Good one,” and nothing would ever happen about it, so we got this fellow down then we stripped him. Now, the water in Korea at the time was very cold, it was just before ice block stage. So we got this feller, stripped him, he was screaming like a stuck pig, and about 20 fellers holding you down, we released a sea cock, which brought the seawater into the bathroom

13:00 and we got a scrubbing brush, ‘course the navy is called ‘pussers’, it always has been, so we got this pussers scrubbing brush, it is made under contract by someone and it’d be the hardest, worst thing in God’s creation, but it lifts rubbish off decks and things and human skin and we got this soap, which is salt water soap, ‘cause an ordinary soap doesn’t work in salt water, and we got him and we scrubbed him and scrubbed him until he bled. He screamed like a stuck pig but we kept on going until we covered every

13:30 part of his body. There wasn’t a part of him wasn’t bleeding and we let him go. Well, if you ever let a stuck pig go, you know what this bloke was like. He was screaming and crying and going on and he got up there with a towel wrapped around himself and he’s going to report us to the captain, he’s going to do everything. Anyhow, he got as far as the some senior chief further up and the chief said, “What the hell’s going on with you?” and he told him, and he said, “No, that wouldn’t have happened son, and if it did,” he said, ‘We’d get onto it straight away.” “Now,” he said, “you’ve fallen somewhere, you’ve hurt yourself

14:00 now go and get dressed and go up the sickbay and I’ll tell them that you’re coming,” and no matter which way he went no one would listen to him. He turned out to be a very clean sort of a fellow. He had to buy himself all new gear and everything like that, but we let the Poms know that we were fair dinkum about this cleanliness business, because believe me, Australian sailors are exceptionally clean people. That was one of the things I admired about the navy, they were clean, and I found out when I joined it who

14:30 kept it that way, it was us, but we had to be clean. Alright, so I’m off that subject now. When we when we got to Korea, from October to December it starts to get cold. Now we were in temperatures now getting into 20, 20 below zero. This is cold by anyone’s standards. We were told not to touch

15:00 anything metal, which is rather stupid because the whole ship’s made of metal, the guns, the whole lot. Our guns were 40 mm Bofors [anti-aircraft guns], which were 40mm barrels, and we had this was a quad mounting. There was two on the port side and two on the starboard side and I was one of the gunners on it. We had to take the oil, the hydraulic oil out of that those guns and put in anti-freeze oil then we had to put heaters on the anti-freeze so that the anti-freeze

15:30 wouldn’t freeze. It was pathetic. We, as crew, had no winter clothing, there wasn’t any. The Australian government had come out of a war which was fought in the tropics and there was no such thing as winter clothing, so they sent us, they committed us too soon to the Korean war, so they went us up there in the same gear that we would have had in the tropics, ordinary dungarees, ordinary dungarees 16:00 and nothing else. Our boots were ordinary leather boots, which froze on your feet when you’re sitting out in 20 below zero. Now we had to borrow off the English, what we call little bum freezers, which were little coats which were sheepskin inside and canvas outside. They kept you warm but only down to your backside. From there down you froze.

16:30 They gave us two pair of long johns. That was something they gave us, a balaclava and a pair of gloves, but you had to keep crunching up the balaclava around your face or otherwise you would get gangrene and it would set in and they would have to remove half your face, which we saw many a photograph of and it’s a terrible thing when gangrene sets in, so it was so cold out there that we were only allowed to be on the guns for 10 minutes and we had to keep running the guns. They had to be run day and night

17:00 day and night otherwise they’d freeze, and if someone attacked us you might as well spit at them because we couldn’t have defended ourselves, so Australia sent its navy and I only talk predominantly about the navy, into war with no winter clothing because there was no winter clothing, and I emphasise ‘none’. When we come off gun watch, we would go to a friend of ours who, was what we called a ‘tankie’. Now a tankie is a fellow in charge

17:30 of the stores in the refrigerated space. We used to go in there and play cards because it was zero temperature, not 20 below zero, and it was warmer in there, and for a lot of years I used to tell people in Korea we used to go into the refrigerator to play cards ‘cause it was warmer and they used to look at me like I was a nutcase and I probably was anyhow, but that’s what we did but seeing, we were there dodging, you know, carcasses flying past us and things like that and smoke, and it wasn’t

18:00 considered very hygienic until we got caught and turfed out so that buggered up that little thing, so you know had to get cold. The ships were designed, our ships were designed for the tropics, so therefore there was no air conditioning, no nothing like that, no fan assisted for cooling or anything like that. If you wanted fresh air in you opened a scuttle, but you certainly do not open a scuttle when it’s 20 below zero and snowing, believe me. So what they did they used to take the heat from the boiler room

18:30 and pump it through all the air ducts throughout the ship, so when you came from 20 below you got into your mess deck it was so boiling hot it was like being in an oven, you stripped down to your underwear and the sweat just poured out of you. The deck would be wet, the steel floor or deck would be wet with perspiration from men, and then all of a sudden you’re action stations, you’d have to get booted and spurred and get up there into 20 below zero, it was unreal. It was nerve racking.

19:00 Now that’s not the only thing that the navy had to put up with. I remember one time I was man under punishment, which is part and parcel for the course. If you go through the navy and never get men under punishment, you’re, you should be a choirboy, but anyhow here we are down in the galley and the chief cook’s there and we’ve got dozens and dozens of these khaki tins like big rice tins you used to get years and years ago

19:30 and they’re got D-D, which meant military packed, processed 1938. Now this food was in there it was packed and processed in 1938, it had gone through the Second World War and here we were 1951 and we were eating it. It was dehydrated onions, dehydrated potatoes, dehydrated cabbage, the most diabolical garbage that was ever conceived by man to be fed to humans. What we used to do, when we pointed

20:00 out that this stuff was 1938, we were told to shut our face, punch holes in it when we got them into the big dixies, and someone get them over the side before the rest of the crew saw it. They did not want the rest of the troops to know we were eating food from 1938. Now if you think that odd, think about this. The war in Vietnam was in the ‘60s and what we didn’t eat in Korea they were eating in Vietnam, and that this is history. You can check on that, that’s a fact of life, but anyhow we ate dehydrated eggs, we ate dehydrated

20:30 everything. It was the most diabolical time for food that you ever struck in your life, so when we did go ashore in Japan, we ate anything you know, like dead set, we’d eat squid, which was a stupid thing. Fancy eating bait, ‘cause that’s all we did with squid, we fished with it, but up there they ate it, so we ate it too. We ate rice, we ate whatever, because it was an edible food. This is when you could get it off the Japanese, so that was it. Now, 1600

21:00 men were onboard that ship. We had flotation on there for rescue for about 400, there was nothing else. There was what they call a Carley Float. Now this thing’s about 16 foot long, give or take, because the memory is not terribly good on it, but there’s about 20 or 30 of these in groups all around the upper deck on these ships, there used to be, they don’t have them anymore. These things are made of cork

21:30 and they’re open at the bottom with lattice, and navy likes everything ship shape, and they painted them with religious fever, they painted them, they had to look nice and they were painted and then when they got dirty, they painted them again. I’m sort of getting ahead of myself here. We had this flotation for these very few people. I could get from my forward mess deck to one of these

22:00 where I was supposed to go to my abandoned ship station in two minutes flat and that’s allowing for London buses, herds of cattle, anything. Nothing got in my way because I was going to be there and I was going to be on that Carly float when it hit the water, but it made no difference because the water was so cold, the life expectancy in that water is 60 seconds and we had no safety equipment, we had no life-saving equipment or anything, so it

22:30 nearly became, or nearly came to pass the second HMAS Sydney in the typhoon was nearly lost with all hands, which would have made it the second Sydney to be lost with all hands, but through the grace of God and the people that built the ship it didn’t happen that way, but this just shows you how a country in politics can do this to its people, to its own fighting men. They’ve learnt a lot since then, they had to, but we were guinea pigs. Like, the fact is penicillin was

23:00 pretty new in those days, so if you got a cold or you stubbed your toe or you went ashore, and you got some of the nasties that the indigenous people would give you, they hit you with penicillin. You got penicillin for anything. We were given other shots, too. You were a collective audience that couldn’t go too far, so they’d line you up and they’d say, “This is so and so and so and so, shut up and have it,” and that’s it. So they’d give them to you. We were test tubes for them and they did that to us in the ‘50s. Also

23:30 about this cold, the army had their problems too. They were in the snow, they were in this thing. They had no winter clothing, none whatsoever. They had to borrow, borrow mind you, off the Canadians and the Norwegians, things called parkas. What the hell’s a parka? No one in Australia knew what a parka was, but a parka was a coat, was padded and it had a hood and it kept you from freezing to death. Now the soldiers

24:00 were given this stuff, boots they were given, special boots so their feet wouldn’t freeze on them like ours did, ‘cause we had ordinary, ordinary leather boots and shoes, nothing else. I was pretty lucky because I, this predicament I put to my father and he organised to a pair of diver’s socks which came from my feet right up to the hips and you pinned them to your underpants and they were made of thick wool, they were beautiful and I slept with them because to have these was like having

24:30 gold bullion and they could have got swiped quicker than anything, so they were attached to me when I slept and then I had gum boots and that, but we still had to wrap our feet in newspaper, brown paper and everything. To go on the guns, I’ll start off: you’re naked, you put on two or three pairs of underpants, normal underpants, then you put on two pair of long johns. You got them there, you put three or four singlets on then you put a navy jumper on. Then you put your socks on, three or four

25:00 pair of socks you put on there, then you bind, that’s right then you pull on your ordinary dungaree pants. You pull them on right, well you can just get them on because everything is sort of so, so big. Then you get your feet into these boots, these rubber boots, which again I slept with in my hammock because not everyone had them and they could have got knocked off real quick. So, and of course you’ve wrapped your feet in brown paper, newspaper, anything. Then you put on this British bum freezer, you put that

25:30 on and you had a pair of mittens, which were just for the thumb. Now we’re gunners and we’ve got to sit on guns and pull triggers and triggers on the guns are made of steel, so as soon as you put your hand on it your hand froze to the gun instantaneously and there’s only one way of getting your hand off that gun and that’s by using warm water and we didn’t have warm water, so we used the next best thing, that we had to get our hand off that gun

26:00 and I’ll just leave it to your imagination, but anyhow and it wasn’t very hygienic, but that’s the only thing we could do, but these mittens were useless, the balaclava over your face was useless, and then these idiot, stupid steel helmets that we wore from the Second World War had to be put on there. The navy had no equipment that was ready for this, for that war. It was reputed and told to me that a fellow from the 3rd Royal Australian Regiment froze to death at his

26:30 post in Korea, but it’s something that they will never, ever tell you about ‘cause they never even want it known. The air force had to borrow all their equipment off the Yankee Air Force. They flew with the 7th, 5th Air Force. They equipped them fully. Then again, they had heaters in their planes and they flew a mile high anyhow, so if they bailed out they probably froze to death as they hit the air, but this shows you what the country did to their service people in the ‘50s in Korea.

27:00 This is why to this very day people like myself, I’m, I was the youngest onboard a ship of 1600 men. I’m 71 this year, and when it gets cold now my shins ache like the living hell. I’ve had one knee replaced and I’m going to have a second one replaced and I still put it down to this, this absolute freezing cold. You could you could tap your legs and you couldn’t feel anything, it was just so frozen cold. I

27:30 have seen men, and I was a fair stump of a fellow, I was five foot 10, five foot 11, and these fellows were big men, six feet two, three and four, and I, and I’d tackle anything ashore because it was sport, you know in fights, but I wouldn’t tackle these fellows because they were too damn big for me, but I’ve seen them cuddled up in the corner crying their eyes out with the cold, crying because it was so cold and you could not get warm and this is it, but that, that’s the story, that’s the story about us, what we did

28:00 there, about the food, which was atrocious and our clothing which didn’t exist and this is why today, the Korean War to us means so much simply because, “Where the hell was it?” people would say, “Where’s Korea?” They didn’t care about us. The wharfies wouldn’t load our ammunition because we were shooting at their Communist mates. They, Australian soldiers died in battle because the bullets the Americans gave them didn’t fit our rifles because they 28:30 wouldn’t load ammunition for them and this is the truth. They wouldn’t give us mail until the air force took the mail directly and flew it there. They wouldn’t do it in the post offices so we had people in the post offices putting our mail on. They did everything in their power in those days, the Australian Workers Union, to stop the Australians winning a war, that we won, we had to refuel our own ships, we had to move our own ships

29:00 and it was a terrible bloody time, so any time that we came ashore when we came back to Sydney or Melbourne and someone was stupid enough to open his mouth and say he was a wharfie, he was decked. He could have been a good bloke, but we decked him anyhow just for the hell of it because of the Australians that died because of wharfies wouldn’t do that. Now that’s not a supposition on my part, that’s a fact of life. I have also been in the Pusan Cemetery and seen the grave stones of these fellows there died in

29:30 battle, died in battle aged 18, died in battle aged 19. I wonder how many of them died because they couldn’t get ammunition. That’s another story. So alright, so we come back down. Now this particular time we’d been up on the eastern coast, we’re coming down to Sasebo, ripper. By then we’d all acquired some female indigenous friends and we were looking forward to seeing them cause we’d been away for a fortnight and of course if you don’t sort of if you don’t

30:00 sort of keep the fires burning there’s other ships that come in that can keep the fires burning, American and British and Dutch and whatever and they are not very they are not very faithful but they’re nice people. Anyhow we came into Sasebo and the first lot went ashore, which is us, good, ripper. We’re in for two days remember. Now we’ve got to refuel and get out in two days and go back up to the thingo, so we’re ashore and we’re into this grog, having a great old time considering

30:30 the fact that it cost about nine cents a bottle and it’s cold, and the girls, well, were willing and able, and we’re having a great old time and it’s 11 o’clock curfew. So we’re into this grog and I tell you what we went ashore at about 11 o’clock that day and by about two, two o’clock, three o’clock in the afternoon, three quarters of us were three parts gone. Next thing, typhoon warning, all ships leave

31:00 immediately, 2C British ships. American ships stay where you are. What the hell’s going on? Why do the British ships got to go and the Yankee one’s going? So anyhow next thing these big Americans come round and they’ve got Colt 45s strapped to their hips and big batons which hurt. “Come on you Aussies, you’re going back to the ship.” You know, “We’re not going nowhere Yank, so that’s it,” and there was a few fights, but when you get a 45 slammed in your gut with the trigger cocked ready to go

31:30 you call him ‘sir’. You get thumped across the ear with a baton, that changes your mind too. So anyhow they load us all back onboard the damn thing and they sent us to sea. They, they sent us to sea in a typhoon and we hadn’t even refuelled. We’d been ashore, we’d been off Korea for two weeks, up and down, up and down. We had less than half the fuel in our tanks. A British admiral

32:00 sent us to sea into a typhoon with less than half our fuel or our fuel capacity. We went out into that thing, we went into a typhoon with a Canadian, so they sent us out into this thing. Now I was 18 years old, that’s right, I was 18 year old and I was working towards the

32:30 goal of being a quartermaster. Now quartermaster in today’s navy is a different thing. He’s a policeman, he’s this, that and the other, but a quartermaster is a fellow that drives the ship, he steers the ship, he does everything. Now where the position was for this ship is three storeys down below encased in a room which is about eight by eight, eight feet by eight feet and you have all the instruments, the steering wheel and god knows what down there, and you have a gyro repeat, which is

33:00 an apparatus that tells you what the movement of the ship, the heading, the degrees, the whatever. You have a voice pipe that comes down from the bridge and they, the officers up there who can see everything will tell you because you cannot see a thing. I’m 18 years old, strong as a bull, can do any damn thing, and here I am on duty going into a typhoon. Well, you’re relieved of the wheel, after my memory serves me, half an hour or an hour. I was on there for three hours. Every

33:30 ounce of my body was controlling that wheel. They are hydraulic assistants to the rudders, but believe me, if you’ve got to throw that wheel, which would be 18 inches in circumference, maybe two feet, throw it around full revolutions one way until you get there, then full revolutions the other way and do that for three hours, believe me it’s nerve racking. You are allowed by

34:00 the navy to be half or to a degree off course which is set. They set a course of such other. I was three to four degrees off course. I could not hold this ship on the heading that was set for me. All those three hours, now this ship is rocked, I mean something is happening out there and we can’t see it, so we don’t know what the heck it is. Next minute you’d be just about thrown

34:30 to the bulkhead or to the wall, which is near about six feet away from you. You’ve got to hang onto this wheel because you are hanging on, the ship is relying on you to steer it straight, right. If you let her go she can do anything because there’s winds up there about 150 miles an hour at this stage of the game, and an aircraft carrier gets pushed around by the wind something shocking. So anyhow, the officers are screaming to me, “Coxswain watch your head,” and they’re getting pretty toey up there because see they can see things that we can’t see and they’re getting pretty snarly

35:00 and when officers start to get snarly you start to wonder what’s going on. Anyhow, it got to the stage, and I’m damn near up to my three hours and I’ve had it. I am physically and mentally buggered, and this officer’s snarled at me, “Watch your head,” and I said, “I can’t hold this bloody ship any better than what I am,” and I said, “I can’t hold her on the course you set me,” and I had made a goof of goofs. I had talked back to an officer, and in those days you did not talk back to officers,

35:30 and I goofed and everyone down there, there was three other people and me, they just looked at me aghast because I had, I had just committed the most vile sin you could commit in the navy. Anyhow, next thing I heard, “Quartermaster, hold her as close to the course as I have set and we will relieve you as soon as we can.” Fair enough and I thought, “Oh boy.” So anyhow about 10 minutes later the hatch comes open

36:00 and in walks the chief quartermaster. He come in he said, “And I’m here to relieve you Sticks,” he said, “Let, let go and I’ll take it.” Now he takes it in and out of harbour. I took it in and out of harbour. I’m only an able seaman. He was so busy doing what he had to do getting this ship into a typhoon that he couldn’t be spared for anything else and I say it myself, and I know praise is no recommendation, I was pretty good on the wheel and that’s why I was allowed to be there. Anyhow, I couldn’t

36:30 release it because my hands had virtually frozen because I was so intent, my mind told me not to let go of that damn thing and he had to punch hell out of my hands to let me go to make me let go, and when I did I just flopped on the deck and he virtually kicked me into a corner, he couldn’t spare the time to help me and I was in distress. I just had to sort myself out and when I was right I got up and went about what I had to do and I was told to report to the bridge.

37:00 Now you get up there and you get out there and there’s an aircraft carrier which is top heavy and she’s dipping down into the water and then the whole front section of up to a quarter of it’s disappearing under water and then you think, “Oh my god,” and I reported to the bridge and here’s a commander up there. “Are you Able Seaman Middleton?” I said, “Yes I am, sir.” He said, ‘Were you on the bridge?” “Yep.” He said, “You did a damn good job, but,” he said, “if you ever speak back to an officer like that again,” he said, “I’ll

37:30 have your nuts for a necktie, now get about your business,” and I said, “Yes sir,” and that was it, that was it. Now I had to get down from that bridge down below and no one at that stage was allowed in the upper deck, but I had to get up there to get a bollocking and ‘cause the navy clears their own yard arm that way, but anyhow, we’re getting well into the typhoon now. The destroyers are dipping into the water, you’d swear to God that they’re not going to come back up. They’re just being

38:00 wrenched and drenched. As I go on in this story, I’ll tell you more about it. I wrote this book here Goodbye Tomorrow about this, because the Australian government was never, ever going to tell anyone what happened about that story and a lot of fellows had died in the meantime and I wrote the story about it so it could be documented and put into the archives both in Canberra and here in Queensland, which it has been and it was only a restricted

38:30 printing, but I did it for the fellows there and well I’ve still got it. But anyhow, we get down in there and food wasn’t, wasn’t a problem that night because there wasn’t any ‘cause the cooks couldn’t cook. They, they’d get physically thrown from one side of the galley to the other and the pots included, and these are big pots. These take 40-50 hundred gallons. If you’ve got 100 gallons of boiling water coming at you, you haven’t got a chance in hell. So they did their very best, but they did make us sandwiches and they made us some

39:00 stuff but very few ate that night because there wasn’t time to eat. We had electrical fires all through that ship. Three of them were in the thousand pound bomb room and the thousand pound bomb room was about five stories down the bows of the ship and these fellers had to climb down there and defuse electrical short circuits in the thousand pound bomb room. They never got a mention, they never got a pat on the head. It was part and parcel to their job, that’s what they had to do, that’s what they were getting

39:30 paid for. No-one thought they were heroes, they just did it. Aeroplanes are made to fly in the sky. I didn’t know much about aeroplanes until I was onboard the carrier, but you have a set of wheels which an aeroplane lands on. Now when an aeroplane is in a situation like this and it’s rocking and rolling sideways, the wheels collapse. Now these planes were all fuelled, ready to go. They had live rockets, live bombs on them some of them because they just

40:00 couldn’t, didn’t have the time to take them off. Course when they hit down and the wheels collapsed, their tanks, their wing tanks hit the steel deck and shattered, which meant there was aviation gasoline going everywhere, the place was awash with it. It was like water running across a street in a big storm. Now where does this stuff go? You’ve got to pump it out and you see you have air being circulated through the ship. It’s sucking up the fumes and taking it to every

40:30 compartment in that ship. Now there’s electric motors breaking down, there’s electric motors short circuiting and they’re setting off little sparks and right throughout the ship is the most beautiful smell of a service station, but this stuff is high octane gasoline and she never blew, and I said earlier to yourself that God was on my side, he was on our side that night because why that ship never exploded was beyond me, on that alone, right.

41:00 Now we get down to another situation. There were situations everywhere that night. Tape 3

00:37 There was lots of situations happened that night and this is where I said before that discipline came in and where we thought you know discipline was bad. Discipline saved us that night. Now people say and I’ve heard it said that fear will make panic. Well there was no panic that night. Fear has as smell that I

01:00 cannot describe to you. When you’re in a group of men who are facing death, as we were, this smell was a sort of a sickly smell of sweat, this, it was fear but I never saw panic that night. I’m 18 years old, I’m going to be 19 in a week’s time, this has happened in October and we’re down in a mess deck and the steel fittings are being

01:30 ripped out of the deck by the force, the velocity of the movement of the ship alone. It’s being ripped out and thrown about. Now you’ve got tables and these big steel-legged chairs being thrown around. These are missiles and people were getting hurt and hit everywhere and this Chief Petty Officer had been in the navy for yonks by the look of him. He had three badges gold, as we used to say, “Three badges gold, gold too bloody old,” and I said, “How we going Chief?” He said, “Sticks, we’re not doing too

02:00 bloody good. If she rolls like that again, we’re gone, we’re history, we’re gone.” Now to tell a kid that’s 18 that’s going to be 19, it sort of doesn’t encourage you, and I saw couple of mates of mine and my nickname was Sticks in the navy, and they said, “Sticks, we’re going to die,” and I said, “Mate, it doesn’t look good does it?” Now this ship was rolling so hard and so heavy that the Canadians and I had a tape, I don’t know where it is now

02:30 this fellow sent me a tape from Canada, he was in the Canadian navy, on the Athabaskan, which was one of our escorts, and the Canadian Captain had seen us roll so hard that this time he said, “She’s gone, the Aussie’s gone,” because all they could see was the bum of the ship with the propellers, but she came back and they said their biggest scare was, now this is pure jet black

03:00 out there, it’s the blackest black you’ll ever be in, in a typhoon I’ll tell you and we were on top of a wave that had to be 90-odd feet high. We were on the very top of it and this Canadian said the biggest fright he ever got that night was to see this goddamn Aussie aircraft carrier surfing down the wave straight at their ship and there was nothing they could do about it and we missed them by yards. No one clapped, no one applauded because too many people were too

03:30 busy doing what they were doing, but the waves were 90-odd feet above us. They were huge, they were bigger than huge. During the storm, as I said everything was breaking loose. You’d fix it, you’d tie it down, it would break, you’d tie it down with rope, strong inch, two-inch rope, it would snap like bloody, like string. Men would be just picked up and thrown half a dozen

04:00 of you hanging onto each other would be thrown as one up against as a wall, like against the bulkhead. You just couldn’t control it, it just happened that way. Aircraft were being thrown all over the place. The aircraft onboard on the flight deck were ripping the steel wire out of the steel deck and going over the side. One stage of the game we got to 200 mile an hour. That was when the wind indicator on the aircraft carrier Sydney broke.

