Australians at War Film Archive

Veronica Barry (Yvonne) - Transcript of interview

Date of interview: 12th March 2004

http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/1367

Tape 1

00:36 Thanks for talking to us today, Mrs Barry. Could I ask you to summarise what the main points are in your life?

I grew up in Rose Bay and I found out a truism: if you’re going to be poor, it’s much better to be poor where everybody around you is poor because you don’t notice it.

01:00 I grew up in Rose Bay and most people were much better off than we were. Your poverty is very obvious. My mother was absolutely determined that we would have an education and she actually went out, scrubbed floors of wealthy people so that we, my brother and I, there were only two of us, could have an education, so I can thank here. Looking back I realise that it must have been very hard. My father

01:30 was in the First World War. He had been married before. We found out after Mum died, big shock and had a daughter, big shock again. She was in her thirties and he was nearly 40 when they were married, so they were older parents. He was not a good husband,

02:00 not a good father. She really had a pretty hard time. Because it was so difficult at home I really found great – my source of joy was being at school, especially in the choir. I won a scholarship to a very snobbish

02:30 private school where the first day, I had an unusual name, Gaysley, which most people found difficult. People remembered it and the first day I was at this high school, I was 13 in hand me down uniform, which was very discreetly arranged, very well, and discreetly arranged for me, and the

03:00 first person I met recognised the name, and told me in a group of girls that “Your mother scrubs our toilet.” It didn’t go down well for a 13 year old. I had a couple of friends there but I could never invite anyone home because my father was at home all the time and he would make it very embarrassing if anybody came to the house.

03:30 I was very protective towards my brother, who was a year and 11 months younger. I think he suffered more from it than I have. People say, “I had a terrible childhood,” but I think in many ways it’s a good experience. It made me quite mature for my age but I think boys, and I’ve been a teacher

04:00 in special ed [special education: special assistance for slow learners], and I found that boys are much more vulnerable. I think men are much more vulnerable. I think women are pretty tough. We’re born to be survivors and we have to get by without strength, you two are a good example, and muscle power, so we have to our brain, and reasoning. I think women are much stronger, mentally

04:30 and physically, not lifting and carrying, but physically women will put up with pain, and carry on for other people.

What was your father’s wartime experience?

Well that’s a great story. All the time growing up my mother would say and I think she believed it. She was very naïve my mother.

05:00 The story was that he had been on – there’s a famous battle hill, 22 or 23, I can’t remember, that is in history books and people were gassed. The story was that he had suffered TB [tuberculosis] from being gassed in the First World War. He was being paid – the pension goes from TPI, which is totally and permanently incapacitated, which is the

05:30 amputations and really badly affected, and he was the next to that. I don’t know what they called that but it would be part of the family folklore that he was almost TPI. My mother would talk about the diggers [Australian soldiers] and how they suffered during the war, and he had been gassed, and that’s why his lungs were affected. He had one functioning lung and had developed TB as a result of the gassing. 06:00 All our cups were separate and my mother would never kiss us on the mouth. She would – cheeks because of this TB and it might be conveyed. We had a memory of that’s why he was the way he was. She would excuse his behaviour. He never struck

06:30 her and she once told us that she had said to him, “If ever you raise a hand to me – ” I can’t imagine her saying it but this was her story, “ – that will be it.” And he never did but what he did to her children! It took me many, many years. I had my mother on a pedestal and he was down there but it wasn’t until I had children myself that I thought, “Now

07:00 hang on!” He never struck her ever. I would leave if a man abused my children like that, didn’t abuse me but abused my children, so I sort of grew into a pattern of thinking, “She wasn’t such a saint after all.” He had enough nous not to strike but she allowed –

07:30 I was one of those people who was always asking questions and I couldn’t work this out, why she would allow this. One time I challenged him about something he was doing that was quite awful and there was a row, and he struck me, and belted me. I staggered into the bedroom

08:00 where she was lying on the bed with a very bad headache and that’s what started it all off. She then said to me and here I am, been belted and clothes ripped off, and she said, “Why do you always cause all this trouble?” Now I had been defending her, so it took me a while to realise that she really needed to

08:30 have somebody like that. It was a sort of sacrificial thing if you understand. The only time we ever talked about this she said she would have loved to have been a nun and she would have made a very good nun. It suddenly hit me years and years later that she was really in the position, being a sort of – not a slave exactly

09:00 but whatever he did was OK because of his war experiences. After she died very sadly and he lived on – when she married him he was supposed to have had six months to live because of this TB. She died at age 74. He lived on to 88 and died seven years after her,

09:30 and boasted about the doctors who told him he had six months to live way back. They had all died according to him. He made life very, very difficult. He invited a woman who was – great suspicions about her. She called herself a nurse, going in and looking after elderly people, mainly widowers, and the house, and everything was left to this woman. My mother couldn’t

10:00 stand her. She really felt she was preying on old people, so that was a very sad outcome. It wasn’t until she died and he was still going, which was very hard to take, that we found out that he had been married before. There was a daughter. I have tried to get in touch with this daughter but haven’t been able to. They were divorced and strangely enough

10:30 my mother’s name was, and she was called Annie, and the first wife was also called Anne or Anna. My brother was looking up his records. He was in the air force during the war. He found the name Anna, thought it was my mother, got confused with the dates and there was a letter from her asking – he wasn’t

11:00 married to her, they were divorced. He wasn’t married to my mother and he put his mother down in England as his next of kin. My brother found a letter from Anna, the first wife, asking that she be sent some money because she was destitute with her child. My brother became incensed. He didn’t work it out,

11:30 thought it was our mother that my father had left destitute. I mean they didn’t marry until after the war. He got his facts all mixed up and he didn’t tell me anything about it. He said, “I know something about the old bastard that you don’t know.” Try as I might, but that was what he believed. He was quite wrong because it wasn’t – I don’t think there was any thought of him leaving her destitute but it was a big shock after

12:00 Mum died to find out that he had been married and pennies started to drop. There was always something odd about my whole bringing up. I was always questioning, “Why that and why this?” One day one of the neighbour’s daughters was getting married and we all went out to see the bride come out. We didn’t talk very much. I mean children don’t ask their parents things.

12:30 I wish I had now. My children have got too much information I think but it is so awful not to know. There was something odd about their marriage. I caught her out a few times, a discrepancy and that lodged itself in my brain. I said to her on this beautiful sunny Saturday because we were saying

13:00 what a beautiful day it was for this wedding, “What sort of a day was it when you got married Mum?” She sort of hesitated and I picked that up immediately, “Oh it wasn’t a very nice day. It was raining.” Then she closed the subject completely, so being an inquisitive child that lodged. There was something going on. So there was another wedding or something to do with a wedding and I

13:30 again said, “Oh was it raining when you got married? “No, it was a beautiful day.” So you know? I found out that what had probably happened was they were married originally in a registry office because he was divorced. She was a Catholic. He was Protestant. Of course in those days the laws were very rigid about Catholics. People have no 14:00 idea how rigid it was. She was allowed to take any part because she’d married a divorced man in a registry office, so it wasn’t regarded as a – in the eyes of the [Catholic] Church. Then I remember we were suddenly making first communions and being involved in the Church. What I think happened was there were two weddings and I think the second one was when – and I

14:30 looked up the records. This is after my mother’s death that all this came about. I think they were remarried in St Mary’s Cathedral. My mother had a friend who became a priest, so I think that explained the two weddings, one on a wet day and one on a sunny day but there were always mysteries. To make

15:00 it even more complicated my father had an aunt, Auntie Sis, and although people would say they were so unalike, he boasted about tact. He didn’t believe in tact and she was the opposite in manner. She was a terrible snob, not that she had anything to be snobbish about but they were basically very much alike, very self-

15:30 centred. I think they had a bad upbringing and she wanted to come to Australia. They were born in Bedford, my father and his family. He sponsored her out. She moved into our house. This is also knowledge I gained after: I was always wondering why she was a slave to my father and a slave to his sister, who came and lived in our house, and took over the place,

16:00 and one day I came home from school, and found my mother cowering in the kitchen. She was very short. We used to call her Mrs Five by Five, five feet wide and five feet high. My aunt was a tall, statuesque sort of woman. She’s up there, Mum is cowering down and she’d been crying. I heard my aunt say, “I’ve been to confession and I’ve been in the choir,” and doing this, that and

16:30 the other connected to the Church. It suddenly hit me years later. She was a Protestant, as my father was. On the ship that brought her to Australia she was looking after somebody’s children and she converted to Catholicism. Here’s Mum out of the Church and because she’d married her brother, and you know what a convert is, they become evangelical. She went to church three times

17:00 on Sunday because she was in the choir and had come home, and was letting my mother know that she took part in the Church. She had this over my mother all their life. She took over the room. She really ran the place.

How long did your aunt live with you for?

Until after Mum died – no, before Mum died.

17:30 My father and she had a big row, and he almost literally threw her out. My idiot brother, who should have known better, I begged and begged him not to do it, she offered him – in those days a hundred pounds was a lot of money – a hundred pounds to build – he was having his house built at Caringbah – offered him the money to build on a room that would eventually be a big

18:00 family room but her flat, with a bit of a stove there. She would have the use of their bathroom. He had been married and they had no children, and then a child turned up ten years after they married. As I predicted, I said, “You know what happened to Mum. How could you even think of it. What about Rene?” His wife. “Oh Rene and Auntie get on very well together.” Famous

18:30 last words. It turned out to be the most awful, awful, awful mistake and got to the stage where Rene had the baby ten years after they married, Auntie took over the baby, and Rene tried to commit suicide. I was always rushing from one place to another. I had a small child who was about the same age as theirs and I’d leave Phillip,

19:00 and go to Rose Bay to my mother crying on the phone about something that the old man was doing, and then I’d go to Caringbah when my brother would ring, and say, “Rene has tried to commit suicide.” Off I’d go. I went round the country and eventually it got really ridiculous. The child was suffering between the two women. Rene had a breakdown and these two,

19:30 brother and sister – I’m going to write a book called The Siblings. It’s all about brothers and sisters, and how their lives have been ruined. My nephew moved as far away as he could to Western Australia. You can’t get much further than that unless you go overseas! He had five children in no time and they rarely see each other.

20:00 My brother eventually got to the stage where Rene and she were actually fighting. It was terrible to go and visit them because if you went around one side Auntie would get offended, and if you went to the other side Rene would get offended. Christmas was a nightmare. Eventually I found a Housing Commission flat. I knew somebody in the Housing Commission and rang the Social Services people, and said, “This woman must be found another place.

20:30 She’s ruining people’s lives.” So she moved to a Housing Commission flat at Liverpool. She wanted to come and live with me. I very tactfully got that idea out. So the two people!

Can I ask you Mrs Barry how much you believe your father’s behaviour had to do with his wartime experiences? Nothing because

21:00 he was an absolute total liar and it wasn’t until Mum died that I sent for his record, because there were so many discrepancies and very embarrassing. I went back to school, got my matriculation, went to university when I had kids and took two years off because my mother was very ill, and

21:30 when she died I decided to look up the records because there were so many mysteries that didn’t make sense. I found out that he went to England. He enlisted in Australia, went to England on the ship, on the way over – or maybe it was hatching in Australia. TB was very prevalent, the disease. I mean it is amazing that it has practically been wiped out. When he got to the other side he never

22:00 saw war service at all because he developed TB and spent most of the time in hospital, so he never went on Hill 33. It was so embarrassing for me. I was in my thirties I think when I decided to go back to school, eventually matriculated and did a university course, and they were so short of teachers in 1968 that they added another

22:30 year to the leaving year, and it became the HSC [Higher School Certificate]. They were desperately short of teachers, so they were taking people with degrees without teacher training and I had to go the Health Department. Everybody had to go to the Health Department and I had to fill in the form that said illnesses in the family, and I put “TB caused by gassing.” Well the doctor – it was quite funny, he was like that [Indicates a large person].

23:00 He was in the Health Department examining other people for health and he knocked me back because I had recently had an operation but I overcame that one. He was looking at this form and he said, “What’s this? TB caused by gassing? It’s not possible.” It was such a shock because I believed it. That was the story he told my mother. TB is a disease that is not caused by gassing!

23:30 He had TB. He never saw war service. He was in the war but because he had developed it on the way, they weren’t sure whether it was on the ship or when he arrived, but he spent time getting a lung removed and then came back to Australia, and got the TPI pension because of that. His whole life was a lie! His life. I think my

24:00 mother believed it. We believed it. If you’re told something when you’re a child you don’t question it, except I did but not until I grew up. There were too many things that didn’t make sense.

What did your family home look like in Rose Bay?

It was quite comfortable. It was weatherboard. As we grew up my brother and I contributed, and my husband

24:30 was very generous, and we gave them money to – they weren’t so badly off because was receiving a War Repatriation pension. They had their hospital and medical care taken care of, so he was comparatively well off, not compared with other people that lived in the street but it was quite comfortable.

25:00 We helped as we grew up. It was a very ordinary place, no garage, weatherboard. My mother was mad on antiques and she couldn’t afford them so she put them on lay-by, and little broken things she’d turn the thing around. She was an absolutely avid reader. She would read the [Sydney Morning] Herald

25:30 and she could tell you the shipping news, and who was going to appear in the law courts. She was a very great reader and I really owe her a lot. I think she thought she was a sort of nun in a way, nobody else would. This was the part that really got me, she’d go down to the hotel and

26:00 buy the drink that would cause us – saying, “He needs it. He’s sick.” We all had to be very quiet. We weren’t allowed to make a noise. The number of times I bit my tongue in half because my brother was completely spoilt and would take advantage of this. As soon as we would raise our voices our mother would come running, [whispers] “Your father is not well!” So that’s how we lived our life.

Did she practice Catholicism?

26:30 Yes, once she got herself involved and she went to church, and confession. I was always sceptical about it. I was always questioning and I tried to tell her – the priest for example, being in Rose Bay and being almost on the border of Vaucluse, they had all the Vaucluse people.

27:00 St Mary Magdalene’s, which is on New South Head Road, Rose Bay but on the way to Vaucluse, so we had Vaucluse people. It was a very wealthy congregation and he would spend most of the sermon reading out the donations, starting from the Vaucluse people. I found it all so hypocritical, even as a child. I didn’t know that the word meant but it was all so

27:30 snobbish. It was crazy. The ordinary people, working class people went to the seven o’clock Mass. There were three Masses: seven o’clock, eight thirty and ten. All the wealthy went to the ten o’clock Mass.

Where did you fit?

I used to go at eight thirty but because I’ve 28:00 never been a morning type, I can stay up all night but not get up in the morning, I usually turned up at the ten o’clock just making it! That’s when all these things would be read out to all these people who had donated. Instead of having a sermon about how to put up with your hideous life, we’d have hours and hours. I spent most of my time at school. I had the most beautiful nun, who was the music teacher.

28:30 She was just inspiring. She told me how music could solve a lot of things and I had quite a good voice, and she encouraged me. She wanted me to have my voice trained but immediately when something good happened to me, he would squash it, “Can’t afford it!” She suggested that she might be able to get hold of a piano because I longed

29:00 to learn music, squashed that. I got a scholarship to go on for Leaving [Certificate], squashed that. So I had to transfer it to a secretarial course, which probably was much better but at the time! So that was the sort of background as I grew up and he got worse and worse. When the war broke out, when it was obvious there was going to be a war, he

29:30 became worse than ever. He’d go overboard. You had to darken all your windows and he’d go berserk. I remember one of the neighbour’s sons was killed fairly early in the war and he went crazy saying, “He was only 19 and here he was, living this life. It should have been him.” I’m thinking all the time, “If only!”

30:00 I was always the one who had to fix things and I remember one time he got very drunk, and he was just so obnoxious. He slammed out of the house as if he was going to jump over The Gap. You know The Gap at Watson’s Bay? That was the big thing. He was always going to jump off The Gap. My mother said to me, “Go after him Vonnie! Go after him Vonnie!” I thought, “God! If I go after him I’ll help him over The Gap.”

30:30 I mean she was that naïve. He had no intention of jumping over The Gap, a big show off. For forty odd years, even when I was having my first baby she couldn’t leave him, she couldn’t stay the night and it was a false alarm, which often happens with first babies, she had to get back to him. “Sure as God made little fishes!” she used to say. “As sure as God made

31:00 little fishes this will be the day that something happens to him!” So he survived to the age of 88, outlived her by seven years causing more problems and she went off tragically. He survived a huge operation when he was 80, became the pet of St Vincent’s because it was the survival of a man with one functioning lung,

31:30 smoked endlessly, wouldn’t let one cigarette out without lighting another! Amazing!

Can I ask you, Mrs Barry, when you were a child were you aware of other families in the Church or the area that were experiencing the same level of domestic – ?

A couple and I usually sussed the children out. I remember at high school there was a girl Vera and she and I became very close because

32:00 she understood. Nobody ever talked about it. Nowadays it’s all talked about but it was absolutely private in the family. Nobody ever, ever explained what happened inside the house. It was just that sort of time.

So how would you know that other people were being abused?

I just had a feeling. I got to be very good at picking up atmosphere.

32:30 I remember walking home from school and each step would get worse because you never knew what to expect. The best thing would be if he was completely out to it and asleep. The worst scenario was if he wasn’t out to it and he was in a picky mood. My brother and his wife, whatever he said they’d agree to and I would be the

33:00 one. Unfortunately I’m more like him than my mother really. I would literally bite my tongue so I wouldn’t respond and he knew this. He’d goad and goad, and goad until I finally would snap, and say something. Then he’d have an excuse. It was a hell of a life and I used to say back at school. I joined the choir. I joined anything that was going on at the school so that I

33:30 could be as late as possible home. So that was the atmosphere. That was one of the reasons I joined the WAAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force], anything to get away from home but also everybody was very worried about the war.

What was the school like that you went to?

Very snobbish, a high school.

34:00 It wasn’t a very happy time except music. They had a very big musical attitude and the music teacher, the nun was the reason why everybody wanted to do music. She was so different from the others. The principal was a very sarcastic woman. She would

34:30 belittle you and make sarcastic remarks, and then look at the class for a big laugh. Half the time it was so sarcastic that they didn’t understand the sarcasm and I made a vow that if ever I had children – well I didn’t think of children, if ever I became a teacher, which I did eventually, I would never use sarcasm. It’s a very adult, patronising thing to do because children don’t

35:00 understand sarcasm, not young ones and it remains forever. I still remember she taught maths and English. She was very good at English and I was very good at English. I thought it was me that was bad at maths but i’ve since found out that she was bad at teaching maths and I did this homework with terrible things going on at home,

35:30 and I really worked hard at it. She came across and she had this red pen, and she [indicates crossing out] like that. She really got pleasure out of putting these red crosses on and then she turned to the class, and she said, it was only a small class, “Veronica! You would be better off – ” I can still remember the words and the tone. “You would be better off writing the opposite to what you

36:00 think!” That was a crazy thing but she turned to the class and they all laughed heartily, not really understanding. That’s when I made the vow that I would never, ever do that to any child. When I was marking papers I’d always do the ticks, forget the others. We can work those out.

How was this nun different then?

The two I remember most, Martina and I can’t remember the other one’s name.

36:30 She was very tall, regal, should never have been with cooee [near] of children. She was sarcastic and nasty. The other one was just the opposite. You know how they wore those – what do they call them?

Habits.

The habits! We’d all start sort of tensing up when we heard the rattle of beads that came down with Martina. With the other one, she’d push her

37:00 thingo over the top, push it back, roll up her sleeves and be one of us. I was very freckled. I had absolutely plain, straight, dark hair, very thick eyebrows and regarded myself as ugly and I had this round pudding face. She once said to me, “Veronica, stop putting yourself down!

37:30 When you grow up, when you get older, you will be very glad that you have a round face. The freckles will fade! Believe me! Your face will be very, very good. People with thin faces get gaunt.” I went home on a cloud thinking, “One day!” But she was like that. She was just the best. So they are the only two

38:00 I remember. I can’t remember any of the others. Outstanding in different ways. One was horrible. The other one was just wonderful. So I hoped that if ever I became a teacher I would be much more like – I can’t remember her name! Funny isn’t it, I can remember the other one.

What did your uniform look like at the school?

It was a blouse and

38:30 tucked into a pleated skirt. Now they call them sun rope pleating. We had to iron and press them. It was a pleated skirt all round, fawn lisle stockings. I don’t know if you know lisle, but we hated them. They were thick. We had plain black lace-up shoes, a straw hat

39:00 with the school band around it and a blazer. My aunt bought me a whole school outfit when I got the scholarship to go, bought the hat, blazer, a case, took me into town. My father knew that I was going to meet her after school and she was going to buy these things.

39:30 he knew very well because I had to get permission to leave school at two thirty. I met her in town, got all these lovely goodies and the case, and the blazer – I can’t remember the other things. I know there was a case, a pencil case, an atlas and a couple of other things, notebooks, stockings, underwear! I think we had to wear

40:00 navy blue bloomers. When I got home fairly late about half past five, quarter to six, I remember it was winter and cold, I came in full of wanting to show off my goodies, and there he was. He said, “We had no idea where you were. You’ve worried your mother!” He got these things

40:30 and threw them all into a big, round bonfire in a drum. I tried to save them, burnt my hands trying to get them out. I was screaming and I think that was one of the reasons that my aunt and he had a row. He just burnt the lot. So that was my father and my mother did nothing.

41:00 It was me that was always – all I did was walk in and he took the whole case. I think I got the blazer out? Oh the blazer had to wait until we got the thing [crest] put on it, so that was saved. I had the blazer but all the other things just went, stood out there poking the fire. So that was one of the reasons

41:30 I joined the WAAAF as soon as I was 18. My brother had joined the air force – no I don’t think he was old enough – anyway he later joined the air force. I went in as what they call a something clerk because I had secretarial skills.

Tape 2 00:36 Mrs Barry, I wanted to ask you what was the name of the school that you went to?

The school was St Mary Magdalene’s. It was right next to the church. I think it was just St Mary Magdalene’s School.

And the scholarship that you received, what was that for?

They had an exam

01:00 at the end of primary. The primary school was run by the same order and that was two streets away. It was in a different place in Strickland Street and I forget what they called it. Anyway, it was some exam that we had. I suppose it would be year 6 and there was a scholarship attached to that, and I managed to get that scholarship, so that’s how I went to St Mary Magdalene’s.

01:30 I liked English. I was very good at English, not very good at – I forget what we did for the – it used to be called the Intermediate [Certificate]. You could leave at age 15 and I managed to get four As and a B, and that was the top. I think I got

02:00 the B in Art. I wasn’t very good at art. To my amazement I got an A in maths and that entitled me to another scholarship where I could go on to the Leaving. The matriculation year was only one year then. It’s two years now. My father wouldn’t let me. Now looking back that sounds as if I had this horrible – he was spiteful and horrible but

02:30 looking back we really couldn’t afford for me to stay on at school. The scholarship was transferred to a secretarial course, which I did for a year and then they sent you out on work experience type things. I worked in St Vincent’s Hospital in Kings Cross, saw very strange things happen there. Then

03:00 I worked for a barrister in Phillip Street. He turned out to be an alcoholic and that was another experience. Then I finally – I can’t remember what the other jobs were. These were work experience ones too, you stayed there for a couple of weeks and they reported on you. I went out to Long Bay Jail and interviewed a murderer

03:30 with that barrister. That was another shock to my system because I had read all the details about it and two criminals had had a shoot out about this woman they were both madly in love with, and one got the shot in first, so he had murdered the other guy.

04:00 His name was McGurran and I met his daughter, and son. They had a terrible time because of their father. Half the time they had to go and find him. I mean when he wasn’t drinking he was a wonderful man and he said, “Come one. I’m going to take you out to Long Bay and we’re going to interview a client.” Now Long Bay Jail! First of all we went by taxi. We stopped at Kings Cross.

