Transcript of Interview

Australians at War Film Archive Harry Cullen (Copp) - Transcript of interview Date of interview: 9th December 2003 http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/1344 Tape 1 00:36 Okay Doug, we’ll make a start now. So if we could start with an introduction to your, your life story, just a summary beginning with where you were born and grew up. Well I was born on the 24th of November, 1918 at Corowa, New South Wales. I think the doctor 01:00 who was in charge of my birth was Dr Barnard. And I was born in the Corowa Private Hospital, and the sister in charge there, was Sister Thompson. And I know that because I’ve met her since. And then I went back to, on the other side of the river to Wahgunyah where we lived, and I grew up there 01:30 on a farm with wheat, growing wheat, sheep and some cattle. Then in, I finished school in, in what, 1933, I think at the age of 15, having got my Intermediate Certificate. And went out to 02:00 be an apprentice winemaker with my uncle who had three vineyards at Rutherglen. The one I went to was called Fairfield, and I stayed there with the manager, boarded with the manager’s wife and worked in the vineyard and in the cellar. So I more or less did my apprenticeship, as a winemaker. Then when, well 02:30 before, about 193-, ’36 I think, I joined the 8th Light Horse Regiment, which was a militia regiment, and it had been commanded by an uncle of mine, Colonel Archie McClorin, who died in Tripoli, Syria in 1918, at the end, just towards the end of the war. Anyway, I rose to the 03:00 rank of lance corporal after three years battling and doing my best. And, and that’s, I did a couple of camps, one at Seymour and one at Benalla. I remember very well the Benalla one. I was the… The brigadier in charge of our regiment, was, he was Colonel Blamey, 03:30 in those days, later General Blamey. And I was to be his orderly, so I had to ride beside him with a lance on a pole. And when we got off to inspect troops or anything like that, I had to walk beside him with this lance, and lead his horse. On one occasion, I can remember, I stuck the lance in the ground, because I had three horses to hold, and a puff of wind came and 04:00 blew the lance over, and it was about an 18 foot long lance, with a spike on the end, and it fell right on Colonel Blamey’s head. I didn’t get full marks for that one, I tell you. Well that was about the end of my experiences with the Light Horse. In 19-, it must have been 1938, 04:30 they called for volunteers to join the new force which was being formed called the Darwin Mobile Force. And I went down to Melbourne to be selected, I think we were out at Victoria Barracks, about 400 of us from various walks of life, all went down to be selected. And we had to march around and around in a circle, and oh, someone in charge said, “Right-o, you fall out, you fall out,” and 05:00 so on, and someone picked me, and I fell out. I can remember that very well. And so I was picked to go to Darwin. Well we, what would happen, we would get on the train and go to Sydney, went out to Liverpool Camp, and then the rest of the recruits who were joining the Darwin Mobile Force, we were there for about three months doing what we called, our 05:30 rookie training. And after our three months there, around about Christmas time 193-, 1938, we marched down to the wharves in Sydney, got onto the old Montoro, which was a, an old Burns Philp boat, which incidentally had been commandeered from, it was the Kaiser’s yacht before the war. 06:00 And as part of the reparations, it was given to the Allies after the war. Australia got the Marella, which was renamed the Marella. Anyway. No, I’m sorry, not the Marella, the Montoro. We got on the Montoro with all our gear, and sailed to Darwin. We took with us our beds for the, which were all steel beds, that were 06:30 for the army, but we had no cabins on the Montoro. So we all put these, had to sleep on the deck. We put the beds up, put them all along the deck on both sides, and slept in the steel beds on the deck of the Montoro until we got to Darwin. And when we got to Darwin of course, we were marched from the wharf there out to Vestie’s Meatworks, which was to be our barracks. Vestie’s Meatworks which was closed down in about 1918, I think. 07:00 But the, the buildings were still there in a very dilapidated condition too. So that’s how I started off. And do you want me to carry on from there? Yes I do actually, its wonderful. Well, after being there about twelve months, we were mainly, we didn’t do much training, military training there, we were mainly building roads and making maps. We built the road to 07:30 East Point, which is now a main road going from Darwin to East Point, but in those days it was just a muddy track. So we built that road, we also built the road out to Rapid Creek, and other roads around Darwin, all by hand with picks and shovels and wheelbarrows. And then the war was declared of course in September 19-, what was, 1939, I think. 08:00 And that was when we were down doing some exercises at Adelaide River, when war broke out. So we got in trucks and drove back to Darwin. And our job in Darwin as the mobile force, was to train recruits, because they called for recruits to join the AIF [Australian Imperial Force], and a lot of people in Darwin and from down in the country, as far as Tennant Creek, came up to Darwin to join the AIF. And they were given 08:30 DX numbers. People from New South Wales got NX numbers, Victorians got VX numbers, and so on. All those who enlisted in Darwin had DX numbers. So we, we trained these fellows in marching mainly, left return, right turn and all that sort of thing. And I can remember one of the fellows who joined up, was a fairly old bloke, a lot of old fellows joined up, some didn’t last 09:00 the distance, they were ordered out of the battalion and we got new ones came in, and they went to what we called ‘olds and bolds’. So the oldest olds and bolds, they took base jobs later on. Anyway, this particular fellow named, was named Nobby Hyde, and he, he came from Tennant Creek, he was a miner down there. And I trained, I was one of those who trained him in Darwin. 09:30 I met him later on during the war, which I’ll tell you about later, or would like me to carry on and tell you now about it. Oh well we’ll go back through everything in much more detail, so keep going the way you are. Anyway, seeing all these fellows were being trained by us in Darwin, and being sent down to, down south to join the AIF, we had a lot of applications from the mobile force to join the AIF. And our CO [Commanding Officer] was Colonel 10:00 Andy McDonald. He was a well-known fellow from the, actually, First World War, but he became our Commanding Officer, later to command the jungle training unit at, down at Canungra. Any rate, Andy called us, called a parade, battalion parade, and he said, “Right, no more 10:30 applications from you fellows to join the AIF, I won’t have you fellows joining this mob of sightseers going overseas, you’ve got to stay, you’ve got to stay here at home.” So at that stage, another fellow named Tinsley, and myself, we were talking about it, and we decided we’d, we’d go on and buy our own tickets to go down to Melbourne by plane, and join the AIF under assumed names, which we did. We went into Darwin and bought a 11:00 ticket, it cost us eighteen pounds something, to go to Adelaide in those days. And any rate, the plane left at about, oh four or five o’clock in the morning from Darwin. And Tinsley and I took our ports on our shoulders, marched out to the, to the aerodrome, which was the old aerodrome at Parap in those days. And when we got out there, there was a sergeant of police there, named 11:30 McCaffery. And Sergeant McCaffery came up to us, he said, “Are you fellows going on, on leave?” And we said, “Yes, we are.” He said, “I wonder if you’d mind posting this official mail for me when you get to Adelaide.” And we said, “Oh no, we’ll post it.” So he gave us a bundle of letters and things to post, and he did that because in those days, all the mail that went from Darwin, went by sea around to Sydney.

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