04:30 Now get back down below again. We’re down there. The ship is progressing, we’re ploughing into waves. All of a sudden a ship 696 feet would hit something like a sandbank or a brick wall and the whole ship would shudder and stop, it was a wave just hit us. A wave and it would stop us then we’d be back again, up and down. We were what they call ‘pile driving’. Now

05:00 this is now I have this stuff from the freedom of information from Captain Harries in here, and I’ll go onto it further about this, and he was frightened the ship was about to break its back because you get a situation where these waves and they break at a given point, well most of the ship is out in fresh air so what’s going to happen? She’s going to break her back. Well, it pile drives and when it pile drives it comes down “boom, boom, boom,

05:30 boom.” Now when this, the Sydney was doing that she was going down to about half of the ship underwater and then she’d, which meant the propellers were out of the water. Soon as this happened they had to cut the power to the propellers or it would shake itself to bits. So when she came back again, “voom, voom, voom,” propellers are under and half the ship is out of the water, so this is how we went through the bloody night. Now on the starboard side

06:00 of the carrier they have a huge cargo hatch. Now this cargo hatch would be twice the size of a normal door in a home, about one and a half times the length of a normal door and half the width again. Now it is what they call dogged down. These are clips that they screw down, they’re all brass and there’s 16 of them around this thing and in the centre of that cargo hatch

06:30 is what they call a manhole where men can come up and go down through this hatch, it’s big enough to carry a human body, but you can’t carry anything, you just go through it. We got hit by a particular hard wave which ripped this thing off the ship, ripped it off the ship. Now it takes anything up to eight men to lift this thing and the water ripped it off as if it was ordinary wet paper, so that meant when the ship rolled

07:00 to starboard tonnes of freezing cold water came into the ship. Now we had to get it out and there was no one to get it out except for where it was coming in. Now we had to get these pumps and these are huge big emergency pumps and it takes on the best of days on flat ground with no wind blowing and nothing it takes six good men to shift it about because the navy in their wisdom didn’t put wheels on things, you had to life them. Imagine

07:30 the weight of it. Imagine the weight of this thing and when it was put down by itself could be picked up and thrown up against the wall like it was a box of sardines, and this thing flying through the air, if it hit you, it was breaking legs so they had to get these things, two of them, get them down, get them secured and get pumps on them or get hoses on them and get them up where this water was coming through up this hatch. Now this hatch had a ladder, we call a ladder, set of stairs and

08:00 about steps, treads, and the water was just coming through in a mass like a big fire hose pressure, freezing and these fellows, eight, nine, ten of them were there holding this hose out so the water could be pumped out. Now they were standing in freezing water and every now and then they’d just go so cold, they’d just have to drop it, someone would have to take their place and they’d choof him off somewhere and rub him down or rub him with

08:30 ship’s alcohol and that so he could stop dying and it was it, but you see now all the lockers, the steel lockers which were secured, welded to the steel deck, were being ripped off. Now these lockers were six foot six high by about 18 inches square and they were secure bolted to a steel deck. They were being ripped off like they were paper. Contents therein were being smashed open. Mate, I saw more five pound notes and 10 pound

09:00 notes tearing round the water that night than you ever saw and they were anybody’s but no one wanted them. You know why? Because we didn’t give a damn about money, money was nothing cause where are we going to spend it when you’re dead? And we were going to die and we knew it. The fear as I said to you was there but it was a fear, 18 years old and I thought, “Jesus, what am I going to do?” There was nowhere to go so you had to face it and that’s exactly how we went through that night. We had to face that fear

09:30 and we knew that next wave was going to be it, we were going to go AOT [Arse Over Tit – roll over] and we’d be on our back, which brings another problem up. This one is touchy but it fact and it happened, Captain Harries drank heavily. At midnight that night the wind was blowing at a speed of 200 miles an hour. Humans could not stand on the flight deck, aeroplanes were blown off it as if they just didn’t exist.

10:00 We were in winds of 200 mile an hour, as I said, waves up to 90 odd feet. We were being smashed about unmercifully and the captain stopped the engines. It was a deathly silence in that ship. What the hell’s the matter, ‘cause without power you’re history and we’re dead and I was in another mess deck. What the hell? We’re going down,

10:30 something’s wrong cause you do not stop an aircraft carrier in the middle of a typhoon and shut the engines down but he did. Now it came back and it came back to me when I was writing this book, Captain Harries was as drunk as a skunk and he was relieved of command that night by the commander who was a navigating commander, Commander Shands. He relieved him of his command, ordered him off the bridge. That is why the story of the typhoon was never told. This is why

11:00 the government wouldn’t tell anyone about it and this is why they were very careful about giving me the information that I wanted. But I got what I wanted and I have it in his own handwriting, Captain Harries own writing, “I stopped the engines at that particular time blah, blah, blah, just to see which way the ship would go.” His own words, I have them. The only way it would go was down. Anyhow, he was relieved of his command, ordered off the bridge and

11:30 they took over and started the engines and you could hear that ripper go through the ship because that power was our life for 1600 men and that was it. But anyhow that was a long story cut short and this is the reason why I wrote that book about it, and it was a fact of life but it took me a long time to get that information. That’s why I did it, so that people there, their children and their children’s children would know what their grandfather and great-grandfather got up to, what he did and why the Australian government never told that story

12:00 but that was it. Gradually, bit by bit that ship, that night, hardly any people got any sleep that night. There was people did, there was people got as drunk as skunks and they said, “Well I’m going to die, I’m going to die happy. I’m going to die, I’m not going to do anything about it.” Slept in their hammocks and sailors aren’t supposed to have grog onboard, but they used to get it onboard. They’d get it in stores and stuff and two fellers I know they were naval airmen they got as drunk as skunks. They

12:30 saluted everyone, they toasted the captain, toasted the stokers, toasted the rubbish men, they toasted everyone till they were that plastered they were just thingo and I asked one of them, “What did you think of the typhoon?” “What typhoon?” You know they were happy. Some blokes revelled in it. They, “Oh mate, this is the life, Jesus, the navy, who’d be anywhere else.” You know, they were nutcases you know. Others huddled up in corners and cried for their mother and things like that, I saw that and I didn’t have a mother so I couldn’t cry for her, 13:00 but I wasn’t going to cry for my father but I was worried. I didn’t think I’d see it again so did a lot of the fellows but gradually during the night it eased and abated. Yeah, stop for a second. We got to the stage where we were going through the eye of the typhoon. Now you cannot stay in the eye of a typhoon, you just cannot. This thing’s travelling at a hell of a rate and you cannot stay in there, but I mean when and Harries came on he said, “This is your captain speaking, you know,” he said, “We will shortly go into the eye

13:30 of the typhoon. Now when we are in there you will only have a matter of a few moments, I want this thing, this ship, battened down, secured because when we hit that wall of water again you are going to be tossed about unmercifully.” He was not joking. That ship was being thrown around like a toy in a bathtub with children. This is a 696 feet, 19,000-tonne aircraft carrier being thrown around by a like a little toy.

14:00 All of a sudden this, the noise of a typhoon, if you ever speak to someone again, ask them what the wind was like and they will tell you it’s like a thousand freight trains coming at you. It is the most awesome, eerie sound you will ever hear and it never stops. It just keeps on going and the ship is screaming, it’s twisting and boy, you’re going to be RS [?] and real quick. Anyhow all of a sudden

14:30 and silence, silence. Blokes are yelling at the top of their voices and all of a sudden you don’t have to yell because you could hear each other. You can drop something and you can hear it and you’ve got to start securing things, picking up tables and things and lashing them down with rope and getting things shipshape. Things are broken and you’ve just got to do it and it’s quiet and the ship is just gently rocking

15:00 away like a Sydney ferry on a Saturday afternoon, lovely. You have two minutes before re-entry. You have a minute to re-entry then next thing, you’re on your side again. You are hit with a hundred brick walls, you are in a typhoon again and everything that you have just done in those two or three minutes is just undone, not by the knots, but the rope is not strong enough to hold the speed of the way that

15:30 thing is thrown with it and bodies with it, like people, not dead ones, but people, live. You’re talking to a bloke beside you and next thing he’s hanging off a wall 20 feet away, been smashed up against there and you were beside him so you have no control over your body ‘cause it just happens too quick. But during the night she gradually, bit by bit, eased down until in the morning and I spent the night awake because I was a seaman and I had to be in any given position where someone said, “Hey you do this,” and you did it you know. There was naval airmen that night

16:00 did it, there was stokers help the seamen. Everybody, there was cooks helping because you see if you didn’t you couldn’t leave it up to one mob, because you know took a lot of people and there was people hurt and there was broken legs, there was arms and god knows what. So we came in at night and here was this little Dutchman, the Van Galen, up ahead of us and she looked in a sorry way, there wasn’t a bit of paint on the thing, she was stripped bare. Our ship was stripped bare, there wasn’t a bit of paint on it, you’d think she’d been through a sandblaster that night,

16:30 there was no paint on it. Aeroplanes were laying on their sides. I’ve got the photographs here, they were laying on their sides. There was big holes in the deck where aeroplanes used to be. There was big pieces of steel ripped out. There was a gun bent over. The five, 10-tonne big crane was gone, history, it was blown over the side. There was not a boat, there was nothing left. They were all gone and, but she was rocking and rolling and everything, she was still fighting the sea but that was it. The Van

17:00 Galen never had a thing left on its upper deck. There was no guardrails, there was nothing that could be moved that didn’t go. The only things were there were the guns and the barrels on the front ones were bent. The bow of that ship was on about a 45-degree angle and the propeller shaft on one, she had two engines, that was busted and bent. She was only on one engine. There was not a thing

17:30 left on the upper deck on the Van Galen and the Canadian was exactly the same, and this friend that sent me this stuff, this is a man that will not step foot on water ever again ever. He won’t even have a bath I’m told. He’s just mentally touched. He was going down to the fire room as the Yanks call it, it was down below, and he was thrown down the hatch by physical force. He broke both arms and collarbones as he hit the deck and that’s how he stayed for hours

18:00 being thrown about. No one could help him, no one could help him. Getting back to the height of this thing, the aircraft carrier has to have air sucked in from way up above down into the boiler room, which is right down below. The boiler room is where the fire is, where it heats up the oil that burns, it heats up the water that powers the engines, the two of them, two destroyer engines. Now these huge big outlets

18:30 or suction inlets whatever you like to call them go right up to just under the bridge and they suck copious amounts of air down there which they have to cool those places. They’re built that way. Now this place down there is never built for water. There’s no water ever gets down there so there’s no pumps down there because this is where the fireboxes are. That night the ship was laying so far over on its side it was automatically sucking water down that thing into the boiler room. Now this feller I know

19:00 his name’s Bird, he was a chief and to this day he’s still under psychiatric care because the water was six inches under the fireboxes, they could not get rid of it and if the water had got into those fireboxes the ship would have disintegrated into such small pieces you would never ever found it again, just would have blown off the face of the earth and they stopped it when it was six inches underneath the fireboxes. They couldn’t get it out because there was nowhere to put it because it shouldn’t have been there in the first place

19:30 but because the ship was laying over on its side and this is what I’m telling you, she was laying over on its side ready to go over. 28 and a half degrees is turn turtle on this particular carrier. All ships have a turn turtle point. We were doing 26, no, 28 degrees is turn turtle, we were doing 26 and a half degree rolls. That ship came back, but getting back to this boiler room the boys, the stokers and whoever had to get these

20:00 pumps down ladders which are built for people to walk up and down not for getting big pumps up and down they had to get them down there, they had to get two down there. They were being thrown around smashed around while they were getting them down there and ropes were breaking and god knows what and what do you do with them when you get there? These are submersible pumps and then they’ve got to get the water up and centrifugal force is only good enough to force on head power up so far and they had to get the water out and they got it out

20:30 and that’s what saved the ship, and when Dick told me that when I was writing this book four odd years ago, I got a cold feeling from the bottom of my backside right to the back of my neck because I froze then because I knew the consequences. She would have blown to pieces, that’s how close and I said, ‘God was on our side that night, he had to be.” But when we got back in, there wasn’t a boat, there wasn’t a thing on that ship that was useable. The paint was stripped off that bloody thing

21:00 and we had that little fuel left in the tanks that if we’d have been out there a few more hours we’d have been just wallowing and that was because a British officer ordered us to sea and the captain never had the guts enough or who wanted the glory of taking a ship and a British ship into a typhoon. You know, shades of Nelson, 1600 soldiers. He’d have got his glory alright.

21:30 Wouldn’t it normally have been considered safer to be in port?

Yes, Yanks didn’t go to port, didn’t go to sea. They had all sorts of ships in there. We had 2000-foot mountains on Sasebo and a typhoon had never entered in the history of Japan. The American navy didn’t go to sea that night and they were putter-puttering about next morning going about things that Yanks do when they’re in their nice little shiny ships and all there, but this configuration of stupidity come in

22:00 one Aussie aircraft carrier, one beat up Canadian destroyer, one beat up bloody Dutchman, nearly sank the two of them. At one stage of the game one of the blokes said Van Galen’s gone, she’s gone, saw her turn turtle. She turned alright, but she came back again but she was ordered immediately by the Americans, had nothing to do with the British navy or that or the Dutch navy or United Nations, the Yanks ordered her immediately to go into dry dock. They

22:30 cleared out God knows what to get her in there and they said, “She’s in too bad a damage, she has to go to Hong Kong now for immediate repairs.” Sent her to Hong Kong, fixed her up and sent her back to Holland to be scrapped. She was buggered, that’s what the sea did, water, water, compounded water, so that’s it. Anyhow we did that thing and we came back and it took us about a week, which was pretty good because after a day’s work you could go ashore and meet these indigenous people again and have a great old time and get on the grog and after a week we were back

23:00 again. We had aeroplanes repaired and fixed up by the British aircraft carrier Ocean, I think it was, and they fixed them up and there was Japanese welders onboard and they were welding up steel, steel stanchions which were bent like they were pieces of putty and they were welding them up and everything like that and guns were being replaced and this huge big crane was being replaced and these big navy cutters were being replaced and that was

23:30 just all gone and everyone worked with everyone and, as in my book, I said the ship was welded together then the men were welded together. Stokers stuck with stokers, stewards stuck with stewards and seamen stuck with seamen and birdies, which were the non-flyers, they, they were all they were just integrated together but after that it became a ship, a ship’s company, we were mates. We nearly ended up spending eternity together and it might sound

24:00 like I’m sort of over emphasising that, but I’m not. It was a fact of life. I can give you any amount of phone numbers of fellers that were there and they’ll tell you the same damn thing of that night, and they’re men in their ‘70s and ‘80s now, and they all knew they were going to die that night and it had an affect on a lot of people, including myself and for many, many years I had an exceptionally bad dream about a ship rolling over, it was my ship, and it was long before The Poseidon Adventure and

24:30 I was trying to get out of the ship by going down and the others were going up the ladder and it, my first wife thought I was a mental case and I probably was cause I’d wake up in the middle of the night sopping wet like you’d thrown a bucket of water over me screaming, “Out get out, get out!” and she couldn’t control me and she was an ex-nurse and it took a long time and a lot of years before I got out of that one and a lot of medicines and a lot of everything and an American psychologist got me out of it

25:00 up at Nambour and he figured it out for me. He said the reason you were going down is because by going down is where the aircraft, the flight deck was so you were going down to get out. The others were going up to go down and it went, my dream went and that was it. So of all the fellas that night, so many of them had psychiatric problems over that particular night alone, it wasn’t funny. And 25:30 they say to you and Vets’ Affairs [Veterans’ Affairs], who have been absolutely marvellous to me and a lot of other fellers I know, they said, “But it didn’t happen in a war zone,” and it didn’t happen in a war zone, it happened at sea and this is it. Before the navy have to fight an enemy, they have to fight the sea and it’s our biggest enemy is the sea, and it’s not funny and this is why I say, in my own personal opinion that women should never be at sea because the first thing a man will do is go to the rescue of a woman.

26:00 It’s embedded in him, in his brain to rescue them. You will help your mate, but you won’t help him as much as you would for a female so they become a damn nuisance at sea, but they seem to be surviving one way or another. That’s it.

OK, was it a riveted ship?

Yes it was, it was riveted. It was last of the riveted ships. After that they brought in welded ships and welded ships used to twist and rip and they weren’t half as strong

26:30 as they are. The ships of today they’re pretty and they’re fast and they’re everything like that but I wouldn’t give them two bob [shilling] against the old ones. As far as battle damage and things like that, ships of old could take battle damage like no one’s business and the ships of today, they’re just like wet putty you know like just or wet cardboard it’d just go through them real easy but they’re all air conditioned and all the sailors have ear muffs and all the sailors have winter clothing and all the sailors have flotation equipment and the

27:00 then when the ship goes down these life buoys go, or not life buoys, they’re special flotation things go down with the ship to a certain thing and then they explode and come up and then the people get them up top. Getting back to these Carley floats and what I said to you I could get from point A to point B to my escape position, safe and sound, I wasn’t going to miss that Carley float for quids [pounds]. When we did get back to Sydney the dockyard workers there, we went into dry dock, which still had water in it

27:30 and the dockies were told to test the Carley floats and the first three they cut loose hit the water, kept on going. They were too heavy with paint so we had the same chance as a snowball in hell, none because the navy wanted their ships to look nice and sweet and shiny and clean so that was the story of it. So that’s why I wrote my story about Goodbye Tomorrow and it’s there and I was very pleased

28:00 that I could write it to let them know, and there’s a fellow that wrote to me, I didn’t know him, he was onboard, but as I said, I was onboard for three years and my cousin was onboard for 18 months and I never ran into him, never met him, never saw him ‘cause it was too big, but by today’s standards they’re probably got a crew of 5000 and we had 1600 and that was a wartime complement, but this fellow had got a book and he communicated back with me and he said my wife read that story

28:30 and he said the tears were rolling down her cheeks and this is only so long ago and he’s in his early ‘80s and so is she and she said, “Did that really happen?” She said, “He said ‘yes it did’.” “The way that man said it?” she said, “exactly the way that man said it.” She said, “My god,” and he said, “You know what, she took me by the hand and I spent one of the nicest afternoons I have for many a year,” and I laughed like hell about that, but that was it, but I got stories, I’ve

29:00 sent them, those books went to America. I just sent two to Houston in Texas, this young fellow doing stories of the Korean war and everything like that, and somehow he got my name off the archives in Melbourne, in - I beg you pardon - in Canberra, and they gave him a number a through a book agent contacted me by email. He got two books sent to Houston and they went to England, they went to Canada, so

29:30 I’m an international author, so that’s it but that’s the story. That was the story on that typhoon. So anyhow, when we came back we finished up there. We were up there about six months and we came back and we left the place and a lot of good and fond memories and things that we did and didn’t do. We came back and we had leave then, we had our leave. Now we got to Western Australia. We were supposed to meet the Gothic

30:00 off Western Australia to take the Queen onboard, but because some damn thing had happened, I don’t know, we didn’t get to do it but we went down to Western Australia to Perth and we had a great old time over there. They wouldn’t let us buy the beer, they wouldn’t let us buy a damn thing, they were, we were conquering heroes just come back from Korea, at least someone heard about us. But we had things, now this is funny, this is what sailors are all about, or used to be. We used to get these 99 denier stockings off the Americans, nylon. They were finer than gossamer and the women out

30:30 here never saw them. Now we had chewing gum, we had after shave lotion and no men in Australia wore, no good sort of a bloke wore after shave lotion. If you did, you were a bit suss. Anyhow we had after shave lotion, we had these 99 denier nylons, we had Lucky Strikes [American cigarettes], we had every damn thing and boy did we go ashore and trade with the natives, oh did we ever, which was pretty good but we let go and they wouldn’t let us buy

31:00 a thing. We could walk in and out of picture shows, cost us a zac. We thought, “This is the greatest thing going you know.” Walk into a pub get as full as a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK [drunk], cost us nothing, and then the cabbie’d pick us up and take us 40 miles back down to Fremantle for nothing, oh mate, this is what living is all about. Anyhow, we got back to Melbourne and we let off the Melbourne savages as we call them, the natives. Anyhow, we were in this hotel which was predominantly a bit suss for sailors in those days, because these other fellows used to be there,

31:30 but two of them were reporters for the Age. Anyhow, we were talking there and one said, “You people off the Sydney?” “Yeah.” Said, “You know I wrote your obituary?” I said, “What do you mean you wrote our obituary?” Cause we never thought of this. So we were in the Age, in this hotel and he said, “Well we wrote a story and it was headlined HMAS Sydney lost at sea in typhoon, all hands.” “You’re joking!” and that sort of

32:00 sobered us up real quick. He said, “I’m not joking,” and he said, “How long have you got?” We said, “Well, we leave in the morning.” “No, now?” We’re hanging around till the pub shuts. He said, “Good, I’ll be back in 10 minutes,” so he went down and he went down to his newspaper office and brought it out and there it was, The Melbourne Age, big letters, HMAS Sydney lost at sea, all hands, and I froze. I just read my obituary and he looked at me and said, “Didn’t you know about this?” I said, “No.”

32:30 He said, “Would you like that?” and I said, “I’d love it.” And like an idiot I let everyone handle it and touch it and it fell apart – sorriest thing I ever did. I actually read my obituary, and my mate and I, did we read the obituary but that was good. We brought them a beer and that and I tucked up this little newspaper and I went back and everyone was impressed, you know, we were lost at sea. So Harries got on the blower [communication system] and he said, “You men have done a magic job.” Oh ripper Rita [great]

33:00 and all this bit you know…”You know no one’s going to be shifted. You’ll stay onboard the vessel blah, blah, blah.” No sooner said that, and blokes were getting drafted left, right and centre all off the damn thing and I stayed with it. Anyhow, we had our leave and we came back onboard and the navy out of the goodness of its heart did something for us. It was a probably a “thank you very much for being heroes” or something like that. They took us over to Western Australia. “Hey that’s ripper, that’s a good place over there. So we’re going over there?” “Yeah, we’re going over there,” and

33:30 couple of hours before we got to this place called Shark Bay, beautiful, it was like paradise. It was - the sea was bluer than blue, it was lovely and we were called up into the flight deck and the captain said, “Captain here,” he said, “We’re about to do an explode an atomic bomb and you are in close proximity to it.” They never told us we were going there an atomic tests. One hour before that thing went off they told us about it. What the hell can you do in Shark Bay?

34:00 No trams, so we just had to stay there and that, and the Maralinga explosions, there were 11,000 men, there’s less than a thousand alive today and you’re talking to one of them. The rest have died, all have died of multiple cancers and the government, subsequent governments have said, but it never happened in a war zone and if you can prove that this atomic thing has anything any bearing on your cancers

34:30 we will fix it up. They never will and that’s it, so that’s another story. It’s a very sad story which is, you’re talking to a survivor, kid, you really are.

Can you tell me what that experience was like being on deck when that all happened?

It was bloody awesome I can tell you that now. It happened at half past eight on a beautiful West Australian morning. It was so brilliant, it was so bright, it was so beautiful to be alive, it was

35:00 just magic, and they said you are now all standing there who weren’t supposed, or who were supposed to be on duty were there down below, but we were all up there. We were in shorts, short socks, boots, navy cap, shirt, that’s all we had on, nothing. We were less than a hundred kilometres from an atomic bomb when it went off, less, and they said, “Right, 10, nine…” on the thing of one turn your backs,

35:30 and, “two, one, turn your backs,” and everything went black, went dark, night. How the hell can you be in daylight then night, night at the same time, and it went dark, then all of a sudden daylight come up like that. It just was the most awesome bloody thing going and we were looking at it and there’s this bloody cloud coming up like that, up, up, up and away. It was inside a ship called HMS [His/Her Majesty’s ship] Plym.

36:00 They brought her from England, sailed her from England with the atomic bomb built into it, the Plym and the moment of explosion the ship vaporised off the face of the earth, vaporised. Today there’s a crater underneath where the Plym was 80, 90 feet wide by about 40, 50 feet deep still there today. Everything around that place is still hot to this very day. That happened in

36:30 1952, it’s still hot. Shells are mutated, fish are infected, they’re mutations. A fish has one head two bodies or one body, three heads or it’s just strange place and yet people still walk ashore there, unbelievable. They never told us a damn thing about that. I had a fellow there he was a lieutenant, Lieutenant Martin, he was my divisional officer and years later he rose to become admiral of the fleet

37:00 and he also rose to become the Governor of New South Wales, and I heard that my divisional officer who was standing about 10, 15 feet from me was dying and there was no way about it, he had multiple cancers and I wrote to him and I wished him well and I used an old sailor’s expression, ‘I’ll see you at division, Sir’, and that’s all I could say. Now ‘seeing that division’ is meeting all the sailors and that’s when the sea gives up the dead 37:30 and all sailors meet. Anyhow, and he wrote back and he said that he was a very sick man and he said, “Sticks, I really don’t remember you but thank you very much for your kind comments,” and everything like that. This was on a heading from Government House. I have it here with the government seal on it and everything like that, next week he died, the Governor of New South Wales. He was my divisional officer. He was standing about six to eight feet away from me. He had cancers, cancers, and he so far is the only serving serviceman who has been paid any

38:00 compensation by the Australian government for the atomic thingo. I’m a member of the Atomic Ex Serviceman’s Association. I’m one of the very few that’s left. As I said, there’s less than a thousand of us left out of 11,000, and not one of them got hit by a bus. They all died of cancers. Not one, multiple, that’s it, that’s the way the cookie crumbles, but that’s the way governments and things, they do things

38:30 to you. First of all, they nearly froze us to death in Korea, and they nearly cooked us off the Monte Bellos, but they didn’t get a lot of us ‘cause we’re still tearing around and still full of great ideas. So that’s it, so we came back from the Monte Bellos and we went about our business and went about being sailors and things and I’d been onboard the ship and then all of a sudden the coronation in England and Bob’s your uncle, and we’re going, the Sydney’s going, you little ripper. 11 o’clock this morning we’re due to drop and get out the harbour

39:00 and we’re going to go down to Melbourne pick up fuel and then choof off, ripper. Never been to England before and I wanted to see what these Poms are all about. Five past 11, I get Able Seaman lay [promoted to Able Seaman] after the Master at Arms’ office and I get down there and I knew the Master at Arms and I said, “Master what’s your problem?” He said, “I’ve got none but you have.” “Well what have I done?” ‘Cause sailors always think they’ve done something, see, and he said, I said, “What have I done?” He said, “You’ve done nothing but you’ve got 10 minutes to get off the ship.” I said, “What the hell for?” He said, “You’re on draft.” I said, “Where to?” He said, “The Platypus,

39:30 that one up there.” I said, “But we’re going to England.” He said, “We are, you’re not.” And I found out there was a fellow from drafting office. This is the fella that works in the office that drafts sailors all round wherever. He’d never been to sea in his life, he’d been in the navy 12 years and he paid money to go and my name came out the hat, and like Mr McGowan, I was going to knock his block off when I met him and I did meet him

40:00 and I was that disgusted with him, even then I never did a thing. I just told him a few well chosen Australian words and walked away ‘cause he brought my berth, ‘cause they went to England, they went all over Europe, they went all over the place and come back through Canada, America, Honolulu, Pearl Harbour and back to Australia. Geez, and I declared war on the navy then. I thought, “Well, this is what you do to me pal,” so I, they made me a Chief and Petty Officer’s Mess man onboard the Platypus. Now the Platypus was a funny old ship,

40:30 it was a ship that was made I believed it was a captured German vessel of the First World War, but I’m not too sure about that, but I know one half of it was a seagoing vessel and the other half was a depot and guess where the officers lived? They lived in the seagoing section of the ship because they could get duty free cigarettes and grog, but the sailors lived on a depot which was still part of the same ship and that’s true, fact of life, but I did not like being a steward for anyone. I’m nobody’s servant and I declared

41:00 war right there and then, and I, but the Chief Petty Officers were pretty good and they said, “Sticks, where do you want to go.” I said, “I don’t give a damn,” but I know a sheila in Melbourne. “Good you, want to go to Lonsdale?” Said, “I’ll go anywhere,” so anyhow we concocted a story about how my grandmother was pregnant and dying or something, those silly old stories that sailors concoct. First one got knocked back ‘cause the captain said, “How long you been onboard?” and I said, “About four weeks, sir.” He said, “Well, you’ve got to be onboard six months,” he

41:30 said, “but these extenuating circumstances, if they’re any worse,” he said,” the navy’ll have to see what they can do.” So I did. We got the chiefs and petty officers got their heads together, I was their steward, and I used to sit down there with them in their mess and we concocted greatest lot of bloody lies you ever heard in your life. Anyhow, we put it up to the captain. I thought he was going to cry, he was an old feller from the Second World War and he said, “Granted.” He said, “HMAS Lonsdale, three months,” and I was there for two years. Greatest perk going.