04:30 He said, “I’ve got to pick up the lady in the case.” Being a very imaginative, romantic type female I had these visions of this beautiful blond that these men were fighting over. Oh talk about disillusion! She came down and she was what we called in those days a ‘bottle blond’, that colour hair, hard as a rock, spoke like a wharf labourer.

05:00 She’s sitting in the back, I’m sitting next to the taxi driver and I thought, “This can’t be the one that these men tried to kill each other over!” She was the one, so that was a big shock and then we got out to Long Bay. It’s a huge place with walls all around. We were escorted, not the girl. She was dropped off somewhere. We went into this place. It was like a little hut, the interview place and the guard was outside with guns.

05:30 I had another vision of the murderer being of a type. He was charming, dark and handsome. He pulled out a chair for me to sit down, so talk about two shocks! I thought I’m not going to make any judgements until I actually meet people. He told the barrister that they’d had this sort of dual,

06:00 like a dual they had and he just happened to get the shot in first. Amazing experiences you know? I had a couple of other jobs, very boring, boring, boring. Then they advertised, the Public Service used to have exams and you could be anywhere. You fill is forms and you do all these sort of things and finally

06:30 got myself into the Mines Department through this. First of all I was in the big Mines Department centre in Bridge Street and then I became the Mining Museum, which is if you take a Millers Point tram down George, or the bus these days, it used to be a tram, right down to where the bridge starts, the pylon

07:00 on the city side, and the Mining Museum as it then was is a building owned by the Department of Mines, and that’s where they did all the assaying. Rocks would come in sent by prospectors or anybody that found anything in the country that looked interesting, ‘fool’s gold’ [Pyrite] as they call it

07:30 would come in by the truckload. They’d send that in by train. It would be picked up by our man in the Mining Museum. He’d bring all the samples in. They’d go down to the ground floor, geologists would come down from the Mines Department, say what they thought it was. If they needed chemical analysis there was a big chemical laboratory on the top floor. I was the only female with – I think there were 48

08:00 or 50 men in the place. There was a lift and I was always wondering why the lift was stuck on the second floor. We had every floor except the second floor and one day somebody called the lift up to the second floor, and I was too late to press my button for the ground floor, so I went up to the second floor. I’ve always wondered about this little round hole and there was the Julian Ashton Art School, which is still there,

08:30 and the boys, my colleagues, had bored a little hole, and they would have a lovely perve at models. Where the models stood was right opposite the hole, so that explained why! I never did go to the Julian Ashton Art School. It was so strange to be seeing people who would be going up there, the very arty types and with all this very formal Mines Department stuff but it was a marvellous

09:00 experience.

What was it like for you being the only woman? How old were you then?

I remember I had my 16th birthday and because there were too many for me to give presents to, weren’t there, I got all these presents. It was marvellous and they would rib me but it was very tame. They’d say, “Oh, what were you doing, sitting on the gas bottle

09:30 last night?” They’d tease me but they were a wonderful group. I worked for the curator and there were all these mining samples sent, well it was an actual Mining Museum. My job was to write out the certificates, tie up the specimen with the sender, I mean some of them were illiterate,

10:00 old prospectors and tramps. The Depression started in 1932. I was a child during the Depression years and that was terrible, and we were comparatively better off because my father had a fixed income. Other people were queuing up. It was dreadful. Everybody went to the country because you could get food

10:30 there, grow your own food and they’d be trying to find gold, and they’d send these samples in. Then I had the job of tying up the sample with the sender and one lovely day – the girl before had no – it was a mess, so I worked out a way to change the filing system, and it worked

11:00 very well. They’d always be sent by rail and I would write to the station master, and ask him to fill our forms if anybody sent them. Nobody thought of that but the one I liked best was when we were trying to track down this great big thing that arrived, a big rock and we couldn’t find out who sent it, so we couldn’t send the certificate

11:30 to say what was in it. I wrote to the station master, described the thing and asked him if he could find out who sent it. Anyway, back came this scrawl from the sender and it said, “My rock was raped in a canvas bag.” [laughs] R-A-P-E-D! We eventually worked it out but it was funny, funny things that happened. That was my favourite one, “My rock was raped in a canvas bag.”

12:00 That went down well but things were very bad at home and in the end they were calling up army. The army was called the AWAS, Australian Women’s Army Service. The WAAAF was the Women’s Australian Auxiliary

12:30 Air Force. The WAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force] in England had two As and we had three, so that distinguished. I went to Robertson, which is down Moss Vale way for training, stayed at an ex-hotel. The army and navy, and air force took over hotels, anything that was available. You just had to

13:00 give it up. I did six weeks training there. We didn’t know where we were going to be sent and I was eventually sent to Melbourne.

I might just go back there Mrs Barry before we go on to the WAAAF. You talked about doing a secretarial course. Whereabouts was that?

That was also part of the – there was a different order of nuns. The Mercy nuns were the ones

13:30 that I went to school with and they were always regarded as very strict. They were originally Irish nuns and they’ve always been very conservative, very strict. The secretarial course was run by – I don’t think it is there any more but it was part of the grounds of St Mary’s Cathedral, owned the building where we did the secretarial course.

14:00 I think it was called St Mary’s Secretarial Training School and it was very good. Employers used to ask for girls who did that course. There was another one at Burwood and I believe it is still going, Miss Hale’s Secretarial College, and everybody wanted to get into that one but the two were the leading secretarial. That

14:30 was very good. I really enjoyed that. I had a horrible experience one day. I had the morning off because I had to do an exam and I was able to go in about 11 or 10, later than I normally did because there was an exam on. We lived off Old South Head Road and I don’t know whether you know Rose Bay but there’s Old South Head Road and New South Head Road. They are parallel and they meet

15:00 just before Watson’s Bay but we lived off Old South Head Road. I’d have to walk down to catch the tram in New South Head Road and there was a hotel on the corner. I’m walking down towards this hotel and I was the only one walking down. It was a bright sunny day and I looked across, and the road was fairly wide, and it looked like a heap of grey clothes in the middle of the road just before it got 15:30 to the last block. My brother went to a school where most boys wore this grey uniform and for one moment I thought, “It could be Keith, my brother!” So I went over and it was a boy who had been killed, obviously instantly, and I can still see what he looked like. His head was completely crushed and I was the

16:00 first person to see it. I ran screaming down the road and there happened to be a policeman on the hotel. I covered a block and a half in a – very fast. I remember dragging the policeman and he knew something had happened. I could hardly speak and dragged him up, pointed to what looked like a heap of rags, and I can still remember the policeman going over, and

16:30 looking down, and saying, “Oh the poor little bugger!” You know, I was so shocked to hear him say, “The poor little bugger.” It turned out later that they were twin boys and the mother had died giving birth. He was about 11, I think. They’d caught a bus. There were two school buses and they were parallel with each other. One was going to Bondi and the other one was going

17:00 somewhere else, and they were skylarking. Believe it or not boys have been boys and they were transferring each other from bus to bus. This is what the policeman told me when he came and saw me. He was a lovely man. One of the twins was in one bus and the other one must have fallen through the window and nobody knew that he had been run over by the bus, and was dragged.

17:30 So it was terrible for the father, who was a widower, had lost his wife when the twins were and now he had lost – so that was phew – another drama that happened to me.

What did you learn at the secretarial course?

Switchboard. We had to learn everything, shorthand, typing,

18:00 composing letters, filing but switchboard, I remember the thing that we absolutely had dinned into our heads was if there was somebody on the line and the line they wanted was engaged, you must go back to the person. Oh! What happened to that old training! Have you ever hung on a line and nobody comes back? Now it’s all voices, which is

18:30 even more irritating but it was absolutely dinned on us, no more than five minutes must elapse. If the phone is still engaged you must go back. We had very good training and it was from there that I went to the barrister, and that was regarded as a great compliment. Another thing that happened when I was working for the barrister in Phillip Street and I also used to take

19:00 the cheques, and put them in the big Commonwealth Bank, which meant walking a couple of blocks down Martin Place to the huge Commonwealth Bank. I’d put the cheques and things in there, and I walked past this great tall building, got to about from there to about there, heard this terrible noise behind me, a man had jumped off the building, and was very dead. So you know?

19:30 It’s amazing. When I was growing up there were three fires in our street and I was the first one to discover the neighbours opposite. They lived in this old weatherboard house with a big veranda around, like the country places and that was another disillusioning moment. I woke up with this glow. I thought the light was on and there was this crackling noise. I went to the

20:00 window and it was a magnificent sight. The whole building was on fire right opposite and I woke everybody, and I think – fire brigade. We were all rushing over. It was a widow with grown up children and then she had a baby after her change of life. Her husband had died I think with the shock. They had all these daughters and they had

20:30 this one son, and his name was Victor. We all called him Dougie. For some unknown reason my father, I must say something good about him, was marvellous with animals and my son has become a vet. He could do anything with any animal. We had dogs and we couldn’t afford to go to the vet. I remember we had this black dog that broke its leg and it was only a young dog, so

21:00 it was like what they call a greenstick fracture, like a twig that’s green. He was so patient with him. We had a hedge all the around the back and he dug a hole, and the dog had enough sense, and he was so gentle with this dog, and he laid its leg like a cast in the soil. He would go out and hold

21:30 it up, and cared for it. The dog had a marvellous recovery. He had budgerigars. They all talked. He spent hours with them! No good with people except Dougie, who was six and he was very fair. His sisters had taken him out swimming. He had grown up sisters. Three of them were married I think and the rest were all grown ups, and he was the baby. He got terribly,

22:00 terribly, terribly, burnt and they put a silk shirt on him, and then rubbed – the old remedy was coconut oil, so really you fried. It was dreadful and I remember seeing him, and the blouse that they put on was all imbedded, He wouldn’t let anybody touch him except my father.

Why were there so many house fires?

I don’t know. One was a house fire. The other

22:30 two – there was a factory of all things in this residential street. There was a factory, a small one and it caught fire twice but it was a factory that made – I don’t know what it made. The famous Cottee’s was in a cottage next door to this factory and they started their drinks in their own cottage. We knew

23:00 the Cottee's and since they’ve become famous [fruit drink manufacturers].

Was that in your street?

The same street, Robert Street, Rose Bay. This is years ago. Now you should see Robert Street now, million dollar houses. Our old house has been pulled down and the most ghastly monstrosity has been put up by a doctor. I went over to see it and I thought, “Oh my God! Our house was better than that!”

23:30 The woman who inherited the house from my father made a mint.

In terms of the secretarial training that you did was it common for girls of that age to leave school and go, and do secretarial training?

A secretarial course or Public Service, or banking. I mean this applied to men as well but the men – you see the Depression started in 1932 and it didn’t really end until the war finished

24:00 the Depression. It was very bad between 1932 and 1934 but I must tell you about the fire. It was a very easy house. It had this huge veranda all around it and the neighbours moved all the furniture out, and just took it out, put it on the veranda, and then somebody took it onto the grass. The fire started in an old cement laundry. Everybody got out and they got a whole lot of stuff out,

24:30 and the house went up very quickly. Vicky or Dougie was immediately sent off to one of his sisters, so he was out of it. It was a big drama, fire brigades at three o’clock in the morning and the next day my job was to get the paper, the afternoon paper The Sun, and every Friday we would spend our pocket money. We were given pocket money for

25:00 trimming the hedges and doing chores. We got nine pence, six pence to go into the cinema and threepence to spend on Ruggles, you know one of those big gobsucker balls that lasted all through the film, and sherbet, a penny each. That was our routine every Friday I had to go and pick up The Sun, and buy myself,

25:30 and my brother a comic, then we’d swap with other people. We lived on comics. I was very anxious to hear all about the fire because there was a reporter there taking photographs. So I turned the pages over trying to find our fire, which was quite spectacular and came across one fire, and it said, “The

26:00 five year old boy raced into the flames to rescue his pet canary but unfortunately the canary could not be revived.” It went on about Dougie doing this, that and the other. It didn’t say Dougie. It said the five year old boy had to be rescued because he rushed in. I thought, “That’s not our fire. There must be another fire.” So I’m turning the pages. I found out that the reporter

26:30 who wrote it wasn’t even there. Dougie wasn’t there. He certainly did not rush into the flames to rescue his pet canary and that was a big shock to my system. To think they lied and my mother used to say, “If it’s in the paper it must be true.” I said to my mother, “Just read what’s in the paper.” She was shocked but she still kept saying it it’s in the paper it must be true. So that was

27:00 another big – isn’t that awful. I knew he wasn’t there because I was the one who led him down to his sister, who was taking him off.

Could you tell me about going to the pictures?

Every Saturday, there was one up Old South Head Road called the King’s Theatre. The building is still there but it’s now a shopping area, and the one we loved to go

27:30 to was the Wintergarden at New South Head Road. It’s now million dollar flats and it was there as a theatre. It was right on the water and that was where the Japanese came up behind the Wintergarden Theatre. One of them came up onto the beach I suppose it was, behind the Wintergarden Theatre.

28:00 The Wintergarden Theatre we loved. That was high up there and every Saturday afternoon there was a great musical thing, community singing and they’d put the words up with a little bouncing ball, and everybody would sing. They had competitions and I was supposed to be very much like Diana Durban. I’m showing my age! Diana Durban was like –

28:30 well not quite like Kylie [Minogue]. She was in films and she had a beautiful voice. She was Canadian and she was the girl. My aunt kept saying, “You ought to go in – ” They had a Diana Durban look alike, so unknown to me my aunt put me in as Diana Durban look alike and I was sitting

29:00 in the audience, and they had this competition. They said, “Now we have some people here.” They called out a couple of names and then mine! I nearly died and I didn’t want to go up on the stage. They kept urging me on and guess what? I won it. I had to sing a Diana Durban song and I used to know all here songs. I remember I won a tablecloth for my mother! I mean she was very pleased and

29:30 I think a box of chocolates I got as well. So that was the Wintergarden. That was wonderful. They had all this entertainment and the organ, the big Wurlitzer organ. The King was closer. We just walked up Old South Head Road to the King. It cost us sixpence to go in. Occasionally we went at night. I remember seeing the film

30:00 San Francisco, you know when it burnt, San Francisco in the great fire. My mother would go with us and a neighbour. My mother was always trying to collect these lovely old antiques and she had this beautiful – I suppose it was a mould. It was a bronze of – I used to call it when I was little “Mummy’s

30:30 lady”. It was a lady with a lamp and there’s a film but it has – you know the old one with the lion roaring, that was MGM [Metro Goldwyn Meyer studios], and this one has a woman holding a lamp, just like my mother’s statue. When I was about five we used to go to the cinema regularly and

31:00 my mother told me, I don’t remember anything about it, that I was supposed to have stood up when the beginning of the film came on with this, and I screamed out, “There’s Mummy’s lady!” I thought it was called Mummy’s lady. Mummy’s lady, which I loved, went to this woman. I really can’t forgive my father for that. He wiped my brother and I out, and left it to this Hungarian woman, who

31:30 had great question marks about how she acquired all this property.

The pictures that you went to, the Wintergarden first of all, could you explain what it actually looked like inside?

Have you ever been to the Cremorne Orpheum? They’ve restored it as it was. It was very much like the Cremorne Orpheum, which was another one that when I married, we lived in Mosman and

32:00 we used to go to the Cremorne Orpheum. They’ve restored Cremorne Orpheum back to exactly how it was with the – what’s the beginning of the modernist? I can’t remember – rainbow sort of – I can’t remember the terminology.

Art Nouveau?

Art Nouveau, that’s it! It has been beautifully restored

32:30 to how it was. They changed them all and then they realised that they were very beautifully done. Have you ever been to the State Theatre in Market Street? It is just superb. You could never replace it.

Can you remember the interior?

The Wintergarden? It had

33:00 I think an upper and a lower. The stalls were in the front and the kids always used to get down near the front, the noisy one used to go down the front, the boys usually. We girls used to be further back but it was like a Community Hall really. They had people to entertain and you had a newsreel, and they had newsreel theatres

33:30 that you’d pop in, they were continuous, mainly in town. They’d have just newsreels and it would be continuous, so you pop in anytime, and go in and out. They had some newsreels. You would see that first. Then they’d have a Cowboy and Indian film. There was a famous one – I forget her name. She was always on the railway line tied up

34:00 with the train coming. The Perils of Pauline it was called! The Perils of Pauline and the Cowboy, probably John Wayne or someone like that, would come and rescue here, and the train would be almost on top of them. The next shot would show the train almost on top of them. The third shot would show the train in the same position and that used to bother me, too. I thought, “It hasn’t moved!”

34:30 I was a pain in the neck. My brother used to say, “Shut up Vonnie! Know all!” He was a pain in the neck but it always got me that the same thing – I mean it never got any closer until the last minute when it was almost on top of her. The hero would come dashing up, slash the ropes with a knife, bundle her up and the train would go shooting past. She was

35:00 always trapped somewhere. A railway line was very popular. She was always in trouble, so that was the first movie. You always got two movies. We’d be very upset if they only put on one. I think Gone with the Wind came out later and that was the full, it was a long picture.

35:30 What else did we do? We’d always go out at interval. We only had threepence to spend and we had to be very – we spent ages. The poor old shopkeeper was saying, “Hurry Up! You’ll miss the next picture.” We’d be debating and if somebody got that, “Would you share that with me?” Our threepence. A penny each and I used to love what they called sherbet ice creams. They were like a cone

36:00 with a little marshmallow to be the ice cream with sprinkles on top and inside was sherbet. It was probably very bad for us. It was probably bi-carb soda! It sort of melted, loved those. Ruggles was another chocolate bar. I’d have to decide between having a milkshake, blowing the whole lot on a milkshake or having – my brother went in

36:30 for what they called gobsuckers. You had this big ball in your cheek. The idea was to make it last throughout the entire, so you didn’t try to – I could never manage that. I got bored of that but we loved the cinema. I became very fond of 37:00 Jeanette McDonald, who was the singer and my hero was Tyrone Power and guess what? Guess who Alan was the image of? Tyrone Power! He was very handsome and I wasn’t that keen on Clark Gable. I thought he was a bit of a – I read somewhere that one of the actresses said he had terrible bad breath. That turned me off him! She

37:30 dreaded to have to kiss him and whenever I saw him in close-ups, I thought, “I wonder if he’s got bad breath. I wonder if somebody has told him.” It was a terrible put off with Clark Gable. I can’t remember who the others were, Tyrone Power was one and Katherine Hepburn, and who was her lover – Spencer Tracey. We had no idea what was going on there!

38:00 They were good. We didn’t care what they were. We became experts. We knew exactly and I mean there were no celebrities as they are now, certainly not in Australia but Hollywood was the big – who was going out with who. Judy Garland, Shirley Temple

38:30 and Diana Durban was marvellous when she came along because she did have dark hair, and she had dark eyebrows, and she had – I mean I don’t think my lips are thick but she didn’t have a little thin mouth. She was my heroine. Shirley Temple was a pain in the neck because she had curls like my brother. She had lovely arched eyebrows and a little thin mouth.

39:00 Diana Durban was the one that I liked and I won a tablecloth through looking like her! I also won a tea set I remember. They had all these competitions, community singing and anybody could go up and recite something. Nobody ever did. I think they cut that one out. People were too nervous.

39:30 I liked the Wintergarden because it had this wonderful atmosphere. It was beautifully decorated and the King’s was a bit of a cheap imitation but the Wintergarden is gone now. They tried to save it because it was quite historical. It cost a fortune. It was like the beautiful State Theatre and I’m grateful forever to

40:00 whoever restored the Cremorne Orpheum because it is beautifully done.

You talked about the newsreels. Can you tell me whether you were seeing anything about what was happening in Europe on the newsreels?

Yes. I remember being terribly distressed when what they now know as Kristallnacht – have you ever heard of Kristallnacht? When the Germans really

40:30 began to attack the Jews and they smashed every shop that was owned by Jews. They would write ‘Judas’ [Juden] and it was known forever after in the history books as Kristallnacht, the night of the glass breaking. It was when Hitler really came down on the Jews and they had to wear the yellow patch.

41:00 They beat them and beat them, and these poor old people who weren’t allowed to take any part, even in England, they weren’t allowed to take jobs in the Public Service. They couldn’t be politicians. The only thing they could be – it’s so different now. I was talking to my granddaughter and she couldn’t believe. I said, “You’ve got no idea the things that went on between Protestants

41:30 and Catholics.” Catholics and Protestants kids used to fight. We didn’t get involved in that but my brother did. He didn’t know which side to be on. His father was Protestant and his mother had got back to being a Catholic, so I suppose he was a Catholic.

Tape 3

00:31 Mrs Barry can I just ask you how you first learned of Hitler?

I think through the newsreels. I remember going to see think it was San Francisco, the fire that broke out in San Francisco and they had newsreels with the film. It changed from two films to newsreels because everybody

01:00 wanted to see the newsreels. The war was coming I think. Kristallnacht was before the war was actually declared and I used to be always saying, “Why don’t they do something?” Because Hitler was attacking Jews. You’d see these storm troopers. They’d show them beating and beating old people. They’d be on

01:30 the ground and they’d be trying to get into their shops, and their shops were all being destroyed. I couldn’t work out why he was doing it because they hadn’t done anything. That was another time that she said, “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask somebody else.” I was always wondering why and I remember saying, “Why doesn’t the Pope do something?” He was supposed to be –

02:00 she couldn’t answer that one. I was very angry about the way they were being treated and we had two Jewish children at our school. Strangely enough there were no Jewish schools then. I’m sure there were no Jewish schools and the nearest to their religion would be the Catholic schools. We had a Jewish girl

02:30 at our school and I used to get angry about her. She wasn’t allowed to join us with some classes and was sort of discriminated against now they’d say. She was very isolated. I remember feeling very sorry for her and I had to write in our final year at school,

03:00 we did Shakespeare’s the Merchant of Venice, and of course dear old Shylock. If somebody ran someone down to me, spoke to me about they do this, that and the other, I’d always immediately be on their side. It sounds wonderful

03:30 but I think it was because people had no idea what went on in our place and I always think, “I wonder what the other side is?” I’d always want to hear the other person’s side of things and I remember being very angry about the way Nola was treated at our school, and why she couldn’t come, and be with is in – I forget which lessons, probably

04:00 religious sorts of things. She always had to sit and read a book in a room by herself because she was Jewish. Also later, not in our street but later when I got married, there was a lovely family and I was friendly with them. It was very open. The neighbours used to look after each other. Croydon Park, we moved into a place there and there was a lovely

04:30 girl, who was the only child, and she was very beautiful. This neighbour who lived next door said, “Don’t get too involved. She’s got the touch of the tar brush.” I didn’t know what that meant and I was an adult with two children at the time. I found out later that she was part aboriginal and that was the description, “Don’t get too involved. She’s

05:00 been – ” something with a tar brush. I didn’t like to say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I found hypocrisy in people – I didn’t even know what the word meant when I was growing up but I found it everywhere and it was strange. I think I came across

05:30 the word, I can’t remember the first time I found out what it meant but “Oh, that’s the word!” It belonged to all these things that I couldn’t really – got angry about. People were treated in one way by people who claimed to be one thing, like the priest reading out all these donations. Most

06:00 of the sermon was taken up with this and it was a different sermon at seven o’clock. They didn’t get the donations read out then. He spent the whole time. You’d have to listen to all this and starting at the top with the big one, probably the people who went to ten o’clock Mass would go after they’d heard their donation. He didn’t give any message and it was all so snobbish.

06:30 Another thing happened when I was 13. My best friend was a girl named, an awful name, Gladys Ghandi and she and I were great friends. She had a similar situation. We never talked about it. We just understood. You never discussed private things at home. You never revealed anything but I knew that she knew, that I

07:00 knew, that she knew. It was a sort of passive understanding and we used to do physical exercises. Every morning every teacher would do these physical duties. That was the morning. I think all kids used to do it. I don’t know why they don’t do it now but anyway! Gladys looked

07:30 dreadful. She was grey and I said, “You look terrible.” She said, “I feel so sick and I’ve got this pain.” I said, “Go and tell somebody.” She wouldn’t go and tell anybody. She was very shy and we were supposed to do this physical exercise, so I put my hand up and said, “Gladys is feeling very sick, Sister.” She said, “Gladys has got a tongue in her head, I presume!”

