Interview Transcript As

Australians at War Film Archive John McPherson (Mac or Macca) - Transcript of interview Date of interview: 8th July 2004 http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/2124 Tape 1 00:30 John, let’s start out today just by getting a quick summary of your life. I was born in Wyong in 1948. I grew up in a very loving household with two brothers and a sister and a mum and dad. Dad was the secretary-manager of the agricultural association. I went to Wyong Primary School. I left there at twelve and went to Wyong High School. 01:00 Did four years there. Was taken on a traineeship by a Wyong dairy company to do agricultural science at the Hawkesbury Agricultural College. Completed that after five years. Did another two years with those. Was conscripted into the army on the ninth of July 1969. Into Singleton. Was drafted into the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps. Of which … from there went to Healesville in Victoria for around about 01:30 four months. Back to Ingleburn, 1 Australia Hospital to do medicines and drugs. Then to 11th Field Ambulance, which was really a holding unit for Vietnam. Did the obligatory Canungra for two weeks. Then Eastern Command Personnel Depot. And then Vietnam on the thirtieth of May 1970. Twelve months in Vietnam. 02:00 Back home. Back to my normal job after six weeks which was very hard to go back to after that length of time. Was married in 1972. Had two children, a girl Leanne and another daughter, Sally. To which … lived in Wyongah. Moved to Wyongah in '72, to where I stayed for nineteen years. 02:30 I was divorced in … twelve years ago, and I moved to my current address in Blackford Avenue Avenue, Kanwal. I left the dairy in '86. Joined Wyong Shire Council as a laboratory technician, then I moved to the status of biological technical officer, having qualifications in biology; 03:00 but knowing the rural area and knowing the rural scene I was given the job of catchment management officer which looked after the water supply. It looked after the laboratory aspects of it all, plus the microbiology. Also did work on the Tuggerah Lakes system and the ocean and the ocean outfalls and the like. I retired from there in 1999 – Friday the thirteenth of August 1999, 03:30 and I done a little bit of work with Associate Professor Dominic Chang who was at that stage the Dean of Life Sciences at the University of Technology in Sydney. Just some part time casual work with him looking at the state of the lagoons and the Brisbane Water. That went for about eighteen months. Since then, I’ve retired, done some travelling, trialled my dogs, looked after my orchids, surfed, played a bit of touch football 04:00 and generally keep fit and happy. Thanks John. That is a very, very fine summary. Well done. Thanks for that. It’s staggered a bit. Ah mate. Just going back, the dates, you know. I said twelve years ago. It’s actually thirteen years ago I moved here, not twelve years ago. But yeah. That’s fine. Well now we can get into the nitty-gritty and go all the way back to the beginning. Now I believe you were born … it was 1948, and you were born in Gosford? 04:30 Gosford hospital. Wyong … I believe they delivered babies around that time, but they weren’t in the months I was born, so I was born in Gosford. But the family was in Wyong? The family was in Wyong. My father moved down here with my mother in 1946 from the northern rivers of New South Wales. My mother was from Alstonville, my father was from Swan Bay. Between Woodburn and Coraki. 05:00 Do you know what brought them to Wyong? Yeah, Dad was a horticulturalist, an agriculturalist by profession; got a job down here in Wyong as the assistant general manager-secretary of the Wyong District Agricultural Association, of which he was in that position for about twelve years. Then, with the retirement of the secretary-manager he became the secretary-manager of the Wyong District Agricultural Association, which he was with them for thirty seven years. The Agricultural Association in those days 05:30 not only ran the agricultural shows, the pastoral competitions, but they ran the race horses, the trots, and the greyhound dogs. So it was quite a big deal? It was a big deal. He was a big deal. He formed the RSL [Returned and Services League] club, he was patron of the RSL club till his passing two years ago. He formed the golf club, he was a Mason [Freemason], and a very, very staunch RSL sub branch man. 06:00 So he'd be fairly legendary around these parts? Absolutely, absolutely. His funeral was one of the biggest they'd seen. He was the patron of so many clubs and his photos are still on some of the Walls of Remembrance. Also, the Wyong RSL is just naming the top auditorium of the Wyong RSL, ‘the Pat McPherson Bar’. It’s got a motto of saying, “Meet you back at Patties.” Can you tell us a bit about his war involvement? 06:30 My father was in the infantry. He served in the Middle East – Egypt and the like. Then he was brought back to New Guinea, and he served on the Kokoda Trail. He was … he had contracted malaria quite bad and he was shipped back shortly before the end of it; but he certainly … he served for six years in the Second World War, to the rank of sergeant. Was that something he would talk to you about? 07:00 He didn’t really talk to us about it then, but after I had my experience in Vietnam he opened up a lot more. And as we do too. We don’t tend to talk to many people if they weren’t there or if they don’t know what we’re talking about; but it was great then, because you felt like you got into the 'inner sanctum' of my father and his good friends from the Wyong RSL. and you felt like one of them. 07:30 Although for the first couple of years after we returned back we were fairly ostracized. But they grew older and more mellow they realized that without us the RSLs would diminish, so were their up and coming. So I was a director of the Wyong RSL sub-branch. I was one of the earlier Vietnam vets to do so. What sort of a man was your father? My father was about my stature. He was a very likeable man. He had a lot 08:00 of friends. Ran a fair business that incorporated quite a lot of money into the town. As I say, he ran the races, plus the agricultural shows and pasture competitions. He had a lot of friends. He moved in fairly big circles also, being in the sub-branch. He was a fairly good golfer, and 08:30 later on bowls. He was a fairly well known and well liked and well recognized. On his passing, the local paper did a beautiful obituary and article on Dad, which was an absolute pleasure to have seen. Were you close to dad? I was. I was very close to Dad. We were all very busy. Dad was busy. He worked six days a week. I worked five and a half, sometimes six days a 09:00 week. And having a young family. Dad had his sporting pursuits, we had our own sporting pursuits. I also have two other brothers and a sister, so he tried to divide his precious spare time amongst us all. It was hard for him but he accomplished that. But he was a bloody good Dad and a bloody nice bloke. Bloody good bloke to go and have a beer with. 09:30 What was he like with discipline? Was he the member of the household that would look after that department? We knew where we stood with Dad. We were mostly taller than him. But he really wasn’t a great disciplinarian. We weren’t bad kids. We didn’t give him too much trouble at all really. So discipline wasn’t a thing that we had to face too often. But we got into our fair share of mischief that probably 10:00 he doesn’t know about, but no harm done. Mum was sort of more the disciplinarian. Dad was … he was a bit soft on the boys. What was mum like? Dad was … Mum is eighty. She was ten years younger than my Dad. What was she like in the early days? Well she was a typical country women who ran a 10:30 house with four children. She did part time work as well. She was just a good Mum. See, Mum was just Mum. She was always there when we needed her. We weren’t the most well-off folks in town, and we were middle class; but they had a lot of good friends and a lot of good support, and they were well known in town. 11:00 We had a lot of good friends. A lot of my parent’s friends, we still call them auntie and uncle, although they were no relation. There was just the friendship and what we thought of these people. What would have the population of Wyong been, back in those days? Oh, about twenty five hundred.

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