Tape 4

00:33 At Lonsdale, it was a transit depot for the navy in Port Melbourne. It was a very famous place. It was named after a very famous ship in the First World War, but it was a transit depot and it was also a police depot, naval shore patrol. My job down there was attached to the I was Able Seaman attached to the naval shore patrol.

01:00 It was a great job because we used to go up to the line, or up to Melbourne of a Friday night to help control the young sailors coming from the naval depot and they used to try and stow grog down their socks and held over covered by their bell bottoms and tucked into all places, and we used to find it on them all the time and they couldn’t understand why we were so damn clever, ‘cause we used to do the same thing when we were recruits. But anyway, we used to confiscate the stuff off them and tell them that next time that we’d whack them in 01:30 the paddy wagon and, “What are you going to do with the grog, Chief?” they’d call us, and we’d say, “Now, don’t you worry about that sonny, but we’ll make sure that it goes to a proper place,” and it did, down to our place. We used to end up with the greatest pile of free grog you ever struck on your life. It was a good job, but anyhow, whilst I was down there I went there for a three-month period and there was a lady I knew down there. As a matter of fact I got married down there, but anyhow I was, one Saturday afternoon

02:00 I was on duty, I was Quarter Master on duty at the main gate and this very irate lady got out of a taxi cab and raced straight up to the sentry box. Now Lonsdale, HMAS Lonsdale was split down the middle by a road right. One side of the road was officers country and the other side was sailors country. Anyhow she was going to charge straight in and I blocked her and I said, “What do you want?” and she said, “Get out of my way, I’m Chief Petty Officer such-and-such’s

02:30 wife and I’m going through and I said, “Lady, I don’t care if you’re the Queen of England, you’re not going nowhere, you just sit here. Who do you want to talk to?” “I want to see Chief Petty Officer so-and- so I’ve got to see him now,” and I said, “Well hang on just a minute, would you mind just going into here,” and there was a little bit of an office off the sentry box and I said, “Just sit here for a moment and I’ll get the chief. Don’t try and get into the depot.” So I got onto the blower and I knew the chief was entertaining that afternoon and not

03:00 all the chiefs and petty officers were onboard, so I got onto the two way piping system and I said, “Chief Petty Officer such-and-such, mayday, mayday, mayday main gate.” Anyhow I hoped that he could understand what I was trying to tell him. She said, “Have you called him?” I said, “I have called him he should be here in a moment,” and within a couple of moments here he is coming around the side from where the Chief Petty Officers were, coming up the thing where I was, hastily tucking shirt into pants and

03:30 whacking on coat and cap and he said, “What’s the matter, what’s the matter” I said, “Your cheese and kisses [rhyming slang for ‘missus’/wife] are here mate and she’s in there.” Well soon as he walked in there it was like, so anyhow, he turned up and “what’s the matter?” I said, “Well your cheese and kisses are sitting in the office there and you’d better go in there Chief.” So in he went and you know it was pretty, you know, hard on there for a minute and so it all sort of calmed down and then next thing arm in arm they went round and he said they’ll,

04:00 “I’ll be in my quarters A B,” and I said, “Very good Chief,” and they disappeared out into Chief Petty Officer’s country. Anyhow, about an hour later they come out arm in arm, all smiles and everything like that. I had to call a cab for him and away she went and he come up to me - and I didn’t know this man at all - and he come up to me and he said, “Able Seaman Middleton,” he said, “You’ve just saved my bacon,” and he said, “I am the Chief Transport Officer in this man’s navy

04:30 and I can send you anywhere that you so desire to go,” and I said, “Are you fair dinkum?” and he said, “How would you like to go anywhere in this man’s navy?” and I said, “How about HMAS Commonwealth in Kure Japan,” and he said, “Why not?” Now I’d like to reiterate on this, HMAS Commonwealth was the depot in Japan for the Korean war and at that particular time it was considered when sailors went there, that they had died and gone to heaven

05:00 because they had two Japanese ladies looking after them. One was a wash girl and one was a house girl, and they tended their all, all their needs and it was an absolute fabulous place for a sailor to end up in, and I said, “HMAS Commonwealth,” and he said, “You’re on your way.” I didn’t think any more of this because sailors do tend to tell fibs at times, especially senior ones. Anyhow, within a week I got mail, it was given to me and it came through the Master at Arms, and he said, “Read this,”

05:30 and I read it and it read, “Signal Navy Office Melbourne: Able Seaman Middleton appropriate to read HMAS Commonwealth forthwith.” I had my tickets, my booking on a trans-continental aircraft, I forget the name of the thing, it’s a super constellation, from Melbourne, Sydney, Darwin, Singapore, Jakarta, Japan

06:00 and I was going in two days’ time. Well, you couldn’t have had a happier feller in the Royal Australian Navy than my little old self and I had all my gear packed on this day we’re going, and I just - going out the gate I got a duty car and we’re going to Essendon Airport and the master at arms stepped out on his little balcony to wish me well and the phone rang, he said, “Just hold driver.” Anyhow I said, “What the hell, get going.” He said, “No,” he said, “Hold it,” so he came out and he said, “Sticks,” the Master at Arms said, “Sticks, want the good news or the bad news?” and I said,

06:30 “I don’t know, lay the bad news on me first.” He said, “Well you’re not going to Commonwealth,” and I said, “Why not?” He said, “Because they shut the place down this week, but,” he said, “you are going to Tarangau.” I said, “You’re joking.” He said, “No,” he said “so back her up driver and you’ll be on your way next week.” And I was, and HMAS Tarangau was virtually a punishment island for bad navy guys, but it was also a refuelling stop for

07:00 navy ships. They came in for water and stores and fuel and everything like that, but it was a punishment draft because they sent you up there for 12 months and there was nowhere to go, was no pubs, was no towns, there was nothing, just a naval depot and a married quarters, which you, fear of death you kept out of, so that was it so up I went to Manus Island. I’m not impressed, because it’s right on the equator, Manus, so I get there

07:30 I get there on Christmas Eve, 1954 and I thought it was the most shocking place I ever struck in my life. It was that stinking hot, and I got there at about 10 o’clock at night, was stinking hot, tropical, smelt like rotten vegetation, which it was, so I promptly drank myself stupid on South Pacific beer, which was the most shocking stuff I ever drank in my life, and next day I found out I had a job. A friend of mine was going south and

08:00 he was a native labour officer, and he said, “Sticks, all you have to do is go down there and send the natives to work,” and I said, “Well, how do you do that? I can’t talk pidgin English,” and he said, “Well, you’ll soon learn.” So next morning we went down there at half past five, we went down to the compound, which subsequently was the place they kept the Japanese prisoners of the war before they hung them out in the bottle dump, that’s where the bad guys were, that’s where they ended up. Anyhow, I went down there at half past five the

08:30 bell was rung, or fighting bellow, as they say in New Guinea, and Bill got out there and he said things that I’d never heard in my life and everyone seemed to understand him except me, and away he went and he turned to me and he shook my hand and he said, “You are now the native labour officer of Manus Island and Lieutenant Godson or Poppa Godson’s your boss, Tom Cowan is the chief petty officer, Incheon Tom cause we reckon he started the Korean war and Bill Perkins,

09:00 Polly Perkins and he’s the bloke in the office so you’re it.” So next morning I went down, which I thought was rather weird. I had to talk to 380 natives and I couldn’t say a word in Pidgin English and I said, “Righto, OK, line up and they all seemed to form up anyway, which I thought was pretty encouraging for me,” and I said, “OK well you can get about doing, what you’re doing,” and some of them sort of looked and giggled and went on and this boss boy come up to me and

09:30 he said, “You not got savvy long talk Pidgin,” and I said, “Nuga?” I said. No, I didn’t say that because I couldn’t say it then. I said, “No, I can’t,” and he said, “OK, name belong gegaso, name belong your name?” I said, “Master Sticks,” and he said, “OK Master Sticks, me talk pidgin, you talk English to me.” I said, “OK,” so he taught me pidgin so that was 1955 and to this very day I can talk pidgin fluently, I’ve never forgotten it. It was a good job. I

10:00 didn’t really mix with the sailors on the island because my job was the natives, and the natives was a full time job. You had to stop them fighting, you had to stop them chewing beetle nut, which was a narcotic, you had to keep them moving around, you had to stop them thieving things. They came from various tribes and places all over New Guinea. There’s 600 different languages in New Guinea and 600 different tribes of people and the, it really

10:30 hasn’t changed that much, and apart from the time when I nearly had my head cut off by a native with a bush knife, it was really good and that was brought about because there was big sickness in their, I think it was chickenpox or something and the navy weren’t letting them go back to their place where they came from, and the natives didn’t like this because they’d been working there for 12 months and they’d they used to get a quid a month, a pound a month and they had

11:00 12 quid to spend and they wanted to go home. It was a lot of money in those days and especially a lot of money for a native, and of course being out on the big line I was 10 miles away from any white man surrounded by a hundred natives and they all had bush knives or parangs [machete] or whatever the heck you call them and they were all pretty sharp and I was, they were sort of a bit slack this day, the group, and they didn’t want to work and of course I told them to in pidgin in

11:30 strong words that they had to get, get cracking and one stood there in front of me, six feet from me and he said, “Me rous ‘im head belong you,” I’m going to cut your head off, and I told him not to be so damn stupid and he was fair dinkum and I was a little bit out numbered. I mean, a hundred to one you know is a bit much. 50 to one I could handle, but not a hundred. Anyhow, I didn’t take my eyes off him because you can’t take your eyes off a native. Like a native or a mad dog

12:00 you take your eyes of them and you’re gone so I kept my eyes on him and I just said, “Bush knife,” and someone put a bush knife in my hand and I just put it in front of him and I said, “You rous them head belong me? Me rous them head belong you something belong you,” which means “you take my head I’ll get yours, now that’s up to you” and then I called for the number one boss boy, who was a big Sepik, a big feller Peter, he was number one and he got a Military Medal for killing five Japanese bare handed,

12:30 he choked every one of them ‘cause he’d just come in from his, come in to his village during the war and found out his mother, his wife, his sister and all the children had been raped and killed by these Japanese soldiers and Peter went berserk and he killed every one of them bare handed and they were armed, and for that he got a Military Medal and when I asked Peter to help me to arrest this bloke he wouldn’t do it. Being the number one boss boy he can’t refuse, but he did because he was sympathetic towards them

13:00 so I was in a predicament. I’ve got the foreman of the group won’t be in it, so I got the second foreman which was Garso who was a Finschhafen, and I said, “Garso,” and I talked to him in pidgin and I said, “Get someone quick time, fast, to get from here to the compound to the police barracks,” this is native police, and “get the sergeant of native police and two constables 13:30 with rifles and bullets to get here quick time, chop, chop,” and he said, “How will I do it?” and I said, “Any way you can, but the fastest point between here and there, but move,” and I still stood there with my bush knife pointed at this blokes throat and he stood there with his pointed at me and all the natives had stopped work and they were wondering what this white guy’s gonna do and I couldn’t lose face by sitting down or take my eyes off or do anything. I had to stand there.

14:00 The sweat was pouring out of me both in fear and the heat and I stood my ground. Anyhow, it felt like three weeks later they turned up, but it was within the hour, half hour, they turned up and the police sergeant came in and they, in those days they wore black lap-laps [loincloths] with a red cummerbund around it with a bayonet scabbard and of course they had the 303 and I asked the sergeant, did he have a round in the up the flue

14:30 and he said, “Yes.” He said he had a full clip and I said, “Alright.” I said if one of those natives make one step towards me put a shot over their heads and he said, “OK,” and they did what they were told, the police boys and I said, “Now put that down, put that thingo down,” and he said, “No gad I’m not putting it down,” and I put it right on his nose and I said, “Put it down,” and he said, “No,” and I said, “Sergeant.” He said, “Yes master?” I said, “Shoot him

15:00 quick time,” not him but above you know like I told him and he let off a shot. You’ve never seen 99 natives drop faster than these fellows did and they dropped on the ground like rockets, and this bloke dropped his bush knife and I said to go, so the policemen rushed him and they were taken over to Lorengau and charged in court. He got 12 months for attempting murder on a white man. ‘Cause those days

15:30 things were a lot different to they are now and Peter unfortunately got six months in the boom for not assisting a white officer and he was never, ever to be employed as a boss boy again, ever and I felt sorry about that because he was a good bloke, big, gees he was a big bloke. He was the only bloke I ever saw lift a 44 gallon drum off the ground bare handed. Just lifted it up, it was full of fuel. He lifted it up and I didn’t believe it

16:00 and he was going to put it on the back of a truck and I said, “Put that back down,” and he put it back down and I said, “OK, OK put it back,” and he picked it up and put it on the ute. I didn’t believe him, I didn’t believe anyone could lift a 44 gallon drum, but he could. He had muscles, he was a big boy, but that was just one of the things…but they used to like me. They’d try all sorts of stunts on me. They’d go for walk about in the bush and they’d want to you know relieve themselves and I’d just look at my watch you know and

16:30 they’d be in the bushes looking at me just to see what I was up to like, you know, and I’d yell out “time!” and they’d come back shaking their heads you know, “can’t put anything over this feller”, and course by then I was getting very proficient in pidgin English and I’d been there about eight months. I was pretty good at pidgin. I have a flair for languages. I just like languages. And all of a sudden one day there’s one of our blokes come flying

17:00 through the scrub, through the jungle. He said, “Sticks, you’re wanted over the air force side.” Over at Momote was the, they had the air force had a depot over there too, and I said, “Yeah well that’s real good. How do I get there, walk?” There’s no buses anything you know, like it’s a big naval depot. He said, “No,” he said, “the air force are out on the road now and you’ve got to go over there, there’s some big problem over there with the natives,” and I said, “Well, let them fix it,” and he said, “No, you’ve been told to get there,” so I had to go, so I put the boss boys

17:30 in charge, told them what I wanted to do, walked out into the scrub and there was the air force jeep there and a air force policeman, white fellow, there and I said, “What’s the story?” and he said, “Well our bloke is there and he’s got a situation he can’t handle,” and he was a native labour officer too and but they did things different to us. I don’t know but they just seemed to do it and they had these natives there. They were, I forget the name of them, but they were black, they were midnight black,

18:00 I’ve never seen people like them and they were big blokes. They were every one of them were about six feet and they were cannibals back in the early ‘50s and this is only 1955 and he’d lost control of them and they were yapping and going on and arguing the toss with him and he’s trying to hold them and he, they can’t you know, and he’s got no weapons, no anything see, and, that’s right, I had the police sergeant with me and the corporal and they were armed,

18:30 I forgot to say that. I had them and they went and when I got there the sergeant said to me, “Etambu,” it’s no good, and I said, “No, it’s not,” and I said, “You got one up the spout?” He said, “Yep,” and I said, “Keep it there,” and I told him again, you know, I said, “If I tell you shoot,” I said, “Put one above their heads,” and that was it. So I went out and I said, “What’s the matter sergeant,” to this white air force bloke and he said, “I’ve lost control of them.” He said, “I don’t know what the hell to do with them but I’ve lost control.” Chimbus were the name of them

19:00 and they were really bad news natives, they were, and I said, “What do you want me to do?” He said, “I want you to pull them into gear and tell them what they’ve got to do and go about it.” So I got out there and I said, “OK, OK, who’s the big head?” Now in pidgin English I said this, which I can’t really translate here. I said, “Who’s the big head, who’s the number one, who’s the honcho?” and this big native came out and he said, “Me,” and I said, “Well what’s, what’s going on?” and he said

19:30 they were sick of the way the air force did things. They didn’t like the food and they didn’t like other things and they weren’t going to do anything and I said, “That’s fair enough,” and I said, “Well I don’t like native food and I don’t like native pay, but I’ve got to stay where I am and do what I’m told.” “Well,” he said, “we’re not,” and I said, “What are you going to do about it?” and he said, “We’re going to…” he said something to me. I really didn’t understand and he said something else to them I didn’t understand, but they all started to come towards us and they weren’t there to shake hands and I said, “Sergeant, now!” and he went “boom” and

20:00 even the air force blokes beside me dropped and they got up and this bloke come over to me and I said, “Sergeant,” I said, “Give us your rifle,” and he got the rifle and I got the rifle and just standing there with the rifle just off the ground and this native was about that close to me and I said, “Are you the big wheel, the number one?” He said, “Yeah,” and I said, “You’re not going to do anything that I tell you?” He said, “No.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “You navy.” I said, “Is that right?” and I just let the rifle slip, you know, “boom,” hit him fair in the tail,

20:30 well he jumped, he jumped, the bloody toe burst and blood went everywhere, ‘cause you couldn’t do that today but we got away with it then and of course he’s whimpering around the place and I said, “Now get back into line and,” I said, “if I hear any more trouble out of this compound,” I said, “I’ll come over here from the navy and,” I said, “if you think this sergeant’s rough, I’m going to bring one over that taught him how to do things.” Well a week later, our captain got a letter of thanks from the commodore that said the natives are so good it’s unbelievable,

21:00 they’re very polite, they do their work, they do everything, and the feller with the toe is in the sickbay and his toe’s being fixed up after that unfortunate accident, so that was it. I just dropped the rifle on his toe. It only fell about so far, but a 303 weighs pretty heavy, but it stopped his gallivanting around I’ll tell you. But anyhow, that was it and the things we had to do was there was nothing to do really. Was one funny story there. I used to have to go around, after I got the

21:30 all the fellows working there, was fellows that worked at the chippy’s [carpenter’s] shop, the wood bloke, carpenters and all that, and it was called ‘House Dee Why’ see, so they worked there and someone else worked somewhere else and up at the church it was ‘House God’ right that’s where God goes. So anyhow, they’re building a new church up in the navy section and I just, I used to do my rounds and patrol around there in the jeep and that to see everyone is doing things because a lot of the white fellers were very racist

22:00 in those days and they used to take the mickey out of these blokes and of course these blokes would come out of the jungle and they had very little to do with white man and of course these blokes, they were just stupid and they shouldn’t have been doing these things, it was my job to police it. So as I came out of this new church, this native come flying out the place like he was running a four-minute mile, he was frothing at the mouth and he’s going down the hill like a maniac and I tried to stop him. He wouldn’t listen to me so I raced in. I said,

22:30 “What the hell’s the matter?” and the electrician came out and he said, “He got zapped with a live wire.” I said, “Oh no,” so I got in the jeep and I flew and I’m after him and I’m really choofing and he’s going like a train down this hill and I said, “Pull up! No go, no go,” and he frothed and bubbles going everywhere and I had to wheel him into the this sort of a hill and I got him and I pinned him down and he’s still agitated to hell, and I said, “What name something like what’s going on,” and he said, “God bit me Godi ky ky me.”

23:00 I said, “God didn’t bite you.” He said, “God bit me,” and I said, “God doesn’t bite people.” “Well, God bit me,” he said, and he showed me his hand and he had all burn marks across here and I said, “Well what happened?” He said, “I don’t know but God bit me,” and that’s it. So I got him in the jeep and we’re going back to this church and there’s no way he’s going to go near there, so I stood outside and I said, “Sit!” Like a dog, “Sit!” And I meant it. “I’ll take your tobacco off you.” And they used to get two sticks of this American

23:30 twist. It was the most vile stuff you ever smoked in your life and it’s like tar, congealed tar, and they used to roll it up into newspapers that long and smoke it, and anyhow, he sat there because I was going to take a stick of tobacco off him and that’s half a month’s tobacco ration. I went in and I saw the electrician. I said, “What the hell happened,” and they said, “We warned the boys not to touch any of the electrical stuff because we were running power through it today and he leant against the wall and he got zapped.”

24:00 So this is see, see you can’t see God, they couldn’t see God and they’ve got their religions and everything like that and to come over to white man’s territory and be told about this God that you can’t see. Anyhow, and all of a sudden you’re in this place that belongs to God and all of sudden something gets your hand and bites your hand, that’s God, and as far as he was concerned God bit him and that was it. Well I had to take him back to the compound. He would not go back in that church could not get him near it

24:30 and as far as I know until the day I left that island he was still an atheist, he was going back to his own way of things because he’d have nothing to do with this white God that bites you, especially when you’re building a shrine to him. So that was one of the funny things that happened, but weekends were very boring because there was nothing really to do. I used to patrol the compound to make sure that the natives were OK. They used to make jungle juice out of green coconuts and sugar and raisons and

25:00 it’d blow the head off a Mack truck but they used to drink it and of course they’d get into fights and that but what I’d do, I used to have to go and get, try to, we’d have a navy ship coming in, some war ship coming in for water and fuel. We liked talking to these fellers that had come from south because they’re from the real world, and we were just up here in New Guinea and they wanted to know how we got a job like this because this is like being in paradise, you know, and hula girls and

25:30 you know native girls walking around bare topped and they thought it was heaven, wanted to know how we got there, how they got there. So I conceived this idea if I could get some crabs and crayfish and native fruits and that and go in, I’d sell them to them cause a bit of a commercial mind ticking over. So first of all I had to get someone to go and get the stuff for a start and that wasn’t going to be me so I organised the natives to do it and to do that they don’t volunteer.

26:00 You either have to threaten to take their tobacco off them or they can go out and get fruit or get the crabs and this fish for you on a voluntary basis of course, and if they did that, when you had enough you wouldn’t take the tobacco off them. It was a gentleman’s agreement so they went along with that see. So they used to go diving and get the crabs and everything like that and I’d cook them up or leave them fresh, and their crayfish were a different thing cause they had to go in the reef and do it and we’d get

26:30 fish which were Red Emperor. Now they were beautiful fish and yay long but they’re hard to catch and the only way you could catch them is with expanding bait and expanding bait is about a quarter stick of gelignite and about a minute fuse and you pack it with stuff like bread and that and you wrap it up with some nuts and bolts and you drop it over the side and you get away from there and of course after the minute’s up it goes, and if there’s any Red Emperor around it, which will be because they’ve come in after the burley [bait]

27:00 you get a dozen fish, but you don’t go in there because as soon as that goes off the crocodiles, and I mean crocodiles, these are 20-odd-foot long these fellers, come in to see what this is all about. So you don’t go over there, you send your volunteer natives over with it, so they go in and get the fish and when you see these big shapes coming in, you tap the side of the lakatoi [canoe] and they come up. By that time you’ve got about eight or nine fish, so you hot foot it over to the navy ship and you’ve got,

27:30 you’ve got a pair of just little shorts on and a straw hat and a pair of boots and that’s all you wore and I was as brown, brown as brown could be. I was nearly as brown as the natives and I’d go along and say, “Do you want to buy any fish?” “Yeah, yeah, yeah, ripper,” so you’d sell a fish for 10 bob, that was unheard of ‘cause you could get a fish anywhere in Australia for two bob and we’re selling them for 10 bob. Coconuts, green coconuts, selling anything to these silly looking sailors and they thought it was great. We made a fortune out of them and

28:00 like, one time one of the ships came in and that and we befriended these fellows, we’re in the wet canteen [canteen where alcohol could legally be served] having a great time and we said to them, you know, they were real good blokes and we…I could organise things like that and I said, “How’d you like to go on a picnic tomorrow?” and they said, “Yeah, ripper, where?” and I said, there’s a place around the side there called Mocarang [?] and this is the place where the Yanks had a big landing during the war and there’s about 60, 70 to a hundred of these

28:30 big alligators that’s there, they’re amphibious tanks and they were just run up the beach and that’s where they stayed. You know the guns and everything were still there and pretty rusty and that. We go around there and we could have a picnic. “Yeah ripper,” so everyone’s had quite a few tubes [drinks] so we said, “We’ll walk you back down to your ship.” Now you had to walk out of the wet canteen, down this big long hill about four or five hundred yards to the wharf to their ship. They said, “No, no we’ll be right, we’ll be right,” so I saw my boss

29:00 Poppa Godson and I said, “Can I borrow the jeep today?” He said, “What’s on?” I said, “Well, I’d like to take a few fellers over to the to Mocarang have a bit of a swim around a bit of a picnic,” and I said, “Besides, the boys,” my natives, “had done the jobs that they had to do,” and he said, “No problem.” So I got the jeep and my mate came with me so we went down picked the boys up, was four of them, had the cooks had made us up some nice sandwiches and we had some beer. You could get an issue of beer and we’d knocked off a 20 pound carbon dioxide fire extinguisher.

29:30 You know what that was for? You get the beer and you stick it down neck down into the sand then you hit it with carbon dioxide down there and it freezes the whole area and there’s your refrigerator, but the navy ran out of carbon dioxide fire extinguishers quickly. But anyhow, we went down there and we said, “How did you get on last night?” “Had a terrific time, you blokes have got it made up here. You’re in heaven.” “Yeah? What did you do?” “We had a bit of a swim before we got back onboard.” “You had a bit of a what?”