08:00 You know, that was the sort of thing and Gladys said, “I’m all right.” Anyway, the exercise went on and Gladys fainted, and she looked dreadful. There was nobody home and there was nobody available to take her home, so guess who? I was always given the job of escorting people home and I got more and more worried about it. It was quite long way to go.

08:30 These days they’d call the parents! The parents would come and pick her up. Her parents were at home and none of the nuns would go. I was always going on trams and doing messages, taking kids somewhere. I remember taking Gladys home and she was just about collapsing. When we got her home her mother was there and she took her in, and I think the doctor came. The next thing we knew was that she was in hospital

09:00 with a burst appendix. I remember I was so shocked and shaken, terribly upset, and very angry that she’d been made to do those physical duties, which probably set it off. She passed out and they didn’t even take her home. Other than walking home on her own I was sent to

09:30 see that she got home. About three days after and I was always trying to find out how she was, and nobody would tell me, and the parish priest arrived. I remember the black car arrived at our place and that was awful. The parish priest came and asked for me, and he was going to take me in to see Gladys. I learned that she was dying and she’d asked to see me.

10:00 It was St Vincent’s. I remember this dark car and it was all dark, gloomy, and horrible. I went in and she was on her own in this room, and she had a sort of thing over her. That’s all I can remember about it and she was obviously having oxygen. She had things and she looked as if she was dead already. She couldn’t speak. She was unconscious

10:30 and I was sent over, and I was frightened. She looked so dreadful and she died that night. So that was terrible. There was all this death and drama. How did she end up with a name like Ghandi?

It’s a very common Irish name actually. Ghandi was the surname but Gladys?

When these newsreels were appearing in Australia –

Showing the war approaching you know.

11:00 What was the general reaction?

Well, it was strange really. Nobody did anything. It reminded me – the other day I was reminded of the prisoners, these refugees in camps. It was just accepted. I mean a lot of people don’t accept it but I think the feeling was, “What can I do? There’s nothing I can do.” Of course Hitler was proclaiming that the Jews were

11:30 in charge of all the money and people believed it. There was much anti-Semitism in England and Australia. People believed that the Jews were running the world because they had the finances but point was they had no other means of living. They weren’t allowed into the Public Service.

12:00 I don’t think they were allowed to be doctors even. They may have been allowed to be doctors but there were prohibitions on them becoming anything else but money lenders and people like that. I can remember getting into trouble. It was supposed to be an open essay, I think the question was something like, “Was Shylock justified in his treatment of Bassanio?”

12:30 You know the story? He wanted a pound of flesh. It’s a very clever play. You had to be exactly the right amount and a pound of flesh was just a saying, and she made him literally get a pound. I thought Antonia was an idiot, absolute idiot.

13:00 He’d really abused him and embarrassed him, and then borrowed money from him, the gall! I wrote and I didn’t follow the party line, which was the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ, we don’t want to know them. The Jews were treated very badly. If you were a Jew you sort of had to be

13:30 with other Jews. Even some of my best friends were Jews and I couldn’t see anything wrong with saying that, which is prejudiced in the first place. I was always really angry about people being treated as if they were a label. I was always against labels and still am. I had a great argument with my daughter about age.

14:00 I said, “I don’t believe in telling my age.” She used to write my age down on each card, “Many happy returns of your whatever birthday.” In the end I got fed up with this and I said, “Look I’ve stopped at 55. 55 was a good year and I’m 55 from now on!” That was some time ago! My son would say, “Many happy returns of your 55 plus, plus, plus, plus!” I couldn’t win

14:30 but I’ve always been against labelling people. If you put a label on somebody, “Oh she’s – ” You know this woman driving the car that hit the two children? Now how many cars have mounted footpaths and driven into houses with drunken young men but because an elderly driver? So everybody is against elderly drivers now. It doesn’t even give

15:00 anything about how it happened but everybody thinks, “Oh we’ve got to get rid of these elderly drivers now.” I worked in a place with children with disabilities. I did high school teaching and then went into special education. My first job was with a school for children with disabilities and I always made a point of saying, “I work with children with a disability,” because

15:30 if you say I work with crippled children, all your brain registers is the word crippled, and children is out of the picture, so I always used to train myself to say, “I work with children. Some have been in accidents and have a disability.” I never say, “I work with handicapped children,” because there’s another label.

Can you

16:00 recall when the war seemed like it was inevitable?

Well I think it was obvious from the pictures of Hitler, you know that amazing photographer [Leni Riefenstahl] that he had. I think she died just recently, nearly 100. She was a genius. It was like a set. I mean it was lit with

16:30 candles usually, blazing candles. It was always dark with the candles lit. He would always orate and they’d all be in row upon row, upon row. It was quite sinister and frightening to see this happening and you knew. I mean in England everybody had given up. The First World War had not long – nobody

17:00 wanted another war and the Germans – I study history. That’s why I have become very interested. After the war Germany – it was called the Treaty of Versailles I think and the French were so vindictive against the Germans because every family in France lost a male member

17:30 and it was dreadful. The French lost more in the First World War. There was a generation of women that went by who were spinsters, so there were no children for quite a while and the French lost so many men in the First World War. They were very vindictive and they tried to punish the Germans, so they weren’t allowed to have any armaments.

18:00 They were starving and it was a terrible time. They learned their lesson with the Japanese War. They built up Japan and the difference was amazing. Hitler came into this absolutely awful society, very much like Iraq at the moment and he was a genius, and he had this genius camerawoman. Goebbels [German Minister for Propaganda]

18:30 was another genius. I don’t think Hitler on his own could have done it but she really presented him. I think she really was an artistic person who interested. She was a genius at photography. Have you ever seen any?

Many recently.

Well you know what I’m talking about. Now that was all on the newsreels and they’d be goosestepping. Goose-stepping is –

19:00 you know? They put their legs up but it’s very hard and disciplined, and they were unimaginably disciplined. There wasn’t one that was out of step and it was all so military. It was obvious. The rest of the world was still getting over the Depression

19:30 and they couldn’t afford to build up their armaments. I studied why Hitler came to power and there’d be women, they’d be so angry about the way they were treated, by the French mainly. [Woodrow] Wilson [American President at the end of World War I], the American, he was hopeless and he let the French dictate the terms. Their object was to punish the Germans and punish them so they would never – and you can’t do that.

20:00 People resent it. Look at the Iraqis against the Americans, it’s obviously the same sort of thing. You’ve got to say the war is over. Civil wars are different altogether but the result was the Germans would do anything to get back their place that they once had and women with prams would carry guns under the

20:30 covers. They were forbidden to have armaments and they built up. Every member of the population was stacking arms and it was obvious. He was so powerful and these pictures we were seeing were so powerful. The Jews were then blamed for all that had happened with the Germans. It was a masterpiece in –

21:00 we’d call it spin doctoring now. He had the famous Goebbels. He had the photographer and he had this army of people around who were – they despised him actually. The German officers were the aristocracy. Instead of like England had its aristocracy, the army were the aristocracy, the officers and they

21:30 were using him. They thought they were using him to get Germany back to its place but in fact he was using them. It’s quite fascinating to read the rise of Hitler and then he got all his storm troopers in, and he had this thing about the Jews. It is believed to go back to Austria where he was born and he fancied himself as an artist. He was kicked out of the

22:00 artist Art School and the one who made the decision that he didn’t have enough talent was a Jew.

What discussion did you have with your family about what was – ?

We didn’t. We had no discussion in the family. I was always trying to ask my mother and quickly realised that there was no way

22:30 that she even – she just accepted it. That’s what people did. They didn’t question anything. Well we’re not doing anything about these refugees. We should be up in arms about these poor devils and blaming them for the bombing. I mean as if whatever his name is, Bin Laden would send them in leaky boats! He’s got millions. He’d send them by plane

23:00 I used to get so angry! I fell out with a friend. She was always following the party line. Alan Jones [right wing radio talkback commentator] was her hero, and I said, “But Bin Laden wouldn’t send people out in leaky boats. He’d send them first class. The poor old refugees – and to send them back!”

Can you recall the day war was

23:30 declared?

Yes! I was about 13 or 14 and it was obvious that it was going to happen because Hitler had marched in. Then we saw all the pictures about [Neville] Chamberlain [British Prime Minister] signing the Treaty, which meant nothing! He came back and the war had been stopped.

24:00 He’d marched into Czechoslovakia and the Brits had accepted that, and that was wrong. They should never – but they weren’t prepared for war. He was. Then the next thing that happened was he said he wouldn’t march into Poland and he marched into Poland or it was the other way around, I can’t remember which. It was obvious once he did that. The Treaty was worthless and Chamberlain resigned, and

24:30 it was all going to happen. Young people that I knew who were older than me, we used to play tennis and go swimming. We had this club that I belonged to. I was one of the younger ones in it and they all went and joined up before the war was declared. Then the day that war was declared, [Robert] Menzies was the Prime Minister and I can remember his voice. It was

25:00 so formal. I forget the wording but, “England has declared war and Australia is now declaring war.” I mean once England declared war we followed. I think the King, King George the 6th it would have been, that’s Elizabeth’s

25:30 father, made this speech and he quoted from a poem. It was a beautiful piece and it was something, “I will walk into the dark down history books and hope for the light.” It was a very beautiful speech and he had a speech defect. He stammered very badly and that’s why it was so dreadful that

26:00 he became King when Edward, the Prince of Wales went off. We knew nothing about that because nothing was published. The American papers had it all and we learned from that but I don’t remember much about that.

How did you hear this declaration of war?

Wireless. Radio was our big communicator. They had radio plays and we listened to the radio. Just as we watch TV we would listen

26:30 to the radio. I’ve got a theory about people who grew up with radio, their imagination was developed because you have to imagine the characters and all the sound effects were done marvellously. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen how they did some of it, even the cricket from England! They’d be listening by radio and then they’d actually

27:00 make the sound of the bat hitting the ball. It was very realistic. I think people who grew up in radio days it developed their imagination and I’ve got a theory about kids watching TV. It’s all there. You don’t need imagination. It’s all fed. You know what the characters look like. You can’t imagine, you just sit and it comes like that. There’s no – [hands indicate pushing forward]

27:30 That’s why actors love theatre because they get a reaction from the audience. They hate films and anybody who has been on stage – I mean it is terrifying being on stage. They can do take after take with film.

What were the radio plays that you listened to?

The Lux Radio Theatre. Every Sunday night they’d have these wonderful plays and

28:00 a lot of them became film. When TV came in they wrote for TV. A lot of them didn’t last because radio was quite different and they’d be marvellous. You never rang anybody on Sunday night at eight o’clock because they’d be listening to the play and they were quite amazing. Then they had the

28:30 Lux Film Studio and you could go in, and watch them doing the play but it wasn’t the same because you could see what they were doing. They would be standing around a microphone and taking their parts. Most people didn’t like that. If they wanted to see a play they’d go to the theatre. You could imagine the characters and sometimes it would be an awful

29:00 shock when you met them, like listening to the commentators now. You imagine what sort of person it is and sometimes it’s quite different. But radio was very – everything came by radio. We’d listen to the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] and people in Europe were forbidden to listen to the BBC, and they had these secret radios.

29:30 Prisoners of war would make radios to listen to the BBC and often there would be hidden messages where they broadcast something. It sounded quite innocuous, a record being played and the underground, especially in France would pick up the message. They’d have secret radios and they’d have to hide because if they were caught they would be executed. This is in Europe when

30:00 Hitler – radio played an enormous part. All the messages came by cable and radio. We heard everything by radio. I mean there wasn’t any TV. It’s hard to imagine isn’t it!

When you heard that declaration how did you feel?

Frightened, terrified because my parents reacted. They’d been through

30:30 the first one and so many died in the First World War. Every family in France lost a member of the family.

How did you think the war might impact you on that night?

Well, we lived in Rose Bay. We were on the coast. We weren’t so frightened

31:00 when the war broke out because it was in Europe. When we were terrified was when the Japanese came into in 1941, December the 7th, and I remember that. I don’t think we were so frightened because it was so far away. It was a long way from us and people went by ship. They didn’t go by plane. It took too long to go by plane.

31:30 My mother was very worried because she had relatives, she was born in England and she was very worried about her relatives in England, and boys joining up. Then when Australia declared war we were then worried about the men having to go to Europe. It was more frightening when the Japanese came into the war because it was much closer.

Who were the men

32:00 that you knew on that night that were joining up?

I belonged to a tennis club. I used to play tennis regularly and I was always with older people. I was much more mature than my – I didn’t have many friends my own age and I was always with older young adults. I remember one couple in our tennis

32:30 club had just become engaged and it was all so romantic, and he joined up, and she was very worried. I think he was 20. They became engaged because of the war and people became engaged because they wanted something to come back to. They thought it would be over very soon, although we didn’t know what to believe really. I was

33:00 too young really to know much about it but I remember because everybody around me was so worried, and the radio – people in England. We were getting a lot from the BBC because that’s where we got most of our information and that was not as easy as it is now. We’d listen to the BBC at certain times and everybody would crouch around the radio to hear what the latest thing was. It was all very slow at the beginning. It was

33:30 what they called the honeymoon time and nothing much happened. The war was declared on September the 3rd, 1939 and nothing much happened. 1941 was bad and 1942. In 1941 the Japanese came into it. The Italians, I remember we were very frightened when we heard that Italy

34:00 had joined Hitler, Benito Mussolini [Italian head of state] because that meant they had more and he invaded the other countries, Holland. Some people joined the Germans and some people didn’t, and it was all very confusing but nothing much happened for the first

34:30 six months, and we thought, “Oh it’s going to be over.” Nothing dramatic was happening and I joined up when things started to heat up. I remember there was this lull and nothing much happened. There were no bombings of London. I think Hitler was getting his stuff together and making treaties with

35:00 Mussolini, and trying to get as much support as possible, and he really thought because there was such anti-Semitism in England among the aristocracy, and some of the people in government, he thought they’d

35:30 join him. He even sent that plane over with – I forget the character, who landed in the field and the Prince of Wales was supposed to be involved in that. There were all sorts of stories that came out later about this group and fascists, you know Oswald [Mosley] [British fascist] and his group. There were various groups springing up who wanted England to join Germany and

36:00 have a united Europe.

Where were you working at this stage?

In 1939 I was still at school I think and I later joined the Mining Museum.

36:30 It’s hard to remember. I had a boyfriend who was in the air force and that was a big worry because he was sent to Amberley in Queensland to do his training, and he wanted us to get married very young, and I didn’t want to get married. Boys seemed to want to get married so that they had a girl to come home to

37:00 and girls weren’t that keen.

Why weren’t they keen?

It was all changing and women were at last being needed, and there were all these opportunities. I mean the war changed females. Feminists think that they changed everything but the war changed everything and it was so hard when the men came back, and the war had ended. The men

37:30 were very much wanting to get back into civilian life and the women lost their role.

When did you first think that the war might offer you some of those opportunities?

When I heard that people were joining the WAAAF and the women were being used to drive buses, be conductors, and women were taking over the jobs that men did,

38:00 and that suddenly became, “Oh! Tremendous!” Girls like me who couldn’t see much future for them except to get married and have babies, and be a housewife, I mean I wasn’t interested in that, and then suddenly all these opportunities became available. Anybody could join up. Once you turned 18

38:30 you could join any of the services and I did some temporary work. When I was at school I went to St Vincent’s and became a nursing aid. That was my first big foray into the big world outside. I was pretty naive and I remember the very first compliment I ever received, and I almost died because they had this alcoholic, who was in the last stages of what they used to call delirium

39:00 tremors, which was the last stage of alcoholism. They had him strapped down in bed he was so violent and almost at the point of death, and I was given a thing like a teacup. I was a VAD, voluntary aid [detachments] – I can’t remember what the D stood for and you worked in hospitals because the nurses went off to war, and the doctors went off to war, very

39:30 short staffed. A lot of nurses went off to war and they needed voluntary nursing aids. Every weekend I would go. I had one week Sunday and one week Saturday, so every weekend I would go to St Vincent’s. I was nearly killed by this fellow. They were very short staffed and they gave me like a teacup to give him some water. He was

40:00 lying still. I thought he was asleep and brought this cup over, and I was leaning over him to give him this water, and he suddenly broke the straps, grabbed me around the neck, and was choking me. Fortunately there was somebody nearby and he came to help. Oh!

Where did you go for the VAD training?

St Vincent’s Hospital. We didn’t get much training. We were just given a uniform and I remember we had a veil,

40:30 and told to this or that. “Go to the Sister in charge – Matron in charge,” and you did whatever she wanted you to do. The very first compliment I ever received , this was from school, there was a young man who had been in a motorbike accident and he was in bed. He beckoned me over and he said very seriously, and naïve

41:00 me fell for it, “Do your eyes trouble you at all? I said, “No why?” “Well they trouble me!” Oh God now I think of it! I was so surprised and that was the very first compliment I ever received.

What sort of training did they give you in terms of the war?

The war was a very different matter. I depended what you joined and

41:30 it didn’t really make much difference. I mean I joined up as a stenographer, secretarial work but we all did the same training because we didn’t know where we’d be sent. That came at the end of our training, wherever you were most needed, so nobody knew where we were going. So we all had to undergo the same training, which was marching, marching, marching. We did all the drill. We had to do all that.

Tape 4

00:33 Mrs Barry, I’d just like to go back a bit before we talk about the training and ask you what kind of recruitment drives were going on for young women at schools or elsewhere?

Not so much at schools because a lot of people didn’t believe in women going into the war anyway. It was like the debate that is going on now about whether they should go to the frontline.

01:00 I mean they were always in roles where they were assisting, like letting the men do the war fighting and relieving them, clerical jobs. Nurses went into hospitals of course. They got the closest to the action but there were anti-aircraft – that’s not quite true because

01:30 I’m not very much – but I remember some of the air force women had to learn Morse code. Do you remember the films of the WRANS [Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service] or the women doing the operations where the planes were and which planes were doing what, and sending messages to the planes? A lot of the WAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force]

02:00 in England were involved in that. We weren’t because the war was in Europe. When Japan came in it was a different matter altogether because it was very close to Australia but my experience was with the war in Europe and it was so far away, so our training was that we would be sent to Europe or we would replace men at home.

02:30 There was a women’s army, which was a volunteer group and they went onto farms, and did farm work while the farmers went to the war [Land Army]. So anywhere where the man was needed to go to war, there were various jobs that were regarded as ‘reserved’. Reserved

03:00 Occupations meant that those people could not join the army and all the geologists that I worked with, and the chemist involved in mineral development, they were all in Reserved Occupations. Some of them joined because they knew that they would not be allowed to join. As soon as the war broke out about three of them joined before they worked out who they would need

03:30 for the war effort. They needed minerals. They needed steel. Australia had plenty of minerals available to turn bauxite into iron and steel for the war effort. Everything went to the war. All the domestic production was nothing. I walk into the supermarket up here and I remember. 04:00 The stores were open only say an hour a day. Anthony Hordern’s was a big store and you had to have coupons for everything, for dresses. Everybody had a ration book. You were allowed so much a week. I can’t remember what the rations were.

04:30 I learned from a friend of my mothers how to use half an egg, very difficult! You were only allowed two eggs a week. Sugar was rationed. Butter was unheard – I think you were allowed a little bit of butter. In England it was much worse. Everything was

05:00 geared to the war effort. So factories opened up and women worked in the factories.

How did you use half an egg? How did you do that?

With great difficulty! You had to crack it in the middle and then I think you put it in water, put the whole egg in water, and then you got a knife, and you

05:30 scooped it up in the shell. You broke it into something, put some water in it, and you then scooped half of it into the shell. There were all sorts of tricks and nobody bought linen because linen wasn’t available. Everything went to the war effort, clothing. I got married during the war and with weddings

06:00 you use an awful lot, and people used to give their coupons to the bride or she’d wear her mother’s veil. I remember buying a suit which has come right back into fashion now! I remember it was gaberdine and I think 17 of my precious coupons went on this. You were only given a certain number.

06:30 I put in on lay-by and then I paid it off, and when I got home I found the 17 coupons in the pocket! It was like winning the lottery and my mother said, “You have to take it back. They’ll find out!” The only reason I took it back was because she was right for once. I mean they knew who had what. It was very strict but oh! It was like winning the lottery to find 17

07:00 coupons. They’d put it in the pocket of the suit. There’s a lovely story about my mother. Mark Foys was a beautiful store. It’s now Courts, you know? That was a wonderful store. Anthony Hordern’s and Mark Foys, my mother used to go to both of those. Anthony Hordern’s had a big – and you couldn’t find out. They weren’t allowed

07:30 to have sales and broadcast what they had because they didn’t want the enemy to know that production was – everything was geared to the war. You had to find out and I forget how she found out but they were selling knives. Now steel and stainless steel was unprocurable because everything

08:00 steel went to the war, and to get knives! Somehow she found out that they were having about an hour’s sale of knives and something else that she got. You had to get in there before the store opened. Women, there would be no men there, women queued up to get these items that were gradually released and she came home in triumph. This is

08:30 a wonderful story, “I got them! I got them!” She got these knives and we all wanted to look at the knives, and she said, “They’re non-stainless!” Now work that one out. My mother fell hook, line and sinker! From then on we had to clean those knives with sand soap. They were beautifully sharp but non-

09:00 stainless, as she boasted. I think it was me that pointed out to her that “Non-stainless meant that they would stain Mum!” I forget. Somebody pointed it out. Oh she was so upset, spent all this money on them but that’s how they sold them, non-stainless knives.

The enlistment process for women, can you remember there being posters or ads

09:30 up for women joining?

The only posters I can remember are ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships’. You weren’t allowed to tell. If you knew where your husband, boyfriend or brother was, you mustn’t ever tell them where the letter had come from. I mean the letters would be blocked out anyway, censored but something would slip in. People would say, “Have you

10:00 heard from your son or your brother?” “Yes I heard that he’s in [whispers].” They’d have the big signs up for the war effort, ‘Buy Bonds Money! [war bonds: loans to the Government for the war effort]’ But there was no advertising. It’s hard to remember but it’s so different now. It’s like another world. You’re always trying to

10:30 keep your clothes darned. I mean darning! We all darned stockings because you couldn’t afford them. We only had one good dress and to save up for a wedding was a nightmare. I remember making my – one of the things I did, I got an A for Dressmaking and we made our own clothes. My mother would

11:00 cut down – she wasn’t a very good dressmaker. My aunt was a good dressmaker. She would cut down my fathers old pants to make things. Everybody used old things. We had sheets that we used and made pillowslips. Women suffered terribly because there were no [sanitary] pads. You had to use rags, old sheets. It was really bad because that –

11:30 nobody was making those. I think they might have made them for the war effort but they all went to the army and the women in the air force, and nurses. The rest of us had to – chemist shops didn’t have goods in them like they have now. It’s very hard to imagine. I remember I was

12:00 there when one of the women neighbours came home and her husband was in a Reserved Occupation. He had to go to the country for whatever reason and he came back, and the country stores still had goods, and it was like a party. He came back with a milk pail with a lid because milk was all delivered and

12:30 you had to have a lid on it. We had ice chests. We didn’t have fridges. They came after the war. The iceman used to also be the milkman and he’d bring this great big block of ice, and he had these big tongs, and he’d put it into the ice chest. On the hot days it would melt and you had to put a thing under the bottom to get the water. It didn’t last long in hot weather.