30:00 “A swim.” “But you couldn’t swim because the swimming pool’s up near the wet canteen.” “No, when we got down near the ship we went for a swim. It’s a full moon.” “Where did you go for a swim?” “Just over here,” and just over here was near these four big - not concert huts - they were huge big refrigerated places to keep all the meats and perishables because, and bodies say someone died they had to be kept in there until they could get them south because

30:30 fresh stuff perishes there within hours because it’s right on the equator. There’s a bit of a bay in there right and in there was about four Japanese ships in any state of, you know, sinking and everything like that and always there’s big crocodiles sunning themselves in the wrecks. Some of these crocodiles 20- odd feet or more, big and I had counted at one stage of the game about 30 of these crocodiles in this area. 31:00 Nobody, but nobody went near this area because that’s where they lived and I had this horrible thought that these idiots might have been swimming in there and as sure as God made little apples, that’s exactly where these idiots were swimming. They came down from the wet canteen, four sailors drunk as skunks, walked down there saw the water, lovely shimmering water in the moonlight, got all their gear off went swimming around, making all the noise, you know wake up the dead, the whole bloody bit, got dressed went back onboard had a good nights sleep and we

31:30 met them next day and I said, “I just want to show you something before we go anywhere.” “What?” “Over here?” “Yeah.” “Is this where it was?” “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” I said, “See those things over there?” “Yeah, bloody crocodiles.” I said, “That’s right, they live there, there’s about a hundred of them in there,” and he went white, whiter than he was, said, “You’re joking,” and I said, “It’s true what they say. God looks after drunks, babies and idiots. You blokes are lucky to be alive.” They went swimming amongst salt water crocodiles.

32:00 So anyhow, when they got over that shock we drove up through the depot, had to see the sentry to tell him what you were doing, where you were going, going to Mocarang, Mocarang and the rules and the laws were in those days if you were having a picnic and there’s grog involved or whatever, but at any stage no one was to go swimming by themselves. You had to be you had to have a lookout. We had no rifles or anything like that but you had to have a lookout just in case something came and of course

32:30 this is after lunch, we’ve all had a jolly old time. Blokes are laying there on the beach sunbaking doing what you normally do when you have a picnic and I decided to go for a swim. Well, I’m about waist high in the water and this bloke’s sitting up on the beach and he’s got a tally and he yelled out, “Hey Sticks.” “What?” I’m a hundred yards off the beach and he said, ‘Can logs go against the water and the tide,” and I said, “No why?” and as I said “why?” it dawned on me.

33:00 By then, everyone’s sitting up on the beach and they reckon that I got up and ran across the water, no joke, and I’ll tell you what, it was pretty frightening at the time but there was a damn crocodile up there. He thought it was a log and it wasn’t a log, it was a crocodile. That’s how cunning these buggers are and it would have got me, that’s the biggest scare ever I got up there, but yeah, they’re big, they’re big. I saw one that they got and this fellow, this man and as I said

33:30 Tarangow was a punishment depot, was an alcoholic and he’d been drummed off many a ship in the navy and this was his last chance to pull himself together or be dishonourably discharged because of alcohol. So anyhow he was on Manus Island and he was threatened with all things so they put him down to what they call the ‘water point’. This is where all this refrigeration was you see, which was very close to the water. So this night apparently at about one o’clock in the morning and the

34:00 Melata [?], which was a Burns Philp ship, had just come in two days before and unloaded all the stores and we used to get restored every six weeks you know fresh meats and whatever. Anyhow, it was all in this refrigerated space and about one o’clock in the morning, no, it was earlier than that, had to be, yeah, it must have been about midnight, but anyhow he gets a phone call, “Quick get down here for god’s sake, there’s a monster crocodile walking through the refrigeration base,” and they thought, “Oh he’s off again, he’s on the grog you know.”

34:30 For a start crocodiles, will not come into a well lit area like that, not really, but because of the fresh meat and the smell of the fresh meat, this feller was looking for it. He was a big bull crocodile, so anyhow he thought, “Go away, wake up, dry up, go away,” you know and hung up on him and about 10 minutes later, “Get here, get here for god’s sake,” and he’s going off at the mouth and he’s had enough of this so he rang the officer of the watch. Now, officers of the watch

35:00 on tropical islands do not like being woken at midnight so he told him what the story was and he said, “Not him again.” He said, “Alright,” he said, “well what do you think?” He said, “Well get the PO [petty officer] of the watch,” they got the PO of the Watch and the PO of the Watch come over and he said, “I don’t know,” he said, “but he’s had it this time, he’s going south but,” he said, “just bring a rifle and a clip, a full clip,” which is five bullets, “303, just in case and down they went and here he’s got a little, a box you know these boxes and all the gear goes in it and you stand there and do what you’ve got to do

35:30 and there was no, oh he had a chair and that and here he was sort of balanced on his chest with his feet up the wall talking on the phone and here’s this big bull crocodile walking through the, walking through the refrigeration place and this joker’s hanging five up there. This is fair dinkum, honest to god, and they…it took a full clip, a .303 in its head to get him this crocodile, he was a big bugger, so and he went south anyway. He flipped his cork, poor bugger, he really flipped his cork so I think he sobered up too.

36:00 But anyhow they shot the crocodile and they dragged it out next morning and they had to get it out and they couldn’t bury it because they had to take it out to sea and they brought this big GMC [General Motors Corporation] truck in, they’re big, big, huge tank recovery trucks and they’ve got this big boom on the back, and lifting this fellow it bent the boom. His head was three, four foot from the rest of his shoulders.

36:30 They estimated he was about 22 foot long and he bent the boom on this thing, on a recovery GMC. They dragged him down to the water and they had a work boat, a work boat. Now this thing’s about 30, 40 foot long work boat, Graham Marine diesel engine in it, pretty powerful. They used it for pushing ships around and doing all sorts of things. They hooked it on to that and they pulled the bollet off the back cause he was too big to tow so they had to get two work boats and tow him out, so they towed him right out and left him right out

37:00 about two miles out and left him there, But he was an enormous big feller. I’ve never, ever forgotten that story and I’ve never, I don’t know where this feller is or if he’s still alive, but he might have gone got on the grog again, but by god I don’t think he drank much after that night. He was, he was frantic with fear but this, he had every reason to be frantic with fear because this crocodile was there he was fair dinkum. He was after, he was after meat and this feller was moving meat, so that’s it but anyhow we came south

37:30 and when the time was up, 12 months was up and nothing else happened untoward. It was just a normal routine place. All I know was you’d throw a pawpaw out the window and what was left of it, and the seeds, and you’d be eating fruit off it in three months’ time, that’s how quick things grew up there in the jungle, and apart from the South Pacific beer which is the most vile stuff - it could take paint off a battle ship, that’s how crook it was and I really mean that. It was shocking stuff and I don’t know if they still make it

38:00 but they had to improve on it - but we were up there for 365 days and of course when we came south, when you’re going south, you’d be going around and you wouldn’t say you know, “G’day Fred.” You’d say, “How long?” “274 days three hours and twenty-two minutes left,” ‘cause you had it down to pat when you were leaving, and of course the night before you go south, your mates get you and they collectively pour grog into you. Your gear and

38:30 everything they, you have your shower, you get into your uniform because you’re going back to the real world, because you can’t move and have a shower and everything next morning, believe me, you’re too sick. So you’re booted and spurred, you’re packed, your gear’s packed and you’ve done all the routine of getting out of a depot into another one and you just wait to sort of sober up and the sentry comes round and wakes you up, puts you on a jeep half past four in the morning, take you out to Mokarang, to the Air Force place at Memoti then put you on the aeroplane

39:00 and you don’t really wake up until you get near Townsville and then when you land you’re that dry you’ll drink even water and when we, when we came there at Garbet we got out there was three of us and all in the same condition, we were dying. And first thing we did was go to a milk bar and you’ve seen these big macho blokes go in and sort of line them up, you know, “I want six whiskies just line them up.” We lined up milk jugs, just line them up and “zoonk, zoonk, zoonk, zoonk.” Within 12 months we hadn’t tasted fresh milk and we were only

39:30 kids and we were still attached to the bottle so we got onto that and we got back in the real world then, and catching up at times, blokes and things you hadn’t seen in 12 months and all that, but course then course I’d had a daughter by then and she was only a couple of months old if she was that and I came south to that, but fun times, but I got to, I got to the stage in the navy and I had some personal problems

40:00 and my time came up, and of course this lady was, she was sort of playing up terribly bad and I had to sort of split the connection, and I was just about divorced and I met this other lady, and she seemed pretty good and I got to six years six months and one day, and they said, “Well, what are you going to do? Are you going to sign on in the navy or what?” and I said, “Well, give us 24 hours and I’ll think about it,” and I told her about it and she said, “Well you’ve got a choice, me or the navy,”

40:30 and I made the wrong choice ‘cause I could have been in charge of something by now if I’d have stayed in the navy, but I mentioned six years six months and one day. I joined for six years. Because I was a boy, I was not a man until I was 18 in the, you’re not a man until you’re 18. All of a sudden when you’re 18, you’re a man and so I had six months to go from time I joined until I became 18 and because at that time in the navy

41:00 there was a lot of trouble, there was bodgies and widgies and fights and gear and going on in the ‘50s and Bumper Farrell was the copper that had organised getting rid of all the widgies and the bodgies and the police commissioner didn’t care how he did it as long as he didn’t kill anyone, and they were rough times, and of course sailors were getting into more strife than Ginger Meggs, and they lined us up one day when we were going ashore and they said, “Look, there’s too many of you blokes getting into trouble. We want you to come home. This is your home remember,

41:30 come home. If you get inebriated come home and there’ll be no trouble,” and my mate and I had never been into trouble ever, so this night looks like we could have got into a bit of trouble so we decided we go home, so we went home and went up the gangway and the Officer of the Watch was there and he must have had a bad day or something and he said something to me mate and me mate said something to him and we got run in for being drunk. So we had to front the man next morning and we got run in and charged with being drunk and disorderly in Her Majesty’s uniform.

Tape 5

00:31 We so what happened, we saw the officer of the watch that night at about 11 o’clock and we had to see the commander next morning, commander’s report, who took a dim view of the fact that we had disgraced Her Majesty’s uniform, and he promptly lashed us up to an extra day in the navy for disgracing Her Majesty’s uniform, and that is why I did six years, six months and one day, but

01:00 it really was worth it because it was a fun time and I really, really enjoyed the navy and I think at my age now I would still be in the navy if they would let me because I enjoyed it.

Can I just ask why you came home that night, what trouble it was that you decided you’d come back to the ship?

Well yeah, there was a couple of girls involved and a couple of blokes involved and they were bigger than us and we though discretion being the better part of valour, and fact is my mate had a new

01:30 uniform and we didn’t want to mess it up, so we went home but we never went home again. It’s rougher at home than staying ashore, so that’s it, but yeah, well, from Tarangow I came back to Morton and of course I was free and easy and I’d been divorced, and I went to HMAS Morton which was a transit depot in those days. It doesn’t exist anymore

02:00 and it was a big submarine base during the Second World War and for shipping sailors all over, transit depot, and of course I had joined from HMAS Morton in the administration side of it down at Edward Street in the 1950s and here I ended up where I started from, so I went down there and I, they said to me, “Can you drive boats,” and of course I’d been a coxswain

02:30 before and course I could drive anything that was driveable, so they gave me the boats to muck about in and we had a great old time and that. Yeah, I’ll tell you, I was there just on 12 months and we had a great time. We used to take the boats out, the Grey Marine diesels, and we had a great time on the things and there was governors on them, but the stokers knew how to get the governors off the engines and we could go down the river full bore and of course we were navy. Navy

03:00 and water police could do anything so, but there was a funny story that happened at the very end of my time and there was a naval hero called Chesterman, he was a captain and he, he was a hero and he was a great man, but pretty dogmatic. But anyhow I was paying off the next week and water skiing had just sort of come in and my mates and I we were over at Kangaroo Point and Kangaroo Point now is by the cliffs and there’s all

03:30 big, big multi storey buildings over there and god knows what, but in those days it was a naval depot and it was Queensland Navy’s First Depot. They go back in the early 1800s and we were over there, I was watch keeping on a vessel called HMAS Mildura, she was there and we were virtually looking after the establishment and this is where all the water transport was kept. So my mate and I decided this day that we would take the boat down

04:00 to the other side of the Storey Bridge where no one could see us because right across the river from where we were was naval headquarters where NOIC was, Naval Officer In Command, who happened to be this war hero Chesterman. Now he used to sit there at his window and he didn’t miss a trick, so we decided we were going to learn how to water ski, so we went up inside the building and we took a door off and we drilled two holes in the top of the thing and went and got some rope and we made a rope big enough to be knotted

04:30 and go through this and have about 15 feet of rope over the side of the boat but you couldn’t be within sight of the depot, get the other side of Kangaroo Point, so down we went. So I got this other fellow on, he stripped down to a pair of shorts and he got in the water and got onto the door. So we’re all hooked up and ready to go and we bored around the thing and we’re having such a great time. We went under the bridge, round the bridge and I completely forgot myself and of course we’re having a tonne of fun, this navy 40-foot work boat

05:00 towing a sailor up the bloody river on the back of a, on a door. Unbeknown to us, we were spotted by himself, Captain Chesterman NOIC. We, and all of a sudden we stopped, we unshipped everything put it all away, got the door in and went about our business like dutiful naval personnel testing a boat. So we got back and there was a naval dockyard police on. That was his duty, he was partly looking after the gear and he said,

05:30 “I think you’re in strife.” “What for?” “Well, you have a captain’s report in 15 minutes.” “What for?” “Well apparently NOIC saw you guys coming up the river. One of them seemed to be walking on water.” “Oh, is that right?” “Oh god, we are gone.” So we got rid of the door, said to my mate, “Come on, you’d better get in your gear, we’re going over to see NOIC,” and I said, “It’s not a request, we’re going.” So we went, went in there, caps in hand

06:00 we were shepherded into the place and this other fellow came in. He had about another six months in to go and this Captain Chesterman stood there and he bellowed like a scrub bull at us. There were no niceties about it. He reckons of all the up-jumped idiots that he’d ever met in the navy, we were two that took the cake, we were stupidity personified. For doing what we did, not only had we let the navy down, we’d shown everyone for a hundred miles

06:30 around us how stupid the navy can be and he was going to throw the book at us so far that if we happened to go down to Herd Island, which was down the Antarctic, they would know about it because of our stupidity. “What have you got to say for that?” and me mate says, “Well, I don’t know,” and he said, “Right you,” and he gave him something and he said, “Well how about you?” I said, “Well there’s not much you can do about it,” and he said, “I beg your pardon, how dare you speak to me like that and why can’t I do something about it?” I said, “Because this is Friday sir, and I’m paying off on Monday.”

07:00 Get out of my office, get out of here, get out and be a civilian, don’t come anywhere near the navy again as long as you live and with that I just walked away and thank god for that, he was in a good mood because they could have made me stay in the navy and lashed me up to six months. We were mucking around, we’d knocked a navy door off, bored holes in it and made a water ski out of it, which I, we thought was pretty good but the navy didn’t,

07:30 but anyhow, I left on the Monday but one of my hang-ups was with the navy and of course now today they give you a garden party and god knows what when you’re leaving, but I had a hang up about this. I’d been six years, six months and one day in the navy and when I left I had to go round to the other part of the depot, which was right next to the morgue, which is a good place for a naval depot, but anyhow I went round there and did all my paperwork and everything like that and course the officers there weren’t terribly

08:00 nice towards me because I’d upset Captain Chesterman, and of course once you upset a captain it goes down in rank until it hits the bottom rung and they only wanted me off the premises. They read my rights, which said that I could be in a naval uniform for 24 hours and after that I was caught in naval uniform I could be charged for impersonating a naval personnel, and I thought to myself, “There’s no way in the world I’m going to be in this uniform any more than one hour after I get out of here.” But the thing that bugged me after all that time in a family

08:30 that virtually thought for you, did everything for you, embraced you, this was your world, for six and a half odd years, you were leaving and there was no trumpets, no band playing, no nothing and this petty officer, when he signed his signature, I was finished with the navy and he said, “Right, on your way out, shut the gate,” and that was me leaving the navy going back into civilian life and you might say the bum fell out the bucket, I was not really impressed

09:00 so I went home, I got out of my uniform for the last time and was a sad time and that was it. Things between my father and I weren’t any better. He’d got older and I’d got older. I’d threatened to knock his block off once to pay him back for all the times that he had caused me pain, but my stepmother had stepped in between us and said to me that I would regret it, myself personally,

09:30 if I ever hit him, and I took her words for wisdom and I never touched him because I had to pluck up courage with a few grogs before I did it anyhow, but vengeance is not something that I play on, I just let it be and I let him walk away and that’s it. But anyhow, I had to get a job and I couldn’t get a job. I everywhere I went I applied for job after job after job, and ‘new Australians’ in those days, or

10:00 immigrants, were getting jobs left, right and centre, and a feller that had come back from Korea with the ability to fix guns wasn’t, you know, qualified to get a job. I tramped wool, Japanese wool buyers would pull wool out of the bales down at Dalgety’s and that and I’d have to jump in the bags with these other fellers for five quid a day. Considering the basic wage was only about nine quid a week, I was getting five quid a day for

10:30 tramping the wool back in, save using a press, and I thought this is very mundane but five quid a day’s not bad and I had a pair of akubra, not akubra, I forget the name of the shoes and they hurt like hell. I brought them with my pay and they hurt like hell and after about three or four days jumping around the lanoline they fell off my feet. They’d spread that much from the lanoline. But I had that job

11:00 for a while. I went round to the RSL [Returned & Services League], the good old RSL look after the old digger I tell you and I went in there. Couldn’t get deferred pay, I couldn’t get a job, couldn’t do anything and they said, “Well, what do you want us to do about it” and I said, “Well, at least get my deferred pay,” and they said, “No, we don’t do things like that. You’ve got to get it yourself.” I said, “How the hell do I get money out of the Commonwealth Government? I don’t know anyone for a start and no one wants to give me my deferred pay,” and I went three months and my father’s patience was getting awfully thin

11:30 and his memory was getting awfully short and he was getting as nasty as he ever used to be, but anyhow all of a sudden one day there was a telegram for me to report to the fire station at Kemp Place because I’d been accepted in for examination, and in I went and I became a fireman and saving damsels in distress and god knows what, but I never did save any. I only got pussy cats and a few other things like that, but it was a good job,

12:00 tonne of, lot of fun. Remember we got pulled up by a motorcycle copper on the Storey Bridge once going to a fire for speeding, and this officer said, “You idiot, you can’t pull us up because we are an emergency vehicle.” He said, “You’re speeding I don’t care,” and he was only a new motorcycle policeman and the call sign for the fire engines in those days for VL4CR, so we got onto VL4CR and they said, “What are you doing calling us? You should be on your way

12:30 to a job.” “We were, we were pulled up by a motorcycle copper for speeding,” and the bloke nearly had a coronary. He said, “You can’t do that,” and we said, “Well do you want to talk to him? He’s standing right beside us, you know,” so we put him on the blower and he said, “Yeah, I pulled him up for speeding,” and he said, “You’re an idiot, I don’t know who are you, you’re an idiot.” He said, “You release that fire engine now or you’ll be a civilian by two o’clock.” Anyhow they got onto the police barracks and they said, “Right, you have to report to the police barracks forthwith.” I bet 13:00 he never, ever pulled up another fire engine going to a fire, ever but that was one thing. There was other things that I learnt. I remember we went to this fire once at West End, it was just before Christmas and it was an old wooden home. The kitchen was detached from the rest of the house like they used to build in the old days. When we got there the place was going end for end. It was really ripping into it because it was a very old house and we did our very best but there was very little you could do about it and it had too much hold by the time we got there.

13:30 We had tonnes of pressure, tonnes of everything, but when we got there I’d be in various places trying to put it out but I ended up in the back section where this used to be kitchen thing was, and in the kitchen was this stove and the stove was all but melted and god knows what. It was a gas stove and a bloke was there with his arm around this woman and she’s crying her heart out and they’d lost everything, all their Christmas presents and the whiskey was exploding and course we were upset about that and

14:00 everything that they owned went. Anyhow I’m trying to pacify them and I’m wet as a shag and I’ve just been fighting fire and I’m just trying to dampen down seeing there was nothing hurting see and he said, “Nothing, absolutely nothing,” and he just give the bloody stove a bit of a kick and the door fell off it and in there was a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK that the woman had put in there, beautifully cooked and that’s what they had, a beautifully cooked WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK . Everything else was gone, gone kaput

14:30 except the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK . Well they both burst out crying but they had a feed, that was more than anything else. But the funny thing about it, the fire’s going like a train, there’s flames ripping through anything and the officer came flying through to me. He said, “Wet this man down, keep wetting him down.” I said, “What the hell for?” He said, “He’s got to read the meter.” I said, “What meter?” He said, “The electric light meter.” I said, “Let the bugger burn.” He said, “No way, he’s got, to the council, got to read the meter,” and we had to keep this bloke wet so he wouldn’t burn while he read the meter so they could send a bill to these

15:00 people, and you know they still do it today, they really do. We thought that was a bit rough, but anyhow that was it, but they were good days and that was Kemp Place up there where I first went on and course things have changed now. We used to race into fires like it was no one’s business. Today, you cannot order a man into a fire. You cannot order him into a fire and if he doesn’t like the order you give him, he can tell you so. Things have really changed from my day

15:30 but I’ve seen some of the firemen down here. They’ve got the very best of equipment. They’ve got all sorts of things, zoot suits, God knows what. We had woollen suits and brass helmets which you used to have to keep polished and god knows what. I remember one time went to another fire down at West End and we’re there and I’m under the house hosing away and there’s fire going everywhere and got blokes outside hosing it from one side and I’m hosing it from under there

16:00 and I’d been there about quarter of an hour and one of the blokes said, “You’d better get out, you’d better get out now.” So I said, “No, it’s pretty good.” “Now get out!” I said, “Why?” He said, “Cause there’s a body cooking above you and I’d been absorbing the water and all the juices from human body all over me.” So they took me outside and they put me into the back of a ute, how undignified and they took me back to the station, my station, and I had to strip naked out in the engine room bay where a couple of fire engines

16:30 were and they had to mop me down with a mop with this special solution on it, like you, because if I had any cuts on me or anything like it septicaemia, but I got a new uniform out of it, that’s the main thing, but that was it but I never forgot that one and I to this very day don’t like pork because human bodies smell like pork when they’re cooking and it’s been a long time since those fires and I still don’t like pork, but that’s it but that’s by the by.

Can you tell me about

17:00 the first body that you came across when you were a young fellow in the fire brigade, that story?

I was a young fireman and this, I’d only been to a couple of fires and this one was a particular nasty one, it was down at down near the airport, I forget the name of the place now, the suburb but it’s a very rich palatial and these two old people living in it were pretty well off, very elderly

17:30 and apparently they’d been living on Scotch and oysters and not much else and the daughter calling on them and that and Daddy had all the money apparently and she was a big, big Queenslander, Ascot, that’s the name of the place, and she was going like a train when we got there it really was. There was three engines involved, three fire engines and one engine, which was ours, was parked about 75/80

18:00 feet away from the house, maybe a bit more and she was bubbling, the paint was bubbling and the tyres were bubbling with the radiated heat coming off it. Anyhow, when we’d sort of got it all fixed up and our lady got somehow she got pulled out but the old bloke couldn’t make it and they came out and this officer was there, this Mr Fradeen, a great old gentleman, he’s long gone now and I’m a young fireman. He said, “Fireman Middleton,” he said, “I want you to get a number four shovel and I want you to go into there into the first bedroom

18:30 and bring the head out,” and I sort of looked at him a bit aghast. “Why?” And he said, “because the head always removes itself from the body in a fire of this heat.” In I went and the ambos were shifting the body out and they wouldn’t have touched the head, so I had to scoop it up on this shovel, trying to avoid looking at it and took it out and the closer I got to that fire engine the more I was going to chunder and I sort of laid the shovel at

19:00 his feet and I’m starting to chunder and he said, “Boy, go round the other edge of the fire engine, other side,” so I did and I let it go and this, father figure man he was, his hand around my shoulders, he said, “Boy,” he said, “the first one’s always the worst one.” He said, “You get used to it after a while,” but I never did and I don’t think anyone would, not a very nice sight, and I remember telling this story to people once when they were eating savouries and they, I wondered how they thought of it.

19:30 Anyhow, fire brigade, yes, anyhow this lady that told me that it was either me or the navy, and I told you I chose the right one, by then I’d married her and I’d left the navy and I was in the fire brigade having a great old time. I loved, loved the fire brigade. It was boys’ toys and things like that and it was great, and I remember one day she told me that I had to,

20:00 the fire brigade wasn’t a nice place for a man to be in and I was getting nowhere and not prestigious from her point of view - that I should strive for something else. So I did, I wrote to Wormald Brothers, which was a big company selling fire equipment, and I wrote, naively, to state that what a great fellow I was as a fireman everything like that and they’d be doing themselves a disservice if they didn’t employ me as a salesman,

20:30 and I didn’t know the first thing about selling a damn thing but I got a very nice letter back from the sales manager just saying that they were pretty full at the moment, crash hot for salesman, but the first opportunity come up I’d have a job, and sure as God made little apples, it happened about a month later and I became a crash hot salesman selling fire equipment for Wormald Brothers so that was it and I was fairly successful at it and I sold to General Motors

21:00 Holden at Acacia Ridge an aluminised asbestos suit because when they dipped the cars of paint and they send them round these big trolleys, gradually as it goes into the oven and it cooks, and it takes 24 hours for this to work, for this car to be painted and done properly, and sometimes these drop off the rails, so they’ve got to shut the whole system down just for a man to go in there and put this hook up so that system can get back again.

21:30 So this aluminised asbestos suit was the bees knees, it was the only thing you could get so you could go in through a little side door, safety door, put the hook back up then get up while the system’s still working and it cost about, for argument’s sake, 3000 quid in those days and they were all hand made and you couldn’t just go and buy one off the shelf. You had to get one hand made, and so I went out there and it took me two months

22:00 to negotiate with them to sell them one, and right I had one up. I couldn’t get one because the company wouldn’t make one so we borrowed a head piece from the air force, we borrowed gloves off the navy, we got the trunk piece off someone else to make a suit. So we put this, we got this bloke out there and all the big wigs were up from south from General Motors Holden and the Fire Brigade were there and everything like this and these cars are going through this system you know and it’s unbearable heat.

22:30 you could cook a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK in a man’s hand in there, that’s how hot they are and they said, “OK, in you go,” so in he went and he’s walking around there and he’s flapping his wings and doing OK, yeah, OK, ‘cause you can’t talk to him, yeah he’s indicating that’s real good and he’s in there and doing all sorts of things. He’s checking things and that and they give him the come out so he come out and they said, “How are you?” He said, “Good,” he said, “bit warm but alright.” He said, “No problem,” he said, “I’m not distressed anything like that whatsoever.” So the chief from New South Wales

23:00 or wherever he was from, Victoria, turned to the purchasing officer and said, “Purchase this piece of equipment.” So he was in the office next door and there’s a glass petition, I’m with the purchasing officer in there and he said, “Oh, that was a good thing,” he said, “we’ve sold that today.” He said, “We’ll need that,” and I said, “Well while you need it now you’ll have to get another one.” “What for? We just brought one. We couldn’t afford another one.” I said, “That’s not a matter of that. What if that bloke goes in there in that suit, falls over, or becomes distressed? How are you going to get him out?” Hell

23:30 so he got out of the office walked around went in there and saw the bloke and the bloke, he scratched his head, I could see him do it and he come in and he said, “Right, you’ve got an order for two.” Up until that stage of the game, and Wormald Brothers had not ever sold one aluminised asbestos suit in Queensland, and I sold two in one afternoon and when I went back to the state manager for then, John Spencer, who’s now dead, he said, “Dick how’d you go?” and I said, “Well, I sold it.” Well he jumped up walked around there come round

24:00 and shook my hand. He said, “You have done well, blah, blah, blah, the company’s proud of you and everything like that,” and he went and sat down and I said, “I’ve got something else to tell you,” and he said, “What is it?” I said, “I sold them two.” Well I was king of the heap that day, I was, and that was it, that was selling. Well, you can either sell or you can’t sell, and apparently I could sell the damn things so that was it. I was quite happy with that. So selling for Wormald Brothers wasn’t,

24:30 you know, wasn’t sort of the bees knees. I wasn’t really wrapped and then I just wanted to go selling other things because I run into a snag and he was a Pommy feller and he didn’t like me getting the accolades that he should be getting because he was a sales manager and he was getting no accolades and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like me and I wasn’t wrapped in him, so I decided to strike out and a bloke said to me, “Ever sold motor car batteries?” I said, “No, I haven’t sold motor car batteries

25:00 at all,” and he said, “Well, I know chloride batteries, I’ve got an opening for a rep, do you want it?” He said, “You travel around you get a company car, the whole bit you know.” I said, “What’s the pay like?” He said, “Pretty good, better than you’re getting now.” So I had to meet this fellow, fellow by the name of Stewart. He’s dead now too and I met him at Toowong RSL, 11 o’clock in the morning, we played a game of snooker, I beat him and he gave me the job, and I lasted nine years nine months with that company

25:30 and they sacked me just before the 10 years because up until that stage of the game they’d never, ever paid long service leave to anyone and at 10 years you have to get it, so nine years nine months I got the chop and it wasn’t long after that legislation was brought in where you couldn’t sack anyone and I was senior company rep. A month before I got the chop I was taken out of for

26:00 best consistent sales over a matter of three years blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s a wonder they didn’t give me a Rolls Royce. Three months later they sacked me for being inefficient and that’s the way the cookie crumbled, but you know you get your ups and downs, so there’s no problems. There’s always another challenge out there. So I left that and I wasn’t terribly impressed, because I thought that was a bit rough and

26:30 I had a son that was in Telecom at the time, and he said to me, “Why don’t you come and work for Telecom?” I said, “Doing what?” I said, “I know nothing technically about things.” He said, “No, get a job. Just get a job anywhere just to get in. Once you’re in, you’re in,” and I said, “Alright, what do you do?” So he hunted around and I could get a job cleaning toilets and emptying rubbish tins in offices and I said, “Yeah, what’s it pay?” and it wasn’t bad money, casual. I didn’t like that work thingos, but I thought, “Well, why

27:00 not? I’m doing nothing now.” So I went in and I got a job with them, just cleaning, around I’m going around cleaning offices, emptying rubbish tins and god knows what, and I walked into this place down, it’s a big multi-storey building now, was where Telecom had a their taxi fleet which they used to have and it was maintained and looked after down there, their own company cars. I walked in and here’s this, I’m cleaning up around there, never been there before and here’s this bloke sitting there at the desk, 10 o’clock in the morning

27:30 feet up on the desk reading the Courier Mail and I’m cleaning up around. “Don’t forget that one,” so I emptied that and I came back put it down. I said, “How do I get a job like you?” He said, “Put in for it.” And I said, “Who do you have to see to put in for it?” He said, “Me.” And I said, “Well, put me in, I’m in.” So he did, he put me in – Charlie, he was an idiot. But anyway, I lasted there a little while and I must have struck gold because one of the big bosses was pretty impressed with me and they gave me

28:00 an opportunity to go into what they call ‘the big line’, which is heavy equipment and god knows what, so I went there and I lasted, I lasted 12 odd years with them and I was made redundant. This was in the start of the redundancy. I used to fill in forms which stated that a piece of article was given to me, and it was an S14 for argument’s sake, so you diddled an S14 in quadruplicate and every department got this, but this stated on the bottom

28:30 ‘no further use’, no, ‘surplus to requirements’ and I got an S14, I become surplus to requirements and it was given to me like a piece of equipment, unbelievable, and at that age I was about 59 year old and who the hell’s going to give a 59 year old Jack-of-all-trades a job, and I couldn’t get one and I used to have to go to the, these

29:00 things with all these drop out kids that really didn’t want jobs, and after I’d been there about three months this real hoity-toity piece, in front of everyone, said to me, “Mr Middleton, you are making no effort to get a job at all and we’re rather disgusted with you.” I said, “Tough teddy.” I said, “Try being 59 and try to get a job,” and that was it. Anyhow, I knew when I was 60, being a returned serviceman I’d get a service pension, which I did,

29:30 so that’s the way the cookie crumbled then, and of course after that other things started going wrong. Being a returned serviceman, I had health problems and they started cutting in then, so that’s the way it goes, so that’s it. So that’s the end of that story, so what else do I do now?

Tell me about how you first came to smoke.

Well, when I was a boy

30:00 in Korea, I was 18, and before I went there I never smoked or drank. In those days, you did what you were told, even at that age, and to smoke a cigarette you’d get knocked to the ground and I just didn’t, but when we went there, we found out that Lord Nuffield from England who was the owner of MG garages and a multi-millionaire, as a tax dodge, gave every Commonwealth Serviceman a hundred cigarettes a week for nothing. That’s

30:30 army, navy and air force. That’s South Africans, Canadians, the Poms, everybody except the Americans, got a hundred cigarettes a week, and all of a sudden you’ve got a hundred cigarettes you don’t have to buy and it’s great. So you’re puffing up big, you’re drinking up big. Drinking was another thing I never did, and of course you go over there you find out you can buy beer at nine cents a bottle, and other things you know, just, it’s a different world for us. So smoking

31:00 became a thing. Tension was a big thing. I’ve often said in mixed company about how we used to get on the grog and get stoned and everything like that, drunk that is, not with narcotics because they weren’t in, in those days. We were under a hell of a lot of tension. We had 11 o’clock curfew in those days. You had to be off the street by 11 o’clock. Course they were still under military rule

31:30 curfew, so you’d get as much grog into you as you can. Bang the tension was that, and I’ve said this before, as was said to me before, “Well, why not?” Because we could be dead tomorrow, which was a fact because we were over there to kill people or to get killed and it’s as simple as that. So subsequently I got hooked on cigarettes. It’s not a thing that you can give up, then you smoked all sorts of cigarettes like Turkish cigarettes

32:00 from the Turks, which are they’re the most shocking thing that was ever invented. They’re oblong cigarettes and I think the camel on the front is the manufacturer to be quite honest, and they are awful. I’ve smoked some awful cigarettes in my time. Even the American twist, give them to the natives, I even tried that out and that is the most shocking, shocking stuff and then I was a fireman for years and of course they only gave us breathing apparatus in case of emergency

32:30 and every fire was an emergency. They didn’t see it in those days. As said to me one time, “Well, if you’re in a lot of smoke, stop breathing.” That was by a fire officer, so how do you do that, how do you do that? So that’s why and subsequently today and this is part of my why I get a service pension from Department of Veterans’ Affairs because my lungs are gone, I’ve only got 70 per cent of them and I can run out of breath just talking

33:00 to you. Now, it doesn’t seem to be, but it happens. That’s about it, that’s all I can say.

I was just wondering if we can go way back now to when you’re a kid growing up. What sort of things did kids in your neighbourhood do?

How far back do you want to go? ‘Cause I can go back to when I was four.

Whatever stories come to mind as far as things you did for fun?

Well, there wasn’t the entertainment that there is now. The movies

33:30 Saturday afternoon were big, big business and you’d get into the pictures for sixpence and I used to get nine pence a week or nine cents a week, so you’d go to the pictures and you’d watch Tom Mix and his horse and Zorro and all that lot who they were very fair dinkum. Tom Mix was the only hero that ever I knew that could fight 20 blokes, wrestle 12 Indians and still keep his hat on, and he fascinated us, and anyone that could do that had to be good.

34:00 But no there wasn’t a lot to do. The war was on. My mother died in 1942, on or about just before Pearl Harbour, I remember that. It was a worrying time for a lot of people. My father was in an essential service, he was an electrician but he had this thing about me not going out anywhere, or nobody coming in, which meant I was virtually isolated in my yard. When Dad

34:30 wasn’t home my sister let me go within close proximity to the place, but never Dad. He in a way had a lot to do with anti-social behaviour of mine, because I didn’t know how to mix with people and the only way I could mix with people as I found out was in the navy on the grog. I had a great time with people but I’m, I may appear to be

35:00 not so much pushy, but open, but I’m not. I’m a fairly conservative sort of a guy, I really am. I can talk to you now, this is no problem. If I go into a room with a lot of people, I’ll be the guy up against the wall in the back just checking the perimeter. I’ve got to get to know someone before I can talk to them. I am shy which a lot of people would say that’s

35:30 a bit of a lie, but I am really shy cause for many, many years I didn’t know how to mix with people because I wasn’t allowed to mix with people and if I attempted to, like I did once, I got the father of a thrashing just for going out to play with kids. So the other kids used to muck about. I, later on, when I got a bit older and harder to control in as much as that it, even to him it must have seemed a little bit odd

36:00 to keep a kid screwed down like that all the time, I was allowed to go out Saturday afternoon with my mates. They all had bikes. I become the fastest runner in town. I used to run everywhere where they could ride a bike and they used to say, “Middo, why don’t you get your old man to buy you a bike,” and I said, “Yeah why not?” He never brought me anything so I said to him one day, when he seemed to be in a very good mood, “Can I get a bike Dad?” and he said, “Course you can.”

36:30 And I thought, “Good God! I can get a bike.” I said, “When can I have it?” He said, “When you’ve saved up enough money to buy it.” Oh, that took the shine off it, and I said, “But I don’t get any money,” and he said, “Well, I’ll tell you this boy, get a job or do something, you know. Save your money up and then you can buy a bike and when you own that bike, no one can ever take that bike off you, it’s your bike and you can do what the heck you like with it.” He did in his own way teach me a lesson, because after 37:00 that I always had enough money to buy it myself and it was always mine, it never belonged to anybody else, but when I did get the bike I, Mr McCallum up the road or up at Ashgrove, and I lived at Ashgrove, too, he gave me a job weighing spuds up and onions in the afternoon after school because my sister worked there, Lorna or my half sister, and he gave me a job weighing spuds up and I did a good job, and he knew the reason I wanted it

37:30 for this bike. This bike was so important and I’d been there weighing up spuds and the idea was for him to keep the money. They were very, very honest, decent, loving people. They were Scots and Mrs McCallum was lovely. Anyhow, he said he’d keep the money for me. I didn’t know how much I had, but anyhow, it turned out that one day he came in and he said, “I want you to see something,” and all these old potato bags were over something and he said, “Just pull them off,” and I pulled them off and

38:00 this bike there and I looked at it and he said, “That’s a bike that you can buy if you want to for 30 bob.” Now I didn’t know there was that much money in the world, 30 bob, three dollars. I didn’t know there was that much money about, and I said, “When, when do I get to the 30 bob,” and he said, “Well, I think after this afternoon you’ve got to the 30 bob.” “Fair dinkum?” “Yeah.” And he said, “It’s your bike,”

38:30 and he did, he wrote out a receipt for me the whole bit you know, and I signed it and I owned a bloody pushbike and I was so wrapped in this, I never even rode it home because it was so special I walked it home. I wouldn’t, I wasn’t game to ride it home and that and I was that’s the first time in my life I had earned and brought something of my own, it was mine, and it was true what Dad said. It was mine and no one could touch it. No one could tell me what the hell

39:00 to do with it, but and I got to thinking about this and then I painted it red. I don’t know why, maybe because I found a tin of red paint, so I painted it red and all the young fellers at the time had names on the front of the motorbikes you know, like ‘Sweet Sue’ or some damn thing, so I thought I’m going to have one too so I figured out, I saw this how they did it, and I went under the house to Dad and I said, “Can I have these,” and he said, “What do you want them for?” and I told him and he said, “Yeah,

39:30 what you, you bugging to buy a couple.” I said, ‘That’s all I want.” “OK.” So he made me a couple of brackets and he cut it out and I put it in there and I called it the ‘Red Terror’, my bike, and then I saw a bell at this bike shop and it was an ingenious thing. You didn’t have to ring it all the time like this other stupid bloody people. It was connected to a piece of string and you attached it on the front and it run on a wheel that run on the rim and when you pull the string it would ring like a fire engine. Maybe that was where I

40:00 got the idea, but anyhow, people used to say to me, “Here comes the bloody Middleton kid, you could hear him coming, dinga, dinga, dinga, dinga, dinga, all the way down the hill.” I loved that bike, I really did, and it was about, I had it for years and I had it up until I think about 12 months before I went into the navy and then I was passing Morgan and Whackers one time there and I saw this bike, it was a rally, an English rally and it cost about 10 quid. Now 10 quid was

40:30 a lot of money, but a rally was a beautiful pushbike, so I went in and I took my bike in because I didn’t trust anyone in Brisbane. If you leave it outside it’d get knocked off, so I took it in to Morgan and Whackers and the bloke said, “You can leave that outside.” I said, “No, where it goes, I go” type of thing you know, and I said, “I want to buy that bike.” Oh you know I was a cash customer, I wanted to buy that bike. “How much?” “10 quid.” And I had about 12 quid on me and I said, “Alright,” and I said,

41:00 “What am I going to do with my bike?” and he said, “Well, I’ll give you a trade-in.” Never heard of a trade-in before. I think he gave me a quid for it or something, which wasn’t bad because it only cost me 30 bob in the first place. So I had this rally and I rode this thing home. Well, it was the flashest thing in town. The kids used to come from two streets round just to have a look at my rally. This was an imported English pushbike. Oh, it was Mickey Mouse [cool] and when I joined the navy I gave it to the little kid next door ‘cause he never had a bike, so I give it to him, so

41:30 that was it. So that was the story about my bike and that started off smoking and drinking and riding pushbikes and all that, so that’s that.

Tape 6

00:31 So when you got your bike did you keep working then, or was that it?

No, I worked from the time when I got back from the country stints, I worked all over the place. I worked for ESCA which was a big electrical supply company. I was delivery boy with a little basket on the front of my bike and I used to fly around Brisbane haunting cars and taxi drivers and I had a great old time, and then I went I decided that, no, I wasn’t

01:00 getting anywhere being a delivery boy and I decided that I was going to get a trade because my father said the only people worth anything are tradesman, so I decided to get a trade and I was not going to be an electrician like he was. There’s no way in hell I was going to be an electrician. I’ll be anything but electrician, so somehow I got talked into going over to see this fellow who was on the south side of Brisbane near the Mater Hospital and he had a sheet metal work so he put me on as an apprentice. So 01:30 I was a sheet metal apprentice there and I got a scar somewhere in the first week I was there, nearly took my damn finger off because of the, the sheet metal is so sharp it’s not funny, but he got a contract one time for making these motorbike mufflers and he wasn’t a man of, who went into great lengths when he was explaining something to you. 40 percent was what he’d tell you and 60 percent you had to work out for yourself, which was pretty fair for him

02:00 but pretty crook for you if you didn’t know what the heck he was talking about. So we had a hundred of these mufflers that had to go down to this place to be nickel plated, which was fair enough, and I had to take them down on this with this big basket. I could, think I could get about 20/30 at a time. Now you would think the man would hire something else, but no, just send the boy down, which was fair enough so he sent me down and I made five trips to this place. At first the bloke didn’t know what the hell I was talking about

02:30 but when I said there was a hundred of them he was quite happy about it, you know, and the price that he talked about wasn’t the price that my boss said it was going to be, but I was most adamant with this fellow that this is what my boss said and if my boss said this was the price, that was it. So this bloke said, “Alright, he’d do the hundred at that price.” Well, when I got back and I told my boss, you know what he did? And he said, well that’s strange, because that was his price and I agreed with it anyhow, and everything seemed strange, and he said, “Where’d you go?” I said, “Down to the nickel plating shop that you told me to go to.”

03:00 But it wasn’t the nickel plating shop that he meant, it was somewhere else and this fellow got a hundred off the cuff and didn’t know where the hell it come from and of course this fellow considered me not terribly bright up top and he dispensed with my services as an apprentice. So I came home and I told my father that I don’t think being an apprentice was such a crash hot job anyhow, so, and that was sort of when I cut my finger and that sort of really put the kybosh on it. I thought, well, I’m not going to get mutilated being an apprentice,

03:30 I’d rather do something else, so I did some more delivery work and then my sister, my half-sister Lorna started learning music and she could really sing. She had the most beautiful voice going, Lorna. She was a, I can’t even say the word, a col…, she had a deep female voice and she beat, and this is a fact, it’s recorded history, she beat Joan Sutherland three years in a row for

04:00 champion of champions at the Mobil quest that used to be run on the Mobil hour of a Sunday night. Joan Sutherland could never beat my sister singing and Joan Sutherland hated her for it, but my sister got a goitre unfortunately and she couldn’t sing anymore, and then of course Joan Sutherland went on to become Joan Sutherland, but when Lorna was doing this, this singing business and that, and I was learning German off him, off her because she was learning German to sing German operas

04:30 and god knows what, as a young fellow and not being able to get out and play with the rest of the world and I used to make my own amusement, I used to imitate birds and things like this, and I could bring willy wagtails out of the trees and god knows what and make noises like motorbikes, and so Australia’s Amateur Hour’s on and Dick Fair was running it at the time and someone, my then mate said to me, “Why don’t you have a go at this?” So I rung them up and I said I was pretty good, god I must have been,

05:00 I must have been naïve. I told them I was pretty crash hot and I was going to win it. Anyhow ,and Marshall Palmer was the fellow over at the picture theatre at Stones Corner. He was the Queensland booking agent and I rang him up and told him that, and he said, “Well yes,” he said, “we’ve got an act drop out and how’d you like to go on this Thursday night.” And he said, What’d you do?” I said, “I’m a mimic.” He said, “And what does that entail?” I said, “Well, I imitate

05:30 sounds of cars, bikes, birds and all sorts of things,” and he said, “Alright, I’ll book you.” So I got a letter from Australia’s Amateur Hour which said that I was going to be on Thursday night in the City Hall Brisbane, be there at a given time. And of course this was a nationally heard show. It was heard everywhere and on Thursday night mums and dads stopped everything to listen to Australia’s Amateur Hour and I fronted up. Told my father and he said, “You’re not going to get anywhere, you’re too bloody stupid to do that. You’re not going to get anywhere, don’t worry about it

06:00 you shouldn’t even go,” but anyhow I was taken along and I went, and of course me mates went with me, by then I had a few mates, and I went in there and of course the next week you hear how you went, so my sister had been on the week before and Lorna came second, which I thought was pretty crash hot, so I did my little thing in front of all these people at the City Hall, which was great, really great. Anyhow next week it come up and I won the damn thing, Australia’s Amateur Hour, and

06:30 I got bookings to go all over the place and my father was very annoyed with me because the first booking I got was Prince Edward Theatre in Sydney, matinees Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday with a night show, and for that I got 10 pound, 10 pound for the week. I got flown to Sydney, I stayed at this flasho hotel and got flown back and my

07:00 father confiscated the money because he was only getting six pound 10 a week and kids my age shouldn’t be getting that money. Anyhow, so he took the money off me. But anyhow, that was life. So I did that, and I, I’ve had a go at a lot of things and I’ve enjoyed doing lots of things. I’ve tried to do voice- overs for things but I just can’t make the connections, I just can’t get there, like you know. I take off the Irish, I take off 07:30 Indians, I you know the hurry curry men and all that you know. I got a bit of a flair for languages. I don’t speak any of them fluently apart from pidgin English, but I have a hell of a lot of fun doing that, so that’s it and now I’ve reached the age that I have, I’ve learnt to sort of still be a little bit off people, not full on, but I don’t have grog to help me along any more, so,

08:00 so that’s it. I hardly drink any more. I’ll have a glass of wine at dinner at night, sometimes here I’ll set the table, cook a meal for myself, have a glass of wine, have a candle and have a candlelit dinner for one, and people said, “That’s stupid,” some of my mates say, “That’s bloody stupid,” and I say, “Yeah, well I’m stupid then cause I like that.” I do like it. I took my present ex-wife, years ago I took her down to,

08:30 we were at Byron Bay, that’s where I first met her. We went down there for dinner one night, shouted her out for dinner. Took her down to the beach with fish and chips on the beach, with a candle and a bottle of champagne. She still talks about it, it was different. I always was the romantic, so that’s about the story.

So what about girls in those early days as a young feller?

Girls frightened the living hell out of me, they really frightened the hell out of me.

09:00 Because not being able to mix with them in the early stages, they just worried me and I went into the Scouts, I become a Scout. I was a Cub, then a Scout and I remember the Scoutmaster had a niece, oh mate she was something to talk about. All the Scouts used to talk about her, she was great. Anyhow, somehow I clicked it with her and I met her at the pictures one afternoon, one Saturday afternoon at the Ashgrove pictures,

09:30 and I was up there and I was dead-set wrapped in this girl and it was winter ‘cause we’re sitting on these canvas seats and that and just put my arm around her, oh man that was it. But she did something that really blew me out of the water. She grabbed my hand and I thought she was going to just put it near her coat but she didn’t, she put it on her boob and I froze and I had a frozen shoulder, I couldn’t move. I wasn’t game to do anything. I just sat there for the rest of the bloody movie and I didn’t

10:00 know what to do because if I’d have said or done anything, she’d have told the Scoutmaster and I’d have been chucked out of the Scouts. If I’d have been chucked out of the Scouts, my father would have killed me. Yeah, women frightened me when I was young, they really did but anyhow I got over that, believe me. Going to Japan was, because it was a different culture, and this is in all seriousness, they have a culture which is very brutal but very beautiful

10:30 if that’s understandable. Their culture is such that they are committed to be in groups at all times. They cannot be a singular race of people, they don’t do anything by themselves. They’ve got to be in a group. They’re like a mob of ducks, they’ve just got to go around in a flock, but they are they have a culture which is beautiful. They have their art is absolutely astounding. They have the prettiest things that you can well imagine,

11:00 it is so gentle and so quiet. You can sit in a Japanese garden which is a proper Japanese garden, and you could meditate there for hours, absolute hours and do nothing, and yet it is so beautiful. You couldn’t do that for five minutes here in Australia or in our world, and I found the Koreans to be the same. The Koreans are the most brutal people on earth. They are

11:30 relatives, descendants of Genghis Khan and he wasn’t the nicest feller ever met, and as brutal as they are they can be as gentle as all hell, so I cannot work out the oriental, but the Japanese girls where we, sex is something that is not frowned on. In a family where things are going bad, it’s for the girls of the family to go out to prostitute themselves

12:00 for the good of the family - is not considered a bad thing. It’s considered an honourable thing. What’s considered to be a bad thing is to mix the blood. They are Orientals and you cannot mix the blood with Orientals. They are, they’re ostracised, they’re out. They will be accepted back into the fold, but the child will become a less than a nothing. A serf would have higher status than a foreign-mixed Japanese,

12:30 and it’s true, it’s a shocking thing. So when you come from a culture where you’re a bit frightened of the girls and you’ve got to be very careful of your Ps and Qs and what you do and what you don’t do, you go to a place in Japan where you go to a bath house and here they are all in the bath, this huge, big bath anyone in this street would be down there, you rip your gear off and jump into the pool with them all starkers, man that’s cool, and we used to go down there and just look

13:00 at them until the military police woke up to us and if we were seen anywhere near a bathhouse we were out, but you could have a bath. They would take you and put you in a bath, these were the bathhouse girls and this was their shop. There was no messing around, no funny business, and they’d strip you and they’d wash your underwear and they’d re-iron your uniform. Everything would be there for you when this bath was finished, which would was for about an hour and it cost two [shillings] and six [pence], a hundred yen, 25 cents

13:30 in those days. First of all they would bath, wash you down. Now getting undressed in front of a female was a little different, it just was, without going into too many details, but anyhow you soon got used to it and to them it was nothing because this is what they do in their culture. They bathe their men. Their men don’t bathe themselves, they’re bathed by their women and they will bath you and soap you down. They will even clean your teeth with a brand new toothbrush

14:00 and then they’ll progress you into a hot bath, hotter. You think you’re damn, they’re going to kill you and it’s that hot and then they take you out. They will towel you down, lay you down on a raised table type of thing and walk up and down your spine and then massage you. Now man, that is the closest thing I have had been to heaven and that’s it, so I got on well with the oriental people. I got on alright with the

14:30 oriental females, apart from the other learning curve which I won’t go into, but they did teach me a lot and I mean culturally and everything like that. I met a girl one night, now I didn’t meet her, I just observed her and she was in a kimono and she was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life. She was with an older Japanese woman and I was just struck by her,

15:00 I was really struck by her and I followed them and I just wanted to know where the heck they went. Anyhow they went up and they talked to this Japanese man. He come up to me and asked me what was my intentions and I said, “I’m just fascinated by her, she’s beautiful you know and I’d like to know her name,” and her name was Cheriko, Cheriko, and that was it and I said, “I would like to

15:30 talk with her.” You cannot talk with her, I wasn’t allowed to talk with her but I was told that she does pass this way every such and such and she would be here at a given time and of course me being at sea and all this, this sort of conflicted with my ideas of falling in love with a Japanese princess, but anyhow I did meet her again and on the third occasion I met, but I never met her by herself and she was always in a kimono. Anyhow this next lady that came spoke a bit of English

16:00 and she told me that I couldn’t mix with her, but I, if I was so persistent in my talking with her that I had to meet her father. I thought, “God, I don’t even know her surname and I’ve got to meet the old man,” but anyhow I was invited and I told my divisional officer about it and everything like that and he said, “Well, you can be honoured about this because they don’t do this,” and of course I had to be booted and spurred and they gave me the right protocol what to do and he turned out to be a lieutenant commander during the, he was in the navy

16:30 and he flew over Sydney and Brisbane off the Japanese submarines that was here right. Now we ate a meal, he and I, at a little table, a little black table, and shoes off and you sit there and everything and the lady of the house which was the mother, the mother-san, she was there and she served me first, I was the guest, then him, then she choofed off. Then her and Cheriko and another little kid out there, they never ate with us,

17:00 no way in the world and we were talking. He spoke beautiful English, he was an educated man and he wanted to know my intentions, then he explained to me the difference between the oriental and us, you know, because we were considered barbarians if you read your history, and that you know, and he told me the story about how you couldn’t mix the blood and the races, it just could not be done, and he said he could see that I come from a cultured family. Oh man, he was cool,

17:30 but it would never be and I was his guest, but he would I would never see Cheriko again, and but I could speak with her in this foyer. Everything was done so properly, it was like in a movie. It was, it was unbelievable you know. It was beautiful. I can still remember it to this day. I can set you the table to this day because it’s embedded up here. Anyway, I was allowed to talk to her. I know the

18:00 chaperone wasn’t very far, so I knew the chaperone was close and I just spoke with her and she spoke in this little sing song voice, English you know and she called me ‘Middy-san’, ‘Middy-san’ and when she said, “Ohio gozaimasu Master Middy-san, ohio,” and oh

18:30 boy, love at first sight, I was there forever. Anyhow we talked and then she said, “It’s not to be,” and her father has requested that this be the last meeting and no matter what I did or anything like that, she never lived there, she wasn’t there, that was it. She just vanished off the face of the earth, but, and this is going to rock you because it rocked me and it still does, Cheriko-san has been in my memory all my life, she’s always been there. Now the old saying is,

19:00 they shall not grow old as we grow old, right? This is true, I remember her the way she was. I was down at the airport about five years ago seeing a son off, coming and going, and I walked in there and this woman walked, she was walking towards me and she had this little case and everything like that and I eyeballed her. She gave this little nod and it was Cheriko, I know it in my heart, I just, I burnt inside.