13:00 I remember this husband, that’s right, he was a chauffer for politicians. He had a very big job and he had a grey uniform, and went to the country quite a bit. While he was there he’d go around all the old stores and he came back with a pail to put the milk in with a lid, which were unprocurable. Aluminium was absolutely –

13:30 you had to use what you had and hope somebody would hand it on. When girls got married everybody would give them some of their old – there was nothing new. There was no steel. There was no aluminium. Everything went to the war and that’s why geologist were in Reserved Occupations because they would find the minerals that would become

14:00 steel. So they were all in Reserved Occupations and that’s where I met my husband, who was a geologist. They had to come from the Mines Department, which is in Bridge Street, the main head office and they had to come to the Mining Museum, and do a stint on these rocks. They had to go down and work out what mineral if any, was

14:30 in that particular specimen of rock. Then they’d say what was in it and that would then come to me with their: “That rock contains – is a specimen of blah, blah, blah.” I’d give them the certificate or if it needed analysis from the chemical laboratory, it would go right up to the top where they had this great big oven, and they’d test them all out.

15:00 I’d have to work for the chief chemist and the boys played tricks on me. I was so naïve when I look back. I was expecting a promotion and a rise. I mean you didn’t get phone calls like you do now. Making a phone call from a country town was a huge business. There was no STD [subscriber trunk dialing – outside local area].

15:30 You can’t imagine what it was like. People would spend hours saving all their money and you’d be cut off. Only some telephones would have long distance calls and you couldn’t travel from one state to another. There was no travel interstate except military personnel. So that meant that all the schools

16:00 that took boarding pupils from other states, they had to give that space to air force or army, or whoever.

Why was there that restricted movement?

Because they needed the troops. There was so much movement of anybody who was in the war. They were the only ones allowed

16:30 to travel interstate. It was just part of the deal and to make it even more complicated, the Sydney to Melbourne, they didn’t have the same tracks. The tracks changed, so you had to get off the train from Central [Station] to Albury, get off the train at Albury, it didn’t matter what time it was, and get onto another train that had a different track width. It was

17:00 ridiculous! I mean the war is on and we’ve got different tracks! It wasn’t until after the war that it is all one gauge now. You’d have to wait and wait, and wait, and no seats. You had to stand. I stood all the way. I was sent to Melbourne and it took hours, and hours, and hours because the trains were being used. Everything went to the war and you’d get sick of people

17:30 saying, “You know there’s a war on!” If somebody didn’t give service – butchers were – people would have affairs with the butcher to get some meat! Butchers did very well. Chickens were very expensive, only people in the country. Chicken we’d only have a Christmas, not like it is now. It’s a completely different world altogether. You can’t imagine what it was like.

18:00 It was blacked out. Even before Japan came into the war they were worried about buildings being identified as being used and we’d have to blackout the curtains. You had to blacken all your windows. My father went overboard and painted them all black. It was lovely during the day! Most people had blackout curtains and they had things on them in case we were bombed.

What would it say on

18:30 those notices about what to do?

Well there’d be wardens who came around. Local people joined as wardens and they would go around, and if they saw a light, you’d get a knock on the door to say, “There’s a light showing.” You’d be fined if any light showed at night and my father being 19:00 George, went overboard, and not only had them shatterproof – Oh! I mean when Japan came to the war that’s when we had to be extra careful.

Could you tell me about that day, what you remember?

1941, the 7th of December. I would have been at home I think.

19:30 I can’t remember but I remember [Franklin] Roosevelt [American President] making the announcement. We heard on the radio that Peal Harbour had been attacked. I didn’t even know where Pearl Harbour was. It didn’t really sink in to Australians because we didn’t know that Pearl Harbour was part of Hawaii.

20:00 Just about every big battleship was in Pearl Harbour and some of them were away but they caught them absolutely unprepared. I remember hearing that Pearl Harbour had been bombed and wondering where Pearl Harbour was. Somebody said it was in Hawaii, and Hawaii to me was some little island. I’d heard of it

20:30 but that was all and it didn’t mean much to Australians until Roosevelt. Churchill [British Prime Minister] had been trying to get Roosevelt to join the war. America was not in the war until 1941 and it was rumoured that one of their ships was sunk. I can’t remember the name of it. Roosevelt wanted the US [United States] to join the war but

21:00 Congress would not allow it. They didn’t want to be in any war and they tried to keep out of it. Churchill and Roosevelt were doing a sort of secret deal, things were going on. They were helping them but England would have lost war. It was very, very bad, 1940. If America hadn’t come into the war we’d have gone and it wasn’t until the Battle of the Coral

21:30 Sea. People forget that Churchill wanted our troops to stay in the Middle East where a lot of our troops were because the war spread all over. When Japan entered the war we were in great danger. I mean they were just above us and it was only a flight. I mean they got to Hawaii and just about wiped out. They got into Sydney harbour!

22:00 Could I ask you to remember, while we know the knowledge now of what we have of the war, are you able to remember how you felt at the time when the Americans came into the war?

Terrified, absolutely terrified. That’s when we were really petrified because our troops were all over in Europe and the Middle East. We had nobody to defend us.

22:30 The Japanese were just – well you know how close Japan is. When Singapore fell that was when it really hit us. Singapore was this great naval base. I’ll tell you how it affected us. My mother was English born, so was my father but he had travelled. He was in the navy himself for many years and then he joined the

23:00 Australian Army in the First World War. My mother always referred to England as home, “I’ve got a letter from home, from cousin so and so.” There was only one family she kept in touch with. All the rest she didn’t have contact with and my aunt, the Gaysley part of the family, she kept in contact with the Gaysleys. My mother was a Manion and the Manions all lived in

23:30 Northwich in Cheshire. I’ve been back there and met some of them. The Gaysleys came from Bedford, which is closer to London. Cheshire is up north. She never said England. She would always say, “They’re having a bad time with rationing.” Their rationing was terrible. Ours was nothing compared to theirs. We’d send food parcels.

24:00 They didn’t have chocolate or anything like that. Chocolate was a real luxury. People who grew up in the war have become chocoholics. My husband was one. I’d buy packets of chocolate biscuits and I’d hide them. I’d let him have one lot for him but no matter where I put them, he’d find them and when visitors would come I’d go to get the chocolate biscuits, and they’d all be gone. That was because they were so deprived during the war because

24:30 he was in Ireland. He was Irish born. Anyway –

Singapore fell when you were talking.

Singapore! My mother would always say home, I got a letter from home and home, and home, and home. She always referred to England as home and then Singapore was the great terrible mistake. The guns were pointing the wrong way. My husband

25:00 was in the British Navy, this is my second husband, he told me this. I was wise after the event but he had a friend and they knew that. The Japanese just came down in the strait on bicycles.

We know in hindsight what we know –

It affected my mother very badly. She thought Churchill was a saint but when Singapore fell and a lot of our troops were

25:30 captured, ended up in prisoner of war camps, terrible conditions, and they went without a fight, they just capitulated, there was no point, she never called England home again. She felt betrayed and she always felt that she was an Australian after that. That was a cut off point for a lot of people. They couldn’t trust Mother! It was as if Mother

26:00 had betrayed them. We were her children and Mother had used our men. I mean we didn’t have to go into the war. We weren’t being attacked but we sent our boys over to help our Mother, and that’s how she betrayed us. A lot of people felt very strongly about that, like the Americans felt about Pearl Harbour. We felt that about Singapore and

26:30 this is what the feedback was that I was getting. Britain became no longer our Mother, our strength, we’d win the war, the Brits will and that’s when we became very frightened because we’d lost thousands of men, and they were just captured without a fight. If there’d been a battle but not a shot was fired. MacArthur and one of our

27:00 generals escaped, and he was court martialed over it but he escaped, and didn’t go with the others. Thousands were captured and in one camp out of 4000 men, six survived. I saw them when the war was over because the war in Europe finished first and then the war in Japan continued.

27:30 I remember being in Martin Place, this was just after the war and they were beginning to send the men home who had survived or the ones who were well enough to. They had a big red double-decker bus and we knew that they were coming down Martin Place. It was open then and I remember being on the corner. I happened to be on Martin Place and

28:00 suddenly all this cheering broke out, and people realised. They were like skeletons and they were the well ones. I was just reading the other day that out of 4000 that went to one particular camp – I don’t think it was Changi, six survived. 4000 Australians and English, so felt very upset and very frightened.

What news did you get at the

28:30 time about the fall of Singapore?

Only that Singapore had fallen and we found out things after because everything was censored. I mean we didn’t know that people had died in Darwin for example, the news we got. Once the war was on censorship took over. You only heard about the victories and I

29:00 remember Darwin, getting a shock when I read later how many people had died in Darwin, and that was the time when we were, part of Australia was bombed. I think they told us the Darwin Post Office was bombed but few casualties and the postmaster died. I think they said about

29:30 five people and it turned out to be hundreds later. We didn’t learn much at all. We only learned about victories. We didn’t learn about what was going on in Greece for example when a lot of Australians were killed in Greece. Curtin who was the Prime Minister at the time, realised that we were in grave danger. He then

30:00 asked Churchill, first of all he asked Churchill to send our troops home to defend us. Churchill said, “We need them. We need them here.” Which meant that Australia could go jump and Churchill declared very bravely because you didn’t stand up to Churchill, that if our troops were sent home he would withdraw all troops. We didn’t know

30:30 about that until after the war. All we knew was that we were desperately sort and unprotected. The only ones who saved us were the Americans, so we welcomed the Americans. The Americans were our saviours because all our troops were in Europe fighting the Battle of Britain and scattered all over

31:00 Greece, and here we were being invaded. If Singapore fell we’d be next. All they had to do was come down the straits and when Darwin was bombed! We actually saw planes going over and then the submarines came into the Harbour! They had a big boom across the harbour. If you went on the ferry it was all blacked out. It was very scary actually. Everything was blacked out and you could

31:30 buy waterfront properties, they were practically giving them away. They couldn’t sell them. If we’d only known. Nobody wanted to live on the coast. Everybody wanted to go to the Blue Mountains or somewhere like that and away from the danger. We saw planes flying over.

What kind of planes?

Japanese. We weren’t told

32:00 they were Japanese but my brother became an expert on planes. He was about to join. He put his age up and joined the air force but boys, like they know the football codes now, they would learn all the planes. It was never revealed. One flew over Rose Bay

32:30 and they believe now after the event that it was a spotter for the submarines. Three of them came in. The HMAS Kuttabul, which was American – with Americans onboard – lots of Americans were killed on the Kuttabul and they cut those down, and said there were just a few wounded.

I want to talk to you specifically about what your memories are

33:00 at the time when the submarine attack happened. I was in Melbourne then and I was terribly upset because Rose Bay and the Wintergarden Theatre! I knew where the thing had gone up. The theatre was like that facing New South Head Road and then there was space, and then the water. It was pretty marshy in there and a couple of times

33:30 when a spring tide came up they suffered some damage but that was very rare. There was this space and the submarine came up just behind the Wintergarden Theatre, so I knew exactly where it was, and there was my mother, and out family! It was brought very close to home and it was in Sydney Harbour. One got away.

34:00 They destroyed the others I think. They didn’t really know how many there were. They were suicide missions: you know the kamikaze pilots and the same with the submarines. They were suicide missions. It was very frightening. It’s like the bombers now, it was an honour and a glory, and you’d

34:30 go to God. They were a special breed. People wanted to marry them and have sex with them, the Japanese, these gods, war gods, who were willing to commit suicide.

What news did you get in Melbourne of what had happened in Sydney?

In Melbourne we got the news that submarines had – and don’t forget I was in the air force. We had access to

35:00 more information than other people but I think it was in the papers because I know I was terribly frightened. It was very hard to ring up. You had to go to special phones. You just didn’t pick up the phone and make a phone call because even the phones were geared to war. They were always engaged and you could never use them. People would queue up and you’d have to have money ready, and there would be an operator to

35:30 put you on. It was a long time before I could find out and it was all confusing, even people in Sydney didn’t know what was going on. At last I got a telegram. Things arrived by telegram in those days. I got a telegram from my mother and the Brits used to have this saying when they were bombed, survivors would say, We can take it!” So she put in the telegram, “We can take it! Everything OK.”

36:00 The Americans were killed and I think there were five Australians. I mean we didn’t know how many were killed. They didn’t tell us. We knew that things were going on that we didn’t know about. That was very frightening too. I mean I was involved in things that people didn’t know about, so I knew.

36:30 Probably it was better that we didn’t know. I think we’ve got too much information now. We’re becoming immune to it. If we see bombing we think, “Oh well! Another bomber.”

Did your family in Rose Bay go down and have a look at any of the damage?

I was in Melbourne. I don’t think so. I think they were too frightened. People just stayed inside because if it could happen once,

37:00 who knew what was happening and we’d seen the plane come over. Darwin had been bombed and the Americans had arrived I think. MacArthur [General Douglas, Commander-In-Chief of the Allied Forces] left the Philippines and his famous statement was, “I shall return!” The Yanks were so gung ho. They hadn’t been through the war.

37:30 They were young and eager, and they were so well dressed, and there were so many of them. We thought, “Oh thank God the Americans are here.” The men didn’t, the men in uniform. They got the girls. They had cigarettes. They had everything that was available to them. In New Guinea where our men came back from the Middle East eventually, when Curtin threatened to

38:00 withdraw all troops, you can imagine what that would have done, if he didn’t send back what we needed. Churchill was so angry at this upstart in Australia, “The colonials worried about their little country.” Australia was a very different place.

Do you remember the first time you saw American troops in Australia?

Yes I can.

38:30 I was in Melbourne. We had newsreels. That was like our television. Everybody would go into these newsreels, which were continuous. Have you ever been to the cinema in Martin Place, the Dendy? You know how that is sort of not very big? They’d be smaller than that and they’d have seats going right back, and they’d be continuous. The newsreels would continue all

39:00 day, so you could go in and go out. Most people at lunchtime in the city would pop in and see what was happening. They were pretty well up to date. We had marvellous cameramen. They had them in Melbourne too. That was shown, what they allowed them to film of course and Pearl Harbour was shown.

39:30 Some of the cameramen, they’d cut a lot out and you’d see where it had been cut. It wasn’t very well done, because like the television, they’d get them to the screen as quickly as they could but it was always behind. It wasn’t like TV, instant. They didn’t have the cameras outside like this 40:00 but they did amazing work with nothing like the equipment but the newsreels were where we got things about the war, and the radio, BBC, otherwise we knew it was all – we knew that we weren’t getting the half of it. I knew that things were going on. I mean if there was a raid and you got a lot of casualties,

40:30 and I knew for example we were all told to stay back. We didn’t have any set hours. We had time off. We worked all weekends and sometimes at night but this was a particular – the high chief wanted everybody to stay back, and we weren’t to tell anybody we were staying back, and it was all very hush, hush, sworn to secrecy, and bible

41:00 stuff. What they wanted to find out was why there were so many casualties in Australia, the trainees. Pilots were being trained in New South Wales in particular at these training centres and they were losing at one stage they lost more men being trained than in the war, which was

41:30 terrifying because the men who were doing the training were old or if they weren’t doing that they were in the war flying planes themselves. I don’t know what the situation was, probably from the First World War but they lost so many being trained that we had a big inquiry. We had to go through all the notes.

Tape 5

00:32 Mrs Barry if you can just elaborate on what you were saying?

That particular time we had to stay back for the two big problems. Trainee pilots being trained in Australia in all areas but I was in Melbourne. It was happening in Victoria and in New South Wales because they were the big states and they were losing so many men

01:00 in training. The planes were crashing. They’d lose the trainer and they’d lose the pilot trainee, and it was happening too much. The other thing that was a big worry was the men who were ill and being in hospital. I found out that the men, the Australians who became ill, the personnel,

01:30 women as well, I think the women were given beds because I ended up in the same place, this is in Melbourne, they were in the Melbourne Showground lying on the concrete floor in places like the horse pavilion, because all the shows didn’t take place, and they were lying on straw palliasses [mattresses], and getting pneumonia. Penicillin was

02:00 available and another antibiotic but it was all reserved for the war, and it was very hard for civilians to get any antibiotics unless they were desperately ill. When I was in Melbourne because there were so many – MacArthur was in Melbourne. I think he went to Brisbane later but he was definitely in Melbourne and

02:30 there was a new hospital that had been started before the war, a modern hospital, and they finished it off to make sure it was ready for the war. I and a couple of us, were asked if we would go and visit some Americans who had been badly injured, and the one that I was to see had been terribly burned in the war.

03:00 They’d been brought to Australia and put in this brand new finished during the war – I think it was just about completed before the war but as soon as the war broke out they finished it. There were no Australians in that hospital, only Americans and our men were in the damp, dungy – I remember he was terribly burned, and wanted me to

03:30 write a letter for him. We did that sort of thing. I could hardly see him because he was covered in bandages and very badly injured but it was a modern hospital with all the facilities that they brought with them, and our men were – I developed German Measles [Rubella] while I was in Melbourne. I was very, very sick. It was a very nasty outbreak and I was quite ill,

04:00 and I had to go to the same place, and I thought, “My God! I’ll never come out,” because people got pneumonia, and died of pneumonia, because they didn’t have the facilities, and there was this beautiful hospital. In one way I suppose they were saving us. There’s no doubt about it and we were lucky that they were available.

04:30 Can I ask you when it was you enlisted in the WAAAF?

In 1941, it would have been.

What building did you have to go to?

Now which building did I have to go to? I filled in an application, which I think was available at a post office.

05:00 I can’t remember where I got the application, maybe I wrote for it and I filled it in. Then you had to wait and I was interviewed. I can’t remember where I was interviewed, I can’t remember a thing about that.

05:30 I think the first thing that happened was I had to meet a group of other WAAAF at Central Station and we’d get out uniforms, and everything in Melbourne. I was being transferred. I was only told that I was being transferred – and don’t forget we did our training in Robertson, so I would have been at Robertson when the allocations were made, and were

06:00 told where we were to go.

Can you tell me about that training at Robertson? How did you get to Robertson?

By train, just about everything was done by train and we got our uniforms. We were told the routine. I think we had beds. It was a former hotel. It has gone back to being a hotel and it’s called Ranelagh, I remember that, a beautiful place.

06:30 So we used that and huge grounds around. We had a corporal. We did drilling. We had inoculations against typhoid in case we went overseas. We were given all the injections and I passed out with the typhoid injection, missed the big last day, spent that in the hospital under

07:00 observation, and everybody was having a good time on the last day. Then I think we were assembled and each one told where they were going to go. Some of the girls came with me. I think there were two that came with me and we were to go to headquarters Melbourne. That was all I was told.

What was the background of the other girls who were in that training with you?

07:30 They were also clerical. There were different groups but the ones I knew were all – that’s not true. There were some that were trained in anti-aircraft. I remember them going off. We went to various places and all I can remember about it is the drilling. Every

08:00 day we had to do these exercises and we marched, and marched, and marched for miles, and miles, and miles, every day.

Through the town?

No, in the bush. It was very rural then.

What were you wearing?

We had khaki, summer we had khaki skirts, like the navy blue. That was the dress uniform, navy blue. We had

08:30 khaki skirts and I think we had some sort of a hat. That’s where I got my sun problems from and a shirt, a khaki shirt.

What did you think of this relentless drilling?

I thought it was ridiculous because I knew I was going to be sitting in an office typing!

09:00 I had no other training. I was what they called a clerk general, which meant I could do shorthand, take shorthand, a stenographer in other wards. That’s what I did. I couldn’t see any point in this drilling. I didn’t do any stenography. I think the idea was that you learned discipline and you learned to obey, act

09:30 without thinking. It didn’t suit me at all [laughs] but I had to do it!

What was the mood amongst the women like?

We were always hungry, starving! We had hours of marching, marching, marching. I can’t remember anything else we did all I can remember is marching. We couldn’t get to eat fast enough you know? Had a lot of

10:00 exercise and it was cold. I remember the cold. Moss Vale can be very cold in that area and very hot in summer. That would have been summer when I was there, that’s right because I struck the cold in Melbourne. It was summer, very hot and we were always thirsty, and always hungry. We couldn’t get the food fast enough. You’d eat anything, ravenous with all this fresh air.

10:30 I think we had to do some camp learning. I suppose if you landed in an emergency situation, maybe some of the girls would have gone to New Guinea or anywhere where they’d be doing records behind the lines or close to the lines. We had to be able to

11:00 do things. We had to make do. It was like a Scout camp in many ways. We were given items. I remember being given, not matches but we had to light a fire. One of the girls had been a Girl Guide, thank God and she knew how to [indicates friction]. We had to do that! We had to improvise and we had to do first aid.

11:30 We had to find a way of getting people out of, say aeroplanes.

Who was training you?

A sergeant major, male, retired from the army. He was absolutely fed up with training bloody women. He talked about us all the time. He abused us. He gave us

12:00 much more drilling than we needed to have really. It was obvious he really resented training women. What was your impression then of the level of seriousness in terms of women’s roles?

Very serious! We were told that we were replacing – we weren’t replacing the men, but we were filling the jobs that men

12:30 were not able to do because they were in the fight. Men were the main thing. We were the handmaidens. We were helping the war effort. They dinned that into us. We were releasing men from these chores. That was the attitude there. it wasn’t the same in Melbourne because it was in the city

13:00 and it was completely different but at Robertson I remember the attitude was – and there was a WAAAF in charge of that. She was the head. I think her name was Stevens and she was very good. The WAAAF were in charge but some of the men were ex – what do they call them above sergeants?

13:30 Warrant officers! Warrant officer is the one between the sergeant and the lieutenant I think is the next one, and he’s the lowest on the rung of officers. The warrant officer has sort of got one foot in each camp and he was very resentful of getting this job. He probably volunteered you know and you had to go where

14:00 you were sent. I mean you had no say in it. Some people with lots of money and influence, like when I was at Bradfield Park there was a Member of Parliament who joined, and he did his training at Bradfield Park, which is Lindfield. On their passing out night, which is the last night of the training and they were going overseas, he managed to get all this wine, and beer, and they were rationed, whiskey. There was a big stink

14:30 about it because he got it through being an MP [Member of Parliament] and there was a big scandal about that. So he really wasn’t happy in the job and he took it out on us. We just had to follow whatever he said and they sent you out in new – not boots exactly. They weren’t boots really.

15:00 You had to be drilled. You had to know how to salute and the right way to do it. You know how you line up and then right turn? You had to swing on your heel. We knew all about that. I can still do that. You had to go through the ranks a certain way. It was ridiculous!

Were you able to spend any time in the town?

15:30 Don’t think so! No, I can’t remember ever going into the town. I mean it was just a little village. It was practically empty. It was a very small place Robertson. It’s still a very small place and we had leave but most of us just slept, caught up on our sleep. We had to get up very early and we went to bed, we’d be exhausted.

16:00 We were very physically active. That’s all I remember about that, so as far as I was concerned I don’t know what good it did me.

What level of camaraderie was there with the other women?

Not a great deal because every moment was filled. You had very little leisure time and you’d be writing letters. If you had any leisure time you’d be writing letters, no computers, no

16:30 phones.

Who were you writing letters to?

Home and a boyfriend I had.

Who was your boyfriend that the time?

He was Ken Napier. He was my boyfriend when I was just left school. I felt more for his parents than I did for him. His parents were lovely. He was an only child and he – this Scottish Dad, who was lovely.

17:00 I mean he was beetle-browed and craggy faced but he was absolutely wonderful and when Ken joined the air force they took me out in their car, and we went to the pictures, and they were lovely to me. I think I was more in love with his parents. His Dad was just so nice and he had this wonderful Scottish accent.

17:30 Ken and I had a big row, and I told him I was going to join the WAAAF. I got so upset when he said, “You know what they call them at Amberley?” where he was in Queensland, “They call them the camp mattress.” I said, “If you think so little of me that I would become a camp mattress!” I was absolutely infuriated at the implication that I would become that!