19:30 This is how I felt, and she just nodded to me and I nodded, never said a word and she just walked off. I knew it was her. Isn’t that unreal? But I knew it. Now that’s a life story for you. But I never spoke to her, it just wasn’t to be, but I knew it was her and it was the way she looked at me and the way she bowed, and she did it with such elegance as the Japanese can. Next thing they can chop your head off with one swipe of a sword, same thing, same elegance, that’s it.

20:00 Can you tell me about how like when you were going to Japan, you sort of have this hatred because they’ve killed a relative, yet suddenly you’re totally enraptured by the culture. Can you explain that sort of change, shift in…?

No I can’t, I cannot though I’ve learnt over the years to understand the oriental in a way. To me, they will, you can forgive the Japanese to a point for what they did during the war, to a point only. Whereas the German 20:30 is a Christian and he can never be forgiven in all time for the barbarous things that they did to their own kind of people, but the Japanese, we were we were a different race and they had been subservient virtually, the Chinese, the Japanese and what have you to the Europeans for so long, it wasn’t funny, and we’d pulled some rotten stunts on them, so when all of a sudden they had control over white people

21:00 it’s like going to a candy store and they didn’t have any checkout, you could just walk in and out and get what you like. They could do what they like so this is where the barbarous things that they did in the prisoner of war camps. As I said to a point you can forgive them but to do those things to humans is beyond my, to my belief now still, but when I went over there I was quite convinced that every Jap [Japanese] I saw I was going to knock down, I was quite convinced of this,

21:30 but then I found them to be, see once the Japanese is beaten and told you’re beaten, don’t worry about it. “OK, we’re beaten.” From then on they start, you, they’re mates, which is strange. Our way of thinking is, “I’ll get him, you know. With my fellows see I was going to get him and I waited a long time and I never did get him but I held that grudge,” but the Japanese don’t hold a grudge. I don’t know about the rest of the Orientals but they don’t, and then this is when I started getting

22:00 into this culture, understand, not understanding but trying to see into their paintings and art and things like that, I wanted to learn it because there was a beauty coming out of bastardry and I wanted to learn about this. Maybe I had, I still have culture in me, or art in me, from somewhere I don’t know, but that was it, that was it and I don’t hate them. I don’t really forgive them but I don’t hate them.

Can you tell me

22:30 about some of the after effects of the war that still lived on in Japan?

Yeah. I went up into China years ago when my second son Gavin finished his university degree. I took him up through Singapore, Hong Kong, Kowloon right up into China into Canton, and I’m going back five or six years ago, maybe a bit more

23:00 ‘cause Gavin being a university student, they teach them some idiot things and Communism was one of them. They play with it, it’s like a toy and it’s not. It’s like a death adder - you leave it alone. But because he knew my hatred of it, he taunted me with it. You know, he even took a military cap with a red star on it just to give me the Jimmy Brits [shits]. I did not like that, but anyhow when I went into China there’s jokers about my age,

23:30 they looked at me with absolute hatred and I knew damn well they were a Chinese ex-military man because I was about the same age as them and you could feel, you could feel that hate coming out of them, you really could, but they’d bow and scrape to you because they’re told they had to do so. We, when we were there we were in a group that was, I forget what

24:00 international thing it was, but we, there was French people there was Americans, Canadians whatever, but we had a Communist guard, she was a female, she’d be about 30, very, very much on the ball. She got a little gat [?] on the thing and when she spoke, everyone jumped. I remember in Canton, the main street, dirt, mud puddles everywhere and this bus we were in got bogged up to the diff. Couldn’t get out, no way, so we said,

24:30 “OK, let’s out and get it.” “No, stop!” She wouldn’t let us off the bus, but she went outside and said something in Chinese next thing there’s about 100 people around the bus. “You, you, you, you and you, here and push this bus and do it now,” and they did, they pushed the bus out the road and they did - she had tremendous power. This is this Communist guard, it’s unbelievable and this was Communism. People were watching people. They were watching us cause we were supposedly to be the first

25:00 Europeans that had gone into Canton since they opened it up, and this was it and it’s crazy. It’s a crazy world and it gets crazier like you know. It’s like I went back to Korea, I’d never, ever set foot on Korea, I was at sea and return to Korea trips were on for returned servicemen, and I booked a passage and went up there and I’ve got all the books in here. I’m an Ambassador

25:30 to Peace to Korea, so when I go back to Korea I take this with me and it’s immediately given to the authorities and I am given a guide to be shown around because I am an ambassador because I fought for their country and it’s on today, still today. But anyhow, when I went there we went up to the 38th parallel to Panmunjom and we were, we were in the same building that the truce was signed and everything like that and the Communist soldiers are still marching up and down outside with their

26:00 caps, their peaked, funny, stupid, Russian-peaked caps, and they look at you with such hate and they’ve still got their guns on their hips and that, and they’re marching up there and they’re looking in the windows and the other South Koreans are there and they stand, if there’s a building here the South Korean will stand only half his body exposed. He hides the other cause he lives in a split country and until his country is one their soldiers will not expose their bodies fully. But anyhow,

26:30 we go there and we see all these things going on, we see all the land the mines that are down the barbed wire entanglement. They had a big, a big flagpole, had to be about 40 foot tall and the flag had to be 20 foot long so the Communist put one up 25 foot high with a 40 foot thingo. If they put up one, they’d put up one bigger. Now when we were there, ‘cause they’ve got these loud speakers coming in from North Korea. ‘Cause you can see them just over the road 27:00 and they’ve got guns trained on them and god knows what all the time, 28 hours a day, they’re watching and trying to get into South Korea. So I had a movie camera I borrowed off my son. Didn’t have the slightest idea how to work the fool of a thing. Hit this, do that, and don’t do that, good. So I knew all about it and we were told by this colonel, who was the military attaché officer, do not under any circumstances point the camera towards the north, do not take a photograph in that direction, or god

27:30 help us, because you are then causing an infringement of peace. This is so temperamental and this is why these little fellers today are so touchy. Whether they’ve got atomic bombs or god knows what, I don’t know or care, but they are unpredictable. So we’re up on this watchtower, and we’re up there and we’ve got these South Korean guards and these fellers are right on the ball. They don’t muck about. They can kill you with one whack of one little finger and you wouldn’t even know you were dead and this is how they’re trained.

28:00 This is without weapons and god knows what, and I’m photographing this, that and the other and next thing I got grabbed from behind and spun round and this is this colonel, this military colonel, he said, “You bloody idiot.” I said, “What? What are you talking about?” He said, “You know what you’ve just done?” I said, “No, I’m just taking…” “You just pointed your movie camera at North Korea.” I said, “I’m sorry about that.” “Sorry?” he said, “You have just caused a situation.”

28:30 I said, “Come on.” He said, “I’m not coming on.” He said, “This military colonel here has now got to apologise to the North Korean colonel over there and to tell him that these people, the people that did this are geriatric old soldiers from the Korean War and to ask the forgiveness because they are not in full control of their powers and it was such and such.” He said, “Sticks, for Christ’s sake jam that

29:00 where your mother never kissed you, will you?” He said, “This bloke has lost face now,” and he had. He had to apologise to the North Korean, and that’s the truth. I got the shock of my life, but this is how sensitive things are at the 38th parallel. When you go along here, we used to go long these buses, these huge buses. We think we’ve got big land-liner buses down there, they’re little fellers in comparison to what they have in South Korea and we went along this road and we were going

29:30 along it and there’s only room for a tank. They weren’t made for buses, they weren’t for anything else. There’s tank traps, there’s everything . You go along to places and along these things there’s huge big thingos there with 40/50 tonnes of rocks on them big rocks, and back there for tanks, North Korean tanks come up there, it doesn’t come up that way ‘cause it can’t they got traps and god knows what. They hit a button here and 40 tonnes of rock fall on it, so that’s one way of stopping

30:00 them see. Anyhow, we’re in this dirty big bus and I’m on the left-hand side looking down, looking down there, way down there and there’s broken cars and trucks and a bus body or something where they’ve just gone over the side. See, human life isn’t worth a hell of a lot over there, so never get confused with the fact just because you’re a European you’re something special. You are only 85 percent water like them. Anyhow, one of the blokes said, “How far are we off the edge Sticks?” I said, “We’re there, we’re in space,”

30:30 and around the corner comes a big barrel and connected to it is a tank and tanks at the 38th parallel have the right of way and they have the right to push you off the road to continue on their journey and there was only a couple of words said and one started with S and a couple with something else, cause these are old army blokes and they thought what the hell. Anyhow, the commander of the tank saw the situation and of course we’ve got splattered all over the bus you know South Korean Veteran returned

31:00 and blah, blah, blah, so he backed off enough for our bus to go through and our bus went through with that much spare to this bloody tank. He was just doing patrols but I’ll tell you what, even back then it was so volatile then it was just unreal.

What about sort of post-war Japan when you first got there it was still pretty poverty stricken wasn’t it?

Very much so. We used to give our rubbish, the food scrap rubbish, tea leaves, peelings

31:30 to these people that did services for the ship and they used to eat them, sell them so you could get anything, soap, a cake of soap. I’ll tell you how much a cake of soap was worth and it was not a thing that I condoned. I thought it was pretty weak on the point of some of our fellows, but you could get a woman for a night for a cake of soap and we could get soap in the canteen for four pence, four cents

32:00 moralistically didn’t go down very well with me, but this is how it was. They didn’t have anything and they lived in little places made of paper and god knows what. It was pretty rough, it was pretty rough. So getting back to what I said previously about the female of the family, the girls in some cases, it was expected that they go out and prostitute themselves to make money for the family and not in any way frowned on. It was an honourable thing for them to do.

32:30 Their different way of thinking, that’s it.

Going back to when you’re a lad what do you remember of Australia being at war in World War Two?

Well, my sister and the girl down the road, Isabel, Isabel Parkinson. I still remember the name. She was a lovely girl and she met this Aussie soldier, his name was Schmidt, he was a German, but of German ancestry, Schmidt

33:00 and he was a hell of a nice bloke, he really was, and a song came out at the time, Izzy and Aussie, “is he, is he, is he an Aussie, is he, hey,” and we used to sing, ‘Stumpy’ we used to call him, and he reckoned if he ever caught us he’d kill us, but he only meant it in joke but he chased us half way round the paddock anyhow, but the girls, my sister and Izzy and the other girls that lived down the street and we lived in a place called Dean Street at Red Hill in those days, the girls’d go to dances and they’d meet Australian soldiers

33:30 and that and sometimes they’d come home, and gee to see these soldiers and these were real soldiers. These were blokes that killed Japs and Germans there’s no mucking around here, so in our eyes they, they’re heroes, they’re no joke, and then all of a sudden the girls would be crying and you couldn’t figure out why the heck they were all crying and moping around. Joe or Fred or Charlie that gave her the chewing gum was just killed in the Western Desert or somewhere and that you know and you used to feel sad too because

34:00 he was a pretty good feller to play with. He used to bring you chocolates, you couldn’t buy chocolates in those days, so yeah that was it. At the start of the war, I remember - I got a hell of a hiding for this one. This is at the very start of the war and my Mum hadn’t died all that long and this day I heard this noise. I couldn’t understand what this noise was, it was a hell of a noise, and I looked up the street and there’s horses, there’s hundreds of horses and all these blokes are riding them and I

34:30 forget all I’d been taught. I hot-footed it up the road and as far as I could see there’s the Light Horses. This was the last of the Light Horses and here they were columns of two and as far as I could see there was bloody horses. Well, I smartly got into this lot you know, and they said, “Go on nugget, on your way home, go on beat it,” and you get some chewing gum chucked at you, but it fascinated me and I was at Red Hill and I followed these blokes. It must have been about three o’clock in the afternoon when they went through.

35:00 There was a whole squadron or what the hell you’d call them, I don’t know, and they went then Red Hill over the Enoggera Creek up Enoggera Creek, up to Ashgrove, down Ashgrove, up all the way to Enoggera to Fraser’s Paddock and I followed them all the way and I didn’t know where the hell I was because they had disappeared inside this fence and I wasn’t allowed to go in there and me mates are gone. All me mates on these horses are all gone. Course they were, “What’s your name nugget?” and all this you know, and these jokers were the last of the Light Horse and they were going to Fraser’s Paddock

35:30 at Enoggera and it’s a big, big housing consortium there now. These fellers had emu feathers in their, kangaroo feathers in their hat, they had the, they were the whole bit. I was nine years old and I followed those fellers all the way. Anyhow it’s getting dark and it’s not funny and it’s, my father’s gotta be home and I don’t know where home is because I’d forgotten, I was too excited. This, this got me, this got me, this following these soldiers and somehow there’s a policeman, a soldier got in the act.

36:00 I don’t know, he must have been a guard or something. “What are you doing?” and I started bawling, real hero, and I’m lost don’t know where the hell I am and next thing these coppers turn up, and in those days, the most antiquated car you ever seen in your life was an old Chevy [Chevrolet] with a rag top, you know, sedan. “So where do you live nugget?” Got me by the ear, and coppers used to love pulling you by the ear you know, they got me in the back. “Where do you live?” I live at Dean Street, Red Hill. So they took me all the way down there and “knock, knock, knock” on the door and these jokers are about 20 foot

36:30 tall and I’m standing between them and then my father comes out and he’s looking like thunder and I knew I was going to be dead in 30 seconds flat. “Is this your boy?” “Yeah, where the hell was he?” and this is how it’s going on. “Yeah, he was up at Enoggera.” “What you doing up at Enoggera?” “Well, he followed all these troops of Light Horse fellers,” and they, you know, “I’ll fix him up you know,” and they went and inside I went. Geez he give me hell for that lot, he really did, but I never forgot that, never forgot that, and of course years, years and years

37:00 later, not too many years later getting out another time, now Brisbane was the end. The Japs could have to Brisbane and they, Australia would fight for the rest of it, we ever heard garbage like it in your life? So when the Yanks got here and they got here in large lumps and heaps of them, and boy they were good for chewing gum and chocolates I’ll tell you. My mate and I, and I had a bike then, I rode, we rode all the way to Toowong. What the hell we were going out at Toowong, but we were over near

37:30 Mount Cootha way and we were in and out, in and out and all these roads and big signs and ‘Keep Out’ and kids, doesn’t mean anything to kids, so we just went on these roads and next thing this bloke jumps out and he’s got tree shoots on him and leaves and he’s got a rifle and he’s going to shoot us and there’s no two ways about it and he talked and we couldn’t understand what the hell he was talking, it was just Yank twang. He was talking to us. “Get off that goddamn bike,” and we thought he was mucking around but he wasn’t

38:00 you know, he got, because he had this knife on the end of this thing and we took it to be a bayonet because we’d heard about these things, and he got us in this box and he rung this thing and he’s yabbering away to the thing. Next thing this jeep pulled up and this he had to be an officer, he was in charge and another black fellow was with him. Never seen a Negro in my life before, and they chucked our bikes in the back them. My mate had started crying and he peed his pants. I’ve never forgot that, real hero to back you up, so we were taken in this…What were we doing

38:30 there? How did we get there? Why are we there? And this went on and on and on. Who brought you there? Who put you there? Who have you got to report to? What are you talking about? You know where we were? We’d gone through mined country, the Americans had mined Mount Cootha and here was two little kids riding around amongst the thingos. Oh geez. Well anyhow, to cut a long story short, that was a loo-loo of a belting that one was

39:00 and the coppers took me home on that one and my father was going to kill me and he said, “That’s it boy.” He said, “You’re going to Nudgee College, that’s it,” he said, “I can’t control you. You’re going to bloody Nudgee, that’s the stone end of you,” and thank god he never sent me to Nudgee because there was not a lot of nice fellers that ended up being teachers down there, I found out later. But anyhow, that was it that was Mount Cootha and yeah, I could have got myself killed before I went anywhere, but I never forget that. This bloody Yank and this Negro, this black feller. Boy, I’d never seen

39:30 I’d never seen a black feller like him. He was big.

Had you seen aboriginals before?

Yeah, Nerdin Sherico at school was an aboriginal. He was a good fellow. He could run faster than me and I kicked him in the bum once and he flattened me. God, he could fight too. I never forgot that, and Nerdin ended up being a radiologist at the Brisbane Hospital many, many years later. He was a great feller. I called him a black feller and he punched me in the nose and ‘cause it was pretty cool to call black people black fellers you know,

40:00 but after he punched me in the nose it wasn’t so funny. Anyhow, I ended up going down to his place and Mrs Sherico treated me like royalty and she made pancakes for me, and anyone who could make pancakes in those days had to be good so I decided they weren’t terrible bad people after all and he become a friend of mine, so that was it, yeah.

So what about the fascination with this Negro for the first time?

Well, I’d never seen them and of course the way they talk, they talk different to us you know. They were, called me little ‘whipper snapper’ and things like that

40:30 and plenty of ‘goddamns’ and all that sort of stuff and I was absolutely fascinated by them. They saved me, years later as I told you when those Americans, those southern Americans were kicking me to pieces and these Negroes come out and they helped me, and they did and I’ve got a lot of time for them because of their cultural background and they’re musical and their talents, and maybe I am an old artist from way back or something.

Tape 7

00:34 Years ago when the war was on, in Brisbane things were pretty rough. There wasn’t the vehicles and cars around there are today and Americans seemed to be everywhere and they brought everything that existed. Nothing was too much trouble. They caused a lot of resentment because they had a lot of money and they also caused a lot of problems because they were getting onto our women, in lots of cases who were engaged

01:00 if not were married to soldiers fighting in New Guinea, and of course the Americans were never held in very high esteem as fighters. Probably their Italian blood, they were lovers not fighters. But anyhow, I used to have to go as a kid with my father and stepmother from Ashgrove in the tram, all the way to Bulimba, which was quite an exciting thing and you’d see a lot of American cars and trucks and things and it came to the terminus down by the river and I had to go across the river

01:30 on this old paddle steamer, I think it was called the Fortitude Valley. It was too…and it was a vehicle paddle steamer, paddle wheel…whatever, but I wouldn’t go across because the water was too deep and there was no way in the world I was going to go across water so deep until one day my father gave me a hell of a thrashing and I had to go anyhow. But anyhow, I went up there and I, my aunty and everything and uncle, Uncle Bill and I really didn’t like my aunty because

02:00 she was a woman that was well built and everything like that and she used to crush me to her ample bosom and she smelt of BO [body odour] and I didn’t like that and the only way I could get out of it was go down the park and watch the Yanks play baseball and right in the bottom of Duke Street where they lived and across there this park is still there today and I think that this pavilion is still there, but it used to be packed with all these American servicemen and they’d be there whistling, yahooing and cooing, eating chewing gum and whacking baseballs and

02:30 “you goddamn little whipper snappers” and - that was us - and me and I’d sit and watch them you know and sometimes they’d let me chuck a ball and I’d get chewing gum and chocolates and it was great you know and I had to eat it all before I got home because don’t you dare take anything off those Americans, especially the black ones, and ‘cause there used to be black ones there too and they used to have to pick up the ball and throw it to the white ones. But I didn’t know about those things in those days. But you didn’t take anything off a black bloke ‘cause he probably put something in it that’d kill you and that’s what they said, so it kept you away from black blokes,

03:00 but anyhow yes. It was a time of great uncertainty. I mean the Japs were only up the road from Townsville less than an hour by plane, so it was a worrisome time and navy ships were everywhere. I used to see submarines coming in from the war and one in particular I saw coming up the Brisbane River. Brisbane was a big naval base for American submarines during the war

03:30 and I saw one submarine coming up and it was laying over well over and smoke was coming out of it and everything like that. Exciting times for a kid in nine, 10 year old you know and all the big flying boats that used to come in and land down at the Bulimba Reefs. Used to fly in and fly up the river. These were all big American stuff. Brisbane airport that we know now was a big duck swamp and the Americans came in here and they said that they wanted a place

04:00 for an airport and there was nowhere and the Brisbane Council at the time said, “Well, we’ve got nothing there but you can have the swamp over there.” I think within 48 hours they were landing light planes on it. They just took that duck swamp over, it was a duck swamp and they made it into Brisbane International Airport today and this is it, that’s no joke. They just did it. They didn’t mess around. They had machines that came from out of space as far as we were concerned. We

04:30 had men working on the street as Australians, picks and shovels. The Americans had this thing that had this big blade on it, would rip the whole suburb up in half the time and it was called bulldozers and things and you’d load a truck by hand and these things would pick stuff up and put it in the truck and you wouldn’t have to do anything and it was so great, was so great so see them. When, one time there the wharfies jacked up and wouldn’t load this stuff for New Guinea, essential war equipment and they were

05:00 needing ammunition and the wharfies, again they were commos [Communists] and they would not load, so this American colonel said he’d had a gut full of this and there was American troops dying and other troops dying and stuff had to be loaded and not on his, not today, not tomorrow, not this week. So they turned up down there with about 10 big trucks, fully armed troops and said, “Load these ships, now!”

05:30 and they loaded them so quick, they didn’t know where the next ship was coming from. They just, they were gutless wonders. But they put force on them. They loaded those ships but that was all that was needed. Australia was in a state of “What the hell?” We didn’t know. We were so under the yoke of British rule we did what we were told. We didn’t know who anyone else was and we were so backward it wasn’t funny. I remember in 1948

06:00 just after the war, six o’clock they pulled down a wire shutter, a wire chicken mesh thing, six o’clock at night and if you were starving to death and had a million pound in your pocket, you couldn’t buy a tin of peas, it was against the law. That shutter went down at six o’clock. This is in 1947/48. This was just before the Korean War and that’s the truth, unbelievable. Rationing was still on, you still couldn’t go up the street and buy petrol when you wanted it.

06:30 You couldn’t buy clothing when you wanted it. You couldn’t buy butter when you wanted it because we were still sending it to England, giving it to the Poms, giving it to them, and when the war was on they wouldn’t come to our rescue at all, they said, “Bugger you.” This is why we are now associated with the Americans, because the Americans came with all they had and gave it to us and that’s what Americans are like. I’m not condoning the Americans because I reckon they’re the worst fighting men in the world.

07:00 They lost Korea, they lost Vietnam. They keep losing things. They lost the [Little] Big Horn, you know, uneducated people beat them. Somalia, they went over there against people that just had little shotguns and they used to blow ‘Huey’ gun ships out of the air. Unbelievable, the Americans, but they’re nice people, nice people.

But as a kid what were they to you?

Strange people that talked, people that had a lot of chewing gum and chocolates and that’s it.

07:30 That’s all they were to me, they really were. I didn’t know anything different. I did not know anything different. It was strange to see them. They dominated and took over everything that they needed and wanted to. You go down to Bulimba today and when you chuck a right to go down to Bulimba towards wool stores there’s a whole, a hotel there and these apartments here. The Yanks built them. They took over the whole the whole hotel as officers quarters and

08:00 brought the homes across the way, knocked them down and put up officers quarters for American male and female officers and you couldn’t go down there to save yourself. You were barred going around your own city, so that’s it.

How did that feel as a kid, being you know taken over basically?

Well, it wasn’t terribly bad because they still fascinated us. Australian soldiers were the best in the world. They had to be because they were Australian. Americans were alright. If you give them a lot of cheek

08:30 and you run away from them because you knew where you were going and they didn’t so that was one thing and you were faster than them anyhow and they wouldn’t run, they used to drive a jeep and they couldn’t go lots of places we went, in a jeep so I suppose we were cheeky but that was it. Learning how to, learning how to liase with foreign people I suppose you might put it, at the age of nine and 10, but doing it from, you know, a young

09:00 partisan’s point of view. No you had to learn to be with people. I’d never, I didn’t know what a foreigner was. I certainly didn’t know, if someone from New South Wales had said they come from New South Wales it was other side of the moon as far as I was concerned. Only people in the world to me were the people in my circle and my locality so that’s it, that was how it was.

Can you tell us the story about you and your Scout mates, finding the raincoat?

Yeah,

09:30 well we used to go down to Scouts of a Friday night and the Boy Scouts were good little fellers, “dib, dib, dob, dob” and all that lot and the epitome, the great little fellers of society. Anyhow, we used to see all these American trucks pull up in the park there that is now Bronco’s headquarters and of course it was pretty rough and ready in those days, and where the Bronco’s building is now there was an old tin shed where all the derelicts and winos used to go. Across the road

10:00 from that was a tannery owned by Mr Fulcher and where the big TAFE [Technical and Further Education] college is was a big cow paddock where I used to get the best mushrooms you ever ate, there. But anyhow, these trucks used to pull in and of course we figured out they must be up to something so we went up there to check them out and of course they were big blokes and we were only little Scouts and they had some big girls with them, but gees some of the things they were getting up to, sort of fascinated us but anyhow one of them saw this raincoat there and we didn’t know what

10:30 it was but he pinched it and we weren’t terribly impressed with him pinching it because we’re Scouts and we are you know good blokes. So anyhow we’d only gone a couple of hundred yards and we decided that the best thing to do was to take it back, honesty being the best policy, and apparently this bloke lost it or whatever. Here we come up, these little Scouts with this thingo and immediately I said we’d sort of found it on the road and they showered us with chocolates and chewing gum and God knows what, so honesty is the best policy

11:00 it really is, so that was it, right and that was the Americans.

I was just wondering about being on the Sydney. What when you weren’t freezing to death what were you sort of doing to amuse yourself?

Writing

11:30 home, writing to girls, answering letters from little girls from little colleges and schools who were knitting balaclavas and socks that, or gloves that your fingers sort of had to cut them out because they were too small for you and things like that or playing uckers, which is a navy game for dice and things like that, or poker or sleeping or whatever or going about your duties

12:00 doing what you had to do. The ship has to be run and people have to run it so being a seaman I had to be available on my shift to do the things that I had to do. Lookouts and watch keeping, all those things had to be done, housekeeping, maintaining the ship, keeping it in a shipshape condition, so this is what you used to do. Plus drills, you’d have drills and they’d pull any caper on you at any given time and you had to,

12:30 when I first went onboard that aircraft carrier, I never thought in a million years I could ever sleep there simply because I slept over tubes, huge big tubes and there was fuel running them, water running through them. There was things shunting backwards and forwards. There was more noises than Queen Street on a Saturday night and I, you just couldn’t sleep. Whirring and noise and sounds and lights on and yet you know after three years when I came ashore

13:00 to a quiet home atmosphere I couldn’t sleep. It was too quiet there was no noise. But I did find out one thing after I came back from Korea. I had been sleeping over this pipe running 100 proof high octane gasoline and I used to rest my arm in there and I’d go to sleep in my hammock and this stuff was just there. It could have consumed the whole mess if a bullet had hit it so this is it so you never know

13:30 what you’re up to then. Yeah, that was it but a ship, a ship is a living, moving thing. I’ve explained it in a book I wrote about the ship how it is a living thing, which it is. It’s a female, we treat it as a female. It has to be looked after and maintained, treated with respect or it will kick you in the teeth. You’ve got to be in control of it, because if you don’t it will take its head and it’ll go anywhere it wants so it has to have a man in control. A lot of

14:00 people will say no to that, but that’s the way it is. I’ve never seen a ship yet that ran anywhere by itself so this is it. No, they’re just things. Ships are always called ‘she’ anyhow, maybe it’s because of the respect of it. When you go aboard a ship first thing you do is salute, when you go onboard a ship, ‘cause the crucifix was held or nailed to the aft mast and sailors were very superstitious and as they went onboard they saluted it and when they left it they saluted it. It’s part of the luck thing

14:30 and this is it. There’s a lot of traditional things about the sea and the navy and everything that a lot of people don’t know. Can you give me some examples of superstitions and things that people?

Alright, Queen Victoria’s day, she was married to Albert. They were a matched pair and she thought the sun shone from him. Sometimes she couldn’t go to these dos that were on and Queens and Kings and what have you have to go to so she’d send Albert. Now

15:00 to this very day when naval officers greet or meet or have a do they toast the Queen, they sit down. They never stand to toast the Queen or the reigning monarch. Army officers do, air force officers do, but not the navy because when in onboard the old ships of old they had very short or very low deck heads which meant a six foot man would bash his head real quick when he stood up and of course

15:30 when they toasted the Queen of England, which she was at the time, the Queen and they stood up and Albert whacked his head on a beam and he went back and told the Queen about this and she said right from this point on, naval officers never have to stand to salute the Queen of England, only army officers and that’s the truth. The other one was Albert again went to a do one night, but he was late and it was a navy do

16:00 and of course rum was the big thing in those days. It was currency, it was everything and of course Albert got to this do and all the naval officers are drunk or incoherent and he was most disgusted about this and he went back to the Queen and she said, “How’d you go?” and he said, “Had a great night but they were all drunk, I wasn’t impressed.” She said, “Drunk, me foot.” She said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. As a mark of disrespect to the Queen of England, naval officers will drag their swords in

16:30 the dust and army officers will wear their swords close hold,” and to this day army officers have their swords there and naval officers have thingo there and their swords are resting on the ground, to this day, and that’s the truth. Want me to keep going, I’ve got a million of them?

What about on your ship, things that you saw, specific examples of things that you saw men doing because they were superstitious?

Whistling,

17:00 you don’t whistle onboard a ship because it’s bad luck. It is considered bad luck. Also on the modern ships now they have Bosun’s pipes and they sound very much like whistling so if you’re whistling around the ship and someone blows a whistle, a pipe which is something very important and you might miss it because someone’s whistling Yankee Doodle Dandy, that’s it, so that’s bad luck. It’s bad luck for the person whistling it too, but that’s bad luck so you don’t whistle. You don’t have two priests onboard the same ship because it’s bad

17:30 luck. You only have one. It is bad luck. You never shoot an albatross. Albatrosses are souls of dead sailors, they are and if you shoot them you will incur all the bad luck from hell, this is it and if an albatross ever lands on your ship you are blessed, you really are because albatrosses never land anywhere except on the sea but they do sometimes land on ships.

18:00 It’s just superstitious that’s it.

Did one albatross ever land on a ship you were on?

Not to my knowledge no, not to my knowledge.

And how seriously do sailors take these superstitions?

Well, in my day they were pretty serious. Didn’t like sailing on a on the 13th. That was considered bad luck. There was lots of the silly looking things I’ve sort of forgotten now but

18:30 they were just some of them, you know. Women were considered bad luck to have onboard ships, though in the olden days the navy took women to sea. Officers had ladies, sailors had their ladies. A son of a gun, the sailors, the gunners had their women in the gun ports. Now the gun ports weren’t very high. You didn’t have to be because the English sailors in those days their height was about five foot four, five foot

19:00 five that was a pretty tall Englishman so subsequently they build these ships in such a way that these fellers could really run around and not dong their heads and so their women came onboard and if they gave birth to children, which they did in the gunports and one was born, he was a son of a gun, a son of a gunner, and that’s it. The other one was show a leg. When the quarter master or master at arms was going round of a morning and he was trying to get the watch out, he’d show a leg, and if a female leg come out

19:30 he ignored her, but if a male leg come out he’d go on watch, so that’s it, that’s true. That’s just the way it was. As I said there’s lots of them. Letting the cat out of the bag, you know you don’t let the cat out the bag. If you let the cat out of the bag, you or someone near you is in a lot of trouble ‘cause the cat was kept in a bag, and it was about yay long, which happens to be about 18 inches long, it was all plaited and it had

20:00 rope pieces put together and held virtually by blood and when a man had to be flogged for some misdemeanour they would drum roll the carrier of the bag which would be the master at arms and the coxswain or the master at arms would put the punishment. The officer of the watch would say, “Let the cat [o’ nine tails] out of the bag,” so the cat was let out of the bag

20:30 and the man was flogged, it was never washed, blood dried and it was put back in the bag and you didn’t open that until the next man had to be flogged, so that’s letting the cat out of the bag. ‘Swinging the lead’ has become a thing of today where swinging the lead is to bludge, to cheat on your mates and time, to let them do the work and not you but swinging the lead does go back and I have swung the lead, heaved the lead. In today’s technology we’ve got all sorts of electronic

21:00 devices that can tell you the depth down to the last fragment of an inch but in older ships they didn’t have this and they had a piece of lead which weighed about 14 pounds and it was hollowed out in the bottom so you could pack in soap or you could pack in a substance that would pick up the bottom like sand or mud or shells or whatever and then every six feet you’d have a marking of something on it right and you would get

21:30 a sailor out there in the what they call the chains, which was a little platform yay by yay and the sailor would get out there with this thing and he would get a momentum up with this thing off the side of the ship and then when he got it up to a given point, I can’t get it up too far cause that hurts, but when he got to a certain point he would let go and if he didn’t get to a certain point it’d come down and crash him on the head and kill him real quickly you know, then they put someone else there, but by swinging the lead you could put it ahead of the ship and

22:00 you would pull it up and you’d the officer would say the depth and you’d say, “By the mark six, Sir,” which was six fathoms. “What be the bottom?” “Be sand, Sir,” because you’d look at the bottom and there’s sand stuck to it so you’ve just told the skipper there’s 36 feet of water out there and it’s a sandy bottom so he’s laughing, so that’s how they did it, swinging the lead. Any more?

Very interesting. What can you tell me about boxing on your ship?

Boxing, as in fisticuffs?

22:30 Physical sports were considered a necessary thing in the navy. I don’t know about the other services. I can only speak for the navy. When you get a whole group of young, robust, physically 100 percent young males together you have a problem. Their testosterone fires in all circles, there’s big fights, there’s all sorts of things, so they have boxing contests

23:00 so they can belt the hell out of each other, get rid of all the steam. Everyone’s happy, someone becomes a hero, Bob’s your uncle. They control it, the navy’s not stupid. This is how they do it so that’s it. I was considered fairly good in my day, fairly good, not the best. I had a few victories and I had a few beltings but they put me in. I was a light heavy weight and they kidded me along and I was up there pumping iron and oh man I was cool

23:30 and I thought this was great. Someone said, “Well we’re going to enter you in the next boxing contest,” and I thought this was great too because I had a few, I was going to belt the ears off anyhow, and all the names went in there in the hat and I think the commander pulled out the names, like two to fight. Pulled out, Able Seaman Middleton fights PTI Johnson, physical training instructor. I lasted 30 seconds. He just “zonk, zonk” and I was history

24:00 and I didn’t have too many friends then. “God what’s the matter with you,” “You nog, I thought you could fight?” But these PTI instructors, they’re like superman, they can do any damn thing and they can fight too but I gave up boxing as a stupid idea right there and then.

Do you have any stories about men defending their ship’s honour?

Yes, after the typhoon,

24:30 after the typhoon the ship’s crew was welded together as one and I saw something I’ve never seen before and never seen since. The camaraderie onboard or camaraderie amongst servicemen is great, it still is today, after 40, 50 odd years it’s still there amongst your fellows and after the typhoon and that night as I said, we damn near died, we all went ashore. Now cooks would go ashore

25:00 with seamen and seamen would go ashore with stokers and this never, ever happened before. We mixed as one group and nobody said a thing about the Sydney because she was our ship. We could call her the ‘old, greatest, rust bucket’, ‘old gin’, we could call it what we liked because it was our ship, but low and behold anyone else that said a word about ours. It was like a decent man, alright he might get

25:30 sometimes a bit rough with his woman and possibly he should not, but that’s not the point. He can do it but no one else can. God help anyone if they tried. It’s the same with our ship and I saw this night and this stoker, he was a two pot screamer [easily drunk] and this big marine said some damn thing and he got this fair up this American for it and he got killed, damn near killed for it. I saw the best black eyes I ever saw in my life on this kid. “How dare you say anything about my ship!” and this marine

26:00 was as big, as big, and he just, yeah this is right they defended their ship but we could say what the hell we liked about our ship it was our ship, was our right to say what we liked, but nobody else. No other sailor could say anything about his, our ship, or we about his but he could say what the hell he liked. He could swear, say anything. That was his prerogative but soon as you opened your mouth about it, boom, you were history, leave it alone and that’s it, defending the faith.

26:30 Were there ever any big brawls between sailors from different ships?

Hell yes, yes often. You see we were trained pretty, we were pretty uptight because we were fit, we were trained, they taught us lots of things. They taught us judo, they taught us how to kill with bayonets, they taught us how to kill with guns and they taught us all those things that’s, that’s what they’ve got the services for and course when you get a mob of young fellows together and they’re trained right up to the

27:00 button, they’re fit, they’re healthy, ready to go. Yeah I’ve seen blokes off the Warrego, which is a ship that doesn’t exist anymore, they were having a few beers and they just mentioned the slightest little thing that could be taken as you shouldn’t say that about my ship. That’s all you needed and you go over there and drop someone ‘cause that starts, ‘cause he’s got a friend and he’s got a friend and there’s a big fight on but before we went to Korea and this was a fact, I remember in Sydney. We were in Pitt Street

27:30 in Sydney and there was a couple of pubs there and I forget the names of the places now and these blokes I think 3 Battalion were in there and we’re drinking with them, having a great old time. Good fellers, real good fighter, and one feller said, “God I’m bored, what, what can we do,” and someone said, “Well how about a fight?” “Yeah, alright why not?” so someone walked up to the bloke, he’d been drinking and just punched him fair in the mouth, then he punched him in the mouth and there was a big fight on and he was going to call the coppers and god knows what, glasses knocked over. All of a sudden it’s over and the publican said, “You can

28:00 get out, you’re fighting.” “No, no one’s fighting, we’re mates.” “What do you mean mates? You were just fighting him you were going to kill him.” “I’m not going to kill him, we were just having a fight, what’s the matter with you?” He said, “Hang on, you don’t like him.” He said, “No, he’s a good bloke, he’s me mate.” “Well, what are you fighting him for?” “Because he’s my mate, don’t you understand that?” “No, no,” no one could understand why you would fight your mate because see if you fought your mate, he’d be clean, it’d be a clean fight and you could say OK that’s enough,

28:30 I’ve had enough but we had to have something to do. You had to get the boredom, I know it sounds ridiculous but this is what it was. Here were young men being sent off to war to kill somebody else and they were amongst themselves with nothing to do and you get sick and tired of drinking, you get sick and tired of chasing females around. You just get sick and tired of all that so you fight, this is what men are about. This is what bulls are about, they just fight in the paddocks, for no reason just, see birds out in the

29:00 street they fight, and this is it, yeah we fought and just for the hell of it, for the fun of it and that was it.

What about when you moved from one ship to another like did you keep allegiance to all the ship’s you’ve been on or is the one you were on at the time?

Yeah, the ship you were on was still the greatest ship you ever sailed on. I still stand to attention burst into tears when they mention about the Sydney. No, I don’t really, but she was my ship and that’s it but say you get, like when I went to the Platypus.

29:30 My god, that was the most undoing thing I ever did, go to that horrible looking thing. I did not like it, I did not want to be there and I couldn’t think of anything worse than my ship sailing off to England and America and god knows what and me not on it because I’d been on it for three years and she was part of me and I’d been part of her. Yes, you do get attached to your ship and after a while it becomes part of you and your allegiance goes to that ship. Possibly when you change association with

30:00 friends, your allegiance is with them but if you fall out with them you meet someone else and their allegiance is with them. So this is the same way in ships, that’s about it.

What sort of exercises did you do in Australia before you headed off to Korea?

PT [Physical Training], Physical Jerks guaranteed to whack the brain of anybody.

30:30 Muscle building, mind bending, climbing walls, climbing up ropes, carrying weights, early morning runs at Crib Point in the freezing cold through all the muddy paddocks and god knows what, all that sort of thing, physical exercise to keep the young minds working. Young minds tick over and get into all sorts of strife.

31:00 They have to be controlled. I believed years ago that they used to put certain stuff called bromide in your coffee or your tea or things like that to control your urges. An old feller was talking to me the other day, he’s 80. He said they used to do that, he said, “I think it’s starting to work,” but anyhow, yeah, they used to and that used to, I’m sure they used to do it and then you’d see this gorgeous thing walk past and someone would say,

31:30 “She’s nice hey?” But a week before you started on this stuff, “Wow, wow, wow!” like you know, but no I think they did use something, I don’t know but they used to have to keep you occupied. A group of older men had to control younger men to control them, to control them cause once you loose control of them, you can’t get them back in because if you let some frisky young horses out in a paddock, you’ve got to get them back in and sometimes that’s pretty hard, right next one.

32:00 What sort of punishments were given out to men onboard a ship?

Diabolical, diabolical like being one minute late, losing a whole day’s pay. If they, navy says they will leave at zero eight zero zero hours in the morning it will leave at zero eight zero z. If they, navy says they will leave at zero eight zero zero hours in the morning it will leave at zero eight zero zero in the morning, so if you’re told to be back onboard that ship at zero seven three zero hours you better be there, as the ticks

32:30 to half past, otherwise you’ve just done a day’s pay. Insubordination was, you could get anything up to seven days working in the dog watches, which is working in your own time after the working day, insubordination, for being cheeky to someone. Without, I once in Sydney got lumbered for not saluting a bloke that I didn’t even know was in the navy. Now figure that one out. He was

33:00 no I saw him and I twigged him as an officer but I wasn’t too sure and I didn’t salute him and I was across the other side of the street anyhow and he reported me.

Was he in uniform or?

He was in civvies [civilian clothing] and I didn’t salute him and the rules are, now this is getting back to the British against the Australian. The Aussies would say what the hell but the Poms, oh God gees you’ve got to salute, you’ve got to do this. This officer dobbed me in because I didn’t salute him.

33:30 He was in civilian clothes and they were wrong, they were technically wrong, morally wrong but I still had to do the punishment. In the navy you are guilty until proved innocent, it’s different in civilian life, you are guilty until, you are what’s his name until you’re proven guilty, but in the navy you are guilty until proved innocent. Now if someone does something or doesn’t do something

34:00 and he’s put up on a charge for it and found guilty, they say, “Righto, you’ve got three months Holsworthy.” Now Holsworthy is the military prison at Liverpool in Sydney. I don’t know if it’s still there but this was the Alcatraz of the services because they used to get you to build, dig a pit 22 foot long, six foot wide, three foot deep with a spoon and you had to dig it and it had to be precise and it had to be the right thing. You

34:30 had to do, you were given an area as big as this area here with sand and it had to be dead straight with not a ripple in it, then they’d run the jeep all over it and say do it again. It was there to break your spirit, to break your heart. It was the Alcatraz, but that was called bastardry. It does happen, it still happens but it’s meant to break your heart, break your spirit. Once you break a man’s spirit, he’s nothing

35:00 just nothing, he’s just a, just a person.

Did you see examples of men who had their spirits broken?

Yes, I saw a bloke, there was a leading seaman. He was a fine bloke, he was a good bloke, he was a leader. We respected him. John was his name, I can’t think of his surname. He was a damn nice bloke. He was always there when you needed him for instruction, for help or whatever and his

35:30 mother became very, very sick. This was just before we sailed to go to Korea and he wanted extra leave. Now the navy needed every hand they could get to make sure their ship and their weapon was ready for war and ready to go and course he was a leading seaman, he was a leader of men, he had to be there. So they gave him as much leave as they thought he should have. She’s really getting worse, she was actually dying and I think he knew it too and he was very devoted to his mother, most boys are, but that’s not the point. He wanted

36:00 leave, he couldn’t get it, he wasn’t allowed to have it. We were sailing next morning and as we were sailing and the ship was pulling away from the wharf the message came down that his mother had died and he dived straight over the bloody side and was going to the hospital to her. Now he broke every rule in the book. As a leader of men, he just shot himself in the foot. So they put a motorboat down, collected him and brought him back and he was in cells, by that night, broke him.

36:30 He went from a hell of a nice bloke to the biggest bastard I ever met. He was a drunkard, he was a fighter, he was a thief, he was everything and they broke him because the navy wouldn’t let him go to his dying mother, and yet the navy will bend over backwards. They will shift mountains to help their men but in this case someone decided you’re not going and that was it, so yes I have seen it. It’s terrible but it happens,

37:00 that’s the truth.

Can you tell me what ‘signing on’ means?

Signing on, yeah, they used to do it in the olden days you used to sign on a ship. You sign on in the navy. You sign on for King and Country, for Queen and Country or reigning monarch and god knows what. But you sign, you put your name, you put your mark

37:30 on it’s a contract between you and the navy. When you, merchant seamen go now you say OK skipper where you going? I’m going to America. OK I want a one way trip to America. OK what are you? I’m a cook. OK sign on. You signed on, you sign on for that trip, that’s the duration of the trip. I signed on in the navy for six years. Somewhere along the way I found out after the King had died that hey, hey, hey we signed on for King and Country so we

38:00 we can get out, so two of my mates and I, we worked on this one and we asked a few around the place who were pretty smart fellers and they said, “Yeah it’s fact.” Jesus, so we went to see the commander and the commander said, “Well, I don’t know about that, I think you’re up against you know, hard timber here,” so no, no captain’s report so we went to the captain, says, “Right,” he said, “You want immediate discharge from the navy?” “Yes sir.” “Why? Well sir, when we signed up, we signed up for King and Country.” He said, “That’s

38:30 correct you did.” He said, “Did you read the small print?” “What small print?” “Well, we happen to have a copy here, now what does it read? It reads for King and Country or reigning monarch. Case dismissed, good try,” and away we went, so we didn’t win, so we tried anything, it just didn’t work. They’re smarter than you are, you know, they’ve been in the, the navy’s been around for a long time so we didn’t get out.

39:00 Did you really want to get out or just?

No, it was a shoofty, you see you’re trying to pull a stunt. There was an expression said to me a long, long time ago. He said, “Sailors are the greatest whinging mob of bludgers you ever struck in your life, they’re forever whinging,” and this old chief petty officer said, “Well, thank God for that because the day they stop whinging you know you got a problem. If they’re whinging, they’re happy. If they’re not whinging something is wrong,” and it’s true.

39:30 Sailors whinge about the food, they whinge about the captain, they whinge about the ship, they whinge about the weather, they whinge about everything but when they stop whinging there is a legitimate problem, but that’s it.

Tape 8

00:35 Well I guess the most important question is, why the navy?

Well I couldn’t get into the French Foreign Legion at the time if you remember. I really had to get away from home and I had an Uncle Dick who was killed at sea. He was lost at sea. He was my father’s younger brother and I was named in his honour and I don’t know whether he had anything to do with steering my into the navy, I don’t know. That’s my dead Uncle

01:00 Dick of course, but I went into there and I liked it and I had a cousin in the navy, Vic Green and Vic was on the cruiser Shropshire during the war and he was in all the big battles at Leyte Gulf and all that and he was my hero and I thought well I’ll join the navy. Was one way of getting away and see the seven seas, and I never got to sea seven seas, but I got to see quite a lot of them. All the countries in the east, the eastern countries

01:30 all the Orients, I saw all of them and that was it.

Growing up in Brisbane was there anything that really thinking back may have fed that desire to join the navy otherwise?

I was always impressed by navy ships. You’d see on the movies, this is before TV of course. You’d see these shiny ships come in and they were beautiful, they were clean they were lovely and the girls seemed to love them and wasn’t until the navy,

02:00 I joined the navy I found out who kept the damn things clean. I was in the surf club up here at Maroochydore in 1947. I joined and I was a junior and this other cousin of mine, who’s dead now, he drowned, we had to clean out the surf boats and we had to keep the place clean and we used to do all the mundane jobs around the place because we weren’t lifesavers, we were juniors and pains in the butt, so they kept us out the road and wherever I went I used to see lifesavers

02:30 on the beach and girls just surrounded them and this was my thing. I thought this was great, until one day in Maroochydore this sailor was on leave and he was in uniform and he had a girl on each arm. That was it. It had to be the navy. I had to go into the navy, so that’s what I did and as I said I couldn’t get into the French Foreign Legion. Besides I’m glad ‘cause I can’t speak French.

Any thought of joining the Light Horse after seeing

03:00 all those?

No, no they fascinated me, though I’ve written poetry about the Light Horse since. They fascinated me. I’ve a story there that I’ve got, was a true story, the matey had to leave and that was about a, he was a blanket relative of mine, he’s long gone now, Mick and when he was a young fellow on the Darling Downs, all his relatives used to breed horses and Mick decided he was going to breed horses and good ones and he did, he bred one of 03:30 in particular, was a sort of a I don’t know a sorrel, but this thing become a pet and it followed him everywhere. It used to come into the house and they used to shoo it out the house, everywhere Mick was the horse was. Mick never broke the horse, he didn’t have to. He used to ride it bare back, 40 miles into town and 40 miles back with the groceries. He never, ever broke the horse. The horse was his friend and he was a friend to the horse. Now when the war came, by that time

04:00 the horse was grown and Mick in those days, ‘14/18 war, if you didn’t join the war you were a coward and you used to get a white feather in the mail, and all this lot for King and Country and all that stupid rot so they used to recruit up here and besides they wanted cannon fodder because the British were killing the Australians and Kiwis as fast as they could get them on the battlefields and that’s no exaggeration, and Mick decided to join up when the recruiting

04:30 drive came. So in those days you had to supply your horse. In some cases you had to supply your rifle, so you know, being without stores and equipment, this governments or governments are all the same. So Mick and a few others rode their horses from Allara all the way to Enoggera in Brisbane and signed on the dotted line. Now as I said this horse was his friend and it was never broken and

05:00 it had to be branded in the army, which Mick really didn’t want it to happen, but it was a clean skin, but it followed Mick. Anyhow Mick went away and Mick got hit a couple of times. The horse brought him home back to the lines. The horse got hit a couple of times and Mick brought it home, but the horse did more for Mick than anything and the war was over and all the things were done and they were striking camp and all coming home and the order was given right line your horses up,

05:30 shoot them. Mick said, “You’re not shooting my horse.” They said, “We’ll shoot your horse ‘cause no horses are going back to Australia.” Mick said, “You’re not shooting my bloody horse.” It’s been, it was Mick’s friend. It’s like you saying “go and shoot your brother,” no way. So Mick grabbed this rifle off whoever and he cocked it and he said anyone comes near me or my horse, I will shoot them dead. They jumped him, put him in irons like a mongrel dog and they shot his

06:00 horse in front of him and Mick went berserk, he went berserk. They brought an honourable man back to Australia in chains and when they discharged him, they gave him his medals, he threw them at the man and the money and he walked away. I don’t know how, I was told he walked, walked from Brisbane back to Allara which is near Warwick. He walked, he wanted nothing to do with the army. He became a recluse. He had nothing to do with them. Never went near Anzac Day, never went near anything.