18:00 He said he didn’t mean it that way but we had this big row because he didn’t want me to join the WAAAF and he wanted us to get engaged, and I was only 18 at the time. He was about 20 or 21. I think he’d had his 21st birthday and he wanted us to get engaged as long as I didn’t join the WAAAF. I was

18:30 determined because I didn’t tell him what was going on at home. I mean he had a fair idea but I loved him madly, but not enough to put up with his – he didn’t want me to join WAAAF. I said, “The only reason you don’t want me to join is because you think I’ll become a – whatever you said.” I said, “That is really insulting.” 19:00 I was so offended by this, that he would think that you know, just because I joined the WAAAF but that was his impression of the girls of Amberley. Amberley is a big training place and they probably did anti- aircraft practice. I don’t know anything about it but that was his impression of what happened when you joined the WAAAF.

19:30 That was another label you see? I had this label thing. I was absolutely against it and I was so offended, and so upset, and I wrote him a scathing letter. I joined the WAAAF and I wrote him this letter that I really regretted sending. I said, “I’ve been here ten days and I’m not pregnant yet. I’ll let you know.”

20:00 A very silly letter! He wrote back and apologised, and said he didn’t mean it the way it came out, and told me that my photo was – he probably lied his head off! His photo of me, he was a great camera addict – I rode of the back of his motorbike. We had a marvellous time. He had a granny

20:30 who lived somewhere in Moss Vale and she ran a Bed and Breakfast. She was Scottish. She was lovely. She was a Mrs Napier too and she was just wonderful. She was the family I wished I’d had because I didn’t have any cousins or aunts, or anybody in Australia, except for one, my father’s sister. My son years later, when he went to England,

21:00 somebody said to John, “Are you going to look up the Gaysleys and the Manions?” He said, “I might look up the Manions but I’ve seen enough of the Gaysleys. I don’t think I’ll bother.” So they were really so different from my family and it was very difficult for me to explain to him what it was like, and why I wanted to join the WAAAF. I couldn’t tell him the real reason and we had this communication problem. He had this

21:30 stereotyped view. Maybe it wasn’t stereotyped, maybe that what his impression of what happened when you joined the WAAAF at Amberley. I said, “I’m going to be in an office.” “Yeah but where is the office?” Anyway, we gradually broke down and he still didn’t understand, and we gradually got cooler. Then he wrote me a letter saying he’d met somebody else and she

22:00 wasn’t in the WAAAF. Years and years later – I mean I knew him for ages and ages. I was mad keen but looking back I now think it was his parents. His granny was lovely. We went all the way down on the back of his motorbike and Granny was funny, she was Scottish, and she made sure that I

22:30 was in a little – you know those lovely white bedspreads? They’re very expensive now they’ve come back. The white fringed – and she made sure that I was way down there, and Ken was way down there, not that we ever did anything! But she was so lovely and said to call her Granny, everybody called her Granny.

23:00 I sort of adopted the family as the family I didn’t have.

You mentioned Mrs Barry that some men were seeking to become engaged, to sew things up before they went away?

That’s right.

Did you have discussions with Ken about him going away?

Oh yes! He said, “But I don’t want you to join the WAAAF. The war will be over soon

23:30 and we can get married, and I’ll get a war – ” There were things to tempt people into joining. After the war they would be given these war service homes and everything would be given to the men, and that’s what affected the women so much because for four years they’d been doing all these jobs, and suddenly the men came back, and it was absolutely compulsory that they get their old jobs back if possible,

24:00 and that the women would go, because they didn’t want all these service men. Some of them were very inefficient. They’d been four years doing different training altogether and the women they found were very good with their small fingers putting bits and pieces in, and women adjusted. Women are very adaptable. Men are not. I’ve got two boys

24:30 and a girl in the middle, and I’ve taught at boy’s High Schools, and I’ve taught at all girls, co-ed, and I’ve had a lot of experience with boys, and girls, and women, even babies right from birth, girl babies are much more adaptable. They sort of adapt to whatever is happening. I mean some aren’t but it is rare to find

25:00 a very shy girl baby. We’ve got one on our floor. The boys are usually the shy ones, don’t like new things happening, whereas girls enjoy it.

This image of the ‘camp mattress’, in your training, did you meet any women who were?

No! Never, but don’t forget I was in almost a civilian job.

25:30 I know it was very different when you are in an area of danger and the man that you’re mad about might be dead the next day. He mightn’t come back. It is a very different matter altogether and some girls thought they’d like to have sex with them and even have

26:00 a child in case he was killed. They hoped he’d come back but there was a lot of that ‘live for the day’. Could you notice a shortage of men?

Yes! In fact it was embarrassing if you were with a man, as I was with my fiancée, who wasn’t in uniform. You felt you had to explain and they didn’t have anything on them to show Reserved

26:30 Occupation. It was embarrassing if you weren’t with somebody in uniform because what were they doing? There were only older men or young kids. The males were all absent. It’s very hard to put yourself back but I remember being very embarrassed. I was invited out to dinner by

27:00 one of the geologists and he was a young man, and he was Reserved. He was one of the chemists and we met because there was a big seminar going on about explosives. Being the only female and the secretary, I was invited to join that group, and take notes. I was the only girl in that. The fire brigade people were there

27:30 because the Mines Department dealt with explosives and he was the explosives’ inspector. He dealt with all explosives and they this big meeting with the Fire Brigade, a government Member, and it was all done at the Mine Museum in one of the rooms on the top floor. That, I was told, was confidential. The Police Commissioner was there. A government Member was there and I was asked if I’d come and take notes,

28:00 which I did. It was very interesting, so I was doing that kind of thing before I joined up. I had to send the report and I had to go over it with the explosives’ expert to make sure I had it all right. It took a couple of days and they wanted it very urgently. They wanted to know what explosives were available

28:30 throughout New South Wales but it was all very hush, hush. Because it was about seven I didn’t have time to have a meal. People came from their jobs and then some of them went back, and two of them

29:00 came with me, and took me to a restaurant. I think we had tea and sandwiches. Coffee, you wouldn’t drink the coffee! There was no coffee as there is now. People who lived then if they came back, they just wouldn’t know where they were. Tea was available but it was rationed. Tea was rationed. Milk was rationed. Sugar was rationed.

Was there any evidence of hostility towards people in Reserved Occupations?

29:30 Oh yes! In the First World War a thing came up and women would send a white feather to somebody who wasn’t in uniform. There was a film made about that and that happened in the Second World War. They had nothing, no badge or anything to say Reserved Occupation because they weren’t allowed to tell what their Reserved Occupation was. People

30:00 thought, “I wonder what sort of occupation he’s in?” They wore suits and they had money obviously, and they lived at home, and they weren’t in the war, so people were very hostile, and they’d even question them, “What’s your occupation?”

What personal experience of this did you have with your fiancée?

30:30 A couple of nasty ones. He tried to join the navy as a naval education officer and he came down to Melbourne. He was allowed to get on the train because of this special thing that he was going for an appointment and I saw him in Melbourne. All the girls that I

31:00 was with, they’d ask, “Is that your boyfriend?” They were very hostile. Even writing to him, I would feel embarrassed because all the mail, you had to leave it somewhere. Because we were in the WAAAF and they would investigate some letters. They didn’t do all of them. They’d pick at random, so you had to be careful what you

31:30 said and because I was in this job we were only allowed to give our address where we lived. We didn’t live where we worked. We weren’t allowed to give that address at all. I used to feel embarrassed writing his name. It was always ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’ in those days. People use first names now. I was always ‘Mr’” and I would feel quite embarrassed writing ‘Mr’. One letter I put

32:00 “F. N. Hanlan” instead of the “Mr” and his sister got the letter out of the letterbox, and she went on about me, told him that “Obviously she doesn’t want to let anyone know she’s got a boyfriend.” I haven’t had good sisters in-law. I’ve had two and they’re not very nice either of them.

32:30 She tried to get him to break it up and it was very difficult for me to explain to him why I had done that because it was offending him. I mean he tried to join the navy but they brought in this – how could I say to him, “I didn’t want to put ‘Mr’ on it.”? That’s how bad it was and everybody was in uniform, every man that you saw.

33:00 If he was above the age of 18 and under the age of about 50, he was in uniform. There were Americans and there were WAAAF, women in uniform. It wasn’t so difficult for women but it even became difficult for young women to be out of uniform because after a while people accepted. When the war first broke out

33:30 it was regarded as they just wanted to be men but after a while they realised that they needed women. I don’t know about Sydney but in Melbourne they had a big campaign to try and get more women, especially in the early 1940s. I think 1942 was when Singapore fell and that was when it became

34:00 really serious.

What about your brother?

My brother went to New Guinea. I didn’t have contact much with him because he was in New Guinea.

When did he enlist?

He really enlisted about the same time as I did, although he was nearly two years younger than me but he put his age up and I think

34:30 they thought he was young. He looked young and he was sent to do clerical work, and he never talked about it his war experience. Most of the men didn’t. They just didn’t want to talk about it. They wanted to forget it when the war was over. The strange part about Ken was, I tried to find out when I came back because I had married someone else and

35:00 my mother told me years, and years later who should turn up at her place but Ken with a little boy. He wanted to know how I was and she said, “I didn’t know what to say. I told him you were married.” He turned up once more because she didn’t give him my address

35:30 and that was the last I heard of him. I don’t know whether he ever – well he married somebody because he had a little boy. But people were very anti anybody in civilian, males in civilian dress and my husband to be, when he came down to Melbourne he tried to bet me to be engaged.

36:00 I just didn’t want to. I wanted to stay in Melbourne but I was transferred to Sydney, to Bradfield Park.

Can you explain your reticence then in regard to that sort of commitment in terms of marriage?

You felt as if you were – you know there was a war going on. It was very dangerous

36:30 and everybody who was young was doing their bit for their country, and I thought he didn’t understand really, being a civilian. There was a dividing line. There’s no doubt about it between the civilians who – I mean we’d done all this drilling! When you’re in a situation like that there is a real comradeship.

37:00 There’s no doubt about that. We would help each other. One of the girls got very blistered feet and you weren’t allowed to drop out because you had blisters. We all had blisters and it was so painful, and she couldn’t even find a bandaid or anything, so I think I wangled bandaids somewhere. I forget. They just weren’t available the way they are now. I think I got a bit of gauze. I think I went to

37:30 the First Aid place and there was a sick bay, that’s right. I went to the sick bay and there was a very nice elderly woman there, and I said, “Can you think of any way that we could get something for blisters?” She said, “It’s ridiculous how they give you those boots! They don’t even give you a chance to run them in.” She produced these little adhesive – they weren’t bandaids. They were strips of adhesive, so I cut

38:00 them up very carefully and slipped a couple to her, and we kept our little stash, so I knew where to go. She said, “You always know somewhere.” I said, “Well you only have to ask! Obviously being a nurse she’ll have something.” She said, “But I wouldn’t have thought of that!” I said, “I learned to think, where you can do something.” I’d forgotten about

38:30 the comradeship. We looked after each other and we’d get very hostile if he picked on somebody. I don’t think we were ever brave enough to say we’re not doing any more drilling. We weren’t that brave but we let him know that he was being unreasonable. “We are women.” I remember one of the girls saying, “We are females, as you keep telling us. Remember

39:00 we are females!” What she was trying to say was we have periods. So I think he wasn’t too sure about whether he should be marching us up and down because he’d never even thought about periods! One of the girls was quite brave. She was older and I remember her saying, “We are females you know? We are having a rest period, which is very brief.” We were nearly collapsing in the shade.

39:30 I think he wasn’t too sure. I think he was a bachelor. He wasn’t too sure about these women’s things, so he eased off a bit and that became our thing. We’d say, “We are females!” So we sort of blackmailed him because he wasn’t too sure whether we meant, “What’s that thing that women have?

40:00 Hmmm, perhaps I’d better go easy.” I mean we were in different times! He didn’t know enough about it. I think he thought we all had periods at the same time. [Laughs] Funny things like that happened. But I can’t remember much about it. All I remember is the drilling, looking after each other, some bitchiness with some of the girls and food, being hungry,

40:30 trying to get more food. That was a constant. I remember being so hungry and we weren’t allowed to talk. We weren’t allowed to chatter. That was hard. Even when we had a rest period we weren’t allowed to talk, “Loose lips sink ships!” We’d hear that all the time. “Loose lips sink ships!” Very hard to say! [Laughs] 41:00 That was on all the trains and trams. Melbourne had trams and Sydney had trams. Yes there was great hostility about anybody out of uniform, only the elderly, little boys. Anybody who was young and strapping, and wasn’t in uniform, people would be glaring at them. They really had a bad time.

Tape 6

00:32 Mrs Barry I wanted to ask you when you arrived in Melbourne whether General MacArthur had already arrived by that stage?

I think he had. I can’t remember whether he was in Melbourne first. I think he was in Brisbane first and then he came to Melbourne, and then I think went back to Brisbane because Brisbane was closer to the war than Melbourne. The place was absolutely full of

01:00 Americans. They were everywhere and they had a huge camp with tents. It was called Yank Tent City and I don’t know where. I didn’t know Melbourne that well, and it was all blacked out. There was no way of finding out where things were. People who lived in Melbourne would probably know but it was in the middle of the city, close to the city. We had torrential

01:30 rain. I arrived by train, this long train journey and I had an abscessed tooth all the way. I will never forget the pain. You had to get out at Albury and switch trains because of this different rail width. It sounds ridiculous but that’s the way it was. I had to go and see a dentist. My first impression of Melbourne was a dental surgery,

02:00 a RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] dental surgery and we used it. I had a miserable couple of days and then it began to rain, and it was raining, flooding rain. I forget how long after we arrived but a series of murders started happening, women, all women. Rainy, blacked out, you can’t imagine dark and damp, and horrible it was. The news reached

02:30 Sydney that there were all these murders. There was a murderer loose and they had no clues. It was random. There might have been one servicewoman. I can’t remember but most of them were young women and I can’t remember how many were killed. I think there were about four or five in the middle of this terrible deluge of rain. My mother was writing saying,

03:00 “Don’t go out at night. I’m very worried. We’re hearing about all these murders.” I mean we weren’t game to move you know? They finally arrested an American [Eddie Leonski] and they found him from – it was very muddy where they had this big camp. He turned out to be one of the Americans. I know he was hanged. I don’t know whether he was hanged here or went back to the US

03:30 but they found him through the mud. They didn’t have DNA in those days of course but I think they tracked him down because of the mud and the mud fitted. Somebody remembered something about him but finally they caught him and then there were no more murders, but it was a terrible time. We were so frightened. It was a really depressing job. The worst part of it

04:00 was we couldn’t tell anybody what we were doing. It was a girl’s school that was taken over but people soon found out. The word got around that that’s where the telegrams came from. Local people soon found out. We covered the dead, the missing, the missing presumed dead, only the

04:30 RAAF. Maybe a plane had crashed and no bodies were recovered, so they were missing presumed dead. Then there was a different category for the missing, maybe they just parachuted down and sort of hit the ground but then they couldn’t find them. Prisoners of war we covered.

05:00 We didn’t do injured. We only did the dead, missing, missing presumed dead, prisoners of war and I think that was it. I was in the group with the dead.

When you arrived in Melbourne what were you told about the job that you were doing?

Just that we would be working at headquarters and it

05:30 had to be absolutely confidential. We had to take oaths that we would not reveal what we were doing, we would never tell anybody what we did or where we worked. We lived in a different place. The part that affected me and everybody else, local people soon got to

06:00 know. I don’t know how they found out. We had some civilians working for us. We had a couple of girls. There were two of them. They weren’t in the WAAAF. Anyway, we would leave work and you’d find queues of people, not big queues but little groups of people, and they’d be trying to find out. Maybe they’d got a telegram

06:30 saying their son or daughter I suppose, was missing or missing presumed dead and this was the place where the information was. We would go out a different way, we’d go out the back way and we couldn’t even speak to them. It was terrible. You’d see that they knew that they shouldn’t be talking to us and we couldn’t talk to them but it was like 07:00 looking at – you know a puppy that’s pleading to be let in. I used to find that dreadful. I’d be feeling really bad and I’d try to go out a different way so that I wouldn’t bump into them. Some of them wouldn’t say anything. They’d just stand there and hope that somehow or other a message would come out. I don’t

07:30 remember the set up but all I know is the cables came from – they must have had somewhere underneath the school, it wasn’t on the same level, where the cables came in with the information. There were girls on a switchboard for cables that came in. All we knew was that we received the cables upstairs in the school.

08:00 I had to deal with the dead and what happened was you’d get a signal, a big signal, it was a cable really, and it would have – some enemy action would take place, some action would take place, and it would have all the people involved in that particular action who

08:30 were somehow injured. What I had to do: both Brits, Americans, French, sometimes French but what I had to do was look out for the ‘Aus’ [Australian]. It always had ‘Aus’ in front of the ones that I had to look out for and the number, and a name.

09:00 Then my next job was I had a hotline to records, which was in a different building further down in St Kilda, St Kilda Road I think it was. Each one of us had a hotline but mine was the hotline because I dealt with the deceased. The first question I had to ask – I’d give them the number and if I had a name, sometimes they

09:30 just had a number and I’d find out the name that belonged to that number. The next question would be the person to be informed, which wasn’t necessarily the next of kin because when they signed their forms and we all did, in case of injury, death or accident, please nominate the person you wished to be informed, not necessarily your

10:00 next of kin. They might pick a priest or a doctor, or a policeman, or a brother, or somebody and everything was delivered by telegram in those days, and then a following letter. So the telegram would be sent to the person nominated as the person to be informed. So you had to find out who was the person to be informed and then find the details, and the relationship of the

10:30 person to be informed. Then what also got me was that I had all the details and we had a brief description of the action, what was in the cable, not great details but just a brief description of what had taken place, then what upset me terribly was

11:00 that it was a pro forma [standard] form. All I did was fill in the missing bits. I remember it started, ‘Deeply regret to inform you’, and then that was written in, and then I filled in the spaces, ‘that your’ son, daughter, husband, whatever and that used to really upset me. I felt that we shouldn’t do it that way. It was so wrong but I mean

11:30 what else could they do? You couldn’t sit down and write a letter, so I would fill that in, type it in, fill in the necessary bits. I remember it started off, this is the telegram, “Deeply regret to inform you that your whatever, had been killed in enemy action, whatever.” They wouldn’t give

12:00 great details and then they’d put, “Deepest sympathy in this. You will receive a following letter and in this terrible time – ” or something. It was very nice telegram. It was brief and something along the lines of, “At this terrible time we will send you as much information as possible and

12:30 give you as much help as possible.” It wasn’t worded like that but that was the gist of it. Then the telegram would go to despatch and they’d send the telegram by Morse code probably, in those days. Then you’d fill in, again the pro forma letter with the details and what the person had to do, “And in this terrible time blah, blah, blah”. That used to upset

13:00 me. I felt that it shouldn’t be “filling in a form.” I never got used to that. I always felt that I’d really rather write a personal letter but you couldn’t do it of course, but that really got to me, and the people waiting outside, not the ones who were killed but the ones, the relatives of people who were missing

13:30 or prisoner of war, or didn’t know what had happened to them. So it wasn’t a bright job and to make matters even worse for us – I mean all this rain was happening, and the murders, that was very soon after we arrived but that gradually cleared itself up, but the worse part was – well not the worst part but the very awful part was that

14:00 we were allocated to different places. As I was down as a Catholic – you can’t imagine how difficult it was in those days. There was a big divide. Protestants would not – I mean you weren’t even allowed in those days I remember, Catholics were not supposed to go to Protestant weddings. That was frowned upon. It was ridiculous.

14:30 Looking back it seems so stupid and you felt guilty if you went to a Protestant church for a friend’s wedding. It was so much like now with Muslims, who are now the low man on the totem pole and it is all so stupid when you look back and think, “That’s all gone and now we’ve got the same thing.” 15:00 You know, the same old same old. It’s ridiculous and somebody else is in the hot seat. Protestants would not be billeted in Catholic places and Catholics would not be billeted in Protestant places, and of course there being no travel interstate, usually schools, boarding schools, and

15:30 places with lots of room, and we were billeted in this beautiful house. I’ve got a photo of it. It was a mansion in Toorak, which was the – we were really supposed to be very lucky but as it turned out it wasn’t so great. They could choose. They could reject

16:00 people or not and this was a very high class exclusive Catholic boarding school. It was run by an unusual order of nuns. They were Dutch and I think it was an exclusive school. I mean all nuns wore nun’s habits but they didn’t. They were very

16:30 unusual. They wore civilian clothes and they weren’t – you known nuns take saints names and things like that. They had their own names and the person in charge was Sister Elizabeth. You wouldn’t know they were nuns but it was a Dutch order. I don’t know what the order was but it was very unusual and this was the most magnificent mansion. It was a copy of a very

17:00 wealthy – I don’t know if he’s French but it was like a French Chateau, beautiful grounds, magnificent building and they built on this dormitory. We weren’t living in the magnificent part of the place. They had daygirls but they also had a big boarding house group that came from all over Australia because it was so exclusive and unusual,

17:30 modern but of course they couldn’t travel, so they had all this room. That’s when the government could – anybody that had any space the government would pay them but they had to take somebody from the services, so we were allocated to that. A friend of mine who was with me at Robertson and I,

18:00 we were the only ones who knew each other, we got there. They had built on fairly recently this very modern, big dormitory room and the beds were like a hospital set up, quite comfortable beds with a little top for books and things, and a place to put your books and things, just a single bed, and then curtains for privacy

18:30 with a bit of space. There were about 24 to a dormitory and we were not allowed to have any contact of any kind with the girls. We found out that we couldn’t have been to a worse place and I really should have reported what went on there. We were starving.

19:00 We didn’t sit with the other girls. We never met any of the other girls and the only person that dealt with us was the principal. It was obvious that they only took us because they had to and they chose the ones they wanted. They let us know without any doubt at all that we were very unwelcome.

19:30 The rules were laid down. We were not to go there, we were not to go there and we had our showers at that time. There were no boarding – there were only day ones there so we had to shower – I think there were a couple of Melbourne girls who maybe lived in the country. I think there were some boarders. We never met them. We had to do our clothing ourselves. We had to

20:00 make sure we didn’t use the line, all these things. It was like a prison but the worst part was we were very hungry. We worked long hours and we didn’t do much physical activity but it was very – there was a canteen at the school, and we spent most of our money on food. In the morning we got –

20:30 they weren’t even cornflakes. They were like cornflakes but unlike cornflakes. They were like cornflakes but nothing like the old Kellogg’s. We had watered milk. It was like water. I mean it was all rationed but they were being paid and paid a large amount, and being in the services we were supposed to have

21:00 more rations, and they were given extra rations for each of us. We never saw them but they were supposed to provide food according to the many rations we would have brought. The milk was awful. I think we once had one hot breakfast

21:30 that I can remember and that was saveloys. Do you know what saveloys are like? They’re red. They’re like sausages and they have offal. I would never! I saw a man demonstrating in the store the other day and I thought, “Oh! I’m going to be sick on the spot.” I had to get away. I mean I’m sure his would have been lovely but they

22:00 were really the last thing you’d want to eat for breakfast. They were red and how they cooked them was put them in boiling water, and bring the water to the boil, and then put them on a plate, and all the water was around them. That was our hot breakfast. I don’t think I can ever remember having an egg and they had all this. I mean they would have been for having us there and they would have had extra rations.

22:30 We had to go to chapel every Sunday separate from the girls, never met any of the girls and one Sunday I was sick. I had terrible cramping, menstrual pains and I just was unable to get up out of bed, and we had heard that something was happening on the Sunday because they tried to

23:00 get us to go out, and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t move and one of my friends was trying to find – there were no hot water bottles. Rubber was war effort. You couldn’t buy it and people used to send their daughters their old rubber bags, and they were precious because you couldn’t buy them. They had tins. 23:30 I remember people used to fill cans with hot water and they’d go cold very quickly. I really needed some heat and one of my friends went off to find something, didn’t find anything and I was alone in the bed. You had to have the beds vacant. It was a Sunday. We weren’t working this

24:00 particular Sunday and Sister Elizabeth arrived, and said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m really ill. I’ve got terrible stomach pains.” I didn’t say I’ve got period pain and she said, “I’m sorry but you’ll have to get up. The place is being inspected.” I had to get out of bed and I was really, really sick and later, another time later on

24:30 I developed German Measles, and I was really, really ill, I had a high temperature, and I couldn’t go to work because I’d infect everybody, and I was sent to hospital, and I had to get out of the dormitory that day, sit in a chair outside. I was really almost delirious. My friend said, “She’s really sick. She needs a doctor.” It wasn’t

25:00 until I got to work the next day that I got some action. We found out that on this particular Sunday that I had this cramping and I said,” There’s no way I can go to chapel,” I was forced to go to chapel. “If you’re going to live here you have to live by the rules of this place.” I mean, I did not want to bloody live there. It was horrible! We were isolated. We were

25:30 let, not even subtly, known that we were regarded as ‘unclean’. They didn’t want us there. We were to have nothing to do with the girls. If we saw them we weren’t to speak to them. What was the incident? I must tell you about this. The Sunday

26:00 we found out later and we could smell these beautiful smells wafting through the place, high ceilings – it was very cold, and somebody was baking cakes. We could smell them and we were going, “Aaaah! Wouldn’t it be lovely.” Scones and cakes I remember, and that was the archbishop was coming to inspect the place. Most of the girls had gone out, they’d been told to

26:30 go out. I was too sick and my friend stayed with me, and we were just almost ordered to leave. I couldn’t move and Pat said, “Von is sick.” So I was allowed to stay on condition I didn’t come in. There was no lunch provided for us and the dining room was out of bounds to us, and we could see this beautiful afternoon tea

27:00 being brought in, and we saw the VIPs [very important persons] arriving in the distance. We were made absolutely crystal clear that we were not welcome. So that was once incident and that was another piece of hypocrisy. All my life, particularly in regard to religion – ! Then the other one was

27:30 unbelievable. For some reason Elizabeth decided that – I think looking back, have you heard of Batavia? It was owned by Dutch and I forget what it is called now [Jakarta]. It has changed its name but it used to be called Batavia and because the Japanese had declared war, and it was very dangerous, and women were being captured, and

28:00 Batavia was invaded I think, and all these women and children, the men were made prisoners of war, some of the women got away on ships, and then they had to worry about being bombed by Allies, the Japanese ships the Allies would bomb, all of them died that way, and some of them apparently –

28:30 we didn’t know anything about this. All I was told was I was supposed to go and kiss the floor three times for the honour of being invited into the big house one evening and I think they only did it to let the powers that be know that they were inviting a representative from the WAAAF because

29:00 these Dutch women had been allocated to be looked after for a couple of days while the authorities worked it out – I mean they had children, babies. Some of them had a dreadful time. They arrived in rags. They just escaped with their lives. I don’t know what it was about. All I knew was these Dutch women were arriving and I was asked to come, and

29:30 help meet them, and talk to them, and pass around supper in this beautiful room. Now I have no idea why I was chosen but now looking back – I was thinking about it the other day, “Now why did they pick on of the WAAAF? Why didn’t they pick one of their girls?” I think it was to impress the authorities that they were treating us like the girls.

30:00 All I knew was that I had this great honour and it was let known that I wasn’t to tell the others but I was invited to come and meet these women, and I didn’t speak Dutch! But anyway, I remember going into this absolutely gorgeous room, all panelled and it was just beautiful, and this great big mantelpiece, and fire. It was very cold. They had no central heating.

30:30 We had navy skirts with slit pockets and of course being evening, I think I had a jumper, and a shirt with a tie of course. It was very cold and these women were very cold, and they were providing blankets, and giving them hot soup. I was helping with that and talking to some of them, and

31:00 asking about the children. The children were all absent but I believe they brought the children with them and they were being looked after somewhere else. I think they were helping them fill in forms because they were a Dutch order and they spoke Dutch but it was evening and they all looked very tired, and exhausted. I felt so sorry for them. They looked dreadful and their hair was all matted, you know? They’d escaped with their lives really and 31:30 they didn’t know what had happened to their men. Anyway, at one stage there was a sort of lull in the proceedings, and they’re filling in forms, and I wasn’t really needed. I was cold and we were always cold, and my fingers had chilblains on them, terrible chilblains. The worst thing you can do is go near a fire but you want to. So I’m standing near the fire, I think I had my back to the fire but

32:00 I had my hands in my pockets. This woman Elizabeth came over and beckoned me, sort of away from the fire. There was something she wanted to say to me and she leaned over, and she said, “Don’t stand like that Veronica. It looks very suggestive.” Now I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about! I was trying to think what I

32:30 was doing that was suggestive and it wasn’t for years that the penny suddenly dropped. I had my hands in my pockets! Da Dah! So that was one experience I’ll never forget! I mean how could you? She left these women in these circumstances. I mean as if they cared one way or the other whether I was playing with myself or

33:00 what! I really had no idea what she meant. It didn’t enter my head. I was trying to think, “Suggestive? What was I doing?” All I could remember doing was standing. I thought, “Maybe my back to the fire?” I thought, “No it would be more suggestive if I had my back to them.” I thought she thought I was bad mannered. I thought, “Well I didn’t have my back to them.” That’s what I thought she meant and I was trying to remember whether I’d

33:30 turned my back on them but suggestive didn’t fit in.

Why do you think there was that antagonism towards the WAAAF girls staying there?

I think there was a general feeling of we weren’t one of them. It was a very snobbish time. I mean you can’t imagine it now but we were regarded as –

34:00 anybody who joined the WAAAF was different. I mean a lot of girls would have probably loved to have joined the WAAAF but their parents wouldn’t let them. It was regarded as I don’t know what, not the right thing to do. Don’t ask me why. They were protected in this

34:30 place and we were out in this masculine world. In fact we were in an office, probably that’s why. I mean we didn’t see any action of any kind. They didn’t know what we did.

Was that wide spread public opinion at the time, that women who join the forces were – ?

I think so

35:00 amongst certain people, especially people in Toorak. Don’t forget this was like Vaucluse. The rest of Melbourne would be like here. It would be like if you invited an Aborigine. I don’t think there were any Aborigine girls in the WAAAF. I can’t remember. It was a terribly racist time.

35:30 I remember at university learning that they did a big IQ test, the Americans did an IQ test on everybody that joined the forces and everybody did the same test. It was how they ranked people. To their shock and horror

36:00 the aborigines living in the northern parts of America – not the aborigines, the blacks. When they finally admitted them – I mean they weren’t allowed to join the army. To their horror they found out that the northern black people far outscored the southern whites and that was a terrible shock.

36:30 They never let that out. It’s the same sort of attitude.

Going back to where you were working, could you explain what the school was and where it was?

I can’t remember the name of the school. I’ve tried and tried to but it was near the parks. It was in the city, in a very nice area. Toorak was where we

37:00 lived. I think it was a fairly socially comfortable middle class area. It wasn’t far from the end of the gardens and I never did find my way around Melbourne because it was all blacked out, and there were no signs.

37:30 All the signs were taken down. I got lost in Vaucluse and I knew it as well as anything.

Were there street signs?

There were no signs anywhere.

No street signs?

No street signs. No railway station, you didn’t know which railway station the train was coming into. You can’t imagine what it was like, black, no lights, all the streets lights were out. It was very dangerous and if you had a torch you had to be very careful to put it on the ground.

38:00 Melbourne was raining, the rain just didn’t stop. They had more rain that season than ever before. It was a record rainfall, flooding and everything was black. It was very miserable and the winter was terrible. I spent the winter there and I remember walking down the street to catch the tram and icicles were on

38:30 all the trees. It was terribly cold and we were always hungry. We only had breakfast. I think we were supposed to have dinner but looking back, they robbed us blind.

What did you have for dinner?

We used to go to restaurants, cafes and spend all our money on food. There weren’t the take out places.

39:00 I mean you could get hamburgers. We lived on hamburgers and we had a canteen but it was mainly cigarettes and I think we could get pies. We had a dreadful diet but we were always hungry. That’s what I remember most about that place and being regarded as lepers.

39:30 Then the wasps hit the fan when one of the girl’s stockings – now there were no nylons and you could get silk stockings but they were very rare, and they were expensive, and took a lot of coupons. One of the girls had her silk stockings stolen from the line and of course you can guess who was under suspicion.

40:00 We had to line up and we had to undo everything. We had to pack everything into our kitbag and we then had to undo the kitbag. They went through everything. So that was pretty awful, turned me right off religion and I haven’t been a member of an institutionalised

40:30 religion since. It was dreadful. I had the priest in Rose Bay reading out the big donations and I had this woman starving us, really stealing from the government because all the money was going into – I mean you should have seen the Bishop’s spread! All our coupons and rations! I mean they had cream and cakes!

41:00 Nobody had cream. That was a luxury plus. We saw them. That’s why we were supposed to be out of the place. We saw all this food being carried in, butter and you know?

How did you get to work?

By tram, walked down the street and took the tram quite a few sections. We lived quite a way from where we worked and then we walked, got off

41:30 the tram in St Kilda Road. That’s where all the headquarters were, all the main army, navy – it was a big wide road. It was like Anzac Parade in width with all these big buildings and the Park opposite and the school – I don’t know Melbourne well enough, and you couldn’t know where you were.

Tape 7

00:02 We are so blessed in Sydney.

I know.

No southerlies [winds] or anything like that, and the Yarra.

I mean they have some nice cultural things.

I love Melbourne now, but oh God it turned me off it. It was quite a shock to go back to Melbourne many, many years later and find that it was quite a nice place actually but I think Sydney is hard to beat.

So do I yeah, anywhere around the world

00:30 really.

So it is hard to imagine now but there was definitely a pecking order and people who went to private exclusive girl’s schools, there’s a bit of it here now but nothing like it. Australia is a very wide-open culture really.

01:00 Was being Catholic a prerequisite of staying in this boarding house?

Oh yes! Good Lord yes! You had to be and you had to be a church going believer and some of the girls wouldn’t go to chapel. It was compulsory to go to chapel every Sunday to Mass.

How did it feel to be a grown woman with a job back under the thumbs of the nuns?

Terrible! Well we weren’t there. We were at work

01:30 a lot and we spent as little time as possible there. I don’t think we had a curfew but I mean nobody wanted to be out in the city with no lights and the only places that had any lights were – there were places where there were service clubs, and they’d have places where you’d go, and they’d have a dance or band but they 02:00 were few and far between. There were restaurants but they had to put up with rationing, but you wouldn’t be wandering around trying to find your way home. The transport was very bad because the men were all away, “There’s a war on, you know!” You got sick of hearing that. There were women driving trams and they always had conductors

02:30 in those days. Women were either in services or – there were so few men that it was sometimes a relief to find that some boys were on leave. We didn’t go out much at night. We didn’t leave work until about

03:00 seven or eight. We didn’t have office hours as such. We had time off and if there was work there we had to do it. We had to stay there until it was finished. I think I had Sundays off although sometimes I worked on Sunday and then occasionally we had these meetings where we’d have to all come in, and sit down, and go through the records if there was an excess of deaths.

03:30 What was regarded as an excess of deaths?

Especially local, domestic not overseas. If there were more Australian names in the cable, they’d want to know why, and don’t forget it was all happening overseas, was that a particular squadron of Australians.

04:00 They’d want to find out why so many Australians were killed, injured, wounded or made prisoners of war and how did they become prisoners of war, and what happened to them because there was a big underground movement, especially in France and Holland where airmen would sometimes parachute out, and often they’d bring them in to join the underground [clandestine movement undermining the enemy],

04:30 all this secret – if they were caught they’d be shot immediately. Having you been reading about the Mouse, you know the White Mouse? [Nancy Wake] Well she did the most amazing things. She was working for the French. She spoke French like a French woman. She was amazing. There was a famous story about her riding a bicycle and she

05:00 was stopped about three or four times. If they’d realised that she wasn’t French she’d have been shot.

What did you know at the time you were working in the HQ [headquarters] about women’s roles in the underground?

I think we knew that it was going on. We didn’t know about women’s roles so much. We heard the men’s role and especially the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] boys,

05:30 who were cared for if their plane crashed, and the underground in France would care for them, and put them in farms, and look after them, and get them back, correspond with the British in some way, send a message that they were looking after three Australians because

06:00 nobody would know what happened to them. The last thing that would be seen, maybe the pilot stayed in the plane while it crashed and some might jump out of the plane. They’d be among the ‘missing, presumed dead’ or just ‘missing’.

Can you give me an example then of exactly what the information would be that you would hear?

It would be

06:30 that – we talked to each other and people in the missing would say there was a raid, and we think they might have been picked up by the underground. We didn’t have any more knowledge than anyone else except that we knew that they had been in that particular action and the

07:00 plane had crashed, and the pilot had been killed but some two or three escaped, and that was the only information we had. Then what happened to them when they hit the ground would have to come via the underground if they survived. If the Germans played the rules and took them as prisoners of war, the rules of war were that they had to inform

07:30 people. I don’t know how that happened but people disappeared and they never knew what happened to them.

How many of these pro forma telegrams might you do in one day?

Well in 1941 and 1942 it was many, many more because the Battle of Britain was taking place when Churchill

08:00 made his famous – you know the Spitfires [aeroplanes]. So many were killed in that. It depended on what action was taking place. I mean some days you’d be flat out. There’d be so many and the phone would be – you’d just get that information, and then you’d get another one. The aim was to get the telegram out as soon as possible and

08:30 sometimes you’d be flat out because the telegrams had to be sent first. They were priority but you had to send a letter on the same day, so the letter would get there a couple of days later. It wasn’t like now. The post was much slower but as soon as possible you had to send the following letter. Why?

Because the telegram only gave you the information that the person had been

09:00 killed and the letter filled in a lot more, any information that they had. They wouldn’t tell them full details but they’d say that his commanding officer and each man had somebody who was in charge of them, and they would write. Our information was only as good

09:30 as what was in the cable. The people on the spot, their fellow pilots and crew would be in the best position to report back when they, if they got back, and if the whole crew went, well nobody would know except that the plane did not return, so we didn’t have much information really. It depended on

10:00 who came back, who survived, what they saw, whether they saw the parachute land, whether they had time to get the parachute out and then another plane would say well we saw the plane crash, and we couldn’t hand around. I mean they’re being fired on, so it was all very piecemeal.

What incidents were there

10:30 of miscommunication of the death?

I don’t think there were many. They had to be absolutely certain. I mean that would be in another department but they’d be pretty certain of the dead, otherwise they’d put ‘missing presumed dead’. If there was any doubt at all it would go to the ‘missing presumed dead’. They had a

11:00 more complicated job, really, because if they’re missing you don’t know what’s happened to them, whether they were still alive? The ones I would get would be definitely dead. There’d be no doubt. There’d be somebody who knew the plane had crashed and there were no survivors as far as they could tell. I suppose there would be mistakes. It happened in the US with

11:30 that soldier in the Korean War but I don’t think so. I don’t think the dead. The missing presumed dead, yes.

You had had a personal connection with someone in the RAAF?

That’s right yes. When I was 10 or 11 my mother had a friend named Mrs Wood. I knew her as Mrs Wood. She was a widow

12:00 and she had one son, and then there was quite a long period – I think Peggy was born about – she was a surprise baby. She was a widow and Peggy broke her leg. I didn’t know Peggy very well. My mother and Mrs Wood were friends, and Mrs Wood said, “Peggy is very lonely,” because she was in plaster for a long time. Now

12:30 we move around. It was different in those days. She was very bored. She couldn’t go to school and it was a bad break. She was like an only child and her brother had joined the RAF [Royal Air Force]. He’d gone to England for a trip, decided to join the RAF anyway, before the war broke out and become a pilot with the RAF, not the Australian,

13:00 the British Air Force. Mrs Wood asked my mother whether I could call in and keep Peggy company after school because she was very bored, and couldn’t do much, so I would do that. Peggy and I became good friends. We played board games and Mrs Wood had a pianola, and I loved the pianola. We would sit and play the pianola. You just

13:30 use the keys and it’s all automatic, wonderful! I loved going there and Peggy used to like it. I would do the pedalling and a pianola stool slopes down so three people can sit on a pianola stool, and one works the pedals because it gets very tiring after a while. That’s how I got to know Peggy and she constantly talked about her big

14:00 brother, Alan. She was longing for him to come home and he was in the RAF, and he flies planes, and he wrote these letters. She showed me the letters and I was looking forward to meeting him. He was coming home on leave and he hadn’t been home for ages, and ages, years I think. Anyway, Alan appeared and at that time he was in the RAF and

14:30 the British Air Force had grey uniforms, ours was navy blue. He looked so gorgeous and he was like Tyrone Power, who was my pinup boy. He was a film star and very handsome, and Alan turned out to be almost his double. He was charming. He was absolutely lovely. I mean he was very fond of his little sister. He hadn’t seen her for years

15:00 and she’d grown up. As far as he was concerned I was this freckle-faced friend of his kid sister and that was it. As far as I was concerned he was, “Aaaah!” I could hardly breath when he came near! They had a big party for his return and all I remember of the party was that we all wore jazz caps. The war hadn’t broken out.

15:30 It was just before the war and he looked so gorgeous in his uniform, and I was sorry to see him go. He was going back and war was obviously going to occur, and he was going to be a pilot. It was all very romantic and he sat on this pianola stool. He was in the middle, Peggy on one side and me on the other, and he put an arm around both of us. I didn’t wash that spot for months! Oh! 16:00 He had no idea of this passion! He was up on a cloud up there, so that was big moment with Alan. He just disappeared and life moved on. I joined the WAAAF and got in this situation where I received the cables. I had to ring up and check, and then write telegrams,

16:30 and it was my birthday. It was the 25th of October and it was a Sunday, and I was working this day. There’d been a few cables, not that many, a few Australians. I’d been doing those and there was a bit of a lull, and then another cable arrived. Two days before I received a letter from my mother, I mean she’d send all the gossip and

17:00 tell me Alan was doing, and what Peggy was doing, and kept me up to date. I hadn’t heard about Alan or Peggy for quite a while and she wrote, and said she had called in to see Mrs Wood. Mrs Wood was very excited because although Alan had been badly injured in a crash in enemy action, he was now in a convalescing

17:30 hospital somewhere in England, and he would be coming home, his injuries quite serious but he was getting better. He was in a convalescent place getting rehab and physiotherapy, and he was coming home, and would probably be out of the war. So she was ecstatic, his mother! She hadn’t seen him for quite a few years.

18:00 Although he was in the RAF he had an RAAF number. He was in the RAF but he was an Australian, so he was in a strange situation really but he was still under our responsibility because his mother lived in Australia and he was born in Australia.

18:30 So I’m going through the cables having thought about Alan, “Oh it would be lovely. I might see if I can wangle some leave and it would be lovely to see him again after all these years. Mrs Wood would be ecstatic and Peggy would be ecstatic.” I wondered how badly injured he was. I get the cable, going through the and I see, “Aus, number, Wood, Alan, direct bombing of

19:00 Red Cross Convalescent Hospital.” It had a big Red Cross and the theory was that you never bombed anything with a Red Cross on it because you knew it was a hospital. Two planes came over I later learned and strafed the building, and two planes dropped bombs. They came down low. They were sighted.

19:30 Because it was Sunday there weren’t many people. Normally there was a canteen there and people would have been in the canteen if it had been a weekday, and that kept the casualties down, but Alan was killed in the bombing. I just couldn’t believe it! I was shocked, and checked and of course it was our Alan.

20:00 I couldn’t believe it and I sent the telegrams off, and I thought, “Oh how can I send this telegram,” because she was the person to be informed, Mrs Wood. So I had a lovely boss. His name was Nisham, Squadron Leader Nisham and he was a very nice man, and I thought, “I just can’t send this telegram.” So I went in to see him and told him the whole story, and showed him the letter, which I happened to have from my mother.

20:30 I said, “Is there any way that I could make my mother the person to be informed, so that she could be there with her because she’ll be on her own?” He said, “Oh no.” It was strictly forbidden to contact anybody. Anyway, he thought about it and I said, “This will kill her. She’s expecting him – in a convalescent hospital,

21:00 out of the war in England and having gone through all that.” So he said, “Is your mother far away?” I said, “No not very far. She could get down there. Perhaps I could make up a story or something so that she could be there.” He said, “Well.” I was a bit worried about my mother because she was a bit flaky at times.

21:30 Anyway, he decided that he would bend the rules and he rang, and said that he knew I was her daughter, and wondered if she’d do him a favour. He said, “Are you able to call in on Mrs Wood today?” We hadn’t sent the telegram at that stage.

22:00 “Would you do me a favour and call in, and visit her?” My mother hearing this, I mean she was very conscious of people in authority. I think she thought it was something to do with Alan being injured and maybe he’d had a set back or something. He didn’t tell her that he’d been killed. He just said, “I’d like you to stay with her for a while

22:30 if you can spare the time.” I’m thinking, “Oh God! I hope my mother doesn’t – ” It was pretty awful for her and anyway that’s what happened. We then sent the telegram and I learned later that Mum was with her when the telegram arrived. She didn’t know that Alan had been killed. She thought it was something to do with maybe being set back or something and he wasn’t coming home when she thought he was coming home

23:00 but it was pretty awful, a dreadful birthday. I’ll never forget it. I think we went out and they were going to celebrate, and I said, “No. That’s the last thing I want to do.” Years and years later, Hal my husband who was Irish, he hadn’t seen his sister in Ireland for about 20 years and he wanted to see her.

23:30 She was very ill and we decided, I retired from teaching, and he retired, and we decided we would buy a campervan. You can do this. In the teacher’s magazine we saw this. You pick it up in London and you don’t rent it. You actually buy it. There’s a buy back scheme and you don’t lose much on it. Instead

24:00 of renting that would cost a fortune, you actually buy it and they guarantee to buy it back at a good price, so it doesn’t deteriorate too much, and if anything happens you have their service. So that’s what we did. We picked it up in London and we went all over the place. We went everywhere. It was a marvellous trip and we went to Ireland. We went all over the British Isles. I have a son who

24:30 had gone to England and he was in debt. We met up with Phillip and got caught in the worst winter on record for umpteen years, and got frozen in. We couldn’t move and among the things that I wanted to do was go, and find out if I could, something about Alan. So we went to a place called Torquay. It’s a beautiful part of England and it’s

25:00 on the coast. We found the Palace Hotel. I went to the library and found out what had happened, and it was the Palace Hotel, which was originally owned by an Archbishop. It was built in the 1800s or something and then it was bought by a wealthy man, who turned it into a hotel, and it was the Palace Hotel. It was a very beautiful place.