06:30 ‘Course when I told him about the navy and Korea and all that you know he said, “Yeah, just as well you weren’t in the bloody army,” and he meant it. There’s only one horse came back from that, that Second, First World War, it was a general’s horse. It never, ever went near the front line and that’s what they did. They either gave them to the Arabs who used them, butchered them for dogs’ meat or they shot them, and that’s the truth, so…

07:00 If the Sydney had have been a welded ship as opposed to a riveted ship do you think it ever would have survived that typhoon?

I doubt it, I doubt it because a welded ship is flexible to a point but it hasn’t got the resilience that a ship, riveted, has. A riveted ship will give and a welded ship won’t. Welded ships break, they just snap.

07:30 It’s hard to say now because technology and steel has changed a hell of a lot. In the olden days like the Titanic for argument’s sake, they reckon today with the steel that they have today, that iceberg wouldn’t have done a thing to the modern ship but because of the different sort of carbon steel that they used, it was so brittle it cracked and that’s why the Titanic went like that. I think yes if the Sydney would have been welded it could have been a different kettle of fish.

So if it had have come to abandon ship

08:00 how hard do you think that would have been?

The survival of the human is foremost in anything. A drowning man will grab a leaf, that’s true. Knowing the fact that the water was that cold that we had no chance anyhow and if we’d have stayed with the ship we’d have gone down, it would have become our tomb, was six of one, half a dozen of the other. I don’t know how I would have gone at the time

08:30 I could not answer that one but it’d be a hard one. Survival would be a great thing, but as I said, in the water it was 60 seconds and you were dead. You were an iceblock, simple. Go down with the ship you’re dead anyhow, so what the hell. There was nowhere to go, you had to go somewhere, had to be somewhere.

Can you tell me why you were left on the wheel for three hours?

Because they didn’t have anyone else qualified that could go onto the wheel. I took a lot of pride in the fact that I could keep my ship,

09:00 the head of my ship in a straight line which was giving me points towards a higher rank, things of this nature. I wanted to be a coxswain as I said I was kept on the wheel simply because they had no one better qualified, and I know this sounds like bragging, but they had no one better qualified of a lower rank than myself because the others that were higher ranked than me had to be out there showing younger men

09:30 what to do because this was a serious situation you know to get a ship ready for a typhoon. It’s an awesome frightening thing. The Yanks I believe in 1945 lost 125 ships, warships in a typhoon off the Philippines, one night.

What was the men’s mood like having survived that typhoon the next day?

Awe,

10:00 absolute awe. Men were very quiet about it. They were in huddles, they were pleased, they were, apart from the fellows that were, there was men’s bodies bruised for weeks after that for being smashed and thrown and hit and in some cases broken, but there was a feeling of “Thank you God for me being here” type of thing, it really was. It was never taken lightly though even though

10:30 we were boys we really understood the situation. As I said that night there was nowhere to go. There was no panic because there was nowhere to go, and at 18 going on 19 I thought, “Well this is lovely, just starting life and I’m going to die,” and I knew I was because these older sailors, the chief petty officers and that said we’ve had it, we’re gone, we’re history and it frightens the living hell out of you but there’s nothing you can do. This had a lot to do with a lot of psychiatric

11:00 problems with a lot of sailors that were onboard that ship and not only my ship, other ships that were in that night. I hate to think of what the Dutchman were, this Canadian to this very day won’t go on water and he’s a broken man. This other chief petty officer that’s a stoker that’s down south now, he still under psychiatric care and this was in 1951, so you know, this is why a lot of reason towards me being a

11:30 TPI [Totally and Permanently Incapacitated] and a lot of other fellers too, this is it.

Can you tell me about one of the instances during that typhoon where you and your mate wanted to have a look at the storm?

That was stupidity personified. We could see when the lights shone out on the sea the sea was black, it was black, it had no colour it was black and you looked out and all you saw was a wall of water, just a wall of water

12:00 every time you looked and this was a ship rolling over on its starboard side so we wanted to get out there and just see how big this bloody wave was, this one in particular, and this is where this stupid act of opening that hatch. Now once you let water in like that you lose the air, water tight integrity of a ship so you endanger the whole ship like this hatch coming off, that ship was in danger and if we couldn’t have got that water out or down below there, apart from the other scenario

12:30 of blowing up, it would have lost its watertight integrity and it would have sunk because each ship is in compartments so we opened it and went out to have a look and it was stupid because the side of the ship which is usually about 40 feet down from the water, the water was running level with it and as she went down she’d come over and the air was starting to suck out because this wave was going and this hissing sound was the most frightening sound

13:00 I have ever heard. It was sucking air away from us and we were sort of running uphill to get into this hatch and we just made it and when we got in there, all I can say is if we’d been caught and we’d have been run in for what we did, we would have deserved everything we got because and I say this without argument, it was one of the stupidest things I ever did in my life. Apart from damn near getting killed, it scared the living hell out of me

13:30 and I placed a ship, it sounds stupid to you but it’s a fact, I placed a ship in jeopardy. If we’d have been drowned or lost over the side that compartment was open and the sea water could have poured in there by the hundreds of tonnes, would have upset the balance of the ship, over, simple. That’s how simple it happens.

As far as your life goes, how do you rate that night of your life?

Very, very, very

14:00 very meaningful. I learnt a lot that night. I learnt a lot about myself that night. I learnt about composure, I learnt to be honest and to pray deeply. A lot of fellers that didn’t sort of believe in religion prayed that night to their God who or whoever, because not always everyone believes in a God but of a higher something. Everyone I know

14:30 knows there is something of a higher nature, and everyone had their own quiet moments because none of them were ever going to see their loved ones again, whoever they be, and all we were to each other that night were the only family we were going to have and we were going to go to hell together, and this is where a lot of sailors still lay out there together and this is where they went down. I know it sounds very

15:00 poetic or something but it’s a fact of life and it happens.

What sort of injuries the next day? There was broken legs, severe bruising, black eyes, people strained, hurt, ruptures, usual run of the mill things when you’ve just been through a washing machine. The ship was damaged, it was hurt, the sailors the humans onboard were hurt but the fact was it was built in British

15:30 shipyards and built properly is the only thing that saved us, and that’s the truth. ‘Cause everything that could have gone wrong that night, bloody well did. Like aviation gasoline spreading all through the ship and the fumes just running wild through the ship. Water, freezing water six inches away from fireboxes that would have blown us to hell, everything went wrong. There was fires in the thousand pound bomb rooms, freak out at the thought of it on a dry day, let alone on a wet day. The things

16:00 that were happening that should never have happened.

During the Korean War did the Sydney lose any aircraft?

Yes, they lost a couple. Pilots cannot bail out under 200 feet because if they do their parachutes do not open. The new modern ones today will shoot you up into the air and you get up there and come down, that’s OK. We had a young pilot, he was 19 year old. He bailed out at 200 feet, got hit, parachute never opened, he went into the ground, boom.

16:30 Couple of others got zapped. There’s lots of thoughts about this and a lot of people have written that yes, x-amount of planes were lost and that was lost and things were lost. As far as I know, there was three lost and that was it. Another one just drove into the ground, there’s another one. Another 19-year- older. Old men make wars, young men fight them and this is it. These gooks [Asians],

17:00 as we called them, used to shoot them out the sky with rifles and things like that. Modern machines in those days being shot out of the sky by a rifle, happens.

How did that affect the men’s morale on the ship when birds don’t come home?

Par for the course, it happens. Bomb hits you, could have hit anywhere else but it hit you. But then again it doesn’t hit you, it hits somebody else. You’re never going to get hit down the street by a motor car or the

17:30 sky’s not going to fall on you, it’s going to fall on someone else. This is the way it is so we’re in there, our business is, and I know it sounds dramatic but we were trained to kill people and people were trained to kill us so if you got killed mate, that’s tough but it didn’t happen to you, it happened to him. He was right beside you. It happened to him, didn’t happen to you, so that’s good luck. Well it is good luck cause you’re breathing. But yes it does affect you. You do think about it and it’s when you bury people at sea is when it hits you hard

18:00 because I’ve been funeral foreign party and buried people at sea and when they’re wrapped in that shroud and they get that navy bombardment shell sown into the bottom and they slide them down off that piece of timber into that cold sea there’s not even bubbles left. That’s where they stay for eternity, that’s where sailors go.

How do you feel when you’re sitting in your gun on a ship that isn’t

18:30 being attacked and you’re sort of sitting there primed ready to go but you’re not able to sort of do anything?

The first morning this happened we were like a racehorse ready to jump at the bell. We were trained, we knew what to do, how to do it and when to do it and then all of a sudden I got this feeling will I be a coward, will I be able to do it, will I be able to pull the trigger, will I run, will I do anything,

19:00 and that was a horrible feeling I had and you know what, I found out a lot of time later a lot of other fellers had the same thought. We didn’t know, we were untried, we didn’t know. It’s a hell of a feeling and you had to sit there and wait for something to wait. I remember two American jets off one of the Yankee ships, couple of cowboys decided to buzz our ship in a war zone so they came down at water level, which is attack level.

19:30 If anything comes at you from that height you just open fire, you don’t care if it’s painted with all the red crosses in god’s creation, you just open fire and we had just stood down and there was a gunner, the layer and the trainer was on there and I was the layer, and I had to put the thing on the target and there was a fellow up there ready to put the ammunition in. We hadn’t broken off and I saw these two spots on the horizon and I said aircraft bear in and I swung

20:00 the gun around and I was ready to pull the trigger and I got “check, check, check, check, check” which means stop. Two cowboys just flew less than deck level in two jets and up into the sky. They were in more strife than Ginger Meggs before they landed onboard that thing because Harries wasn’t a man to be fiddled with. They gave no IFF, which is Identification Friend or Foe, they gave nothing, they came straight in.

20:30 In a war zone you don’t do that if you want to stay healthy. Probably wouldn’t have done much, they’re flying at five 600 miles an hour and I had a 40 millimetre pop gun, but if the right angle I could have hit them but I tried, but I got a pat on the shoulder for it you know good on you, good observation. Even the radar had picked it up. It was too quick to do anything about it because these things travel fast and they’re a lot faster today, so that’s it. Can you briefly tell me what exactly what your job entailed on the gun?

21:00 Yeah, pulling triggers and shooting aircraft out the sky, that’s all it was, that’s all I was trained for, to shoot aircraft out of the sky, to protect the ship that I was on against aerial attack or I was trained from hand guns up to four point sevens anti-aircraft so I had the job of being, my ability to be used wherever it was necessary so if I was taken off that and put onto an anti aircraft gun I could have handled it just as

21:30 well but my job was to shoot aeroplanes out of the sky and their job was to shoot ships and people, so six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Was it a technical job did you think?

At the time it was technical, but not really, it wasn’t all that technical. It was a lot of learning, it was a, I don’t know- probably say ‘fun’, but then young men think war’s fun but it’s not fun, far from being funny. We didn’t think of the consequences of people getting hit or hurt or killed.

22:00 We didn’t do that. Soldiers eye-to-eye are, the soldiers, they eyeball them. It’s where sailors shoot at ships, air, aircraft just shoot at little targets down on the ground. They don’t ever see humans but the army does. We shoot ships. Submarines shoot ships, so that’s it.

Did you feel any safer being on a capital ship, how did that feel?

Strange as it may seem, yes it did, though we were a very vulnerable

22:30 target because we were a capital ship everyone was out to get the big guy. Yeah, we felt very happy on it because of its size. I told you before how I had to get belted to go across the Brisbane River once because I didn’t want to go in water so deep. We, for some unknown reason on our way to Japan, stopped in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at a time at the time that had never had been depth sounded. It could have been a mile, two miles

23:00 or three miles deep, we did not know but it stopped in the middle of the ocean for some unknown reason. The destroyer was over there and it was piped, “Swimmers to swim if you wish.” There was snipers up on things with rifles in case of sharks and there was no bathing togs in those days ‘cause it was all men, so over the side we were and here I was stark bollocky naked in the middle of the bloody Pacific Ocean in water so bloody deep that if you sunk

23:30 200 city halls it would never reach the bottom and I looked up at this massive piece of bloody steel and I thought, “My god, it could leave without me,” and I swam back to that ship and I got inboard so quick and I thought I’ll never do that again as long as I live but that’s it, you see. Yeah, we felt very happy in them. They were big ships but they were vulnerable ships and the right bomb in the right place would blow it apart because we were just a floating gasoline station with bombs, simple.

24:00 What were the general feelings between the officers on the ship and the men?

Not good, it was them and us. They were a privileged class which they have always been. Things have changed a lot now a hell of a lot, but in my day it was the British navy versus the serfs. The best of food the best of stuff was got, the officers got it, sailors didn’t. They, we had a change over period

24:30 a change over in monetary thing between BOF [actually BCOF, British Commonwealth Occupation Force] exchange money and Japanese yen. There was say 10, 15 cents left over every transaction out of a twenty dollar note or something so it was decided there was too much of this spare cash floating around and they couldn’t give it to us and that so they said the officers, how about on every transaction like this we put all this into a dirty big bucket, at the end of the time we all split it up and everyone

25:00 gets it. Good idea. So you know what they did? While we were up there all that time, every transaction the money was put in this big thing alright. You know what the officers did? They brought grog for the officers. So when we’re having to unload this stuff and West Australia was our first thing, I was down in the hold this time. There’s one feller there, Lieutenant Commander Ulrich, he was the pig of pigs. He was a mongrel and he had 20 dozen bottles of beer on this pallet and there was the crane up ahead and everything

25:30 like that and they said, “Right, ready for the next one?” “Yeah, ready,” and you swung her up like that and as she was lifted it went “voom,” up against the bloody thing and I don’t know how many bottles were broken but they never got them all, believe me, there’s many ways to skin a cat and you don’t upset sailors like that and we were working down in the hold there and we wouldn’t come out. You know why? ‘Cause we were overcome with the fumes, the beer fumes and they accused us of drinking down three, but this officer came to our aid

26:00 they said no they’re just drunk from the fumes. But Jesus, we smashed a lot of grog on the way up, mongrels. That was theft but they did it. No, it wasn’t very good. There’s always been the officer class and the sailor class, but today and you couldn’t come out of the lower deck to become an officer, just wasn’t done. I mean you couldn’t hold your spoon right, nor your fork or what napkin, you can’t do it. But today, they ask you to come out of the lower ranks. In those days we used to say you come up through the hawse pipe which means you were dragged up. The hawse pipe is the front where 26:30 the anchor goes up and if you come up through the hawse pipe you come up from the lower deck. You were never, ever accepted, ever no matter what but today you are. The ball game changed.

Can you tell me about tattooing in the navy?

Yeah, Vikings started it. I don’t know if Vikings started it but they did it, and the King of England had it and King of Sweden had it and it was supposed to be manly and machoey and god knows what.

27:00 I got tattoos that was in Kure, Japan 1951. That was supposed to be a big dragon all down my back and we’re in a place in Kure and 11 o’clock curfew and that and course I’m as full as a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK . What’s the matter if you’re going to get tattooed ‘cause you might get killed anyway so what the hell. You may as well be pretty when you get there and so I turned round and I disappeared, they couldn’t find me. My cap’s, there my wallet’s there everything’s

27:30 there, and I’m at this tattoo artist in an out of bounds area, stripped to the skin with a tattoo on my back ready to roll. He’s ready to start tattooing me with his bamboo things and when they found me, oh boy didn’t they give me heaps, and I wouldn’t go, there was no way in the world I was going until I had a tattoo so they got snifter that bore ‘Kure 1951’. You can hardly read the bloody thing. Soon as I got that I was happy. I was lead away like a little lamb. Went back to the beer hall and went back to the ship. Woke up in the morning, “Oh jesus, that’s sore…

28:00 oh tattoo. Should have been on my back, damn near was. Thank you fellers, that’s it.”

Do you ever compare your Korean war experience as opposed to the typhoon episode?

In what way?

Was it did it feel like all your navy service was one big thing or was it did you break

28:30 it up into episodes and did one episode seem bigger than another perhaps?

The typhoon was bigger than Ben Hur, believe me. That was the most mind boggling experience I’ve ever been through in my life and dangerous. The Korean War was dangerous because we didn’t know what the hell was going to happen. There was mines floating around in the water, there wasn’t any opposition to us from aircraft. We didn’t know at the time but Russians were flying jets,

29:00 nor did we know that the submarines that were following us, were Russian, but they were but you see it’s us and it happens to other ships, it doesn’t happen to you. It was one big episode, one big learning curve, one big series of trouble and I was in it and that’s it. Part of my life it was my life and I just lived it. I went through it, simple.

And how do you think that affected the rest of your life?

It did. It had a tremendous

29:30 affect in my life. I was quite unsettled when I came out. Civilians were strange people, they just didn’t talk straight, they were stupid, they didn’t know what the hell you were talking about. Everything you came up with they didn’t like, and they did it their way and besides when you left to go into the navy the other fellers that were left behind seemed to be promoted to bosses and managers and everything and you were just a bum when you got back. It did affect my life because I couldn’t mix with people. Maybe this was going back to my father’s day, who, when he kept

30:00 me away from other people. I had big trouble associating with females. I married the wrong type. I married ones who had drinking problems and big problems. Maybe I was the knight in shining armour, I don’t know but every time I got married it failed and I used to think I was a good bloke. But I had problems too, I had big ones and

30:30 as I said, one wife used to think I was a screaming nutcase and she could have been right but I was still suffering with the trauma of the typhoon, still.

And you talked a little bit before, can you just explain to me about how people wrongly say, “You know that wasn’t in a war zone,” what do you say to that?

One word, “Crap.” They were using real bullets. The fact was it happened in 1950

31:00 was at a time when people had a gut full of the war. They had a war from 1939-1940 right through to 1945. A lot of people had died. A lot of devastation a lot of everything, they didn’t want any more wars, they didn’t want any more little police actions or whatever. This police action was a nice political new word that no one ever had before. It was a war. Once you pull a trigger and shoot someone a foreigner on their land or wherever it’s a war. They shoot back, it’s a war.

31:30 Samoa is a war, this other’s a war. Vietnam was a war. You can’t say it was a police action. They now, it’s, the Canadians went through this, the Americans went through it. People rejected it. They did not want to be associated with a war. “Forget it, we don’t want anymore about wars.” “You were there, tough teddy,” you know. “Go and live your own little life, leave us alone, we don’t want a war.” See, Vietnam that was another thing. That was a big blow up too, but they had to have that one

32:00 good or bad but no it’s was no bloody police action. I can take you to a cemetery in Pusan, I can show it was no police action. There’s 300-odd Australians died in the Korean war I believe. I’ve got the figures facts and figures over there but they all died, no police action. It was real, real one.

32:30 This is a poem that I wrote it’s reflecting to Anzac Day and the fact that when you meet some blokes one day you won’t seem them again next year, so here it goes:

\n[Verse follows]\n Shuffle up a step.\n They stand there with their medals on this special day,\n some have come to see their mates\n and some, well just to pray.\n For Anzac Day\n we honour those that have gone before,\n and now with all the ANZACs gone\n and to be seen no more.\n We look around at our mates\n and shuffle up a step\n

33:00 we were so young,\n

so proud and vain we thought we knew it all.\n It wasn’t till we lost some mates\n and sometimes saw them fall\n and realised that we were no longer boys\n but now we’re straight and tall.\n Yes proudly with the best\n so we look around on Anzac Day\n and shuffle up a step.\n The crowds, the bands, the children waving flags,\n the sounds of time are running fast.\n Will he be here next year?\n I’ll meet him at the RSL\n and buy the man a beer.\n The Last Post sounds,\n I hate that sound\n

33:30 and straighten up a bit.\n

Oh yes we are a mighty sight\n as we march on proud through time.\n Yesterday’s young warriors\n and shuffle up a step.\n So it’s over now this Anzac Day\n and we’ve all gone home\n and fondly we reflect the things we said,\n the blokes we met, the places that we saw\n and so next year some will be gone for evermore.\n So we shrug it off, give a smile\n and shuffle up a step.\n

34:00 The sea is an awesome thing. Three quarters of the earth is water. We had to learn a long time ago to run with the sea. We can’t control it. This is the one element on this earth that man has never been able to master and to beat. He has to live with the sea. The sea is an awesome weapon and the ships that ply the oceans, some of them just disappear off the face of the earth. They just disappear. The sea

34:30 takes them. The sea will take what it wants. The sea can be as gentle and as boisterous as you can ever want anything and when you go to sea you are in control. You are not on a land situation where you can run away from something. You are in an object that is floating in that sea and that sea is the controlling factor. The weather the whole thing is controlled by the sea and the army guys used to say to us, you’ve got it made. You’ve

35:00 got a home, it’s nice and warm, you’re out there and that’s it and we used to say the first thing we have to beat before we ever try the enemy is the sea, ‘cause it is our constant enemy. Every minute of every hour of every day the sea is changing. It can be a most beautiful embracing woman. It can be the most cantankerous wildest bitch that ever drew breath. It is, the sea is a living thing, it is a living thing

35:30 and man will never control it. It will control us, that’s it.

Can you tell me the importance of Anzac Day?

For a long time a lot of my friends including myself would had nothing to do with Anzac Day. I wouldn’t go near it, I wouldn’t touch it with a 40 foot pole. I didn’t have any feeling for it because I didn’t, I thought it was all garbage, but the older you get the more you start to realise it is not

36:00 the war that you’re thinking about, the it’s the fact that you went as a group to do a specific job, the best you could for the country that you were in and that’s what you’re saluting. You’re saluting the fact of fallen people, people male and female that gave their lives for the belief in their country, and that’s what this Anzac day to me is all about. New Zealand and Australia

36:30 cemented a bond many years ago on Gallipoli that can never be broken no matter who tries it. We can be spat at the Kiwis as much as we like and they us, but we’ll never break that bond because it’s a bond of friendship over an Anzac Day and it’s a, there’s a lot of blood been spilt in the name of Anzac Day and it’s very, very meaningful. I’ve seen big men brought to tears.

37:00 I’ve shed a few myself at Anzac Day things. It just gets you. People turn up, people think, “Oh it’s a holiday, ripper,” you know they don’t really know and forgive them, for they don’t know what they do, that’s fact and you’ve only got to be in it or see in it or be in a war or something like that and you realise the significance of it. It’s not a fun game and you don’t go home at five o’clock. You don’t knock off, it’s there all the time and

37:30 it’s a struggle of life and death. It’s a struggle of principles. It’s a struggle of lots of things, but Anzac Day is a very significant and very meaningful and possibly religious day but it’s not for the glorification of war, it’s about country, simple and people, simple as that. Got me.

In so much as Anzac Day is keeping memories alive in that regard, how is it important to keep the memory of the Sydney and what it

38:00 went through, in that typhoon, alive because it’s been brushed over by history?

Yep, I don’t think it’s all that important really because it’s the ship is a thing, it’s an article that was made to go back to dust. Like the men that sailed it, it’s a time. We talk about the Titanic. It is now a memory. The Sydney is a memory, it is a memory now and it will be a memory in a hundred years from now. It was a ship it was an aircraft

38:30 carrier. Good God, they used aircraft carriers in years to come, you know but the aircraft carrier superseded the battleship and the battleship was the most awesome weapon ever made by mankind but the aircraft carrier superseded it because of its significance. Today, there is a whole fleet of ships that travel with an aircraft carrier and an aircraft carrier it’s called a battle group. It is surrounded by one or two

39:00 battleships, three or four cruisers, 15 or 20 destroyers, refuellers, ammunition ships, submarines, just to protect one ship. It is a weapon, it’s a very awesome weapon. It that ship can destroy civilisations with the power that it has in the hardware that it has. When you pack 5000 people on a ship

39:30 it is an awesome thing. The ship sails around the world. It never comes into port, it hasn’t got to. Aircraft come onboard, they bring new sailors on take older sailors off back. This is it, it’s just a refuelling thing. They don’t have to refuel. It lasts four, five years, 10 years with the fuel it’s got. All they have to do is put stores in it. This is why they’ve got 15, 20, 25 ships following it around the oceans. It is in itself a weapon, awesome. That’s it, to what it used to be.

40:00 Is it easy to sum up your life in the navy?

Fabulous time it was. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a great time. I thoroughly enjoyed the navy. I saw lots of things. I grew up, I became a man. I became civilised. I think I learnt art. I learnt the appreciation of lots of things, all through the navy and I wouldn’t have got it if I hadn’t have been there and at 71 I wished

40:30 the hell I could go back into it, but they don’t, as someone said to me and he was onboard a ship named after my ship the Sydney and he was as drunk as a skunk and he said to me, “You’re a bloody legend, you’re a legend in your own time,” and I said, “Is that right?” Because I was serving on that ship before any of them were born and he was right, and I came away from there and said, “I’m not going back there again, I’m not going back there because I’m too old for this caper,”

41:00 so that’s it.

INTERVIEW ENDS