25:30 So we made our way there and to my amazement – it had been restored, and I explained all about Alan, and what had happened. I mean it was a big thing, the Palace Hotel being bombed. They had a lot of bombings in Torquay including a couple of years later, bombs were dropped on a church and there were children in

26:00 the Sunday school, and 23 children and two Sunday school teachers were killed. I mean they knew that the Germans had deliberately bombed the Palace with its Red Cross, so they knew it was convalescent but there was talk about it was an RAAF training area in the area, so the Germans may have believed that was put up just to fool them

26:30 but normally they avoided bombing Red Crosses. A couple of years later when the children were killed and the church was destroyed, adults were killed but among the dead 23 children, and two Sunday school teachers, they really hated the Germans. Years after the war – they thought they’d done it deliberately, they

27:00 found out the German bomber tried to drop his bombs, his engine was – he knew he was going to crash and he tried to drop his bombs in the water but didn’t make it, so they don’t think he did it deliberately. So I went back and they had all these records of the whole thing. They were wonderful! They gave us a room and we sat, and they made photocopies,

27:30 and among the pictures of the place as a rehabilitation convalescent place – they did publicity. The Department of Public Records used to do a lot of publicity shots showing airmen in good circumstances. I mean there weren’t that many pictures

28:00 and one of the pictures turned out to be Alan. I’ve got it. It was just amazing and they also could tell me where he was buried. The old part of the building was pretty intact but a newer part that had been added on in the 1920s when it became a hotel wasn’t that well built and that was where the casualties

28:30 were. They were brother and sister killed in that. I think there were about 17 killed and there happened to be by chance – I mean they were so thankful that it was a Sunday, and not a weekday because there would have been many more people, staff and airmen. A lot of them were away for the day. What was the other thing that was quite weird? The other thing

29:00 was that there was a Home Guard, you know, the Dad’s Army? They did voluntary work and looked after things. A lot of planes crashed and they would march in, and take their parlous off to the local constabulary. They did all that sort of thing and they were doing practice work in the area.

29:30 They just picked that Sunday to do their work and apparently a few of them were killed. They saw the planes go over and they were able to give a description of what happened. Tow planes absolutely strafed the building. They came down low and deliberately bombed it, dropped quite a lot of bombs, and then flew off. Some of them were killed but the fact that they were there and they were trained

30:00 meant that they saved a lot of lives. They were able to go in and with their training got the people out. I’ve got pictures of the place wrecked and restored. It was just fantastic.

You’d had that personal connection –

Absolutely! It was amazing.

What thoughts had you had up until then about what the impact of these – ?

I just thought how awful it was. He’d

30:30 gone through all that and then to be killed when he was supposed to be out of the war, and safe. It was so unfair. The unfairness of it was what upset me most. He was such a lovely person and I met somebody who had known him. 31:00 He was called ‘Mr Wimbledon’. He used to comment on Wimbledon tennis. He was a wonderful commentator and he had retired from Wimbledon, and was watching the Wimbledon tennis in England, and something came up about him. An anniversary was coming up or he was turning 80. He was so absolutely adored by

31:30 the British and Australians. He always did the commentary. His commentary was wonderful. He was a former tennis player. I can’t remember his name but I’ve got a letter from him. They were doing a sort of biography of him because he was about to retire and they mentioned that he had been at the Palace Hotel. He was very much involved in the Palace Hotel and by sheer chance was absent

32:00 on the day of the bombing, so he could have been killed if it had been a weekday. I thought, “The Palace Hotel? Where have I heard that?” So I wrote to him and told him that we’d got all this information, and asked him if by any chance he remembered Alan, and if he could give me some idea of their day-to-day activities. He wrote me a letter back

32:30 but I had most of the information that he had. My information was more up to date than his. Hal and I walked around this marvellous property, acres and acres, and it’s right on the coast, and there’s two little bays that go in and out. It was the most beautiful place and I thought if only I could find Peggy. Her mother would be dead by now but if I could find Peggy and tell her

33:00 that his last days were spent in the most beautiful place you could imagine. What I wanted to find out was whether he was well enough to go down to where this beautiful outlook was. We walked right down to where the coast was and these beautiful little bays. It’s just the most beautiful, magical place and it was a great comfort to know. He was obviously getting better because the picture shows him in uniform

33:30 having physiotherapy and it’s called ‘Lifting Weights’ – the caption underneath. It’s an official photograph and it just happened to be him in it with one other, and there were no other photographs of – I mean there were pictures of the ball room, and groups of them doing things but that’s the only one. It’s a close up of him and as soon as I saw it, he was just as I remembered him. It was an amazing chance.

34:00 You can see that he’s got something that his leg is in to lift his leg, so obviously – I mean I presume he was able to walk. He was in uniform but maybe for the photograph, but I hope he was able to walk around because it was the most gorgeous place. You couldn’t imagine a better place. At least he was out of the war and I believe he was killed instantly.

34:30 How did receiving the news about Alan that day change you?

I think I realised that life was so – I mean the whole being in the war and seeing all these young men, you realised. People didn’t make plans ahead really. I didn’t. I mean that’s why I didn’t think of marriage. You really lived from

35:00 day to day. You realised that life could end anytime but I didn’t think it would end like that for Alan. That was so unfair. He’d done his job, gone through all that danger and I thought it was so unfair for his mother. I think she just about had a breakdown. I just didn’t want to know any more about it. I’m sorry now that I

35:30 didn’t write to her. I wish now that I when I went back but it was years later that I went back. I didn’t want to even talk about it. It was too awful. My mother was very much affected because she had Mrs Wood there who couldn’t believe it. She was just saying, “No, no, no, no.” She told me later that she just

36:00 wouldn’t accept it. She said, “No it must be a mistake. Alan’s out of the war. How could he be killed when he’s in the hospital?” But what she didn’t realise was – you know. I think in the letter it was said that a – bombing raid was how they described it, a bombing raid was carried out and bombs were dropped on the – and

36:30 unfortunately your son was one of those killed. So you didn’t really absorb anything. One of the things they’re finding out is people who get news that’s very – it doesn’t go in. The doctor might go on talking and they’ve discovered they’ve got to be very careful about

37:00 telling people they’ve got say cancer or something, and what they can do, and they hurriedly go to the positives, you know like we can give you chemotherapy, none of that registers. All they hear is the word cancer.

How did getting that news change your attitude specifically to your job?

I got to dread looking at the cables

37:30 and I was also having problems at this terrible place we were living. They were so unaware. Life for them just carried on. It was such a contrast between being in this office building and dealing – it brought home to me how we sort of being immured to the real thing that was happening and here,

38:00 suddenly was – and you think all these other people going through the same thing. In a way it spoilt me for the job because I became every emotionally involved then and thinking, “I wonder what’s happening when these people – ?” I got to the stage where I didn’t want to send the telegram. The letters were all right because they were sort of longer but the telegram I dreaded sending off and 38:30 it got to the stage where I eventually got a transfer, and was transferred back to Sydney. I think it really affected me more than knew it was affecting me but also living in this terrible contrast. I mean the other girls were saying, “Aren’t you lucky living in that beautiful – ours is a real hole.” What they didn’t realise was that it was a beautiful

39:00 house but they were well treated and respected. We were treated like pariahs. It was awful. I’ll never forget. It turned me right off it, especially that incident in the room. It puzzled me. I couldn’t work it out. At first I thought, “I’m sure I didn’t have my back to them.” I thought

39:30 she was telling me I was being rude and inhospitable to these women. I knew words pretty well and I couldn’t work out why would she say it was suggestive.

40:00 “It’s very suggestive.” I thought I must have misheard her. She must have said – I was trying to work out a word that meant I was being rude to the women. I thought, “Did I have my back to them? Maybe that’s what she meant.” I puzzled all night about it and in the morning I thought, “The woman is mad,” but it worried me. I thought I was doing something that offended her

40:30 and I didn’t know what it was that I was doing that offended, and that made me worried about what I was doing that caused her to whisper, whisper, whisper. It was for years – you know how suddenly you’re doing something quite unconnected with that sort of thing and something makes you remember it. It’s like a penny drops.

41:00 That’s what I was doing when my mother died, and we found out my father had been married before. I’d be doing something quite mundane and I’d think, “Aaaah! That explains that and that explains that!” With my aunt and the number of times she’d been to communion and confession, and church. I can never work that one out,

41:30 why my mother was so in the power of this woman. I mean my father’s sister? No wonder my son said when he was going overseas – somebody said to him, “Are you going to track down the Gaysleys and the Manions?” He said, “I might track down the Manions but I don’t think I’ll track down the Gaysleys. I’ve seen enough of them.”

Tape 8

00:31 Mrs Barry, I wanted to ask you if you could explain what the reaction in Melbourne was to the Americans in the wake of the murders?

I think mainly it was relief to find out that it was – that they’d found somebody and the Americans were absolutely devastated. Melbourne was horrified.

01:00 I can’t say that nobody liked them. We really needed them but they were so flashy and had so much money. They were very insensitive because they hadn’t gone through the war, the years of war. They’d suddenly come into it and they came over with a sort of, “We’re

01:30 here. Everything will be right. The Yanks are here.” It was very galling. They had a lot of money. They had a lot of supplies. They had entertainment. Places were set up for them by the Americans. Americans came over and set up hamburger joints. It became Americanised suddenly

02:00 and there was a lot of resentment. The girls of course – their boyfriends were all away and here were these wealthy Yanks, and they were very polite, you know, “Ma'am. Yes Ma'am.” They were welcomed into people’s homes and the English people themselves, the older generation didn’t like them at all but the girls did.

02:30 There was a general feeling of resentment. They had come into the war late and they were making out that, “We won the war. We saved all you people.” They certainly saved us. There was no doubt about that but nobody wanted it that way, so there was a lot of resentment.

Was there a backlash in Melbourne

03:00 in particular because of the murders?

I know that with me and all the WAAAF who had to work at night – I mean you were afraid to get into a taxi, and you can’t imagine how dark it was. You couldn’t see where you were going. That’s why I would

03:30 never be able to find my way around Melbourne because there were no signs, there were no lights. You got out at a station and even in Sydney all the signs were gone. You didn’t know which station you were getting out and if you got out at the wrong station, if you didn’t count your stations, you’d be stuck. There’d be no buses and the trains ran very infrequently. So it was the same in Melbourne.

04:00 I think the feeling was relief, that it wasn’t an Australian and that it was an American. I think that was the attitude and the Americans went out of their way to say how sorry they were. They were devastated because they were anxious to have good relationships with people 04:30 and I think they made it pretty clear that they were absolutely devastated. I think he was hung in Melbourne actually because of that. Once they arrested him, it was made absolutely clear and of course the poor guy had Indian blood in him. That was like having aborigine. I mean the American Indians

05:00 are treated still like our Aborigines are treated. I think they’ve got more rights but very similar and they were very pleased to find that – he wasn’t full American Indian, but they let it be known that he should never have been accepted into the army, and he had mental problems. They

05:30 spent a lot of time apologising, apologising and anything they could do, and the people who had been murdered were – I think they were compensated. There wasn’t much in it because they didn’t want to give too much away but the feeling I remember was one of absolute utter relief that they’d caught this person because it was

06:00 random and it went on for quite a few weeks. I think it was just relief that he’d been found and I think they hung him in Melbourne. It might be on the records about it. It would have been 1941 I think. It was a terrible year, a dreadful year.

06:30 I got a transfer back to Bradfield Park where I was – it sounded great, ‘Secret and Confidential Secretary to the Officers’. It was an embarkation depot. They did their training and they actually left Australia, so it was if they went on

07:00 leave for example and didn’t come back, they were regarded as deserters because it was an embarkation depot: they were off to the war. It was also a training area. It was a huge area and I was secretary to the squadron leader who was in charge of the whole place, the – I forget what they called the next in line, Gorrie, a great big man. I did letters and

07:30 wrote letters, and I had this office to myself. I had to put seals on everything. Everything had to be sealed. It was secret and confidential. It sounded like a wonderful job that I’d got. The way I got the job, somebody came out from the inner office and the general room, the big room where I was at first, poked his head around the door, “Anybody here do shorthand?” Nobody replied and silly me put up my hand. That’s how I got the job.

08:00 So I became the confidential and private secretary in charge of all the secret and confidential files, and also worked for the adjutant. The adjutant’s job – there were all these officers. They were all my little lot and the adjutant was the one, being an embarkation depot it meant that anybody who didn’t come back from leave was a deserter.

08:30 It wasn’t just AWL [absent without leave], he could be court martialled because he knew he was going to war and he was regarded as a deserter, and they’d have a court martial. I mean I was so young and this poor guy who was about the same age as me, and here’s this woman, girl really,

09:00 and the adjutant, and he didn’t come back. I think he was two days late coming back. He was then charged with desertion and the adjutant had to interview him, and a court martial would take place, like a court case. I would go to the court martial and take notes, and help the adjutant. I had varying jobs but that was a big one. Anybody who didn’t come back

09:30 from leave, well they were then charged with desertion. You had to arrange a court martial and I had to get all the evidence, and I’d go with him, and interview the person. They would be arrested and this poor guy, and he was so shy. He was a real country lad and his reason for coming back late was that they – how did he word it? I’m taking all this down and he was so

10:00 uncomfortable. At one stage I said to him, “Would you like me to go?” He didn’t like to say, “Yes I would.” The adjutant said, “Oh this girl’s heard it all before. You can’t tell her anything – ” which wasn’t exactly true but he was so embarrassed and so shy. He was blushing and the reason he’d come back late, he and his girl:

10:30 “They let their emotions overcome them,” was the way we worded it, very flowery stuff you know? Because they were both Catholic and he didn’t want to leave her because he was going away, in case she became pregnant he wanted to marry her to make sure everything was all right but he forgot about the banns, the Catholic Church, the banns they put up. You have to give

11:00 notice of marriage. I don’t know whether it is still done but I think in the Protestant Churches too it’s the same or used to be. You have to have a certain time, it’s about a week or something, to give notice and the minister then announces the banns. I’ve forgotten it all but I remember that was the reason he didn’t come back. He’d forgotten about

11:30 the banns. They couldn’t get married and they arranged somehow that the banns be shortened, and they were doing that because of the war. I think they were cut out altogether eventually. He stayed till the very last moment that he could so that they could get married and then came back, so my adjutant was for him. He was

12:00 defending him and we were going over the notes, and I said, “At least he came back. You’ve got to give him that.” I was ‘for’ him but he was so embarrassed talking about this and I mean he was like a child. I’ve often wondered what happened to him. Anyway, he got out of it because he came back. He could have stayed. I kept saying, “He could have stayed, you know.” I mean we wouldn’t have known. He came

12:30 back. That was a big thing that he came back. So I don’t know what happened to him. We had a couple of people who didn’t want to come back, didn’t want to go overseas and they were court martialed, and kicked out but it was very interesting. It was quite an interesting job. It was very boring in the main room and the only reason I got the job was because somebody said, “Anybody out here

13:00 do shorthand?” Silly me put up my hand but it was a good job!

What was the attitude towards people who didn’t come back from leave?

Oh very bad because it reflected on those who had come back. None of them wanted to go overseas. They all had final leave you see and that was the time when they – it was a very emotional time. They

13:30 saw their girlfriends and friends, and things happened. Some of them didn’t care. They just came back but I mean the good ones were very upset. It was very emotional. I mean the whole war was very emotional and I was worried about – I’d remembered all the training – pilots being trained

14:00 who had been killed in training, and they had this big training area at Bradfield Park. There was a little bit in the paper the other day: it’s no longer called Bradfield Park.

Whereabouts was it?

Lindfield. I think there is a big technological place down there and I think there is a film school or something down there. I must go back and have a look at it one time.

What was the set out of the buildings

14:30 at that time?

It was like a huge camp and we had fibro – just run up, very cold. It was freezing in winter and hot in summer. We had no heating and I remember being so cold, and again another piece of hypocrisy: by this time I didn’t acknowledge that I was Catholic or I didn’t want to

15:00 be billeted to anything that smacked of religion, and I didn’t need to there. The Catholic padre popped his head around the desk and said, “Anybody here want to come to sermon on Sunday?” I was the only one there and I said, “No. I’m working on Sunday.” I made up something and my fingers were very cold.

15:30 The old typewriters were the metal typewriters and it was so cold. My fingers would be blue and I’d be trying to get them warm, and a Salvation Army padre popped his head around the door, and said, “Oooh! You look very cold!” I said, “I am! I’m frozen!” He said, “You poor old thing! We’ll have to fix that.” He disappeared, came back the next

16:00 day with mittens, beautifully knitted mittens and a little radiator. Now that to me – I’ve been keen on the Salvation Army ever since and when I die I’m going to leave them whatever I can. Now that is true Christianity to me, didn’t try to talk me into reading the Bible or anything. He just popped his head around the door and said, “Oooh you look very cold.”

16:30 My hands were blue you know, I couldn’t get them to work. He said, “We’ll see if we can fix that!” I thought he’d just gone away and the next day two things, a little heater, a little bar heater, where he got it I don’t know but it made such a difference, and the mittens. It was wonderful!

What was the accommodation like where you were staying?

Terrible! In the camp and it was a building.

17:00 The showers were cold and freezing. The ablutions they called them and we slept on – they weren’t beds, they were straw palliasses they called them, filled with straw, and they were on a sort of criss- cross thing that raised them off the concrete floor.

17:30 They were so uncomfortable and it was freezing. It is very cold there, very flat and open, and the westerly winds used to just come. I was colder there than I ever was in Melbourne and Melbourne was frosty, frost on the trees but I’ve never been as cold as I was at Bradfield Park. I tried to get a hot water bag, couldn’t get one

18:00 for love nor money. A chemist tried to get me a rubber one. Nobody would part with their precious – they were like gold you know? On the trains they used to have these heated – like flat metal and you’d put your feet on them, and they were filled with hot water. There was no rubber. Rubber was used in the war.

18:30 It’s hard to imagine but nothing was produced except milk, food, the absolute basics. Hospitals had – I mean they must have produced surgical things but even they were very scarce. Everything went to the war effort.

Were you engaged at this time? I had re-met

19:00 Fred. I think I was sick of the war you know and I was so cold at Bradfield Park. I was sick of it all. I’d had enough and another friend of mine, not a close friend but a friend of a friend, and I had met him, and he was killed. She was devastated and we thought,

19:30 “It will never end.” Then it gradually – once the Americans came that change the whole – and then the war in Europe ended with the D-Day. I think the war in Europe ended in August 1945 and Japan surrendered when the bombs were dropped, and that was about –

20:00 I think August was the European war and then I think it was the end of 1945 that the Japanese surrendered.

What year were you in Bradfield Park?

It would be 1942 and 1943.

And were you engaged at this point?

I was being told

20:30 I was engaged but I still was reluctant. I think by that time I’d had enough of the war. I think Alan’s death and the murders, and the hypocrisy, the contrast between what I was doing at work, and going back to this – like a cocoon you know? These people had no idea what was going on and they were so

21:00 greedy, and stupid, and snobbish, looked down on us, and these girls were flitting around having parties. We’d see their names in the papers, in the social pages. It was an absolutely different time from now. There was definitely a pecking order. Some people did very well out of the war. I mean there was a black market and

21:30 if you had money you could buy anything but it really sickened me to think that this was a religious organization, and it was ripping off to benefit the girls, and benefit the archbishop, and being thrown out of the place when we were sick.

When you were in Melbourne, could I just go back to that

22:00 and ask you to describe where you actually worked, the inside of it, what the equipment was, and the actual layout of the office? Do you have a memory of that?

Where we lived?

No, where you worked.

Well, it was a school and I had a desk. I forget what part we were in. There were rooms off. I think it was the administration part of the school and there were other people in different

22:30 rooms, like classrooms had been divided up. They put partitions up. I think it was a big classroom and then the RAAF put partitions up so that my boss was in an office just off the there. We had various people in charge of – there was me and

23:00 my boss in one part. It was one big room that they had partitioned off and the missing presumed dead was a bigger area because they had lots of problems. They had so much information to try and find. Mine was fairly straightforward really. Squadron Leader Nisham was in charge of the whole place

23:30 and he was my immediate boss, and the dead were the ones that you had to be so careful about but the missing had – I think there was a sergeant or a warrant officer, and he had about four or five, or six people. It was a much bigger section and they all were partitioned off from me. We could go in and out. We couldn’t

24:00 really meet in the same room. It was like boxed in. They put up temporary partitions so that we had space and we couldn’t hear each other’s telephone conversations. The biggest thing was the hotline to records, which wasn’t in the building. It was way down away from us and we had the cables, so we’d be constantly

24:30 on the phone. Then we’d be typing the letters, collating the records and we had to keep very careful records, and make sure that our records didn’t get mixed up. Then I think the prisoners of war were next door because they were in another room. The only people I saw every day were the

25:00 officers who were working in charge of us and the missing presumed dead personnel. The others were in other parts and we rarely saw each other. We’d go to the canteen sometimes and we all smoked in those days you know?

What hours were you working?

Any time

25:30 at all. We’d have to come in anyway. We had to come in every day. At what time?

I think it was half past eight that we’d usually arrive. Sometimes we got there earlier. We didn’t spend much time at the – well, I won’t call it the home, the school, at the boarding school.

26:00 Sometimes we’d just have a break and go across to the park. The park was very close and we’d often go to the park. We couldn’t go far away because we had to tell them where we’d be and if we were needed they’d send somebody. We couldn’t go just wandering around. We had to say that we were going to the park and we’d be near the little bridge blah, blah. Somebody would come over and say, “You’ve got to

26:30 come back” because the cables arrived. Some days you’d be sitting there and nothing much would happen, for me. Other people would be busy. I don’t think we had injured. I think that was in some other place because there would be so many of them and they’d be having to get hospital information. We just had the dead, the missing presumed dead, which was the biggest

27:00 area, the missing – what was the other category? Prisoners of war. They would be one, two, three, four categories. Then the others, I don’t know where they were. The injured were somewhere else but we didn’t know where other people were and they didn’t know where we were. It was all very hush, hush and people would say,

27:30 “Where do you work?” I’d just say, “I’m just a clerk.” That’s what we were told to say, “I’m just a clerk. I work with officers and do letters.” They thought I was a bit of a ring-in really, in an office. Why wasn’t I at the front, you know!

Did you tell your family what you were doing?

I had

28:00 to tell my mother because she wanted to know what it was all about but I didn’t give her all the details. I just said that that was one of the jobs that I had to do. I didn’t tell her anything about it. She was too upset you know? She didn’t know why she was not being told and I didn’t

28:30 want to tell her that we knew that Alan had died because she would have said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” It was very hard to get through to her that we weren’t allowed to. I said, “Well, when the news came about Alan, my boss thought it was better to have someone with her and he trusted you.”

You mentioned that there were servicemen’s clubs in Melbourne and

29:00 various places to go. Did you go out much socially?

Not in Melbourne because it was so dark and rainy. Most of our social life was spent getting food. We’d go out as a group of girls and we got into the habit of that because we didn’t want to be wandering around on our own, and we didn’t want to go back to the place, so what we usually did was go to a café, and

29:30 spend all our money on food. We’d have a drink and occasionally we’d go to films but we usually went out as a group of girls. On some Saturday nights – we worked very hard. We had long hours and we had to be available. I think there was even a phone there and if we were

30:00 needed – it went to the office, and they would say, “Would you tell Gaysley and Cox, and so and so, that we need to see them.” They wouldn’t say at the school or at the office, “We need to see them,” and that was all. Sometimes they’d pass the message, sometimes they wouldn’t and we’d get into trouble. We’d say, “We didn’t get the message.”

30:30 They’d think we were lying and we didn’t want to go in. It caused a lot of trouble. We hated being there. I tried every which way. Squadron Leader Nisham was a good Catholic and he picked out the girls who went there.

How many girls were there?

From my group there were about four of us. The rest came from other areas.

Moving back up to Bradfield Park and the work that you did

31:00 there, how much knowledge did you have of the process of court martial? Were you privy to that?

Oh Yes! I used to go to the court martials because these were minor things. There was one occasion when a cook threw a knife at somebody who criticised his food but there wasn’t anything very big that happened. He was a

31:30 solicitor, a former solicitor the adjutant and he would be the defender. He would defend whoever it was. That was his job, so it was quite interesting. I had to learn all the jargon. I mean I was the only one available and again you worked whatever time was needed. You didn’t have nice office hours.

What was the story with the cook?

I think the cook 32:00 produced a knife because one of the airmen or somebody criticised the food. He said he wouldn’t give it to his dog or something and the cook was fed up with toiling away, and getting no response from his cooking, so I think it touched a nerve, and he got one of his carving knives, and threw it. I think it hit him in the shoulder. He was very lucky

32:30 but he was up on court martial. There were two charged with desertion. I remember the boy in particular. That was a very serious one because he was – it wasn’t just a couple of days over. I can’t remember but it was enough to have him worry about being kicked out the service. I mean if that happened to you, you’d never get a job anywhere and what about his wife?

33:00 But I think it was accepted that he did come back and it was because of the banns. He hadn’t thought of the banns.

Were there other examples that you can remember?

I’m just trying to think. There was a fight between the two – it wasn’t very serious. None of them were terribly serious when I was there. There was somebody who deliberately

33:30 stayed away and they sent the military police after him. He was arrested and disappeared from our jurisdiction but he wanted out. He’d had enough. There were a lot of them who had domestic problems and didn’t want to go, and leave the situation. It was very hard on the wives. Some of them would come back from one

34:00 lot of service and find that their wives had had affairs, and there were children there who couldn’t possibly be theirs. That was one. He came back from being in – I think he was in the army and he came back from the army, decided to join the RAAF, and when he came back from the army, he thought he’d get a job

34:30 closer to home if he joined the RAAF, and you could do that. It took a while but he had a good service record and he said he wanted to be a pilot but he didn’t really want to go back into action. They found that he’d lied about that and when he came back he found that there was a child there that couldn’t possibly be his. She said it was early or he’d forgotten

35:00 but he hit her and knocked her about. I think the child aborted or miscarried and so that was a serious one because he was charged with assault, and desertion, because he didn’t come back. I can’t remember what happened to him. We didn’t have a court martial. If there was an assault it went to

35:30 the police. If it was something to do with the air force it was court martial and the RAAF – a proper judge. It was very fair. In many ways it was fairer than the ordinary courts because they listened to both sides and they

36:00 were really leaning towards the serviceman. It wasn’t that they were wanting him to get off but it was very fair. It wasn’t like some of the cases where they cross-examine and cross-examine them, and really force you to say things out of context. I’ve been a witness in a case and it’s terrifying.

36:30 There was a boy in my class at Northcote and he was very badly injured in a bicycle accident. He was double banking another kid on his new bike and he actually, Billy actually went into the car, cut the corner, and the driver of the car was taking his wife to hospital to have a baby. There was evidence – the cross-examination implied that he was speeding

37:00 and he wasn’t, and it was Bill who hit him rather than he hit Billy, and the boy on the back fortunately for him, went off, and got a very badly injured leg but Billy went head into the car. He was very badly injured and in a coma for weeks, and came into my class. They didn’t know what to do with him because he was very – what we called in the jargon, had a very

37:30 low tolerance level, which meant that if the blind was facing that way and a little bit of light was coming in, Billy would go berserk, and he was a very big boy, and I was told that they didn’t know what to do with him because he didn’t fit into any category really, and because he was so big, he was 14 but he was an absolute perfect beautifully –

38:00 Mrs Barry can I just interrupt and draw you back to the court martial? What was the punishment for desertion?

Jail. I think in the olden days it was execution, but it wasn’t execution, kicked out of the army, lose rank and pay. You know it was a disgrace. I think

38:30 there was a fine. Well, the fine was that you’d lose all of your pay that was owing to you. I mean people who went overseas a certain amount was put aside each day for each day that you served overseas. It was like a superannuation kind of thing. You’d lose that and you’d lose your ranking. If you were a corporal you wouldn’t

39:00 be paid as a corporal from the day you did whatever it was you were court martialled for. Your pay would reduce from that time on and then you’d be disgraced. You’d be discharged with – depending on the seriousness of it you would serve time in a military prison, depending on the 39:30 circumstances. It was a very serious problem. Nobody wanted to be charged with desertion, except some people who chose to get out and didn’t care.

As the war was dragging on was this problem of desertion, was that getting more prevalent?

I’m not sure about that. I can only say what happened in our – I think somebody told me that it was

40:00 an increasing problem because people were sick of it and especially when the war in Europe ended, and we were still going on with the war in Japan, which ended suddenly with the dropping of the bomb. The Japanese knew they’d had it.

40:30 People when the bombs dropped, they said it would have ended anyway but it may have gone on for a few more years and many more people would have been killed. I don’t know about that one. It was terrible that civilians – I mean why should they have been the ones to be sacrificed? Yeah war is not good, not good.

Tape 9

00:31 Mrs Barry can I just ask you about what we were talking about? Can you explain to me what would happen once you despatched the telegram from HQ?

The next thing they had to do was write the letter, so the telegram would go and I would immediately write the letter because that would take longer to get there, and it had to be sent as soon as it was possible to

01:00 get to the person, because they’d be reeling in shock, and they wouldn’t be taking anything in. There wasn’t much information in the telegram but a lot of information in the – about how to get in touch with – there were a whole lot of things that had to be done when somebody dies. Obviously they couldn’t identify the person but there is a sort of rigmarole that has to be carried out and you have to say when the person was

01:30 born, and give all the details about their date of birth, and a whole lot of stuff, and what the person wanted to be done if it was possible, to bury the body, did they want it buried, a tremendous amount of information. They were given, not so much in the letter but they were given a telephone number

02:00 to ring and somebody would probably go out to the house, and talk to them. It wasn’t just all done – I mean it was very well done. Once the person had received the letter telling them the things they needed to deal with – I mean there was a whole lot of red tape stuff because they had to make sure that it was the person who had died and don’t forget it’s in a different country, and

02:30 what they wanted done about the burial –

Who would be the person that would go to the house?

It could be an RAAF officer, depending on the circumstances always. The Americans always sent an officer to the house and sometimes the RAAF would send – if it was one that people

03:00 got publicised, they might – I mean say if somebody had done something very brave or been awarded by his officer – there was always somebody in charge of the person, and if they had done something very brave – .there was an amazing story about an Australian pilot whose plane was hit. He was hit in the face, in the eye, they

03:30 gave him morphine and he knew that he couldn’t get the plane back, and he dropped two of his buddies off on land. He knew he’d never make it back, so he headed out to sea and told them they all had to try and jump to save themselves. Two of them elected to stay with him because he couldn’t

04:00 see and he just flew the plane, and he was awarded the equivalent of the air force VC [Victoria Cross] but somebody would then have told that story. His buddies would have. Sometimes people did amazing things and there was nobody left alive to tell about them, so the stories would come back. They all did briefings after any –

04:30 they’d go back, and they’d tell everything that happened. That would all be recorded and if somebody died or died after they came back, maybe they were very badly injured and died as a result of those injuries, somebody would know about it. The relatives always wanted to know the full details as much as possible. Sometimes it

05:00 was too harrowing, people who were there. I mean not people like me because I wasn’t there at the time but the people who were there and knew what happened – I mean somebody might be burnt, and suffered an agonising death, well they certainly wouldn’t give all that detail. It’s not necessary. They were dead. Sometimes they were very badly

05:30 burned and spent years in hospital having facial reconstruction. Gorton, who was once Prime Minister, he was very badly burnt and disfigured. He had one of those – this amazing man who was a surgeon and he instituted various ways of replacing skin. He was a

06:00 pioneer, amazing work that he did.

What did the image of the telegram boy come to represent?

That was dreadful. Everybody dreaded to see – and he had an official cap. Sometimes people complained that the post office was very insensitive. The post master would get the telegram first of all. It was all

06:30 done by Morse code then, you know, “de, de, det, de, de, det.” Certainly the telegrams saying people had died would go to the post master and sometimes they mightn’t have anybody there. Sometimes in country towns the post master would know everybody in the town and he would bring the telegram himself. It depended

07:00 entirely on the place, but in the city they couldn’t just leave the post office.

What did the telegram boy look like?

Like a kid on a bicycle and people complained about that. They said they should have senior people and there were stories about the telegrams not being delivered, and the telegram boy leaving the telegram. He’s not

07:30 supposed to leave it if there was nobody to receive it. It was absolutely essential that somebody there received it. I don’t know whether they signed for it. I don’t think they had to sign for it but he had to ensure that somebody took it and I don’t think he was supposed to leave it if there wasn’t a person it was addressed to. There was a lot of stuff went on with the insensitive –

08:00 I mean kids who weren’t really – see the men were away. It’s very hard to imagine how difficult it was because only old men, who couldn’t go to the war, were left behind and people came back from retirement. Old post masters came back and did the job, and there were only kids available.

08:30 So it was very difficult and the sight of the boy on the bike was enough to – people would know that something awful had happened, and neighbours would see the telegram boy coming, and they would prepare to – and be very glad it wasn’t their place

09:00 he was coming to. It was terrible, terrible way to receive the news but what else could they do? Everything came by telegram, urgent things. When I had my daughter, I was told it was going to be a boy and I already had a boy, I was sent telegrams of congratulations. People sent telegrams for weddings. Somebody used to read out the telegrams. They made up a lot of them you know!

09:30 Speaking of weddings, at what point during the war were you married?

1943 and it was a very strange wedding because there was no petrol, only army/navy and occasionally if you had the right job but you could only use it in your job,

10:00 so what they had, wedding cars had what they called gas – they were like great big gas things, and the cars were made to move by some sort of coal gas that was burnt off. It was dread. They used to wreck the cars. We were married at a church in Lindfield. My husband’s mother –

10:30 I won’t go into that. It was a very unfriendly wedding, the first one. The second one was so different. We had just got around the corner, she refused to speak to my mother and general nastiness all round, and we got around the corner, and the car broke down right outside a tennis court.

11:00 It was a Saturday and people were playing tennis, and there was no way they could fix it up, so they had to send another car. So we watched the tennis and waited, and waited, and we were catching a train to go to Mount Victoria, and we went to caves, the Jenolan Caves. It was all very – it wasn’t a very

11:30 good time but the gas producers I think they called them. You’d see these cars with these great big – don’t ask me how they worked. I think coal was burnt. You couldn’t get petrol and wedding cars in particular used to have these great big – except rich people who could buy petrol on the black market but as soon as you saw an

12:00 ordinary car people became very suspicious because it was a very democratic process. Unless you had money, you could get coupons. It was like getting drugs, paid money and they’d get extra on their rations. I once had a terrible situation of losing my ration book and I was married to a geologist, and we were heading for the country. I

12:30 was going with him and I couldn’t find my ration book. You couldn’t go anywhere without your ration book because you wouldn’t get any food. If you went to a hotel you had to hand your ration book in so that they could use your book to supply. I had to go to the police and they were very suspicious of anybody who said they’d lost their ration book because you’d get another one you see? They didn’t know how many you had used up until they worked out a way of – I forget how they worked that out.

13:00 I thought I was going to be arrested and we were held up in Liverpool Police Station I remember, Liverpool Street Police Station. There was a nasty, great big sergeant. He was quite convinced I was lying and I don’t know what happened to it, and you had to wait. We had to put off the trip. They had to go

13:30 without me in the end because I had to wait a day and a half to get the ration book. Everything was in triplicate. It is like me here with the key. I can’t go anywhere without the key. I mean that drives me mad but you couldn’t go anywhere without your ration book. You couldn’t visit anybody because you wouldn’t expect them to supply their limited – so if you went to visit

14:00 people you took your ration book with you and you helped with the – I mean some people didn’t need as much. If you had a family, everybody had a ration book but you needed more rations and some bachelors lived at home, and if there were no small children, everybody sort of divided them up. If you were

14:30 getting married the best present you could get was some extra coupons.

To what extent did normal life including weddings carry on during the war?

They did but a lot of people married in registry offices. You didn’t have big weddings unless you had a lot of money but it was fair in a way. It was pretty democratic because

15:00 everybody got the same rations and anybody that appeared in a full bridal outfit with bridesmaids would be immediately suspicious. You’d think, “Mmm how did they get them?” There weren’t big weddings. Nobody had very big weddings and then rationing was gradually reduced on clothing but we had to wait until the men came back, and the factories got back into full

15:30 production. I mean there was no steel. It took a long time before things gradually got back to normal and it took years. There was a housing shortage. Men came back, married their girlfriends, fiancées, whatever and wanted a house, and there were no houses, and there were no builders, and there were no factories to produce the bricks, and the blah, blah, blah.

16:00 People lived in garages and lived in their parents’ rooms. It was a mad time, mad. I remember there was a lovely Japanese couple living next to us. We rented a place. Very few people owned their place and we lived at Mosman, and next door but one

16:30 was a Japanese family, and they’d been living there for years, and years, and years. They were lovely. They didn’t have much to do with people but they were very reserved, but lovely people and I used to talk to the two daughters, and when the war broke they disappeared. They were interned because they were enemy. It was horrible, horrible. I tried to find out what had happened

17:00 to them and nobody knew, and there was all that – anybody who looked Asian, they were mistaken for Japanese. Some were born in Australia. I think the girls were born in Australia. The parents were born in Japan, so they just disappeared.

We touched on racism a little bit. What evidence did you see of the presence of African American soldiers

17:30 in Australia?

Very few. We hardly saw any and the Americans themselves were prejudiced against their – Australians just took them – I don’t think they had any prejudice against them but the Americans themselves were very prejudiced against the African Americans. Fights would start, big fights with the non-African Americans. It happened

18:00 quite a few times in Melbourne and the American military police, they were everywhere, and we’d often see them marching a black man and a white man who had had a big fight, especially if the black man approached a white woman there was tremendous racism, mainly from the Americans.

18:30 I don’t think the Australians – they didn’t really know them very well. They were in American uniform and they just took them as Americans but the most racism occurred between the Americans, and especially if they maybe danced with a white woman. You know how in a dance, they used to have dances where you could change partners and especially if a black man cut in

19:00 on a white American, and – not so much the Australians because the Australians didn’t regard them as anything but Americans. Mainly with the Americans themselves there was tremendous prejudice. I think at one stage they wouldn’t have Americans in the army. I remember it took quite a while and there were very few American officers, African

19:30 American officers. We think there is racism here but it is nothing like it was then.

Can you recall personally how you experienced hearing about the end of the war in the Pacific? Do you recall where you were?

I think we were mainly – it was away and it was overseas in

20:00 Europe, and we were very relieved when it happened but we were so concerned about our boys, and the Japanese still going on, and we had all these men. I was just reading the other day, of 4000 men in one Japanese prison camp, six survived and they did those terrible marches. We were more concerned about

20:30 our Australians who were captured by the Japanese and we were very glad it was all ending but it was so far away and our men were mostly – some of them were still flying but it was mainly the Americans and British who were involved in the D-Day landings. Ours were fighting the war in the Pacific.

Can you recall how you actually heard the news?

I think I heard the news that

21:00 a bomb had been dropped and all we heard was the Japanese had surrendered. It was so sudden. We knew that they were being driven back and they were being beaten. Once the Americans came into the war and the Battle of the Coral Sea, where they really saved Australia from being invaded. People forget that.

21:30 We would be Japanese if it wasn’t for the Americans and so that altered the situation, and gradually they were losing but they were still fighting. I mean some of them were still fighting years after the war ended.

What was the atmosphere like in your house with you and your husband when the war ended?

Great relief. It was tremendous

22:00 but it was mainly on my part because my husband hadn’t really taken part in the war. His brother was in the RAAF. I was just so sad about all the men who had died. All I could think of was, “What was it all for? Where did it get us?” I mean Hitler had to be stopped but when the Japanese

22:30 came in and they were so cruel, and awful, and we lost so many men in Changi. The Germans were very cruel to the Jews, but mainly they followed the rules of war. I mean they didn’t shoot people down, some did but some Australians did horrible things, and some

23:00 British did horrible things. It wasn’t like the Vietnam War. There were certain rules you followed and that’s what made Alan’s death so awful because normally they did follow – a Red Cross on a building was normally avoided by both sides. That’s what made Alan’s death so dreadful because they were seen to actually strafe

23:30 the building. They were seen by these volunteer, the Dad’s Army group who were doing the exercising nearby and they couldn’t believe it when they saw them deliberately, low over the building, and drop bombs, and then come back, and drop more, two planes, although it had this big Red Cross on the top. Usually

24:00 the Germans followed the rules. I mean the Nazis were a different group altogether. A lot of the German officers were not Nazis. It’s hard for us to separate the two but the majority would follow the rules and if somebody put their hands up –

24:30 the rules, if you can have rules in war but they did really. The rule was that most people followed, you gave your name, your number, your rank and that was it. You weren’t supposed to give any more information and if you said you were giving up, then you were made a prisoner of war, and you were supposed to be treated

25:00 by the same rules that everybody was treated by. There was always somebody who does something but broadly speaking I’d say the majority of Germans were not as – the Japanese had a different culture altogether. They regarded anybody who gave up and became a prisoner of war, as beneath contempt. You were supposed to die for your country.

25:30 Given that you were privy to some very confidential inner workings of war administration, what impact did that have on you as a person in terms of your thoughts about war and conflict?

I thought it was all so – people sitting in offices and I was one of them, signing papers, making decisions for young men who were out there, politicians,

26:00 and people sitting in offices, they’d go home to their normal homes, and it was all so wrong. I still feel that. I think, “Why doesn’t Howard go to Iraq and become a soldier for a day? Why doesn’t George Bush?” I mean that turkey? When he went to Iraq and took the – it was supposed to be a proper turkey. It wasn’t.

26:30 I mean that sickens me. It makes me sick. I think, “What was it all for?” I mean Hitler – look at all the people who died. Russians died. More Russians died in the Second World War than any other country. Our men died. It’s all so wrong and it’s young men, and

27:00 women these days, and families. Look at all these navy men saying goodbye to their wives and children. What’s it all about, Alfie? What’s it all for? The war is over after a while and nothing changes. At least we felt that we had got rid of a tyrant. We had to get rid of Hitler. It was a – if you can call a war a 27:30 just war, but these civil wars? You can’t justify going to war. What makes me sick is that you build up these dictators, all these – Argentina, not Argentina. You know the people who disappeared?

28:00 Chile?

Chile. I mean the Americans put him up there, supported him and they did the same with Bin Laden. Then all of a sudden things change and they’re enemies. It’s all political but people die and all the civilians who die. I think it affected me when Alan died,

28:30 because it was so unfair and what did Alan’s life mean? I think I’d had it and I think going back to that place at Toorak, after all the misery, and the people who would line up outside, ordinary people. Those people where

29:00 we lived had no idea. As far as they were concerned there was no war at all. They weren’t losing money. A lot of people lost money because there was no interstate travel. They had all these WAAAF and the government paid them probably more. I don’t know. I might be wrong there but they paid them well.

29:30 They certainly didn’t justify – there were about 24 in each dormitory and I forget how many there were altogether. There were 24 in my dormitory, so they had 24 multiplied by however many were there, ration books and we certainly didn’t get it. So where did it go?

30:00 I don’t know whether other people had the same experience but that was my experience and that was part of my war experience. It was sickening and I will try to work out why putting my hands in my pocket was suggestive. Can you work that one out? I was very naïve. I had no idea what I had done!

30:30 Can I ask you then as a woman how your participation in the WAAAF changed you?

I think it made me realise how hypocritical – I was already aware of hypocrisy. I didn’t know what it meant but it still bugs me when I hear these politicians going on and I still feel like saying, “You hypocrite!”

31:00 I guess what I’m asking is what impact did it have on you to be a woman working during the war?

Well, I think I felt very privileged to have that experience. It was marvellous experience. The only thing that was ridiculous was all the drilling we had to do but maybe it would have been necessary if I’d been sent somewhere else, but I had

31:30 no idea. My qualifications were as a clerk general. That was the category. I can’t imagine all that drilling would have – can’t imagine. Anyway, probably all the exercise I did saved me from having osteoporosis. I got plenty of exercise.

32:00 I don’t know.

What did the opportunity to work mean?

I was already working, so that wasn’t a problem. I had a wonderful job. I was the only female and these hunks that were around me. Unfortunately they were older and some of them were engaged already but it was a wonderful place, and they were lovely guys. One of them became a prisoner of war and

32:30 everybody tried to give money to the war effort, and mine was – you had to think of something gimmicky because you were so sick of giving money to every single thing, and mine was – I instituted a swear bucket. I was the only female and people didn’t swear in those days. They were real gentlemen. I mean

33:00 they’d tease you but it was all good fun. It was very good flirting stuff, very good for me and I wore fairly high heels, and you could hear me on the – I was the only female there, and the only one with high heels, so they’d start swearing. “Here comes the bloody typist!” “Clink!” In would go the – I think it was a shilling they had to put in for “bloody”

33:30 and “bugger” was two shillings. They didn’t use any other – they were taboo words. They only used those but – “Here comes the bloody, bloody – !” “Clink. Clink. Clink.” I’d have lots of money by the end, just to annoy me, but it was all good fun. The only trouble was the curator who was my immediate boss. I was supposed to be secretary to the curator. He disapproved.

34:00 The previous girl, her name was Monica Stapleton and everybody had a nickname, any girl that worked there. She was Suzy Ginglebusher and mine was Veronica Gaysley, and I was Bonnie Beatlebug, so you lived with that name. I don’t know why. It was rather childish but anyway, he disapproved very much of what

34:30 the other girl did. She went down, had lunch, morning tea, so he was determined that this new girl, me, wasn’t going to be – he tried every which way to stop me from going down. The thing was they had morning tea and chemist would come down, and the tea was in beakers. You know those big chemical beakers? It was the thing to do to have your cup of tea with the beakers,

35:00 so I used to go down and have my tea with the boys, and he tried every way. “I would really prefer Miss Gaysley blah, blah, blah.” He was very English and he would never look you in the eye. He was embarrassed and he’d put his head down like this, and I’d think, “I’d better not go. He’s the boss.”

35:30 What do you think the most important lesson is that our society could have gained from World War II?

I would have thought they would have learned not to have any more wars but look at all the wars that have occurred. I think that the trouble is that the next generation comes along and they no idea,

36:00 they can’t possibly imagine what it was like. I mean it’s impossible. It’s a different world altogether. I think people are realising that people are not happy. They’ve got food, medicine, everything is available to them but they’re not any happier than other generations.

36:30 There are wars going on. People are dying. A lot of people have a lot of money and a lot of people have no money. I think we’ve got so many possessions. I mean look at all this stuff and as you were saying, the next one comes along, and that all becomes obsolete, and you’ve got to get the next one. Why?

37:00 Why have we got to get all this stuff? We get more and more, and more complications and if something goes wrong, and it doesn’t take much to go wrong, as you have found, and when you take it along it works, and it’s so sensitive, and so prissy, prissy, prissy that even the temperature can affect it. You go through all that

37:30 business. Why are we hell bent on making a better mousetrap? Where does it get us? What’s it all for? People are building bigger and bigger bombs, and I read in the paper yesterday that they’ve got these landing barges, and somebody pointed out to them that they’re too heavy!

38:00 They’ve ordered them and I think they’re on their way but they forgot to ask the navy how they will go. They’ll be too heavy for the ship, which are getting smaller so that they are more manoeuvrable, so that will all be scrapped probably. It’s mad. What’s it all for? Why can’t we all sit down and accept each other? Religion is the thing that gets me.

38:30 Why can’t we all let people believe what they want to believe? If they want to believe that the sky is falling, you know? If they are not doing any harm to anybody but why kill somebody because they don’t believe in the thing you believe in? It’s crazy. I don’t know. I feel very concerned about children growing up in this mad world. I mean look at all the –

39:00 my grandchildren in England, the kids have to have a label. They have to have their bellies showing. Why? It’s like lemmings you know? “Because so and so’s got it.” I mean why? It’s mad. My little granddaughter has to have that particular label. She’s only seven

39:30 and even little babies are having jeans with the right name on them. Mad! Why are we doing it and why can’t we all live with each other? I think billionaires who have all this money and spend a million dollars on a bet! Did you see where that man put a million

40:00 dollar bet on a horse? I mean that’s obscene! To me obscenity is not the naked body. I think naked bodies are beautiful but obscenity is somebody putting a million dollar bet on a horse when people are starving. I mean that’s obscenity. I’d got to war about that!

INTERVIEW ENDS